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11.19.16

Links 19/11/2016: KDE Applications 16.12 Beta, Zorin OS 12

Posted in News Roundup at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Ubuntu Mate, Windows 10 and macOS Sierra: A marriage of 3 OSs

      I gave myself a little gift recently and revisited Ubuntu Mate by virtue of a transplanted hard disk.

      In my case, Mate was a gift that was giving and giving until it wasn’t.

      When the eMachines T6528 went belly up due to leaky logic board capacitors, I parted this tank of a tower out, half-heartedly vowing to get back to this low-footprint Linux distribution as soon as I could.

      Fast forward several months and with some precious free time on my hands, I was finally able to make good on the promise.

  • Server

    • Cloud Native: Service-driven Operations that Save Money, Increase IT Flexibility

      I obsess about operations. I think it started when I was a department IT manager at a financial services institute. It was appallingly difficult to get changes deployed into production and the cost of change was spectacularly high. It felt like there had to be a better way, and most every decision I have made professionally since 2008 has led me to work on technology that makes that guy or gal’s life easier.

    • Planning Microservices: Know the Tradeoffs With Monolithic Design

      By now, you no doubt understand the advantages of using a microservices architecture, especially in greenfield applications and in new organizations that need to achieve efficiencies wherever they can. But what about your legacy code and applications? Do you totally rewrite the monolith or do you chip away at it with new functionalities, added as microservices, over time?

    • Docker Containers and Synnex Distribution? Oh My

      In a quiet corner at the Synnex Varnex conference, Rob Moyer is pulling back the curtain — just a bit — on the Synnex CloudSolv strategy for channel partners. The conversation with ChannelE2E includes some familiar themes. But there are also some surprises — including a serious bet on container technology and Docker.

      Synnex CloudSolv is a management and deployment platform that helps channel partners to activate cloud solutions for their end-customers. Moyer, VP of software and cloud services at Synnex, isn’t pursuing a toe-to-toe cloud marketplace battle against Ingram Micro, Tech Data and other distributors. Instead of vetting hundreds of software and SaaS solutions for online distribution, Moyer discreetly but purposely made a few strategic bets — including Docker, Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite (particularly for education) and Red Hats.

    • 5 Common Myths about Containers

      Containers are faster. Containers work only on Linux. Containers are insecure. These are all examples of myths about Docker and other container platforms that continue to persist.

      Some of these misconceptions reflect popular misunderstandings of containers. Others are based on information that was once accurate, but is no longer true. Either way, these myths are important to clear up if you want to deploy containers effectively.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Ships Beta of KDE Applications 16.12

        Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of KDE Applications. With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

        Check the community release notes for information on new tarballs, tarballs that are now KF5 based and known issues. A more complete announcement will be available for the final release

        The KDE Applications 16.12 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We’re counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the team by installing the beta and reporting any bugs.

      • KDE Applications 16.12 Enters Beta Testing, Final Release Arrives on December 15

        Today, November 18, 2016, KDE announced the availability for public testing of the Beta build of the upcoming KDE Applications 16.12 software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.

        As reported last week, the KDE Applications 16.08 series reached end of life with the third and last maintenance update, versioned 16.08.3, which means that work begun on the next major branch, KDE Applications 16.12, which you can now take for a test drive using today’s Beta release.

      • KDE Applications 16.12 Now In Beta

        KDE Applications 16.12 is now in beta while this collection of KDE software is under a dependency and feature freeze ahead of next month’s official release.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Zorin OS 12 Core and Ultimate Are Here: Our Biggest Release Ever

        We’re proud to announce the availability of the Zorin OS 12 Core and Ultimate–the biggest release in the history of Zorin OS. With this new version, we’ve introduced an entirely new desktop experience that will make your computer more useful, more powerful and more enjoyable to use.

      • Zorin OS 12 Officially Released, the Biggest Release Ever of the Linux Distro

        The guys behind the Ubuntu-based Zorin OS Linux operating system were proud to announce the general availability of the final release of Zorin OS 12, which comes in both Core and Ultimate flavors.

        Zorin OS 12 is the result of many months of hard work, and it looks like it’s the project’s biggest release ever. The GNU/Linux distribution is now based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, and ships with the Zorin Desktop 2.0 desktop environment.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2016/46

        Now this is a week I call fully rolling. There was a full 7 snapshots since the last review – which is about the maximum we can do in a week with one snapshot per day (or we have to change the versioning to not be only ‘date’ based). So, this review is about the snapshots {20161110..20161116}.

      • When Trying Out Tumbleweed, It’s Easy To See Why OpenSUSE Leap Disabled Nouveau

        I’ve been running some fresh benchmarks of the recently released openSUSE Leap 42.2 compared to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed and friends. Those benchmarks will be posted shortly, but after using the Nouveau experience on Tumbleweed I found the need to comment.

      • OpenSUSE 42.2 Merges Best Features of Enterprise, Community Models

        In the world of Linux distributions, users are often faced with the option of choosing an enterprise-grade distribution or a community distribution. With the openSUSE Leap approach, SUSE is attempting to merge the best of both the enterprise and community models into a new type of Linux distribution. In the pure community-first model the upstream open-source code is packaged in a distribution, which can then be further hardened to eventually produce an enterprise-grade Linux product. The open-source openSUSE Leap 42.2 Linux distribution became generally available on Nov. 16 and takes a different approach. Code from the SUSE Linux Enterprise Service Pack 2 release, which debuted on Nov. 8, is now in the freely available openSUSE Leap 42.2 update. As part of its enterprise community stability focus, openSUSE Leap benefits from the Linux 4.4 Long Term Support Kernel (LTS). SUSE expects to support openSUSE Leap releases for 36 months. The new release also includes the latest in open-source application packages with LibreOffice and Firefox as well as developer and graphics tools. This slide show eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the new openSUSE 42.2 Linux operating system release.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Permabit pulls on Red Hat, opens arms for a Linux cuddle

        The Mad Hatter of Linux is getting Alice in Wonderland style physical space virtualisation with thin provisioning, compression and deduplication courtesy of Permabit.

        Building on its June 2016 Linux availability announcement, Permabit and Red Hat have a go-to-market partnership based on the former’s Albireo deduplication and HIOPS compression technology being added as a kernel module to Red Hat Linux. Up until now dedupe and compression have largely been storage array features, and then appearing in software-only storage running on servers and direct-attached disks, SSDs or JBODs.

      • Red Hat CEO on Microsoft, Google, and Cutting Edge Software

        Even among technology companies, Red Hat has to stand out as one of the geekiest firms in the business.

        The enterprise company offers services and support around the Linux open-source operating system, which non-techies can think of as a free equivalent of Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s MacOS. Developers and IT operators, however, regard Linux as more than just a free service: It’s the underpinning of some of the most popular apps and software used today.

        For instance, if you’ve ordered a car ride from Uber or bought digital storage from Amazon, it’s likely Linux OS was in a corporate data center somewhere along the line, making sure the appropriate software was chugging along.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Introducing Fedora Hubs

          The goal of the Fedora Hubs project is to provide a consistent contributor experience across all Fedora teams. Hubs serve as an “intranet” for the Fedora Project. The many different projects in Fedora each have different processes and workflows. Hubs will be a single place where contributors can learn about and contribute to these projects in a consistent way.

          Hubs is also a social tool for Fedora contributors. It’s designed to help you keep up with everything and everybody across a big open source project in ways that aren’t currently possible. Hubs solves obstacles so new contributors can get in touch with experienced ones.

          Do you want to learn more about the history behind Hubs? Fedora Design team lead Máirín Duffy wrote a few blog posts on the progress of Hubs.

        • Fedora Loves Python at SeaGL 2016

          The Seattle GNU/Linux conference, SeaGL, intentionally attracts a variety of attendees, students from Seattle Central College, local Linux enthusiasts, curious neighbors, and programmers from big software companies, indies and start-ups. About 500 people attended the exhibits and talks on the two days. The exhibit area was closed for the keynotes so I saw Corey Quinn tell us the Art of Personal Failure and Allison Randal presented Free as in Freedom. Bill Wright received the Cascadia Community Builder Award for his efforts building LinuxFest NorthWest.

        • Flock Stories 2016, Episode 4: Matthew Miller

          Today’s guest is Matthew Miller (mattdm)! He’s a long-time Fedora user and contributor, as well as the founder of Boston University Linux. However, perhaps most important of all, he is the current Fedora Project Leader! In this interview, we ask Matthew questions like…

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Tails 3.0 Anonymous Live OS to Be Based on Debian 9 “Stretch”, Require 64-bit PC

          A few days after the announcement of Tails 2.7, the development team behind the popular amnesic incognito live system based on Debian GNU/Linux unveiled a few technical details about the next major release.

          Yes, we’re talking about Tails 3.0, which is now in development and appears to be the next major update of the anonymous live OS that ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden used to protect his identity online. Tails is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution built around the popular Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser anonymous browser.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • This Ubuntu Linux laptop packs a 4K display and Nvidia’s beastly GeForce GTX 1070

            System76’s Ubuntu-based Oryx Pro is a Linux laptop loaded with features also found in some of the fastest Windows laptops.

            The Oryx Pro can be the ultimate Linux gaming laptop. It can be configured with a 15.6-inch 4K screen and Nvidia’s latest Pascal GeForce GTX 1070 GPU.

            The laptop with those features starts at $1,987, and goes higher as more storage and memory are added. The ultimate 4K Oryx Pro configuration with 9TB of SSD storage prices out at $7,012. It comes preloaded with Ubuntu 16.04 or 16.10.

          • Ubuntu Core 16 Enables Snappy IoT

            Ubuntu Core 16 is now available. It is a tiny, transactional implementation of Ubuntu Linux that targets embedded applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). It uses a new packaging system with modules called snaps that include metadata about their connectivity and interface requirements (Fig. 1).

            A snap can have one or more interfaces that are either a plug or a slot providing connections between snaps. A snap exists as a read-only, immutable, compressed squashFS blob, while an instance also includes a private, writeable directory. Communication with the operating system services uses the interface mechanism. Snaps can be given access to other directories.

          • Ubuntu Core [Comic]

            Nowadays, Linux processes are forever in conflict. Is there somewhere out there for them to live together in harmony… perhaps by separating them via full resource isolation?

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source Solves and Supports Today’s Business Needs

    Open source is free software that developers make available to benefit the community. The original developer of the software benefits from making their code freely available because doing so increases the number of end users with the ability to enhance the software. These enhancements can make the software more valuable for all. Some examples of open source software include Android, Wikipedia, Mozilla Firefox, WordPress and Drupal.

  • Calendar sharing in the XXIth century

    But the point is this one: It is 2016 and shared calendars that should be simple and straightforward are both complex and obscure. People should not think twice about what to use: they should be able to share their calendars seamlessly, post it online, move from one provider to another with very little hassle. Instead of this most are locked in and when they want to move to another provider the notion that they should learn about the various calendar sharing protocols is simply outlandish.

  • Can Node.js Scale? Ask the Team at Alibaba

    Alibaba is arguably the world’s biggest online commerce company. It serves millions of users and hosts millions of merchants and businesses. As of August 2016, Alibaba had 434 million users with 427 million active mobile monthly users. During this year’s Singles Day, which happened on November 11 and is one of the (if not the) biggest online sales events, Alibaba registered $1 billion in sales in its first five minutes.

  • Five Tenets of Thriving with Open Source without Risking Your Business

    Vendors, university researchers, students, and developers find that open source is a very effective tool for validating a solution to a particular problem. However, these solutions are often born within the context of a specific company’s use case or a specific research problem. Therefore, these projects are similar to code built in the context of a professional services engagement and often don’t have the polish and finish of an enterprise product. Some may not even have solved basic enterprise requirements like availability, resilience, security, and so on.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • A New Tool for LibreOffice

      Tony Get, my colleague, showed me an interesting tool available in Android: it’s an app to turn your Android device into a remote control to work with your LibreOffice Impress presentations. It is called Impress Remote and it is very easy to use.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • GDS Appoints Anna Shipman As Open Source Lead

      The Government Digital Service (GDS) has appointed its first open source lead, with the goal of driving the use of open source platforms and frameworks throughout Whitehall and beyond.

      Anna Shipman, who has been at GDS for several years will step into the role, having worked extensively with open source as the development lead for GDS’s open source infrastructure provisioning project vCloud Tools.

      Shipman also has experience working with open source projects outside of GDS with her work on government-as-a-platform, the GDS objective to create a range of open and reusable digital components that can be used to create digital services without the need for costly, bespoke systems.

    • Director’s Forum: A Blog from USPTO’s Leadership

      Improving the way the government delivers information technology (IT) solutions to its customers isn’t just a goal, it’s our mission. We at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office know that by publishing our open source code, the public can help us come up with new and better IT solutions. In advance of the new Federal Source Code Policy and in support of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative, we have been publishing content on Github for over a year, and it now includes source code for a mobile application for trademarks.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Choosing Your Open-Source Licenses

      Open-source development covers a lot of bases. There’s everything from documentation to development that is freely available on the web. It’s rather magical to know that you’ve got access to the code that drives some of the industry’s most widely used platforms like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, and much more.

      As a purveyor of some open-source goodness myself, I’ve started to become more aware of the nuances of each of the various open-source licenses. There is much more to these licenses than many of us may realize. It is a legal contract, so it is important to be aware of the differences in each license.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Data Pipeline goes open, changing business models, and more open source news

      The world of open source software is a busy place. Sometimes keeping up with all of the news, announcements, and cool things to be discovered can be difficult. Here’s a look at some of what we’re reading today.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • AMD announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform

        AMD announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) featuring software support of new Radeon GPU hardware, new math libraries, and a rich foundation of modern programming languages, designed to speed development of high-performance, energy-efficient heterogeneous computing systems. AMD also announced planned support of OpenCL™ and for a wide range of CPUs in upcoming releases of ROCm, including support for AMD’s upcoming “Zen”-based CPUs, Cavium ThunderX CPUs, and IBM Power 8 CPUs. The advances further cement ROCm’s position as the most versatile open source platform for GPU computing.

      • AMD Goes Open Source in Newest ROCm Platform Update

        Processor maker is going all in for developing and sharing GPU-related hardware and software for high-end computing use cases.
        In days gone by, one rarely heard of IT companies getting involved in the open sourcing of hardware blueprints. It was always about software. This is happening more frequently all the time and making a significant impact in many enterprises. It’s yet another seismic change that has hit the larger-picture IT world.

        This is relevant now because companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Brocade, Cisco Systems and a number of others through the Open Compute Project are now dedicated to designing and open sourcing items such as new-gen servers, racks, routers, switches, specialized teleco equipment and storage appliances, in addition to offering previously proprietary expertise to others in how to build new-gen IT hardware.

      • RusEFI open-source engine-control hardware now working in the real world

        RusEFI isn’t anywhere near a works-right-out-of-the-box system, even now. It’s hardware for the expert user who is comfortable doing everything from soldering to writing code, and it’s all absolutely open-source, on both the hardware and software sides. The advantage of this? According to RusEFI developer Andrey Belomutskiy, “You are free to criticize/change software and hardware without being yelled/threatened/banned, in the spirit of open source.”

Leftovers

  • Science

    • What Electronics Can Do to Your Infant’s Brain

      Have you ever watched a baby stare at a TV? The TV is huge, flashing and mesmerizing, and you’ll notice that while watching, infants do not turn their heads – they just sit and stare straight ahead. Because infants become so transfixed on the screen, they stop doing anything and everything else and ultimately, they miss out on human interaction and the opportunity to explore their new and exciting world.

      The same is true of certain electronic toys. The graphics and sounds are mesmerizing and hold a child’s attention for longer than a traditional toy. Studies have shown that during the time kids are watching a screen or playing on an electronic toy, they are not interacting and learning as much as they could with other types of toys. Electronics also change how we interact with our children – sometimes the toy becomes the babysitter, and parents do not have to interact.

    • We Should Think of American Education as a National Security Issue

      The election of Donald Trump to the White House left great segments of the US population elated, and others feeling deflated and terrified. It still isn’t clear what he will do after he’s inaugurated, although certain policies and approaches are beginning to take shape. But as observers take stock of how a novice politician who’s never held elected office snagged the highest one in the land, something has become abundantly clear—America is divided, and one of the starkest divisions is around education.

      People voted along lines that reflect levels of education. While Hillary Clinton led college graduates by nine points (52/43 percent), Trump led non-college graduates by eight (52/44 percent). According to Pew Research, this is the widest gap in support between college-educated and non-college educated voters recorded in exit polls since 1980.

      To hold Trump, or any president, accountable to the people they represent, the US needs an informed electorate. According to some experts, this is literally an issue of national security. More uniformly educated populations are better equipped to resolve chronic policy problems, bolster economic growth, and keep pace with rapidly shifting geopolitical dynamics, which contributes to stability at home.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Michigan Officials Seek to Block Court-Ordered Bottled Water Delivery in Flint

      State officials in Michigan asked a federal court in Detroit on Thursday to block a court order requiring bottled water deliveries to homes in Flint, Michigan, where residents are still waiting for clean tap water two years after municipal water supplies were contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

      The state’s motion requests the court to temporarily block the water delivery order while officials appeal the requirement. The order was issued by a federal judge last week and requires city and state officials to deliver bottled water to Flint residents unless they have a functioning faucet filter or refuse the delivery service.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Friday
    • Serious Linux Vulnerability Found By Just Holding Down The Enter Key For 70 Seconds

      Security researchers have found a rather frightening vulnerability in Linux that could ultimately allow an attacker to copy, modify, or destroy the contents of a hard drive, along with with configure the network to exfiltrate data. That in and of itself is cause for concern, but the real harrowing part about this is how easy it is to activate—an attacker need only boot up the system and hold down the enter key for 70 seconds.

    • Open Source Software: Secure Except When It Isn’t

      There is still a flaw in the open source security model which the Core Infrastructure Initiative only partly addressed. Remember the thousands and thousands of eyes looking for vulnerabilities in the code? While that may be true in a generalized sense, there are some small but important projects that are flying under the radar and don’t seem to be getting the necessary attention.

    • Adobe Fined $1M in Multistate Suit Over 2013 Breach; No Jail for Spamhaus Attacker

      Adobe will pay just $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by 15 state attorneys general over its huge 2013 data breach that exposed payment records on approximately 38 million people. In other news, the 39-year-old Dutchman responsible for coordinating an epic, weeks-long distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam provider Spamhaus in 2013 will avoid any jail time for his crimes thanks to a court ruling in Amsterdam this week.

      On Oct. 3, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story that Adobe had just suffered a breach in which hackers siphoned usernames, passwords and payment card data on 38 million customers. The intruders also made off with digital truckloads of source code for some of Adobe’s most valuable software properties — including Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop and ColdFusion.

    • Half of companies have been hit with ransomware in the past year

      MORE TERRIFYING SECURITY RESEARCH has discovered that almost half of a collection of firms surveyed admitted that they have been the victim of a ransomware attack.

      Endpoint security outfit SentinelOne said that the ransomware attacks do not just go after monies these days, but have darker aims and can be used to threaten and terrorise people.

      “[Our] results point to a significant shift for ransomware. It’s no longer just a tool for cyber crime, but a tool for cyber terrorism and espionage,” said Tony Rowan, chief security consultant at SentinelOne, in the firm’s Ransomware Research Data Summary (PDF).

    • Security Of FLOSS

      I’ve worked with IT since the 1960s. I’ve seen systems that fell down just idling. I’ve seen systems that were insecure by design. Their creators just didn’t seem to care. I’ve seen systems that were made to get you. Their creators wanted to own your soul. I’ve also used FLOSS.

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Attribution of Russia in DNC hack has curtailed Kremlin’s hacking, Clapper says

      In what might be viewed as a slight disagreement in assessment, or at the very least, semantics, Clapper told the committee Thursday that there was not strong evidence of a connection between WikiLeaks, which provided a frequent drip of leaked emails from top Democratic officials aimed at damaging the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and the Russian hacking campaign against Democratic party entities and individuals, for which many believe provided WikiLeaks the stolen contents for their leaks.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • New peatland coalition targets cutting climate change, saving thousands of lives

      A new global initiative, launched today at the climate meeting in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of lives by protecting peatlands – the world’s largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

      The Global Peatlands Initiative will mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in a targeted effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

      Greenhouse gas emissions from drained and burning peatlands account for up to 5 per cent of anthropogenic carbon emissions. These emissions are rising due to increasing peat degradation and loss from agriculture and fires, and driving the world closer to a dangerous tipping point.

      Rising temperatures can cause a chain reaction in which thawing permafrost switches boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gas. Peat carbon stocks are equivalent to at least 60 per cent of all atmospheric carbon, meaning they hold the potential to send climate change spiraling out of control.

    • New UN initiative aims to save lives and cut climate change by protecting peatlands

      A new global initiative was launched today at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 22) under way in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of live by protecting peatlands – the largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

      According to the UN environment Programme (UNEP), the Global Peatlands Initiative seeks mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in an effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

      If global temperatures continue to rise, this could lead to thawing permafrost, switching boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, resulting in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and potentially causing climate change to spiral out of control.

      Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment stressed that despite the Paris Agreement, global temperatures will rise over 3 degrees Celsius this century. “This will cause misery and chaos for millions of vulnerable people, so we cannot afford to let any opportunity to reduce emissions slip by,” he added.

    • 69 Million People Exposed to ‘Killer Haze’ During Wildfire in Indonesia

      Latest study from Scientific Reports reveals that massive wildfires in Indonesia and Borneo had produced unhealthy air pollution, exposing 69 million people and causing thousands of cases of premature deaths.

      The wildfire greatly affected the forests and peatland of Equatorial Asia during the autumn of 2015. Experts have found that a quarter of people living in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia were severely exposed to the killer haze between September and October 2015.

      In an article by Eureka Alert, the lead author of the study, Dr. Paola Crippa, from Newcastle University, UK, said: “Our study estimated that between 6,150 and 17,270 premature deaths occurred due to breathing in the polluted air over that short two month period. To put this into perspective, we estimate that around 1 in 6,000 people exposed to the polluted haze from these fires died as a result. The uncertainty in these estimates is mostly due to the lack of medical studies on exposure from extreme air pollution in the area.”

    • Why It Matters That Trump’s Attorney General Pick Is a Climate Change Skeptic

      Jeff Sessions, the ultra-conservative Republican senator from Alabama, has been a controversial political figure for decades. His early career as a US attorney was threatened by allegations of racist remarks in the 1980s, but he remained popular in his home state and managed to carve out a congressional career for himself as a staunch opponent of, among many other things, consensus climate science.

      But Sessions is about to get a whole lot more influential to the lives of all Americans: President-elect Donald Trump has picked him to be the next attorney general of the United States.

      In what’s become a daily routine during the Trump transitionary period, the president-elect’s pick of Sessions has been met with exasperated outcries. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are preparing for a long period of conflict under the Trump Administration, and Sessions is sure to be a part of it.

  • Finance

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Why Anti-Trump Protests Matter

      Since election night, U.S. cities and towns have rung with protest. Hundreds of thousands of people, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Columbia, South Carolina to Salt Lake City, Utah took to the streets en masse to protest the election of a man who promised, among other things, to force Muslims to register and to repeal a health care bill that helps some 20 million people get health insurance, and who has been accused of sexual assault by at least 13 women. Hand-scrawled signs declared “Not My President,” “No To Bigotry,” “Trump Puts My Life In Danger,” and “Protests Are Patriotic.”

    • Anna Soubry: ‘What’s happened to our country? We’ve lost the plot’

      The Tory MP was one of David Cameron’s modernisers, and campaigned to remain in the EU. Now she is angry at everyone – at Labour, her own party, the Daily Mail, even herself – but feels she must vote for article 50 regardless

    • Donald Trump Agrees to Pay $25 Million in Trump University Settlement

      Donald J. Trump has reversed course and agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign.

      The settlement was announced by the New York attorney general on Friday, just 10 days before one of the cases, a federal class-action lawsuit in San Diego, was set to be heard by a jury. The deal, if approved, averts a potentially embarrassing and highly unusual predicament: a president-elect on trial, and possibly even taking the stand in his own defense, while scrambling to build his incoming administration.

      It was a remarkable concession from a real estate mogul who derides legal settlements and has mocked fellow businessmen who agree to them.

      But the allegations in the case were highly unpleasant for Mr. Trump: Students paid up to $35,000 in tuition for programs that, according to the testimony of former Trump University employees, used high-pressure sales tactics and employed unqualified instructors.

      The agreement wraps together the outstanding Trump University litigation, including two federal class-action cases in San Diego, and a separate lawsuit by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. The complaints alleged that students were cheated out of thousands of dollars in tuition through deceptive claims about what they would learn and high-pressure sales tactics.

    • Who Will Advise Trump on Science?

      In 1976, President Gerald Ford appointed physicist H. Guyford Stever as the first Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Having previously advised the military during World War II, and directed the National Science Foundation for four years, Stever became the first of a long line of advisors who counseled the White House on matters of science and technology—everything from disease outbreaks to climate change to nanotechnology.

      [...]

      But amid that certainty, there is also lots of room for variability. (Buckle up; here be acronyms.) Holdren currently wears many different hats. He’s also the president’s Science Advisor or, to quote the formal title, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. He co-chairs (with Obama) the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—a group of leading scientists and engineers who offer policy recommendations on everything from the reliability of forensic science to preparing for a biological weapons attack. And he sits on the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a group that coordinates research and development efforts across all federal agencies; it is chaired by the president and includes the vice-president and several cabinet secretaries.

      So Holdren’s a busy guy. But of these jobs, only the OSTP directorship is a non-negotiable Senate-confirmed post. The rest are essentially optional, and depend on the president’s attitudes to science and willingness to continue the legacy of past offices. Trump might not convene the PCAST or the NSTC; both are established by Executive Order. He could appoint an OSTP Director and never seek advice from them.

    • The End Of Trump’s Reign Could Be Way Sooner Than You Think

      So that election sure was pretty crazy, huh? There are lots and lots and lots of really pissed-off people right now, and since we’ve said quite a bit on the subject, I won’t add more to that here. What I will tell you is that you absolutely have a real-world, tangible way to fight. And I’m not talking about having to wait four years for the next presidential election.

    • Michael Moore’s to do list for a revolution: an intervention for liberals

      We have a new leader in America. Known for his distinct regional accent and often seen wearing a baseball cap at rallies, he starred in a show on NBC, and holds strong opinions about guns and the NRA. He may not be the leader you saw coming, but you’re going to see a lot more of him: Michael Moore. The documentary filmmaker shuns the activist label he is often given. In a recent LA Times interview Moore asserted, “I’m not an activist, I’m a citizen. It’s redundant to say I’m an activist. We all should be active.” Moore has been very active, and has made films that take on some of America’s most complex and controversial topics — globalization, gun violence, 9/11, our healthcare system, the economy, war, and most recently, Donald Trump, someone he did see coming. Unlike the Democrats.

      Moore tried to warn the left in July, when he wrote a piece titled simply “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win. In it, he did not mince words: “Go ahead and say the words, ’cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: ‘PRESIDENT TRUMP.’ Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.” With his midwestern directness and efficiency, Moore then proceeded to list how and why Donald Trump was going to win.

      A week after Trump’s election, Democrats and progressives are still raw with shock and grief. The agony is acute. The mood of over half the country? Political satirist Barry Crimmins nailed it in a tweet, saying “We’re now kids trapped in the back of our blowhard, road-raging, shitty-driver, dad’s car for a 4-yr trip and he’s issued a “No Talking” edict.”

    • Donald Trump daughter Ivanka pictured in meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

      Donald Trump’s daughter has been pictured attending a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, heightening concerns the President-elect’s family will wield unprecedented influence over his political duties.

      Ivanka Trump, who features in handout photos of the impromptu gathering, plays a significant role in managing Mr Trump’s businesses, along with his other adult children.

      Unlike other presidents, Mr Trump’s children are part of his transition team, which has been beset by problems since its inception.

    • In Their Coastal Citadels, Democrats Argue Over What Went Wrong

      Republican America is now so vast that a traveler could drive 3,600 miles across the continent, from Key West, Fla., to the Canadian border crossing at Porthill, Idaho, without ever leaving a state under total GOP control.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Dunja Mijatović: Online threats of killing, rape and violence everyday reality for too many female journalists

      No job comes without sacrifices, but how many downgrading comments, criticism or even threats can one person take before it becomes too much?

      Just consider the experiences of a female journalist that I know:

      She had her phone number shared on dating websites, her email and other accounts were hacked, she received death threats on Skype, the website publishing her articles was hacked and a sex video was posted with the implication that she had participated in an orgy. Anonymous articles with lies about her and her family were also posted online.

      Imagine being forced to shut down your accounts on social media platforms because of such massive attacks with detailed images of rape and other forms of sexual violence.

      At one point, you would probably be inclined to ask yourself if it is really worth it. Is this a career I want to continue to pursue?

      In the past few years, more and more female journalists and bloggers have been forced to question their profession. Male journalists are also subject to hate speech and online abuse, but research findings suggest that female journalists face a disproportionate amount of gender-based threats and harassment on the internet. They are experiencing what Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, has described as a “double attack”: they are being targeted for being both a journalist and a woman.

      How do these attacks affect female journalists’ lives, their work and society in general? Journalists are used to being in the frontline of conflict and they often deal with difficult and even dangerous situations. But what if you cannot shield yourself from these threats? What if the frontline became your own doorstep, your office or your computer screen?

    • European Union Orders British Press NOT to Report when Terrorists are Muslims

      So, according to the ECRI and scholars of Teesside University, when Muslim jihadists murder people and the press reports that killers are Muslims, the press, and not Islamists, is encouraging “Islamophobic incidents” in Britain. According to ECRI Chair Christian Ahlund, “It is no coincidence that racist violence is on the rise in the UK at the same time as we see worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech in the newspapers, online and even among politicians.”

    • More dialogue needed on censorship: Singapore International Film Festival chief

      Yuni Hadi has been promoting independent Singapore films for many years. She has helmed the film programme at The Substation Centre for the Arts, creating milestone projects such as the annual Fly-by-Night Video Challenge and the Singapore Short Film Festival. She also helms Objectifs Films, a Singapore-based international film distributor. She is also the co-producer of award-winning Singapore film Ilo Ilo which saw its box-office takings in Singapore surge, after it attained international accolades.

      Today, she is executive director of the Singapore International Film Festival which takes place from No 23 to Dec 4.

      She went “On the Record” with 938LIVE’s Bharati Jagdish about censorship and growing the local film industry. They started by talking about the perceived bias against local content.

    • Junk Scientist Greets Skepticism With Legal Threats, Sues Blogger For Criticizing Him And His Work

      There’s nothing those operating on the fringes of science hate more than people questioning their means, methods, and conclusions. To question is to be sued, unfortunately. Ken White has again fired up the Popehat signal in hopes of securing a skeptical blogger some legal assistance in fighting off a clearly bogus defamation suit by a junk scientist offended by the blogger’s dismantling of his junk science.

    • Bhutan journalist hit by defamation suit for sharing Facebook post

      It is known as the land of gross national happiness, a country that puts contentment before the trappings of wealth and power. But discontent is growing in Bhutan after one of the country’s best-known journalists was hit with a defamation suit for sharing a story on Facebook.

      In a case that will test the boundaries of freedom of speech in the tiny Himalayan kingdom, independent journalist Namgay Zam, a former presenter on the state-run broadcaster Bhutan Broadcasting Service, faces imprisonment or a fine equivalent to 10 years’ salary if she is found guilty of defaming a prominent businessman.

    • Rap star handed five YEARS in jail after Sharia court says his songs are blasphemous

      A Sharia court convicted the 29-year-old singer after he was banned from performing due to the nature of his music.

      Amir Tataloo’s fans reacted furiously to the news that he had been apprehended while walking down a street in the capital Tehran in August.

      He has been held in custody until his trial this week and will now be forced to endure physical punishment after defying the Ministry of Culture.

      According to reports Mr Tatoloo refused to leave the country he was born in and defied orders to stop performing.

    • The Failure of Facebook Democracy

      In December of 2007, the legal theorist Cass R. Sunstein wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the filtering effects that frequently attend the spread of information on the Web. “As a result of the Internet, we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches—much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we’re likely to like,” Sunstein noted. In the piece, “The Polarization of Extremes,” Sunstein argued that the trend promised ill effects for the direction—or, more precisely, the misdirection—of public opinion. “If people are sorted into enclaves and niches, what will happen to their views?” he wondered. “What are the eventual effects on democracy?”

    • It’s time to get rid of the Facebook “news feed,” because it’s not news

      In the wake of the US election, critics have blamed Facebook for bringing about—at least in part—Trump’s surprise win. A BuzzFeed report showed that Facebook users interacted far more with “fake news” stories about both candidates than they did with mainstream news outlets before the election. This wouldn’t seem like such a big deal if it weren’t for a Pew Research Center survey showing that 44% of Americans rely on Facebook to get all their news.

      But proving whether fake news influenced the election more than the usual political propaganda is impossible. What’s certain is that fake news on Facebook is a symptom of a larger problem: the company is trying to play contradictory roles as both trustworthy news publisher and fun social media platform for personal sharing. The problem is that it cannot be both—at least not without making some changes.

    • James Woods Quits Twitter Over ‘Censorship’ of Alt-Right After Suing User Who Called Him a Coke Addict
    • Actor James Woods quits Twitter, citing censorship
    • ‘Buh-bye’: Twitter zaps ‘dramatic b*tch’ James Woods for quitting site over ‘censorship’ of racists
    • I QUIT! James Woods to leave Twitter over alt-right ban and censorship
    • Conservative Actor James Woods Quits Twitter Over Censorship Concerns
    • He’s done! Fed-up James Woods bids Twitter a not-so-fond farewell over political censorship
    • How attacking the alt-right only adds to the flames

      What blissful days these must be for the alt-right.

      Their preferred candidate for president is transitioning into the White House.

      Their champion, Steve Bannon, formerly CEO of the most mainstream media platform for alt-right voices on the internet, Breitbart.com, has secured a place in the West Wing at elbow’s length from the new president.

      And the conventional media seem to be stumbling around trying to decide whether to explain the alt-right, ignore it, censor it or refuse to even speak its name.

      Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, fears the very term “alt-right” is a sinister “branding move” to give cover to racists. Instead, he suggests journalists should use phrases such as “the alt-right, a white nationalist, anti-Semitic movement.”

    • 60 percent of Russians think Internet censorship is necessary, poll finds

      Sixty percent of Russians believe that Internet censorship — in particular, the banning of certain websites and material — is necessary, according to a new poll.

      Just 25 percent opposed the idea; the rest of the respondents didn’t know or declined to answer.

      The poll was conducted by the Levada Center, an independent polling firm, which asked Russians questions about trust in media and censorship between Oct. 21 to 24. On the subject of political censorship, 32 percent of Russians said that denying access to certain websites would infringe upon the rights and freedoms of activists, while 44 percent said it did not and 24 percent could not answer.

    • Russia starts blocking LinkedIn network
    • U.S. says concerned over Russia blocking access to LinkedIn
    • LinkedIn Blocked In Russia; Government Says It Threatens Russian Online Censorship Drive

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Argentina Orders Telecoms To Create A Permanent Database Of All Mobile Phone Users

      Even one is a problem, for reasons that Edward Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang pointed out earlier this year: a mobile phone is “the perfect tracking device.” The new register may indeed help tackle the theft of mobile phones in Argentina. But it will also create a powerful and dangerous new resource that the authorities will surely be unable to resist dipping into for other purposes.

    • Look Inside the Windowless New York Skyscraper Linked to the NSA

      Since publishing a story about an apparent National Security Agency surveillance site in New York, The Intercept has obtained several previously unseen photographs from within the building, offering a rare glimpse behind its thick concrete and granite walls.

      On Wednesday, we reported that top-secret documents indicate there is an NSA spy hub inside the massive, windowless skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, used by AT&T to route communications across the world. The 550-foot tower contains equipment that covertly monitors phone calls, faxes, and internet data, according to the documents. But with the exception of employees who have worked at the building, few people have ever been allowed inside the iconic brutalist structure, which was built to withstand a nuclear attack amid the Cold War.

      Stanley Greenberg, a 60-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, shared a series of photographs he took in September 1992 while visiting 33 Thomas Street. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks, security was not as tight. At the time, Greenberg was carrying out research for a book, Invisible New York, and AT&T granted him access. The photographs never made it into the book, but Greenberg revisited his photo archive this week and sent the pictures to The Intercept after reading the revelations about the building’s apparent role as an NSA site, code-named TITANPOINTE.

      [...]

      One of Greenberg’s photos (featured at the top of this article) clearly shows some of AT&T’s “4ESS switch” equipment that is used to send phone calls across networks. The NSA’s documents describe the TITANPOINTE facility as containing a “RIMROCK access,” which is what the agency calls the 4ESS switches that it taps into. By 2004, at least one of these was an “international gateway” used to route foreign calls to and from the U.S., a former AT&T engineer has said.

      Another photograph taken by Greenberg (below) shows a room full of large batteries, which were likely used as a back-up energy source for the building in the event of a power failure. Original planning documents for 33 Thomas Street state that it would have enough emergency power to last two weeks, enabling it to become a “self-contained city” in the event of a catastrophe.

      [...]

      Klein later moved to California, where he continued his work for AT&T. In 2006, he alleged in a sworn court declaration that the company had maintained a secure room in one of its San Francisco offices, which he stated had been equipped with NSA technology to spy on phone and internet traffic. Klein told The Intercept that he didn’t know of any NSA presence at 33 Thomas Street, but it did not surprise him to discover its apparent role as the TITANPOINTE surveillance site.

      “I always assumed and gathered information back then that there were numerous other offices like the one in San Francisco,” he said. “I was only aware of the ones on the West Coast, from talking to people. But logically I assumed there had to be some in places like New York or Chicago, the major telecom centers.”

    • ‘National Bird’ Confronts Perils Of Becoming Drone Whistleblower

      President Barack Obama’s administration institutionalized a drone program that involves a targeted assassination policy for individuals put on kill lists. It not only devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in countries, like Afghanistan, but it traumatizes the military officers, who are part of the system which makes strikes possible. But for them, there is little to no support for the depression, suicidal ideations, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) they develop as a result of the horrible things they are asked to do.

      As the documentary, “National Bird,” shows, the officers struggle with the morality of their actions, but they face a presidential administration, which has criminalized more whistleblowers than all other previous presidential administrations combined. Officers who speak out about the drone program face the prospect of harsh prosecution under the Espionage Act, as if talking about what they saw as officers is treasonous. That weighs heavy on veterans of the drone program and makes them terrified to be labeled whistleblowers because they know how the government could destroy their lives if they become known to the public as whistleblowers.

    • Law updating GCHQ’s power passes final hurdle in Parliament

      A new law giving GCHQ increased powers is set to become law.

      The Investigatory Powers Bill has been passed by peers in the House of Lords and there only remains some discussion of possible amendments in both houses of Parliament before Royal Assent by the Queen makes it law.

      Privacy campaigners have criticised the bill as ‘Snooper’s Charter II’ after the 2012 Draft Communications Bill which was blocked by Liberal Democrats in the coalition government.

    • Trump’s CIA Director Pick Thinks Using Encryption ‘May Itself Be A Red Flag’

      Donald Trump announced on Friday that he’s chosen Congressman Mike Pompeo to run the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the premiere spy agency of the United States.

      Pompeo, a Republican lawmaker from Kansas and a former Army officer, has little-to-no experience in the world of intelligence (other than being part of the House Intelligence Committee), but he’s distinguished himself for being a strong supporter of mass surveillance and for thinking that using encryption, by itself, might be a sign that you’re a terrorist.

      “Forcing terrorists into encrypted channels, however, impedes their operational effectiveness by constraining the amount of data they can send and complicating transmission protocols, a phenomenon known in military parlance as virtual attrition,” Pompeo wrote in an op-ed published in January by The Wall Street Journal. “Moreover, the use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag.”

    • TfL to track Tube users in stations by their MAC addresses

      Transport for London is to start a four week trial of reading Wi-Fi connection request data from London Underground passengers’ mobile phones.

      The trial, which will last four weeks from 21 November, “will help give TfL a more accurate understanding of how people move through stations, interchange between services and how crowding develops,” according to the transport authority.

      The idea is to develop a more accurate picture of how passengers make interchanges on the Tube network.

      Data available to TfL at present only records where people enter the London Underground and where they leave it, meaning figuring out their movements in between those points is a matter of educated guesswork.

    • Local Muslims express concerns about Flynn being tabbed as NSA director

      The selection of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for National Security Adviser has local Muslim leaders concerned about what it could mean for their community members.

      There’s already been some talk of a Muslim registry under a Trump administration, but the appointment of Flynn is adding to the concerns of Muslims in south-central Wisconsin.

      Flynn has been outspoken in his opposition to radical Islam, but that is not the part that bothers local Muslim leaders.

      He’s also taken aim at the religion as a whole, tweeting in February – “Fear of Islam is RATIONAL.”

    • NSA pick Flynn a critic of Muslim militancy, culture

      Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence officer who is Donald Trump’s pick to serve as his national security adviser, is a harsh critic of Muslim extremism and the religion itself, calling “radical Islam” an existential threat to the United States.

      In strident speeches and public comments, including a fiery address at the Republican National Convention, Flynn has aggressively argued that Islamic State militants pose a threat on a global scale and demanded a far more aggressive U.S. military campaign against the group.

    • No Snoopers’ Charter – Donate
    • Top US intelligence official: I submitted my resignation
    • Clapper, US intel chief, resigns
    • Intelligence Director James Clapper Resigns
    • Next for the DNI
    • Intelligence chief to leave as Trump arrives
    • World Briefs: US spy chief resigns, to leave in January
    • Trump weighs dismantling top spy agency: report
    • Donald Trump Is Plotting to Eliminate a Cabinet-Level Position: Report
    • Adm. Michael Rogers Leading Candidate to Be Trump’s Director of National Intelligence
    • Donald Trump Hopes to Abolish Intelligence Chief Position, Reverse CIA Reforms

      Donald Trump’s national security team is discussing plans to dismantle the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the organization that was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, according to an adviser to the president-elect and a former senior intelligence official. The news comes as the current director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced his resignation Thursday.

      The Trump national security team has been meeting in recent days, planning the removal of the cabinet-level position and assessing how to fold parts of the organization into the 16 federal intelligence agencies it oversees, according to both people with knowledge of the plans. If the restructuring is accomplished, it would undo legislation passed by Congress in 2004, dismantle the biggest American intelligence bureaucracy created since the end of World War II, and roll back a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

    • Police Just Found Phone & USB Stick Belonging To Paris Suicide Bomber, After Misplacing It For Almost Two Years

      Remember how, right after the Paris bombings, people started blaming encryption for the attacks, despite the fact it was later revealed that most of the planning was done in the open and communication occurred via unencrypted SMS messages? As we noted, it seemed pretty clear that the bombings were an intelligence and law enforcement failure rather than an encryption problem.

      Now, just to add more evidence to that conclusion in the most ridiculous way possible, apparently Brussels police just found a mobile phone and USB stick that had belonged to one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks, Brahim Abdeslam. The police had seized the phone and USB stick during a drug raid back in February of 2015… and promptly misplaced them entirely. They were found under a stack of papers. Really.

    • Mystery death of former spy worker found drowned in bath with his front door unlocked

      A former GCHQ employee once suspended from work because of an “incident” was found drowned in his bath with his flat’s front door unlocked, an inquest heard.

      Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed any suicidal thoughts to those closest to him and was actively seeking a new job at the time of his death.

    • SPY BATH DEATH RIDDLE Mystery surrounds case of GCHQ worker, 28, left face down in bath for up to three weeks
    • Mystery surrounds the death of a former spy worker, 28, who was found drowned in the bath with his front door unlocked

      A former GCHQ worker who was looking for a new job was found drowned in his bath with the front door of his flat unlocked by his parents.

      Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed suicidal ideas and seemed ‘completely normal’ when he last saw his parents a couple of months ago, an inquest heard.

      They found him laying face-down in his bath when they went to his Cheltenham flat – near the spy base – on April 17 because they had been unable to contact him.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • U.S. allowed Italian kidnap prosecution to shield higher-ups, ex-CIA officer says

      A former CIA officer has broken the U.S. silence around the 2003 abduction of a radical Islamist cleric in Italy, charging that the agency inflated the threat the preacher posed and that the United States then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from responsibility for approving the operation.

    • New CIA Director Mike Pompeo on torture, Muslims, terror, Iran, NSA spying

      Pompeo on Guantanamo Bay:

      “GTMO has been a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism. I have traveled to GTMO and have seen the honorable and professional behavior of the American men and women in uniform, who serve at the detention facility,” Pompeo said in a statement on Nov. 18. “The detainees at GTMO are treated exceptionally well – so well that some have even declined to be resettled, instead choosing to stay at GTMO. It is delusional to think that any plan the president puts before Congress to relocate radical Islamic terrorists to the U.S, and potentially Fort Leavenworth Kansas, will make our country safer. The reality is that this proposal will ultimately put Kansans and Americans in danger.”

    • Stopping Turnkey Tyranny: What The Obama Administration Can Do About The NSA On The Way Out

      Last week, I was a little unfair to our friends over at Fight for the Future in noting that it was too late for President Obama to “dismantle the NSA” as was suggested in a Time article written by FftF’s awesome campaign director Evan Greer. I was focusing on why the President should have limited the NSA much more seriously earlier on (like way earlier…), but some interpreted it to mean that I was suggesting that FftF had only just jumped on the bandwagon to stop mass surveillance. That’s clearly not true — as it’s been one of the leading voices in the fight to get the President to scale back mass surveillance since the group took on that issue many years ago.

    • Barack Obama will not pardon Edward Snowden unless he goes to court – while Trump’s CIA pick wants him executed

      There is very little chance President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden before his final term is up – leaving his fate to an unforgiving Trump administration and an incoming CIA director who had called for his execution.

      Mr Snowden has lived in Russia since he leaked documents revealing a secret surveillance programme helmed by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies. The Department of Justice charged Mr Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

    • Obama suggests Snowden pardon unlikely
    • Obama: Pardon for Snowden Couldn’t Be Contemplated Until US Court Appearance
    • Snowden Fields Questions at Pen Int’l Session Dedicated to Imprisoned Writers
    • Amal Clooney told the UN they did nothing to help Isis sex slaves. Now she’s asking women to help instead

      After appearing before the United Nations for the first time and telling delegates she was “ashamed” to stand before them while they did nothing to prevent the rape and abuse of Yazidi women, Amal Clooney stood before a conference of women and urged them to join the fight for women’s rights in countries where they are most under threat.

      The renowned human rights lawyer gave the keynote speech at the Texas Conference for Women on Tuesday, where more than 100 leading women from different sectors also delivered talks.

      In September, Clooney condemned world leaders for their inaction over the persecution of the Yazidi community, a religious minority in northern Iraq who have been targeted by Isis. In her speech on Tuesday, Clooney spoke more about the plight of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was trafficked by Isis as a sex slave and now advocates on behalf of Yazidi women.

    • Trump’s Choice For Attorney General Is A Fan Of “Civil Asset Forfeiture”

      Civil asset forfeiture is victimization by government — removing any possibility of a defense. It’s taking without any sort of proof of wrongdoing by the person whose money has been hoovered up by the government; it’s the antithesis of our legal standard, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

      It turns citizens who have been convicted of nothing into victims of greedy law enforcement workers and officials, who typically get to keep the proceeds or part of the proceeds from stopping somebody on the road who’s carrying some cash and declaring it the result of ill-gotten gains…sometimes simply because people who are in the drug trade use a road and sometimes without as much as a bullshit excuse like that.

    • Jeff Sessions’ Nomination as Attorney General Alarms Civil Libertarians

      President-elect Donald Trump has nominated US Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to be his administration’s attorney general, a move that civil liberties advocates are decrying as a likely catastrophe for privacy and immigration.

      While many of Trump’s forthcoming nominations will amount to little more than inside-the-Beltway gossip, Sessions stands out. He’s an advocate for surveillance and an enemy of encryption; an opponent of criminal justice reform; and a hardliner on immigration. First elected to the US Senate in 1996, he has long stood to the right even among his conservative Republican colleagues as a champion of security above all. As Attorney General, Sessions would have the power to radically recast the Obama administration’s definition of civil liberties online and off.

      The Senate Judiciary Committee must still approve Sessions’ nomination. But civil rights groups are already sounding the alarm over the possibility that he could become the most powerful law enforcement officer in the land. Sessions’ track record also suggest he’s also going to find himself at sharp odds with the tech industry’s liberal and libertarian-leaning leadership.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Facebook’s detailed open-source maps show the gaps in global internet connectivity

      The open-source maps were created in collaboration with the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network and World Bank statistics to create datasets that incorporate population demographics, infrastructure development and existing internet penetration to identify the connectivity gaps and how to fix them. Making them open source means NGOs, innovators or companies can access them. They plan to release more maps over the coming months.

    • Say good-bye to net neutrality

      In the wake of a Donald Trump’s upset victory, telecom industry players are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of eviscerating Barack Obama’s fledgling net neutrality rules.

      It was one of the crowning achievements of Obama’s administration when the FCC passed rules that barred broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic, or providing paid “fast lanes” for select content. The rules enshrined the principal that all data traveling through ISPs’ pipes had to be treated equally.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Tech Companies Urge Trump To Protect DMCA Safe Harbors

        Donald Trump isn’t in the White House yet is but already under pressure from people hoping to benefit from his influence. Among them Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which have written to the president-elect hoping that he’ll uphold the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA to prevent service providers from being held liable for user-uploaded content.

      • Librarians, Archivists, Call On WIPO Members To Create Safe Harbour Against Copyright Liability

        The age of digitisation has opened new doors to distribution of information including for libraries and archives. However, librarians and archivists are often confronted with risk of liability for copyright infringement, nationally and in cross-border activities. This week, they asked the World Intellectual Property Organization copyright committee to provide them not only with some exceptions to copyright, but with protection against liability.

11.18.16

Links 18/11/2016: Apache at 17 (Years), GNU Octave 4.2

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Jim Zemlin: Why Open Source is Professionalizing, and How to Stay Ahead

    If it is true that software is eating the world then it is also true that open source is eating software. The very fabric of our digital society increasingly runs on software built and supported collectively by hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. And not just traditional technology companies. As we move towards a world defined by digital experiences carmakers, retailers, banks, hospitals, movie studios and so many more are becoming involved in building and underwriting this work—in reality they are becoming software companies themselves.

  • How Open Source and InnerSource are changing the IT Landscape
  • The Tragedy of Open Source
  • Open Source and Trends shaping it
  • Managing the Opportunities and Challenges of Open Source Innovation
  • Open Source is all about Community
  • Open Source Development at the UK Government

    New code developed for the UK government is open by default. Coding in the open enables reuse and increases transparency, which results in better digital services, said Anna Shipman, technical architect at Government Digital Service (GDS). She spoke about open sourcing government at GOTO Berlin 2016.

    Our job is to change the way the government works, said Shipman. The UK government wants to provide digital services which are so good that people want to use them; services which are leading to better interaction between the government and citizen.

    Software development at the UK government used to be done with yearly big bang releases. Over the years this has changed with many teams doing several code updates every day.

  • ‘Podling’ Apache projects are spending longer in the incubator

    Stewards of the Apache Software Foundation are mildly concerned that many nascent projects are spending longer in the incubator, putting pressure on limited mentoring resources.

    In the 12 months up to November 2016, ASF oversaw 30 new “podling” incubator projects, of which four were retired and just seven graduated. Jim Jagielski, director and co-founder at ASF, said the graduation rate has fallen compared to previous years, causing him to ponder why so many projects were apparently stuck.

  • Apache: 17 years on in the open source community

    Apache is a public charity based in the US that facilitates the development of open source projects for the public good in a vendor neutral environment.

    This week the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) hosted ApacheCon in Seville, Spain to celebrate not only it’s 17 year old ‘birthday’ but to further instill this open source community’s core principles that have been with it since the beginning: the ‘Apache Way’.

  • AT&T’s Chris Rice Upskills on SDN & Open Source

    One key advantage SDN provides is the ability to directly program the network by rapidly adding on-demand applications on top of the SDN controller. Service providers are increasingly turning to open source software as a viable alternative to proprietary automation tools, but concerns such as cost, security, standards and whether the software is “carrier-grade” remain front of mind.

  • Transforming scientific research with OpenStack

    A cloud-based approach is often heralded as the natural way forward when it comes to improving agility. And whilst many traditional enterprises have turned to the technology, other types of organizations are seeing the benefits too.

  • Open Source vs Proprietary Cloud: Choose Wisely

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 51 To Enable WebGL 2 By Default, FLAC Audio, Skia Content Rendering On Linux
      • Introducing Firefox Focus – a free, fast and easy to use private browser for iOS
      • Privacy made simple with Firefox Focus

        Today we launched Firefox Focus, a brand new iOS browser that puts user privacy first. More than ever before, we believe that everyone on the Internet has a right to protect their privacy. By launching Firefox Focus, we are putting that belief into practice in a big way.

        How big? If you download Firefox Focus and start to browse, you will notice a prominent “Erase” button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. If you tap that button, the Firefox Focus app erases all browsing information including cookies, website history or passwords. Of course, you can erase this on any other browser but we are making it simple here – just one tap away.

        Out of sight too often means out of mind. Burying the tools to clear browsing history and data behind clicks or taps means that fewer people will do it. By putting the “Erase” button front and center, we offer users a simple path to healthy online behaviors — protecting their online freedom and taking greater control of their personal data. To further enhance user privacy, Firefox Focus also by default blocks advertising, social and analytics tracking. So, on Firefox Focus, “private” browsing is actually automatic, and erasing your history is incredibly simple.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • AtScale Takes its BI Platform Beyond Hadoop

      As it began to develop, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Conference 2016: First videos online

      Here at The Document Foundation we’ve been really busy since the LibreOffice Conference in September, running our Community Weeks and the Month of LibreOffice. But finally we’ve started putting videos online from presentations at the conference.

      Don’t miss this opening presentation, the State of the Project, and then scroll down for more talks and demos.

  • Funding

    • Kubernetes founders launch Heptio with $8.5M in funding to help bring containers to the enterprise

      For years, the public face of Kubernetes was one of the project’s founders: Google group product manager Craig McLuckie. He started the open-source container-management project together with Joe Beda, Brendan Burns and a few other engineers inside of Google, which has since brought it under the guidance of the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

      Beda became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners in late 2015, Burns left Google for Microsoft earlier this year and McLuckie quietly left Google to start a new venture a few weeks ago. McLuckie and Beda have now teamed up again to launch Heptio, a new pure-play Kubernetes company.

  • BSD

    • openbsd changes of note

      mcl2k2 pools and the em conversion. The details are in the commits, but the short story is that due to hardware limitations, a number of tradeoffs need to be made between performance and memory usage. The em chip can (mostly) only be programmed to write to 2k buffers. However, ethernet payloads are not nicely aligned. They’re two bytes off. Leading to a costly choice. Provide a 2k buffer, and then copy all the data after the fact, which is slow. Or allocate a larger than 2k buffer, and provide em with a pointer that’s 2 bytes offset. Previously, the next size up from 2k was 4k, which is quite wasteful. The new 2k2 buffer size still wastes a bit of memory, but much less.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Faster unified capabilities and open source code on DISA’s plate for 2017

      The Defense Information Systems Agency is trying to speed up the delivery of its voice, video and data services to Defense Department and military employees.

      DISA currently has its Unified Capabilities (UC) contract award date set for the fourth quarter of 2018, but the IT agency thinks it can push the award to the left and have it finished by the first quarter. The contract, called Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS), would integrate things like voice, video, email, content management and other communication devices into one seamless, unified client.

      However, DISA’s Enterprise-wide Services Division Chief Brian Hermann, thinks DISA can award and set up UC faster.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • 4 tips for DIY makers

      First, I take a picture of the postcard and upload it to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, usually Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 International. These two licenses allow anyone to use the image of my artwork for both non-commercial and commercial purposes, modify and remix them. And uploading to Wikimedia Commons puts my artwork in a place where many people will see it.

  • Programming/Development

    • LLVM’s LLD Linker Looking At Enabling Multi-Threading By Default
    • You Are Not Paid to Write Code

      “Taco Bell Programming” is the idea that we can solve many of the problems we face as software engineers with clever reconfigurations of the same basic Unix tools. The name comes from the fact that every item on the menu at Taco Bell, a company which generates almost $2 billion in revenue annually, is simply a different configuration of roughly eight ingredients.

      Many people grumble or reject the notion of using proven tools or techniques. It’s boring. It requires investing time to learn at the expense of shipping code. It doesn’t do this one thing that we need it to do. It won’t work for us. For some reason—and I continue to be completely baffled by this—everyone sees their situation as a unique snowflake despite the fact that a million other people have probably done the same thing. It’s a weird form of tunnel vision, and I see it at every level in the organization. I catch myself doing it on occasion too. I think it’s just human nature.

    • Eclipse Che cloud IDE joins Docker revolution

      Eclipse Che 5.0 is making accommodations for Docker containers and Language Server Protocol across multiple IDEs. The newest version of the Eclipse Foundation’s cloud-based IDE and workspace server will be available by the end of the year.

      The update offers Docker Compose Workspaces, in which a workspace can run multiple developer machines with support for Docker Compose files and standard Dockerfiles. In the popular Docker software container platform, a Compose file is a Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) file defining services, networks, and volumes; a Docker file is a text document with commands to assemble an image. Che also has been certified for Docker Store, which features enterprise-ready containers. In addition, Docker is joining the Eclipse Foundation and will work directly with Che.

Leftovers

  • Are Office Depot workers pushing unnecessary computer fixes?

    1116-ctm-officedepotinvestigation-jones-1181439-640×360.jpg
    KIRO-TV

    The retailer says it helps about 6,000 customers per week with its free PC health checks, and that it does not condone any of the alleged conduct we uncovered. But CBS affiliate KIRO-TV’s undercover cameras showed how employees used the service to sell customers expensive computer repairs that weren’t there, reports KIRO’s Jesse Jones.

    Office Depot’s technicians repeatedly told us our computers were infected.

    “It’s got malware symptoms in there,” one said.

    They said they could fix them — for a hefty fee.

    “It actually looks like it’s $180 right now,” the technician estimated.

    The only problem? All the PC’s were brand new and fresh out of the box. The computer security firm IOActive also gave them a clean bill of health.

    “We found no symptoms of malware on these computers when we operated them,” said Will Longman, IOActive VP of Information Technology and Security.

    We even purchased one of the new computers at Office Depot. But when we brought it to technicians at a different store, a technician said, “Malware symptoms were found in the machine.”

  • Science

    • Blast Off With the Amateur Rocketeers of the Mojave Desert

      An event called “Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships” doesn’t bring to mind a day of peace and quiet. If nothing else, a field packed with amateur rocketeers blasting things toward the heavens is raucous to say the least. But Sean Lemoine found it all very … zen. “It’s very serene out there, just watching the rockets,” he says.

      Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships is among the world’s biggest amateur rocketry events. Some 250 rocketeers from as away as the UK and Argentina gathered on a cracked lakebed in the Mojave Desert, where the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the airspace for miles around. That’s essential, because these folks launch rockets capable of reaching 17,000 feet and making Elon Musk smile.

  • Hardware

    • Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2016: Less is More

      In our last report for Q2 2016, we counted 68,813 spinning hard drives in operation. For Q3 2016 we have 67,642 drives, or 1,171 fewer hard drives. Stop, put down that Twitter account, Backblaze is not shrinking. In fact, we’re growing very nicely and are approaching 300 petabytes of data under our management. We have fewer drives because over the last quarter we swapped out more than 3,500 2 terabyte (TB) HGST and WDC hard drives for 2,400 8 TB Seagate drives. So we have fewer drives, but more data. Lots more data! We’ll get into the specifics a little later on, but first, let’s take a look at our Q3 2016 drive stats.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Reproducible Builds: week 81 in Stretch cycle
    • Security-hardened Android, bounties for Tcl coders, and more open source news

      In a blog post yesterday, the Tor project announced a refresh of a prototype of a Tor-enabled Android phone aimed at reducing vulnerability to security and privacy issues. Combining several existing software packages together, the effort has created an installation tool for hardening your phone. While designed for a Nexus 6P reference device, the project hopes to expand to provide greater hardware choice.

    • Linux flaw exposed in a minute by pressing enter key

      Researchers have discovered a major vulnerability in the Cryptesetup utility that can impact many GNU/Linux systems, which is activated by pressing the enter key for about 70 seconds.

    • Chinese IoT Firm Siphoned Text Messages, Call Records

      A Chinese technology firm has been siphoning text messages and call records from cheap Android-based mobile smart phones and secretly sending the data to servers in China, researchers revealed this week. The revelations came the same day the White House and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued sweeping guidelines aimed at building security into Internet-connected devices, and just hours before a key congressional panel sought recommendations from industry in regulating basic security standards for so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices.

    • Google security engineer slams antivirus software, cites better security methods

      Google senior security engineer Darren Bilby isn’t a fan of antivirus software, telling a conference in New Zealand that more time should be spent on more meaningful defenses such as whitelisting applications.

      Speaking at the Kiwicon hacking conference, Bilby said that antivirus apps are simply ineffective and the security world should concentrate its efforts on things that can make a difference.

      “Please no more magic,” Bilby told the conference, according to The Register. “We need to stop investing in those things we have shown do not work. Sure, you are going to have to spend some time on things like intrusion detection systems because that’s what the industry has decided is the plan, but allocate some time to working on things that actually genuinely help.”

      Antivirus software does some useful things, he said, “but in reality it is more like a canary in the coal mine. It is worse than that. It’s like we are standing around the dead canary saying, ‘Thank god it inhaled all the poisonous gas.’”

    • Dutch government wants to keep “zero days” available for exploitation

      The Dutch government is very clear about at least one thing: unknown software vulnerabilities, also known as “zero days”, may be left open by the government, in order to be exploited by secret services and the police.

      We all benefit from a secure and reliable digital infrastructure. It ensures the protection of sensitive personal data, security, company secrets and the national interest. It is essential for the protection of free communication and privacy. As a consequence, any vulnerability should be patched immediately. This is obviously only possible when unknown vulnerabilities are disclosed responsibly. Keeping a vulnerability under wraps is patently irresponsible: it may be found simultaneously by others who abuse it, for example to steal sensitive information or to attack other devices.

    • How To ‘PoisonTap’ A Locked Computer Using A $5 Raspberry Pi

      White hat hacker Samy Kamkar has come up with a way of to hijack Internet traffics from a password-protected computer.

      Serial white hat hacker Samy Kamkar has developed a new exploit for breaking into a locked computer and installing a persistent web-based backdoor on it for accessing the victim’s online accounts.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • David Petraeus in the running to be Trump’s secretary of state

      David Petraeus – the former US army general and CIA director who was prosecuted for mishandling classified information – has entered the race to become Donald Trump’s secretary of state, diplomatic sources said on Thursday.

      Petraeus resigned in November 2012 after the FBI discovered he had had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and had shared classified information with her. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for mishandling the information. People who have seen him recently say he is anxious to return to public life and has privately refused to rule out serving in a Trump administration.

    • You say pro-NATO, I say pro-peace

      So the NATO Secretary General’s second justification of the organisation’s continued existence is not exactly what one would call compelling. But I suppose he had to try, when Juncker’s threatened folie de grandeur that is the EU army is even less inspiring.

      So, back to President-elect Donald Trump. What will he do, faced with this mess of competing western military/security interests and Euro-bureaucrat careerists? Perhaps his US isolationist position is not so mad, bad and dangerous to know as the wailings of the western liberal press would have us believe?

      American “exceptionalism” and NATO interventionism have not exactly benefited much of the world since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps the time has indeed come for an American Commander-in-Chief who can cut deals, cut through the sabre-rattling rhetoric and, even unintentionally, make a significant contribution to world peace.

      Stranger things have happened. After all, outgoing President Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace a mere eight months after his inauguration….

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Assange ends testimony to prosecutors

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has “co-operated fully” with prosecutors questioning him over a Swedish rape allegation and hopes the case against him will now be dropped, his lawyer Jennifer Robinson says.

      But she told reporters outside Assange’s refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Tuesday that even if Swedish authorities drop the case he will still have to stay inside the embassy while a US investigation into WikiLeaks’ release of secret US government documents continues.

      In the embassy where he’s been holed up since mid-2016, the 45-year-old Australian on Tuesday finished two days of giving testimony on an allegation he raped a woman in Stockholm in 2010.

    • Why the World Needs WikiLeaks

      My organization, WikiLeaks, took a lot of heat during the run-up to the recent presidential election. We have been accused of abetting the candidacy of Donald J. Trump by publishing cryptographically authenticated information about Hillary Clinton’s campaign and its influence over the Democratic National Committee, the implication being that a news organization should have withheld accurate, newsworthy information from the public.

      The Obama Justice Department continues to pursue its six-year criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, the largest known of its kind, into the publishing of classified documents and articles about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and Mrs. Clinton’s first year as secretary of state. According to the trial testimony of one F.B.I. agent, the investigation includes several of WikiLeaks founders, owners and managers. And last month our editor, Julian Assange, who has asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, had his internet connection severed.

    • What Will Be the Costs of Whistleblowing in Trump’s America When They Were Already Extreme Under Obama?

      It was around four in the morning when I received the phone call. “I was raided by the FBI,” said a trembling voice on the other end. “I need help.”

      I was immediately alarmed. I was in the middle of production of a highly risky investigation into the U.S. drone war, and I had gained exclusive access to film with two whistleblowers who wanted to go on the record about their experiences in the drone program. The voice on the phone belonged to one of them, and my research would later become the documentary film “National Bird.”

      When I answered the phone, I was at a veterans’ convention near Denver and had just established contact with a third whistleblower.

    • How Will Trump Deal with FOIA?

      President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that the media is incompetent, biased, and vindictive. He was also the first candidate in modern US history to refuse to release his tax returns.

      Taken together, the inbound Trump administration doesn’t look like it’s going to be particularly forthcoming or transparent with reporters. But how will his administration deal with the Freedom of Information Act, one of the most powerful tools reporters, activists, and researchers have to gain insight into the inner workings of government?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Indonesian fires exposed 69 million to ‘killer haze’

      Wildfires in Indonesia and Borneo exposed 69 million people to unhealthy air pollution and are responsible for thousands of premature deaths, new research has shown.

      The study, published today in Scientific Reports, gives the most accurate picture yet of the impact on human health of the wildfires which ripped through forest and peatland in Equatorial Asia during the autumn of 2015.

      The study used detailed observations of the haze from Singapore and Indonesia. Analysing hourly air quality data from a model at a resolution of 10km – where all previous studies have looked at daily levels at a much lower resolution – the team was able to show that a quarter of the population of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia was exposed to unhealthy air quality conditions between September and October 2015.

    • Britain ratifies Paris climate agreement

      Britain said on Thursday it had ratified the Paris Agreement, the global deal to combat climate change.

      The Paris Agreement came into force on Nov. 4 when more than 55 countries representing more than 55 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions ratified the deal.

      “The UK is ratifying the historic Paris Agreement so that we can help to accelerate global action on climate change and deliver on our commitments to create a safer, more prosperous future for us all,” Nick Hurd, Minister of State for Climate Change and Industry, said.

    • Largest bank in Norway pulls its assets in Dakota Access pipeline

      A press release from Greenpeace Thursday says the largest bank in Norway, DNB, sold its assets in the Dakota Access pipeline. They say this decision was the result of 120,000 signatures from Greenpeace Norway and others to DNB, urging the bank and other financial institutions to pull finances from the project.

  • Finance

    • EU set to ask Ukip group to repay almost £150,000 in ‘misspent funds’

      Ukip is likely to be asked to repay tens of thousands of euros by European parliament finance chiefs who have accused the party of misspending EU funds on party workers and Nigel Farage’s failed bid to win a seat in Westminster.

      The Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe, a Ukip-dominated political vehicle, will be asked to repay €173,000 (£148,000) in misspent funds and denied a further €501,000 in EU grants for breaking European rules that ban spending EU money on national election campaigns and referendums.

    • We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail

      Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.

      Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote.

    • Angela Merkel suggests TTIP trade deal won’t be concluded under Barack Obama’s presidency

      Angela Merkel has said the TTIP trade deal will not be completed now Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.

      Speaking at a joint press conference with US President Barack Obama, the German Chancellor said the United States represents an important trading partner for both Germany and the European Union.

      “I’ve always come out strongly in favour of concluding a trade agreement with the United States of America,” Ms Merkel said.

      She added: “We have made progress, quite a lot of progress, but they will not be concluded now.

      “But we will keep what we have achieved so far, and I’m absolutely certain one day we will come back to what we have achieved and build on it.”

    • Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here

      The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians.

      The Bush and Clinton dynasties were destroyed by the media-saturated lure of the pseudo-populist billionaire with narcissist sensibilities and ugly, fascist proclivities. The monumental election of Trump was a desperate and xenophobic cry of human hearts for a way out from under the devastation of a disintegrating neoliberal order – a nostalgic return to an imaginary past of greatness.

      White working- and middle-class fellow citizens – out of anger and anguish – rejected the economic neglect of neoliberal policies and the self-righteous arrogance of elites. Yet these same citizens also supported a candidate who appeared to blame their social misery on minorities, and who alienated Mexican immigrants, Muslims, black people, Jews, gay people, women and China in the process.

      This lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating brought neoliberalism to its knees. In short, the abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Daily Report: The Increasingly Tectonic Force of Social Media

      Social media has been in the glare since the election for its perceived harmful qualities, such as the spreading of hate speech and the false information.

      But the effect of social media on world affairs is much larger than just misinformation and mean tweets, Farhad Manjoo writes. In his new State of the Art column, he argues that social media — now collectively used by billions of people worldwide through services like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, WeChat and Weibo — has grown to a point where it is increasingly influencing the course of global events.

    • Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’

      What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common? For starters, they’re all make-believe — and invented by the same man.

      Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he’s British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. “South Park” lawsuit last year.

      But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump’s son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner’s faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google.

    • The fact fake news ‘outperformed’ real news on Facebook proves the problem is wildly out of control

      BuzzFeed is reporting that at the end of the US presidential election, the top malicious fake news stories actually outperformed the most popular legitimate news stories shared by media companies.

      According to data from a Facebook-monitoring tool, the top 20 fake news stories collectively got more engagements – shares, likes, comments – than the top 20 factually accurate news stories shared by mainstream news outlets.

    • [Older] Did Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald Use Threats and Bribery to Silence a Young Journalist?

      In retrospect, it sounds preposterous: A nationally recognized journalist publishes an article alleging a conspiracy between the Republican candidate for President of the United States and Russia, and, when his hyperbole is exposed in an email from a young journalist, allegedly attempts to intimidate and bribe that journalist in exchange for his silence. Nevertheless, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

    • Here’s Your 2016 Election Explained from 2013

      Here’s an excerpt from my book Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. I wrote the passage below in 2013. Nobody wanted to read it then, nobody thought it meant anything. Well, maybe it makes more sense now. And, yeah, I’m a little bitter about that.

      “Yep. Thirty years on the big bucket, pouring out two hundred tons of steel a day. Lookit my right arm—muscle’s twice as thick as on the left ’cause of that lever I pulled every day. I got that job right after Korea in fact. My old man sent me to see the foreman while I was still wearing my uniform.”

      “How’s it up there now? I heard the president say he’s creating more jobs, so I was considering moving up.”

      “Moving on isn’t a bad idea. I wished I had done it at your age. Hell, I wished I’d done it last month.”

      “So there’s work where you’re from?”

      “Same there as it was four years ago and four years before that. Every four years the president comes back into western Pennsylvania like a dog looking for a place to pee. He reminds us that his wife’s cousin is from some town near to ours, gets photographed at the diner if it’s still in business, and then makes those promises to us while winking at the big business donors who feed him bribes they call campaign contributions. I’m tempted to cut out the middleman and just write in ‘Goldman Sachs’ on my ballot next election.”

    • ‘Yesterday We Were Stunned, Today We Organize’ – CounterSpin special report on what comes next after Trump’s election

      So, much to come, but for this week, what now for electoral reform and congressional diversity, for the environment, for Muslim-Americans and others made vulnerable by the so-called War on Terror in its domestic and international fronts? We’ll hear from Rob Richie and Cynthia Terrell from FairVote, from author and professor Deepa Kumar, from Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, and from Patty Lovera from Food and Water Watch. They’re all coming up, but first a brief look back at recent press

    • How Trump’s ‘Chief Strategist’ Provided a ‘Platform for the Alt-Right’

      Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign chief executive and the announced “Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President” in the Trump administration, has declared of Breitbart, the website he still heads, “We’re the platform for the alt-right.” What did he mean by that?

      Well, the alt-right, by Breitbart‘s own description, is a coalition of advocates of “scientific race differences”; people interested in “the preservation of their own tribe and its culture” who “believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved”; online traffickers in racist and antisemitic stereotypes who “feel a mischievous urge to blaspheme”; and a significant fringe of hardcore, pro-Hitler neo-Nazis.

    • Neo-Liberalism Under Cover of Racism

      The first, and highly successful method is to convince people that it is not the massive appropriation of resources by the ultra-wealthy which causes their poverty, it is rather competition for the scraps with outsiders. This approach employs pandering to racism and xenophobia, and is characteristic of UKIP and Trump.

      The second approach employs the antithesis to the same end. It is to co-opt the forces marginalised by the first approach and rally them behind an “alternative” approach which is still neo-liberalism. This is identity politics which reached its apotheosis in the Clinton campaign. The Wikileaks releases of DNC and Podesta emails revealed the extreme cynicism of Clinton manipulation of ethnic group votes. Still more blatant was the promotion of the idea that Hillary being a corrupt neo-con warmonger was outweighed by the fact she was female. The notion that elevating extremely rich and privileged women already within the 1% to top positions, breaks a glass ceiling and benefits all women, is the precise feminist equivalent of trickledown theory.

      That the xenophobic strand rather than the identity politics strand won will, I predict, prove to have no impact on continued neo-liberal policies.

    • You Are Still Crying Wolf

      Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

      Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.

    • Barack Obama on fake news: ‘We have problems’ if we can’t tell the difference

      “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said during a press conference in Germany.

      Since the surprise election of Donald Trump as president-elect, Facebook has battled accusations that it has failed to stem the flow of misinformation on its network and that its business model leads to users becoming divided into polarized political echo chambers.

      Obama said that we live in an age with “so much active misinformation” that is “packaged very well” and looks the same whether it’s on Facebook or on TV.

    • The Electoral College Was Created to Stop Demagogues Like Trump

      Trump promises to bring to the presidency precisely the ‘tumult and disorder’ that Hamilton warned against

      Since Nov. 9, Donald Trump has been described as our “President-elect.” But many would be shocked to learn that this term is actually legally meaningless. The Constitution sets out a specific hurdle for Trump to ascend to the presidency. And that will not happen until Dec. 19 when the members of the Electoral College meet in their respective states to vote for the President.

    • Senator Boxer Introduces Bill to Eliminate Electoral College

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • From Hate Speech To Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg

      Mark Zuckerberg — one of the most insightful, adept leaders in the business world — has a problem. It’s a problem he has been slow to acknowledge, even though it’s become more apparent by the day.

      Several current and former Facebook employees tell NPR there is a lot of internal turmoil about how the platform does and doesn’t censor content that users find offensive. And outside Facebook, the public is regularly confounded by the company’s decisions — around controversial posts and around fake news.

      (Did Pope Francis really endorse Donald Trump? Does Hillary Clinton really have a body double?)

    • Facebook’s Problem Is More Complicated Than Fake News

      In the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, many questions have been raised about Facebook’s role in the promotion of inaccurate and highly partisan information during the presidential race and whether this fake news influenced the election’s outcome.

      A few have downplayed Facebook’s impact, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said that it is “extremely unlikely” that fake news could have swayed the election. But questions about the social network’s political significance merit more than passing attention.

    • Six Monarchs, 140 Dissidents, One Rule: Keep Your Mouth Shut

      Bahraini human rights activist Zainab al-Khawaja, known to her 47, 900 Twitter followers as @angryarabiya, faced trial in a courtroom in Manama in October 2014. The charges related to an incident two years earlier when she had ripped up a photo of Bahrain’s King Hamad in an act of protest. If the judge was expecting contrition, he was in for a shock. Al-Khawaja proceeded to pull out another photo of the king, ripped it up, and placed it in front of a bemused judge, who promptly adjourned the hearing and stomped off.

    • Why Twitter’s Alt-Right Banning Campaign Will Become The Alt-Right’s Best Recruitment Tool

      If there are two points worth hammering home on matters of free speech, they are that defenders of free speech must be willing to defend speech they don’t like and that the solution to bad speech is more good speech. I would argue that Western democracy as a whole can be defined as a political version of the Socratic Method, by which the electorate engages in public debate, constantly questioning the other side, in order to produce the most optimal thoughts. For those that value this method of discourse, it’s instantly recognized that it only works if you have opposing views. To that end, it’s imperative that we not only allow, but feverishly welcome, different points of view.

      But this kind of thinking is currently under assault in America, and from both sides. The latest example of this is Twitter’s recent decision to carpet-ban an entire slew of accounts linked to the so-called “alt-right” movement.

    • Mark Zuckerberg Continues to Miss the Point on Facebook as a Media Entity

      Zuckerberg says he “cares deeply” about the company’s fake news problem

      As critics slam Facebook for the role they believe it—and in particular its penchant for fake news stories—played in the election of Donald Trump, CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to resist any attempt to pin some of the blame on his company. But in doing so, he misses the point.

      Over the weekend, the Facebook co-founder took to the site to respond to some of those criticisms. He said he “cares deeply” about the fake news problem and wants to get it right. But he also said that he doesn’t believe fake news contributed to the election’s outcome.

    • Kim Jong Un Gets New Mean Nickname After Chinese Censors Block Fat Jokes
    • China censors search reuslts for Kim Jong Un’s ‘Fatty’ nickname
    • China clamps down on Kim Jong-un ‘fatty’ jokes
    • China Really Doesn’t Want Anyone to Call Kim Jong-Un a ‘Fatty’

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • UK Joins Russia And China In Legalizing Bulk Surveillance

      The highly-intrusive Investigatory Powers Bill has been passed by the UK’s House of Lords, and will come into force within weeks.

      The move gives the British government the power to spy on its citizens to an extent that’s virtually unprecedented anywhere in the world – only Russia and China have comparable regimes.

      It legalizes activities that the GCHQ spy agency had been illegally carrying out for years, including the bulk collection of personal communications data. It also allows both the security services and the police the power to hack into and bug electronic devices from smartphones to baby monitors.

      Meanwhile, internet and phone providers will be required to record and store for a year their customers’ phone and web activity. This will include the websites they’ve visited and the communications software they’ve used, along with every mobile app and more.

    • Your mobile phone records and home address for sale

      Corrupt insiders at offshore call centres are offering the private details of Australian customers of Optus, Telstra and Vodafone for sale to anyone prepared to pay.

      A Fairfax Media investigation can reveal Mumbai-based security firm AI Solutions is asking between $350 and $1000 in exchange for the private information, but even more if the target is an Australian “VIP, politician, police, [or] celebrity”.

    • Chinese tourist town uses face recognition as an entry pass

      Who needs tickets when you have a face? From today, the ticketed tourist town of Wuzhen in China is using face-recognition technology to identify people staying in its hotels and to act as their entry pass through the gates of the attraction.

      The system, which is expected to process 5000 visitors a day, has been created by web giant Baidu – often referred to as the “Chinese Google”.

      Wuzhen is a historic town that has been turned into a tourist attraction with museums, tours and traditional crafts. When people check in to hotels in the tourist area, they will now have their pictures taken and uploaded to a central database. If they leave and re-enter the town, the face-recognition software will check that they are actually a guest of a hotel there before allowing them back in.

    • UN privacy chief: UK surveillance bill is ‘worse than scary’

      Joseph Cannataci, the UN’s special rapporteur on privacy, attacked the government’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill, saying he had never seen evidence that mass surveillance works. He also accused MPs of leading an “absolute offensive” and an “orchestrated” media campaign to distort the debate and take hold of new powers.

      The comments came during a live streamed keynote presentation at the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil, where leading experts from around the world have gathered to discuss the future of the internet and web policy.

      In a wide-ranging presentation and discussion panel Cannataci — who has previously said the UK’s digital surveillance is similar to George Orwell’s 1984 — discussed the state of surveillance and privacy around the world. Pausing to briefly talk about the Home Office’s new bill, but without going deeply into detail, Cannataci said: “The snoopers’ charter in the UK is just a bit worse than scary, isn’t it.”

    • Google Unleashes its Machine Learning Group [Ed: Human learning at Google (spying, dossiers, classification, surveillance etc.) as “Machine Learning” ‘group’]
    • Companies Keep Asking Us To Track You; We’d Rather You Be Protected From Tracking
    • James Clapper, who led America’s digital mass surveillance efforts, has resigned
    • Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Resigns
    • James Clapper, the US intelligence chief, resigns
    • James Clapper, of NSA-scandal fame, is stepping down
    • America’s Top Spy Talks Snowden Leaks and Our Ominous Future

      Public appearances don’t come easily to James Clapper, the United States director of national intelligence. America’s top spy is a 75-year-old self-described geezer who speaks in a low, guttural growl; his physical appearance—muscular and bald—recalls an aging biker who has reluctantly accepted life in a suit. Clapper especially hates appearing on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress wait to ambush him and play what he calls “stump the chump.” As he says, “I rank testimony—particularly in the open—right up there with root canals and folding fitted sheets.”

    • Lawmakers Want To Halt Changes That Would Allow Trump Wider Hacking Abilities

      A group of senators are making a last-ditch effort to delay proposed changes to a federal rule that would greatly expand the government current hacking powers.

      The Review the Rule Act would delay the proposed changes to Rule 41, officially known as the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, from going into effect until July 1, 2017. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court approved proposed changes to Rule 41, giving Congress until Dec. 1 to modify, reject, or postpone the changes established by the court before they become law.

      Broadly speaking, Rule 41 deals with circumstances in which the government is allowed to tap into citizen’s computers.

      The bipartisan group backing the bill includes Democratic Senators Chris Coons, Steve Daines, Ron Wyden, and Al Franken and Republican Senator Mike Lee, together with Representatives John Conyers Jr., and Ted Poe, a Democrat and Republican respectively.

    • Britain has passed the ‘most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy’

      The new law, dubbed the “snoopers’ charter”, was introduced by then-home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and took two attempts to get passed into law following breakdowns in the previous coalition government.

      Four years and a general election later — May is now prime minister — the bill was finalized and passed on Wednesday by both parliamentary houses.

      But civil liberties groups have long criticized the bill, with some arguing that the law will let the UK government “document everything we do online”.

      It’s no wonder, because it basically does.

      The law will force internet providers to record every internet customer’s top-level web history in real-time for up to a year, which can be accessed by numerous government departments; force companies to decrypt data on demand — though the government has never been that clear on exactly how it forces foreign firms to do that that; and even disclose any new security features in products before they launch.

    • Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden threatens to filibuster if Trump goes after encryption

      Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who was re-elected last week, told VICE News in an exclusive interview that he is willing to cross the aisle to work with President-elect Donald Trump, but that he is also poised for battle on civil liberties.

      Wyden is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and has gone up against the NSA and the CIA. He thinks national security will play a prominent role in the Trump administration. And even though his party is in the minority in Congress, he intends to hold Trump accountable should the president try to weaken protections surrounding encryption.

    • Privacy is the only working antidote against echo chambers

      Echo chambers are causing real harm to developing a coherent discourse in any subject, but those echo chambers all depend on identity. Replace the identity with privacy, and the echo chamber cannot function, instead allowing for a diverse range of unidentified opinions and viewpoints.

      The term “echo chamber” has gotten a revival lately, and especially after the recent US presidential election: the dangers of only speaking to, and hearing, likeminded people – being in an “echo chamber” where your own opinions are echoed back at you. Facebook is cited as one of the worst echo-chamber environments, and for good reason.

      Wall Street Journal’s “Blue Feed, Red Feed” demonstration really highlights how bad the phenomenon is: you only see news stories that reinforce your existing opinions. (If you haven’t seen the demo, it’s worth seeing.) Since Facebook is a for-profit company, it tries to keep us happy, and part of keeping us happy is confirming that we’re right about basically everything we believe.

    • Why the Investigatory Powers Act is a privacy disaster waiting to happen

      On Thursday, the Investigatory Powers Bill, colloquially known as the Snoopers’ Charter, completed its final stage and is set to become law. The legislative process began in March of this year, and has been rather overshadowed by the Brexit referendum and its shambolic aftermath. As a result, the UK government has had a comparatively easy ride over what are some of the most extreme surveillance powers in the world.

    • Snooper’s Charter is set to become law: how the Investigatory Powers Bill will affect you

      After more than 12 months of debate, jostling and a healthy dose of criticism, the United Kingdom’s new surveillance regime is set to become law.

      Both the House of Lords and House of Commons have now passed the Investigatory Powers Bill – the biggest overhaul of surveillance powers for more than a decade.

      Now the bill has been passed by both of these official bodies, it is almost law. Before it officially is adopted, however, it will need to receive Royal Assent, which is likely to be given before the end of 2016 (to match the government’s intentions and ahead of existing surveillance laws expiring).

    • Burner Phones and Email Encryption: Protecting Documentary Sources in a Surveillance State

      I bought a burner phone in cash and felt like a criminal. Earlier, as I was spreading the dollar bills on the counter, I asked myself, “Am I completely paranoid?” It was not the first time during the production of my drone warfare documentary, National Bird, that this thought crossed my mind, and it was certainly not the last.

      But I was not paranoid – and neither were the protagonists of my film, three whistleblowers who had worked in the U.S. drone program with top-secret clearances. Less than 24 hours prior to my phone purchase, one of them had had their home raided by the FBI and was now being investigated for espionage. I needed to contact my lawyer, an expert on First Amendment rights, and given the recent turn of events, using my own phone did not seem like a good idea.

      When I started my research for National Bird, I knew I was entering dangerous territory loaded with sensitive information. My goal for the film was to speak to the people directly impacted by the drone war, not to some pundits in suits in front of bookshelves. I wanted to gain access to the people on the inside who were fighting this high-tech war, and to the victims and survivors in the target countries. This was a risky project from the outset and it became necessary to work with lawyers to reduce the risks for everyone involved.

    • iPhone call history can be extracted from an iCloud account

      APPLE USERS are having their call records stored in the company’s iCloud servers in a way that can be extracted by third parties.

      Russian software house ElcomSoft has revealed that it has found a way to extract the data in near real time, for anyone targeting a phone with iOS 9 or above.

      The company has released an app called ElcomSoft Phone Breaker 6.20, capable of performing its nefarious mischief even on a locked, PIN-protected phone.

    • Apple logs iPhone, iMessage and FaceTime calls in iCloud

      Despite Apples’ apparent strong stance on security, its user’s iCloud Drives are frequently accessed by legal authorities.

      Even in the now famous case of the case of the San Bernardino shooter, Apple revealed it had already handed over access to the shooters iCloud. That data includes email logs and content, text messages, photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and iOS device backups.

    • Apple Uploading Call Data, Including From Third-Party Call Apps, To Users’ iCloud Accounts

      Plain vanilla call records aren’t that difficult to obtain. They’ve long been considered third-party records and can be obtained without a warrant. The Intercept quotes a former FBI agent as saying this is a “boon” for law enforcement because the four-month retention period is longer than most service providers’.

      That doesn’t seem to be correct at all. The EFF’s Nate Cardozo points out that most service providers retain call logs for at least a year, with some retaining records for as long as a decade. Kim Zetter, who wrote the piece for The Intercept, believes it might be a misunderstanding. Providers may retain content (messages, etc.) for a shorter time frame than the four months of records Apple automatically uploads, but former agent Robert Osgood (quoted in The Intercept’s piece) clearly states he’s referring to call logs.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Christians sentenced to 80 lashes by Sharia court for drinking communion wine

      Yaser Mosibzadeh, Saheb Fadayee and Mohammed Reza Omidi will be flogged in public after being arrested at a house church gathering in Rasht, Iran, earlier this year.

      The trio spent weeks in prison before finally being released on bail, but will now be subjected to the cruel and degrading punishment after being found guilty by Islamist judges.

      Security agents also raided the home of their pastor Yousef Nadarkhani and his wife Fatemeh Pasandideh and arrested them at the same time, but they were not detained.

    • Amnesty criticises Indonesia for blasphemy probe against Governor Ahok

      Amnesty International has asked Indonesia to drop the blasphemy probe against Jakarta’s Chinese Christian Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama.

      Ahok was in the limelight in the last few weeks after hardline Islamist organisations demanded his ouster and held a rally in capital Jakarta that turned violent.

    • Briton who reported rape in Dubai could face jail for extramarital sex

      A British woman who reported being raped by two men is “petrified” after being told she faces jail in Dubai for extramarital sex.

      The 25-year-old tourist claimed she was attacked by two men while on holiday in the United Arab Emirates and reported the incident to police.

      But officers then charged the professional from Cheshire with extramarital sex and, despite being bailed, she is not allowed to leave the country. Her passport has been confiscated and UK-based UAE legal experts Detained in Dubai said she could face a prison sentence if found guilty.

      The family of the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, have set up fundraising pages online to raise money to cover her legal costs. She is currently residing in a safe house.

      The woman’s father wrote online that his daughter had met the two men in her hotel who raped her. He claims the alleged attack was filmed. He added: “She is stranded, is not allowed to leave the country, and is alone scared, and in a dreadful situation, as you can imagine.”

    • Turnkey Tyranny: Jamming the Lock on the Way Out

      For six years—from 2006 to 2013—I worked inside the intelligence community to enforce laws and policies that protect privacy and civil liberties. My tenure spanned the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The surveillance policies of both administrations enlarged the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies and put considerable strain on privacy.

      Edward Snowden’s disclosures of mass surveillance programs, beginning in 2013, led to a course correction in the late Obama years. Changes included a substantial transparency drive, limits on signals intelligence collection that apply to foreigners, and reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that include the end of bulk collection of metadata under that law. I have argued that the Snowden reforms forced the NSA to become “more transparent, more accountable, more protective of privacy—and more effective.”

      Still, we delude ourselves if we think they have made the NSA tyrant-proof. In Snowden’s first interview from Hong Kong, warned against “turnkey tyranny.” One day, he said, “a new leader will be elected” and “they’ll find the switch.” With Donald Trump’s election, it is important that this warning not be proved prophetic. While the United States has a robust system of intelligence oversight—the strongest in the world—it still largely depends on the good faith of Executive Branch officials.

    • Trump’s Torture Promise Hits A Deep Nerve For The People Who Worked To Ban It

      President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to bring back enhanced interrogation techniques — including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” — is rattling the tight-knit community of government officials and activists who have worked for a decade to forbid it.

      “I cannot believe we are honestly having this convo,” one anti-torture advocate, who has helped shape interrogation policy during Obama’s tenure, wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email. “This is so fucking depressing.”

      Trump first promised back in February, months before he won the Republican nomination, that he would revive the use of Bush-era interrogation tactics — like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and rectal feeding — that have since been outlawed and labeled torture. After his win, Republican lawmakers are coming out of the woodwork and endorsing his plan. Sen. Tom Cotton said Wednesday night that he had faith in Mr. Trump to “make those tough calls” to bring back waterboarding.

      For this small community — made up of a smattering of human rights groups, activists and former national security officials — that rhetoric threatens to invalidate nearly a decade of anti-torture efforts and void the marginal, but significant, successes under the Obama administration. While Obama has been fiercely criticized for failing to prosecute Bush-era officials for the CIA’s now-defunct torture program and for aiding the CIA’s obfuscation on the issue, there has been slow, but significant effort to close off pathways for the US to torture in the future, including policies that have passed through Congress.

    • Chelsea Manning Formally Petitions Obama to Commute Her Sentence

      Last week, Chelsea Manning formally petitioned President Obama for clemency, asking him to reduce the remainder of her 35-year sentence to time served. According to the New York Times, Manning, who pleaded guilty in 2010, has been imprisoned for longer than any other whistleblower in American history.

      In a statement accompanying the petition, a copy of which was provided to Jezebel, Manning said she took “full and complete responsibility” for leaking the secret military and diplomatic documents. “I have never made any excuses for what I did. I pleaded guilty without the protection of a plea agreement because I believed the military justice system would understand my motivation for the disclosure and sentence me fairly. I was wrong.”

    • The United Kingdom is a Malign Entity that Must Be Broken – Indefensible Chagos Decision

      I have no doubt the majority of people in the UK would be horrified by the deportation of the Chagos Islanders. But the entire political and economic structure of the UK state is such that it is inevitably a satrap to United states Crimes, be it in Diego Garcia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or elsewhere. The only remedy is for the United Kingdom and its worldwide imperial pretensions to be ended as a state. I express this view succinctly here:

    • UK Home Secretary Agrees To Turn Over Accused Hacker Lauri Love To US Government

      Accused hacker Lauri Love is headed to the United States to face prosecution, thanks to an order signed by UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd. The Home Office felt that — after “all things” were “considered” — the best place for an Asberger’s sufferer with suicidal tendencies is the US prison system, most likely segregated from the general population.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Music torrent site What.cd has been shut down

        What.cd, an invite-only music torrent website first launched in 2007, has been shut down after a raid by French authorities. The private tracker offered free (and often illegal) access to a massive, deeply thorough collection of music and was popular among audiophiles for its strict rules around quality and file formats. The site was created after the shutdown of another well-known torrent website, Oink, which operated between 2004 and 2007. Though its primary focus was music sharing, What.cd also permitted torrents of computer software, ebooks, and other content.

      • World’s largest music torrent site goes dark, disputes report about server seizure

        It took nearly 10 years, but authorities have finally targeted and taken down What.cd, which had risen to become the Internet’s largest invite-only, music-trading torrent site.

        The news was confirmed by the tracker’s official Twitter account on Thursday via two posts: “We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

      • BREIN’s New Torrent Piracy Crackdown Results in First Settlement

        Last year, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN announced a broad crackdown on torrent pirates, which resulted in the first settlement this week. The person in question paid 4,800 euros for sharing 12 TV-show episodes. According to BREIN, hundreds of thousands of pirates are now at risk of receiving similar treatment.

      • Mega Compromised by Hackers (Updated)

        Mega, the cloud storage site originally founded by Kim Dotcom, was compromised by hackers this week. Outsiders gained access to part of the site’s infrastructure and released some source code, claiming to have user details as well. Mega confirmed the hack of their seperate blog/help centre system but says that no user data was compromised

11.17.16

Links 17/11/2016: OpenSUSE Leap 42.2, Microsoft E.E.E. on Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • What’s important in open source today

    Jono mentioned that it’s his goal in life to “understand every nuance of how we build predicable, productive, and accessible communities.” He says we are surrounded by communities. We have Wikipedia, the maker movement, and the public becoming the VC for crowdfunding. The data backs up this trend. Community growth participation is growing across industries. Using a commercial software methodology, it would cost over $10 billion to build Wikipedia and/or Fedora. Open source is not just a passing phase.

  • How to Avoid Burnout Managing an Open Source Project

    Regardless of where you work in the stack, if you work with open source software, there’s likely been a time when you faced burnout and other unhealthy side effects related to your work on open source projects. A few of the talks at OSCON Europe addressed this darker side of working in open source head-on.

  • Netflix’s Chaos Monkey Open Cloud Utility is Worth A Look

    Not many organizations have the cloud expertise that Netflix has, and it may come as a surprise to some people to learn that Netflix regularly open sources key, tested and hardened cloud tools that it has used for years. We’ve reported on Netflix open sourcing a series of interesting “Monkey” cloud tools as part of its “simian army,” which it has deployed as a series satellite utilities orbiting its central cloud platform.

    Netflix previously released Chaos Monkey, a utility that improves the resiliency of Software as a Service by randomly choosing to turn off servers and containers at optimized times. Then, Netflix announced the upgrade of Chaos Monkey, and Chaos Monkey 2.0 is now on github. Now, in an interview with infoQ, Netflix Engineer Lorin Hochstein weighs in on what you can get out of this tool.

  • Google Collects Open Artificial Intelligence Demos, Invites You to Contribute
  • Why design and marketing matter and what to do about it

    Rachel Nabors started off the second morning of All Things Open with a great talk about the need for designers in open source.

  • How to make your own ‘unexpected’ number generator

    I don’t generally use word processors or WYSIWYG applications, because they all tend to assume that you’re designing for a single output. However, for this project I was designing for a specific output; I wanted to produce a file that would be printable on a single US Letter and A4 sheet of paper, which would then be folded into a PocketMod, and carried in one’s wallet, or used as a bookmark in a gaming book. Having used it for professional print work at a former job and for some community conferences, I knew that Scribus was the tool for the job.

  • ARK Announces Official Open Source Release of ARK Blockchain Code on GitHub

    This is a paid press relase. CoinTelegraph does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products or other materials on this page. Readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company. CoinTelegraph is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in the press release.

  • An introduction to open source GIS – Part I

    Geospatial information system (GIS) solutions make sense of location-aware data, turning it into usable insights in industries as diverse as energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, finance, and all levels of government

  • ReactOS 0.4.3 Released

    The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of another incremental update, version 0.4.3. This would be fourth such release the project has made this year, an indication we hope of the steady progress that we have made. Approximately 342 issues were resolved since the release of 0.4.2, with the oldest dating all the way back to 2006 involving text alignment.

  • ReactOS 0.4.3 Released, Fixes Over 300 Issues

    ReactOS 0.4.3 is now available as the newest version of this open-source OS that seeks to re-implement the interfaces of Windows.

    As described earlier, ReactOS 0.4.3 has a ton of changes. ReactOS 0.4.3 has many fixes/improvements to its kernel, less crashes in the Win32 subsystem, file-system fixes, a USB audio driver has been started, a basic filter driver added, TCP/IP fixes, improvements to kernel-mode DLLs, a rewritten WinSock 2 DLL, and much more.

  • ReactOS 0.4.3 Officially Released with New Winsock Library, over 340 Bug Fixes

    Today, November 16, 2016, the development team behind the ReactOS free and open-source computer operating system designed to be compatible with Windows applications and drivers, announced the release of ReactOS 0.4.3.

  • How to Choose Between Closed-Source and Open-Source Software

    When it comes to commercial and open source tools (i.e., paid and free software) the debate as to which category of software is better continues, leaving egos, careers, and forums in ruins. I personally think that it’s impossible to definitively prove that one class of software is the best for every situation. The best source code scanning tool in the world may not do a thing for you if it doesn’t run against your code.

  • Events

    • Blender enthusiasts gather for the 15th annual conference

      This year marks the 15th Blender Conference, held in Amsterdam around the last weekend of October every year. I’ve attended quite a few of these conferences, and each year feels better than the one before. If you’ve never attended the Blender Conference, allow me to set things up for you: By open source conference standards, it’s a pretty small event. But for events focused on a single open source program, the Blender Conference is pretty impressive. I think attendance this year clocked in right around 300 people, and tickets were sold out more than a month in advance.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Has Linux got OpenStack licked? The Vanilla ‘Plus’ strategy

      No man is an island, nor is OpenStack removed from the fates of two of its – until recently – best-known names.

      Hewlett-Packard Enterprise was once the largest single contributor to OpenStack. Now, HPE is getting rid of its OpenStack engineers as it turns over responsibility for its OpenStack work to MicroFocus under a deal announced in September.

      The ascent of OpenStack-consulting wunderkind Mirantis experienced a hiccup with its decision to unload 100 OpenStackers and reallocate another 100. Mirantis is understood to have let go devs working on the Solum platform-as-a-service and Savanna Hadoop-as-a-service projects it started in 2013.

  • Education

    • Moodle: An Open Source Community To Protect, Improve And Sustainably Benefit From

      Open Source communities are as vibrant as the participants within them – as with any community, your return is proportional to your investment. An example of someone who is intuitively aware of this is Bas Brands. In an interview for Moodlerooms’ E-Learn Magazine, he tells his experience of sustaining a lifelong relationship with Moodle’s Open Source community, while makes a name for himself and a learning company with alluring prospects.

  • Funding

    • Sauce Labs Raises $70M for Application Testing

      Open-source based testing vendor looks to accelerate its business with new funding.

      Before any company deploys any web or mobile app, it needs to test, and that’s where Sauce Labs fits in. Sauce Labs announced on November 15 that it has raised a $70 million series E round of funding. The new capital will be used to help Sauce Labs expands its go-to-market and engineering efforts.

      The new round of funding was led by Centerview Capital Technology, IVP and Adams Street Partners. Total funding to date for Sauce Labs now stands at $101 million.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • NVIDIA GCC Backend Gets Ready For OpenMP Offloading

      While GCC 7 feature development is officially over, one of the late patches to land for GCC 7.1 in trunk are improvements to the NVIDIA NVPTX back-end.

      The big code that landed today in GCC are all of the prerequisites for supporting OpenMP offloading with the NVPTX back-end. PTX is the IR used in NVIDIA’s CUDA that is then consumed by the proprietary graphics driver for converting this representation into the actual GPU machine code. The NVPTX back-end has been part of GCC for a while now as part of OpenACC offloading and now the recent focus on OpenMP offloading.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing/Legal

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • EFSA models transparency with open source ‘Knowledge Junction’

        The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has made all its models from the last 15 years available on an open source platform called the Knowledge Junction, which also encourages external submissions of data, images and videos that could go on to be used by EFSA in its risk assessments.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Editorial: Groups make Strides with open source textbooks

        With college being as expensive as it is, the high price of textbooks has always been a problem for students. Books can increase the cost of college by thousands of dollars, which can be troublesome for those already struggling to make ends meet. However, groups on campus are making efforts to alleviate this problem and make affordable textbooks a reality. The UConn bookstore recently donated $30,000 towards addressing this concern. In addition, the Undergraduate Student Government has been working along with UConnPIRG to provide open source textbooks for the student body.

        The first major initiative was undertaken with chemistry professor Dr. Edward Neth, who teaches CHEM 1124, 1125 and 1126. Working with a $20,000 donation from the student government, Neth edited an existing open access textbook and adapted it for his classes. Other chemistry professors have begun using open source textbooks as well, and this has already saved students thousands of dollars.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Cypress Has Begun Publishing Broadcom Datasheets

        Earlier this summer Cypress semiconductor acquired Broadcom’s wireless “Internet of Things” business. With that associated IP, Cypress has begun making public NDA-free data-sheets on associated chipsets.

  • Programming/Development

    • Farewell to Rob Collins

      We would like to share with you the sad news, that Rob Collins has passed away earlier this month, on November 2nd, after a short but intense illness.

      Many of you may know Rob from the sponsored massage sessions he regularly ran at EuroPython in recent years and which he continued to develop, taking them from a single man setup (single threaded process) to a group of people setup by giving workshops (multiprocessing) and later on by passing on his skills to more leaders (removing the GIL) to spread wellness and kindness throughout our conference series.

    • Examining ValueObjects

      When programming, I often find it’s useful to represent things as a compound. A 2D coordinate consists of an x value and y value. An amount of money consists of a number and a currency. A date range consists of start and end dates, which themselves can be compounds of year, month, and day.

      As I do this, I run into the question of whether two compound objects are the same. If I have two point objects that both represent the Cartesian coordinates of (2,3), it makes sense to treat them as equal. Objects that are equal due to the value of their properties, in this case their x and y coordinates, are called value objects.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Touch Bar MacBook Pro teardown finds some unpleasant surprises [Updated]

      Apple is selling two new computers that it’s calling MacBook Pros: one model without the new Touch Bar and one model with a Touch Bar. But according to a teardown of the Touch Bar model by iFixit, the differences don’t stop there. The Touch Bar has an entirely different motherboard, cooling system, and internal layout. Unfortunately some of those changes make it even more difficult to repair than its cousin.

      The Touch Bar MacBook Pro has a much larger cooling system than the non-Touch Bar model—it uses two fans instead of one, and the symmetrical and vaguely mustache-shaped logic board wraps around both of them. The odd layout (plus the need to make additional room for extra chips like the Apple T1 and the second Thunderbolt 3 controller) leaves less room for other things, and as a result Apple has soldered the SSD to the motherboard in the Touch Bar MacBook Pros, much as it has in the 12-inch MacBook.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Panel Explores Relation Between Plant Breeders’ Convention And Plant Treaty

      When countries belong to several international instruments, some aspects of those instruments may run contradictory to one another. A symposium held recently by the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) sought to explore the interrelations between the convention and the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Farmers’ rights lie at the intersection of the two treaties and while some find the treaties complementary, some others view them as contradictory on farmers’ rights. Meanwhile, farmers themselves have been blocked from participating in deliberations.

  • Security

    • Evolution of the SSL and TLS protocols

      The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol is undoubtedly the most widely used protocol on the Internet today. If you have ever done an online banking transaction, visited a social networking website, or checked your email, you have most likely used TLS. Apart from wrapping the plain text HTTP protocol with cryptographic goodness, other lower level protocols like SMTP and FTP can also use TLS to ensure that all the data between client and server is inaccessible to attackers in between. This article takes a brief look at the evolution of the protocol and discusses why it was necessary to make changes to it.

    • Press the Enter Key For 70 Seconds To Bypass Linux Disk Encryption Authentication
    • How to fix the Cryptsetup vulnerability in Linux

      Linux enjoys a level of security that most platforms cannot touch. That does not, in any way, mean it is perfect. In fact, over the last couple of years a number of really ugly vulnerabilities have been found — and very quickly patched. Enough time has passed since Heartbleed for those that do to find yet another security issue.

    • Get root on Linux: learn the secret password
    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • The Web-Shaking Mirai Botnet Is Splintering—But Also Evolving

      Over the last few weeks, a series of powerful hacker attacks powered by the malware known as Mirai have used botnets created of internet-connected devices to clobber targets ranging from the internet backbone company Dyn to the French internet service provider OVH. And just when it seemed that Mirai might be losing steam, new evidence shows that it’s still dangerous—and even evolving.

      Researchers following Mirai say that while the number of daily assaults dipped briefly, they’re now observing development in the Mirai malware itself that seems designed to allow it to infect more of the vulnerable routers, DVRs and other internet-of-things (IoT) gadgets it’s hijacked to power its streams of malicious traffic. That progression could actually increase the total population available to the botnet, they warn, potentially giving it more total compute power to draw on.

      “There was an idea that maybe the bots would die off or darken over time, but I think what we are seeing is Mirai evolve,” says John Costello, a senior analyst at the security intelligence firm Flashpoint. “People are really being creative and finding new ways to infect devices that weren’t susceptible previously. Mirai is not going away.”

    • This $5 Device Can Hack Your Locked Computer In One Minute

      Next time you go out for lunch and leave your computer unattended at the office, be careful. A new tool makes it almost trivial for criminals to log onto websites as if they were you, and get access to your network router, allowing them to launch other types of attacks.

      Hackers and security researchers have long found ways to hack into computers left alone. But the new $5 tool called PoisonTap, created by the well-known hacker and developer Samy Kamkar, can even break into password-protected computers, as long as there’s a browser open in the background.Kamkar explained how it works in a blog post published on Wednesday.

    • Wickedly Clever USB Stick Installs a Backdoor on Locked PCs

      You probably know by now that plugging a random USB into your PC is the digital equivalent of swallowing a pill handed to you by a stranger on the New York subway. But serial hacker Samy Kamkar‘s latest invention may make you think of your computer’s USB ports themselves as unpatchable vulnerabilities—ones that open your network to any hacker who can get momentary access to them, even when your computer is locked.

    • How does your encrypted Linux system respond to the Cryptsetup bug?

      In all three case, the encrypted system partition is still encrypted, so you data is still save. However, as detailed in the bug report, unencrypted partitions, like ones mounted at /boot and /boot/efi (on UEFI systems) might still be open for exploitation. But how far can an attacker go on such system, when the system partition is still encrypted? Not far, I hope.

      A bug always has a solution, and in this case, the authors provided an easy-to-apply workaround. I’ve expanded on it a bit in the code block below. If after applying the workaround you discover that it does not work, welcome to the club. It didn’t work on all the encrypted systems I applied it on – Ubuntu 16.10, Manjaro 16.10, and Fedora Rawhide. By the way, all three distributions were running either Cryptsetup 1.7.2 or 1.7.3.

    • Holding down the Enter key can smash through Linux’s defenses
    • 7 open source security predictions for 2017

      Everyone uses open source. It’s found in around 95 per cent of applications and it’s easy to understand why. Open source’s value in reducing development costs, in freeing internal developers to work on higher-order tasks, and in accelerating time to market is undeniable.

      The rapid adoption of open source has outpaced the implementation of effective open source management and security practices. In the annual ‘Future of Open Source Survey’ conducted earlier this year by Black Duck, nearly half of respondents said they had no formal processes to track their open source, and half reported that no one has responsibility for identifying known vulnerabilities and tracking remediation.

      The flip side of the open source coin is that if you’re using open source, the chances are good that you’re also including vulnerabilities known to the world at large. Since 2014, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has reported over 8,000 new vulnerabilities in open source software.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Vladimir Putin orders Russia to withdraw support for International Court amid calls for Syria air strikes investigation

      Vladimir Putin has signed an order to have Russia withdrawn from the International Criminal Court (ICC) amid calls for his military to be referred over air strikes backing President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the annexation of Crimea.

      The President instructed Russia’s foreign ministry to notify the United Nations of the country’s refusal to be subject to the body’s activity on Wednesday, following the same move by Gambia, South Africa and Burundi.

    • Anifah to attend emergency OIC meeting on Saudi Arabia missile attacks

      A Malaysian delegation led by Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman will be attending the Emergency Meeting of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers to be held in Makkah, Saudi Arabia tomorrow (Nov 17).

      The Foreign Ministry said the Yemeni Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia on Oct 9 and 27 was up for discussion in the Emergency Meeting.

      “Malaysia’s participation at this meeting is an affirmation of its solidarity with Saudi Arabia in the wake of the missile attacks.

      “Malaysia hopes that the ongoing conflict in the region will be resolved through peaceful means,” the ministry said in a statement today.

    • Netanyahu Advances Submarine Deal – and His Lawyer Represents the Germans Behind It
    • Damn the torpedoes
    • Report: Netanyahu’s personal lawyer said to be behind German submarine deal
    • NSA undoes media spin on submarines
    • Iran deal critics to Trump: Please don’t rip it up

      President-elect Donald Trump spent much of his campaign railing against the Iran nuclear deal, even raising the possibility of scrapping the agreement immediately upon taking office.

      But many of the deal’s most ardent critics are now saying: “Slow down.”

      As the reality of Donald Trump’s White House win sinks in among nuclear deal opponents, some are insisting that pulling out of the agreement is unwise. Instead, they say, Trump should step up enforcement of the deal, look for ways to renegotiate it, and pursue measures to punish Iran for its non-nuclear misbehavior. Such a multi-pronged, get-tough approach may even give Trump cover to fend off any criticism he may get for keeping the deal.

    • Trump could face a nuclear decision soon

      I was the former nuclear missile launch officer who in October appeared in a TV advertisement for Hillary Clinton, saying: “The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. It should scare everyone.” The ad featured various quotes from Trump’s campaign rallies and interviews, in which he says, among other things: “I would bomb the shit out of ’em,” “I wanna be unpredictable,” and “I love war.” As I walked through a nuclear missile launch center in the ad, I explained that “self-control may be all that keeps these missiles from firing.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Guy FOIAs NSA for Area 51 Docs, Finds Diner

      Area 51 will probably always be a part of science folklore, even if the truth about the legendary site is probably much more boring than many anticipate.

      Turns out, when the intelligence community is talking about Area 51, it’s actually referring to a military dining facility, according to years long Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA.

      “3 years to declassify Area 51 Intellipedia entry—and I discover it’s a dining hall at [Fort] Bliss?” the owner of The Black Vault, an online depository of FOIA requests, tweeted on Tuesday.

    • WIPO To Use Creative Commons Licences For All Of Its Publications

      The UN World Intellectual Property Organization, the foremost international body for intellectual property rights, today announced that it will make all of its publications available under Creative Commons licences – which said it helped to develop along with other organisations. The move, made along with a wide range of other major international organisations, is an effort to make its publications as widely accessible as possible, an indirect nod to the limiting nature of copyright.

    • WIPO study shows growth of women inventors [Ed: way to distract from WIPO’s horrible abuse of women and men]

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Opponents of Dakota oil pipeline protest across USA

      Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline protested in Canada and cities around the USA on Tuesday, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.

      Tuesday was recognized as a “Day of Action” by opponents of the 1,172-mile, 30-inch diameter underground pipeline planned to deliver crude oil from production areas in North Dakota to Patoka, Ill. The pipeline would cross through land considered sacred by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and environmentalists worry about how the pipeline might affect water quality.

      Former Democratic presidential candidate and independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders joined demonstrators outside the White House on Tuesday evening. In a tweet, he encouraged President Obama to “stop this pipeline anyway you can. Declare Standing Rock a national monument.”

    • Trump Has Declared Climate War. But My Generation Will Win.

      Donald J. Trump’s positions on climate change amount to a declaration of war on young people like me. But millennials have a stronger position in this fight than it may first appear.

      There is no way to sugarcoat the consequences of what happened on Election Day. Mr. Trump is a disaster for the planet. His plan to “cancel” America’s adherence to the Paris climate agreement and accelerate fossil fuel production threatens to destroy global momentum on climate change. At the international climate talks now taking place in Marrakesh, Morocco, American environmentalists cried upon learning of Mr. Trump’s victory.

      “Without U.S. action to reduce emissions and U.S. diplomatic leadership, implementation of Paris will surely slow,” Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton, told The Associated Press. Keeping the increase in global warming to below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which most scientists believe is the tipping point for catastrophic changes to the earth’s natural systems, “would become impossible,” Professor Oppenheimer said.

    • Are We All Screwed If the US Leaves the Paris Climate Agreement?

      The Paris climate agreement, a historic international treaty to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, has only been in effect for 12 days. But if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his campaign promise to “cancel” the agreement, America’s participation in the pact could be halted before it begins.

      In the wake of the election, there’s been a lot of speculation as to what could happen if the US reneges on their promise. Like all presidents before him, not everything Trump promised on the campaign trail will come to pass. But when a man who has said climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese government (a comment he later said was a joke) is elected to the White House, you might want to take his stated intentions on a major climate agreement seriously.

    • Saudi Arabia And Russia To Meet Ahead Of OPEC Meeting

      Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih and his Russian counterpart Alexander Novak are said to be heading to Qatar later this week for an unscheduled meeting, according to industry sources quoted by Reuters. The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) is meeting in Doha, and though OPEC’s de factor leader Saudi Arabia is not a member of the gas forum, OPEC’s Algeria, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, the UAE, and Venezuela are.

      According to Reuters sources who had spoken on the condition of anonymity, the Saudi minister was expected to meet other OPEC ministers, and maybe Russia’s Novak, this coming Friday.

    • Saudi Arabia Warns Trump Not To Block Oil Imports

      Saudi Arabia has had a bad week: the kingdom, having spent tens of millions in “donations” to fund not only the Clinton Foundation which is now irrelevant, but also allegedly to sponsor 20% of Hillary’s presidential campaign, has suddenly found itself with no “influence” to request in exchange for its “generosity.” Instead, it is forced to engage in something it loathes: open diplomacy.

      As a result, its first attempt at engaging with the US president-elect, amounts to what is effectively a thinly veiled threat wrapped as a warning. As the FT reports, “Saudi Arabia has warned Donald Trump that the incoming US president will risk the health of his country’s economy if he acts on his election promises to block oil imports.”

    • Oil Fades After Iraq, Iran And Nigeria Oil Ministers All Decide To Skip OPEC Doha Meeting

      In yet another sign that behind the frequently blasted OPEC headlines meant to suggest a sense of OPEC unity yet which do nothing more than incite a short squeeze (as even Morgan Stanley has now admitted), there is far less cohesion, moments ago we learned that Nigeria’s Oil minister Emmanuel Kachikwu is the latest to skip this week’s Doha meeting scheduled for November 17 and 18. Earlier today we found that Iraq’s oil minister would likewise bypass the energy talks this week in Qatar, where rival producer Saudi Arabia plans to hold talks with Russia on possible collective action to limit production. Earlier today Bloomberg reported that his Iranian counterpart is also said to be giving the meeting a miss.

      Iraq and Iran both want exemptions from any OPEC cuts in output, putting pressure on Saudi Arabia, the producer group’s biggest member, to bear the brunt of a possible reduction. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has yet to find a way to finalize a preliminary deal it reached in September to curtail supply, ending a two-year policy of pumping without limits.

    • Climate change a Chinese hoax? Beijing gives Donald Trump a lesson in history

      China has rejected Donald Trump’s claims that climate change is a Chinese hoax, urging the US president-elect to take a “smart decision” over his country’s commitment to the fight against global warming.

      Trump, who is the first self-declared climate change denier to lead one of the world’s top emitters, has dismissed global warming as “very expensive … bullshit” and claimed the concept “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.

      But speaking at UN climate talks in Marrakech on Wednesday, China’s vice foreign minister, Liu Zhenmin, pointed out that it was in fact the billionaire’s Republican predecessors who launched climate negotiations almost three decades ago.

      “If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Liu was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.

      The IPCC was set up by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in 1988 in a bid to better understand and respond to the risks of climate change. It received the 2007 Nobel peace prize for helping build “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming”.

  • Finance

    • Snapchat Parent Files for $25 Billion IPO

      Snap Inc. has confidentially filed paperwork for an initial public offering that may value the popular messaging platform at as much as $25 billion, a major step toward what would be one of the highest-profile stock debuts in recent years.

    • The great CETA swindle

      On both sides of the Atlantic, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada is hugely controversial. A record 3.3 million people across Europe signed a petition against CETA and its twin agreement TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). European and Canadian trade unions, as well as consumer, environmental and public health groups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) reject the agreement. Constitutional challenges against CETA have been filed in Germany and Canada and the compatibility of CETA’s controversial privileges for foreign investors with EU law is likely to be judged by the European Court of Justice.

      The controversy has also reached governments and parliaments. Across Europe, more than 2,100 local and regional governments have declared themselves TTIP/CETA free zones, often in cross-party resolutions. National and regional parliaments, too, worry about CETA, for example in Belgium, France, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands. In October 2016, concerns in four sub-federal Belgian governments (led by Wallonia) over the agreement’s negative impacts, and in particular its dangerous privileges for foreign investors, nearly stopped the federal government from approving the signing of CETA.

    • Lessons from the Barroso affair: How to reform Commission ethics

      Following the revelation that former Commission President Barroso would join Goldman Sachs International, Juncker had to be prodded long and hard before passing the case on for assessment at the Commission’s ad-hoc ethics committee. At the start of November, the committee published its opinion, criticising Barroso’s lack of judgment regarding his new roles as chairman and adviser at the bank.

      And yet, the committee failed to find sufficient evidence that a breach of the ethics requirements in the European Treaty had occurred.

      Juncker is now proposing an extension of the cooling-off period for outgoing presidents from 18 months to three years. Anticipating that this may not sit well with other Commissioners, he has insisted he would still subject himself to this longer period of abstinence, even if his colleagues were to object to the change of rules for ex-presidents.

      It is, of course, positive to see the Commission finally accepting that there is a problem with its ethics rules. But Juncker’s proposal is yet another example of the Commission’s highest level insisting on regulating itself, and, after months of ignoring the public outcry over Commissioners’ scandals, it does too little to prevent future cases.

    • ‘Monster’ at the Berlaymont

      Martin Selmayr is admired, despised and feared. What’s clear: He’s the most powerful EU chief of staff ever.

    • Obama calls for ‘course correction’ to share spoils of globalisation

      Barack Obama has given a rousing defence of the virtues of democracy and warned that a backlash against globalisation is boosting populist movements around the world, in what was billed as his last public address abroad.

      Speaking near the Acropolis of Athens, the outgoing US president said that democracy – like the version invented by the ancient Greeks “in this small, great world” – might still be imperfect, yet for all its flaws it fostered hope over fear.

      “Even if progress follows a winding path – sometimes forward, sometimes back – democracy is still the most effective form of government ever devised by man,” Obama said.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Clinton Campaign Was Undone By Its Own Neglect And A Touch Of Arrogance, Staffers Say

      In the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s staff in key Midwest states sent out alarms to their headquarters in Brooklyn. They were facing a problematic shortage of paid canvassers to help turn out the vote.

      For months, the Clinton campaign had banked on a wide army of volunteer organizers to help corral independents and Democratic leaners and re-energize a base not particularly enthused about the election. But they were volunteers. And as anecdotal data came back to offices in key battlegrounds, concern mounted that leadership had skimped on a critical campaign function.

      “It was arrogance, arrogance that they were going to win. That this was all wrapped up,” a senior battleground state operative told The Huffington Post.

      Several theories have been proffered to explain just what went wrong for the Clinton campaign in an election that virtually everyone expected the Democratic nominee to win. But lost in the discussion is a simple explanation, one that was re-emphasized to HuffPost in interviews with several high-ranking officials and state-based organizers: The Clinton campaign was harmed by its own neglect.

    • Americans Throw Their Support Behind The Free Press

      Donald Trump railed against the “failing” New York Times throughout the 2016 election, and days after winning the presidency claimed the paper was “losing thousands of subscribers” for its “very poor and inaccurate” election coverage.

      Not so, says the Times. The paper has picked up new subscribers to both its print and digital editions at four times the normal rate, according to spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades-Ha.

      The Times is one of several publications to tout increased paid readership or donations in the aftermath of Trump’s victory. The uptick in subscriptions is a bright spot amid a flurry of unflattering post-mortems on the media’s role in propelling Trump to become the Republican nominee and general uncertainty about the industry’s influence going forward.

    • Republicans Stole the Supreme Court

      We are already hearing from Republicans and Democrats in leadership positions that it is incumbent on Americans to normalize and legitimize the new Trump presidency. We are told to give him a chance, to reach across the aisle, and that we must all work hard, in President Obama’s formulation, to make sure that Trump succeeds. But before you decide to take Obama’s advice, I would implore you to stand firm and even angry on this one point at least: The current Supreme Court vacancy is not Trump’s to fill. This was President Obama’s vacancy and President Obama’s nomination. Please don’t tacitly give up on it because it was stolen by unprecedented obstruction and contempt. Instead, do to them what they have done to us. Sometimes, when they go low, we need to go lower, to protect a thing of great value.

    • FBI Director Comey’s credibility issues go beyond presidential politics to 9/11 panel

      FBI Director James Comey’s credibility is under heavy fire due to his headline-making public statements about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton that have entangled the bureau in presidential politics.

      Republicans howled in July when Comey publicly declared he wouldn’t recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Over the weekend, Democrat Clinton reportedly told supporters she blames her surprising loss to President-elect Donald Trump on Comey’s announcement 11 days before the election that he had restarted the email probe, as well as his announcement two days before the election that an examination of newly discovered emails had not changed his July findings.

    • Federal prosecutors launch probe of law firm over donations

      Federal prosecutors in Boston have opened a grand jury investigation into potentially illegal campaign contributions from lawyers at the Thornton Law Firm, a leading donor to Democrats around the country, according to two people familiar with the probe.

      The US attorney’s office is one of three agencies now looking into the Boston-based personal injury firm’s practice of reimbursing its partners for millions of dollars in political donations, according to the two people. The law firm has insisted that the donations were legal, but, soon after the Globe revealed the firm’s practice, politicians began returning hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

    • Apocalypse Then, and Now, Cracker Revolution Edition

      These things have been ongoing for the past 15 years. Obama prosecuted more dissidents, er, “whistleblowers,” than all previous presidents combined, and he did by calling them spies under the 1917 Espionage Act. The NSA as state security has been monitoring you under two administrations.

      Militarized police forces received their tanks and other weapons from two presidents. All of the terrible events that lead to Black Lives Matter took place before the election, and the killers were for the most part left unpunished by both the judiciary for criminal murders, and by the Federal-level Department of Justice for violation of civil rights. Unlike during the 1960s when the Feds stepped in and filed civil rights charges to bust up racism among local and state governments, the last two administration have not.

      When people do bad things and know they’ll get away with them, that is “normalization,” not just some hate words we have sadly all heard before.

      As for war and fracking, um, the U.S. has been engaged in global wars for 15 years, and set the Middle East on fire. Fracking has been destroying our nation for years, and oil dumped into the Gulf back in 2010.

      Fascism did not start on November 8. We have been living in a police state of sorts for some time before you all discovered it will start next year.

    • Carl Icahn Confirms 2 Trump Cabinet Contenders on Twitter

      Longtime Donald Trump supporter and activist investor Carl Icahn confirmed on Tuesday that the president-elect is looking at Wall Street veteran Steven Mnuchin as his choice for treasury secretary and billionaire Wilbur Ross for commerce secretary.

    • Trump’s vast web of conflicts: A user’s guide

      Donald Trump’s new hires should brace themselves for a full immersion in government ethics school.

      They’re going to need it given the president-elect’s sprawling business empire and his lack of interest in selling off his companies and properties outright.

      The Republican’s appointees will be running departments and agencies with direct ties to their boss’ businesses and wider political interests, from an IRS audit into his tax records to National Labor Relations Board enforcement of cases involving his hotel workers to the FBI’s investigation into the suspected Russian cyberespionage aimed at influencing an election that Trump just won.

      Unlike past presidents who took office with considerable wealth, from George H.W. Bush to John F. Kennedy, the setup Trump is creating for his financial assets — leaving his three oldest adult children and a “team of highly skilled executives” in charge while he’s in the Oval Office — appears likely to expose large numbers of people the president hires to an unprecedented set of conflicts spanning his entire federal government.

    • Jesse Jackson: Obama should pardon Hillary Clinton

      Speaking at President Gerald Ford’s alma mater, The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for President Obama to issue a blanket pardon to Hillary Clinton before he leaves office, just like Ford did for Richard Nixon.

      Stopping short of saying Clinton did anything wrong, Jackson told a large crowd of University of Michigan students, faculty and administrators gathered at daylong celebration of his career that Obama should short-circuit President-elect Donald Trump’s promised attempt to prosecute Hillary Clinton for use of a private e-mail server.

      “It would be a monumental moral mistake to pursue the indictment of Hillary Clinton,” Jackson said. He said issuing the pardon could help heal the nation, like Ford’s pardon of Nixon did.

    • It’s Worse Than You Think

      Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.

      Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Megyn Kelly’s Cautionary Tale of Crossing Donald Trump

      The Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has spent the better part of the last year living in the main gladiator pit of 2016, becoming as much a target for Donald J. Trump as any of his opponents and emerging as a pivotal figure in the forced resignation of the Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes, whom she accused of sexual harassment.

      On Tuesday, she was in her office at the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, taking stock, preparing for the next phase — a Trump presidency — and warning fellow journalists to look at her experience during the campaign as a potential cautionary tale.

      “The relentless campaign that Trump unleashed on me and Fox News to try to get coverage the way he liked it was unprecedented and potentially very dangerous,” she said, casual but animated behind her translucent desk. If he were to repeat the same behavior from the White House, she said, “it would be quite chilling for many reporters.”

    • Twitter suspends American far-right activists’ accounts

      Twitter has suspended the accounts of a number of American “alt-right” activists hours after announcing a renewed push to crack down on hate speech.

      Among the accounts removed were those of the self-described white-nationalist National Policy Institute, its magazine, Radix, and its head Richard Spencer, as well as other prominent alt-right figures including Pax Dickinson and Paul Town.

      Spencer, who according to anti-hate group SPLC “calls for ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ to halt the ‘deconstruction’ of European culture”, decried the bans as “corporate Stalinism” to right-wing news outlet Daily Caller.

      “Twitter is trying to airbrush the alt right out of existence,” Spencer said. “They’re clearly afraid. They will fail!” Members of the Reddit forum r/altright called the move a “purge”.

    • Booming e-business and tight censorship: China wants to have the internet both ways

      Liu Yunshan, the No. 5 in the Politburo Standing Committee and in charge of ideological control, doesn’t look like an internet guru or a man who can influence the future of one of humanity’s great inventions.

      Yet the 69-year-old senior cadre will be the keynote speaker at the third World Internet Conference, an event organised by the Chinese government.

    • China holds ‘World Internet Conference’ as censorship intensifies

      As China hosts execs from global tech companies at its World Internet Conference, human rights advocates are warning that online censorship in the country is only getting worse.

    • Satan, sex and censorship: 17 banned album sleeves

      As so often, The Beatles led the way. Barely a month before Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comments got their records burned in America, The Beatles almost pole-axed their “lovable Moptops” image with the sleeve for a US-only album, Yesterday… And Today. Satirising their US label’s latest mincing of their UK records into an extra LP, the Fabs kitted themselves up as butchers for the cover, chopping up dolls with gleeful grins. The Beatles as a premonition of Alice Cooper was all too much, and quickly recalled copies had an innocuous publicity pic glued over the grisly bloodbath.

    • AZERBAIJAN: Raids, fines enforce state religious censorship

      Police and officials of the State Committee for Work with Religious Organisations have raided at least 26 shops and six homes in October and early November across Azerbaijan to seize religious literature being distributed without the compulsory state permission. Some book sellers have already been punished. All the literature seized from shops appears to have been Muslim.

      Not one State Committee official in Baku or in branches around the country, police officer or court would discuss these raids, literature seizures or punishments with Forum 18.

      The “Expertise” Department at the State Committee in Baku – which implements the state censorship – told Forum 18 on 16 November its head Nahid Mammadov was out of the office and no-one else could speak for the department. Asked about the many raids, the man simply said that everything done was “in the law”. The man who answered the phone of State Committee official Aliheydar Zulfuqarov – who participated in raids on shops in the southern town of Masalli (see below) – put the phone down when Forum 18 introduced itself. The State Committee press office told Forum 18 its head, Yaqut Aliyeva, was away until 18 November and no-one else could speak to the press.

    • TUSC vindicated in censorship protest

      As the democratic credentials of ‘official politics’ are being increasingly questioned, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) recently chalked up a modest victory against establishment efforts to prevent alternative voices from being heard.

    • Southampton Labour must bin Tory cuts!
    • Professor compiles list of fake, misleading ‘news’ websites

      An assistant professor’s list of fake and misleading websites, many of which have driven the dialogue of politics this election season, is going viral after being published this week.

    • Trump Supporters Warn of Censorship, Suggest Alternatives, In Battle Over Fake News Sites

      On Tuesday Twitter announced it was rolling out new tools for reporting abuse on its network and later that day it suspended numerous “alt-right” accounts. Then Facebook came under fire after a report exposed it knew how to combat fake news articles, but did not tackle the problem for fear of conservative backlash. Facebook has since removed ads from fake news sites and a “rogue” team allegedly been put in place to take on fake news. Google, who was criticized for fake news filtering onto its front page, is also taking action to ensure more real reporting from credible outlets is highlighted. On the surface this news seems positive, but to some Donald Trump supporters this news means one thing: censorship.

    • Breitbart and Private Eye among websites accused of false, misleading, clickbait or satirical ‘news’

      The spread of fake online news has itself been hitting headlines in recent weeks, with accusations flying that such content may have helped sweep Donald Trump into the White House.

      Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communications and media at Massachusetts’s Merrimack College, has created a list of websites as a teaching resource for her students, which categorises websites and organisations that publish “false, misleading, clickbait-y, and/or satirical ‘news’ sources.”

    • Here are all the fake ‘news’ sites to watch out for on Facebook
    • Fed up with phony news? College professor creates list of ‘false, misleading, clickbait-y’ sites
    • How to break it to your friends and family that they’re sharing fake news
    • Fed up with fake news, Facebook users are solving the problem with a simple list
    • This List of Fake News Websites Proliferating on Facebook Is Staggering
    • Twitter’s Misbegotten Censorship
    • Could alt-right account bans spell the end of Twitter?
    • Twitter suspends prominent alt-right accounts
    • Twitter Suspends Accounts Affiliated With Alt-Right
    • Twitter Suspends Alt-Right Accounts, Promises Tools To Fight Abuse
    • Q&A: The science of online censorship

      Information doesn’t flow through the internet as freely as it seems. Depending on which country you live in, you may see different content on a webpage—or no content at all. As the internet has become the most important public space for everything from protest movements to pornography, governments around the world have started locking it down. And that has given rise to a new field of research: the science of censorship. ScienceInsider caught up with Phillipa Gill, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, to find out what’s cooking in this online cat and mouse game. She spoke to us yesterday from the Internet Measurement Conference in Santa Monica, California, which she co-chaired. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

    • Chief Censor says his office’s work is now more important than ever

      A century ago, viewing a picture of a woman’s exposed decolletage was considered a “grave danger” to the average person’s moral health.

      “Suggestive” or violent images – laughably tame by today’s standards – were quickly sliced from incoming films by New Zealand Government censors. They were the moral guardians of what the country viewed.

      Today, as censorship in this country celebrates its centenary, critics are asking – is there even any point?

    • Pressure grows on Facebook over censorship

      Palestine Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, 18MillionRising and Dream Defenders also signed the letter, which specifically points to the disabling of Palestinian journalists’ accounts and the removal of Black activists’ content as examples of Facebook’s censorship.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Liberals need to stop carping about Saudi Arabia. In a dangerous world, our allies cannot be saints

      Among the many conflicts marked during this year’s Remembrance Day commemorations, the ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the First Gulf War provided a timely reminder of what can be achieved when nations work together.

      In an age when the very notion of military intervention has become anathema for political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, the highly successful 1991 campaign to liberate the Gulf state of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s illegal annexation marked a high point in relations between the West and its Arab allies.

      Western forces, it is true, were responsible for conducting most of the operation. But the supporting role provided by Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, which actively facilitated the formation of a 500,000-strong foreign army on its soil, was invaluable.

    • Indonesia Says Jakarta’s Christian Governor Is Suspected of Blasphemy

      Indonesia was thrown into turmoil on Wednesday after the National Police named the Christian governor of the country’s capital a suspect in a blasphemy investigation over comments he made about the Quran. Outrage over those remarks set off bloody street protests this month.

      The governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Jakarta’s popular leader, has been barred from leaving the country as the authorities continue their investigation of him, Tito Karnavian, the national police chief, said at a televised news conference.

      Mr. Basuki, who is known as Ahok and is running for re-election in February, has been a political target of radical Islamic organizations since taking office in 2014. Some of those groups seized on comments he made in September to a group of fishermen, in which he lightheartedly cited a Quran verse that warns against taking Christians and Jews as friends.

    • UK woman ‘gang-raped’ in Dubai now faces jail for ‘extra-marital affair’ in Sharia arrest

      The 25-year-old is not allowed to leave the country after claiming she was attacked by two UK men last month.

      The situation is not uncommon in the middle-eastern country that prohibits women from being alone with men who they are not married or directly related to.

      Under Sharia law, adultery can be substantiated through a confession or if four people witnessed the offence and testified before the court.

      The men are understood to have flown back to the UK.

    • British woman who says she was gang raped arrested on ‘extra-marital sex’ charges in Dubai as attackers go free

      A British tourist has been arrested and charged with illegal “extra-marital sex” in Dubai after telling police she had been gang raped.

      The 25-year-old woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was on holiday in the United Arab Emirates when she was allegedly attacked by two British men last month.

      When she reported the rape at a police station, she was allegedly arrested for breaking Emirati laws against extra-marital sex, while her attackers have since flown home to the UK.

    • Here are the devastating capabilities of the weapons Obama will leave behind for Trump

      Even the extreme legal theories of the George W Bush administration were mild compared to some of the “compromise” positions Obama’s DoJ argued for, and now Donald J Trump gets to use those positions to further its own terrifying agenda of mass deportations, reprisals against the press, torture and assassination, and surveillance based on religious affiliation or ethnic origin.

      When it came to things like closing Guantanamo, Obama argued for limits on establishing offshore black-sites and military tribunals, but refused to shut the door on them. So maybe Trump won’t be able to use Gitmo to house the people he has kidnapped by his CIA, but he can use the legal authority that Obama argued for to set up lots of other Guantanamos wherever he likes.

      Likewise torture: Obama decided that it was better to move and and bury the CIA torture report, and had his DoJ block any attempt to have torture declared illegal, which would have given people opposing Trump’s torture agenda with a potent legal weapon that is now unavailable to them.

      Obama argued that the president should be able to create kill lists of Americans and foreigners who could be assassinated with impunity, and argued against even judicial review of these lists.

    • A Message to President-Elect Trump About Upholding Freedom in the Muslim World

      President-elect Donald Trump, the American people voted you as the future 45th President of the United States and entrusted you with many missions and responsibilities. As head of a great democracy you will be the defender of what the forefathers of the American nation cherished the most: liberty and freedom of speech for all the citizens irrespective of their origin, religion, wealth or social status.

    • Rutgers Lecturer Forcibly Sent For Psych Evaluation By NYPD For Some Tweets About The Election

      As you may have noticed, a lot of people have opinions on the election that just happened. And, many people are using social media to express those opinions, for good or for bad. Some people are excited, some people are angry. And no matter which side you fall on, you should recognize that expressing opinions on social media is protected (and should be encouraged as part of a healthy political process involving public discussion and debate). Kevin Allred, a lecturer at Rutgers University, is definitely on the side of folks who aren’t happy with the results of the election. And, like many, he’s been tweeting about his opinions on the matter. Having read through his Twitter feed, it doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary from stuff that I’ve seen from others. In fact, I’d argue that it actually seems fairly tame.

      Either way, last night he Tweeted that the NYPD had come to his house because the police at Rutgers believed he was “a threat” based on some of his tweets. There were two tweets in particular. One was about burning a flag in protest and the other was a rhetorical question about the 2nd Amendment.

      [...]

      Allred blames Trump for this — and while we’ve made it clear that we’ve got lots of concerns about Trump’s views on free speech, Trump isn’t exactly directing police to pick up people for various tweets. But the whole situation is extremely disturbing nonetheless. It’s frightening how little law enforcement seems to recognize or care about the First Amendment.

    • Chelsea Manning Petitions Obama for Clemency Before Leaving Office

      Imprisoned Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning is petitioning President Obama to grant her clemency before he leaves office. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence in the disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after being convicted of passing hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks. She has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and for years was denied gender-affirming surgery.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda

      The Federal Communications Commission has deleted every major item from the agenda of its monthly meeting, apparently submitting to a request from Republicans to halt major rulemakings until Donald Trump is inaugurated as president.

      Republicans from the House and Senate sent letters to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler yesterday urging him to stand down in his final months as chairman. The GOP pointed out that the FCC halted major rulemakings eight years ago after the election of Barack Obama when prompted by a similar request by Democrats.

    • GOP tells FCC to just stop what it’s doing until Trump is inaugurated

      Republicans in Congress have urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid passing any controversial regulations between now and Donald Trump’s inauguration as president. If FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler complies with the request, it could prevent passage of rules designed to help cable customers avoid set-top box rental fees—and any other controversial changes.

      “Leadership of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon change,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote to Wheeler yesterday. “Congressional oversight of the execution of our nation’s communications policies will continue. Any action taken by the FCC following November 8, 2016, will receive particular scrutiny. I strongly urge the FCC to avoid directing its attention and resources in the coming months to complex, partisan, or otherwise controversial items that the new Congress and new Administration will have an interest in reviewing.”

  • DRM

    • Bug Related To HDCP DRM Is Giving New Playstation PS4 Pro Owners Headaches

      Sony recently released the slightly-more powerful Playstation 4 Pro console, a beefier version of its existing PS4 console that brings 4K and HDR functionality to customers with 4K sets. 4K was already proving to be a bit of a headache for early adopters, many of whom didn’t realize that in order to get a 4K device to work, every device in the chain (particularly their audio receiver) not only needs to support 4K and the updated HDMI 2.0a standard for HDR (high dynamic range), but HDCP 2.2 — an updated version of the copy protection standard used to try and lock down video content.

      HDCP has always been a bit of a headache, like so much DRM usually causing consumers more trouble than it’s worth, and then being ultimately useless in trying to prevent piracy that occurs anyway. The latest incarnation of this issue appears to be plaguing PS4 Pro owners, who are plugging their $400 console into their expensive new receiver and 4KTV only to find that the unit doesn’t work as advertised.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • The CJEU decision in Soulier: what does it mean for laws other than the French one on out-of-print books?

        As reported by this blog through a breaking news post, yesterday the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its decision in Soulier and Doke, C-301/15.

        This was a reference for a preliminary ruling from the French Conseil d’État (Council of State) and concerned the compatibility with EU law [read: the InfoSoc Directive] of the 2012 French law to allow and regulate the digital exploitation of out-of-print 20th century books.

      • Police Raid Pirate Site & Seize 60 Servers Following MPAA Complaint

        A complaint from the MPAA has led the cyber-crime division of Ukraine’s National Police to raid FS.to, one of the country’s most popular pirate sites. Thus far 60 servers have been seized and 19 people have been arrested, but police fear the site could reappear since some individuals are on the run and a mirror site may be standing by in Russia.

      • “Anti-Piracy Outfit Impersonates Competitor, Steals its Clients”

        Two employees of anti-piracy outfit MarkScan have been arrested by Indian police. The men are accused of masquerading as competing anti-piracy firm Aiplex, informing its clients via a fake website that the company was shutting down, and suggesting MarkScan as an alternative. The CEO of the company was allegedly in on the scam, which is still under investivation.

11.16.16

Links 16/11/2016: X.Org Server 1.19, Firefox 50

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • 75,000 children in Nigeria could starve to death within months, says UN

      In Nigeria, 75,000 children risk dying in “a few months” as hunger grips the country’s ravaged north-east in the wake of the Boko Haram insurgency, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.

      Boko Haram jihadists have laid waste to the impoverished region since taking up arms against the government in 2009, displacing millions and disrupting farming and trade.

      Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, has reclaimed territory from the Islamists but the insurgency has taken a brutal toll, with more than 20,000 people dead, 2.6 million displaced, and famine taking root.

      UN humanitarian coordinator Peter Lundberg said the crisis was unfolding at “high speed”.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Donald Trump’s Drone War

      My new book, The Drone Memos, will be published by The New Press today. The Guardian is running a 4000-word slice of the 20,000-word introduction on its website this morning. The introduction is unsparing in its criticism of the Obama administration. I argue that the administration claimed too much power, and that its efforts to shield that power from congressional, judicial, and public review were irresponsible and short-sighted. I blame the administration for normalizing extrajudicial killing and for turning over to the next administration authorities that are breathtakingly broad and not subject to any meaningful constraint that can’t be lifted by a stroke of the next president’s pen.

      I began writing the introduction a year ago and finished it several months ago, when the world looked very different than it does today. I have complicated feelings about the release of the book at this particular historical moment. Obama has been a great president in many ways, and the United States is a stronger, more humane, and more just country now than it was when he took office. If Donald Trump tries to fulfill even a small fraction of his campaign pledges, the next four years will be a true test of our democratic institutions, and I’m sure I’ll look back on the Obama years nostalgically.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Trump’s Denial of Catastrophic Climate Change Is a Clear Danger

      Donald Trump’s stunning victory has left millions in dread and moved thousands into the streets. Fear has spread among immigrants and Muslims. The 20 million who have received health insurance under Obamacare worry about Trump’s vow to repeal it. The media speculate about what he might do: Will he really tear up the Iran nuclear deal or order the CIA to start torturing people again? But it is Trump’s denial of catastrophic climate change—he has repeatedly said he considers it a “hoax”—and his vow to reverse all of the progress made under President Obama to address it that pose some of the most chilling and potentially irreversible threats.

    • Noam Chomsky: Donald Trump’s election will accelerate global warming and humanity’s ‘race to disaster’

      The renowned American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has warned the US Republican party is now “the most dangerous organisation in world history” because of the denial of climate change by President-elect Donald Trump and other leading figures.

      Following the US elections, Professor Chomsky said it appeared humans planned to answer what he called “the most important question in their history … by accelerating the race to disaster”.

      Mr Trump has already appointed a prominent climate change denier to run his transition team covering the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other advisers include people with close links to the fossil fuel industry.

  • Finance

    • Michael Gove raises question of ‘quickie divorce’ for UK from EU

      Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and leading Brexit campaigner, has pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process.

      The ex-justice secretary, who led the Vote Leave campaign with Boris Johnson, questioned why the UK cannot just leave the EU without having settled its future relationship with the bloc after having sorted out “housekeeping” related to outstanding payments.

      Speaking at the newly formed Commons Brexit committee, he said there was a tendency for civil servants to think any problem requires more civil servants and suggested “Occam’s razor” should be applied, implying the simplest solution is the best one.

    • EU-US trade deal “not realistic” under Trump presidency, says Germany

      There is no chance of completing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) under US president-elect Donald Trump, a senior German official has said.

      “We don’t harbour any hopes of a transatlantic trade deal,” the unnamed official told the Guardian, adding: “That’s not realistic.”

      Along with the UK, Germany has been the main supporter of TTIP in Europe. Now that the UK is set to leave the European Union after June’s Brexit vote, the admission by Germany that TTIP is not going to happen is effectively the death-knell for the deal.

      But the comments are hardly surprising in the wake of the earlier news, reported by Ars, that the US would abandon the similar Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). However, Germany’s acknowledgement represents a huge setback for the European Commission, which was still trying to persuade Trump to proceed with TTIP last week.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Google Gets a Seat on the Trump Transition Team

      Google is among the many major corporations whose surrogates are getting key roles on Donald Trump’s transition team.

      Joshua Wright has been put in charge of transition efforts at the influential Federal Trade Commission after pulling off the rare revolving-door quadruple-play, moving from Google-supported academic work to government – as an FTC commissioner – back to the Google gravy train and now back to the government.

    • Was Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s Attack Dog, Paid Illegally?

      A campaign watchdog group filed a complaint with federal election officials that alleges Stephen Bannon—recently named one of Donald Trump’s top White House advisers—may have gotten paid illegally during Trump’s campaign by pro-Trump billionaires.

      And now, a new set of Federal Election Commission filings that haven’t yet been reported on may give the group’s case some additional heft.

      At issue are payments of nearly $200,000 that a super PAC called Make America Number 1 made to a company tied to Bannon. On Aug. 17, Bannon left his post as chairman of Breitbart News and became the Trump campaign’s CEO. Available FEC filings show the campaign didn’t pay Bannon a salary. Larry Noble, General Counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, said he believes the super PAC covertly paid Bannon for his campaign work through his moviemaking company. Neither the super PAC nor Bannon provided a response to Noble’s comment.

    • GOP rushes to embrace Trump

      Some Republicans acknowledged there had been a sea change since Trump surprised Democrats and some in his own party by defeating Hillary Clinton.

      Republicans on Capitol Hill “are so excited. People are coming up to me, telling me they’ve been with Trump since day one,” Collins explained to reporters.

      “And I kind of look and say, ‘Well, OK, if you say so.’

      “Donald Trump has accomplished for us something no one thought possible. … Everything is red, and we’ve got four solid years to get this right.”

      After winning the GOP nomination to be Speaker for the next two years, Ryan gave yet another shout-out to Trump — the second of the day.

    • How Bannon flattered and coaxed Trump on policies key to the alt-right

      Soon after terrorist attacks killed 130 people in Paris last year, Donald Trump faced sharp criticism for saying the United States had “no choice” but to close down some mosques.

      Two days later, Trump called in to a radio show run by a friendly political operative who offered a suggestion.

      Was it possible, asked the host, Stephen K. Bannon, that Trump hadn’t really meant that mosques should be closed?

      “Were you actually saying, you need a [New York City police] intelligence unit to get a network of informants?” Bannon asked. He continued: “I guess what I’m saying is, you’re not prepared to allow an enemy within . . . to try to tear down this country?”

    • Let Them Eat Facts: Why Fact Checking Is Mostly Useless In Convincing Voters

      Last week I wrote a bit about the ridiculous and misguided backlash against Facebook over the election results. The basis of the claim was that there were a bunch of fake or extremely misleading stories shared on the site by Trump supporters, and some felt that helped swing the election (and, yes, there were also fake stories shared by Clinton supporters — but apparently sharing fake news was nearly twice as common among Trump supporters than Clinton supporters). I still think this analysis blaming Facebook is wrong. There was confirmation bias, absolutely, but it’s not as if a lack of fake news would have changed people’s minds. Many were just passing along the fake news because it fit the worldview they already have.

      In response to that last post, someone complained that I was arguing that “facts don’t matter” and worried that this would just lead to more and more lies and fake news from all sides. I hope that’s not the case, but as I said in my reply, it’s somewhat more complicated. Some folks liked that reply a lot so I’m expanding on it a bit in this post. And the key point is to discuss why “fact checking” doesn’t really work in convincing people whom to vote for. This doesn’t mean I’m against fact checking, or think that facts don’t matter. Quite the reverse. I think more facts are really important, and I’ve spent lots of time over the years calling out bogus news stories based on factual errors.

    • Let’s Get Uncomfortable, Election Edition

      For the people now protesting, good for you to make your views known. It is important.

      May I also suggest you use the remaining time to protest Obama’s refusal to prosecute torture, curtail the NSA, fail to close Gitmo, his jailing of whistleblowers, his decision not to use his Justice Department to aggressively prosecute police killers of young Black men under existing civil rights laws, his claiming of the power to assassinate Americans with drones, and his war on journalists via gutting of FOIA?

      Because silence on those issues means Trump inherits all of that power.

      May I also suggest volunteering for some of: homeless shelters, LGBTQ and vet’s crisis lines, Planned Parenthood, Congresspeople who will work for these causes, ACLU, Occupy (who addresses the economic inequality that drove many Trump voters) and the like?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Home Secretary signs Lauri Love extradition order

      The Home Secretary Amber Rudd has signed an order for Lauri Love to be extradited to America where he’s accused of hacking into US government computer networks.

    • Chelsea Manning petitions Obama for clemency

      The legal team for Chelsea Manning, imprisoned WikiLeaks whistleblower, has petitioned US President Barack Obama to reduce her prison sentence to time served. Chelsea has already spent six years in confinement, longer than any other US leaker in history. In 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted on several counts under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

    • Harsher Security Tactics? Obama Left Door Ajar, and Donald Trump Is Knocking

      As a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump vowed to refill the cells of the Guantánamo Bay prison and said American terrorism suspects should be sent there for military prosecution. He called for targeting mosques for surveillance, escalating airstrikes aimed at terrorists and taking out their civilian family members, and bringing back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”

      It is hard to know how much of this stark vision for throwing off constraints on the exercise of national security power was merely tough campaign talk. But if the Trump administration follows through on such ideas, it will find some assistance in a surprising source: President Obama’s have-it-both-ways approach to curbing what he saw as overreaching in the war on terrorism.

    • Chagos Islanders denied right to return home

      The long-awaited decision – expected to cause enormous disappointment – follows more than 40 years of campaigning, court cases and calls for the UK to right a wrong committed by Harold Wilson’s Labour government.

      Hundreds of Chagos islanders living in the UK and Mauritius have been waiting for an announcement for more than two years. But cost, economic viability and objections from the US military have been significant obstacles.

      It is expected that the British government will provide a further package of compensation to the islanders and that the announcement will be accompanied by an official apology for the forced movement of 1,500 people. Half of the exiles have since died.

    • Government set to make announcement on plight of exiled Chagos Islanders

      The government is expected to make an announcement about the resettlement of Chagos Islanders who were expelled 40 years ago to make way for a US air base.

      Chagossians were forced to leave the territory in the central Indian Ocean by 1973 to make way for a major US air base on Diego Garcia.

      The expulsions are regarded as one of the most shameful parts of Britain’s modern colonial history and a lengthy campaign has taken place to give Chagossians the right to resettle in the British territory.

      In June, former residents of the islands lost their legal challenge at the Supreme Court.

      But the Foreign Office is now understood to be preparing to make an announcement on the Chagos Islands, also referred to as the British Indian Ocean Territory.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • How Trademark Law Harms Peoples’ Lives and Wealth

        Trademark, copyright, and patent law are three segments of the same basic concept: protecting businesses from unlawful use of their property. Unfortunately, a system that arose during Roman times has not been satisfactorily updated for the digital age. Particularly with issues regarding patent and trademark law, updates will be necessary to make sure that laws remain enforceable and do their work of protecting businesses.

        [...]

        In the United States, patent laws date back to Colonial times and the United States Constitution. Patents have been viewed favorably and unfavorably at different times in American History. In general, during healthy economic times, patents are viewed as driving investment, innovation, and economic growth. During depressions, patents are viewed as economically unhealthy, and geared towards creating monopolies.

        While patent law has worked to prevent inventors for many years, in 2011, This American Life did an episode of their show on a particular Silicon Valley phenomenon called “patent trolls.” Patent trolls are companies which do not conduct any kind of business of their own, but simply buy patents from inventors, and then threaten companies which are using those patents with lawsuits. Since American courts have been very pro-patent since the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011, companies generally have no choice but to pay the patent trolls fees, or stop using patented technology.

        According to Perry Clegg, founder of Trademark Access, patents are actually hurting innovation and harming economic growth. “Because so many technological developments piggyback on each other, it is sometimes impossible to create the next big innovation without incorporating previously patented technology.” When big innovations were decades apart, this might not have made as much difference. At the rapid pace of modern technological development, patent trolling can discourage companies from innovating, if they feel it likely that they will have to pay exorbitant fees to companies who exist only to prosecute based on perceived infringement.

        [...]

        Trademark and patent laws must be updated
        A generation ago, it was mostly big businesses that were concerned about protecting patents and trademarks. Now, as many more small companies are entering the technological fray, it is necessary for patent, trademark, and copyright laws to be updated to keep up with the digital times.

        Especially as we move towards the age of the Internet of Things, these changes will only continue to accelerate. If government officials are not careful, outdated laws run the risk of stifling growth and harming innovation.

    • Copyrights

11.15.16

Links 15/11/2016: “498 out of 500 of the Speediest Computers on the Planet Are Running Linux”

Posted in News Roundup at 5:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ARK Crew Releases Open Source Code on GitHub

    ARK Crew, developers of the new ARK cryptocurrency ecosystem, has announced the release of its open source code on GitHub. The source code launch was set to coincide with the platform’s first developer-focused bounty program, designed to encourage others to participate in the review and provide feedback on the project.

  • Editorial: What Does Open Source Mean to You?

    The same goes for the large amount of open source JavaScript projects available to us developers. Whether they are intended to help you build amazing apps, or as a learning resource to help you level up your skills, these are all projects, supported and maintained by the community. Thanks to the collaborative nature of open source, you’re free to download and modify any of them and, most importantly, to contribute any changes you make back to the project itself.

    I love open source and I’m thankful for it. It’s an integral part of working on the internet, but one which it is all to easy to overlook. That’s why I’m happy that we’re dedicating a whole week’s worth of articles to the subject. Talking of which, let’s look at what we have in store…

  • ‘World’s first Open Source SDN and NFV Orchestrator’ demonstrated at Operations Transformation Forum

    Huawei demonstrated the OPEN-O Sun, said to be the world’s first Open Source SDN and NFV Orchestrator, at the Operations Transformation Forum 2016 in Wuzhen, China.

    The forum brought together industry leaders from around the world to discuss the transformation of digital operations and share best practices. Helen Chen, leader of the OPEN-O Integration Project noted that the OPEN-O Orchestrator will soon be commercially available.

  • What to do about free riders in open organizations and communities: Addressing open source’s free rider problem

    For advice on addressing this problem, Jonathan suggests we look to ecosystem management, “an industry in itself, with its attendant experts, who write books and speak at conferences.” I recently read one of the seminal books in this area, Governing the Commons, by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, and I’d like to offer some initial thoughts on how it might apply to open organizations and open source sustainability.

    [...]

    Free-riding in open source communities leads to overworked and underpaid individuals, and eventually to burnout. It’s bad for people, and it’s bad for projects. It’s a problem we need to address. Ostrom shows us how to tackle the problem with a methodical approach to institutional design and analysis. Open organizations that steward open source software projects have much to learn from her, while recognizing that we will need to adapt her recommendations to fit our situation.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

    • What’s In Store for Cloud Computing, Apache CloudStack in 2017?
    • Apache jclouds 2.0, a Java Multi-Cloud Toolkit, Arrives

      Over the past several months, we’ve taken note of the many open source projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to data-centric and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves these projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support.

      Apache also incubates a number of interesting cloud-centric projects. Now, it has announced the availability of Apache jclouds v2.0, which is a Java multi-cloud toolkit.

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 7 Feature Development Ends

      GCC 7 feature development is officially over with the development phase entering stage three now where the focus is on bug-fixing.

      While GCC 7 feature development has ended, Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek wrote in this latest GCC status report, “Patches posted early enough during Stage 1 and not yet fully reviewed may still get in early in Stage 3. Please make sure to ping them soon enough.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • Parliament: Navarre should move to use open source

      The Parliament of Navarre, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, wants the region to switch to free and open source software. A resolution urging the government to draft a migration plan was adopted by the Parliament on 27 October.

    • [Older] Uncle Sam launches open source trove of government code

      The United States government has made good on its policy of requiring agencies to release 20 per cent of their bespoke code as open source by making code.gov live, complete with lots of code.

    • Hungary aims to get rid of IT vendor lock-in

      Hungary’s central government wants to reduce its dependency on a handful of IT vendorsm. To begin with, a decision taken last week aims to reduce the use of a proprietary office productivity suite by 60 % in 2020. The government also wants to improve its procurement of IT solutions in order to to create business opportunities for small and medium-sized companies.

    • Russian Bill Makes Free Software a Public Priority

      The draft, approved by the Russian Federation’s Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.

    • Russian Bill makes Free Software a Public Priority

      Legislators have drafted a bill that will boost Free Software on multiple levels within the Russian Federation’s public sector.

      The draft, approved by the Russian Federation’s Duma (lower chamber) in mid-October, requires the public sector to prioritise Free Software over proprietary alternatives, gives precedence to local IT businesses that offer Free Software for public tenders, and recognises the need to encourage collaboration with the global network of Free Software organisations and communities.

      The text enforces prioritising Free Software over proprietary alternatives by requiring public administrations to formally justify any purchase of proprietary software. The purchase will be considered unjustified if a Free Software solution exists that satisfies the list of technical specifications and standards. In addition, all IT purchase agreements in the public sphere must be registered in a dedicated registrar and detail the overall quantity and price of both purchased proprietary and Free Software.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Open source licenses are shared resources

      One can easily see examples of software as a shared resource, whether shared by a few people or a few million people. Of course, these shared resources are not always as fully appreciated as they should be. They can pass underappreciated until drama such as a security vulnerability draws attention and illuminates the importance of what is being shared.

      But a license? A shared resource?

      Yes, open source licenses are shared resources. And, they, too, may be underappreciated until a vulnerability is exploited. Legal documents (contracts, licenses, whatever they may be called) are typically unique to each commercial enterprise. Certainly, there is some commonality. Lawyers adapt from what others have done. Patterns are followed. Text is reused.

    • Building Out an Open Source Project? Your License Matters

      It was only a few years ago when Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the prediction that open source software would soon become nearly pervasive in organizations of all sizes. That has essentially become true, and many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so.

      As businesses adopt open source platforms such as OpenStack and Hadoop, they are complementing them with their own open source projects.For these reasons and other ones, it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators. Here is our newly updated ollection of resources to help you navigate the world of open source laws and licenses.

      We’ve rounded up some resources on open source, licenes and the law, as seen in this post, but the topic remains a moving target. Did you know that there is an official, free journal dedicated to open source law? It’s the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, and it’s worth looking into.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Boundless Launches GIS Products Based on Open-Source, Data-Rich Future

      In a proprietary, license-based model, users might need to pay more to scale up their operations. For some, the extra costs might mean going through a procurement cycle, which takes time and resources.

    • Free and open sewing patterns gain popularity

      About two months ago, I started rewriting the entire Makemypattern.com codebase. I am using this opportunity to implement some improvements and features that were difficult to implement in the existing backend. But my main reason is that I am going to make all of my code available as open source. And for that, I need to make it easy for others to extend and adapt the code.

      With a mission that is not merely about making patterns anymore, I also feel like a name change was needed. So when I finish my rewrite, I will relocate to Freesewing.org, which is free as in beer and free as in speech.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • How Google changed itself for India in a ‘mission to connect the world’

    Alphabet Inc’s Google is ready to spend billions to get millions of Indians online– through a slew of India-specific products and initiatives – to stay relevant in the world’s fastest-growing internet economy.

    With 350-million internet users, India has already surpassed the US, and the number is expected to double by 2020. Around 15,000 new Indians log onto the internet every day, fitting perfectly in Google’s scheme of the “next billion internet users” gambit to acquire new customers.

    But this wasn’t the case three years ago, not until smartphones burgeoned and a large number of people started accessing the Net through their phones.

    All that makes India more important for Google, especially after China, which has the maximum number of internet users globally, closed its doors the American internet firm.

  • Science

    • The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think

      One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.

      For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many of your users.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Flint mayor asks for state of emergency renewal over water crisis

      Mayor Karen Weaver has asked for a renewal of the state emergency it was declared nearly one year ago over Flint’s water crisis.

      A resolution is on the agenda for Flint City Council members to approve or deny the request at Monday evening’s meeting as the declaration is due to expire Nov. 14.

      “Mayor Karen W. Weaver has stated that it imperative that Flint’s state of emergency remain in place until the city of Flint’s drinking water is deemed safe to drink without a filter,” states the resolution.

    • Congress begins lame duck session, with Flint water crisis funding on the agenda

      Michigan’s senior U.S. Senator says there are some things that Congress has to address when it returns to work this week.

      Sen. Debbie Stabenow says her top priority during Congress’ lame duck session will be lining up federal money for Flint.

      “We have a promise that was made to me by the Speaker of the House and the Republican Majority Leader that before the end of this year we would pass the money that’s critical to fixing the pipes in Flint,” says Stabenow.

    • VW admits Audi automatic transmission software can change test behavior

      Last week, a German newspaper reported that Audi was hiding emissions-cheating software in its automatic transmissions. I don’t know why it took a whole week, but Volkswagen finally came around to admitting as much.

      “Adaptive shift programs can lead to incorrect and non-reproducible results” in emissions tests, Volkswagen told Reuters on Sunday. Software in the AL 551 automatic transmission may detect testing conditions and shift in a way that minimizes emissions, only to act “normally” out on the road. Much like Dieselgate’s defeat device, that leads to higher-than-imagined pollution, which could be in excess of legal limits.

      Audi’s AL 551 can be found in both gas and diesel vehicles, including the A6, A8 and Q5.

    • WTO ‘Paragraph 6’ System For Affordable Medicine: Time For Change?

      A range of practitioners and representatives in the manufacture of medicines, intergovernmental officials, academics and civil society representatives last week gave diverse views on the effectiveness of a waiver to international trade rules intended to ease shipments of affordable medicines to low-income countries.

      Alongside the first day of the 8-9 November World Trade Organization Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the intergovernmental South Centre held a side event to discuss experiences in the implementation and the effective functioning of the system.

    • New MSF survey: Thousands of kids dying in northeast Nigeria

      Thousands of children have died of starvation and disease in Boko Haram-ravaged northeastern Nigeria, Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday quoting a new survey that is forcing Nigerian officials to stop denying the crisis.

      The Paris-based organization hopes that official recognition of the calamity in which “thousands are dying” will help bring urgent aid before older children also start dying, Natalie Roberts, emergency program manager for northeast Nigeria, told The Associated Press.

      A survey of two refugee camps in the northeastern city of Maiduguri shows a quarter of the expected population of under-5 children is missing, assumed dead, according to the organization. Under-5 mortality rates in the camps are more than double the threshold for declaring an emergency, Roberts said in a phone interview from Paris.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • How to Secure Your Ubuntu Network

      In 2016, keeping your Ubuntu network secure is more important than ever. Despite what some people might think, there’s much more to this than merely putting up a router to protect a network. You must also configure each of your PCs properly to ensure you’re operating within a secure Ubuntu network. This article will show you how.

    • Linux Foundation Back Reproducible Builds Effort for Secure Software

      Building software securely requires a verifiable method of reproduction and that is why the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative is supporting the Reproducible Builds Project.

      In an effort to help open-source software developers build more secure software, the Linux Foundation is doubling down on its efforts to help the reproducible builds project. Among the most basic and often most difficult aspects of software development is making sure that the software end-users get is the same software that developers actually built.

    • Boy, 17, admits TalkTalk hacking offences

      A 17-year-old boy has admitted hacking offences linked to a data breach at the communications firm TalkTalk.

      Norwich Youth Court was told he had used hacking tool software to identify vulnerabilities on target websites.

    • Upgrade for KDE neon Security Issue

      Last month we moved the neon archive to a new server so packages got built on our existing server then uploaded to the new server. Checking the config it seemed I’d made the nasty error of leaving it open to the world rather than requiring an ssh gateway to access the apt repository, so anyone scanning around could have uploaded packages. There’s no reason to think that happened but the default in security is to be paranoid for any possibility.

    • Security B-Sides conferences attract growing information security crowd

      The Security B-Sides DC conference is part of the B-Sides movement, which was created to provide a community framework to build events for and by information security practitioners. Alex Norman, the co-director of Security B-Sides DC, tells us how he wants to expand information security beyond security professionals, and to involve a larger, more diverse community.

    • Major Linux security hole gapes open

      An old Linux security ‘feature’ script, which activates LUKS disk encryption, has been hiding a major security hole in plain sight.

    • A Linux Exploit That Uses 6502 Code

      With ubiquitous desktop computing now several decades old, anyone creating an operating system distribution now faces a backwards compatibility problem. Each upgrade brings its own set of new features, but it must maintain compatibility with the features of the previous versions or risk alienating users. If you are a critic of Microsoft products for their bloat, this is one of the factors behind that particular issue.

    • Cryptsetup Vulnerability Allows Easily Getting To A Root Shell

      CVE-2016-4484 was disclosed on Monday as a Cryptsetup issue that allows users to easily gain access to a root initramfs shell on affected systems in a little over one minute of simply hitting the keyboard’s enter key.

      This Cryptsetup vulnerability is widespread and easy to exploit, simply requiring a lot of invalid passwords before being dropped down a root shell. The data on the LUKS-encrypted volume is still protected, but you have root shell access. The CVE reads, “This vulnerability allows to obtain a root initramfs shell on affected systems. The vulnerability is very reliable because it doesn’t depend on specific systems or configurations. Attackers can copy, modify or destroy the hard disc as well as set up the network to exflitrate data. This vulnerability is specially serious in environments like libraries, ATMs, airport machines, labs, etc, where the whole boot process is protect (password in BIOS and GRUB) and we only have a keyboard or/and a mouse.”

    • CVE-2016-4484: Cryptsetup Initrd root Shell
    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Super Mari-owned: Startling Nintendo-based vulnerability discovered in Ubuntu

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Assange Is Questioned in London Over Rape Accusation in Sweden

      Six years after the Swedish authorities opened an investigation into a rape accusation made against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, he was questioned about the matter on Monday.

      The questions were prepared by prosecutors in Sweden, where an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange was issued in 2010, but were posed by a prosecutor from Ecuador under an agreement the two countries made in August. Ecuador granted Mr. Assange political asylum in 2012, and the interview occurred at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Mr. Assange has lived in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over the rape accusation.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Thanks to Donald Trump, China just won the global green technology sector

      There’s no denying who the king of technology in the 20th century was: America. But the 21st century poses new challenges that must be met by the rise of the green technology and green energy sectors across the globe. And whatever country is producing the best green tech solutions is in the pole position to spring to the top of the 21st century technological heap.

      America’s election of Donald Trump virtually guarantees that country will be China.

      To be fair, China was already ahead of the US on this front. It began investing big in green tech more than a decade ago, and it is now the world’s leading investor in green energy. Last year alone, China invested more than US$100 billion in green energy – that’s more than double what the US invested – and that number is expected to grow. Trump or no, there’s a good chance China would have won this race. But the US, the second-biggest global investor, was in a better position than any other single nation to challenge China on this front.

    • Floridians Wonder How President-Elect Trump Will Deal With Their Rising Seas

      Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump’s signature piece of property in the South, is just 70-miles north of Miami in Palm Beach, a mostly upscale barrier island. But the residence and private club is likely to be affected by the rising tides and increasingly powerful hurricanes that now regularly batter the coast of Florida.

      Miami and nearby coastal towns in Florida are, and will be, impacted by changes in our climate—the sea levels in just the past decade rose at double the rate of the entire century before, according to the World Resource Institute. But in the end, Floridians chose noted climate change-skeptic Donald Trump as their future leader.

  • Finance

    • EU ministers to discuss plan to charge Britons to visit Europe after Brexit

      A European plan under which Britons will face a £10 charge to travel to the EU after Brexit is to be discussed by interior ministers this week.

      The plan for a European version of the US visa waiver programme has already won the backing of the British diplomat now in charge of European security.

      Sir Julian King, the European commissioner for the security union is to give evidence to peers on Tuesday. He has described the plan as “a valuable additional piece of the jigsaw” in the war against international terrorism.

    • Why India wiped out 86% of its cash overnight

      On 8 November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave only four hours’ notice that virtually all the cash in the world’s seventh-largest economy would be effectively worthless.

      The Indian government likes to use the technical term “demonetisation” to describe the move, which makes it sound rather dull. It isn’t. This is the economic equivalent of “shock and awe”.

      [...]

      These may be the largest denomination Indian notes but they are not high value by international standards – 1,000 rupees is only £12. But together the two notes represent 86% of the currency in circulation.

      Think of that, at a stroke 86% of the cash in India now cannot be used.

      What is more, India is overwhelmingly a cash economy, with 90% of all transactions taking place that way.

      And that is the target of Mr Modi’s dramatic move. Because so much business is done in cash, very few people pay tax on the money they earn.

    • Donald Trump victory wipes $1 trillion off value of global bond markets

      Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the US presidential election wiped more than $1 trillion (£800bn) off the value of global bond markets in two days.

      President-elect Trump has pledged to massively increase infrastructure spending, which has caused a big shift away from the safety of government debt and into the shares of companies who may cash in on any spending bonanza. The wider stock market has also risen on the back of investors’ predictions of increased growth.

      Turning on the government spending taps would push up inflation, meaning that the already meagre returns on US bonds would head into negative territory, adding more reasons to sell and move into riskier assets.

    • 7 WTF Ways Famous Companies Rip You Off Every Day

      There’s a righteous, almost smug satisfaction to buying something cheap. It feels like we’re sticking it to the big companies by denying them those extra ten cents per unit on a box of Kit Kats. However, no one loves a bargain more than the businesses themselves. That usually takes the form of tax evasion and poor wages, but sometimes they like to get … creative.

    • Baby dies after Indian hospital refuses to accept parents’ money because of country’s new cash note ban

      A baby died when a hospital in India refused to accept a deposit paid in banknotes which were withdrawn from circulation the day before.

      Police said they are investigating a doctor in a Mumbai suburb who allegedly turned away a couple with a premature baby because they did not have the correct currency.

      Kiran Sharma gave birth to a boy around one month early on 9 November and was rushed to Jeevan Jyot Hospital in Govandi to the east of the city, reported The New Indian Express.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • VP Elect Mike Pence Goes To Court To Keep His Emails Secret

      The circumstances are different, but the general principle is the same — and there’s a really important issue at stake when it comes to FOIA and public records issues. The background is fairly convoluted, but here’s a quick summary. After President Obama announced a plan to defer enforcement of certain immigration laws for certain individuals, a few states were upset about it, and Texas and Indiana (where Pence is governor) sued the President. Pence hired an outside law firm to handle the case, and a local lawyer thought this was a waste of taxpayer funds. The lawyer filed public records requests to get access to emails about the decision to hire the law firm and to find out the costs to taxpayers.

      Pence’s office released some emails, but they were apparently redacted in places — and in one case an email referred to an attached white paper that was not included. The lawyer who filed the request, William Groth, went to court to demand that the Pence administration reveal the full email with the attached white paper. The Pence administration has argued that it’s not subject to public records requests as “attorney-client” work material — but also that the courts are not allowed to question what the government chooses to release or redact under public records laws. A lower court agreed — following an Indiana Supreme Court ruling saying that the courts cannot “meddle” in public records decisions by the legislative or executive branch due to “separation of powers.” That’s a bizarre reading of the law that seems to actually turn the concept of separation of powers on its head, as it kind of destroys a key part of that separation: the checks and balances of the three branches of government.

    • Your Government Wants to Militarize Social Media to Influence Your Beliefs

      A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces.

      The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion.

      A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month revealed how a CIA-funded tool, Geofeedia, was already being used by police to conduct surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters.

      Although Facebook and Twitter both quickly revoked Geofeedia’s access to their social feeds, the conference proves that social media surveillance remains a rapidly growing industry with no regulatory oversight. And its biggest customers are our own governments.

    • Remember when they told us Hillary, not Bernie, would beat Trump?

      If the Democrats continue to front establishment candidates while the establishment’s cherished beliefs continue to crumble, they will continue to lose.

      American politics now: the anti-establishment, white-nationalism troll party and the pro-establishment party that thinks you’ll vote for them because you fear white supremacists more than you hate the trolls.

      American politics tomorrow, if we address ourselves to the work at hand: the terrified troll white-nationalist party versus the party of hope, change and rebuilding: “dismissing a major indicator of popularity like polling—a key tool of campaign journalism in virtually all other contexts—due to vague, handwaving claims of unvettedness comes across as far more a convenient talking point than an earnestly arrived-at conclusion.”

    • Interview: Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein On Clinton’s Loss To Trump

      When the liberal class heard news media report Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote, numerous people experienced meltdowns that involved blaming anyone and everyone but Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In particular, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was one of the targets, even though the math did not point to Stein as a culprit for the outcome.

      MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow wailed, “If you vote for somebody who can’t win for president, it means that you don’t care who wins for president.” It not only displayed the prejudice many liberals have against allowing more choices and more voices in presidential elections, but it also exemplified a denial among liberal pundits. They reflexively lashed out at Stein or Bernie Sanders in order to ignore their failure to recognize how Trump had a strong chance all along to win because voters were fed up with the neoliberal economic policies of Democrats.

      For this week’s “Unauthorized Disclosure,” the show returns with an interview with Jill Stein. She highlights what her campaign managed to accomplish. She looks back on smears she faced, such as the idea that she was anti-vaccine and says she views it as a “sign of the media’s weakness and also their fear and our strength.” Then, she shares how she was never confident Clinton would win the election and addresses the denial among Democrats, who do not want to confront the reality of what happened. She also lists off a number of initiatives and efforts she plans to help support in the aftermath of the election.

    • Julian Assange, Whose Wikileaks Played a Pivotal Role in US Election, Faces Possible Criminal Trial

      I sit in the tiny conference room adjoined to Julian Assange’s tiny living space in Ecuador embassy. I always feel a bit restless and nervous waiting for him. I worry how he’s coping. I realize how difficult it must be, to be here for years every day looking at these same walls, not feeling the sunshine.

      Just then the cat pops in, making me feel more at ease. He has full reign. He is on the table sniffing the muffins and rubbing up against me purring and maybe a little disappointed that everything I’ve brought is vegan.

      Next, the big man walks in, wearing a Sea Shepherd tshirt and jeans, a bit disheveled. It’s early but he manages a smile. He’s got a long day ahead.

    • Julian Assange calls for leaks on Trump after claims Wikileaks attacked Hillary Clinton

      The online group was grilled by users of Reddit in a questions and answer session on the online debating forum.

      WikiLeaks became a focal point during the election campaign.

      It published thousands of internal Democrat National Council emails, and more recently thousands more from the hacked email account of the Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.

      Some Reddit users appeared suspicious Wikileaks had an agenda to get Donald Trump elected.

    • WikiLeaks informant Chelsea Manning asks Obama to cut her 35-year prison sentence to time served

      The Lawyer of Chelsea Manning, a former US soldier who is currently serving a prison sentence for disclosing secret diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, has put forth a petition requesting President Barack Obama to grant clemency and reduce the rest of her 35-year sentence to the more than six years she has already served.

      Manning’s punishment is the longest period of incarceration awarded to any leaker in American history.

    • Anti-Semitic incidents stoke fear among Jews after Trump win

      A synagogue in Montana wants police protection after Nazi fliers were delivered nearby following Donald Trump’s election win. Anxiety is now growing among American Jews after Trump appointed an alleged anti-Semite as one of his closest advisors on Sunday as the number of hate incidents continues to rise across the US.

    • Did the WikiLeaks Email Dumps Cost Hillary the White House? [Ed: falsely blames it all on Russia, without evidence]
    • Pain Management

      The only thing that will save us from a populist racist oligarch demagogue is a populist anti-racist anti-neoliberal progressive with a mobilized movement behind them and serious contenders up and down the ticket.

    • Sanders backs Trump protests, questions Electoral College
    • Amid DNC Reckoning, Ellison Emerges as Progressive Antidote to Trump

      Amid the growing post-election call for a “reckoning” within the Democratic Party, Rep. Keith Ellison on Minnesota has swiftly emerged as the favored progressive choice to lead that transition.

      “Liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups have started plotting a major overhaul of the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” the Washington Post reported late Thursday, with the first step being a replacement for the embattled interim chair Donna Brazile.

      The progressive flank of the party has largely placed the blame for the stunning election loss on the DNC and its elitist leadership, which they say is out of touch with the Left’s grassroots base, which wants to see a renunciation of corporate influence.

    • Maine became the first state in the country Tuesday to pass ranked choice voting

      Amid a national vote that rocked the political world Tuesday, voters in Maine narrowly approved a measure that supporters say will be respectively disruptive to the state’s political status quo.

      With 98 percent of the vote reporting in the state, 52 percent of voters approved a ballot question making Maine the first state to implement ranked choice voting, a fundamental reform of how voters literally fill out their ballot.

      In a ranked choice vote system, rather than simply voting for one candidate, voters rank their candidates by preference—first, second, third, and so on.

    • Maine Passes Ranked-Choice Voting

      Maine residents have approved a ballot question that will allow voters to rank their choice of candidates.

      Under the election overhaul, ballots are counted at the state level in multiple rounds. Last-place candidates are eliminated until a candidate wins by a majority.

    • Stephen Bannon and Reince Priebus to lead Trump’s White House

      Donald Trump has named Reince Priebus as his White House chief of staff, rewarding a loyalist to his party and its long-serving chairman by making him his top aide in the Oval Office. But he also named Steve Bannon, the head of his campaign and of the far-right website Breitbart, as his “chief strategist and senior counselor”.

      The statement announcing Trump’s decision named Bannon first, despite the vague title of his role. It said he and Priebus would work as “equal partners”.

      “Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory,” Trump said. “Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”

    • Trump appoints Chief of Staff, chief strategist

      “I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country,” Trump said in a statement.

    • Denying climate change is only part of it: 5 ways Donald Trump spells doom for the environment

      If the world’s governments don’t prevent the planet’s surface temperature from increasing more than 2°C, then life on Earth will become a difficult proposition for many humans, animals and plants. Glaciers will melt, sea levels will rise, crops will fail, water availability will decrease, and diseases will proliferate. Some areas will experience more wildfires and extreme heat; in others, more hurricanes and extreme storms. Coastal cities and possibly entire nations will be swallowed by the sea. There will be widespread social and economic instability, leading to regional conflicts.

    • Trump seeks top-secret security clearances for his kids

      President-elect Donald Trump is seeking top-secret security clearances for his adult children, CBS News reported Monday.

      CBS News said the real estate mogul has asked the White House if he can obtain such clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., as well as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

      But a transition team official told the presidential pool reporter Monday night that the president-elect did not request such a step and said the Trump children have not started filling out paperwork for such clearances.

    • I actually have something I would use the Department of Education to do. It would be to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.
    • Donald Trump ‘will consult Nigel Farage before Theresa May’ on UK policy proposals, says Aaron Banks

      Donald Trump will run policy proposals affecting the UK past Nigel Farage before consulting Theresa May, a Ukip donor has claimed.

      Mr Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon will “run ideas” past interim Ukip leader Mr Farage, prominent Ukip donor Aaron Banks told the Daily Telegraph.

      “There is no doubt about it that Steve Bannon will talk to Nigel Farage before any other British politician and run stuff by them,” Mr Banks said.

    • Playtime is over

      Well, I was optimistic. The tea party radicals have gone nuclear, but I wasn’t counting on a neo-Nazi running the White House, or on the Kremlin stepping in …

      Let me explain.

      A few years ago, wandering around the net, I stumbled on a page titled “Why Japan lost the Second World War”. (Sorry, I can’t find the URL.) It held two photographs. The first was a map of the Pacific Theater used by the Japanese General Staff. It extended from Sakhalin in the north to Australia in the south, from what we now call Bangladesh in the west, to Hawaii in the east. The second photograph was the map of the war in the White House. A Mercator projection showing the entire planet. And the juxtaposition explained in one striking visual exactly why the Japanese military adventure against the United States was doomed from the outset: they weren’t even aware of the true size of the battleground.

      I’d like you to imagine what it must have been like to be a Japanese staff officer. Because that’s where we’re standing today. We think we’re fighting local battles against Brexit or Trumpism. But in actuality, they’re local fronts in a global war. And we’re losing because we can barely understand how big the conflict is.

      (NB: By “we”, I mean folks who think that the Age of Enlightenment, the end of monarchism, and the evolution of Liberalism are good things. If you disagree with this, then kindly hold your breath until your head explodes. (And don’t bother commenting below: I’ll delete and ban you on sight.))

      The logjam created by the Beige Dictatorship was global, throughout the western democracies; and now it has broken. But it didn’t break by accident, and the consequences could be very bad indeed.

      What happened last week is not just about America. It was one move—a very significant one, bishop-takes-queen maybe—in a long-drawn-out geopolitical chess game. It’s being fought around the world: Brexit was one move, the election and massacres of Dutarte in the Philippines were another, the post-coup crackdown in Turkey is a third. The possible election of Marine Le Pen (a no-shit out-of-the-closet fascist) as President of France next year is more of this stuff. The eldritch knot of connections between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Da’esh in the wreckage of Syria is icing on top. It’s happening all over and I no longer think this is a coincidence.

    • Looking for someone to blame? It’s not third parties

      As news of Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss sinks in, many Clinton supporters looking for someone to blame are pointing fingers at a familiar scapegoat: people who voted outside the two-party system.

      Pundits are already trying to blame Libertarian Gary Johnson and me, the Green party candidate, for Trump’s win. For example, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow concocted a scenario in which by taking every Stein vote and half of Johnson’s votes, Clinton could have grabbed enough states from Trump to eke out an electoral college win, a story repeated by CNN. Unwilling to accept that Clinton didn’t motivate enough voters to win the presidency, and explore the reasons why, many pundits are instead looking to put responsibility for the loss onto others.

      First the facts: if every single Stein voter had voted for Clinton, Clinton still lost.

    • Why Are Liberals Blaming The Green Party For Trump?

      The Green Party’s showing in this year’s election was strong but not significant enough to reach the desired 5%. It was more like 1%. Still, the Stein Baraka ticket garnered more than 1.2 million votes nationwide. That’s a big bump from the last Green Party presidential ticket in 2012 which won less than half a million votes.

      Already some liberal pundits, shocked by the election of Donald Trump have begun blaming the Green Party for Clinton’s loss. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman tweeted on election night, “Jill Stein managed to play Ralph Nader. Without her Florida might have been saved.”

    • A road map Hillary Clinton did not follow to the White House

      We know this because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange came into possession of it along with tens of thousands of other emails to and from Clinton’s strategist Podesta, and spread them across the internet.

      Huma Abedin’s email revealed no high drama or internal backbiting, and so it did not grab headlines during the campaign. It simply noted that she had met with Smith, a San Francisco political consultant, and she attached a memo, titled thoughts.doc. Written by Smith, it maps out a strategy, though not one followed by Hillary Clinton.

      Smith and his firm, SCN Strategies, are among the most successful Democratic campaign firms in the state and country. In 2008, he ran Clinton’s 2008 winning primary campaigns in California and Texas. And in 2014, he was making a pitch for a position in Clinton’s 2016 campaign; he didn’t get it.

      “Today, you are a fully known quantity and a second-time candidate for President of the United States,” Smith wrote, setting forth how Clinton might announce her candidacy and frame her campaign. “As such you will be expected to have a clear and deep rationale for your candidacy from the first day of the campaign.”

    • Donna Brazile says CNN should have let her ‘defend myself’ following Wikileaks email

      Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and former CNN contributor, went after her former employer at an event at a women’s college in Virginia Monday, blaming them for “ripping me a new one” instead of allowing her to defend herself after it appeared she tipped off Hillary Clinton’s campaign to town hall questions.

      Brazile, who had been a contributor and commentator at CNN for 14, resigned from the network earlier this year after WikiLeaks published hacked emails that showed Brazile tipping off Clinton’s campaign in advance to at least two questions the Democratic presidential nominee could be asked at upcoming town hall events.

      “CNN never gave me a question,” Brazile said at a talk held at Hollins University, according to The Roanoke Times. “I wish CNN had given me some other things, like the ability to defend myself rather than ripping me a new one.”

      Brazile did not deny the allegations that she had emailed two questions in advance, but she said she “never got on Clinton’s campaign airplane or prepped the candidate for any of the debates,” according to the Roanoke Times. When the network cut ties with Brazile permanently, it said the company was “completely uncomfortable” with the revelations and asserted that it had not provided questions to Brazile in advance.

    • Rep. Keith Ellison Enters Race for DNC Chair With Strong Support

      Rep. Keith Ellison formally announced his candidacy Monday to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a race that has taken on unusual importance as the party looks for someone to lead its efforts to rebuild after last week’s devastating loss to Donald Trump.

      Ellison, a progressive who backed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, enters the potentially crowded race as the clear favorite thanks to early backing from a number of leading Democrats.

      “It is not enough for Democrats to ask for voters’ support every two years. We must be with them through every lost paycheck, every tuition hike, and every time they are the victim of a hate crime,” Ellison said in a statement announcing his bid. “When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation. To do that, we must begin the rebuilding process now.”

    • More than half of arrested anti-Trump protesters didn’t vote

      More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote, according to state election records.

      At least seventy demonstrators either didn’t turn in a ballot or weren’t registered to vote.

      KGW compiled a list of the 112 people arrested by the Portland Police Bureau during recent protests. Those names and ages, provided by police, were then compared to state voter logs by Multnomah County Elections officials.

      Records show 35 of the protesters arrested didn’t return a ballot for the November 8 election. Thirty-five of the demonstrators taken into custody weren’t registered to vote.

    • D.C. Area High School Students Walk Out Of Class To Protest Trump

      A day after hundreds of students staged a peaceful protest at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, another large protest is taking place in the District.

      Hundreds of students walked out of school at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, in the Tenleytown neighborhood, Tuesday morning in protest of President Elect Donald Trump.

    • President Trump’s Cabinet Will Be Filled With Deplorables

      There are 67 days until Donald Trump’s inauguration, a fact that seems to have surprised the president-elect – who reportedly never thought he’d remain in the race past October 2015 – as much as anyone. According to the Wall Street Journal, not only was Trump “surprised by the scope” of the president’s duties when President Obama explained them to him in private last week, but his aides were unaware they would need to hire an entirely new White House staff.

    • The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…

      On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.

      Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here’s a sample of the list

    • ‘Trump lookalike’ chef slams media coverage of beating

      TV chef Anders Vendel said in a Facebook post that he was beaten up by three men, two of whom bound his arms behind his back, while the third beat him in the face. He estimated that he was punched twenty times in the face, which took place at 4am in central Malmö on Saturday.

      The attack left him with a broken nose and extensive bruising around his right eye, mouth and jaw.

      In the Facebook post, which has since been deleted but has been widely cited by populist media including Russian state propaganda channel RT, Vendel had said the men thought he resembled the US President-elect. He also said they were Muslim.

      But in a comment to The Local on Monday, the chef said the way his case was being used abroad was “scary.”

      Headlines in RT, the Daily Mail and various other global media emphasised the attackers’ supposed religion. None of them had spoken to the chef.

      “I was angry, hurt and humiliated when I wrote what I was thinking at the time,” Vendel said.

    • Trump’s victory comes with a silver lining for the world’s progressives

      The election of Donald Trump symbolises the demise of a remarkable era. It was a time when we saw the curious spectacle of a superpower, the US, growing stronger because of – rather than despite – its burgeoning deficits. It was also remarkable because of the sudden influx of two billion workers – from China and Eastern Europe – into capitalism’s international supply chain. This combination gave global capitalism a historic boost, while at the same time suppressing Western labour’s share of income and prospects.

      Trump’s success comes as that dynamic fails. His presidency represents a defeat for liberal democrats everywhere, but it holds important lessons – as well as hope – for progressives.

      From the mid-1970s to 2008, the US economy had kept global capitalism in an unstable, though finely balanced, equilibrium. It sucked into its territory the net exports of economies such as those of Germany, Japan and later China, providing the world’s most efficient factories with the requisite demand. How was this growing trade deficit paid for? By the return of around 70 per cent of the profits made by foreign corporates to Wall Street, to be invested in America’s financial markets.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Spies Use Tinder, and It’s as Creepy as You’d Think

      On September 4, a group of young activists planned to attend a demonstration against Interim President Michel Temer in the city center of São Paulo. They never made it. Their group had been infiltrated by an Army Captain Willian Pina Botelho—via Tinder.

      Surveillance and infiltration are not new tactics, but the ACLU revelation last month that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook had been sharing data with surveillance service Geofeedia reminds us that the internet is bringing it to whole new levels. The story of the “Tinder infiltrator” serves as a reminder for a generation of young activists who are organizing online: don’t stop organizing, but be vigilant.

    • Comey Can’t Say How Often Encryption Thwarts Investigations, But Probably A Lot

      FBI Director James Comey believes encryption is perhaps the biggest threat to public safety yet. So big, in fact, that he can only engage in hyperbole about it. There’s been very little done to quantify the problem, even by the agency that seems to fear it most.

      In 2015, Comey told senators that a “vast majority” of devices seized by US law enforcement “may no longer be accessible” due to encryption. Comey has a very strange definition of “vast majority,” as Marcy Wheeler points out.

    • US Secrecy Prevails In German Constitutional Court

      The German constitutional court has rebuffed a second complaint seeking to allow oversight bodies to see the US National Security Administration (NSA) selector list.

      The list was pushed by the NSA to its German sister organisation BND to crawl through data traffic intercepted at the DeCIX, an internet exchange point in Frankfurt and traffic-wise the largest peering platform worldwide.

    • 1ST LEAD Court: Germany does not have to hand over NSA list of spying targets By Friederike Heine, dpa

      The list of so-called “selectors” – telephone numbers, email and IP addresses – was handed to Germany‘s foreign intelligence agency BND by the National Security Agency (NSA) with the aim of spying on German and European targets.

    • The German government won’t have to disclose who it spied on with the NSA
    • German court’s ruling on mass spying is a victory for the BND and NSA
    • German court rejects opposition’s bid for disclosure of NSA spy targets
    • German Constitutional Court rules out access to NSA’s ‘selectors’ list
    • Court rejects case to reveal more on US spies in Germany
    • CIA, NSA ordered to reveal to judge whether they were involved in Occupy Philly surveillance

      A federal judge has ordered the CIA and the National Security Agency to disclose to him whether they were involved in spying on Occupy Philadelphia protesters during their monthlong demonstration at what is now Dilworth Park five years ago.

      Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a lawyer for the demonstrators, U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller gave the agencies until early next year to submit a list of any records detailing the agencies’ potential surveillance activities, along with a justification of why those documents should be withheld from public disclosure.

      Schiller said he would rely upon that list to determine whether to release such documents or whether he would need to examine such records in person before making his decision.

    • Federal Contractor Collected Pay From NSA, OPM for Hours He Didn’t Work: Prosecutors
    • Apps for Communicating and Organizing in the Age of Trump

      On January 20, Donald Trump will gain control over the most powerful surveillance system in history. Worried? Here are some steps you can take to protect yourself.

      The U.S. government has a long history of targeting activists. Agents spied on Martin Luther King Jr., bugging his hotel rooms in an attempt to find out personal information which could be used to discredit him. More recently, the FBI spied on Black Lives Matter activists.

      U.S. intelligence agencies have unprecedented power to gather information on millions of American citizens. This information includes our communications, banking info, and web browsing data. We know that the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on who you talk to, when, and where you call from.

    • Donald Trump is about to control the most powerful surveillance machine in history

      The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to Donald Trump.

      It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes NSA surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights.

    • Shazam Keeps Your Mac’s Microphone Always On, Even When You Turn It Off

      What’s that song? On your cellphone, the popular app Shazam is able to answer that question by listening for just a few seconds, as if it were magic. On Apple’s computers, Shazam never turns the microphone off, even if you tell it to.

      When a user of Shazam’s Mac app turns the app “OFF,” the app actually keeps the microphone on in the background. For the security researcher who discovered that the mic is always on, it’s a bug that users should know about. For Shazam, it’s just a feature that makes the app work better.

    • A 10-Digit Key Code to Your Private Life: Your Cellphone Number

      The next time someone asks you for your cellphone number, you may want to think twice about giving it.

      The cellphone number is more than just a bunch of digits. It is increasingly used as a link to private information maintained by all sorts of companies, including money lenders and social networks. It can be used to monitor and predict what you buy, look for online or even watch on television.

      It has become “kind of a key into the room of your life and information about you,” said Edward M. Stroz, a former high-tech crime agent for the F.B.I. who is co-president of Stroz Friedberg, a private investigator.

      Yet the cellphone number is not a legally regulated piece of information like a Social Security number, which companies are required to keep private. And we are told to hide and protect our Social Security numbers while most of us don’t hesitate when asked to write a cellphone number on a form or share it with someone we barely know.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Saudi bans schools from marking non-Islamic holidays

      Saudi education ministry has warned international schools from marking non-Islamic occasions, such as Christmas and New Year, the media reported on Monday.

      The ban includes forbidding those schools from providing holidays on such occasions or changing the dates of exams to suit them, Xinhua news agency reported.

    • Spokesperson Maryam Namazie wins 2016 International Secularism (Laicite) Prize

      This is a time where “solidarity” is no longer an act of defending revolutionaries but fascists; where there is always support for Islamist projects like Sharia courts, the burqa, gender segregation, apostasy and blasphemy laws – whether de jure or de facto – but never for those who refuse to be silenced, erased and “disappeared”.

      It’s a time when “progressive” all too often means protecting regressive identity politics, which homogenises entire communities and societies, and deems theocrats as the sole legitimate arbiters and gatekeepers of “community” values.

      It’s a politics of betrayal – devoid of class struggle and political ideals – which sees any dissent through Islamist eyes and immediately labels it “Islamophobic” and blasphemous.

      We are called “aggressive apostates”, “fundamentalist secularists”, “native informants”, “inflammatory”. We are accused of violating the “safe spaces” of Islamists on universities and even “inciting hatred”.

    • Blasphemy: How Kano mob murdered my wife in my presence – Husband

      Pastor Mike Agbahime, husband of Bridget Agbahime who was killed by an irate mob in Kano for alleged blasphemy has finally spoken up on the events that lead to his wife’s death.

      Agbahime in an interview with The Punch blamed Kano Governor Umar Ganduje for paving the way for the release of the arrested suspects.

    • Mauritanian clerics urge for blogger’s death penalty to be applied

      Muslim clerics in Mauritania on Sunday urged the authorities to execute a blogger who was sentenced to death in 2014 for apostasy after writing a blog post on Islam and racial discrimination.

      Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir’s article touched a nerve in Mauritania, a West African country with deep social and racial divisions. He was tried for apostasy and received the death penalty despite having repented and saying his article was misunderstood.

      According to the U.S.-based Freedom Now rights group who provide Mkhaitir with legal counsel, the blog post appears to have been the first he published. Prior to his arrest he worked as an engineer for a mining company and was not an activist, Freedom Now said on its website.

    • Delta: Police Raid Baby Factory in Oshimili Council, Arrest Six Pregnant Wome

      Police have raided a baby factory and arrested at least six pregnant women who are allegedly planning to sell their newborn babies after delivery in Delta State.
      The police said the arrest was made in Okwe community, Oshimili South Local Government Area of the state in Nigeria’s South-South region.
      They revealed that a victim, Blessing Aondoseer, had reported that her husband allegedly connived with some people to take away her two weeks old baby.

    • Freedom House warns that internet privacy is eroding fast

      INDEPENDENT WATCHDOG Freedom House has issued its 2016 report along with a chilling warning that internet privacy is becoming something of an oxymoron.

      Freedom House is based in Washington and deals with how countries handle and provide the internet and technology to citizens. We imagine that it is currently hiring. The Freedom On The Net report said that freedom has declined for the sixth year in a row.

    • The Way to Stop Trump

      The stunning upset election of Donald Trump has left many Americans wondering what has become of their country, their party, their government, even their sense of the world. Purple prose has been unleashed on the problem; comparisons to fascism and totalitarianism abound. Commentators claim that Trump’s election reflects a racist, sexist, xenophobic America. But we should resist the temptation to draw broad-brush generalizations about American character from last Tuesday’s outcome. The result was far more equivocal than that; a majority of the voters rejected Trump, after all. There is no question that President Trump will be a disaster—if we let him. But the more important point is that—as the fate of American democracy in the years after 9/11 has taught us—we can and must stop him.

      The risks are almost certainly greater than those posed by any prior American president. Trump, who has no government experience, a notoriously unreliable temperament, and a record of demagoguery and lies, will come to office with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and, once he fills the late Antonin Scalia’s seat, on the Supreme Court as well. His shortlist of Cabinet appointees offers little hope that voices of moderation will be heard. Who, then, is going to stop him? Will he be able to put in place all the worst ideas he tossed out so cavalierly on the campaign trail? Building a wall; banning and deporting Muslims; ending Obamacare; reneging on climate change treaty responsibilities; expanding libel law; criminalizing abortion; jailing his political opponents; supporting aggressive stop-and-frisk policing; reviving mass surveillance and torture?

      Whether Trump will actually try to implement these promises, and more importantly, whether he will succeed if he does try, lies as much in our hands as in his. If Americans let him, Trump may well do all that he promised—and more. Imagine, for example, what a Trump administration might do if there is another serious terrorist attack on US soil. What little he has said about national security suggests that he will make us nostalgic for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

    • Chuck Schumer: The Worst Possible Democratic Leader at the Worst Possible Time

      When Barack Obama leaves the White House, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will almost certainly be elected Senate minority leader — and therefore become the highest ranking Democratic official in America.

    • Prosecutor Shuts Down New Orleans Cop’s Attempt To Charge Arrestee With Hate Crime For Insulting Responding Officers

      The Louisiana legislature decided to help out its most underprivileged constituents — law enforcement officers — by making it a felony to “attack” them using nothing more than words.

      When New Orleans police officers arrived at the scene of a disturbance to arrest an intoxicated man for banging on a hotel’s windows and harassing the employees, the situation devolved into the totally expected.

    • Hate Crimes Are Up — But the Government Isn’t Keeping Good Track of Them

      In 2015, the authorities in California documented 837 hate-crime incidents, charting a surge in offenses motivated by religious intolerance toward Muslims and Jews, while crimes against Latinos grew by 35 percent.

      Last week, shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected the country’s next president, the Southern Poverty Law Center put up a form on its website encouraging people to share details about potential hate crimes. By the next day, they’d received about 250 reports – more than they’re used to seeing in six months.

      Then on Monday, the FBI released its latest national tabulation of hate crimes, data that showed an overall uptick of 6.8 percent from 2014 to 2015. The accounting, drawn from information passed on to the bureau by state and local law enforcement agencies, charted a 67-percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes.

    • Self-styled ‘Sharia patrol’ allegedly launch brutal attack on girl for ‘not wearing HIJAB’

      In the horrific footage from Vienna, Austria, the youngster is seen being violently attacked by a group of girls and a boy in what is believed to be a “Sharia patrol”.

      In this clip, she keeps her hands in her pocket and takes the savage beating, despite breaking her jaw in two places and blood dripping from her face.

      The group is reported to have said in the video: “She has pulled the headscarf down, demolish her!”

    • Lauri Love faces hacking trial in US after UK signs extradition order

      Love’s family plan to appeal against the decision. The 31-year-old—who has Asperger’s syndrome—faces up to 99 years in prison and fears for his own life, his lawyers have said.

      A home office spokesperson told Ars: “On Monday 14 November, the secretary of state, having carefully considered all relevant matters, signed an order for Lauri Love’s extradition to the United States. Mr Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting US military and federal government agencies.”

      Rudd considered four so-called legal tests of the Extradition Act 2003: whether Love is at risk of the death penalty; whether specialty arrangements are in place; whether Love has previously been extradited from another country to the UK, thereby requiring consent from that country; and whether Love was previously transferred to the UK by the International Criminal Court.

      However, the home secretary concluded that none of these issues applied to Love.

    • Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s ex-president, says successor Temer took bribes

      Brazil has been plunged into a fresh bout of political uncertainty after lawyers for former president Dilma Rousseff presented evidence suggesting her successor, Michel Temer, accepted bribes from a construction company.

      If accepted the documents filed with the supreme electoral court raise the possibility of the 2014 presidential election being declared invalid due to campaign funding violations, which could force Temer from office.

      The two politicians were running mates in 2014 but have since become bitter enemies. Rousseff, of the Workers party, was impeached and removed from the presidency in September on charges of window-dressing government accounts. She has levelled accusations of treachery at her replacement, Temer, of the centre-right Brazilian Democratic Movement party.

    • Hate crimes against Muslim Americans increased by 67 percent in 2015, says FBI

      Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, ‘We saw a spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide beginning toward the end of 2015. That spike has continued until today and even accelerated after the election of President-elect Trump’

    • Jews Aren’t An SJW-Approved Minority
    • U.S. Muslims make up only one percent of the population, but file 40% of workplace discrimination complaints

      Even outside of fear of drawing an Islamist attack, avoiding conflict with Muslim employees affects both the company’s ‘inclusive’ image, and its liability to lawsuits by activist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). When special interest activist groups put pressure on businesses to give into their demands businesses often (depending on the issue/s) concede rather than face bad publicity. Businesses placating to Muslim demands is one of the objectives of the Hamas-affiliated CAIR. Masquerading as a civil liberties organization for Muslims, CAIR, as mentioned in the video, pressures businesses into accommodating the most trivial of Muslim practices advocated for in sharia law.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply

      Decentralized and distributed networks are, quite simply, fundamental; everyone is affected in many ways by the degree of distribution — not least one’s personal agency, the development of our societal structures, and our impact on this planet’s living systems.

      As we instrument the planet, as we build out a pervasive computing environment, as increasingly little ‘undigital’ remains, ensuring the decentralized and distributed nature of that digital infrastructure is nothing short of mission critical. We must resist the easy short-term temptations of centralization to avoid its longer-term miseries.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • South Centre, FAO Sign Agreement Promoting Tech Transfer, Innovation

      The intergovernmental South Centre and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation have signed a five-year agreement to help the global south fight malnutrition, reduce poverty, and address climate change consequences. The memorandum of understanding was signed on the margins of the recent climate change discussion held in Marrakesh.

    • Countries Asked To Revise IP Laws Preventing Implementation Of Farmers’ Rights [Ed: Treating people like farming slaves and perpetuating poverty by imposing ‘IP’, then calling them “pirates”.]

      Global Consultation on Farmers’ Rights took place in Bali, Indonesia from 27-30 September and was co-organised by the governments of Indonesia and Norway. The secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) engaged in the preparatory process, according to the treaty’s website.

      The consultation was attended by 95 participants from 37 countries, from all the seven regions of the FAO, according to a source. Participants came from governments, academia, international organisations (such as the ITPGRFA, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants [UPOV], and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), non-governmental organisations (such as Oxfam, the Development Fund, and SEARICE), and farmers and farmers’ organisation (such as la Via Campesina), the source said.

    • Copyrights

      • Toto, I Don’t Think We’re In The Public Domain Anymore

        Long-time readers may remember our coverage of a slow-moving copyright case over public domain images from The Wizard of Oz and other movies. In brief: back in 2006, Warner Bros. sued vintage/nostalgia merchandise company AVELA, which had obtained restored images from old promotional posters for the films and was selling them for T-shirts and other products. Nobody disputed that these specific images were in the public domain, because the promo materials had not been registered for copyright even though the films were — but Warner claimed that the images nevertheless infringed on the copyright in the characters established by the film. The court originally sided with Warner in full, but on appeal found that the exact two-dimensional reproductions of the images on T-shirts and the like were not infringing, but instances where they were combined with text and other images or used to create three-dimensional models were, and awarded some pretty huge damages. To complicate matters, there’s also a trademark claim wrapped up in all this. There was another appeal, and now a court has upheld the ruling and the damages, giving movie studios another weapon in their war on the public domain (here’s a PDF of the full ruling).

        Now, there are a lot of layers here, and I’m going to focus on The Wizard Of Oz, since it provides the most interesting example. The 1900 book is in the public domain. The 1939 movie is still under copyright held by Warner. The associated 1939 promo materials were not registered (a requirement at the time) and are in the public domain. And many characters and other elements of the movie are also covered by trademark, also owned by Warner. Absolutely none of these facts are in dispute — but put them all together and you have a giant mess that illustrates the flimsiness of the idea/expression dichotomy, and how something can supposedly remain in the public domain while being gutted of all its usefulness to the public.

      • Donald Trump Parody Results in Clockwork Orange Copyright Suit

        A YouTube parody which hoped to provide a satirical take on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has ended in a lawsuit. Hugh Atkin portrayed elements of Trump’s efforts in the style of and alongside images from A Clockwork Orange. Now the Australian is getting sued in the United States for copyright infringement.

      • U.S. Copyright Office Undecided About Future of DMCA Takedowns

        The U.S. Government’s Copyright Office has launched a new consultation seeking guidance on the future of the DMCA’s takedown process and safe harbor. Through a set of concrete questions, they hope to find a balance between the interests of copyright holders, Internet services and the public at large.

11.14.16

Links 14/11/2016: TOP500, Mesa 13.0.1 Released, Debian 9.0 Stretch Installer Updated

Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How Capital One is embracing open source

    I eventually found out that my friends was fed up, the company wouldn’t allow him to contribute to open source. Wow. Even in Silicon Valley.

  • Synacor, Inc.’s Zimbra Open Source Support and Zimbra Suite Plus
  • ARK Platform Is Now Open Source, Announces Bounty Program

    ARK Platform, the innovative blockchain based products and solutions initiative has taken a major step by making the codes completely open source. The platform released the codes on its official GitHub account on November 12, 2016, with the intention of allowing developers from across the world to take advantage of the latest advancements in blockchain technology.

  • GCHQ launches new Stroom software

    GCHQ’s aim is to contribute and create its own open source software as a government department and technology organisation.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla plans to rejuvenate Firefox in 2017

        Mozilla last week named its next-generation browser engine project and said it would introduce the new technology to Firefox next year.

        Dubbed Quantum, the new engine will include several components from Servo, the browser rendering engine that Mozilla has sponsored, and been working on, since 2013. Written with Rust, Servo was envisioned as a replacement for Firefox’s long-standing Gecko engine. Both Servo and Rust originated at Mozilla’s research group.

      • Firefox’s New Quantum Build Promises to Kickstart the Browser

        Back in August, Mozilla delivered a number of updates for its Firefox browser that created a bit of fanfare, but the browser has steadily lost market share to Google Chrome. Still, if you’ve been a fan of open source for any length of time, you are familiar with Firefox’s status as a pioneering browser.

        Now, Mozilla has announced plans to kickstart Firefox innovation with a next-generation browse project called Quantum. Here are details.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • Why We Embraced Open Source For Our Database Needs After A Decade Working With Proprietary Solutions

      After investigating our open source options and due diligence, we picked MariaDB as Teleplan’s new replacement e-TRAC database partner. With MariaDB, we realized significant performance improvements.

      For example, whereas running one particular daily report would take up to 15 seconds to run on Oracle Enterprise, with MariaDB it was running in under a second. We did not have the in-house expertise to work on improving the Oracle performance and found this aspect much easier with MariaDB. We also received excellent support both in terms of value and responsiveness and that, coupled with a highly competitive cost, makes MariaDB a great overall package for our e-TRAC needs.

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • A Portable, Accurate, Low-Cost, Open Source Air Particle Counter

        If you live in a city with poor air quality you may be aware that particulates are one of the chief contributors to the problem. Tiny particles of soot from combustion, less than 10μm across, hence commonly referred to as PM10. These are hazardous because they can accumulate deep in the lungs, wherein all kinds of nasties can be caused.

      • How maker communities align with open source

        The maker movement intersects deeply with open source. When I think of open source I normally think of the most hardcore bleeding-edge software or hardware development. But the maker movement has a long-established sharing culture, which really is nothing less than pure open source.

        The source code is a little different, however. For example, consider Nicole Curtis, the maker celebrity and TV star of Rehab Addict. Nicole routinely shows her fans how to remodel their homes and save a fortune. For example, she redid a bathroom by upcycling what others discarded for $1000, easily a tenth of the cost of putting in a new bathroom. Her videos provide the howtos for anyone with similar problems, so in a sense they represent the “source code” to rehab a house.

      • These Open-Source Designs Let Anyone Build A Better Block (No DIY Skills Required)

        Now anyone can do the work to take ownership of their neighborhood. All it takes is effort and this kit from the Better Block Project.

      • Citizen science in action: open-source air pollution monitoring in Bulgaria

  • Programming/Development

    • Introduction to Eclipse Che, a next-generation, web-based IDE

      Correctly installing and configuring an integrated development environment, workspace, and build tools in order to contribute to a project can be a daunting or time consuming task, even for experienced developers. Tyler Jewell, CEO of Codenvy, faced this problem when he was attempting to set up a simple Java project when he was working on getting his coding skills back after dealing with some health issues and having spent time in managerial positions. After multiple days of struggling, Jewell could not get the project to work, but inspiration struck him.

    • production ready

      A few thoughts on what it means for software to be production ready. Or rather, what if any information is conveyed to me when I’m told that something is used in production. Millions of users can’t be wrong!

      Some time ago, I worked with a framework. It doesn’t matter which, the bugs have all been fixed, and I don’t think it was remarkable. But our team picked it because it was production ready, and then I discovered it wasn’t quite so ready.

    • It’s Been Five Years Since The Open64 5.0 Compiler Release

      This week marked five years since the release of the Open64 5.0 compiler in what is the latest and likely last-ever release of this once-promising code compiler.

      Open64 5.0 was released back in 2011 and unfortunately there hasn’t been a release since. Last year we wrote how the Open64 project vanished. A few days after that article, it was said back on 27 March 2015, “The websites and SVN servers are down for maintenance and will be back soon.”

Leftovers

  • The Dangerous Cult You Didn’t Even Know You Were A Part Of

    There is a multi-billion-dollar cult, propagated by the Hollywood elite, which preys like an engorged leech on the minds and pocketbooks of people seeking a purpose. Oh, I’m sorry, did you think I’m talking about Scientology? Well, think different. I’m talking about a little gadget company you may know as Apple Inc. Of course, I expect the Apple Sheep (or as I like to call them, Shapples) to angrily yet gingerly close their brand-new “rose gold” (Shapple word for “pink”) MacBook Air, take an even angrier sip of their matcha latte, and send off a furious Kimoji.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • NHS bosses ‘tried to keep cuts secret’

      NHS chiefs tried to keep plans to cut hospital services in England secret, an investigation has found.

      Forty-four reviews of local services have been set up across the country and all have now drawn up proposals.

      Some involve closing A&Es or, in one case, a whole hospital, but the details of most have yet to emerge.

      That is because NHS England told local managers to keep the plans “out of the public domain” and avoid requests for information, the King’s Fund suggested.

      One piece of guidance even went as far as to advise managers how to reject freedom of information requests.

  • Security

    • Linux Foundation doubles down on support for tamper-free software

      The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) is renewing its financial support for a project that ensures binaries produced from open source software projects are free of tampering.

      The Reproducible Builds Project provides tools and best practices to software projects to ensure that the binaries generated by a compilation process are identical each time and can be matched to the source code used to build them.

    • 3 encryption tools for Linux that will keep your data safe

      Encryption is an interesting thing. The first time I saw encryption in action was on a friend’s Gentoo Linux laptop that could only boot if the USB key with the boot partition and decryption key was inserted. Cool stuff, from a geek point-of-view.

      Fast forward, and revelations from Edward Snowden and ongoing concerns about government snooping are slowly bringing encryption and privacy tools into the mainstream. Even if you’re not worried about a Big Brother or some shady spy-versus-spy scenario, encryption can still protect your identity and privacy if your laptop is stolen. Think of all the things we keep on laptops: contact information, financial information, and client and company information. All of that data is worthy of protection. Luckily, Linux users have access to several tools for the affordable price of free.

      There are three main methods for protecting the data on your laptop, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

    • The Network Standard Used in Cars Is Wide Open to Attack

      The networked electronics found under the hood of modern automobiles enable a great many useful and cool things, such as fuel-saving engine optimizations, parking assist mechanisms, collision avoidance systems, and myriad further applications most often involving sensing and the passing of data among vehicular systems and human drivers. As is pretty much always the case when electronics become networked, this connectivity also offers hackers new potential exploits.

      According to research presented last month at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Vienna, courtesy of computer scientists at the University of Michigan (and Adrian Colyer’s excellent The Morning Paper), the controller area network (CAN) protocol implemented by in-vehicle networks has a new and potentially quite dangerous vulnerability. The attack, known as a bus-off attack, exploits the CAN’s built-in error handling facilities to potentially nuke both contemporary insecure CANs and future secured versions.

    • Top 5 Rootkit Threats and How to Root Them out

      Rootkits are much in the news lately. They were recently sighted in the Street Fighter V video game, critical infrastructure controls and even Yahoo email servers.

      In the case of Yahoo, the spying tool that the U.S. government ordered the company to install on its servers was a “buggy” rootkit that concealed itself on Yahoo’s systems and provided the government with a backdoor into Yahoo emails, according to an article in Motherboard.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Donald Trump Likely to End Aid for Rebels Fighting Syrian Government

      President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that he was likely to abandon the American effort to support “moderate” opposition groups in Syria who are battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying “we have no idea who these people are.”

      In an interview with The Wall Street Journal that dealt largely with economic issues, including his willingness to retain parts of the Affordable Care Act, he repeated a position he took often during his campaign: that the United States should focus on defeating the Islamic State, and find common ground with the Syrians and their Russian backers.

      “I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” Mr. Trump told The Journal. “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria.”

      His comments suggest that once Mr. Trump begins overseeing both the public support for the opposition groups, and a far larger covert effort run by the Central Intelligence Agency, he may wind down or abandon the effort. But there are in fact two wars going on simultaneously in Syria.

    • A Tale of Two Airports

      The folly involved in the United Kingdom continuing to cling on to tiny relics of Empire is underlined by considering two airports. Firstly we have St Helena, where DFID have famously wasted £250 million of taxpayers’ money on an airport which cannot be used because of wind shear.

      [...]

      British attitudes to St Helena were for generations of malign neglect, and the recent laudable attempt to improve things has been destroyed by gross incompetence – for which nobody has resigned or been sacked.

      By comparison, the equally isolated Chagos Islands have an excellent airport, owned by the British Government, on Diego Garcia. The problem here of course is that the British government brutally uprooted and deported the entire local population, and leased the base to the United States, keeping the previous inhabitants away by force.

      [...]

      Personally, I should like to see the US air force removed and the islands demilitarised. But even without that, dual military and civilian use of runways exists in a great many locations all round the world and there is no reason whatsoever why civilian flights could not land. Indeed, passing billionaires are permitted to land their Lear jets already to refuel. But of course, making the islands viable for tourism and a population is not the goal here. The goal is to make them unviable.

      So there we have it, a tale of two airports on extremely remote islands. One built at vast expense which cannot be used, and one perfectly viable which the government will not permit to be used. It is a story which sums up the shame, immorality and international criminality of the UK’s continuing Imperial pretensions.

    • Naomi Klein Delivers Sydney Peace Prize Lecture Against Backdrop of Trump Win

      Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein accepted the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize in Australia on Friday, delivering a searing speech that reflected on Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States and the factors that allowed it to happen.

      “If there is a single overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate, of direct appeals to power over the ‘other’…especially during times of economic hardship,” said Klein, whose books include The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

      Calling Trump the “demagogue of the moment,” Klein went on to identify other lessons to “take from our barely three-day-old reality.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Trump’s conflicts of interest take White House into uncharted territory

      When President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House next year he will bring with him potential conflicts of interest across all areas of government that are unprecedented in American history.

      Trump, who manages a sprawling, international network of businesses, has thus far refused to put his businesses into a blind trust the way his predecessors in the nation’s highest office have traditionally done. Instead he has said his businesses will be run by his own adult children.

      Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest child, has insisted that Trump’s holdings would go into a trust managed by him and his siblings Eric and Ivanka Trump.

      “We’re not going to be involved in government,” Trump Jr told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in September on Good Morning America. “He wants nothing to do with [the company]. He wants to fix this country.”

    • 2016 will be the hottest year on record, UN says

      2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century.

      The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists.

      The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December.

    • 18 state parks to close for deer reduction hunts

      Eighteen Indiana state parks will close temporarily on November 14-15 and again on November 28-29 to allow for controlled hunts to reduce the deer population.

  • Finance

    • MPAA-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership accord dead in wake of Trump win

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed and controversial 12-nation trade pact dealing with everything from intellectual property to human rights, effectively died Friday. Congressional leaders from both parties told the White House they would no longer consider it with a lame duck president, even one who staunchly backed the plan.

    • Congress will abandon Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, White House concedes

      White House officials conceded on Friday that the president’s hard-fought-for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would not pass Congress, as lawmakers there prepared for the anti-global trade policies of President-elect Donald Trump.

    • Trump Wants to Let Wall Street Scam Customers Again Because of Course He Does

      Donald Trump ran as a populist enemy of the global financial elite. In other news, Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager who has somehow secured a position as a key Trump economic adviser despite being a member of the global financial elite Trump has vowed to crush, tells the Financial Times that Trump will eliminate a rule requiring financial advisers to follow their clients’ best interests. The rule came about in response to a long-standing practice, exposed most blatantly in the wake of the housing crash, by which advisers would dump products onto their clients in order to get them off their own firm’s balance sheet. The Obama rule requires financial advisers to follow their clients’ fiduciary interest.

    • Amazon Has Begun Labeling Some Items Prime-Exclusive (Updated)

      Did you want to buy a Blu-ray copy of Academy Award-winning movie Birdman from Amazon? If you’re not an Amazon Prime member, you’re out of luck. The retailer has begun to restrict sales of some items to its members.

    • Brexit vote drives firms to ditch £65bn of investment

      British businesses have abandoned investment plans worth more than £65 billion since the vote to leave the European Union five months ago.

      A survey of more than 1,000 companies found that uncertainty about the UK’s future in the single market and the falling value of sterling were driving down investment.

    • China threatens to cut iPhone sales if Trump declares a trade war

      China’s state-run newspaper says the government would respond with “countermeasures” if President-elect Donald Trump starts a trade war against the country, warning that the sales of iPhones and US cars would suffer a “setback.” In an editorial published on Sunday, the Global Times said it would be “naive” for Trump to follow through on his campaign promises to implement a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the US and to declare the country a currency manipulator.

      Trump repeatedly targeted China during his presidential campaign, vowing to take a tougher stance on trade in the hopes of reviving manufacturing in the US. In its editorial, the Global Times dismissed the notion that Trump alone could implement a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports, though it warned that any protectionist measure could leave trade “paralyzed.”

    • Theresa May sets out stall for UK’s place in Trump’s world

      Britain must “adapt to the moment and evolve its thinking” to become a global leader in free trade, Theresa May is to say.

      The prime minister will pledge to lead the charge in remaking globalisation, days after Donald Trump was elected US president on the promise of protecting American industry and ending a string of free trade agreements.

      May’s speech will be seen as an attempt to reposition the UK after the Brexit vote and the US presidential election and as a response to Nigel Farage becoming the first UK politician to meet the president-elect over the weekend.

    • Sunset over America: it’s time for the next superpower

      On Thursday morning I was doing some work with the radio on, which was playing In Our Time, the Radio 4 programme which discusses ideas and events from through history. It’s a simple formula: get a topic, get three experts on the topic and a moderator, talk for 45 minutes.

    • Trump win shows UK can’t ignore working class: May

      Donald Trump’s surprise victory shows that Britain has to regain control over immigration and deal with its own “overlooked” communities, Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to say Monday evening, according to London’s the Telegraph.

      In her first major speech since Trump won America’s top office, May will say that the U.S. election stunner — coming close on the heels of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June — is evidence that “change is in the air” and that Britain must do more for the working class and voters on low incomes who feel “overlooked,” the paper reported.

    • citizen campaign asks MEPs to vote against CETA

      CETA, the planned free trade agreement between the EU and Canada has been approved by the EU governments and will be now discussed and voted on in the European Parliament. The vote is scheduled for end of 2016 or early 2017.

      Today (8 November) sees the launch of the final phase of the campaign entitled “CETA CHECK”. Civil society organizations from all EU countries will call on citizens to ask Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to vote against CETA. The campaign is supported by the EU-wide Stop TTIP alliance which, together with the self-organized Stop TTIP European Citizens’ Initiative, collected over 3.5 million signatures against TTIP & CETA.

    • Trump Presidency Could Be Worth $14 Billion to His Troubled Lender

      Donald Trump’s election has likely given a massive lifeline to Deutsche Bank, the German financial firm that has been rocked recently by rumors that they would have to pay a $14 billion fine to the Justice Department over crisis-related mortgage abuses.

      That money is unlikely to ever be imposed, now that one of Deutsche Bank’s biggest borrowers – Trump – will soon be sitting in the White House.

      That conflict of interest is one of the innumerable ones facing Trump as he leaves his life of grifting behind and becomes the nation’s chief executive. While the Justice Department is nominally independent of the White House, I had to stop writing this sentence because of constant laughing. Trump could easily move to protect his personal investments by aiding his business partner Deutsche Bank.

    • Wallonia blocked a harmful EU trade deal – but we don’t share Trump’s dreams

      I could never have imagined it. That an economic and trade agreement between the EU and Canada could turn into a soap opera involving a small region of Belgium. Yet that’s what happened: for two weeks, a four-letter word, Ceta, resonated on factory floors and offices, in homes, schools and cafes the length and breadth of Wallonia, the region I have the privilege to be president of, as our parliament delayed the deal.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Donald Trump Ran on Protecting Social Security But Transition Team Includes Privatizers

      Donald Trump campaigned on protecting Social Security. At the Miami GOP presidential debate in March, he said he would “do everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is; to make this country rich again.” In August, his campaign told CNNMoney that “We will not cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, but protect them both.”

      But two of the people said to be helming the president-elect’s Social Security Administration (SSA) transition team have a record of hostility to the program.

    • Maine Just Voted for a Better Way to Vote

      On Tuesday, Maine became the first state to challenge America’s first-past-the-post voting system, as voters approved, by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, a referendum instituting ranked-choice voting for state and federal elections. It’s by far the biggest victory for a reform movement that has attracted high-profile endorsements from politicians like John McCain and Howard Dean but had so far failed to gain traction beyond a few progressive American cities. For Maine, it’s a shift that could make third-party voting more viable overnight—by eliminating the ability of third-parties to play spoiler.

    • Soft or hard Brexit: do the UK’s political parties know what they want?

      Scottish Independence activists take part in an Independence 2 rally, outside the SNP conference in Glasgow, mid-October, 2016. Jane Barlow/Press Association. All rights reserved.Amidst the rapidly changing politics of Brexit, and the furore around the Article 50 judgement, it seems that the big division between the government and opposition parties is whether the UK heads towards a ‘soft’ or a ‘hard’ Brexit. But with Theresa May denying she wants a hard Brexit, and Labour and the LibDems not in the same place on what a soft Brexit looks like, the question arises both as to how meaningful the soft/hard distinction is, and whether any of the parties really know what they want.

    • Apparently Trump Draining The Swamp Of Lobbyists & Crony Capitalists Requires A Lot Of Lobbyists & Crony Capitalists

      That swamp is looking mighty damp. And this doesn’t touch on the fact that top execs from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been floated as Trump’s Treasury Secretary. Draining that swamp, huh? Remember Bannon’s quote about how people were sick of Clinton’s ties to Wall Street? Should we remind you that Bannon used to work at Goldman Sachs himself?

      Anyway, let’s just address two responses I’m sure will likely appear in the comments below — perhaps by people so furious that we’re insulting “their guy” that they won’t read this far: Yes, Clinton would have brought in probably just as many lobbyists. Just as President Obama campaigned on stopping the power of lobbyists in DC… and then went ahead and brought a bunch into his administration, it’s almost certain that Clinton would have done the same. But the Trump campaign’s explicit claim was that it would be breaking away from lobbyists, crony capitalists and close ties to Wall Street at the very time it was bringing those people into the campaign.

    • Trump Warms to the Electoral College, 4 Years After Calling It “a Disaster for a Democracy”

      Every four years, the bizarre, undemocratic institution at the heart of American democracy, the Electoral College, gets more vocal detractors. That is particularly the case in years like this one, when the mechanism awards the presidency to the runner-up in the national popular vote, Donald Trump.

      “The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump,” Michael Moore wrote on Facebook post Wednesday. “The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College.”

      Urged on by Lady Gaga, more than a million people signed a petition on Thursday calling on the electors, when they meet next month, to ignore the current rules, which bind them to voting for the winner of their state and cast their ballots instead for the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton.

    • A White Nationalist Who Hates Jews Will Be Trump’s Right-Hand Man In The White House

      President-elect Donald Trump’s first White House hire tells you everything you need to know about his commitment to his campaign’s bigoted message. Stephen Bannon, an anti-Semite who ran the white nationalist “alt-right” website Breitbart News before taking a leave of absence to become the Trump campaign CEO, will be Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor.

      On November 13, Trump released a statement announcing Bannon’s hiring. The same statement noted that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus would become Trump’s chief of staff. While White House chief of staff is typically the most senior position in the White House, the press release named Bannon first and described the two as “equal partners” in the Trump administration.

    • If Donald Trump Implements His Proposed Policies, We’ll See Him in Court

      Donald Trump has time to alter his proposed policies. But if he doesn’t, the ACLU will fight him every step of the way.

      This morning, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, and the ACLU has a message for him.

      President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.

    • Amid DNC Reckoning, Ellison Emerges as Progressive Antidote to Trump

      Amid the growing post-election call for a “reckoning” within the Democratic Party, Rep. Keith Ellison on Minnesota has swiftly emerged as the favored progressive choice to lead that transition.

    • Marine Le Pen Says She And Donald Trump Are Building “A New World”

      The far-right leader of the French National Front, Marine Le Pen, has hailed Donald Trump’s victory in the US election and claimed they are both part of a “new world” being built in the wake of Brexit.

      Le Pen was interviewed on The Andrew Marr Show on Remembrance Sunday – a move which has angered critics of Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist politics and provoked protests outside the BBC studio.

    • Donald Trump Picks Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff and Stephen Bannon as Strategist

      Mr. Bannon’s selection demonstrated the power of grass-roots activists who backed Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Some of them have long traded in the conspiracy theories and sometimes racist messages of Breitbart News, the website that Mr. Bannon ran for much of the last decade.
      Continue reading the main story

      The site has accused President Obama of “importing more hating Muslims”; compared Planned Parenthood’s work to the Holocaust; called the conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew”; and advised female victims of online harassment to “just log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that point with a picture of a crying child.

    • Mark Zuckerberg Defends Facebook Against Charges of Swaying Election

      Days after dismissing the suggestion that Facebook swayed the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg elaborated on his comments Saturday on his own page on the social network.

      While the Facebook CEO stood firm on the notion that fake news articles were somehow responsible for discouraging its users from voting for Hillary Clinton, he did also say that his company was looking at ways to continue cutting down on the appearance of hoaxes on the platform.

      “We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here,” Zuckerberg wrote.

      The Facebook CEO also made clear, however, that there is a fine line between battling fake news and getting into the murkier territory of deciding what information is factual or not.

    • Trump says social media was key to victory

      Donald Trump says he’ll continue to tweet as president.

      In a preview clip of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview to air Sunday, the president-elect said social media is a “modern form of communication” that played a key role in his election victory.

      “When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story or when somebody other than you and another– a network, or whatever, because of course, CBS would never do a thing like that right? I have a method of fighting back,” Trump told Lesley Stahl.

    • Documenting Trump’s war on science

      During Canada’s nightmarish Stephen Harper years — when an Arctic country with two oceanic coastlines and major freshwater reserves was ruled by a ruthless climate-denier — science librarian John Dupuis did yeoman service documenting and rounding up the assault on science that was an essential part of Harper’s payback to the oil interests he represented.

      Now America is to be governed by man who believes that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy, whose EPA team is led by a man who says climate change is “nothing to worry about,” who campaigned on a promise to revive the coal industry and bring back the Keystone XL Pipeline.

      Dupuis is making ready to document the coming Trump campaign against science. In an era of catastrophic climate change, climate denial means war on science, because reality has a well-known liberal bias and people who observe and document reality are therefore enemies of the state.

    • American Exceptionalism, Under God: Pledging Allegiance to the Homeland

      Among the exceptional things about America is that, along with North Korea, we are one of a very few nations that have our schools begin the day with a pledge of allegiance. Unlike North Korea, however, our pledge also includes a reference to God.

    • Commander-In-Chief Donald Trump Will Have Terrifying Powers. Thanks, Obama.

      When Donald Trump becomes commander in chief in January, he will take on presidential powers that have never been more expansive and unchecked.

      He’ll control an unaccountable drone program, and the prison at Guantanamo Bay. His FBI, including a network of 15,000 paid informants, already has a record of spying on mosques and activists, and his NSA’s surveillance empire is ubiquitous and governed by arcane rules, most of which remain secret. He will inherit bombing campaigns in seven Muslim countries, the de facto ability to declare war unilaterally, and a massive nuclear arsenal — much of which is on hair-trigger alert.

      Caught off guard by Hillary Clinton’s election defeat, Democrats who defended these powers under President Obama may suddenly be having second thoughts as the White House gets handed over to a man they described — with good reason — as “unhinged,” and “dangerously unfit.”

    • Who Will Be President Trump’s Dr. Strangelove?

      The hub of the NSC is the NSC Principals Committee, a kind of super cabinet. Its nerve center is the Situation Room in the West Wing basement. Twelve of the 13 people depicted in the famous White House photo taken in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden operation were connected to the NSC. By law, the Principals Committee includes the president, vice president, and secretaries of defense, state, and, since 2007, energy. The committee’s exact composition varies from meeting to meeting, to be decided by the president and senior White House staff. Within the broad strokes of the original 1947 law, as updated over the years and then amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, NSC quite literally makes its own rules, and those rules are set by the president.

    • The Big Split

      Throughout this election I said I didn’t believe Trump wanted to win. And judging from the Podesta emails, the DNC helped engineer the Trump ascension to the Republican nomination. Trump was the only guy (along with Ted Cruz) more repulsive to the public than Hillary Clinton. Which keeps reminding me of Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Two-thirds of the world’s internet users live under government censorship: report

      Two-thirds of the world’s internet users live under regimes of government censorship, according to a report released today. The report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, finds that internet freedom across the globe declined for a sixth consecutive year in 2016, as governments cracked down on social media services and messaging apps.

      The findings are based on an analysis of web freedom in 65 countries, covering 88 percent of the world’s online population. Freedom House ranked China as the worst abuser of internet freedom for the second consecutive year, followed by Syria and Iran. (The report does not include North Korea.) Online freedom in the US increased slightly over the year due to the USA Freedom Act, which limits the bulk collection of metadata carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies.

    • Lessons of History: Rulers would rather kill people than allow them to share ideas freely

      In my last column, I outlined how the Power of Narrative is the biggest power anybody can hold in society, and the civil unrest that follows when it is handed over. I wrote a little bit about parallels between the printing press and today’s Internet in terms of how that power is shifting. However, most people aren’t prepared for just how far rulers are prepared to go to defend their power of narrative: judging by history, they would rather have people killed than thinking freely.

      They say that people who don’t study history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history (and meanwhile, those who do study history are doomed to stand by watching others repeat those same mistakes). Therefore, it is absolutely vital to understand the power struggles around the printing press.

      I wrote in my last column that Martin Luther’s mass-printed bibles in German and French, the so-called Luther Bibles, enabled the common folk to completely bypass the clergy’s reading of bibles in Latin, enabling them to go straight to the source material and cut out a gatekeeper, something that led to a century of civil war.

    • Trump’s Very First Tweet As President Elect Basically Shits On The First Amendment

      Since being declared the winner of the Presidential election, Donald Trump has actually played the part of an actual President-elect quite well. His victory speech was quite gracious and welcoming. His meeting with President Obama appeared to go well. Of course, anyone who’s watched him during the campaign knew it couldn’t last, but perhaps, maybe, he’d actually be presidential for a few weeks or (could we dare?) a few months? But, nope. All it took was about 48 hours and the man who four years ago demanded that people “march on Washington” because President Obama was re-elected, used his very first tweet as the President elect to shit all over the First Amendment.

    • Censoring films unwanted: Adoor Gopalakrishnan

      Veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan has criticised censorship in cinema, saying it is “totally unwanted” and feels television programmes are the ones which should be censored.

      Many television programmes, especially soap operas, are even showcasing crime on prime time after giving prior announcement, the 75-year-old Dadasaheb Phalke awardee said.

      He also questioned the display of anti-smoking and liquor messages on the movie screen and said if smoking and drinking were injurious to health, it should be banned. “There is no need for cinema to bear its burden,” he said.

    • CNN Uses Copyright To Block Viral Clip Of Van Jones’ Impassioned Statement

      This election year may have been something of a clusterfuck for just about everyone… but it was damn good for CNN. The cable news channel that was generally filled with some of the most idiotic and meaningless banter made out like a bandit, apparently bringing in a billion dollars in profit by being the country’s official organ player in a grand circus of political entertainment. The hiring of direct partisans on both sides, the failure to do very much actual deep looking at anything, and the complete pointlessness of whatever a Wolf Blitzer is all seemed to delight in turning anything about issues into horse race he said/she said soundbites.

      And now it’s being an annoying copyright asshole too.

    • WRAL Says It Will ‘Review’ Obscenity Policy In Wake of ‘SNL’ Censorship

      The “SNL” episode was an emotionally charged one, showing comedian and host Dave Chappelle tackle last week’s election of Republican Donald J. Trump with some scathing material that made use of words that are often not utilized on TV. After referring to a vulgar term for the female anatomy, Chappelle quickly apologized to Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of the late-night institution, on the air. The episode opened with cast member Kate McKinnon playing Hillary Clinton singing the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah.” “I’m not giving up, and neither should you,” the character told viewers.

    • North Carolina’s WRAL Censors Parts of Post-Election ‘Saturday Night Live’

      The Raleigh, N.C. affiliate of NBC censored “Saturday Night Live” in nine different parts of last night’s broadcast, citing language used by comedian and host Dave Chappelle and raising concerns on social media of whether broadcasters could become more wary of edgy content under an administration led by President-elect Donald Trump.

    • Facebook forced to apologise for censoring burn victim’s birthday photo
    • Facebook forced to apologize for censoring burn victim’s birthday photo
    • Facebook Apologizes for Deleting Burned Swedish Firefighter’s Photo
    • Facebook slammed for removing a photo of a burn victim who lost his ears hair and eyebrows in explosion
    • Swedish firefighter ‘not surprised’ Facebook twice pulled down photo of his severe burns

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • It’s Too Late For President Obama To ‘Dismantle’ The NSA’s Mass Surveillance

      I should say up front that I’m a big supporter of Fight for the Future and the work they do, and while some may take this post as a slam on them, it is anything but. We’re very much on the same page on nearly everything, but it caught my attention when FftF’s Evan Greer wrote a piece asking President Obama to “shut down” the NSA’s mass surveillance systems before Donald Trump gets control of it all. Specifically the article says “before it’s too late.” While I’d love to see Obama shut down the NSA’s mass surveillance system, it’s time to admit that it is too late. Anything the President does to that effect in this lame duck session can, and will, be reversed on day one of the Trump administration. Perhaps there’s some value in the symbolic gesture, but let’s face the facts: it’s too late.

    • [Older] On-Demand Cell Phone Searches Hurt Teenagers on Parole

      Should law enforcement get an all access, long-term pass to a teenager’s cell phone, just because he or she had a run in with police? That question is in front of California’s highest court, and in an amicus brief filed earlier this month, EFF and the three California offices of the ACLU warned that it was a highly invasive and unconstitutional condition of juvenile parole.

    • [Older] Mass surveillance at public gatherings is why we need oversight policies

      You probably don’t expect the government to log and track your personally identifying information, despite having broken no laws, just because you attended an event at the fairgrounds. That would be preposterous in the Land of the Free.

      But, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal agencies have joined forces with local police to deploy automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology at gun shows, with the aim of collecting attendees’ plate information—without an explicit target. Gun show patrons are typically concerned about their Second Amendment rights, but what about the First Amendment?

      ALPRs are high-speed camera systems that capture the license plates of every vehicle that passes into view. These images are then translated into machine-readable characters that can be run through police and driver databases. The scans are also often added to massive ALPR databases. In aggregate, this data can reveal patterns of behavior, such as when you leave for work, where you sleep at night, what doctors you visit, who you hang out with, and, yes, whether you attend gun shows.

      ALPR is a form of mass surveillance since it captures information on every driver, not just those suspected of involvement in crimes. Most states and local jurisdictions have not enacted any kind of public accountability for these systems.

    • Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration

      On Tuesday, Americans handed the U.S. presidency to a racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, climate-science-denying, misogynistic, revenge-obsessed ego-maniac — and with it control over a vast and all-too-unaccountable intelligence apparatus; and in a speech less than three weeks ago, Trump promised to sue all of the women who have come forward with sexual assault accusations against him.

      Trump has repeatedly shown utter disrespect for the rule of law. He doesn’t believe in freedom of religion. He advocates torture. He has said he’ll instruct his Justice Department to investigate Black Lives Matter activists, and it’s likely he’ll appoint Rudy Giuliani, of New York City’s racist and unconstitutional “stop-and-frisk” fame, as his attorney general to do the investigating. The New York Times also reports that “Mr. Trump still privately muses about all the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day.”

      With Trump eager to misuse his power and get revenge on his perceived enemies, it’s reasonable to conclude there will be a parallel increase in abuse of power in law enforcement and the intelligence community. Activists who put their bodies on the line trying to protect basic rights — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, civil rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, privacy rights — will face the brunt of it.

      Thanks to 16 years of relentless and illegal expansion of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, Trump is about to have more tools of surveillance at his disposal than any tyrant ever has. Those preparing for the long fight ahead must protect themselves, even if doing so can be technically complicated.

      The best approach varies from situation to situation, but here are some first steps that activists and other concerned citizens should take.

    • Long Time Mass Surveillance Defenders Freak Out Now That Trump Will Have Control

      The Lawfare blog, run by the Brookings Institution, has long reliably been a good source to go to for reading what defenders of mass surveillance and the surveillance state are thinking — in a non-hysterical way. While I disagree with much of what’s posted on there, it tends to be thoughtful and interesting reading. Its founder and Editor-in-Chief is Ben Wittes, who’s always good for an impassioned defense of the NSA’s surveillance on Americans, and was all in on forcing tech companies to break encryption. He wasn’t worried, you see, because he was quite sure the NSA would never spy on him. Because, you know, he’s a good guy.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Swedish moves to interview Julian Assange in embassy welcomed by Ecuador

      Representatives from the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the Swedish police will be present while questions are put to the WikiLeaks founder by an Ecuadorian official on Monday.

      Mr Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador and has been living inside the embassy for over four years.

      He believes that if he leaves the embassy he will be extradited to the United States for questioning over the activities of WikiLeaks.

      He denies the allegation against him and has been offering to be interviewed at the embassy.

    • Turkey seeks life sentences in pro-Kurdish newspaper trial: state media

      Turkish prosecutors are seeking long jail terms or life sentences for nine staff of a pro-Kurdish newspaper, including prize-winning novelist Asli Erdogan, on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization and harming national unity, state-run media said on Thursday.

      Erdogan, who is not related to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, was jailed pending trial in August after police detained her and two dozen more staff from the Ozgur Gundem newspaper, which was closed by court order on a charge of spreading propaganda of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

    • ‘It’s About Embracing a Different Way of Life’ – CounterSpin interview with Rose Aguilar on reporting from Standing Rock

      What’s happening right now in North Dakota is reflective of many things: the violent desperation of extractive industry and the willingness of the state to act as its enforcers, counterposed with the peaceful power of people gathered in simple defense of the water, land and life of their community and the wider world.

    • Paris attacks suspect more ‘radicalized’ since arrest

      The main Paris attacks suspect, Salah Abdeslam, has become even more radicalized since being imprisoned for his presumed role in the slaughter of 130 people a year ago, his former lawyer has said.

      “He’s got a beard, he’s become a true fundamentalist whereas before he was a kid wearing Nike trainers,” Belgian lawyer Sven Mary told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant’s Saturday edition.

      Belgian-born French national Abdeslam is believed to be the only jihadist survivor of the November 13 attacks in the French capital that Belgian authorities claim were orchestrated by the Islamic State high command.

      After four months on the run, the 27-year-old of Moroccan origin was arrested in Brussels in March and subsequently transferred to France in April.

    • Jail race war: Killers set up sinister hate group Death Before Dishonour to protect themselves against Muslim prisoners

      Jail bosses fear a race war could break out behind bars after ­hardened killers set up protection groups against Muslim convicts.

      The Sunday People can reveal that ­governors have been given an urgent ­security warning about one new network called Death Before Dishonour.

      The group – calling themselves DBD for short – have formed to protect ­themselves against what they claim is an increasing risk from Muslim inmates.

      But it raises the threat of further meltdown in our crisis-hit jails.

      Members of the gangs are being ­recruited from special Close Supervision Centres set up to hold the most dangerous convicts – often violent lifers.

    • British ‘sharia courts’ under scrutiny

      For more than 30 years, sharia courts enforcing Islamic law have been operating quietly across Britain. But two official inquiries have put them in the spotlight amid accusations that they discriminate against women.

      Very little is known about them, even their number, which one study by the University of Reading puts at 30, while the British think tank Civitas estimates there are 85.

      Sharia courts or councils, as they prefer to be called, mainly pronounce on Islamic divorces, which today constitute 90 percent of the cases they handle.

      They range from groups of Muslim scholars attached to a mosque, to informal organisations or even a single imam.

    • Bay Area: Join us 11/16 to talk about infosec for dissidents and citizens

      The eighth episode of Ars Technica Live is coming up next Wednesday, November 16, in Oakland, California, at Longitude! Join Ars Technica editors Dan Goodin and Annalee Newitz with guest Morgan Marquis-Boire for a conversation about infosec, surveillance, and digital authoritarianism.

      Marquis-Boire is a New Zealand-born hacker, security researcher, and journalist. He is the director of security for First Look Media and a contributing writer for The Intercept. Prior to this, he worked at Google. Marquis-Boire is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, focusing on state-sponsored hacking and the global surveillance industry. He currently serves as a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as an advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Amnesty International.

    • A Torture Victim Turned Human Rights Champion Ends His U.N. Run Fighting for Justice

      I don’t think we’re even close to being able to say that we are defeating torture or have eradicated it. It’s hard to make that assessment, however, because in all countries, torture fluctuates for different reasons — sometimes it’s used more extensively, and sometimes it’s used less extensively.

      What I think has happened, however, mostly in this six-year period, but maybe a little earlier as well and hopefully continuing, is an increased awareness of the need to apply the prism of torture to situations that we don’t commonly associate with torture.

      For example, there are forms of imprisonment — like solitary confinement — that undoubtedly are cruel, but that the public does not associate with torture. This also includes the mistreatment of people in settings other than detention or during criminal investigations — for example, in healthcare or social care settings.

      I think we are also making inroads in associating the prohibition against torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment with the prohibition on discrimination of all forms. This gives us more awareness of the need to look at the mistreatment of women and girls — and also LGBT persons and other groups whose mistreatment we typically think of as discrimination — under the prism of torture.

    • [Older] What We’re Scared About This Halloween: Prosecutorial Discretion Under Notoriously Vague Computer Crime Statute

      Should prosecutors have the ability to take advantage of unclear laws to bring charges for behavior far beyond the problem Congress was trying to address? We don’t think so. When not carefully limited, criminal laws give prosecutors too much power to go after innocent individuals for innocuous behavior, like violating a website’s terms of use by using a partner’s password to post something for them or print out a boarding pass. And that’s terrifying. It’s also contrary to a long-held constitutional rule requiring vague criminal statutes to be interpreted narrowly—called the Rule of Lenity—intended to ensure that people have clear and unambiguous notice in the letter of the law itself of what behavior could land them in prison.

      But recently released federal guidelines for prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), intended to assist prosecutors in deciding when to bring charges under the notoriously vague federal statute targeting computer break-ins, demonstrate that prosecutors have far too much discretion in applying the CFAA. What’s more, the guidelines all but condone use of the CFAA to prosecute cases for political gain, under the guise of “deterrence.”

    • The Death Penalty Won Big on Election Day, But the Devil Is In the Details

      As it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump was about to win the presidency on Tuesday night, mental health staff were on call at San Quentin Prison and at the Central California Women’s Facility, where anxiety was running high over a separate election result. By the next day the men and women on death row would know whether Californians had voted to spare their lives — by passing Proposition 62, abolishing the death penalty — or hasten their deaths, by passing Proposition 66, aimed to quicken executions. “They are understandably concerned,” California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Terry Thornton told me earlier that day, pointing out that many are already under treatment for mental illness. The results of the ballot initiatives “could be destabilizing.”

      It’s hard to imagine a place more heavily monitored than California’s death row, where isolation, strip-searches, and suicide watch are a fact of life. Yet CDCR counts 25 suicides among the condemned since 1978, the year a ballot initiative dramatically expanded the crimes punishable by execution in California. With the same people responsible for that initiative now campaigning against the death penalty, no one had more at stake in their success on Election Day than the nearly 750 people facing execution in California.

    • [Older] Recording Police Is Protected by the First Amendment, EFF Tells Court

      In an era when bystander recordings of police shootings have shined a much-needed light on law enforcement activities—greatly contributing to public discussion about police use of force—it’s never been more important to establish that citizen journalists have a free speech right to record and share videos of public police activity, EFF told a federal appeals court today.

      “Individuals have the unambiguous right under the First Amendment to record police officers exercising their official duties in public,” said EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “Bystander videos published online have alerted the public to the use of deadly force in numerous cases—Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, the list goes on. These recordings have informed the public and elected officials about what is happening on our streets. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the process of taking these photos and videos is protected by the First Amendment as an inherently expressive activity or as a form of informat

    • U.N. Investigator Talks About the Future of Solitary and the Death Penalty

      Early into your tenure, you conducted a worldwide study that concluded that solitary confinement can amount to torture. You’ve now just released a new report that builds upon that 2011 report and provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of the use of solitary confinement in 35 jurisdictions, including several states here in the U.S. What is your assessment of the state of the campaign to end solitary confinement both worldwide and here in the U.S.?

    • Will America Now Have a Pravda?

      As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take control of the American executive branch, he will have a weapon at his disposal that few if any presidents have enjoyed—a direct connection to a faithful media operation that reaches millions of loyal populist readers in the form of Breitbart, the self-styled honey badger of alt-right journalism.

      Other presidents have had strategies for going around the mainstream media. Franklin Roosevelt had his Fireside Chats on the radio, but his broadcasts were sporadic and rarely ran more than half an hour long. Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed direct lines to the top at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the television networks, where they directed their angry Bat-calls in hopes of manipulating coverage.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • In Wake Of Trump Win, ISPs Are Already Laying The Groundwork For Gutting Net Neutrality

      With Donald Trump now the President elect, all eyes in telecom have turned to what happens now in regards to FCC telecom enforcement generally, and our shiny new net neutrality rules specifically. Trump has proclaimed he opposes net neutrality, despite making it abundantly clear he doesn’t appear to actually know what it is (he appears to falsely believe it has something to do with the fairness doctrine). As such most people believe he’ll work to gut the current FCC, which as we’ve noted has, for the first time in arguably twenty years or so, actually been doing a few things to actually help broadband consumers and sector competition.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • A digital levy on Google and Facebook isn’t the answer to UK newspaper woes

        This is not the only attempt to re-direct money from the Internet giants towards newspapers and magazines. As Ars has reported, the European Commission wishes to introduce a new ancillary copyright for publishers that will last for 20 years. The idea once again is to force big online companies like Google to pay money to traditional publishers.

        Leaving aside the fact that the ancillary copyright idea will cause huge collateral damage to the Internet, it’s the wrong approach for the same reason that the digital levy is wrong. Both seek to punish Google and Facebook for being too successful at gaining online advertising.

        The rancour towards them is made plain in last week’s letter, where “digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook” are described as “amassing eye-watering profits and paying minimal tax in the UK.” Most people would agree that they should be paying their fair share of taxes, but trying to demonise them for their “eye-watering profits” reveals the underlying envy.

      • Take Note: Copyright Troll Gets Stiff Response From Someone It Tried To Bully, Immediately Runs Away

        It should be well-known by readers of this site that copyright trolls are essentially bullies. They send out their settlement threat letters, hoping to extort money from a public that typically doesn’t know better than to be terrified by the legalese claims within the letters. It’s a practice fraught with deception, as the evidence referenced in the letters typically amounts to nothing more than an IP address — which itself may or may not be correct — while the threats themselves can often times include consequences not remotely plausible. Still, the bullying goes on, because it works enough to make it profitable.

        That’s why it’s important to highlight how these bullies tend to respond when a target decides to stand up to them. Much like the bullies we’ve had in our personal lives, they tend to run away as quickly as possible. One recent example of this is James Collins, who received a troll letter from LHF Productions, the company behind the movie London Has Fallen. The company accused Collins of both downloading the movie via BitTorrent, as well as then making it available to others via the same means. Rather than acquiescing, however, Collins got himself a lawyer and had him punch back.

      • “Trolls” Try to Censor TorrentFreak’s Copyright Trolls Coverage…

        DMCA takedown notices are designed to take down infringing content, but they regularly target legitimate content as well. Just recently a local distributor of Dreamworks’ “Trolls” movie tried to have several TorrentFreak links removed from Google for merely referencing “copyright trolls.”

      • Anti-Piracy Movie Competition Entries Are Terrifying

        Aussie movie company Village Roadshow has invited aspiring filmmakers to showcase their work in a competition to highlight the effects of piracy on the industry. Entrants have been uploading their work online unprotected, and it’s fair to say that most think that piracy is a terrifying thing.

      • [Older] Samsung Sets Its Reputation on Fire With Bogus DMCA Takedown Notices

        In our view, Samsung does not have a viable copyright claim against these YouTube videos. Even if Samsung does own a related copyright—perhaps in the design of its logo or in the phone’s screen image—it cannot use that copyright to control all depictions of its phones. Reviews and news coverage need to show images of the phone. And even snarky commentary, like footage of the GTA V mod, is fair use.

        If it doesn’t have a viable copyright claim, why did Samsung send DMCA takedown notices? We asked Samsung’s counsel (the notices were sent on Samsung’s behalf by the 900-lawyer firm Paul Hastings LLP) but received no response. It appears that Samsung took the easy path to removing content it did not like by making a copyright claim where none existed. DMCA takedown notices are, by far, the quickest and easiest way to get speech removed from the Internet. That makes them irresistible for companies, individuals, and even governments eager to censor online speech.

      • [Older] Copyright Office Sets Trap for Unwary Website Owners

        Under a new rule from the Copyright Office, website owners could be exposed to massive risk of copyright liability simply for neglecting to submit an online form on time. The rule could eliminate the safe harbor status that thousands of websites receive under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

11.13.16

Links 13/11/2016: GNOME 3.22.2 Released, Multiple Processes in Firefox

Posted in News Roundup at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Google Pixel Phone Hacked in 60 Seconds at PwnFest 2016

      The brand new Android smartphone launched by Google just a few months back has been hacked by Chinese hackers just in less than a minute.

      Yes, the Google’s latest Pixel smartphone has been hacked by a team white-hat hackers from Qihoo 360, besides at the 2016 PwnFest hacking competition in Seoul.

    • Too Big to Fail Open-Source Software Needs Hacker Help

      The internet runs on free and open-source code. LAMP is shorthand for the basic stack of applications that makes the internet work. It stands for: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Together, those four pieces of software provide the foundation that lets us share both important data and elaborately filtered selfies all over the world. They are also all free and open-source projects, maintained by core teams of developers. These workers are the saints of the information age.

      Open-source has a tendency to be more stable than proprietary code, thanks in no small part to what’s called Linus’s Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Because open-source projects invite anyone to contribute, the idea is that lots of developers and testers will find and fix all the problems. It’s worked well so far, but it’s a theory that gets a bit creakier with age, as we’ve begun to see.

    • Heimdall Open-Source PHP Ransomware Targets Web Servers
    • Infect to Protect

      I’m not one to jump on each and every bandwagon I see. Sometimes that’s a good decision, sometimes it’s better to just wait and see where they go before taking any action.

      Containers are one of those ideas that, while promising and intriguing, were quite clumsy in the beginning, so I ignored them for a good while. It’s sufficiently mature now; so much so that’s quite difficult to ignore them. Time to investigate them again.

      [...]

      While the prototype I built isn’t practical and is of very limited use, I find the idea of sandboxed programs without the need for specialized runtimes very enticing.

      Programs can be still packaged the way they have been packaged in the past decades, without throwing away some of the sandboxing benefits that containers provide, all the while not introducing new concepts for users.

      Of course, something like this – even if properly implemented – won’t be a replacement for containers. Specially if one considers their role as packets ready for deployment, which have a lot of value for devops personnel.

      The code, as usual, is open source, and available from this Git repository.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama’s Final Arms-Export Tally More than Doubles Bush’s

      The Obama administration has approved more than $278 billion in foreign arms sales in its eight years, more than double the total of the previous administration, according to figures released by the Pentagon on Tuesday.

      Many of the approved deals — most but hardly all of which have become actual sales — have been to Mideast nations, including key allies in the campaign against Islamic State militants and countries that have been building up their defenses in fear of a nuclear Iran.

    • Reckoning with a Trump Presidency and the Elite Democrats Who Helped Deliver It

      The United States has been plunged into a state of purgatory following the election of Donald Trump. In all political quarters, people are engaged in their own post-mortem analysis of how this happened and what it means, not only for the future of this country, but for the world. Trump ran on a pledge to engage in mass deportations, denying Muslims entry to the US, the stripping of abortion rights and threats to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. Although Trump has staked out conflicting positions on a wide range of issues over the past several years, his campaign centered on an overtly nativist agenda. And his running mate, Mike Pence, is one of the key leaders of the radical religious right contingent of the Republican Party.

      While many Democrats are pointing fingers outside their own ranks to make sense of the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, few are willing to examine how their choice of nominee and the campaign they ran shaped the result. In this podcast, Intercept editor-in-chief Betsy Reed and co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill break down how we got here and what a Trump presidency means for civil liberties, surveillance, war, abortion rights, and other issues. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

    • Paris’s Bataclan Reopens a Year After Massacre

      A concert by British musician Sting at the Bataclan on Saturday night at once honored those who died in the attack a year ago and celebrated the life that the historic theater represents.

    • [Older] The fatal expense of American imperialism

      It may seem tendentious to call America an empire, but the term fits certain realities of US power and how it’s used. An empire is a group of territories under a single power. Nineteenth-century Britain was obviously an empire when it ruled India, Egypt, and dozens of other colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The United States directly rules only a handful of conquered islands (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands), but it stations troops and has used force to influence who governs in dozens of other sovereign countries. That grip on power beyond America’s own shores is now weakening.

    • Michael Sukhoff, Ann Garrison, Michael Parenti, Noah Treanor, and Paulette Moore

      Their first guest is author Michael Parenti, who discusses the nature of American empire.

    • ISIS has reportedly bulldozed two of the world’s most important ancient cities

      As the Iraqi military struggle to reclaim the city of Mosul in northern Iraq from the Islamic State (ISIS), satellite images show that two iconic archaeological sites have been purposefully destroyed – and not necessarily by fighting.

      Both were capital cities of ancient Mesopotamia – the important region where writing, farming, and civilisation as we know it arose. An ancient temple described as “the most spectacular sacred structure known from ancient Mesopotamia” has been bulldozed to the ground.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Mainstream Media: Don’t Mention Wikileaks

      I have been six hours watching “experts” across mainstream channels analyse why their earlier statements were totally wrong. There has been not one single mention of #WikiLeaks – or of social media at all. The clapped out old journalistic hacks are in denial that their mechanisms of control are now irrelevant, and they as greasy cogs in those mechanisms are viewed with contempt. The contrast between the mainstream media political narrative and what people were saying on social media was absolutely stark. People got their information from #WikiLeaks.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Earth’s plants are countering some of the effects of climate change

      IN 1972, on their way to the Moon, the crew of Apollo 17 snapped what would become one of the most famous photographs ever taken. The “Blue Marble” shows Earth as it looks from space: a blue sphere overlaid by large brown swatches of land, with wisps of white cloud floating above.

      But times change, and modern pictures of Earth look different. A wash of greenery is spreading over the globe, from central Africa to Europe and South East Asia. One measurement found that between 1982 and 2009 about 18m square kilometres of new vegetation had sprouted on Earth’s surface, an area roughly twice the size of the United States.

    • Betraying Water Protectors, Obama Set to Approve Dakota Access Pipeline

      Even as water protectors continued to face off against police on Friday in North Dakota, news outlets reported that the Obama administration is set to approve the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as early as Monday.

      Citing “two sources familiar with the timing,” Politico said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could approve a disputed easement within days, which would allow pipeline construction—on hold since September—to continue across the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation. The Standing Rock tribe is vehemently opposed to the project, saying it threatens water supplies and sacred sites.

      Amid such opposition, Politico reported, “the prospect of a Monday announcement is raising concerns that nationwide protests planned for Tuesday could turn uncivil.”

    • Climate Change Has Already Altered Nearly Every Ecosystem on Earth

      Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C, according to a new study published in the journal Science on Friday.

      Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene to create “human-assisted evolution,” the study, titled The Broad Footprint of Climate Change from Genes to Biomes to People, found.

    • Lash Out at the Darkness and Fight Like Hell

      This newsletter usually describes the many things the Center for Biological Diversity is working on each week.

      Not today. We’re only thinking about one thing right now: stopping Donald Trump from destroying the planet.

      If President Trump carries out the disastrous promises he made while campaigning, the Environmental Protection Agency will be gutted, the Endangered Species Act will be repealed, old-growth forests will be clearcut, hard-fought global climate change agreements will be undermined, and polluters will be given free rein over our water and air.

      There’s no way in hell we’re letting that happen.

    • Trump’s Climate Contrarian: Myron Ebell Takes On the E.P.A.

      The mug-shot posters, pasted on walls and lampposts around Paris by an activist group during the United Nations climate talks last year, were hardly flattering. They depicted Myron Ebell, a climate contrarian, as one of seven “climate criminals” wanted for “destroying our future.”

      But in his customary mild-mannered way, Mr. Ebell, who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group in Washington, brushed it off.

      “I’ve gotten used to this over the years,” he told an interviewer at the talks. “But I did go out and get my photo taken with my poster, just so I have it as a memento.”

    • Tesla’s Future in Trump’s World

      What will Donald Trump actually do?

      It’s a question many Americans are asking themselves now that the U.S. has wrapped up one of its least policy-specific elections ever. The president-elect has offered only the loosest of legislative prescriptions, including whatever plans he may have for the energy industry.

  • Finance

    • MPAA-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal dead in wake of Trump win

      Among the reasons the deal was relevant to Ars readers is because of how it treated intellectual property. The TPP exported US copyright law regarding how long a copyright lasts. For signing nations, the plan would have made copyrights last for the life of the creator plus 70 years after his or her death. That’s basically the same as in the US.

      When the 2,000-page text of the deal was released in November last year—after negotiations were done in secret—the Motion Picture Association of America hailed it. “The TPP reaffirms what we have long understood—that strengthening copyright is integral to America’s creative community and to facilitating legitimate international commerce,” Chris Dodd, the MPAA chairman, said.

      At one point last year, many feared the TPP would require signing companies to mandate that Internet service providers terminate accounts for Internet copyright scofflaws. That, however, never materialized. In the US, many of the top ISPs have a six-strikes consumer infringement program.

    • The Battle Against TPP Isn’t Over, But It Has Shifted

      With President-elect Trump’s victory last night, the last hopes of the Obama administration passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the lame duck session of Congress have evaporated. The passage of the TPP through Congress was dependent upon support from members of the Republican majority, and there is no realistic prospect that they will now pass the deal given their elected President’s firmly expressed opposition to it. Even if they did so, the new President would presumably veto the pact’s implementing legislation.

      Moreover, it’s not possible for the other eleven countries to forge ahead without the United States on board. This is because of a condition that the TPP will not enter into effect unless at least six of the original signatories have ratified the deal, and only if their combined GDP amounts to at least 85 percent of the total GDP of all the original signatories. It is impossible for this condition to be met without both the United States and Japan ratifying the deal.

      We’re calling it: today is the day the TPP died.

      Nevertheless, the battle against the deal is not over. Why not? Because the other TPP countries are still in the process of passing their implementing legislation, which contains all of the worst measures in the TPP that we have been fighting against for the last six years—including the extension of the term of copyright, the strict rules against DRM circumvention, the tough criminal penalties against those who infringe copyright or who leak trade secrets, and the prohibition against mandates to review source code for bugs and backdoors. Countries that continue along the path of passing their implementing legislation will end up in the worst of all possible worlds—having accepted all the US demands on copyright and other digital policies, but without receiving any trade benefits from the United States in exchange.

    • The Lesser of Two Weevils

      Obama was a massive disappointment. Promise of economic change proved empty. It is difficult now to recall what a big emphasis in campaigning he placed on civil liberties, including ending torture and closing Guantanamo. What we got was the opposite. There was no proper legal process for Guantanamo detainees. Those responsible for the policy of torture were promoted and protected. The only CIA officer jailed over torture was John Kiriakou for blowing the whistle on it. Obama’s War on Whistleblowers has been the fiercest in US history. There is no doubt that in Obama’s USA, Daniel Ellsberg would have gone to jail for a very long time. The surveillance state has extended its reach still further, while execution by drone is so routine as to pass without notice. Between drones, bombs and troops on the ground often as “advisers” or “trainers”, there has not been a single day in Obama’s eight years in which US forces have not killed a Muslim in a Muslim country.

      Yet a year from now we are very likely to conclude that things have got much worse since Obama. I fully expect Clinton to be elected. What was for me most interesting about the various WikiLeaks releases was not the mesh of sleaze and corruption. There is no doubt that Hillary was peddling influence in exchange for massive donations to the Clinton Foundation and fees and gifts to Bill and herself, and that the Clintons were able to access the resources of their “Charity” for personal use through a variety of subterfuges, quite probably legal. I knew all of that. Anybody who had not already worked out that the same Saudis who have top western politicians in their pockets are also funding ISIS, is a fool. I have been saying it for years.

    • The Final Bill for TPP May Include Trump
    • ‘What Open Borders Mean for Corporations Is Really About Restricting Workers’ Rights’

      Michelle Chen: “Samsung has found all sorts of creative ways, depending on which regulatory system they’re working under, to evade labor contract law and keep workers on these short-term contracts.”

    • TPP: Trans-Pacific Partnership dead, before Trump even takes office

      Eight years in the making, the giant Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal between Australia, the US and 10 other regional powers is as good as dead after the Obama administration walked away from its plan to put it before the “lame duck” Congress ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president.

      Controversial in Australia because it would allow US-headquartered corporations to sue Australian governments in extraterritorial tribunals and entrench pharmaceutical monopolies and copyright rules, the TPP was the subject of a last-minute plea by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to president-elect Donald Trump in their 15-minute phone conversation on Thursday.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Newsweek recalls 125,000 copies of its souvenir Madam President issue

      Everyone from pollsters to pundits got the result of the US presidential election wrong.

      But few can have made it in such an expensive manner.

      Newsweek and a partner that prints up special commemorative issues has been forced into an embarrassing recall, after it sent out 125,000 copies of its Madam President issue designed to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s win.

    • It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump

      They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

    • Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit

      The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.

      The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.

    • Anti-Trump protests continue across US as 10,000 march in New York

      In New York, where peaceful marches along downtown streets have taken place since Wednesday – the day after Trump’s shock presidential election victory over Hillary Clinton – more than 10,000 people indicated on Facebook that they would attend a noon march from Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters.

      As marchers mustered at East 17th Street and Broadway, organisers estimated the turnout at 2,000. As the march began to move, however, the true figure seemed closer to the promised 10,000.

      Chanting “Not my president!”, the crowd set off up Fifth Avenue under heavy police escort. A call-and-response developed, protesters chanting: “Whose streets? ‎Our streets!”

      Marcher Kim Peterson, 41 and a‎ Brooklyn stay-at-home mom, said: “He may have won the election but I will never accept what he stands for or his beliefs, not for myself or my children.”

    • The Comey Non-Story and the Problem of Meta-Scandals

      Hillary Clinton has been the subject of many scandals—some legitimate, some with a mix of fact and fantasy. But last week a “scandal” emerged that was created by media entirely out of whole cloth.

      On October 28, FBI Director James Comey dropped a “bombshell” on Clinton, informing congressional committee chairs that his agency had found more emails “pertinent to the investigation” of her private email server, and was looking into the matter. Just like that, chaos broke out, and the entire presidential election hung in the balance.

      [...]

      But the Comey letter wasn’t a scandal; the letter didn’t actually say anything new, and certainly nothing damaging to Clinton.

    • Hillary Clinton Blames FBI’s James Comey For Election Loss In Call With Top Donors

      At the end of September 2016, the Indian motion picture producer’s association, India’s largest organisation related to entertainment, announced a ban on all Pakistani artists.

      In retaliation, Pakistan authorities imposed a complete ban on airing Indian content on all its TV channels, including Bollywood movies.

      This cultural war, triggered by the September Uri attacks in Kashmir, is far from new.

    • Dumbass Democrats

      Congratulations, you played yourself!

      Ok, this rant is from my working-class heart, but it is due time for a rant.

      Well, who the hell are the Democrats going to blame now? The degree to which you scapegoat the Green Party or the white working-class is precisely the degree to which you are proving you will never learn a damn thing and are completely unable to lead this country.

      If it wasn’t such a farce, I’d say it is King Lear redux.

      Let’s look at some really basic, I mean high school level politics. Not fair, the average 16 year old is far wiser than the big shots of the DNC.

    • The Establishment’s Massive ‘Intelligence Failure’

      As shocking as Donald Trump’s victory was – and as uncertain as the future is – his victory marked a massive “intelligence failure” of the Establishment, a blow to its arrogance and self-dealing, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

    • 10 Cartoonists React to Trump Winning the Election
    • Why Trump won

      There are evidently overlapping reasons for these developments, although all the political movements involved are not, by any means, the same. Some are of the right and some of the left. Some have authoritarian streaks which others lack. Some are relatively liberal and outward looking while others are more orientated towards protectionism. All of them, however, share some common features. They are patriotic rather than internationalist. They all have varying concerns about immigration, reflecting the nativism – the feeling that indigenous residents ought to be given more consideration and support than immigrants – of a majority of their supporters. They all exhibit distrust and a measure of contempt for the established political systems.

    • James Comey To Congress: About Those Hillary Clinton Emails I Mentioned Last Week? Meh, Forget About It, Nothing To See

      James Comey continues to be playing by his own ridiculous rules. He was playing by his own rules when he publicly announced that no charges would be sought against Hillary Clinton over her emails back in July. He was playing by his own rules a week ago when he revealed in a letter to Congress that new information had come to light, man. And, he continued to play by his own rules in sending a new letter to Congress saying “ooops, turns out there was nothing.”

    • Washington Post Columnist: If This Democracy Is Going To Stay Healthy, We Need To Start Trusting The FBI More

      Trust and respect aren’t things someone (or something) holds in an infinite, uninterrupted supply. They’re gained and lost due to the actions of the entity holding this extremely liquid supply of trust. Oddly, some people — like Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza — seem to believe trust and respect should be given to certain “venerated institutions,” because to do otherwise is to surrender to something approaching nihilism.

    • Shame on Us, the American Media

      Early this year, when it became clear Donald Trump would become the GOP presidential nominee, but before we knew how Republicans would respond to being overtaken by a racist authoritarian, I argued at length that while Trump was a symptom of deep rot within their party, our other democratic institutions were still strong enough to contain the threat he posed.

      It was obvious by then that Trump’s reckless and illiberal candidacy would be damaging to America’s civic health, just by itself. But those very traits, it seemed, would also make it nearly impossible for him to win the presidency; and in the event of the unthinkable, he would be hemmed in by both the exigencies of governing and the conforming power of imperfect institutions like the legislature, the judiciary, the civil service, and the media, outside the presidency.

    • Marine Le Pen: ‘Not a hair’s breadth’ separates Front National and Ukip

      The leader of France’s far-right Front National has said not a “hair’s breadth” separates her party from Nigel Farage’s Ukip.

      Marine Le Pen said it was “ridiculous” for Farage and his colleagues to pretend otherwise. Pressed on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show about why Ukip refused to associate itself with the FN, Le Pen said: “Sorry, but objectively there is – on the topic of immigration and the European Union – not a hair’s breadth of difference between what Ukip thinks and what the National Front thinks, let’s be truthful.

      “Maybe Ukip is trying to counter the demonisation they are victim of by saying, ‘We are the good guys and the National Front are the bad guys’ – they can do so, but I don’t feel obliged to follow this strategy because, frankly, I feel it’s a little bit ridiculous.”

    • An American Tragedy

      Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus “scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.

    • Why I’m Voting Third Party

      Choosing the lesser of two evils means I am still choosing evil.

      [...]

      A strong showing for third party candidates will be a wake up call to both the Democratic and Republican establishments they have to deal with real desire for change, not ignore voters, or try to scare us into abandoning our conscience and principles by trading (again) short term goals for long term progress.

      For those who truly support Clinton, please, vote that way. But don’t disparage the rest of us for believing we can do better, even if that road is a long. Too many have accepted, election after election, the long con of no third party.

    • How Did Donald Trump Win?

      It’s not about left and right anymore, not about Black and White. It is all about up and down. And it elected Donald Trump via a bumpy road. The next candidate to really figure it out will sweep into power.

      And what it is is stated succiently by former McCain campaign chief strategist Steve Schmidt: jobs, specifically the loss of jobs to technology and globalization, and the changes to our society that that is causing.

      The defining issue of our times, says Schmidt, is the displacement of workers, particularly those who traditionally held working class roles. America is watching a leveling down unprecedented in its history, a form of societal and economic devolution.

    • Another Election Loser: Corporate Media

      Liberals had a good laugh this summer when CNN’s Brianna Keilar (8/17/16) insisted to Donald Trump campaign lawyer Michael Cohen that his team was “down” in the race.

      “Says who?” he asked.

      Keilar snarked back: “Polls. Most of them. All of them?”

      At the time, it was the sickest of all burns. As the polls kept forecasting a clear win for Hillary Clinton, Trump fans went back and forth between complaining about a rigged system and accusing the polls of being dishonest.

      Again, it was a good laugh for liberals—until Election Day.

      As the dust settles and America comes to terms with the election of Donald Trump, it’s time to take a look at the embarrassment of the media class, with the failure of polling only one part of the story. For those who have bemoaned the mediocrity of corporate media, this might appear as a well-deserved comeuppance, but it also brings the uncomfortable upending of decades of common wisdom about media and elections.

    • Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump–but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them

      There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders’ consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. Before, during and after the race was competitive, this was the Vermont senator’s strongest argument: He was out-polling Trump in the general election by an average of 10 or so points, whereas Clinton was only slightly ahead. His favorables were also much higher, often with a spread as much as 25 points.

    • The Day After: How to Renounce Your American Citizenship

      Despite what you may see on TV or in the movies, there is only one way to voluntarily renounce citizenship. You can’t do it by tearing up your American passport, or writing a manifesto. It’s done by appointment only.

      You start by making an appointment at the nearest American embassy or consulate. You technically can complete the renunciation procedures anywhere a properly-empowered American diplomat will meet you abroad, but in reality it is unlikely s/he will drop by your villa, or come by your prison cell.

      At the embassy (the rules are the same at a consulate) you’ll fill out some forms. You can Google and complete, but not sign them, ahead of time if you wish: DS-4079, DS-4080, DS-4081, and DS-4082. Have a look; most of the requested information is pretty vanilla stuff, and is largely to make sure you understand what you are doing and the consequences of doing it.

      The reason for making sure of all that making sure stuff is two-fold.

      One, the State Department, who handles all this, has been sued by people in the past who claim they were tricked or mislead and did not know what they were doing, and want their citizenship back. The other reason is that barring certain highly-specific situations, renouncing citizenship is a one-way street. The U.S. government considers it a permanent, unrecoverable, irrevocable, decision. You gotta get it right the first time.

    • Deal With It: The Democratic National Committee Lost This Election

      There is a meme ripping through the social media of Clinton supporters that her loss is in large part the fault of third party voters. Or the misogyny apocalypse. People, please.

      How about 18 months of unresolved email questions? The destruction of Bernie Sanders by the Democratic National Committee alongside Hillary-friendly media? The lack of outreach to third party voters along with fear mongering that a vote for Johnson or Stein would bring on Armageddon, the ridiculous name calling towards Republicans that should have been courted to crossover and vote against a candidate many did not enthusiastically support, the unresolved questions about the Clinton Foundation and pay-for-play, the unreleased Goldman-Sachs speeches, the changes of position and policy, the untrustworthiness, the empty and depressing strategy of I’m the Lesser of Two Evils, the weasel stuff like Bill on Loretta Lynch’s plane, the grossly negative final weeks of the campaign, the poor turnout in places, the silly accusations that Putin and Wikileaks and the FBI were rigging the election, the sneaky stuff like CNN leaking debate questions to her ahead of time — any of that matter?

      I mean, who could have anticipated a candidate with all that baggage, and some epically bad decision-making skills, might run into problems getting elected?

    • What Now? Post-Election Special

      Much can and will and should be said about the, yes, presidential election of, yes, Donald Trump—including about media’s role. On this first post-election show, we focus on the question of: What now? What now for electoral reform and congressional diversity? For the environment? For Muslim-Americans and others made vulnerable by the so-called “War on Terror” in its domestic and international fronts?

    • Trump’s ‘Unhinged’ Lie About Obama Doesn’t Register as News to Corporate Media

      Now, if we live in a world where descriptions can be true or false, Trump’s account is clearly false. He’s describing the Obama rally as something he’s seen himself, so it’s fair to say that he’s lying about what the president did. (If he actually perceived Obama “really screaming” at a protester, that signifies a break from reality that is if anything more alarming.) Trump didn’t misspeak; he repeated the claim at other events, talking in Tampa of Obama “screaming and screaming and screaming,” for instance.

      So a major-party presidential candidate on the verge of the election repeatedly tells a far-fetched and easily checkable lie about the current president, calling a thing that didn’t happen “a disgrace.” In the 2016 presidential campaign, where political journalists have obsessively covered every utterance of Trump, this surely qualifies as important news the electorate should know about, right?

    • Facebook is being blamed for Trump’s election – but Mark Zuckerberg’s response seems tone deaf

      Half the nation is blaming Facebook for Donald Trump’s election.

      And Facebook feels that’s very unfair!

      The argument is that Facebook now plays a huge role in the distribution of information. Its 2 billion active users may read traditional news sources, like The New York Times and Business Insider. But they aren’t typically visiting those websites directly. Instead, they’re scrolling through Facebook’s news feed and reading articles that get shared by friends.

      The problem is that Facebook users aren’t always good at distinguishing legitimate news sources from satire, propaganda, or just plain false information. And if bad information goes viral, it can negatively influence the public’s opinion.

      The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad, that President Obama called Facebook a “dust cloud of nonsense.”

    • Why the White Working Class Rebelled: Neoliberalism is Killing Them (Literally)

      The Democratic Party has been the Establishment for eight years, and the Clintons have arguably been the Establishment for 24 years. Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.

      A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.

    • Five unanswered questions after Trump’s upset victory

      Three days after the presidential election, liberals are grappling with the reality of President-elect Donald Trump, while conservatives exult about an unexpected end to Democratic control of the White House.

      Neither side correctly anticipated the outcome on Election Day. And there are still several key questions that have not been definitively answered.

      What happened to Democratic turnout?

      Not every single vote has been counted yet, but the general pattern is clear: Hillary Clinton underperformed President Obama’s showing in 2012 by a dramatic margin.

    • Nine times Donald Trump has already betrayed the US voters who put their faith in him

      Trump railed against Barack Obama’s flagship policy to allow millions of poor Americans to access healthcare.

      Pledging to ditch the policy during the campaign, he said: “We will do it very quickly. It is a catastrophe.”

      Now he says he might simply reform it, keeping the ban on insurers denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowing young adults to be insured on parents’ policies.

      Trump said he was persuaded to keep the elements by Mr Obama, who he previously accused of founding the Islamic State.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Swaziland: Self-Censorship At ‘Times’ Newspaper

      The Times of Swaziland, the only independent daily newspaper in the kingdom, censored itself heavily in a report about exploitation of sugar workers to deflect criticism away from the absolute monarch King Mswati III.

      This trend of misinformation has been continuing at the newspaper for years.

      The Times said on Monday (7 November 2016), ‘The new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) report is called “Swazi gold”‘.

    • IMDb Sues The State Of California Over New ‘Ageism’ Law
    • IMDb Sues to Invalidate California’s Actor Age Censorship Law

      IMDb is suing California Attorney General Kamala Harris to protect its right to post actors’ ages on their profiles.

      A complaint filed Thursday in California federal court aims to overturn Assembly Bill 1687, which requires IMDb.com to remove the ages or birth dates of public figures in the entertainment industry on its site upon request.

      The law was passed in September as an effort to mitigate age discrimination in Hollywood and has been widely criticized as unconstitutional — a point IMDb emphasizes in its suit.

      “IMDb shares the worthy goal of preventing age discrimination,” writes attorney John C. Hueston in the complaint. “But AB 1687 is an unconstitutional law that does not advance, much less achieve, that goal. To the contrary, rather than passing laws designed to address the root problem of age discrimination, the State of California has chosen to chill free speech and undermine public access to factual information.”

    • EU in new attempt to make ISP:s police and censor the Internet

      Freedom of speech and freedom of information will be in the hands of ISP:s who are to be liable for all user uploads. There is good reason to fear that these companies will be overly anxious and cautious – censoring everything with even a remote possibility of being an infringement of copyright.

      This is yet another attempt to get around the eCommerce-directives principle of »mere conduit« stating that net operators can not be liable for what users are doing in their cables.

    • China is the obstacle to Google’s plan to end internet censorship

      It’s been three years since Eric Schmidt proclaimed that Google would chart a course to ending online censorship within ten years. Now is a great time to check on Google’s progress, reassess the landscape, benchmark Google’s efforts against others who share the same goal, postulate on the China strategy and offer suggestions on how they might effectively move forward.

    • The Paradox Of Trump Threatening Documentary Filmmaker While Supporting Citizens United

      I’m not sure if Donald Trump has ever officially weighed in on the famous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but if he did, I’m guessing he would support that ruling wholeheartedly. After all, he recently hired the former President of Citizens United to be his deputy campaign manager. And, I know that people freak out about the term “Citizens United” and some believe it’s the root cause of all evil in American politics today, but that’s wrong. At its heart, that case was a First Amendment free speech case, about whether a group (Citizens United) could show a documentary film heavily critical of Hillary Clinton close to the 2008 election. We can all argue about the evils of campaign finance and dark money and super PACs, but there should be ways to fix that without banning movies.

      Either way, it’s quite ironic that with the former head of Citizens United helping to lead his campaign, Trump is now basically arguing against the very Citizens United ruling by threatening to sue lots of folks associated with a new documentary, called You’ve Been Trumped Too. Unfortunately, the filmmaker hasn’t released the actual threat letters, so we can’t see the details, but he claims that “Trump is threatening to sue movie theatres, reporters or anyone who repeats the allegations made in my new film.” People Magazine claims it’s seen the threat letters but chosen not to post them.

    • Bad Idea From Famed First Amendment Lawyer: Press Should Sue Trump For Libel

      Floyd Abrams is one of, if not the most famous First Amendment lawyers in the country. He gets and deserves a ton of respect. His most famous case was defending the NY Times against the US government when Richard Nixon tried to block the NY Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. And he’s been involved in many other seminal First Amendment cases as well. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t sometimes make mistakes — like the time he insisted that SOPA wouldn’t violate the First Amendment because it was censorship for a good cause (i.e., for his clients at the MPAA). Or the time he falsely accused Wikileaks of indiscriminately leaking information that was actually being more carefully distributed.

      And while I totally agree with Abrams in claiming that Donald Trump is the “greatest threat to the First Amendment since the passage of The Sedition Act of 1918,” I disagree with his thoughts on how to fight it. His argument is that the press that Trump has been insulting should sue Trump for defamation…

    • Censorship: Is it necessary?

      Recently, Eckerd College officials told students and faculty that free speech is welcome on their campus. Eckerd College was not the first to impose this policy, which started with University of Chicago in 2012. Censorship has been debated on college campuses for some time now, causing an uproar with students.

    • India’s Long History of Television Censorship

      The Indian state has a propensity to censor regardless of the government in power. Nevertheless, the ban imposed on NDTV India is a significant escalation against the country’s free press.

    • A sad song of musical censorship in India and Pakistan

      At the end of September 2016, the Indian motion picture producer’s association, India’s largest organisation related to entertainment, announced a ban on all Pakistani artists.

      In retaliation, Pakistan authorities imposed a complete ban on airing Indian content on all its TV channels, including Bollywood movies.

      This cultural war, triggered by the September Uri attacks in Kashmir, is far from new.

    • Facebook slammed for censoring burn victim’s birthday photo
    • Facebook apologises and backs down after it removed a photograph of a Swedish fireman who was disfigured in a blaze
    • Facebook slammed for censoring burn victim’s birthday pic
    • Why does Facebook remove photos of burn victims like Lasse Gustavson?
    • Facebook Apologises For Removing Photo Of Burns Survivor Lasse Gustavson
    • Facebook Bans Burn Survivor’s Photo Twice, Receives Backlash
    • Facebook Apologizes After Banning Picture of Burn Victim on His Birthday
    • Twitter Censorship #USSLiberty #Vanunu
    • Artist Double Diamond Sun Body, Currently Showing At MAMA, Uses Irreverence To Challenge Censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Why did Facebook buy a social analytics tool used by media companies?

      Facebook has repeatedly denied it is a media company. So why did it just go and buy a startup best known for its social analytics platform for media publishers?

      Arriving on the scene in 2011, CrowdTangle has become an indispensable tracking tool for media outlets. Its real-time dashboards, custom notifications, and personalized visualizations help publishers compare their social leverage with their competitors’ and discover trending content. In its own words: “Hundreds of newsrooms and thousands of journalists use the tool every day.”

    • Why the Government Must Disclose Its Exploit to the Defense in the Playpen Cases

      In addition to difficult questions concerning the Fourth Amendment, Rule 41, and the limits of government hacking, the Playpen cases raise an important question about the future of digital rights: whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances the government must disclose to criminal defendants how the government carried out its hacking.

      In the Playpen cases, the government has provided some information to the accused about how the “network investigative technique,” or “NIT,” operated. But, critically, the government refuses to produce the exploit it used to allegedly take control of suspects’ computers.

      That refusal—in addition to all the other problems with the Playpen cases—violates the rights of the accused. And, as at least one court has correctly found, the refusal to disclose the exploit to the defense requires suppression of evidence obtained as a result.

    • Delivering Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere to Mobile Users at WARP Speed

      As people spend more and more time using phones and tablets, privacy and security for mobile browsers has become an acute problem. That’s why we’re excited to see a new Android browser called WARP improving the state of the field. WARP was built by Qualcomm and EMbience, and includes ports of EFF’s Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere tools to bring privacy and security protections to a wider, mobile audience.

      WARP is a patched version of Google’s Chromium codebase. Its built-in features include Web Defender, which is a privacy mechanism that is compatible with EFF’s Privacy Badger 1.0, and Secure Connect, which is a native port of HTTPS Everywhere. WARP may also be used as the basis for customized browsers shipped by wireless carriers and handset manufacturers. However, we recommend that, if you want to use WARP (or any other browser), it’s best to get the version from the Play Store rather than one that may have been modified in undocumented ways by carriers or handset manufacturers.

    • Managing Security Trade-offs: Why I Still Recommend Signal

      Recently, I read a blog post by a developer who also does infosec consulting and training for investigative journalists, helping protect their ability to work in the public interest and communicate with sources unimpeded by surveillance states and other adversaries.

      The post, titled “Why I won’t recommend Signal anymore,” piqued my interest as I spend a lot of time evangelising Signal to virtually anyone I interact with, for reasons which I have spent several years discovering. I immediately thought, “What did this guy discover that I’ve so blatantly missed?” and read through the article.

    • EFF to Supreme Court: Cell Phone Location Data Is Off-Limits to Police Without a Warrant

      Washington, D.C.—Cell phone location data, which can provide an incredibly detailed picture of people’s private lives, implicates our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches, requiring police to obtain a warrant to gain access, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the Supreme Court today.

      Weighing in on separate cases where two courts have applied 1970s-era law to digital communications in the information age, EFF urged the nation’s highest court to step in and establish that Americans have the right to expect location data generated from their cell phones is private and protected by the Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures.

    • Fewer Resources, Fewer Choices: A School Administrator in Indiana Works to Protect Student Privacy

      In a rural, partly Amish community in Indiana, the schools are rapidly adopting educational technology from tech giants like Google. Students may be leaving farms in the morning to come to classrooms with Chromebooks at every desk. As technology becomes more and more integrated into modern education, these schools have to draw on scarce resources to protect the privacy of their students.

      Eric M. is the Director of Technology at a public K-12 school district in a rural area of Indiana. The district is relatively small, with about 2100 students. In addition to G-Suite for Education (known as Google Apps for Education until recently), students use software from major publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson. Beyond these core apps, some classrooms also use smaller software like Mobymax, Achieve3000, and Nearpod, as well as publicly available platforms like Prezi and Glogster.

      “It seems like every classroom you look into is using technology,” Eric said. “As a technology director, that makes me both excited and scared.”

    • Appeals court hears arguments in Somali terror case

      The four men in the case are Basaaly Saeed Moalin, a San Diego cabdriver; Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, the imam of a City Heights mosque; Issa Doreh, former president of a nonprofit group aiding the Somali community; and Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud of Anaheim. They were convicted of funneling less than $10,000 to the terrorist group al-Shabab.

      The main evidence in the trial was excerpts of about 1,800 wiretap recordings of phone calls from Moalin to Somalia and to his co-defendants. Prosecutors said the recordings captured the scheme to raise the funds and wire transfer them overseas.

    • Terror-funding conviction in San Diego under fire over NSA phone data collection
    • Autocracy: Rules for Survival

      However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

    • Boeing, DISA Develop Mobile Device for Top-Secret Military Communications; Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn Comments
    • The Head Of The NSA Is Testing Boeing’s Self-Destructing Smartphone
    • Trump Election Ignites Fears Over US Encryption, Surveillance Policy
    • Worried about the NSA under Trump? Here’s how to protect yourself

      In January 2017, Donald Trump will become President of the United States of America, and the most technologically advanced surveillance infrastructure in the world will start reporting directly to him.

      When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance regime in 2013, he warned that a new American president could rapidly expand its scope overnight with just a simple change of government policy.

    • President Obama Should Shut Down the NSA’s Mass Spying Before It’s Too Late

      Modern surveillance programs would be a disaster under President Trump

      President Obama has just 71 days until Donald Trump is inaugurated as our next commander-in-chief. That means he has a matter of weeks to do one thing that could help prevent the United States from veering into fascism: declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government’s unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can — before Trump is the one running it.

    • ORG concerned over GCHQ sovereignty under new US president
    • Open Rights Group: Donald Trump presidency is bad news for UK surveillance

      Privacy campaigners at the Open Rights Group (ORG) have warned that Donald Trump running the US National Security Agency (NSA), and therefore working closely with GCHQ, could spell trouble for UK surveillance.

    • Scared About Trump Wielding FBI And NSA Cyber Power? You Should Be

      Americans are understandably anxious about the idea of Donald Trump wantonly wielding “The Cyber” to quiet his enemies, following his election to president today. The fear is manifesting and metastasizing fast on social media…

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • A New Dawn for Hate?

      Aaron, Nik, and Nancy are not alone. A mere three days after the election, reports of harassment and violence directed at people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, Muslims, and others have been pouring in. Shaun King, the senior justice writer for the New York Daily News, has received dozens and dozens of reports of abuse and is chronicling them on Twitter. The Southern Poverty Law Center is also collecting reports of racist harassment, as are various news outlets.

    • Congress Needs To Clarify That Password Sharing Is Not a Federal Crime

      The Internet has been on fire in recent months over two court decisions that threaten to criminalize password sharing. The law at the heart of the cases is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1986 statute meant to outlaw computer break-ins. Congress passed the CFAA after “War Games”—a techno-thriller film about a teen whose computer shenanigans nearly sparked World War III—put the fear of God into lawmakers about the vulnerability of our computer networks. The law—passed years before the advent of the modern Internet—is seriously showing its age.

      How the CFAA, which was originally intended to target criminals for havoc-wreaking computer break-ins and data theft, came to be used to convict people for using someone else’s password is a study in prosecutorial overreach and shows how the law has failed to keep up with technology. Congress needs to step up and overhaul this flawed and outdated law.

      The CFAA makes it illegal to intentionally access a “protected computer”—which includes any computer connected to the Internet—”without authorization” or in excess of authorization. But the law fails to define “without authorization.”

    • Richard Cohen Can’t Help Race-Baiting, Defending Harassment

      Cohen himself was accused of “inappropriate behavior” toward a female staffer in 1996–and later wrote a column (10/25/10) saying that allegations against Thomas should be forgotten, on the grounds that “we all did and said terrible things when we were young.” On the basis of his self-serving rejection of sexual harassment investigations, Cohen’s column is headlined “The Gangs of Washington Are Drawing Their Knives.”

    • Donald Trump May Choose Bush-Era Torture Architect for CIA Chief

      President-elect Donald Trump may choose an architect of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program, Jose Rodriguez, to head the CIA, The Intercept reported Friday.

      The Intercept cites a post-election prediction from Dentons, a law firm where Trump confidante Newt Gingrich (himself a potential secretary of state) serves as an advisor. “Dentons was also retained by Make America Number 1, one of the primary Super PACs supporting Trump’s candidacy,” the outlet writes.

      Rodriguez directed the National Clandestine Service and “helped develop the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of ‘waterboarding,’ the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees,” The Intercept writes.

    • Zimbabwean Hunter Will Not Be Prosecuted Over Cecil the Lion Killing

      A Zimbabwean hunter involved in the killing of Cecil the lion in 2015 will not face prosecution after a high court in the African country threw out the charges against him, according to his lawyer.

      State prosecutors accused hunter Theo Bronkhorst of helping to lure the 13-year-old, black-maned lion out of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park in order for American dentist Walter Palmer to hunt Cecil.

    • The Dutch prison crisis: A shortage of prisoners

      While the UK and much of the world struggles with overcrowded prisons, the Netherlands has the opposite problem. It is actually short of people to lock up. In the past few years 19 prisons have closed down and more are slated for closure next year. How has this happened – and why do some people think it’s a problem?

      The smell of fried onions wafts up the metal staircase, past the cell doors and along the wing. Down in the kitchen inmates are preparing their evening meal. One man, gripping a long serrated blade, is expertly chopping vegetables.

      “I’ve had six years to practice so I am getting better!” he says.

      It is noisy work because the knife is on a long steel chain attached to the worktop.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Court Not Impressed By Airbnb’s Argument Against The City Of San Francisco

      Earlier this year, we noted that a bunch of cities were looking to make Airbnb liable for residents in those cities using the platform without following certain city rules. As we noted at the time, this seemed to pretty clearly violate Section 230 of the CDA, which says that platforms cannot be liable for the actions of their users. San Francisco went ahead with such a law anyway, even though it tried to rework it at the last minute to deal with Airbnb’s points on why it was illegal. The case ended up in court either way — and unfortunately, the initial ruling has sided with San Francisco over Airbnb.

      Now, I know that for a variety of reasons, there are people who just flat out hate Airbnb and think that it’s somehow bad or problematic for cities or rental prices or whatever. I don’t think the data supports this, but either way, you should be concerned about the results here. This isn’t about whether or not Airbnb is “good” or “bad” for cities. It’s about a fundamental principle on which the internet operates — which has allowed the internet to grow and to thrive, and which has protected free speech on the internet, by not making platforms magically liable for what users say or do. But the court here basically doesn’t care about all of that.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Will President Trump Be Tough on Online Piracy?

        At TorrentFreak we have no interest in reporting on politics, except when it’s relevant to copyright issues.

        After the surprising victory of Donald Trump earlier this week, several people asked what this would mean for the country’s stance on piracy and copyright enforcement in general.

        While we would love to dissect the issue in detail, there are no concrete policy proposals yet. Neither Trump nor Clinton have gone into detail over the past few months.

        So what do we know?

        It’s not a secret that Donald Trump made some rather dubious remarks during his election campaign. For example, he suggested that it might be worth considering whether to “close up” the Internet over terrorist threats.

        Extreme or not, we believe that extrapolating these kinds of one-liners into copyright policy proposals goes a bit far, to say the least.

      • Conspiracy Theories Run Amok Over Copyright Office Executive Changes

        Last week, we wrote about the big news in the copyright realm, where the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, removed the Register of Copyrights (the head of the Copyright Office), Maria Pallante, from her job. Technically, Hayden reassigned Pallante to a new job in the Library of Congress, but Pallante rejected that offer and resigned. While we — and some others — pointed out that this was a good opportunity to reshape the Copyright Office away from being a taxpayer-funded lobbying organization for Hollywood, some folks who support ever more draconian copyright immediately jumped on all sorts of conspiracy theories about how this was really Google somehow firing Pallante, including one site that directly had that as a headline.

        To anyone who actually had knowledge of what was going on, this made no sense. Hayden is not connected to Google in any way. This is just out and out tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory from people who see “Google” behind any policy they dislike. It seemed rather obvious that, like just about any new CEO of an organization, Hayden was clearing out some senior staff for a variety of reasons. And there was a pretty obvious big reason why Hayden would like to reassign Pallante: she has been directly and publicly advocating for Congress to move the Copyright Office outside of the Library of Congress. If you came in to run an organization and one of your direct reports was going over your head to try to transfer an entire division somewhere else, it’s likely you’d fire that person too. It’s kind of a management 101 thing.

11.12.16

Links 12/11/2016: Core Infrastructure Initiative Supports Reproducible Builds, Temer’s Assault on FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Project Imixs-Workflow 4.0 released!

    Imixs-Workflow is an Open Source Workflow Engine for Human-Centric BPM. Human-centric business process management supports human skills and activities by a task orientated workflow-engine.

    The new release includes a number of improvements concerning performance and stability. Version 4.0. is now based on Java 8 and can be run with any Java EE 7 application server. In addition to a long list of improvements, the Lucene search engine technology is now fully integrated into the Imixs-Workflow engine. Thus, the open source framework provides much more flexibility in data access and allows a faster integration into existing business solutions.

  • The digital revolution’s hidden secret: Open-source cloud software

    Buried deep within the heart of the digital revolution is a hidden secret. This secret is open-source software. Open-source software has been key to the transformation of business because it is low-cost, often free, and easy for a young company to modify and deploy. Because of these strong points, open-source software has produced powerful technologies for modern enterprise computing. To guide this explosive community, foundations have appeared, forming an alliance of businesses, startups and developers.

    To gain some insight into one such foundation, John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the KubeCon 2016 conference in Seattle, WA. There, he sat down with Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

  • Can an on-prem-cloud hybrid service solve companies’ open-source quandary?

    Companies wanting to stay on tech’s bleeding edge face a bit of a quandary these days: Most agree that the latest, greatest software is happening in open source; however, the job of curating and operating it is too messy for the IT teams at most businesses. We spoke with one startup co-founder who believes they’ve found a way to serve open-source innovation to customers without choking them with complexity.

    Bich Le, chief architect and co-founder of Platform9, started the company with some fellow VMware alumni. “The opportunity that we saw was open-source software was getting amazing and ruling the world, especially in the infrastructure space for running compute, storage, networking — but what’s defining this software is it’s very complex to operate,” Le told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during KubeCon 2016.

  • Radisys Propels 5G, Contributes Virtual EPC to Open Source Group

    Radisys contributed its evolved packet core (EPC) framework to the open source CORD project to create a virtual EPC (vEPC).

  • Kubernetes and the open-source, cloud-native evolution

    As the movement to further the education and advancement of Docker, Kubernetes and Cloud-Native architectures continues to grow, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation hosted KubeCon 2016 in Seattle, WA, this week to gather leading Kubernetes technologists from multiple open-source cloud-native communities.

    During the event, Jim Walker, VP of Marketing at CoreOS Inc., and Joseph Jacks, senior director of Product Management at Apprenda Inc., spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. KubeCon is a biannual community conference dedicated to Kubernetes, the open-source container cluster management software project by Google.

    Walker and Jacks spoke to Furrier about what’s going on at KubeCon, as well as in cloud-native and open source as it evolves.

  • Google Announces Code-In 2016 To Encourage Open Source
  • Google Code-in is Coming, Focused on Open Source

    We’re almost done with 2016, and this time of year is when Google announces its annual Code-in contest, which it has just done. Code-in is an an online contest hosted by Google for pre-university students aged 13 to 17. The contest encourages open source and exposes young people to open source.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Anatomy of a Chrome for Android bug: the mixed-up world of mobile browsers

        Security researchers at Kaspersky recently wrote about various Android attacks featuring malware known as Svpeng.

        Svpeng is a whole family of data-stealing and banking-related threats, so this is more than just what Google might glibly try to label Potentially Harmful Software: it’s malware, and you definitely don’t want it near your phone.

      • There are 2 Billion active Chrome browsers across mobile and desktop

        Chrome is installed by default on all Android devices that come from Google’s partners as well as all Chromebook computers. That probably accounts to a lot of devices, without taking into consideration all the Chrome browsers that users choose to install on their PCs and Macs. So it’s not hard to see how the browser could now be running on billions of phones and desktops and actively used on most of them.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • The battle for Apache Cassandra highlights major problem with open source projects

      Developers prefer Apache-licensed software, but the companies involved in Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects should tread carefully. While it’s great to be associated with the the Apache brand, the ASF can seem like “Conan the Barbarian” to project leads who don’t abide by its rules. That’s one lesson to take from the fracas between the ASF and DataStax, the principal developer of the popular Cassandra database.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

    • US Government Opens Access to Federal Source Code with Code.gov

      So far, the government is emphasizing the release of at least 20 percent of its custom code as open source. That may not be enough from the perspective of an open source community, but Pittenger argues that “20 percent is a good start. We need to balance the benefits from open sourcing code with the risks associated with vulnerabilities. Keep in mind that outsourced code may have been written by the lowest-cost bidder. For example, we don’t know if any secure development practices were followed, such as threat modeling, security design reviews, or static analysis. We also don’t know whether the contractors building the software closely tracked the open source they used in the code for known vulnerabilities. My advice would be to risk-rank the applications covered by these policies, and start by open sourcing the least critical. I would argue strongly against releasing code that manages sensitive taxpayer information or code for defense and intelligence agencies.”

      Read more

    • Brazil to Replace Open Source Software with Microsoft Products [Ed: After the banksters overthrew Brazil’s government and installed Temer et al Microsoft continues its long assault on the country’s digital sovereignty [1, 2, 3, 4]]

      “The Brazilian government is reportedly pondering an en masse transition from open source software to Microsoft products, including here Windows 10 and the Office productivity suite.”

    • Brazilian government plans largest Microsoft procurement to date
    • Brazil Replacing Open Source Software With Microsoft’s Windows 10 And Office

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • After a decade, open source Java is still controversial

      Ten years later, the open-sourcing of Java remains a point of contention, with many in the community extolling the importance of an open Java, while others remain critical of its handling, including the belief that Sun Microsystems didn’t go far enough.

      Sun Microsystems officially open-sourced Java on Nov. 13, 2006—a move long pined for by the industry at large. Java’s code had already been accessible prior to that date—a strategy that helped boost the platform from its earliest days, notes Java founder James Gosling.

    • Programming: Windows and Linux Lose Developers to Mac OS

      Both GNU/Linux and Windows have been slowly losing ground among developers. The Linux desktop hasn’t changed much in years and remains a clunky alternative. Windows 10 has made progress, but increasingly developers are choosing to use Macs. The number of developers using a Windows platform for development is expected to drop below 50 percent over the next year.

    • GitHub Enterprise 2.8 adds new workflow options

      The big changes rolled out for GitHub Enterprise 2.8 may seem familiar, but don’t say GitHub is running out of ideas. Instead, the company is adding tools to GitHub Enterprise that enterprises may already know, rather than expand functionality exclusive to GitHub.

      Some new pieces, like the Reviews or Projects functions, will likely draw users because of their tight integration with the product or because they provide the equivalent of a third-party option. But others, like Jupyter support, appeal because they open up GitHub Enterprise to use cases that didn’t exist before or would have been difficult to implement.

    • Tumblr Is The Latest Company Boasting About PHP7 Performance

      We’ve talked a lot on Phoronix about PHP 7 due to the mighty impressive performance improvements found in this major update that was released at the end of last year. Many companies have blogged about their positive performance experiences in upgrading to PHP7, many of which we’ve shared on Phoronix, and Tumblr is now the latest company to boast about their migration from PHP5 to PHP7.

Leftovers

  • The Tech Industry Waits to See Trump’s Tech Policies

    U.S. President-elect Donald Trump isn’t even in office yet, but technology industry associations are already sounding off about what his presidency will mean for tech. Trump laid out a detailed tech policy agenda in advance of the Nov. 8 election, but there are still a lot of questions swirling about his stance toward key tech sectors such as telecom, and there are questions about whether his administration will be as much of a champion for open source technologies as Obama’s was.

    Here are some soundbytes from the discussion.

    BSA | The Software Alliance, which represents companies such as IBM and Microsoft, along with tech advocacy groups such as the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and TechFreedom, have had mostly optimistic things to say, and their leaders are hoping to help mold Trump’s tech policies.

    “There will be a lot of issues the Trump administration will have to confront and deal with, and we hope to play a constructive role in helping them think through those issues,” Robert Atkinson, ITIF’s founder and president, told Bloomberg BNA.

  • Security

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Morning Spin: WikiLeaks emails show Emanuel involvement in Bush-Obama meeting

      Much of the political universe was centered on President-elect Donald Trump’s initial visit and meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday.

      Eight years ago, the same type of meeting unfolded between then-President-elect Barack Obama and then-President George W. Bush. Heavily involved was Rahm Emanuel, who had been picked to serve as Obama’s White House chief of staff, though it had not yet been announced publicly.

      Hacked emails from John Podesta, who co-chaired Obama’s transition team and served as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, show Emanuel’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering on the Obama-Bush meeting. In one of the emails, posted in recent weeks by WikiLeaks, Emanuel complains about a draft of the press statement Obama’s transition team was prepared to release about the meeting.

      “I don’t see how this carries us very far,” Emanuel wrote about the brief statement acknowledging the meeting took place and little more. “It is so devoid of detail and will lead to a lot of freelancing by the press. That’s the danger.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Norway caught in pipeline uproar
    • Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

      A bright speck of climate news was quickly overshadowed by the presidential election this week—America’s children have officially won the right to sue their government over global warming.

      Yesterday, a lawsuit filed by 21 youth plaintiffs was ruled valid by US District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Oregon. A group of citizens, whose ages range from nine to 20, charged President Obama, the fossil fuel industry, and other federal agencies with violating their constitutional rights by declining to take action against climate change.

    • For 12 years, plants bought us extra time on climate change

      Plants are our best friends in the fight against climate change, and a new study shows just how important they are. From 2002 to 2014, plants sucked up so much carbon dioxide that they slowed the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, even as human-made CO2 emissions were increasing.

      The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, show how important ecosystems are in regulating the carbon cycle, and also how little we know about the processes contributing to climate change. This information can help scientists and policymakers come up with solutions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Finance

    • Sterling records best fortnight in 8 years after Trump boost

      Sterling hit a five-week high against the dollar on Friday and recorded its best fortnight on a trade-weighted basis in almost eight years, with investors’ focus having turned away from Brexit and towards political risks elsewhere.

      Since Donald Trump’s shock victory in the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, the pound has been the best performer of any major currency, outshining even the dollar, which itself is on track to record its best week in a year against a basket of currencies.

      Sterling rose above $1.26 for the first time since Oct. 6, the day before it plunged as much as 10 percent in a matter of minutes in a “flash crash”, and advanced as high as $1.2673 in European trade. By 1704 GMT it was around $1.2607, up 0.4 percent on the day.

    • Pound sterling value rise: How has it gone from the worst to best performing major currency?

      Traders might be looking at the prospect of destabilising victories for populists in European elections and are upgrading their view of the relative prospects for sterling in that light

    • European Parliament planning to vote in the dark on CETA – Carthy

      Sinn Féin MEP for the Midlands North West, Matt Carthy has harshly criticised the European Commission’s insistence to push ahead with the timeline of their trade deal with Canada, CETA, despite crucial elements of the agreement being reserved for so-called ‘retrofitting’.

      Matt Carthy said:

      “When Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor went to Brussels to sign CETA last month, many assumed that the case was closed. This week, however the European Commission confirmed that crucial elements of the agreement have yet to be agreed in the controversial Chapter on Investment Protection.

    • TPP seen as doomed after Trump victory

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal – that would have created the world’s largest free-trade zone – is all but dead, now that the Obama administration has given up hope of a last-ditch effort to ratify it amid a rising tide of protectionism.

      A former senior adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is calling on Canada to shift focus and try to negotiate free-trade deals with Japan and other Asian countries.

    • Obama Administration Gives Up on Pacific Trade Deal

      A sweeping Pacific trade pact meant to bind the U.S.and Asia effectively died Friday, as Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress told the White House they won’t advance it in the election’s aftermath, and Obama administration officials acknowledged it has no way forward now.

      The failure to pass the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership—by far the biggest trade agreement in more than a decade—is a bitter defeat for President Barack Obama, whose belated but fervent support for freer trade divided his party and complicated the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

    • Recoverability of third party funding costs in arbitration

      A significant appeal decision has recently emerged dealing with the recoverability between the parties of third party funding (“TPF”) costs in arbitral proceedings – Essar Oilfield Services Limited v Norscot Rig Management Pvt Limited.

      Essar concerns a long-running ICC arbitration where the successful party, Norscot, further succeeded in an application to recover its costs of litigation funding.
      The case is being hailed as a landmark judgment in some quarters and is expected to encourage more parties to engage in arbitration, especially if they have TPF. The equal and opposite is also true.

    • Middle and low earners pay bulk of taxes in Finland

      Nearly a third of all Finnish income taxes were paid by those earning between 35,000 and 54,999 euros last year. That group pays some 29 percent of all income taxes collected in Finland.

    • Can Trump make ‘trickle-down’ economics work?

      The theory: Lowering taxes for businesses and wealthy individuals leaves more cash in their pockets, spurring more investment and hiring, and the faster growth generates enough new tax income to pay for the cuts. The top tax rate under Reagan was slashed to 28% from 70%, and business deductions became more generous. About 16 million jobs were created during his two terms, and the economy grew as much as 7.3% in 1984.

      Trump proposes chopping the top individual marginal rate to 33% from 40% — as well as more modest cuts for those with low and moderate incomes — and the corporate rate to 15% from 35%. The many small-business owners taxed at the individual rate also would pay 15%.

    • No, Trump Didn’t Kill the TPP — Progressives Did

      If you read the headlines, Donald Trump’s election has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The headlines have it wrong.

      Donald Trump didn’t kill the TPP. Assuming we see the fight through to the bitter end, it’s the cross-border, cross-sector, progressive “movement of movements” that will have defeated the TPP.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Bernie Sanders would have easily beaten Donald Trump according to new pre-election poll

      Bernie Sanders would have crushed Donald Trump according to new pre-election poll.

      In the wake of the shocking election results, many have wondered what would have happened were the Democratic socialist chosen as the nominee.

      The poll, reported by the Huffington Post, found that the Vermont senator would have likely earned 56 per cent of the vote, while Mr Trump would have only received 44 per cent.

    • Historian who predicted Trump’s win says he’ll be impeached

      A political historian and professor who predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidency has a new bet: Trump will be impeached.

      “I’m going to make another prediction,” Allan Lichtman told The Washington Post Friday. “This one is not based on a system; it’s just my gut. They don’t want Trump as president, because they can’t control him. He’s unpredictable. They’d love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I’m quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

      Lichtman isn’t the first to predict that Trump could be impeached. University of Utah Law Professor Christopher Lewis Peterson wrote a 23-page article explaining the legal reasons Congress should impeach Trump. And on Friday, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore told MSNBC reporters he predicts Trump will either be impeached or resign before his term is up.

    • “Hitler’s only kidding about the antisemitism” New York Times, 1922

      “Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”

      “You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them.”

    • My Nightmare Trump Prediction Came True—Now What?

      A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair outlining what seemed at the time like an improbably absurd argument—how Donald Trump, then a lunatic-fringe candidate with no political credibility, could somehow win the White House. His path to victory, I suggested, ran through traditionally Democratic strongholds such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where I detected a unique hunger for an outsider. For months, I made a similar argument to my so-called “elite” friends who work in politics, the media, and the financial-services industry. And for months, they all laughed me off. Then, on Tuesday evening, Trump rode a path through the Rust Belt all the way to the White House.

      In retrospect, this elite ignorance was one of the factors powering Trump’s success. Ever since May, the “smartest” people in America, from both parties, seemed to believe that a Trump victory was more or less unthinkable. In fact, Republicans believed this so steadfastly that, as recently as last month, they were protesting for Trump to withdraw from the ticket. Did this result in a certain complacency among the Hillary Clinton campaign and her supporters (perhaps roused belatedly by James Comey’s provocation)? It’s hard to say for sure, but it likely played a role in depressing voter turnout.

    • Electoral college should change its mind and make Hillary Clinton president, say millions of signatories to petition

      There’s only one group of people who can – very theoretically – stop the result of the Presidential election. And millions of people are calling on them to do so.

      A petition arguing that the result of the election should be overturned has been signed by nearly 2.5 million people, all of whom are asking that Hillary Clinton becomes president.

      Those behind the petition are arguing that since Ms Clinton is easily winning the popular vote – by as many as millions of ballots – she should be elected president. It also argues that Donald Trump is not fit to be the president and so shouldn’t be allowed to take his position.

    • Donald Trump could still theoretically not be president because of ‘faithless electors’ and the electoral college

      It’s still theoretically possible for Donald Trump not to become president. But the near-impossibility all depends on the electoral college and the strange US system.

      Donald Trump might have won the election by getting more of the votes in the electoral college than Hillary Clinton did. But strictly and legally, it’s not the election that just happened that matters: it’s the one where the members of the electoral college go and represent their voters and pick their candidate.

      That’s due to happen on 12 December, at meetings in each state where all Republican or Democrat representatives – depending on how each state voted – will cast their vote. And it will almost certainly go one way, with most of the electors casting their ballots for Donald Trump and making him President.

    • Exclusive: Riding Trump wave, Breitbart News plans U.S., European expansion

      The right-wing Breitbart News Network is expanding its U.S. operations and launching sites in Germany and France, its U.S. editor-in-chief told Reuters, as it seeks to monetize the anger and anti-immigrant sentiment unleashed by Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign.

      The planned expansion is one sign of how the right-wing media landscape is shifting in the wake of Trump’s campaign to provide a platform for the more radical views that helped fuel the Republican candidate’s shock election victory on Tuesday.

    • Why we need a new Democratic Party

      As a first step, I believe it necessary for the members and leadership of the Democratic National Committee to step down and be replaced by people who are determined to create a party that represents America – including all those who feel powerless and disenfranchised, and who have been left out of our politics and left behind in our economy.

      The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people’s party – a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican party, which is about to take over all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.

      What happened in America Tuesday should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

    • Spoiled Americans now want to flee what they created

      The reactions of many Americans to the Trump victory is a symptom of their political immaturity.

    • Trump’s victory over Clinton was sealed 40 years ago

      In the afterglow of Donald Trump’s historic presidential victory, the Democratic firing squad is already out, looking for someone to blame.

      It’s time to look in the mirror.

      Despite being a historically weak candidate, Hillary Clinton’s demise wasn’t just about Hillary Clinton.

      Clinton was the final lifeline to a neoliberal bubble built by the Clintons and many others—that finally popped on November 8th, 2016.

    • The U.S. presidential election of 1876: votes, cannabis and intellectual property

      Let’s step back from the supercharged atmosphere of this week’s electoral events and focus on a curious side-show. First, perhaps for the sixth
      time in U.S. electoral history, the winner of the electoral vote did not win the popular vote. Second, several American states were simultaneously holding various ballot initiatives on the legalization of cannabis. This Kat began to wonder: has there ever been a juxtapose between the two in connection with any previous presidential election? Mirabile dictu—the answer is “yes”, the election of 1876. And in this lies a unique tale about Samuel J. Tilden, Tilden’s Extract, and the world of intellectual property during that period.

    • Trump election: Juncker warns president may upset US ties with Europe

      Donald Trump’s election risks upsetting EU ties with the US “fundamentally and structurally”, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has warned.

      “We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works,” Mr Juncker told students in Luxembourg.

      The Commission chief predicted that two years would be wasted while Mr Trump “tours a world he doesn’t know”.

      His remarks contrasted with other EU leaders’ more muted reaction to the Tuesday’s shock election result.

    • Donald Trump blocks press access, in defiance of long standing practices

      Donald Trump is keeping Americans in the dark about his earliest conversations and decisions as president-elect, bucking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on its new leader.

      Mr Trump on Thursday refused to allow journalists to travel with him to Washington for his historic first meetings with President Barack Obama and congressional leaders. The Republican’s top advisers rebuffed news organisations’ requests for a small “pool” of journalists to trail him as he attended the meetings.

    • Trump fills the swamp with more lobbyists

      In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. by, among other things, introducing tough new restrictions on lobbying.

      “I am proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again,” Trump said during the October 17 appearance in Green Bay, Wisconsin where he first used the “drain the swamp” line.

    • The bad news the Government released during the week of the US election

      As the bitter and often fraught presidential battle across the Atlantic – and to the surprise of many, the election of Donald Trump, a billionaire businessman with little experience of the political machinery of Washington – came to a conclusion this week, many of the front pages in the UK and the commentary focused on the drama unfolding in the States.

      But here The Independent looks at some of the news and reports released by the UK Government this week that appear to have slipped under the radar.

      According to Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, ministers have slipped out a deluge of embarrassing announcements because Parliament is in recess. He added: “The Tories might think they can take things for granted while the world looks away, aghast at the election of Donald Trump but my party will be keeping a total focus on them and the damaging policies they are pushing through”.

    • Donald Trump presidency: Memo from an old friend of the US
    • Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook fake news didn’t sway election

      Mark Zuckerberg addressed growing criticism of Facebook’s ascendant power to sway public opinion, saying the “small amount” of fake news that spread on the social network during the election did not influence the outcome.

      “To think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said Thursday evening during the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

      Zuckerberg said people underestimated support for president-elect Donald Trump. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.”

      His remarks came as Trump’s presidential win prompted Silicon Valley soul searching, with some wondering whether the tools created here had run amok.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The Spanish Government The Latest To Try To Ban Memes

      It would be sort of fun to watch the more authoritarian governments of the world attempt to combat internet memes with censorship if it weren’t both so damaging to the free speech ideals I hold so dear and if recent, ahem, events weren’t making these stories hit a little closer to home than they would have but a few months ago. Countries like Russia and Indonesia have both taken steps to attempt to make illegal the time-honored tradition of putting up a famous person’s picture and then typing words across it. Despite both governments’ insisting that these legislative attempts are all to do with protecting people’s honor and/or quelling false information about the subjects of these memes, the truth is that the aims behind them are more to do with clamping down on dissident speech and protecting those in power from criticism. That, indeed, is why these laws tend to be worded so vaguely. Vague enough, in fact, that it’s quite clear that they can be used to criminalize pretty much any speech that the ruling government doesn’t like.

    • Angola: Blocking rap concert is state censorship

      Ahead of the planned livestream of a concert this evening in Luanda by Luaty Beirão – also known as Ikonoklasta – and MCK, two well-known rappers and critics of the Angolan government, Tjiurimo Hengari, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Southern Africa said:

      “Angolan authorities must ensure that the rappers’ concert takes place without any further interference by the police, who blocked it over the weekend.”

      “The unexplained police intervention has potentially far-reaching consequences for freedom of assembly and artistic expression in the country, and smacks of state censorship of Luaty Beirão and MCK for their criticism of Angola’s government.”

    • Censorship: High School Makes 18-Year-Old Girl Remove ‘Hillary for Prison’ T-Shirt

      Boca Raton High School in Palm Beach County, Florida, trampled an 18-year-old girl’s free speech rights: the school forced her to change out of a T-shirt that bore the political message “Hillary for Prison.”

      The provocative T-shirt drew the ire of student Maxine Yeakle’s classmates, who said they considered all supporters of Donald Trump to be racist, according to The Sun Sentinel. Their criticisms became disruptive, and as a result, Yeakle was sent to the principal’s office. The disrupters were not punished: only the girl whose political advocacy inspired the others to misbehave was punished.

    • Hey UN: leave the media censorship to North Korea

      The United Nations isn’t all that into me.

      While hundreds of journalists have been planning their arrival in Morocco for months to attend its ​fancy-pants ​climate change conference this week, I’ve only just recently been given “permission” to attend because the global organization doesn’t like what I might have to say. It worries I’m advocate, not a journalist, and that maybe my reporting won’t be “helpful” in its fight.

    • The Daily Fix: Censorship should not become the new normal

      On Monday, Information and Broadcasting Minister Venkaiah Naidu decided to put on hold the order requiring NDTV India to go off air for a day on November 9 as a penalty for allegedly revealing strategically sensitive information during its broadcast about the militant attack on the Pathankot airbase in January.

      The decision was taken after the NDTV management asked for the order to be reviewed, Naidu said. He added somewhat belligerently that the decision to take the channel off air for a day was just and proper and dismissed criticism that the government was muzzling those who were critical of it.

    • China’s internet censorship is throttling software development

      If you’ve ever been to mainland China, chances are you’re familiar with the Great Firewall, the country’s all-encompassing internet censorship apparatus. You know the despair of not being able to open Facebook, the pain of going mute on Twitter. But with a good VPN, you can magic many of these inconveniences away – at least temporarily.

      For software developers based in China, however, it’s not that simple. You’re not just censored from certain websites. Basic building blocks that you use for product development are suddenly beyond your reach.

    • China Responds to U.S. Election With Heavy Censorship, Light Schadenfreude

      As news of Donald Trump’s shocking presidential win was reverberating around the world Wednesday, media coverage in China was oddly scant — and not by accident.

      China’s censors had issued advance orders to media outlets to restrict coverage of the U.S. democratic contest. All websites, news outlets and TV networks were told not to provide any live coverage or broadcasts of the election and to avoid “excessive” reporting of the story, a source who was briefed on the official instructions told the South China Morning Post.

      In response, coverage of Trump’s upset was carried only as a secondary story across the Chinese media landscape, with most outlets highlighting a meeting between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Vladimir Putin instead.

    • UBC Free Speech Club don red “MAGA” hats to challenge censorship on campus

      Yesterday also marked a coming out party for the Free Speech Club at the University of British Columbia. To mark the occasion, members of the club set up a table outside the student commons and proudly wore the now infamous red hats reading Make America Great Again and Make Canada Great Again.

    • Debate on digital age censorship

      “Censorship has been a topic of debate since it was introduced in 1916 – and never more so than it is now. Never before has the public had so much access to audiovisual material via so many channels,” says panel facilitator Diane Pivac of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.

      “We’ve invited a panel that brings a whole range of viewpoints to the discussion. We’re asking how do new technologies change and challenge censorship? And how equipped are our regulators to meet these challenges?” says Diane.

      “The Government is moving ahead with classification of online entertainment content, but is censorship still relevant?

      “And how do we balance the public’s right to freedom of expression against concern over young people’s ease of access to potentially harmful material?”

      [...]

      The panel debate is part of CENSORED – 100 Years of Film Censorship in NZ – a two-week programme featuring films that were once banned by New Zealand censors, documentaries, censors’ offcuts and discussion.

    • Could The U.S. Soon Be Making Movies To ‘Serve Socialism’ In China?

      China’s new film law may have an impact on the American movie business, which is increasingly influenced by China.

      The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, passed new laws to govern the world’s second largest film market Monday, reports Xinhua News Agency.

    • Azerbaijan reveals conditions for possible military censorship on media

      Azerbaijan can apply military censorship on media upon the declaration of martial law in the country.

      This is according to Article 1.0.3 of the revised Law “On martial law”, the parliament told APA on Thursday.

      Military censorship includes pre-coordination of mass media information by military and state authorities, control on correspondences for the purpose of preventing illegal dissemination of state secrets, on TV and radio broadcast as well as phone and radio talks.

    • Angry Saudi intellectuals brand closure of cafe and cultural space as ‘censorship’

      Students and book lovers in Riyadh have expressed their dismay that a popular artistic spot in the city has been shut down and all its books removed pending an investigation by the Saudi authorities.

      Rawi Cafe located on the campus of South Imam University posted pictures of its previously dark, wooden, library-like interior stripped of all its books to social media last week, alerting customers that the business had been shut down by the Ministry for Culture and Information.

      Rawi had previously been popular with students, researchers, and others in Riyadh’s intellectual community.

    • Top media bodies condemn NDTV India ban, term it arbitrary
    • Dear NDTV, Have You Learnt Your Lesson Now?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Users flock to encrypted email service after Trump win

      Donald Trump’s surprise win has been good news for end-to-end encrypted services. The Swiss company Protonmail announced today that weekly sign-ups had doubled after Donald Trump’s surprise win on Tuesday, although the company did not disclose raw numbers for the jump. “Regardless of which side of the political spectrum you are on, Trump’s control over the NSA is now an indisputable fact, and we think it is worth taking a closer look at what this means,” CEO Andy Yen wrote in an accompanying post.

    • Peter Thiel is joining Donald Trump’s transition team

      In addition to Thiel, Vice President-elect Mike Pence will act as chairman for the transition team, according to the statement. Three of Trump’s children — Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump — will serve alongside Thiel on the committee. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi also made the list, as well as RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

    • Peter Thiel Said to Join Trump’s Presidential Transition Team

      Thiel, who was one of the few tech industry executives who supported the Republican candidate, will play a role in vetting presidential appointments and selecting which of Trump’s campaign promises will become the policies of America’s 45th president, according to people familiar with the discussions. Thiel’s title and precise role are still being determined, the people said. The Huffington Post earlier reported that Thiel would lead the transition team.

      Speaking for Trump as a delegate at the Republican National Convention this summer and again a week before the election, Thiel echoed what had become a popular refrain among Trump’s electorate: government is broken and outsiders are the only ones who can fix it.

    • Donald Trump Will Have His Eye on You

      Edward Snowden warned us about the abuses of our national security state. Now look who’s in charge of it.

    • Trump and mass surveillance: You were warned

      The danger of all of this one day falling into the »wrong« hands ought to have been obvious from the very beginning.

      It’s naive to claim that Big Brotherism is a problem in just some cases, used by some political forces, with some specific justifications. Mass surveillance is a problem by its very nature and to its core – regardless who is in power. Always.

    • Feds Can Unlock Most Devices They Need To Get Into, FBI Admits

      The FBI is able to unlock or access data on most of the phones and computers it encounters during its investigations, as well as those of local and state cops, according to the bureau’s General Counsel Jim Baker.

      So far in the fiscal year 2016 (from Oct. 1, 2015 until Sept. 30, 2016), the FBI has encountered passwords or passcodes—that is locked phones or laptops—in 2,095 out of 6,814 (31 percent) mobile devices analyzed by its forensic labs, Baker said according to attendants at a public meeting on encryption and the challenges it poses to law enforcement, celebrated in Washington D.C. on Friday.

      And even for those 2,095 devices that were locked, the fed’s investigators were able to break in in 1,210 cases, and couldn’t unlock around 880 devices, Baker reportedly said. In other words, in the vast majority of cases (87%), the FBI was able to access the data it needed.

    • Facebook Bug Tells Users They Are Dead

      It’s a fitting end to a strange week. When many Facebook users logged on to their accounts on Friday afternoon, they discovered the social network had declared them to be deceased.

      The lethal online epidemic is causing Facebook FB to display a small memorial message above users’ regular homepage profile. In the case of my editor, Rachel King, Fortune tech writers who visited her page discovered a “Remembering Rachel King” message, and a wish to remember to remember and celebrate her life.

    • Facebook Is Utterly Dominating America’s Social Media Use

      Social media is playing an increasingly influential role in our lives. Even if given the benefit of the doubt—believing that they are “tech” companies and not “media” companies—people are using Facebook and Twitter to gather news and information about world events, not just to find and follow friends.

    • The RCMP Used Police Databases and Social Media to Track Aboriginal Protestors

      The Royal Canadian Mounted Police used law enforcement databases and social media to identify indigenous protesters and then made their identities known to front-line officers, new documents show.

      “The year 2013 saw an increase across Canada in Aboriginal protests,” an RCMP document from 2015, obtained through an information request by Carleton University professor Jeffrey Monaghan and researcher Andy Crosby, states.

      In March of 2014, according to the document, the RCMP put a call out to its divisions across Canada and local police departments to hand over any information in their databases that might help the RCMP identify and track aboriginal protesters.

      This initiative was known as Project SITKA, and with this data from police and social media, the RCMP identified 313 activists across the country who attended protests “opposing natural resource development, particularly pipeline and shale gas expansion.” Those who attended anti-capitalist protests, and protests regarding missing and murdered indigenous women, were also targeted.

    • People in tech are freaking out about Donald Trump being given control of the NSA

      Last month, Wired published a story with the headline “Imagine if Donald Trump controlled the NSA.” Now there’s no need to imagine.

      Trump overcame all odds on Wednesday when he became the 45th president-elect of the United States. As a result, he’s about to gain control of the US intelligence agencies, including the NSA (National Security Agency).

      Tech workers and security campaigners have been quick to express concerns about handing control of the NSA to Trump.

    • MalwareMustDie closes blog in NSA/CIA spy protest

      MalwareMustDie, the white-hat security research group, has closed its blog in protest of alleged American espionage against friendly countries.

      MMD believes that US spy agencies have been installing backdoors on the servers of universities and other public institutions outside the United States.

      Shadow Brokers, which famously hacked the National Security Agency in the US and released supposed NSA hacking tools for anyone to use, recently published files containing the IP addresses of 49 countries they claim have been hacked by the NSA.

      According to the website SecurityAffairs.co, these hack attacks have been linked back to Equation Group, an NSA espionage group.

    • Trump’s election stokes fears of future NSA surveillance abuses

      They say you reap what you sow. The US is just weeks away from handing over massive surveillance powers to a man who has expressed enthusiasm for the idea of spying on those he sees as adversaries.

      It’s common knowledge that the US collects massive amounts of data on phone and internet communications involving both its own citizens and people abroad. The National Security Agency (NSA) can read text messages, track social media activity and hack into your computer’s webcam. Since Edward Snowden’s revelations on spying in 2013, US president Barack Obama has been criticised by privacy activists for not doing enough to curb such programmes.

      Now, his failure to act threatens to turn into a cautionary tale with a dark moral: don’t build a surveillance state, because you don’t know who will end up in charge of it.

      During his campaign, president-elect Donald Trump railed against Apple when the tech giant resisted unlocking the iPhone of one of the perpetrators of the mass shooting in San Bernadino, California. In July, he invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton and publish her deleted emails.

      He has also spoken in favour of allowing the surveillance of mosques in the US, as New York City did after the 9/11 attacks, and of asking Muslims to register in a federal database and authorising the NSA to collect metadata. “I tend to err on the side of security,” he said last year.

      When Trump takes office in January, how will he decide to wield the government’s surveillance powers? He could try to roll back the reforms that Obama has put in place, such as limitations on when the agency can collect people’s data and how it can be stored. He can decide which countries the US spies on. He might choose to push much harder against companies that decline to build government “back doors” to their technology.

      Trump has also promised to exact revenge on personal enemies, such as the women who accused him of sexual assault. Back when details of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping came to light, analysts were caught snooping on their partners and love interests. Could Trump take similar advantages?

    • Home Monitoring Will Soon Monitor You

      I worry. About my family. My house. My dumb possessions, and my treasured ones. Doesn’t everyone? “Happiness,” Don Draper opines in Mad Men’s pilot, “is the freedom from fear.” Companies sell people solutions to those fears—even if they are contrived ones. Listerine, invented to cure a made-up condition called halitosis. Nike, whose kicks are used for sloth more than athleticism. Apple, whose modernist, glass-and-aluminum shields hide compulsion.

    • Privacy experts fear Donald Trump running global surveillance network

      Privacy activists, human rights campaigners and former US security officials have expressed fears over the prospect of Donald Trump controlling the vast global US and UK surveillance network.

      They criticised Barack Obama’s administration for being too complacent after the 2013 revelations by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, and making only modest concessions to privacy concerns rather than carrying out major legislative changes.

      The concern comes after Snowden dismissed fears for his safety if Trump, who called him “a spy who has caused great damage in the US”, was to strike a deal with Vladimir Putin to have him extradited.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Donald Trump May Select an Architect of Bush’s Torture Program to Run CIA

      Donald Trump may select Jose Rodriguez, one of the primary architects of the George W. Bush torture program, to run the Central Intelligence Agency, according to a law firm with close ties to Trump.

      Rodriguez, the former director of the National Clandestine Service, helped developed the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of “waterboarding,” the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees.

    • Glenn Greenwald: Trump will have vast powers. He can thank Democrats for them.

      Liberals are understandably panicked about what Donald Trump can carry out. “We have a president-elect with authoritarian tendencies assuming a presidency that has never been more powerful ,” Franklin Foer wrote this past week in Slate. Trump will command not only a massive nuclear arsenal and the most robust military in history, but also the ability to wage numerous wars in secret and without congressional authorization; a ubiquitous system of electronic surveillance that can reach most forms of human communication and activity; and countless methods for shielding himself from judicial accountability, congressional oversight and the rule of law — exactly what the Constitution was created to prevent. Trump assumes the presidency “at the peak of its imperial powers,” as Foer put it.

      Sen. Barack Obama certainly saw it that way when he first ran for president in 2008. Limiting executive-power abuses and protecting civil liberties were central themes of his campaign. The former law professor repeatedly railed against the Bush-Cheney template of vesting the president with unchecked authorities in the name of fighting terrorism or achieving other policy objectives. “This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide,” he said in 2007. Listing an array of controversial Bush-Cheney policies, from warrantless domestic surveillance to due-process-free investigations and imprisonment, he vowed: “We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.”

    • The Democratic Party deserves so much of the blame for electing Donald Trump

      Election Day 2016 was a miserable failure for the Democratic Party. When all the votes are counted, it appears that Donald Trump will have won 30 states and at least 300 Electoral College votes. After months of tough talk, Democrats not only lost the presidency, but lost the Senate and continued to lose the House. It was a thorough drubbing. Calling it anything other than that is a damn lie.

      But I must linger there for a while. The Democratic Party has mastered lying to itself and its core constituencies. It claims a progressive identity, but is as moderate and lukewarm as it has ever been on so many issues that matter to everyday people. It claims to be tough on Wall Street, financial corruption and white collar crime, but is awash in donations from lobbyists and executives in the industry. Democrats claim to be the party of working people, but so often seem to be deeply out of touch with their problems and needs.

    • The idea that America ‘doesn’t talk about’ racism is absurd

      As we confront our nation’s election of a man who dwells blithely in stereotype and caricature, many of us are wondering what we are to do as responsible citizens faced with what many of us regard as a political and moral catastrophe. One thing someone opposed to Donald Trump’s unenlightened, “mean boy” perspective on women, nonwhites, the disabled, Muslims, and others might consider doing is to avoid imitating him.

      It may seem perhaps the least likely thing an anti-Trumpian would do, but there’s a word we might consider tempering our usage of in the coming years, given that the way we use it opens us to certain charges involving kettles and the color black. I refer to the word “racist.”

      The Martian anthropologist would recognize no difference between the way those accused of being witches were treated in 17th-century Salem, Mass., and the way many innocent people are being accused of “racism” today. Those appalled by the way people were tarred with the Communist label in the 1940s and 1950s must recognize that America has blundered into the same censorious mob mentality in assailing as “racists,” just recently, people such as Ellen DeGeneres — for Photoshopping herself riding on Jamaican gold medal sprinter Usain Bolt’s back in celebration of his win — and Hillary Clinton — for referring to the black men terrorizing poor black neighborhoods as “superpredators” in describing plans for protecting people in those neighborhoods from such crime.

    • ‘You voted Trump!’: Elderly motorist beaten in street by gang of youths as girl screams abuse

      This shocking footage shows an elderly motorist being beaten in the street by youths as a girl can be heard screaming “you voted Trump!”

      The man is repeatedly punched and kicked in the face by the youngsters in what has been described online as an alleged race attack.

      The incident took place in the middle of the day in Chicago following Donald Trump’s shock victory in the US presidential election.

      The driver struggles to his feet at one point as fists rain down on him and shouts at one of the gang to get out of his car.

    • Woman fabricated story of being attacked and robbed of hijab at Louisiana college by man wearing Donald Trump hat

      A Louisana college student admitted she made up reports of being attacked by two men, one she said was wearing a Donald Trump hat.

      The Lafayette Police department say they are no longer investigating her claims. The University of Louisiana would not disclose whether they were taking disciplinary action against the student, citing federal law prohibition.

      Authorities said the University of Louisiana student reported the alleged robbery Wednesday morning, and claimed one of the apparent attackers wore a white Donald Trump cap, according to The Advertiser.

      Her claim drew on fears of anti-Muslim backlash in the wake of Mr Trump’s election to the US presidency. His campaign stoked fears of Muslim immigration to the US that appealed to much of his predominantly white, nationalistic supporters. Multiple reports of hate crimes against Muslims, Latinos, black people, and the LGBTQ community have already surfaced.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Will Offer a Lower-Quality Video Option But Without a Discount

      After T-Mobile and Sprint introduced lower-cost wireless plans in return for customers accepting lower quality video streaming, AT&T is following suit. Sort of.

      The second-largest wireless carrier said it would introduce a feature starting next year called “Stream Saver” to let customers voluntarily downgrade streaming video from any service—such as YouTube and Netflix—to DVD quality. But AT&T will not lower prices or give a discount to customers activating the lower-quality stream, which would use much less data than watching a typical high-definition video stream. The data used will also still count against a customer’s monthly data allowance.

      AT&T emphasized that the feature, which will be turned on by default, was intended to help customers use less data, essentially stretching their monthly allowance to go further. Customers can opt turn off the feature at any time.

    • Trump and net neutrality: How Republicans can make the rules go away

      The net neutrality rules implemented during Barack Obama’s presidency don’t seem likely to survive Donald Trump’s administration.

      Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler crafted the rules to survive lawsuits filed by Internet service providers, and the strategy worked when a federal appeals court upheld the rules in June of this year. But that doesn’t mean a new presidential administration can’t overturn them.

      The FCC rules say ISPs may not block or throttle lawful Internet traffic or speed up Web services in exchange for payments from online service providers. A similar set of net neutrality rules was previously struck down in court, leading to Wheeler’s decision to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The commission’s Title II authority was enough to put the rules on solid legal ground.

    • AT&T to limit video quality by default—even on unlimited data plans

      AT&T today said it will begin limiting the quality of mobile video for cellular data customers in early 2017. A new feature called “Stream Saver” will throttle video to DVD resolution of about 480p. Customers will be able to opt out of Stream Saver, but it will be enabled by default—even for customers with unlimited data, AT&T told Ars.

      AT&T will notify customers once Stream Saver has been activated and provide instructions for turning it off and back on, the company’s announcement said. Customers on limited data plans may appreciate the feature, as it could help them stay under their data caps. But AT&T’s decision to enable video throttling by default on unlimited plans that were sold without any mention of such limits has little benefit for customers. It could have some benefit only because AT&T reserves the right to throttle unlimited data plans when customers exceed 22GB a month and connect to a congested cell tower. Using less data for video will help keep “unlimited” customers under 22GB.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay Risks “Repeat Offender” Ban From Google

        The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites risk a “repeat offender” ban from Google, but not over copyright infringements. Google has updated its safe browsing service, used by modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, which will now block websites for a minimum of thirty days after being repeatedly marked as harmful.

      • University Bans BitTorrent to Stop Flood of Infringement Notices

        A university in Canada has taken sweeping action in an effort to stem the tide of piracy notices. The University of Calgary says that after banning BitTorrent usage on several networks, infringement notices immediately dropped by 90%. People wanting access to the protocol will now need to apply for an exemption.

      • EU Copyright Directive – privatised censorship and filtering of free speech

        The European Commission’s proposal on copyright attempts something very ambitious – two different measures that would restrict free speech, squeezed into a single article of a legislative proposal.

      • A joint dataset for the EU copyright consultation responses

        In March of 2016, the European Commission asked for your input on two specific issues of copyright reform: Freedom of panorama (the ability to freely share your photos of public places) and extra copyright for publishers.

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