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04.18.16

Links 18/4/2016: Linux 4.6 RC4, Tomb Raider for GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Keeping the Blockchain Open in the Shadow of Tech Giants

    You’ll find it parroted most in the open source community, particularly when Microsoft pulls stunts like their recent “partnering” with canonical to implement an Ubuntu-like Posix environment in Windows Ten. The phrase originates from the DOJ’s findings during the United States v. Microsoft Corp. antitrust case in 2003, as an internal standard for their technology development. Examples of Microsoft’s attempts at this methodology are pervasive in their offerings, including ActiveX and DirectX in the web and graphics software ecosystems, and recently, their involvement with the Linux community.

  • MEF, China Unicom, ON.Lab, Huawei Sign Open Source Agreement

    The MEF, China Unicom, ON.Lab, and Huawei are pleased to announce a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on using open source solutions to transform Central Offices and accelerate the industry transition to Third Network services. MOU partners will develop Proof of Concept use cases that illustrate how operators can deliver agile, assured, and orchestrated MEF-defined services by using open source software and open specification hardware. These use cases will serve as a stepping stone for deployable Third Network services that yield productivity-enhancing benefits for end customers.

  • Events

    • Mixing Linux and ZFS, LinuxFest NorthWest and More…

      It’s LinuxFest NorthWest time! I’ve never been to LFNW, but I have a soft spot in my heart for it’s hometown of Bellingham, Washington. Back in the day — we’re talking the late 1960s and early 70s — Bellingham was home to a hippie underground newspaper, Northwest Passage, that was known in counterculture circles of the day across the continent. Alas, the Passage has been gone since ’86, but its spirit seems to live on in a high techy, Linuxy sort of way at LFNW. From what I’ve seen, LFNW seems to be the most community driven and for-the–people of the major festivals in the U.S.

    • Reflections on Starting a Local FOSS Group

      Last Wednesday was no less than the third time the local FOSS group in Aalborg met. Today I’m looking back at how it all started so I thought I would share some thoughts that may help others who would like to spread free and open source software in their local area.

    • BrickHack 2016

      Last month at the Rochester Institute of Technology, BrickHack 2016 came to a close. BrickHack is an annual hackathon organized by students at RIT. Close to 300 people attend every year. This year was BrickHack’s second event.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • An introduction to Redox

        Back in March, a young operating system project attracted attention in the open source community. The project is called Redox and its developers are working on a Unix-like operating system written in the Rust language. The Redox operating system features a microkernel design (like MINIX), the permissive MIT license and some interesting design ideas.

        While I read a lot of opinions in March about the developers and their design goals, I encountered very little commentary on what it was like to use the young operating system itself. This lead me to become curious and download the project’s small installation ISO which is just 26MB in size.

      • Firefox 45.0.2 Has Been Released
      • Thunderbird 45.0 Has Been Released, Bringing New Features And Bug-Fixes
      • ‘BLATANTLY ILLEGAL’: 17 newspapers slam ex-Mozilla CEO’s new ad-blocking browser [Ed: means he does it right!]

        A group of the biggest US newspaper publishers — including Dow Jones, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Co. — have cosigned what they are calling a “cease and desist” letter (read it in full below) sent to the former Mozilla CEO’s new browser company.

      • A nail in the coffin for Firefox? Mozilla struggles to redefine browser

        A quiet announcement about a new Mozilla project sounded like a death knell for the Firefox browser.

        It wasn’t. But the project, called Tofino, reveals the technology challenges Mozilla faces more than a decade after Firefox’s debut. Hundreds of millions of people still use the browser, but its star is fading compared with Google’s Chrome.

        Mozilla released details about the Tofino project Friday, saying a six-person team at Mozilla will consider how to radically revamp Web browsers.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • LibreOffice

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Richard Stallman on Free Software: Freedom is Worth the Inconvenience

      Dr. Richard Stallman is an inductee of the internet hall of fame as well as the founder of the “Free Software” movement. In the words of Robert Grüning “Richard Stallman is like the Socrates of software, the money making colleagues are the sophists.” Another member of my audience said that Stallman is like Tron – he fights for the users. Yet Richard himself disliked both characterizations and called them misleading. So I suggest you check out my Singularity 1on1 interview with Richard Stallman, learn about the Free Software movement and judge for yourself.

    • DejaGnu 1.6 released

      DejaGnu 1.6 was released on April 15, 2016. Important changes include decent SSH support, many bug fixes and a much improved manual. Many old and defunct board files have been removed.

    • Libgcrypt 1.7.0 released

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Free, high-quality education resources from the National Science Digital Library

        The use of open educational resources is growing. Open education involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available to all without the restrictions of copyright and proprietary licensing models. According to U.S. Secretary of Education John King, “Openly licensed educational resources can increase equity by providing all students, regardless of zip code, access to high-quality learning materials that have the most up-to-date and relevant content.”

    • Open Hardware or OS

      • Redox: a Rust-based microkernel

        Creating a new operating system from scratch is a daunting task—witness the slow progress of GNU Hurd, for example. But it would be hard to argue that the existing systems are the be-all and end-all of how we interact with computer hardware. At least some of the deficiencies in today’s offerings can arguably be traced to the language used to implement them; C, for all its power, has some fairly serious flaws that lead to bugs and security holes of various sorts. So it is interesting to see a new entrant that uses the Rust language, which is focused on memory safety. The result is Redox, which is still far from ready for everyday use, but may provide an interesting counterpoint to Linux, the BSDs, OS X, Windows, and others.

      • Announcing Kestrel-4

        Based on the recent and wild success of the Kestrel-3 home-brew computer project, I am happy to announce my next project for the open computing masses. Say hello to the Kestrel-4.

      • An Open-Source Steam Controller Driver is in Development

        What properly holds me back from buying one is the fact I need to use Steam to use the controller, and the few games I do play aren’t available on Steam (e.g, SuperTuxKart, MAME, etc).

      • Open-source 3D printed WireBeings robot allows for voice controlled wifi functionality at a bargain

        When I was a child growing up in the 1980s robots were something found exclusively in the realm of science fiction. As time passed, the 1990s emerged and Honda’s Asimo started making appearances in tech-centric television programming on the Discovery Channel or TLC (this, during an era when those networks still focused on educational content).

  • Programming/Development

    • RFC: EfficiencySanitizer

      We plan to build a suite of compiler-based dynamic instrumentation tools for analyzing targeted performance problems. These tools will all live under a new “EfficiencySanitizer” (or “esan”) sanitizer umbrella, as they will share significant portions of their implementations.

    • Google Is Working On An Efficiency Sanitizer To Improve Performance Problems

      Derek Bruening of Google has announced the company’s interest in creating an “Efficiency Sanitizer” for LLVM/Clang for analyzing targeted performance problems.

      Worked on Google and other compoanies have been Address Sanitizer, Memory Sanitizer, Thread Sanitizer, Leak Sanitizer, Data Flow Sanitizer, and other sanitizers found in LLVM/Clang some of which have also been ported to GCC. These sanitizers have been incredibly helpful for developers in catching various problems within program code-bases, including many security issues. The latest focus being pursued by Google’s compiler engineers is on an Efficiency Sanitizer.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • 10 Inventors Who Died Because Of Their Own Inventions

      These people made contributions to the mankind but they would have never thought that their own creation would be held accountable for their last breath.

    • Actor Wil Wheaton Brings Love of Arts to STEM Festival

      Actor and writer Wil Wheaton wants to “add an A to the STEM acronym and make it STEAM.” He’ll be speaking at the USA Science and Engineering Festival April 16-17 in Washington about why he thinks the arts should be represented in the acronym commonly used when referring to the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

      Wheaton, 43, best known for his role as Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the 1980s and ’90s and more recently as a fictionalized version of himself on “The Big Bang Theory,” says that he has always been fascinated by science and technology, and has made it a goal of his to ensure that kids get the encouragement they need to pursue those fields.

    • Kettering Cosmos: How school children exposed Soviet secret

      The existence of the Plesetsk site was not admitted by the USSR for a further 17 years.

      It was reported at the time that the schoolboys had “beat the Americans” in discovering the site. Bob Christy, another pupil who participated in the experiment, thinks they probably knew of its existence, but the school’s work made sure the information was made public.

      “It wasn’t about studying the Russian space programme, it was about helping children understand space,” he said.

  • Hardware

    • Intel planning for thousands of job cuts, internal sources say

      Intel is preparing a significant round of job cuts across business units this spring, according to multiple sources inside the company familiar with its plans.

      The cutbacks will reduce employment in some parts of the business by double-digit percentages, according to Intel insiders, amounting to thousands of job cuts across the company by the end of the year. The planned downsizing could begin soon after Intel reports its first-quarter financial results Tuesday, though sources say timing and specifics remain fluid.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto’s Most Dangerous Product?

      On 13 April, the EU Parliament called on the European Commission to restrict certain permitted uses of the toxic herbicide glyphosate, best known in Monsanto’s ‘Roundup’ formulation.

      Glyphosate was last year determined to be “probably carcinogenic” by the WHO, and the resolution calls for no approval for many uses now considered acceptable, including use in or close to public parks, playgrounds and gardens and use where integrated pest management systems are sufficient for necessary weed control. The resolution falls short of an outright ban called for by many and also calls for the renewal of the licence for glyphosate to be limited to just seven years instead of the 15 proposed by the Commission.

      Nearly 700 MEPs voted on the seven-year licensing of glyphosate and the vote was passed by 374 votes in favor to 225 votes against.

    • This is what a dying NHS looks like

      If you don’t believe the Tories would destroy the NHS it’s time to face reality. It’s happening right now. The NHS is critically unwell, and whether it’s deliberate or not, death’s door is open.

  • Security

    • Backdoor in JBoss Java Platform Puts 3.2 Million Servers at Risk
    • Let’s Encrypt: threat or opportunity to other certificate authorities?

      Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority (CA) that just left beta stage, that provides domain name-validated (DV) X.509 certificates for free and in an automated way: users just have to run a piece of software on their server to get and install a certificate, resulting in a valid TLS setup.

    • Making it easier to deploy TPMTOTP on non-EFI systems

      On EFI systems you can handle this by sticking the secret in an EFI variable (there’s some special-casing in the code to deal with the additional metadata on the front of things you read out of efivarfs). But that’s not terribly useful if you’re not on an EFI system. Thankfully, there’s a way around this. TPMs have a small quantity of nvram built into them, so we can stick the secret there. If you pass the -n argument to sealdata, that’ll happen. The unseal apps will attempt to pull the secret out of nvram before falling back to looking for a file, so things should just magically work.

    • Badlock Vulnerability Falls Flat Against Its Hype

      Weeks of anxiety and concern over the Badlock vulnerability ended today with an anticlimactic thud.

    • Samba 4.4.2, 4.3.8 and 4.2.11 Security Releases Available for Download
    • The Internet of bricks

      One of the promises of the “Internet of things” is that it gives us greater control over our homes, gadgets, and more. Free software also offers that sort of promise, along with the idea that, if necessary, we can support our own gadgetry when the manufacturer moves on to some new shiny object. The currently unfolding story of the Revolv hub shows that, in many cases, these promises are empty. The devices we depend on and think we own can, in fact, be turned into useless bricks at the manufacturer’s whim.

      The Revolv “M1″ home-automation hub was one of many products designed to bring home control to the Internet. It is able to control lights, heating, and more, all driven by smartphone-based applications. The product was sufficiently successful to catch the eye of the business-development folks at Nest, who acquired the company; Nest was acquired in turn by Google, and is now a separate company under the “Alphabet” umbrella.

    • Underwriters Labs refuses to share new IoT cybersecurity standard

      UL, the 122-year-old safety standards organisation whose various marks (UL, ENEC, etc.) certify minimum safety standards in fields as diverse as electrical wiring, cleaning products, and even dietary supplements, is now tackling the cybersecurity of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with its new UL 2900 certification. But there’s a problem: UL’s refusal to freely share the text of the new standard with security researchers leaves some experts wondering if UL knows what they’re doing.

      When Ars requested a copy of the UL 2900 docs to take a closer look at the standard, UL (formerly known as Underwriters Laboratories) declined, indicating that if we wished to purchase a copy—retail price, around £600/$800 for the full set—we were welcome to do so. Independent security researchers are also, we must assume, welcome to become UL retail customers.

    • Combined malware threat is robbing banks of millions every day

      THE SECURITY attack dogs at IBM have uncovered two normally solo malware threats working together to rob banks in the US and Canada.

      IBM’s X-Force division has dubbed the combined malware Stealma and Louise GozNym by merging the names of the individual, but now friendly, Gozi ISFB and Nymaim.

      “It appears that the operators of Nymaim have recompiled its source code with part of the Gozi ISFB source code, creating a combination that is being actively used in attacks against more than 24 US and Canadian banks, stealing millions of dollars so far,” said IBM in a blog post.

    • Flaw-finding Ruby on Rails bot steams past humans
    • Future of secure systems in the US

      Security and privacy are important to many people. Given the personal and financial importance of data stored in computers (traditional or mobile), users don’t want criminals to get a hold of it. Companies know this, which is why both Apple IOS and Google Android both encrypt their local file systems by default now. If a bill anything like what’s been proposed becomes law, users that care about security are going to go elsewhere. That may end up being non-US companies’ products or US companies may shift operations to localities more friendly to secure design. Either way, the US tech sector loses. A more accurate title would have been Technology Jobs Off-Shoring Act of 2016.

    • Software end of life matters!

      Anytime you work on a software project, the big events are always new releases. We love to get our update and see what sort of new and exciting things have been added. New versions are exciting, they’re the result of months or years of hard work. Who doesn’t love to talk about the new cool things going on?

    • JBOSS Backdoor opens 3 million servers at risk of attacks

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Hillary’s Neocon Problem

      Hillary Clinton has a dark history in foreign policy. Indeed, if the Nuremberg principles were applied evenly, her name would certainly be on the docket, along with her former boss in the White House, who is actually less of a hawk than she. When Donald Trump publicly expressed a willingness to negotiate with Russia over international conflicts, she referred to such an idea as putting “Christmas in the Kremlin.” She’s red-baited Bernie Sanders for his support for the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions back in the 1980s. Clinton basically backs not “political realism,” but the more imperial tradition of neoconservative “American exceptionalism,” a chauvinist mindset by which the US sets the political, economic, and military priorities of the world and the places and times of its interventions, sometimes with allied support, sometimes without, at its own discretion.

    • Is Hillary Clinton Above the Law?

      Secretary of State Clinton was harsh on subordinates who were careless with classified information, but those rules apparently weren’t for her, a troubling double standard, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • Young Iraqis Overwhelmingly Consider U.S. Their Enemy, Poll Says

      The poll was conducted by Penn Schoen Berland, a public relations and market research firm co-founded by controversial strategist Mark Penn, and was sponsored by a Dubai-based affiliate of Burson Marsteller, once described as “the PR firm for evil.” Still, the undertaking, as outlined by organizers, sounds ambitious. It included 250 face-to-face interviews in three Iraqi cities, plus another 3,250 interviews in 15 other countries throughout the Arab world, all with men and women ages 18-24 “selected to provide an accurate reflection of each nation’s geographic and socio-economic make-up.” It claims an error rate of plus or minus 1.65 percent.

    • Pope Francis Takes On ‘Just War’ Theory

      The Catholic Church, which over the centuries has blessed many dreadful wars, is shifting to an anti-war position favored by Pope Francis and more in line with Jesus’s teachings, writes ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

    • Deadly Myths: Iraq ‘Surge’ General Calls for ‘Surge 2.0’

      There is no question that the neocons in the room, whose lavish sinecures come to them courtesy of the military-industrial complex, were hyperventilating in anticipation of another major US invasion of Iraq (and Syria). War is the greatest DC jobs program and the hits just keep coming.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Lawsuits Charge that 3M Knew About the Dangers of Its Chemicals

      FOR DECADES, 3M was the primary producer of C8, or PFOA, and was the sole producer of a related chemical known as PFOS. But while DuPont was caught up in a massive class-action suit over C8, 3M has largely avoided public scrutiny and serious legal or financial consequences for its role in developing and selling these industrial pollutants.

      In February, however, a state court in Minnesota, where the company is headquartered, allowed a lawsuit against 3M to move forward. And late last year, lawyers filed a class-action suit in Decatur, Alabama, home to one of 3M’s biggest plants. Both lawsuits charge that 3M knew about the health hazards posed by the perfluorinated chemicals it was manufacturing and using to make carpet coating, Scotchgard, firefighting foam, and other products — and that the company knew the chemicals were spreading beyond its sites. With PFCs cropping up in drinking water around the country and all over the world, the two lawsuits raise the possibility that 3M may finally be held accountable in a court of law.

    • WWF: Finland has spent its natural resources for 2016

      The environmental group WWF Finland says that as of today, the country has already used up its share of natural resources for the entire year. Energy production, traffic emissions and food production are the top ills.

    • We Just Crushed The Global Record For Hottest Start Of Any Year

      NASA reports that this was the hottest three-month start (January to March) of any year on record. It beat the previous record — just set in 2015 — by a stunning 0.7°F (0.39°C). Normally, such multi-month records are measured in the hundredths of a degree

      Last month was the hottest February on record by far. It followed the hottest January on record by far, which followed the hottest December by far, which followed the hottest November on record by far, which followed the hottest October on record by far. Some may detect a pattern here.

    • Going out, I found I was really going in: John Muir’s spiritual and political journey

      However, his friends were worried. Muir’s siblings pleaded with him to abandon his “clouds and flowers” for more practical pursuits. “You must be social John,” Jeanne Carr, a transcendentalist friend and spiritual mentor had written him, trying to coax him to leave the mountains and re-enter public life. “I could envy you your solitude, but there may be too much of it.” Carr felt strongly that Muir had a singular gift for carrying the transcendentalist vision of a sacred nature to a wider public, a vision she believed could help to dismantle the industrial consensus that saw nature only as a commercial resource to be exploited.

  • Finance

    • US Corporate Tax Cheats Hiding $1.4 Trillion in Profits in Offshore Accounts

      The biggest tax dodger is technology giant Apple, with $181 billion held offshore. General Electric had the second-largest stash, at $119 billion, enough to repay four times over the $28 billion GE received in federal guarantees during the 2008 Wall Street crash. Microsoft had $108 billion in overseas accounts, with companies like Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, IBM, Cisco Systems, Google, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson rounding out the top ten.

      Overseas tax havens have been the focus of recent revelations about tax scams by wealthy individuals, based on the leak of the “Panama Papers,” documents from a single Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, involving 214,000 offshore shell companies. The firm’s clients included 29 billionaires and 140 top politicians worldwide, among them a dozen heads of government.

    • Paul Krugman Is Proof That To Be Successful Even As An “Objective” Academic You Must Serve The One Percent
    • Bernie Sanders publishes tax returns showing $205,000 earnings following Hillary Clinton’s challenge

      Bernie Sanders has revealed he earns $205,000 dollars (£145,000) a year, after being challenged by Hillary Clinton to publish his tax returns.

      Mr Sanders’ annual income, which is shared with his wife, is less than his multimillionaire rival made for three recent speeches delivered to Goldman Sachs employees.

      The banking giant paid Ms Clinton $675,000 (£475,000) for the appearances. She and her husband have an estimated net worth of $110m (£77m), far surpassing the Sanders, who are worth around $300,000 (£210,000).

    • Hillary’s Bold Plan to Financially Penalize Recidivist Super-Predators

      The other day Hillary promised she would appoint Attorneys General like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. “I will appoint an Attorney General who will continue the courageous work of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.” Given that the comments came at an Al Sharpton event, I assumed the comment meant to invoke Holder and Lynch’s efforts to reform criminal justice and, presumably, their even more laudable support for civil rights.

      Nevertheless, it was a disturbing comment, given that Holder and Lynch have also both coddled the bankers who crashed our economy. Indeed, when Hillary tries to defend her huge donations from bankers, she always points to Obama’s even huger ones, and insists that there’s no evidence he was influenced by them. But the Obama DOJ record on bank crime is itself the counter to Hillary’s claim those donations didn’t influence the President.

    • 99% Party: Sanders Supporters Shower Clinton Motorcade with 1000 $1 Bills

      Actor George Clooney hosted a couple of obscenely expensive fundraising events for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on Friday and Saturday nights. 1%er couples needed to pony up $353,400 to buy access. Saturday’s event was at Clooney’s home at 7:00 pm.

      At the same time, Howard Gold, a next-door neighbor of Clooney, hosted a $27 per person fundraiser in support of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination, according to The Hill.

      Gold, whose family founded the 99 Cents Only store chain, called his event the “99% Party.” The email invitation to the 99% party read, “Swimming pools, Movie Stars and merriment for all! This is happening right next door to Clooney’s party for Hillary!” according to The Hill.

    • Here’s a Way to Shut Down Panama Papers-Style Tax Havens — If We Wanted To

      IT WOULD HAVE been infuriating at any time of the year to learn about the massive tax evasion by the global 0.01 percent revealed by the Panama Papers leak. But it’s especially maddening for regular American schlubs to hear about it in April, just as we’re doing our own taxes.

      According to estimates by Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman in his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations, rich individuals and big corporations use various machinations to pay at least a third of a trillion dollars less than they owe every year. For everyone else, this translates directly into higher taxes, more national debt, and less government spending.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Facebook denies that it would ever try to influence the election

      Gizmodo published a screenshot Friday of an internal poll that Facebook employees were purportedly using to decide what questions to ask CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a meeting in March.

    • Like it or not, Mark Zuckerberg is now Silicon Valley’s ambassador to the rest of the world

      The company’s main product announcement, its attempt to turn Messenger into a hub little programs for businesses to chat with customers, was greeted by puzzlement from users and skepticism from the developers who were the main audience for the show.

    • To Protect Hillary Clinton, Democrats Wage War on Their Own Core Citizens United Argument

      FOR YEARS, THE Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United was depicted by Democrats as the root of all political evil. But now, the core argument embraced by the Court’s conservatives to justify their ruling has taken center stage in the Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — because Clinton supporters, to defend the huge amount of corporate cash on which their candidate is relying, frequently invoke that very same reasoning.

    • Superdelegates have destroyed the will of the people: As a political activist and hopeful millennial, I won’t support a broken system by voting for Hillary

      Four years ago, I attended a College Democrats conference in Chicago. I set foot inside Obama’s campaign headquarters and felt the enthusiasm about his presidency first-hand. For the first time, I called myself a Democrat with confidence. Democracy empowered me. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with the entire world.

      Throughout my college career, I was actively involved with the College Democrats. I served as president. I recruited friends to attend meetings, volunteer for voter registration drives, petition for candidates, canvass in local neighborhoods and spread the word about upcoming presidential debates. I even formed close relationships with fellow Democrats through it. Civic engagement and active citizenship was my life. I wanted to empower everyone around me to exercise their political power.

      [...]

      In a truly democratic system, we’d have more competent, diverse candidates. Voting no longer provides me the indulgence and satisfaction it once did. I feel it does more harm than good with our current political climate. If I vote for Clinton as a rejection of Trump, or vote for Sanders to dodge a Clinton vote, what duty am I actually performing? When I vote for a president I don’t support, I support a flawed political system. I refuse that system.

    • New York Observer Reporter Who Resigned Over Trump Ties And Endorsement: For Me, “A Line Had Been Crossed”
    • Wall Street Journal Slimes Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Forgets About George W. Bush’s Monumental Blunders

      In an article titled “Islam and the Radical West” published in the Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens raises the important issue of the radicalization of Western Muslims. But as far as responsible and informed journalism goes, the piece’s credibility ends there. Stephens goes on to make a number of stereotypical and weakly supported claims regarding Islam while taking amateurish pot shots at some of America’s most important thinkers, including Noam Chomsky.

    • Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon

      Beyond sharing this neocon “regime change” obsession, former Secretary of State Clinton also talks like a neocon. One of their trademark skills is to use propaganda or “perception management” to demonize their targets and to romanticize their allies, what is called “gluing white hats” on their side and “gluing black hats” on the other.

    • Meet The Protesters Who Crashed Donald Trump’s Private Event

      Maya Randolph and Aru, who declined to give her last name, were two of the few dozen New Yorkers arrested Thursday evening at a massive protest of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. The young women were part of a group of 10 people who were arrested and charged with criminal trespass after they stormed the hotel where Trump was speaking at a private event.

    • Trump Manager Said Apologizing To Reporter He Allegedly Assaulted Would Be ‘Unrealistic’

      Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, refused to apologize on Sunday for his alleged assault of former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields.

    • The Best Reporting on Bernie Sanders Over the Years

      Bernie Sanders became the first socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and ran successfully as an Independent for the House of Representatives and then the Senate. Now, the Democratic challenger to Hillary Clinton has young voters “feeling the Bern.”

      The political career of Bernie Sanders nearly ended before it began. In the early 1970s, he lost his first four races — two for the Senate and two for governor — running on the ticket of Vermont’s radical Liberty Union Party, while espousing positions such as ending the Vietnam War and abolishing the CIA. But when he ran as an Independent for mayor of Burlington in 1981, the socialist Sanders beat the five-term Democratic incumbent.

    • Barack Obama Never Said Money Wasn’t Corrupting; In Fact, He Said the Opposite

      DURING THURSDAY’S DEMOCRATIC debate in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders asked this question about Hillary Clinton: “Do we really feel confident about a candidate saying that she’s going to bring change in America when she is so dependent on big money interests?”

      Clinton’s response was to invoke Barack Obama. “Make no mistake about it, this is not just an attack on me, it’s an attack on President Obama,” she said. “President Obama had a Super PAC when he ran. President Obama took tens of millions of dollars from contributors. And President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year.”

    • Breaking Up the Banks: Why Sanders is Right

      Now Krugman has always been a defender of the banks and always in denial that banks can be crooked. A few years ago, Iceland had a problem. The banks were very crooked. They controlled the government that was about to give enormous amounts of money to the banks. I had gone over and met with the Prime Minister and former Prime Ministers and convinced them not to pay Britain and the sort of crooked depositors. They hired Krugman at a very high fee and gave him the handouts and he said no, the Icelandic banks are not crooked. Iceland should really bankrupt itself and pay for the Icesave and the British bank affiliates that went under, even though these were not bank branches but bank affiliates.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Online censorship on the rise: Why I prefer to save things offline

      It took me some time to trust the cloud. Growing up with digital technologies that were neither resilient nor reliable — a floppy drive could go kaput without you having done anything, a CD once scratched could not be recovered, hard drives malfunctioned and it was a given that once every few months your PC would crash and need a re-install — I have always been paranoid about making backups and storing information. Once I kicked into my professional years, I developed a foolproof, albeit paranoid, system, where I backed up my machines to a common hard drive, made a mirror image of that hard drive, and for absolutely crucial documents, I would put them on to a separate DVD which would have the emergency documents. It was around 2006, when I discovered the cloud.

      [...]

      Turkey, recently, demanded that German authorities remove a satirical German video titled Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan mocking their President. In response, Germany reminded the Turkish diplomacy of that lovely little thing called freedom of speech, and in the meantime, Extra 3, the group that had released the video on YouTube, added English subtitles to the video. Just for perks. I hope you gave a brownie point to Germany, even as you scrambled to see the video.

    • Decision to hide UAlbany student newspapers ‘inappropriate’

      The decision to hide issues of a student-run newspaper at the University at Albany that called attention to a rise in reported campus sexual assaults — coming during a visit by accepted students — was inappropriate, a top college official said.

    • Silent censorship

      JUST living in Australia for a few months and watching television, makes you see clearly, how the Fiji public is so badly denied by the poverty of Fiji media offerings and silent censorship

      There are wonderful Australian media programs such as Q and A, Insiders, Catalyst, Landline, Insights, Foreign Correspondent, Four Corners, to name just a few, not even mentioning the many specials every week on ABC and SBS.

      Just in the past two months alone, Landline explored how an Australian sugarcane farmer, successfully intercropped rice to pander to his Vietnamese wife. Another intercropped with sunflowers for the seeds and oil, and mung beans (which Fiji farmers have also tried on a very small scale).

    • Soaring Subsidies and Nutritional Censorship Highlight Food Policy Disasters: New at Reason

      Recently, a pair of controversial federal food issues has made the news. The unpredicted increase in USDA farm subsidies and continuing fallout from the new dietary guidelines have captured headlines. They’re worth focusing on together, as they represent some varied and truly awful federal food law and policy.

      Earlier this week, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Tx.) blasted critics of farm subsidies, claiming we live in a “fantasyland” where such subsidies aren’t needed.

    • IHT Retrospective | 1941: Roosevelt Tells Press He Wants No Censorship
    • UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Told To Resign After Censorship Of Pepper-Spray Google Results

      UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi may be forced to resign after documents were released earlier this week which show the school paying $175,000 of university funds to scrub Google results of references to the 2011 pepper-spray incident.

    • Pepper-sprayed students outraged as UC Davis tried to scrub incident from web

      The California university is being accused of censorship after paying a firm to try to hide references to the incident in which police sprayed protesters in 2011

    • On UC Davis and Erasing Things from the Internet

      This week, I and much of the internet learned that UC Davis paid at least $175,000 to a Maryland firm by the name of Nevis & Associates to disassociate the pepper spray incident of 2011 — in which footage of a campus police officer very casually and callously covering student Occupy protesters with pepper spray at close range was caught on video and disseminated — from both the name of the university and its chancellor in Google search results.

    • From draconian censorship to wilful conformity

      A discussion on Pakistan’s media on Sunday found that the industry, while certainly more independent than years past, is also following dangerous patterns of conformity and is no longer a watchdog for public interest.

      New Delhi-based activist Saif Mahmood moderated a session titled “Media: More Independent, Less Responsible’. He began by quoting an IBA-USAID study where Pakistan’s media was given a responsibility score of 5.46, and an independence score of 5.74, and added that these were reasonably good scores in his opinion.

    • Censorship on films meaningless in internet era

      “Censorship on films is futile in India. There are several other media these days which provide inappropriate content to youngsters for free,” said Bollywood director Sudhir Mishra, who is known for directing critically acclaimed films like Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Dharavi and Chameli.

    • Google refuses to censor search results that identify PJS and YMA

      The British press has played ball, agreeing not to name YMA, his husband PJS and the two others, AB and CD with whom a threesome is supposed to have taken place but it is impossible for law enforcement agencies to control what appears online. Google has been the first port of call for many curious-minded people eager to learn the names of those involved, and the search giant has said that — despite many requests to do so — it will not censor search results that could lead people to the names.

      Spend a little time on Twitter, Facebook, and numerous other websites and it won’t be long before you learn — if you don’t already know — the identities of the four people involved. Web Sheriff is not happy about this, and has requested that Google remove search results in a way that is reminiscent of the Right To Be Forgotten. As noted by Torrent Freak, Web Sheriff is usually associated with copyright-related takedown notices, but now also seeks to remove data that could harmful to reputations.

    • Merkel Vows to Repeal Law, After It Is Used to Prosecute Comic for Insulting Erdogan

      CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL alienated a broad swathe of the German public on Friday by approving a request from Turkey to prosecute Jan Böhmermann, a comedian who insulted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by reading an obscene poem about him on late-night television.

      In the same statement, however, Merkel said that her government would move to repeal the law Böhmermann appears to have violated, an obscure provision of the German penal code that makes it a crime to insult foreign heads of state. If approved, the change would not take effect until 2018.

      In the meantime, Böhmermann now faces possible prosecution both for breaking that law — an artifact of the ancient prohibition on hurting the feelings of monarchs, known as lèse-majesté — and for ordinary defamation, because Erdogan has also filed a separate defamation complaint with a state prosecutor.

    • Hard to satire: Turkey forcing censorship abroad
    • Angela Merkel is now silencing German satirists to please Erdogan. This is what the EU has wrought
    • Erdogan’s attitude to Europe is looking more and more like Putin’s
    • Great Ashby councillor’s campaign over ‘unjust’ censorship

      Terry Tyler, a member of Great Ashby Community Council, says the communications policy he and other members must adhere to is so restrictive it is preventing him from doing his job.

      The policy, seen by the Comet, says ‘correspondence with the public from individual councillors should be avoided’ and states ‘the clerk should clear all comments to the media with the chair of the council’.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Trade Secrets: who voted what

      As expected, the European Parliament approved the Trade Secrets Protection directive by a large majority (503 in favour vs. 131 against).

    • Why Has The World Forgotten Islamic State’s Female Sex Slaves?

      Twenty months ago the Islamic State (ISIS) abducted thousands of Yezidi women and girls as the extremist group swept through their villages in northern Iraq in the middle of a terrible summer. Many were forced to become sex slaves for the group’s fighters. Hundreds remain enslaved and many of those who have escaped are still reliving the trauma and often not getting the help they desperately need.

    • Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

      Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

      Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

    • Confessions of a Former Torturer

      [...] Sleep deprivation, as I’ve said before, can be accomplished in a matter of hours. You can let someone go to sleep in a dark room with no windows, and you can wake them up in 15 or 20 minutes. They have no idea how long they’ve been asleep. And with no windows, they have no idea what time of day it is. You can let them go back to sleep, and you can wake them up in 20 minutes. They still have no idea. And they’ve since—within 45 minutes, they’ve lost all sense of time. Two or three hours later, you can convince this person that he’s been living for four or five days, when it’s really only been an hour.

    • The Telegram Criticising Bush That Got Me Sacked

      As this blog is now read daily by tens of thousands of people who had not heard of me before, some idea of where I come from might be in order. After a diplomatic career of rapid promotion (senior civil service age 36, my first Ambassadorship in Uzbekistan age 42) my opposition to Bush/Blair’s immoral and counter-productive foreign policy got me sacked.

      This telegram (diplomatic communications are called that; cable in the USA) I am with retrospect very proud to have sent. To have made at the time the observation that the Bush/Blair policy of invasion, oppression and torture would not suppress fundamentalism, but would create it, was prescient. I should say I understood very well I would be sacked. Some things are worth being sacked for.

      On provenance, after being kicked out I typed this up from my handwritten draft which I had in my briefcase; hence it does not carry the identifiers it would gain when sent. I assure you it is genuine, and by now I expect it should be obtainable under a Freedom of Information request. If someone makes one I would be grateful – the date on it is the day I wrote it, it might have got sent a day or two later, so give them a range.

    • Green Party proposes prosecuting Northern Irish men under the abortion laws for ‘reckless conception’

      The Deputy Leader of the Green Party for Northern Ireland has suggested making “reckless conception” a criminal offence for men “in the interests of equality”

    • Iraqi Man Removed From Southwest Flight For Speaking Arabic

      While on the plane, he called his uncle to tell him about the dinner and ended the phone call by saying “inshallah” — a common term used in Arabic that translates to “God willing.” But after he hung up, he noticed a female passenger eyeing him suspiciously. The passenger reported Makhzoomi, who was then removed from the flight and searched.

    • Student Thrown Off Flight After Passenger Heard Him Say ‘God Willing’ in Arabic

      So once again people from The World’s Most Frightened Country (C) fully overreacted to nothing. One of the 230 million people worldwide who speak Arabic happened to be on an airplane and happened to use one of the most common expressions in his language.

      [...]

      Makhzoomi explained he was talking on the phone with his uncle and, as he said goodbye, he used the phrase “inshallah,” which translates as “if God is willing.” The student said that after hung up, he noticed a female passenger looking at him who then got up and left her seat.

      Moments later an airport employee made Makhzoomi step off the plane into the arms of security officers. Makhzoomi was told the woman thought he said “Shahid,” meaning martyr. Because in-shal-lah and sha-hid sound the same, at least to a dumb ass who speaks no apparent Arabic and likely learned the term shahid when it was last mispronounced on AM talk radio.

    • Racial Justice Takes Center Stage in New York Primary

      AS IT HAS grown in volume and influence, the movement reaffirming the value of black lives has raised its cry for racial justice from the streets and the internet to the race for the Democratic nomination, especially in the New York primary, where talk of police accountability, mass incarceration, and structural inequality has become an integral part of the candidates’ pitch to voters.

      At the Democratic debate on Thursday night, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spoke frankly about racism, with Clinton calling on white people to “recognize that there is systemic racism,” and Sanders again criticizing Clinton’s 1996 comments about “super predators,” saying that “it was a racist term and everyone knew it was a racist term.”

      But while competition for the so-called black vote continues to heat up ahead of Tuesday’s primaries, and the generational gap that has defined the primary race persists, members of Black Lives Matter remain determined to keep all candidates in check on matters of race and racism.

    • Are the Economic Pins to the Saudi-US Relationship Still in Place?

      So on the one hand, Obama is making a big show of declassifying the 28 pages. On the other hand, he is lobbying (privately until this NYT report) to ensure that nothing legal will come of the release of those pages.

      It feels kind of like Obama’s treatment of torture, allowing very limited exposure of what happened, all while ensuring there will be no legal accountability (legal accountability, I’d add, that would threaten to expose others higher up in the US executive branch; and note that while the Administration is permitting a lawsuit of James Mitchell and Bruce Jesson, I’m skeptical this well get very far either).

      Against this background, the Saudis are trying to negotiate an oil freeze to bring up prices, but apparently have delayed doing so, ostensibly because of rising animosity with Iran but also, analysts suggest, to hurt US capacity.

    • Bernie Sanders: US “Can’t Be Blackmailed” by Saudi Arabia

      “It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the World Trade Center on September 11.

    • Obama Appeases Saudi Head-Choppers

      Do we have a more unattractive “ally” than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? In order to find one, we have to go all the way back to World War II, when the US was allied with the Soviet Union while “Uncle” Joe Stalin was murdering millions in the gulag.

    • George Clooney Bemoans Big-Money Politics After Hosting Big-Ticket Fundraisers for Clinton (Video)

      Hollywood star and Democratic Party booster George Clooney pulled off a clever script-flipping trick on Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press.” When confronted with Bernie Sanders’ recent critique of the cost required to attend the two fundraisers he and his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, hosted over the weekend for Hillary Clinton in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, Clooney completely agreed with it.

    • George Clooney on Hillary Clinton Event: ‘There Is a Difference Between the Koch Brothers and Us’
    • Over 7,800 Prosecutions Questioned After NJ Lab Tech Caught Faking Drug Test Results

      If Shah wasn’t concerned about putting a possibly innocent person behind bars, it’s unlikely his yearly salary of $101,039 would have been much of a motivating factor for better work either. It could be that this was an isolated incident — the one time Shah cut corners to increase throughput. (Which, truth be told, is kind of how our entire criminal justice system operates: throughput is preferable to diligent effort.)

      But odds are that if Shah got caught, it’s something that happened eventually, rather than immediately. Bad habits are easy to develop and tend to spiral out of control until the inevitable happens. There’s no way to tell if this was a one-off. Conversely, there’s no way to positively state this didn’t happen all the time. Hence the thousands of criminal cases now being viewed as questionable.

    • The Bernie Sanders Miracle: American Crowd in Brooklyn Cheers Palestinian Dignity

      The Israeli propaganda line is that the Palestinians are natural, intrinsic terrorists who are always attacking Israelis out of blind hatred for Jews and who casually deploy terrorism on a mass scale and refuse to recognize the inexorability and naturalness of several million European and North African and other Jews living in Palestine.

    • Arab-Americans, including ‘Watan’ Newspaper, Endorse Bernie Sanders

      It notes that Sanders’s demand for even-handedness in US policy toward Israel and Palestine is unusual in the Democratic Party.

    • ‘I have a conscience’: the Wall Streeters fighting for Bernie Sanders in New York

      He may be an investment banker himself, but Ryan prefers Sanders’ pledge to begin breaking up the banks in his first 100 days in the White House over Clinton’s more indirect promises.

      “She has a thousand talking points, but when the lights are turned off and all the glare of the election fades, politics-as-normal will return, the lobbyists will get to work, and nothing at all will happen,” he said.

      Frank, still speaking anonymously, agrees. “Hillary Clinton is paying lip-service to Wall Street changes. Maybe in her heart she means business, but for me income inequality is the civil rights issue of our time, and I feel strongly we need a president who is totally committed to making this happen.”

    • ACLU Sues Bureau of Prisons Over Missing Torture Documents

      The ACLU lawsuit alleges that either the bureau conducted an inadequate search, or is illegally denying the existence of documents.

    • Liberals for Hillary: There is Nothing Stranger

      Meanwhile, since the 1960s, when African Americans secured the right to vote in practice, not just theory, Republicans have been recruiting displaced and alienated white voters into their ranks, taking advantage of racist and nativist animosities, and anything else that they could put to use.

    • I Feel a Political Revolution Coming

      The media often would like us to believe that Sanders’ promises to continue his quest for equality are too lofty and unrealistic, and even impossible. Is it really impossible to treat Black people like humans instead of just votes? Is it really so impossible to make an investment in our students instead of the $17 billion the Clintons invested in police, military grade weapons and prisons? Is it really impossible to invest in the healthcare of the American people instead of the $26 billion wasted training foreign armies under Clinton as Secretary of State? Is it really impossible to demand transparency from our police departments and our criminal justice system in an effort to bring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to fruition once and for all? Is it really impossible to take the necessary steps to get more teachers and counselors in our schools instead of labeling them super predators and putting them on the school to prison pipeline?

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Working on HTML5.1

      HTML5 was released in 2014 as the result of a concerted effort by the W3C HTML Working Group. The intention was then to begin publishing regular incremental updates to the HTML standard, but a few things meant that didn’t happen as planned. Now the Web Platform Working Group (WP WG) is working towards an HTML5.1 release within the next six months, and a general workflow that means we can release a stable version of HTML as a W3C Recommendation about once per year.

    • Obama Urges Opening Cable TV Boxes To Competition

      President Obama is throwing his weight behind a plan that would lead to competition in the market for set-top cable and satellite TV boxes. Most viewers now rent the boxes from their TV providers. The Federal Communications Commission wants to make it easier for viewers to buy the devices.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

04.16.16

Links 16/4/2016: Wine 1.9.8 Released, Saints Row 2 for GNU/Linux, KDE Neon Upgrade, GNOME 3.20.1, Rust 1.8, OpenEMR 4.2.1

Posted in News Roundup at 10:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • DHS: Open Source Software Is Like Giving Mafia a Copy of FBI System Code

    But publishing source code could also let attackers “construct highly targeted attacks against the software,” or “build-in malware directly into the source code, compile, then replace key software components as ‘doppelgangers’ of the original,” DHS’ Office of the Chief Information Officer argued in comments posted on GitHub.

  • Dissecting The Myth That Open Source Software Is Not Commercial

    Writing a myth-debunking piece for such an informed audience poses a certain risk. The readers of the IEEE Software Blog already know what open source software is, and many have probably written some. How can I be sure that anyone reading this even holds the belief about to be debunked?

  • ownCloud 9.0 Enterprise Edition Arrives with Extensive File Control Capabilities

    ownCloud, Inc. has had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of the Enterprise Edition (EE) of its powerful ownCloud 9.0 self-hosting cloud server solution.

    Engineered exclusively for small and medium-sized business, as well as major organizations and enterprises, ownCloud 9.0 Enterprise Edition is now available with extensive file control capabilities and all the cool new features that made the open-source version of the project famous amongst Linux users.

  • Is there a need for open source file sharing?

    Want a solution like Box, Dropbox or Egnyte but one you can deploy everywhere? Feel passionate about open source and want to leverage a community solution? ownCloud might just have something for you.

    ownCloud offers an on-premises enterprise file access platform, but one which is an open source solution. The company firmly pitches its wares with stated differentiation through openness, modular architecture, extensibility and federated sharing abilities. So are they onto something here?

  • The advantages of open source in Internet of Things design

    Another complementary approach to standards development is the release of designs and specifications into the open source community as open hardware and interface standards for others to adopt. Examples include Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beaglebone, which enable quick prototyping, as well as the mangOH open hardware reference design, an open source design that is more easily scalable in commercial settings and is built specifically for IoT cellular connectivity.

    Open source platforms like these enable developers that may have limited hardware, wireless or low-level software expertise to start developing IoT applications in days—rather than months. If executed properly, these can significantly reduce the time and effort to get prototypes from paper to production by ensuring that various connectors and sensors work together automatically with no additional coding required. With industrial-grade specifications, these next-generation platforms not only allow quick prototyping, but also rapid industrialization of IoT applications.

  • Apache Storm 1.0 packs a punch

    When big data mavens debate the merits of using Apache Spark versus Apache Storm for streaming data processing, the argument usually sounds like this: Sure, Storm has great scale and speed, but it’s hard to use. Plus, it’s slowly being overtaken by Spark, so why go with old and busted when there’s new and hot?

    That’s why Apache Storm 1.0 hopes to turn the ship around, not only by making it faster but by also easier and more convenient to work with.

  • Apache Storm 1.0 Packs a Speed Punch, is Set to Compete in the Big Data Space

    Are you familiar with Apache Storm? Not everyone is, but it, along with another Apache tool called Flink, is competing with tools like Apache Spark in the Big Data space. These tools focus on streaming data processing, which is emerging as a huge theme in the data analytics world.

  • Apache Wookie Heads to the Attic

    The last time I wrote about Apache Wookie was May 2012, on the occasion of the open-source project’s 0.10.0 release.

  • Coreboot Ported To Run On Lenovo’s ThinkPad T420
  • Broadwell-DE SoC / Xeon D Support Added To Coreboot
  • Open Source MANO Group Targets June for ‘Release 0′

    OSM was formed under the auspices of European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) earlier this year, around the same time as the OPEN-Orchestrator Project (OPEN-O), a Linux Foundation group that is taking a different approach to unified open source-based orchestration efforts.

  • Events

    • Dig into IoT with 41 OpenIoT Summit presentations

      Slide decks from 41 OpenIoT Summit talks are now online, from sessions including AllSeen, Brillo, mBed, Iotivity, Tizen, Weave, Zephyr, and IoT security.

      Last week, we pointed you to 50 slide decks released by the Linux Foundation from the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC), held in San Diego in April 4-6. Now, the non-profit Linux advocacy organization has released 41 more slide presentations, this time from the inaugural OpenIoT Summit track co-located with ELC.

    • Will North Carolina’s HB2 Affect State’s Open Source Conferences?

      At this point, how much effect the continuing economic backlash caused by the North Carolina General Assembly’s passage HB2, otherwise known as the “Bathroom Bill,” will have on the state’s two major open source conferences is anybody’s guess. Certainly, the past three weeks have not been good for operators of event venues in North Carolina, nor have they been good for the state’s bean counters, whose job is to make what the General Assembly spends balance with incoming tax revenue, which is certainly taking a hit in at least some counties.

    • Listen to ASF’s Rich Bowen Interview Speakers Before ApacheCon Next Month

      ApacheCon is just a few weeks away, and I, for one, am really looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be the best yet. I think that every time, and so far, I’ve been right.

      We’ve been doing ApacheCon for more than 15 years now, and it just keeps getting better. This year it will take place May 9-13 in Vancouver, Canada.

    • LinuxFest Northwest 2016 Takes Place April 23-24, in Bellingham, WA, US

      We have some great news for our Linux readers living in the US, as the upcoming LinuxFest Northwest 2016 event is taking place next week, between April 23-24, in Bellingham, WA.

      For those of you not in the known, LinuxFest Northwest is an annual event, targeted at novice, intermediate, and advanced Open Source and Linux enthusiasts, that usually takes place on the last weekend of the month of April, in Bellingham, Washington, United States of America (USA).

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Announcing Rust 1.8

        The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.8. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

        As always, you can install Rust 1.8 from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.8 on GitHub. About 1400 patches were landed in this release.

      • Rust Programming Language 1.8 Released

        Rust 1.8 has been declared stable by the team working on this increasingly popular programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

      • Mozilla’s Commitment to Inclusive Internet Access

        Developing the Internet and defending its openness are key to global growth that is equitable, sustainable, and inclusive. The Internet is most powerful when anyone — regardless of gender or geography — can participate equally.

      • Mozilla has asked us to “police” this forum.

        I was contacted by Mozilla with the request to “police” our forum, since we (Pale Moon devs) are in direct control of the things discussed and posted here.

        I’d like to clarify our position on this kind of thing to keep things from becoming unpleasant in both our relationship with you, the community, and our relationship with Mozilla:

        We do not censor your posts, and this will not change in the future — this is an open forum.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • OpenStack Foundation Survey Shows Deployments Fully Underway

      Results from the seventh OpenStack Foundation user survey are out, and they paint a picture of a powerful cloud platform that has squarely moved from the evaluation stage at many enterprises to deployment stage. Sixty-five percent of OpenStack deployments are now in production, 33 percent more than a year ago, according to the findings. And 97 percent of community members said that “standardizing on the same open platform and APIs that power a global network of public and private clouds” was one of their top five considerations in choosing OpenStack.

    • Organizing the OpenStack community locally and globally

      Sharone Zitzman is no stranger to community. As a lead for the Cloudify open source community at GigaSpaces, and an organizer of many local events including OpenStack Israel, DevOps Days Tel Aviv, and the DevOps Israel meetup group, she knows well what it means to be involved with bringing people together for common goals across open source projects.

    • Hortonworks and Pivotal Provide Details on Deepening Partnership

      As reported here earlier this week, the Hortonworks’ Hadoop Summit has been underway in Dublin, Ireland, and one of the biggest pieces of news there was that Pivotal, already a player in the Hadoop distribution arena, will be reselling Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which is Hortonworks’ Hadoop platform. A corollary piece of news is that Pivotal is also shifting from focusing on its own distribution to the Hortonworks platform.

    • Hortonworks Ramps Up Hadoop Security

      Hortonworks this week announced a series of enterprise security efforts to bolster performance and data safety with its Hortonworks Data Platform.

      The company announced Tuesday that Pivotal Software will standardize on Hortonworks’ Hadoop distribution. Hortonworks also will resell extract, transform and load tools developed by Syncsort.

      The thrust of the Hortonworks’ product announcements, which were made in conjunction with its Hadoop Summit, concerned updates on applying security policies and maintaining data governance to simplify the provisioning of clusters in hybrid clouds. Those procedures were designed to make it easier for customers to interactively explore data in Hadoop.

    • Cumulus, Dell and Red Hat Partner on Open Source DevOps for OpenStack

      Cumulus Networks, Dell and Red Hat have forged a partnership to bring to DevOps efficiencies to the open source cloud by automating networking and deployment for OpenStack clusters, according to news announced this morning.

    • Cumulus Networks Collaborates with Dell and Red Hat to Simplify 300+ Node OpenStack Pod

      Cumulus Networks, the leading provider of Linux networking operating systems, today announced a collaboration with Dell, the leading provider of open and innovative technologies, and Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, to simplify large-scale OpenStack deployments without the need for any proprietary software-defined networking (SDN) fabric solutions. The resulting solution offers an all-Linux OpenStack pod that is easy to install and maintain, and incorporates the latest networking technologies.

    • TripleO Evolves for OpenStack Deployments

      There are a lot of different ways to deploy an open-source OpenStack cloud, and one of the best ironically is with OpenStack itself, via a project known as OpenStack on OpenStack (OOO), or just simply TripleO.

    • Cumulus, Dell, Red Hat Use Open-Source DevOps for an OpenStack Cluster

      The three vendors were able to use such open DevOps tools as Git and Ansible to install and deploy a 300-plus-node OpenStack cluster in six hours.

    • Open source cloud drives Volkswagen’s DevOps culture transformation

      Volkswagen plumped for an OpenStack-based private cloud to kick-start its new approach and, after a shoot-off between Mirantis and Red Hat, the company opted for the former.

    • OpenStack Survey Highlights Containers and DevOps in Open Source Cloud

      Ubuntu continues to dominate OpenStack deployments, interest in containers is strongly increasing and DevOps remains the top focus of open source clouds. These are among the takeaways from the latest OpenStack user survey, which debuted this week.

  • Databases

    • ActorDB: an alternative view of a distributed database

      My Percona Live Data Performance Conference talk is called ActorDB: an alternative view of a distributed database. ActorDB is an open source database that was developed using a distributed model: it uses an SQL database that speaks the MySQL client/server protocol.

  • Hadoop

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Inside Facebook’s Open Source Machine [Ed: openwashing censorship and surveillance company (proprietary)]
    • Give to get: inside Facebook’s open source operation

      Facebook doesn’t sell software, but it’s arguably the largest open source software company in the world.

      In the last few years, the social network has accelerated its contributions to open source, providing not only code it uses in its own operations, such as its artificial intelligence software Torch, but also designs for servers and entire data centers. At the company’s F8 conference for developers and business partners this week, Facebook’s open source leaders announced continued progress on such projects as React Native, which helps developers use the same code on different operating systems.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.9 vs. 5.3 vs. 6.0 Compiler Benchmarks On Debian 8.4

      With GCC 6.1 due out soon with its plethora of new features and improvements, I decided to run some fresh benchmarks this week of GCC 4.9.3 vs. GCC 5.3 vs. GCC 6.0.0 on a Debian stable system.

      From the Xeon E3-1280 v5 system with MSI C236A Workstation, I was using Debian 8.4 x86_64 as the base Linux OS for this benchmarking while building clean compilers of GCC 4.9.3, GCC 5.3.0, and GCC 6.0.0 20160410.

    • Free Software Foundation’s Priorities Reflect Changing Times

      In 2008, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) created its list of high-priority projects that “are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software and free software operating systems.”

      However, the list has been neglected in recent years, to the extent that the page for projects that no longer need to be on the list includes nothing added in the last five years.

      Consequently, the FSF is considering ways to reintroduce the list. In the process, it is revealing its own priorities, and how those have changed over the years — sometimes with unexpected results.

    • GCC 7.0 Now In Development, GCC 6.1 Likely Coming Next Week

      The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) made it today to having no P1 regressions (the highest priority) and thus they’ve now branched the code for the GCC 6 series, GCC 7.0 is now on the master branch, and GCC 6.1 should be released next week.

      For those still confused by the new GCC versioning scheme, GCC 6.1 will be the first stable release in the GCC 6 series. Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat who is managing the release hopes to ship GCC 6.1 by the end of next week or shortly after that point. A GCC 6.1 RC1 candidate is meanwhile imminent.

    • foliot @ Savannah: GNU Foliot version 0.9.6-beta is released.
    • denemo @ Savannah: Version 2.0.6 is out

  • Project Releases

    • OpenEMR 4.2.1 is released

      The OpenEMR community has released version 4.2.1. This new version is 2014 ONC Certified as a Modular EHR. OpenEMR 4.2.1 has numerous new features including 30 language translations and a patient flow board.

  • Public Services/Government

    • New local government digital standard published

      A local government digital service standard has been agreed and published after taking into account the views of council staff in a consultation last month.

      The standard is a common approach for local authorities to deliver good quality, user centred, value for money digital services – and is a local government version of the original Government Digital Service Standard used across central government.

    • NZGOAL Software Extension

      The New Zealand Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) frame work is being extended to incorporate software licensing. The draft below is an initial draft for which we are seeking feedback on. The intention of this extension to NZGOAL is to ensure that publicly funded bespoke software is appropriately licensed to enable reuse by the public as well as government. This should enable more efficient maintenance and improvement, and potentially accelerate innovation going forward.

    • Dutch MP calls for open source resource centre

      The Dutch government should set up a resource centre on free software and open standards, says Member of Parliament Astrid Oosenbrug. “There is a serious lack of understanding of these two topics in the government”, the MP says. The centre should remedy this, and Ms Oosenburg has started studying possibilities and options.

    • Opening Minds As Well As Government With FLOSS
    • Italian parliament hosts debate on open source

      Italy’s parliament on Monday will hold a public debate on possible regulations on free and open source software, open standards, open data and open government. The meeting on Monday 18 April is hosted by Mirella Liuzzi, of the Five Star Movement.

    • White House Source Code Policy a Big Win for Open Government

      The U.S. White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is considering a new policy for sharing source code for software created by or for government projects. There’s a lot to love about the proposed policy: it would make it easier for people to find and reuse government software, and explicitly encourages government agencies to prioritize free and open source software options in their procurement decisions.

      EFF submitted a comment on the policy through the White House’s GitHub repository (you can also download our comment as a PDF). The OMB is encouraging people to send comments through GitHub, reply to and +1 each other’s comments, and even offer direct edits to the policy via pull requests.

    • U.S. Federal Source Code Policy: FSF supports, and urges improvements – comment by April 18!

      You can submit your own comments regarding this proposal, supporting the FSF’s suggestions and adding your own ideas for improvement, through 11:59pm EDT on Monday, April 18, 2016.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • How Node.js created a model open source community

      The creation of programming languages and platforms is rarely without challenges. A case in point is in the experiences of the community around the Node.js platform. Node.js allows the creation of backend services using JavaScript and a collection of “modules” that handle various core functionality and other core functions. Node.js’ modules use an API designed to reduce the complexity of writing server applications. Node.js’ package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.

    • Git work flows in the upcoming 2.7 release

      Easy to program in. No need to recompile, you can hack in as you would in shell. Fun.

    • Bug bounty blitzers open-source sick subdomain-spotter

      The tools, AltDNS and Assetnote, help hackers to automatically identify subdomains and hosts, then generate mobile phone push notifications the minute new possibly-vulnerable domains are published.

Leftovers

  • Monica Lewinsky: ‘The shame sticks to you like tar’

    Nearly 20 years ago, Monica Lewinsky found herself at the heart of a political storm. Now she’s turned that dark time into a force for good

  • 3 projects to enhance the experience of reading or writing poems

    April is National Poetry Month in the United States and Canada. During April, individuals and institutions take part by reading, sharing, and writing poetry. You can find National Poetry Month events at your local library, your local bookstore, and at many other places. To give National Poetry Month an open source spin, in this article I’ll share three open source projects for reading or writing poetry. From reading classical Greek and Roman poetry, to exploring the corpus of Persian poetry, to crafting poems of your own with a handy Android application, these projects take advantage of the creativity of open source to enhance the experience of reading or writing poems.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • 9 Ways Global Warming Is Making Us Sick

      The Obama administration has released a major new report on how manmade global warming is making Americans sicker—and it’s only going to get worse.

      Developed over three years and involving approximately 100 climate and public health experts, the 332-page report was based on more than 1,800 published scientific studies and new federal research, and was reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Badlock: Samba Vulns & Patching your machines

      Unless you are living in a black hole aka SCIF, or otherwise totally disconnected from various news outlets, you have likely heard about the numerous vulns that dropped as a series of CVEs better known as ‘badlock’ Tuesday. Well, there is good news for those on Redhat based distros! Patches are already in the default repos for Fedora / RHEL / CentOS.

    • Gone In Six Characters: Short URLs Considered Harmful for Cloud Services

      TL;DR: short URLs produced by bit.ly, goo.gl, and similar services are so short that they can be scanned by brute force. Our scan discovered a large number of Microsoft OneDrive accounts with private documents. Many of these accounts are unlocked and allow anyone to inject malware that will be automatically downloaded to users’ devices. We also discovered many driving directions that reveal sensitive information for identifiable individuals, including their visits to specialized medical facilities, prisons, and adult establishments.

    • URL shorteners could offer shortcut to malware infection, study claims
    • Guess what? URL shorteners short-circuit cloud security

      Two security researchers have published research exposing the potential privacy problems connected to using Web address shortening services. When used to share data protected by credentials included in the Web address associated with the content, these services could allow an attacker to gain access to data simply by searching through the entire address space for a URL-shortening service in search of content, because of how predictable and short those addresses are.

    • Defining “Gray Hat”

      Black Hats are the bad guys: cybercriminals (like Russian cybercrime gangs), cyberspies (like the Chinese state-sponsored hackers that broke into OPM), or cyberterrorists (ISIS hackers who want to crash the power grid). They may or may not include cybervandals (like some Anonymous activity) that simply defaces websites. Black Hats are those who want to cause damage or profit at the expense of others.

      [...]

      The biggest recent debate is “0day sales to the NSA”, which blew up after Stuxnet, and in particular, after Snowden. This is when experts look for bugs/vulnerabilities, but instead of reporting them to the vendor to be fixed (as White Hats typically do), they sell the bugs to the NSA, so the vulnerabilities (call “0days” in this context) can be used to hack computers in intelligence and military operations. Partisans who don’t like the NSA use “Grey Hat” to refer to those who sell 0days to the NSA.

      WIRED’s definition is this partisan definition. Kim Zetter has done more to report on Stuxnet than any other journalist, which is why her definition is so narrow.

    • WordPress Turns On Free Encryption
    • Badlock Flaw Disclosed as Microsoft Issues 13 Security Advisories
    • How Badlock Was Discovered and Fixed

      Severity analysis of vulnerabilities by experts from the information security industry is rarely based on real code review. In the ‘Badlock’ case, most read our CVE descriptions and built up a score representing a risk this CVE poses to a user. There is nothing wrong with this approach if it is done correctly. CVEs are analyzed in isolation; as if no other issue exists. In the case of a ‘Badlock‘ there were eight CVEs. The difference is the fact that one of them was in a foundational component used by most of the code affected by the remaining seven CVEs. That very specific CVE was marked CVE-2015-5370.

    • Linux Ransomware Could Soon Be Affecting Everyone [Ed: This is a truly garbage ‘article’ from a plagiarism Web site. One actually needs to install malware to be affected]

      Windows operating system has been plagued by ransomware since years, and the attackers have generated millions in revenue. The ransomware is expanding to Mac, Android, and Linux now. It is being said that this year is a critical one in terms of ransomware, and all major operating systems are predicted to get affected. Also, the attackers are constantly working on improving the ransomware, making it harder to deal with.

    • Experts crack Petya ransomware, enable hard drive decryption for free
    • Libgcrypt 1.7 Adds New Algorithms, Performance Improvements

      Werner Koch announced the release today of libgcrypt 1.7, a major update to this general cryptographic library.

      Libgcrypt 1.7 adds a nnumber of new hash algorithms, ChaCha20 stream cipher support, various other new algorithms/modes and also some new curves for ECC.

    • Friday’s security advisories

  • Defence/Aggression

    • James Henry on Panama Papers, Sanho Tree on Hiroshima

      Also on the show: “No US apology for Hiroshima” was many media’s thumbnail of Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent visit to one of the Japanese cities—along with, of course, Nagasaki—where the US killed more than 200,000 people with atomic bombs dropped in 1945. The dominant Hiroshima “narrative”—lamentable but necessary, ultimately saved more than it killed—has remained remarkably unchanged, in good part because of US media’s defense and preservation of it. We discussed that narrative years ago with military and diplomatic historian Sanho Tree, now director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

    • Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has said $681 million banked into the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s bank accounts was a “genuine donation.”

      Saudi Arabia has for the first time publicly confirmed Malaysia’s claim that $681 million in Prime Minister Najib Razak’s bank accounts was a donation from the Saudi royal family, countering accusations that the money was siphoned from heavily indebted state investment fund 1MDB.

      Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir called the money a “genuine donation” in comments Thursday to Malaysian reporters in Istanbul after a meeting with Najib. On Friday, Malaysia’s foreign ministry provided a video clip of Al-Jubeir’s comments, which Najib’s office said vindicate the prime minister, who has faced months of pressure to resign from critics including former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

    • A New Nuclear Arms Race Feared as U.S. & Others Aim to Build Smaller, “More Usable” Nukes

      Part 2 of our conversation with Marylia Kelley. Her group, the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, just published a report titled “Trillion Dollar Trainwreck: Out-of-control U.S. nuclear weapons programs accelerate spending, proliferation, health and safety risks.”

    • Learning to Love the Bomb — Again

      Perhaps the height of Official Washington’s madness is the casual decision to invest $1 trillion in a new generation of nukes, including a downsized, easy-to-use variety, with almost no debate, a danger that Michael Brenner addresses.

    • Obama’s Trillion-Dollar Nuclear-Arms Train Wreck
    • The CIA Doesn’t Want You To Know that ISI Supports Terror, But DIA Does

      The National Security Archive just got a number of documents on the funding of the Haqqani network, showing it gets (or got) funding from Gulf donations, the Taliban in the tribal lands, and Pakistan’s ISI. A particularly interesting DIA cable describes how a guy named Qabool Khan, on orders of the Haqqani, got a job — thanks to Hamid Karzai’s brother Mahmoud’s influence — running security for the US Salerno and Chapman bases. Along with intelligence about Americans on the base, of the $800 he made for each guard at the base, Khan sent $300 back to the Haqqanis.

    • America’s Imperial Overstretch

      This week, SU-24 fighter-bombers buzzed a U.S. destroyer in the Baltic Sea. The Russian planes carried no missiles or bombs.

      Message: What are you Americans doing here?

      In the South China Sea, U.S. planes overfly, and U.S. warships sail inside, the territorial limits of islets claimed by Beijing.

      In South Korea, U.S. forces conduct annual military exercises as warnings to a North Korea that is testing nuclear warheads and long-range missiles that can reach the United States.

    • U.S. Report on Saudi Arabia Downplays Civilian Casualties in Yemen

      IN ITS ANNUAL human rights report on Saudi Arabia, the State Department ignored thousands of civilian casualties from the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen and overlooked the widespread use of illegal cluster munitions by the bombing coalition.

      Saudi Arabia launched an air campaign in Yemen last March after Houthi rebels in Yemen threatened the rule of the Saudi-backed president. The Saudi military has been widely criticized for targeting civilians, destroying homes, schools, and hospitals, and using internationally banned cluster munitions.

      The Obama administration has supported the Saudi-led campaign throughout, providing the coalition with intelligence and selling them at least $20 billion in weapons since the campaign began in March.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Gender Argument

      Hillary Clinton calls on women to support her to be the first female President, but all Americans should look carefully at her record advocating bloody, neocon “regime change” wars, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Does Over-Classification Matter With the Hillary Emails?

      Rules are for fools, and in this case the fools in question are you, me and what’s left of the American democratic system. Obama, in an interview, basically made it clear nobody is going to indict Hillary Clinton for exposing classified material via her unclassified email server, even if it requires made-up rules to let her get away with it.

      The president’s comments in an interview last Sunday that “there’s classified and then there’s classified” made clear he imagines national security law allows for ample, self-determined fudge room when exposing classified material.

    • New EU trade secrets law could jail whistleblowers, block drug trial data access

      EU parliament has adopted new rules on the protection of trade secrets, shortly after passing those on data protection, reported by Ars earlier today.

      A European Parliament press release explains: “The rules will introduce an EU-wide definition of trade secrets and oblige member states to ensure that victims of the misuse of trade secrets will be able to defend their rights in court and seek compensation. The agreed text also lays down rules on the protection of confidential information during litigation.” According to the agreed rules, “trade secret” means information which is “secret, has commercial value because it is secret, and has been subject to reasonable steps to keep it secret.”

      A controversial issue is the impact the new trade secrets rules will have on whistleblowers and journalists: “MEPs stressed the need to ensure that the legislation does not curb media freedom and pluralism or restrict the work of journalists, in particular with regard to their investigations and the protection of their sources.”

      However, the Pirate Party MEP, Julia Reda, believes the new rules will harm journalism, writing that they have “created major uncertainties about the role of whistleblowers and investigative journalists. All information, including information about malpractice, can be protected as a trade secret. As a result, the burden of proof that the public interest outweighs the business interest will now always lie with the whistleblower.”

      One area where whistleblowing is crucially important concerns drug safety. Health Action International (HAI), a non-governmental organisation dedicated to strengthening medicines policy to improve public health, said it was was “deeply disappointed with today’s adoption of the European Union Trade Secrets Directive.”

    • Trade Secrets Directive Clears European Parliament Despite Concerns

      Rejecting calls for a vote to be delayed until the European Commission proposes tougher whistle-blower protections, the European Parliament on 14 April approved by 503-131 new rules giving companies redress for theft or misuse of trade secrets. Debate on the trade secrets directive showed sharp divisions among lawmakers, heightened by the recent “Panama Papers” and other leaks, over whether the legislation will help businesses safeguard their innovative ideas or lead to increased corporate secrecy.

    • BREAKING: Safe passage through Panama – EU Trade Secrets Directive approved, but not without protest

      In the end, the voices in favour prevailed, with 503 votes for and only 131 against. The strength of this majority is also fair reflection of the concerns, which were at times overstated. For a start, contrary to the suggestion from the Ecologist, the Directive has no impact on criminal law (this remains entirely a matter for national legislators). Recital 12a also makes clear that national judicial authorities have ample scope for taking account of national sensitivities. I suspect national approaches to whistleblowing and public interest will remain largely unchanged as a result of the Directive, although the impact of the Panama Papers is perhaps harder to predict.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘Days of Revolt’: Corporate Influence and the Pitfalls of a Two-Party System (Video)

      Dr. Margaret Flowers is an environmental activist running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland as a member of the Green Party. In this episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt,” she discusses political stagnation and revolution with Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges.

      The two discuss the “corporate stranglehold” on American elections and the oppressive nature of two-party systems. Although she emphasizes the importance of grass-roots movements to incite political change, Flowers also notes that it’s “important to have people inside of the system.”

    • Why World Leaders Are Terrified of Water Shortages

      Secret conversations between American diplomats show how a growing water crisis in the Middle East destabilized the region, helping spark civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and how those water shortages are spreading to the United States.

      Classified US cables reviewed by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting show a mounting concern by global political and business leaders that water shortages could spark unrest across the world, with dire consequences.

      [...]

      The classified diplomatic cables, made public years ago by WikiLeaks, now are providing fresh perspective on how water shortages have helped push Syria and Yemen into civil war, and prompted the king of neighboring Saudi Arabia to direct his country’s food companies to scour the globe for farmland. Since then, concerns about the world’s freshwater supplies have only accelerated.

      It’s not just government officials who are worried. In 2009, US Embassy officers visited Nestlé’s headquarters in Switzerland, where company executives, who run the world’s largest food company and are dependent on freshwater to grow ingredients, provided a grim outlook of the coming years. An embassy official cabled Washington with the subject line, “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

    • Greenland ice melts ‘disturbingly’ early

      Meteorologists on Greenland have recorded a 10 percent melt of the island’s sheet ice, beating the record for the earliest date for this level of melting by ‘nearly a month.’

  • Finance

    • Ted Cruz Uses Discredited Talking Points To Make Case Against Minimum Wage Hike

      Research, however, shows no significant connection between increasing the minimum wage and jobs. A 2009 analysis of 64 United States minimum-wage studies found “little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment.” Likewise, a 2013 Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report found that “Research over the past two decades has shown that, despite skeptics’ claims, modest increases in the minimum wage have little to no negative impact on jobs. In fact, under current labor market conditions, where tepid consumer demand is a major factor holding businesses back from expanding their payrolls, raising the minimum wage can provide a catalyst for new hiring.”

    • US corporations have $1.4tn hidden in tax havens, claims Oxfam report

      US corporate giants such as Apple, Walmart and General Electric have stashed $1.4tn (£980bn) in tax havens, despite receiving trillions of dollars in taxpayer support, according to a report by anti-poverty charity Oxfam.

    • Jeremy Corbyn suggests EU-wide minimum wage to give British workers a ‘level playing field’

      The European Union should consider introducing an EU-wide minimum wage to reduce the incentive for people to immigrate to Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has suggested.

      The Labour leader today made his first speech of the EU referendum campaign, arguing that there was a “strong socialist case” for staying in the bloc.

      But Mr Corbyn accepted that there were concerns about the impact of migration on the UK – and said changes to wage laws could help reduce perceived pressures.

    • Dutch voters now demanding referendum on TTIP

      Some 100,000 Dutch citizens have already signed a petition demanding a referendum on TTIP. 300,000 names are needed to trigger a non-binding vote on the issue, as was the case with the Ukraine plebiscite.

      The Socialist Party (Socialistische Partij) is pushing for the referendum. Founded in 1977 as the ‘Communist Party of the Netherlands/Marxist–Leninist’, it won 15 out of 150 seats (10%) in the Dutch Parliament elections in 2012, equivalent to just under 910,000 individual votes.

      Spokesman Jasper Van Dijk told EurActiv that the EU-Ukraine referendum had given the campaign, which has lasted a matter of months, added impetus.

      NGOs against TTIP were part of the drive, he said, which had excited popular imagination.

    • Elizabeth Warren Introduces Bill To Make Tax Season Return-Free

      Yay, it’s tax season again! As our American readers will know, this is the wonderful time of year when we scramble to get all of our taxes and deductions paperwork in order, take them to some storefront that looks like a military recruitment center, push all of those papers in front of someone that looks like they just graduated from college, and scream, “You figure it out!” For our foreign readers, I should explain that we do this because our tax code is more complicated than the plot of Game of Thrones, our tax authorities are every bit as ruthless as that same series, and we’ve collectively allowed our citizens’ payment of due obligations to become a for-profit industry. But seriously, though, come to America. It’s great. I swear.

    • City Council Passes Law Limiting Homeless People’s Belongings to What Can Fit in Trash Bin

      Like every American city in the Age of the 99 Percent, Los Angeles has a significant homeless problem. Full-on shantytowns are now a feature of LA’s urban landscape, with colonies of desperate men and women setting up camps, and building shelters out of tarps, wherever they can find safe space to do so.

    • CETA, TTIP and ISDS: Lessons from Canada

      A new video is set to spark debate on CETA (the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) with the deal on the verge of a vote this year in the European Parliament, where opponents hope it will be defeated.

      Today, the Council of Canadians, in partnership with the European Citizens’ Initiative against TTIP and CETA, is launching CETA: Lessons from Canada, a five-minute animation. Using a technique known as “handimation”, the short video gives a comprehensive background on the controversial deal, known to many as TTIP 1.0.

    • Saudi Arabia Warns of Economic Fallout if Congress Passes 9/11 Bill

      Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

      The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.

      Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • We Must Speak Up—Capitalism is Eating Democracy

      Yanis Varoufakis, previous finance minister for Greece, offers insights as an economic insider about the current workings of global finance. He suggests the key challenge of our time is a lack of democracy to balance today’s unchecked capitalism. Capitalism without democratic oversight can become a very uncivilized system—brutish and destructive. This current imbalance threatens the global economy, our environment, and the future of civil society.

    • Media Asking Wrong Questions on North Carolina’s ‘Bathroom Law’

      But while media are busy working through anti-LGBT talking points, they aren’t asking Republican politicians to explain how they’ll enforce laws that would require people to prove their “biological sex” at the bathroom door. The law says people must use facilities that corresponding to the sex “stated on a person’s birth certificate.” So people should carry their birth certificates with them at all times?

    • Protests Against Money in Politics Hold Little Interest for Beltway’s ‘Political Junkies’

      More than 400 people were arrested in a non-violent sit-in on Capitol Hill April 11, many having marched 150 miles from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The protest, called Democracy Spring, is about ending the influence of big money in politics and ensuring free, fair elections through things like restoring the Voting Rights Act. The next day, another 85 mostly elderly people were arrested, many chanting, “Democracy is not for sale, [we’re] not too old to go to jail.”

    • How Does That Plastic Taste?

      As of March 2016, a review of recent corporate news coverage indicates that many of the themes in Jamail’s article have not been covered in the corporate press, including especially the extent to which the seafood we eat contains plastic, as well as a number of the solutions to this problem, as discussed by Dr. Wallace Nichols and other researchers.

    • Release of Clinton’s Wall Street Speeches Could End Her Candidacy for President

      The reason you and I will never see the transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street fat-cats — and the reason she’s established a nonsensical condition for their release, that being an agreement by members of another party, involved in a separate primary, to do the same — is that if she were ever to release those transcripts, it could end her candidacy for president.

      Please don’t take my word for it, though.

      Nor even that of the many neutral observers in the media who are deeply troubled by Clinton’s lack of transparency as to these well-compensated closed-door events — a lack of transparency that has actually been a hallmark of her career in politics.

      Nor do we even need to take Clinton’s word for it — as we could certainly argue that her insistence that none of these transcripts ever be seen by the public is itself a confession that her words would cause significant trauma to her presidential bid.

    • The Brooklyn Dodgers: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders Give Non-Answers at Debate

      WHEN A CANDIDATE for high office can’t respond to a simple question with an honest answer, attention should be paid. More often than not these days, that kind of behavior is just greeted with a shrug by the members of the elite media, but specific acts of evasion are worth studying. Because if something’s important enough for a candidate that they concoct a ludicrous non-response, there’s probably a sore point under there somewhere.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Favorability Rating Among Democrats Hit a New Low (Video)

      Hillary Clinton may be the Democratic frontrunner, but her appeal is waning. According to the HuffPost Pollster average, 55 percent of the electorate now views Clinton unfavorably—and 40.2 percent of people view her favorably, according to the same average.

    • Bernie Sanders earned $205,000 in 2014

      Earlier today I noted that someone who earns $200,000 pays an average federal income tax rate of 15 percent. Well, it turns out that Bernie Sanders is really, really average. He released his 2014 tax return tonight, and it reports that he had an adjusted gross income of $205,617 and total taxes due of $27,653. That’s 13 percent of his income.

    • What exactly do pro-Brexiters mean when they say they want to make Britain great again?

      The United Kingdom could ‘better face the future outside the European Union’. That was the opinion of 43% of respondents in the European Union Public Opinion survey, the Eurobarometer, in May 2015. It’s hardly surprising that such a large proportion of the population has such a bleak view of the benefits the EU brings to the UK, considering that scrutiny of Brussels has intensified over recent years. And in the run-up to the referendum, the spotlight is well and truly fixed on the issue.

    • A Note on Hillary Clinton, the Queen of Chaos

      In fact, this primary campaign has produced a couple of surprises, more earthly than divine. Both surprises reveal widespread grassroots discontent with both Hillary Clinton and the whole American political establishment. However, this discontent so far fails to focus on the point of my book: the need to combat the ideology and practice of U.S. war policy personified by Hillary Clinton. Where is the effective alternative to the War Party?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Texas Prison System Unveils New Censorship Policy

      The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is getting in the digital censorship game with a new policy that would punish an offender for having a social media presence, even when someone on the outside is posting updates on their behalf.

    • GreatFire activist urges western firms to help end Chinese censorship

      Western companies need to end their hypocrisy over free speech in China, and start helping to end censorship in the country, a leading anti-censorship activist has told the Guardian.

      One of the three co-founders of GreatFire, an organisation dedicated to fighting the so-called Great Firewall of China, the technological heart of state censorship in the country, said it hurts to see companies such as Apple citing Chinese censorship in their battles with western governments, while co-operating with authoritarian state in order to earn money from its burgeoning middle classes and take advantage of its enormous manufacturing base.

      Speaking in London shortly before winning a Freedom of Expression award from campaign group Index on Censorship, the activist, who goes by the pseudonym Charlie Smith due to the threat to his safety if the Chinese government discovers his identity, listed Apple and LinkedIn amongst his personal villains.

    • It’s Official: Washington Thinks Chinese Internet Censorship Is a ‘Trade Barrier’

      In its annual report on the challenges U.S. exporters face in foreign markets, released in April, the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) listed Chinese Internet censorship as a trade barrier for the first time. The move is likely to please U.S. businesses that operate in China or that are considering doing so. But previous U.S. attempts to encourage China to dismantle the so-called Great Firewall of Censorship, which keeps out certain foreign content Chinese authorities deem harmful, have had little effect. Will describing censorship as a trade barrier make a difference? In this ChinaFile conversation, experts discuss the implications of the new report, and how might China react to this pressure from Washington.

    • Leaked Documents Confirm Ecuador’s Internet Censorship Machine

      According to a leaked internal memo of the multinational ISP Telefónica in Ecuador, the Association of Internet Providers of Ecuador (AEPROVI) collaborated with the Ecuadorian government to block their users’ access to websites. The memo was obtained and published by the Associated Whistleblowing Press and the Ecuadorian whistleblowing platform, Ecuador Transparente.

      The memo describes how on March 28, 2014, between 7:20 pm and 7:53 pm, a technician received reports of users unable to access Google and YouTube. It explains that Telefónica staff verified the accessibility issues and reported them to Telefónica’s Network Operations Center (NOC). The NOC then confirmed that these websites were inaccessible due to AEPROVI “blocking access to certain Internet websites by request of the National Government.” The leaked document explains that many clients were affected, prompting AEPROVI to roll back its website blocking in order to remedy the situation.

    • Ecuador Briefly Censored Google and YouTube, Leaked Document Shows

      On Thursday, March 27, 2014, someone hacked the official Twitter account of Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa. The next day, hackers posted personal emails from the country’s spy chief Rommy Vallejo on a Google-hosted blog, which contained a classic Anonymous-like YouTube video.

      Hours later, some internet users in Ecuador reported not being able to access Google and YouTube. As it turned out, the outage wasn’t caused by a technical glitch, but a government censorship order, according to a leaked document from telephone giant Telefonica.

      “The issues with accessing internet pages such as Google and YouTube was due to the fact that personnel at [Ecuador’s internet providers’ association] AEPROVI blocked access to certain internet pages by request of the national government,” reads part of the document, which appears to be an internal Telefonica support ticket.

    • Erdogan Tries to Extend Turkish Censorship to Germany

      Jan Böhmermann, host of the late-night “Neo Magazin Royale,” in Hamburg, Germany, on August 21, 2012. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has filed a complaint against the comedian who recited a satirical and sexually crude poem about him on German television, complicating Berlin’s attempts to get Turkey’s help in dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis.

    • Merkel, Accused of Betraying Core Values, Faces a Balancing Act With Turkey
    • Journalists want ‘slanderous’ poem republished

      Colleagues of satirist Jan Böhmermann at public broadcaster ZDF are campaigning to have his ‘slanderous’ poem about Turkey’s leader reinstated online – even as legal action looms against the comedian.

    • Let’s All Talk About The Stuff That UC Davis Spent $175k Trying To Keep Off These Internets

      Those funds, spent by a public university, mind you, were spent in the wake of the pepper spraying incident specifically to reformulate the image of UC Davis by obfuscating search results, web mentions of the incident, and by crafting a deluge of other UC Davis content that was decidedly more brand-friendly. But, hey, are you still confused as to what incident we’re talking about here? Maybe this video of the incident will help jog your memory.

      What should be readily apparent to you by now is that trying to bury factual if unfortunate history by hiring so-called brand reputation groups works about as well as trying to cover up your inability to cook a decent meal by dumping chocolate icing on everything you make. Sure, icing is good, but you still burnt that bone-in ribeye, you fool.

      More importantly, in true Streisand Effect fashion, the attempted coverup of the incident now has us all discussing it again. And not only discussing the incident, but multiplying information about the incident, and footage of it, throughout the internet.

    • Texas prisons’ new rules aim to force social media to close inmate accounts

      This month the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) updated its offender handbook (PDF) to stipulate that inmates are not allowed to have social media accounts. While blog posts are still permitted, a spokesperson for the TDCJ told Ars that the rule was developed to get social media platforms to comply with the corrections department’s takedown requests more readily.

    • ABC rejects criticism its Chinese web portal bows to Beijing censorship

      The ABC has strongly rejected criticism its Chinese web portal, AustraliaPlus.cn, helps Beijing to silence critical voices in the region.

      An opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review by Prof John Fitzgerald, director of the Asia Pacific program in social investment and philanthropy at Swinburne University of Technology accused the ABC of selling out its news values in order to get a foothold in China.

      “The ABC has not, and never has, entered into an agreement with China or any country in regards to censorship of its content,” the ABC said in a strongly-worded statement.

    • 6 May: Tehran Book Fair, Uncensored

      Taking place on 6-7 May 2016 at London’s Free Word Centre, the book fair coincides with the Tehran Book Fair, but unlike the Iranian counterpart, it’s free from censorship, and will feature censored books from independent Iranian publishers.

      Most of the event will be in Farsi, but there will be an English-language session too on Friday 6 May from 4.30pm to 5.30pm – in association with Index on Censorship and Small Media.

    • Student journalists battling censorship on campuses nationwide

      Freedom of the press on campus has garnered plenty of attention with incidents at the University of Missouri and Wesleyan University. Yet the two incidents “are hardly the only examples,” warns Observer.

      At Mizzou, a student photographer was pushed away from covering student protesters by former professor Melissa Click, who has since been fired and charged with assault. The Wesleyan Argus faced controversy and defunding threats after publishing a critical article about Black Lives Matter.

    • Jodie Ginsberg: “Free expression needs defenders”
    • In the Erdogan vs. Böhmermann crisis, the real comedians are the politicians themselves
    • UC Davis Spent $175,000 To Bury This Story Of Police Brutality. We’re Writing About It So They Fail.
    • UC Davis Wondered If $175,000 Would Make The Internet Go Away. Conclusion: No.
    • UC Davis spent $175,000 to bury search results after cops pepper-sprayed protestors
    • University of California in Davis Spent $175k on SEO and “Reputation Management”
    • U. of Delaware Students Drew a Penis on a Free Speech Ball. Cops Made Them Censor It.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Mexican Supreme Court Should Reject Mass Surveillance
    • Two hidden recording devices are discovered at Harvard Law School
    • How Technology Helps Creditors Control Debtors

      From software that records your every keystroke, to GPS tracking, to ignition kill switches—lenders have more power over their customers than ever.

    • Facebook Employees Asked Mark Zuckerberg If They Should Try to Stop a Donald Trump Presidency

      This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared to publicly denounce the political positions of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign during the keynote speech of the company’s annual F8 developer conference.

      “I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others,’” Zuckerberg said, never referring to Trump by name. “I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases, even for cutting access to the internet.”

      [...]

      “Facebook can promote or block any material that it wants,” UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh told Gizmodo. “Facebook has the same First Amendment right as the New York Times. They can completely block Trump if they want. They block him or promote him.” But the New York Times isn’t hosting pages like Donald Trump for President or Donald Trump for President 2016, the way Facebook is.

      [...]

      Facebook has toyed with skewing news in the past. During the 2012 presidential election, Facebook secretly tampered with 1.9 million user’s news feeds. The company also tampered with news feeds in 2010 during a 61-million-person experiment to see how Facebook could impact the real-world voting behavior of millions of people. An academic paper was published about the secret experiment, claiming that Facebook increased voter turnout by more than 340,000 people. In 2012, Facebook also deliberately experimented on its users’ emotions. The company, again, secretly tampered with the news feeds of 700,000 people and concluded that Facebook can basically make you feel whatever it wants you to.

    • Canadian police had access to BlackBerry Messenger pretty much like everyone else

      POLICE IN CANADA took advantage of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) security’s “Achilles’ heel” by compelling the company to hand over its universal decryption key, and using access to mobile operators’ infrastructure to read more than a million messages.

      Declassified documents arising from a Royal Canadian Mounted Police criminal investigation between 2010 and 2012 indicate that the police force kept a dedicated server at its headquarters in Ottawa to intercept messages. The server was connected to the network of Canadian mobile operator Rogers, which also cooperated with investigators.

    • Canadian Law Enforcement Can Intercept, Decrypt Blackberry Messages

      Blackberry’s CEO, John Chen, didn’t care for the fact that Apple was “locking” law enforcement out of its devices by providing customers with default encryption. As he saw it, Apple was placing profits ahead of Mom, Apple pie and American-made motorcars.

    • Report Exposes Flaws In Link Shorteners That Reveal Sensitive Info About Users And Track Their Offline Movements

      The Freedom to Tinker Foundation has just released a study it compiled over the last 18 months — one in which it scanned thousands of shortened URLs and discovered what they unintentionally revealed. Microsoft’s OneDrive — which uses link-shortening — could be made to reveal documents uploaders never intended to share with the public. Worse, Freedom to Tinker discovered a small percentage of brute-forced URLs linked to documents with “write” privileges enabled.

    • How Short URLs Could Reveal Your Home Address and Get You Hacked

      Two researchers devised a method to automatically guess, or scan by brute force, millions of Microsoft OneDrive (1drv.ms) and Google Maps (goo.gl/maps) short links. This way, they found thousands of open OneDrive folders with potentially sensitive information, as well as Google Maps links that could be used to identify the people who created them, as well as their identity.

      In other words, short URLs with five, six, or seven-character tokens that users might think as private, are not that private.

      “When you are sharing something using a short URL, you are not sharing with just the intended recipient…you are sharing with the entire world.” Vitaly Shmatikov, a professor at Cornell Tech, and one of the researchers who worked on the study, told Motherboard in an email.

    • How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell

      But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.

    • How Bad Are Geolocation Tools? Really, Really Bad

      Geolocation is one of those tools that the less technically minded like to use to feel smart. At its core it’s a database, showing locations for IP addresses, but like most database-based tools, the old maxim of GIGO [Garbage In, Garbage Out] applies. Over the weekend Fusion’s Kashmir Hill wrote a great story about how one geolocation company has sent hundreds of people to one farm in Kansas for no reason other than laziness. And yes, it’s exactly as bad as it sounds.

    • Sixth Circuit Says Cell Site Location Data Just A Business Record; No Warrants Required

      To date, four appeals courts have entered opinions on whether cell site location info is covered by the Fourth Amendment. So far, only the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has found this to be worthy of a warrant. All others find CSLI to be covered under the Third Party Doctrine. These cases all deal with historical cell site location info, usually obtained in bulk with subpoenas. Near real-time tracking using tower pings is another issue entirely — one that’s rarer because a) obtaining rolling CSLI from a provider is a pain and b) everyone’s using Stingrays now.

    • FBI Has Been Not Counting Encryption’s Impact on Investigations for Over a Decade

      During the first of a series of hearings in the last year in which Jim Comey (at this particular hearing, backed by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates) pushed for back doors, they were forced to admit they didn’t actually have numbers proving encryption was a big problem for their investigations because they simply weren’t tracking that number.

    • Documents Show FBI Deployed Software Exploits To Break Encryption Back In 2003

      Documents FOIA’ed by Ryan Shapiro and shared with the New York Times shed some new light on previous FBI efforts to break encryption. Back in 2003, the FBI was investigating an animal rights group for possibly sabotaging companies that used animals for testing. The FBI’s Department of Cutesy Investigation Names dubbed this “Operation Trail Mix,” which I’m sure endeared it to the agents on the case. At the center of the investigation were emails the FBI couldn’t read. But it found a way.

    • The FBI’s Asinine Attempt to Retroactively Justify Cracking Farook’s Phone

      That’s the logic the FBI is now peddling to reporters who are copping onto what was clear from the start: that there was never going to be anything of interest on Farook’s phone. After all, they’re suggesting geolocation data on the phone (some of which would be available from Verizon) might explain the 18 minutes of the day of the attack the FBI has yet to piece together.

    • FAQ: Apple, the FBI, and Zero Days
    • Massive EU data protection overhaul finally approved

      The European Parliament today voted in favour of major reforms to data protection in the EU, first put forward in January 2012 as a replacement for the current rules, which were drawn up in 1995. The new law is done and dusted and will come into action in April 2018.

      There are two components to the new law: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is designed to give EU citizens better control of their personal data, and the Data Protection Directive, which covers how personal data is used by police in the EU.

    • Apple Responds To DOJ’s Attempt To Get Into Drug Dealer’s Phone: Why You So Dishonest?

      As we’ve discussed at length, there are multiple cases going on right now in which the US Justice Department is looking to compel Apple to help access encrypted information on iPhones. There was lots of attention paid to the one in San Bernardino, around Syed Farook’s work iPhone, but that case is now over. The one getting almost but not quite as much attention is the one happening across the country in NY, where magistrate judge James Orenstein ruled against the DOJ a little over a month ago, with a very detailed explanation for why the All Writs Act clearly did not apply. The DOJ, not surprisingly, appealed that ruling (technically made a “renewed application” rather than an appeal) to an Article III judge and the case was assigned to judge Margo Brodie.

    • Special forces troops ‘using new GCHQ system’ on anti-terror patrols? [Ed: propaganda rag uses the “support the troops” card to ‘sell’ GCHQ to us]
    • GCHQ director acknowledges historic mistreatment of LGBT people at Stonewall conference
    • UK spy chief apologises for GCHQ’s historic ban on gay staff
    • Spy agency chief: I apologize to gay staff unfairly dismissed in the past
    • GCHQ chief apologises for ‘horrifying’ treatment of Alan Turing [Ed: intolerance, new charm offensive]
    • Head of GCHQ apologises for historic ban on homosexuals
    • GCHQ apology for Turing and homosexuals treatment
    • GCHQ boss publicly apologises for the organisation’s historic ban on gay staff
    • Edward Snowden Forms Improbable Partnership With Jean-Michel Jarre
    • Edward Snowden made a song with electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre
    • Edward Snowden Is Releasing A Song Called ‘Exit’. No, It’s Not A Joke.
    • Edward Snowden is now dabbling in techno music
    • Edward Snowden releasing techno track with Jean Michel Jarre
    • Edward Snowden has been messaging teenagers about the news and making electronic music
    • US anti-encryption law is so ‘braindead’ it will outlaw file compression

      The proposed bill put forward by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to force US companies to build backdoors into their encryption systems has quickly run into trouble.

      Less than 24 hours after the draft Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016 was released, more than 43,000 signatures have been added to a petition calling for the bill to be withdrawn. The petition, organized by CREDO Action, calls for Congress to block the proposed law as a matter of urgency.

    • Microsoft Sues Government Over Its ECPA-Enabled Gag Orders

      The lawsuit claims these gag orders violate multiple rights of multiple parties. Those whose data is being requested are having their Fourth Amendment rights violated by the undisclosed searches. Microsoft’s First Amendment rights are being violated by the accompanying gag orders.

    • Adoption of three texts on personal data: teach yourself how to be safe!

      Today, the European Parliament adopted three texts on personal data: the regulation framework for personal data processing by private companies, the Directive on judicial and police processing of personal data, and the PNR (Passenger Name Record) that aims at the creation of national records gathering large amounts of data of persons travelling from or to the European Union, including internal flights. These texts feature numerous loopholes that threaten the right to privacy. Given the inability of the institutions to come up with regulations that actually protect Internet users, it is up to each and every one of us to learn how to protect themselves, their personal data and their privacy on the Internet.

    • Coast Guard Academy competes against other service academies, NSA in cyber security exercise [Ed: New NSA puff piece wrapped up in prose]
    • Facebook Hired a Former DARPA Head To Lead An Ambitious New Research Lab [Ed: imperialism and mass surveillance symbiotic]

      She was a key Google executive, too

      If you need another sign that Facebook’s world-dominating ambitions are just getting started, here’s one: the Menlo Park, Calif. company has hired a former DARPA chief to lead its new research lab.

    • Mobile By Reach: Digging Deeper into Pew Numbers from February, with Projections to 2016 [Ed: so who needs RFID? People let themselves be tracked at all time]

      With Pew’s survey we found using my company analysis that the world has 5.0 Billion unique mobile phone owners (owning one or more mobile phones, which can be smart or dumb phones). Out of the 5.0B, the number of unique smartphone owners was 2.3 Billion last year (46%) and as we’ve measured out of the sales numbers the total installed base of all smartphones at 2.5 Billion so 200 million of the total smartphones in use worldwide are by those of us who have 2 phones in their pockets (or 9% of all smartphone unique owners have 2 smartphones). I published this breakdown of the world mobile phone unique ownership and smartphone vs dumbphone vs no-phone owners in February, based on Pew numbers:

    • US court agrees with feds: Warrants aren’t needed for cell-site location data

      Another federal appeals court is siding with the Obama administration’s position that court warrants are not required to track a suspect’s cell-site location. The Wednesday decision (PDF) by the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals adds to the growing number of federal appeals court rulings siding with the government, likely meaning the US Supreme Court won’t weigh into the legal thicket any time soon. Only one federal circuit has sided against the government, but that ruling was set aside, (PDF) and a new decision is pending after the court accepted the government’s petition to rehear the dispute.

    • Subway photographer connects random photos to people’s social media profiles

      Егор Цветков (Egor Tsvetkov), a photographer in Russia, has taken photos of random people on the subway and connected them to social media portraits and complete profiles using face matching technology. This is a game changer.

      It used to be that technology was good enough to say whether two photos appeared to be of the same person. We’ve now reached an inflection point where one input photo can (mostly) be used to find the matching person among tens of millions of people, and where the processing power used is low enough for that service to be free. This is a complete game changer.

      The gravity of this doesn’t really hit you until you see the examples, where the photos are taken under radically different lighting and angles than the portrait photos, and sometimes with different facial hair, too. What’s more, this photographer used a freely available photo matching service – FindFace.ru – which has already imported a vast amount of (all?) photos on vKontakte, which is Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, and let a neural network study all of those photos.

    • Harry Potter Publisher Goes on a Bizarre Anti-Piracy Rampage

      The publishing platform responsible for marketing J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has gone on a bizarre anti-piracy rampage. Pottermore and its anti-piracy partners told Google that J.K. Rowling’s Wikipedia page was infringing, but sadly that’s just the tip of a ridiculous DMCA notice iceberg.

    • So GCHQ is already spying on behalf of the copyright industry. Why isn’t there an outcry over this change of mission?

      It was a little-noticed story in the Entertainment and Oddities section: The GCHQ is using its spying network to help the copyright industry prevent “unauthorized distribution of creative works” – meaning ordinary people sharing interesting things with each other. Yes, that spying network which was supposed to prevent horrible terror attacks, and only to prevent horrible terror attacks, to safeguard our very lives as a last line of defense, is now in the service of the copyright industry.

    • Burr-Feinstein encryption bill is officially here in all its scary glory

      Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein released the official version of their anti-encryption bill today after a draft appeared online last week. The bill, titled the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, would require tech firms to decrypt customers’ data at a court’s request.

      The Burr-Feinstein proposal has already faced heavy criticism from the tech and legislative communities and is not expected to get anywhere in the Senate. President Obama has also indicated that he will not support the bill, Reuters reports.

    • Impeachment or NSA-Led Coup? Alarming Efforts to Oust Brazil’s Rousseff

      Over 60% of Brazilians do not believe that President Dilma Rousseff should be subject to impeachment proceedings, but a cadre of corrupt far right politicians armed with NSA surveillance documents continue to push for her ouster.

      On Monday, a 65-member congressional committee in Brazil voted to advance impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff, in relation to the “carwash” corruption investigation. Although President Rousseff is not herself implicated in illegal or corrupt activity, the impeachment is proceeding on the grounds of “a crime of responsibility,” suggesting that she should have taken action to prevent corruption.

    • NSA, other feds using innovation to improve security [Ed: this site has just reaffirmed status as useless, shallow stenography for Feds and spies]
    • US Attorney Suggests Solution To Open Source Encryption: Ban Importation Of Open Source Encryption

      If you can’t read that, she said: “I think it would be reasonable to ban the import of open-source encryption software.” This is idiotic on any number of levels, and that an actual representative of law enforcement would make such a claim is immensely troubling and raises serious questions about the competency of the US Attorney’s Office in Eastern Michigan.

      First off, the Open Technology Institute released a paper late last year showing that there was a ton of both open source and foreign encryption products that weren’t subject to US regulations. Another paper, released earlier this year by the Berkman Center and written by Bruce Schneier (along with Kathleen Seidel and Saranya Vijayakumar), found that there were 865 encryption products from 55 different countries on the market when they wrote the paper (it could be more by now), with 546 of those from outside the US. In other words, there are a lot of these kinds of products. So, at the very least, they’d be used by people outside of the US.

      But, more to the point, a ban on importing them? We already had that legal fight, though back then it was on the question of exporting encryption. In Bernstein v. the US Department of Justice, the government sought to block Daniel Bernstein from publishing his algorithm for his Snuffle encryption system, saying it violated export laws related to exporting weapons. Eventually, the 9th Circuit ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and any regulations preventing publication would be unconstitutional.

    • Apparently Hacking Syed Farook’s iPhone Accomplished Nothing (Other Than Making Everyone Less Safe)

      Remember, this was the same iPhone that the DOJ and the FBI said was critical in their investigation. This is the same iPhone that the San Bernardino District Attorney, Michael Ramos, insisted could be hiding evidence of a “dormant cyber pathogen” destined to destroy San Bernardino County’s computer network.

    • How the NSA’s CryptoKids Stole My FOIA Innocence

      The CryptoKids, if you’re not aware, was a mid-2000s attempt by the NSA to appeal to the youth of today by creating a crazy cartoon cadre of codebreakers that’s one pair of rollerblades away from a cease and desist from Burger King. It was generally considered a terrible idea, and then after news broke about the whole “spying on citizens” thing, an absolutely terrible idea.

    • Brussels Terrorist Laptop Included Details Of Planned Attack In Unencrypted Folder Titled ‘Target’

      As the push to backdoor or ban encryption heats up, kneejerk politicians have rushed to embrace each and every recent attack and to immediately point fingers at encryption. Right after the Paris attacks, politicians started blaming encryption, even though evidence suggested they communicated by unencrypted SMS. Even months later, the press was ridiculously using the total lack of evidence of any encryption… as evidence of encryption. Then with the Brussels attacks from a few weeks ago politicians like Rep. Adam Schiff immediately tried to blame encryption insisting that “we can be sure that terrorists will continue to use what they perceive to be the most secure means to plot their attacks.”

    • The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos

      SOFT ROBOTS THAT can grasp delicate objects, computer algorithms designed to spot an “insider threat,” and artificial intelligence that will sift through large data sets — these are just a few of the technologies being pursued by companies with investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

      Yet among the 38 previously undisclosed companies receiving In-Q-Tel funding, the research focus that stands out is social media mining and surveillance; the portfolio document lists several tech companies pursuing work in this area, including Dataminr, Geofeedia, PATHAR, and TransVoyant.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Matthew Keys Gets 2 Years In Jail For 40 Minute Web Defacement He Didn’t Even Commit

      The latest in the Matthe Keys case is that Keys has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for his involvement in a minor incomprehensible web defacement of an LA Times story that lasted for all of about 40 minutes. The prosecution was asking for 5 years, while Keys’ lawyers asked for nothing more than probation. As we noted, the whole thing seems fairly crazy. It is entirely possible that Keys acted like an immature jackass regarding his former employer, but the actual case revolved around a single action: the claimed sharing of login credentials for the content management system of the Tribune Company, which another person (who is apparently known to law enforcement, but has never been charged with anything) used to do a minor defacement of a single story to have the headline read: Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337.

      This minor defacement was up for about 40 minutes before being taken down. When the government tried to add up the damages, the Tribune Company at first admitted that there were basically none. After being pushed, they “found” more damages and somehow it turned into nearly a million dollars, by making emails that “cost” $225 and talking about something totally unrelated to this hack — some alleged harassment Key did by emailing people in a database from his former employer. If he actually did this (he denies it), it was a really shitty thing to do, but it also was not what he was on trial for.

    • Journalist gets two-year sentence for helping Anonymous hack LA Times

      Matthew Keys was convicted of giving login credentials to the hacking group, in a decision civil liberties group calls ‘prosecutorial discretion run amok’

    • Swedish prosecutors argue for upholding Assange arrest warrant

      Swedish prosecutors still believe an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be upheld, they said on Thursday in reply to the Stockholm District Court that will decide whether to lift the warrant.

    • Indonesia’s Aceh province canes non-Muslim for selling booze

      An elderly Christian woman has been caned in a conservative Indonesian province for selling alcohol, the first time someone from outside the Islamic faith has been punished there under strict religious laws.

      The 60-year-old was whipped nearly 30 times with a rattan cane before a crowd of hundreds in Aceh province Tuesday (Apr 12), an official said, along with a couple who were subjected to 100 lashes for committing adultery.

      Aceh is the only province in the predominantly Muslim country that applies sharia law, and public canings for breaches of Islamic code happen on a regular basis and often attract huge crowds.

      Those caught engaging in adultery, same-sex relationships, drinking and even associating with unmarried members of the opposite sex can end up facing the cane.

    • The Government’s Unprecedented Position in CIA Torture Lawsuit Is Very Good News

      Those responsible for the CIA torture program have never had to face their victims’ claims in a U.S. court because the government has always shielded the perpetrators. Until now.

    • Two Election Scandals That CNN Won’t Touch

      In 1968, Richard Nixon’s operatives derailed President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks which could have brought that bloody conflict to an end that year – rather than four years later and saved millions of lives – but peace might have meant Nixon’s defeat. A sordid tale described in declassified U.S. government records.

      In 1980, it was Ronald Reagan’s operatives who went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back to disrupt his negotiations to free 52 American hostages held by Iranian radicals and thus doom Carter’s reelection chances, a story described by more than two dozen sources from a range of different perspectives.

      But these two well-documented cases apparently touch too raw a nerve, so they are not on CNN’s roster. Still, you can learn about them at Consortiumnews.com by clicking on the “October Surprise Series” tab and reading the stories there.

    • How the Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings Changed How America Talks About Sexual Harassment

      On Saturday, HBO will premiere the film “Confirmation” starring Kerry Washington as Anita Hill and Wendell Pierce as then-judge, now–Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The movie recreates the three days of Supreme Court confirmation hearings that riveted the country in October 1991, launching a national conversation about sexual harassment in the workplace and helping to lead to a watershed year for women in elected office. Twenty-five years later, these hearings still resonate as one of the greatest political, sexual, and racial dramas in modern history. Slate senior legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick recently spoke with Gillian Thomas, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and author of Because of Sex, about Confirmation. (The two writers were also college roommates, graduating in 1990.)

    • Black Lives Don’t Matter, Black Votes Do: the Racial Hypocrisy of Hillary and Bill Clinton

      The Clintons have always cultivated a warm affection for African-Americans. One iconic image shows Bill riffing on his saxophone for Arsenio Hall. Another pictures Hillary hugging parishioners in black churches. Similar beguiling images appear daily in the media as her presidential campaign progresses.

    • The Single Most Important Thing That Hillary Clinton Did Not Say Last Night

      Hillary Clinton doesn’t want you to know who she would name to the Supreme Court.

    • EU rulings on whistleblowers and right-to-be-forgotten laws puts press freedom at risk

      European journalists were reminded today that their freedom to report is not only determined by national laws, but increasingly by European institutions. Today, after years of political battle, the European Parliament adopted the Passenger Name Record directive, the Data Protection Package, and the Trade Secrets Protection Act. The stakes were immense and the debates long and heated, leading to dissent and divisions within many political groups-and campaigns about the potential impact from journalists.

    • Sit-Ins, Arrests, and Escalation: Student Divestment Movement Springs into Action

      The fossil fuel divestment movement continued its momentum this week as students across the U.S. highlighted the need for their institutions to dump “support of global climate disaster, exploitation, and human suffering.”

      On Tuesday, for example, four members of Divest Harvard were arrested after staging a sit-in at the Federal Reserve Bank building, where the Harvard Management Company, which manages that university’s endowment, is located.

      That company “is the entity that actually does the day-to-day work investing in fossil fuel companies, so we thought it would be appropriate to take our message to this other important actor,” Harvard Law School student and Divest Harvard student Kelsey Skaggs, told the Crimson.

    • Anonymous hacktivist Matt DeHart gets credit from U.S. authorities for time served in Canadian prison

      An Anonymous hacktivist and former U.S. airman, who sought asylum in Canada claiming torture by American officials over his access to secret government documents, has unexpectedly had two years he spent in prison in Canada deducted from his sentence.

      After his deportation from Canada last year when his refugee claim was rejected, Matt DeHart entered a plea bargain with U.S. prosecutors, admitting to possession of sexually explicit photos of two underaged teenagers and avoiding court by fleeing across the border.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Wireless Industry Survey: Everybody Really Loves Zero Rating

      With the FCC glacially pondering whether or not zero rating (exempting some content from usage caps) is a bad idea, the wireless industry has decided to try and settle the argument. According to a new study by the wireless industry, 94% of Millennials are more likely to try a new online service if it’s part of a free data offering, 98% are more likely to stay with a carrier that offers such services, and 94% of Millennials are likely to use more data if it doesn’t count against their data plan. As intended, the survey resulted in a lot of varied news headlines insisting that “consumers actually like ISPs to play favorites on mobile data caps.”

    • White House Threatens To Veto Bill Attempting To Gut Net Neutrality, Defang FCC

      As we just noted, the House has been pushing yet another bill that attempts to punish the FCC for its uncharacteristic new habit of actually standing up to giant ISPs. The “No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act” (pdf) professes to be a bill focused on curtailing government run amok; with a particular eye on preventing the FCC from being able to regulate broadband rates (not-coincidentally just as ISPs begin heavily pursuing usage caps). But the bill uses a unique definition of “rate regulation” to, in reality, ban the FCC from doing, well, pretty much anything.

    • The Untold Story of the Teen Hackers Who Transformed the Early Internet

      On October 12th, 1983, Bill Landreth called his friend Chris in Detroit to chat. Chris frantically explained that the FBI had raided his house. “Don’t call me anymore,” Chris said in what would be a very short conversation. Bill didn’t know exactly what was happening, but he did know this: If the FBI had come for Chris, then he might be next.

      The next day, around a dozen FBI agents stormed Bill’s parent’s house just outside of San Diego, amassing piles of evidence including a computer that Bill, then 18, had hidden under his sister’s bed. Bill and Chris, who was 14 at the time, were the leaders of a coalition of teen hackers known as The Inner Circle. In a single day, the FBI conducted coordinated raids of group members across nine states, taking computers, modems, and copious handwritten notes detailing ways to access various networks on what was then a rudimentary version of the internet.

    • House Passes Bill to Sabotage Net Neutrality

      In a disappointing turn of events, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 241 to 173 to pass H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, a bill that would undermine the FCC’s ability to enforce key net neutrality protections.

      As we’ve mentioned previously, the bill’s ostensible purpose is to bar the FCC from regulating the rates of broadband Internet providers, thus locking into law a promise that the agency made when it introduced its new net neutrality rules last year. On its face, that’s not necessarily a bad idea.

      The problem is that the bill is worded in such a way that it could be used to keep the FCC from enforcing many important protections of users’ rights. At best, H.R. 2666 is a poorly written bill that brings a host of unintended consequences. At worst, it’s a calculated attempt to undermine the net neutrality principles we’ve all been fighting for.

      As the bill moves to the Senate this session, it’s crucial that senators reject it. Fortunately, President Obama has said that he will veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Analysis: WTO Amendment On Access To Medicines Faces EU Conundrum

      After waiting for over a decade, the World Trade Organization is finally close to achieving the first ever amendment to its rule-book, with only a handful of members still needing to formally accept new intellectual property provisions dealing with one aspect of access to medicines.

    • WIPO Members Flirt With Agreement On WIPO Technical Assistance

      South Africa commended WIPO on the interventions provided on successful technology licensing, intellectual property marketing, and IP valuation, in the document. South Africa suggested, as the way forward after the project, that WIPO set up a programme with the objective of advancing the skill set of individuals within offices of technology transfer in institutions, small and medium sized enterprises, and innovators.

    • Trademarks

      • Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Joins Too Many Other Presidential Campaigns In Abusing Trademark Law

        I shouldn’t have to start this post this way, but after someone flipped out in my last post about the treatment of Hillary Clinton and her emails, accusing me of being nothing more than a “BernieBro,” I’ll just make this explicit: I don’t currently support any of the current Presidential candidates, and am pretty sure I’ve mocked all of them for ignorance around issues that concern those of us at Techdirt. Either way, I wonder how the guy insisting I was just a secret Bernie supporter will respond to this article…

        Yes, because now Bernie Sanders’ campaign is the latest in a long list of presidential candidates to abuse trademark law to try to stifle criticism. His campaign joins those of Hillary Clinton, Ben Carson, Ron Paul and more as presidential candidates, past and present, abusing trademark law.

      • Delhi High Court steps into India trade mark row

        The Delhi High Court has come to the rescue of trade mark applicants, who are aggrieved that the Indian Trade Marks Registry has abandoned nearly 200,000 pending applications

      • Own name defence narrowed in Europe

        The recently introduced EU trade mark reforms limit the scope of the own name defence. James Whymark and Rachel Boakes explain why the change was introduced, and ask if it is really necessary

      • UK Trademark Battle Over The Number 3

        Anyone reading this site will know by now that the alcohol business has a trademark problem. As a quick refresher, what used to be an industry largely dominated by massive macro-companies has since evolved into one of small players, with craft breweries and distilleries exploding in popularity. With the increased amount of brands and inventory on the market, so too has the practice of creatively named brands come into vogue. And with that has come the trademark squabbles. Examples of the trademark disputes centered around these creative names for brands will include a beer called ‘Strikes Bock’, a brew entitled ‘Mus Knuckle’, and a brewery called ‘Innovation Brewing’.

      • Interview: Om Prakash Gupta on India’s trade mark troubles

        The Controller General of India’s Patent and Trade Mark Registry responded to Managing IP’s questions by email regarding the concerns over nearly 200,000 abandoned trade mark applications

    • Copyrights

      • You Wouldn’t Steal a Carouselambra (other Led Zeppelin songs are available)

        The essence of the recent ruling was not an investigation of stealing, but a finding that there is sufficiently substantial similarity between the pieces of music for a further trial. So why do so many news sources that should know better continue to frame the issues into a theft narrative?

      • MPAA Wants ISPs to Disconnect Persistent Pirates

        The MPAA wants Internet providers and services to take stronger actions against persistent copyright infringers. Ideally, the most egregious pirates should lose their accounts permanently, the group says. To accomplish this ISPs should be required to track the number of notices they receive for each account.

      • Can Lawyers ‘Overcome’ The Bogus Copyright On ‘We Shall Overcome’ And Free It To The Public Domain?

        Earlier this year, after a bit of a roller coaster ride of a legal fight over the copyright status of the song “Happy Birthday,” the two key parties finally reached a settlement that declared the song in the public domain. While many news reports had earlier claimed that the judge in the case had done the same, that wasn’t really true. The judge simply declared that Warner Chappell did not hold the copyright, leaving it an open question as to whether or not anyone else did — and some quickly raised their hands to claim the copyright.

        Either way, the legal team that helped achieve this eventual victory has apparently decided to go for it again. Representing a group calling itself the We Shall Overcome Foundation (WSOF), they are claiming that The Richmond Organization (TRO Inc.) and Ludlow Music are falsely claiming copyright over the famous civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” because that song is in the public domain. The case has tremendous similarities to the Happy Birthday case. As in that case, the plaintiffs say they’re making a documentary about the song. In this case, they sought a license for the song and were denied without explanation. TRO-Ludlow had first told WSOF that the song was “very difficult” to clear and they had to approve any use. WSOF recorded someone singing just one short verse, and then TRO-Ludlow flat out refused, but would not give any further explanation.

      • Judge Tosses Rick Ross’ Copyright Suit Over LMFAO’s Use Of Derivative Three-Word Phrase

        It’s been less than a year since we discussed LMFAO, the band, and its attempt to bully a brewery into renaming its beer called LMFAO with intellectual property threats. Well, the bro-rock duo is back in the IP spotlight again, but this time with a win. Rick Ross had long ago sued LMFAO over its hit song Party Rock Anthem for including a line, “Everyday I’m shufflin’.” Ross had his own hit song called Hustlin, which famously contained the line “Everyday I’m hustlin’,” and Ross argued for copyright infringement, claiming LMFAO’s lyric was an unauthorized derivative work.

04.14.16

Links 14/4/2016: Muktware Returns, Google Chrome 50 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why every developer is an open source developer these days

    Fast forward a few years, and it’s clear this trend toward open, collaborative development will come to permeate software development completely. As indicated by VisionMobile data, we’re already seeing developer demographics skew younger and less experienced, with this new generation of developers growing up on GitHub and speaking open source as their first language.

    This is a far cry from the past two decades, when open source was a religious battle at times, and enterprises were far more likely to use open source than contribute to it. As the O’Reilly survey data indicates, however, we’ve moved on. This willingness to reuse and contribute should lead to levels of developer productivity that we’ve never before seen.

  • 9 open source robotics projects

    Open source isn’t just changing the way we interact with the world, it’s changing the way the world interacts back with us. Case in point: open source robotics.

    Robots are playing an increasing role in our world, and while we perhaps haven’t reached the utopian future with robotic housekeepers imagined for us in the Jetsons, robotics are making advances in fields that fifty years ago would have been completely unimaginable.

  • Software in the Public Interest contributing members: Check your activity status!

    That’s a longer title than I’d like, but I want to try and catch the attention of anyone who might have missed more directed notifications about this. If you’re not an SPI contributing member there’s probably nothing to see here…

    Although I decided not to stand for re-election at the Software in the Public Interest (SPI) board elections last July, I haven’t stopped my involvement with the organisation. In particular I’ve spent some time working on an overhaul of the members website and rolling it out. One of the things this has enabled is implementation of 2009-11-04.jmd.1: Contributing membership expiry, by tracking activity in elections and providing an easy way for a member to indicate they consider themselves active even if they haven’t voted.

  • Events/Community

    • As PGConf US Approaches, Hear from Leaders in the PostgreSQL Community

      PGConf US, the largest official gathering of the PostgreSQL open source community is less than a week away. It will be held this year at the New York Marriott, Brooklyn Bridge, from April 18 – 20 (http://www.pgconf.us).

    • Working Late May Be Destroying Your Organization: Colin McNamara

      Many of us who work in the IT field are aware of the grim reality of working late at night. People often end up working long hours as they take on additional work and projects. But, is that good for you? Is it good for your organization? Is it good for your teams and clients? By doing so, are you helping your company or hurting it?

      [...]

      If you are continuously writing code, you will burn out. To avoid that, McNamara uses a strategy that comes from the Marine Corps: It’s a 72-hour stand. McNamara said that after 72 hours of coding, it’s time for rest, “Do not open your laptops. Go spend time with your family, as we don’t want you being divorced.”

      McNamara’s teams noticed significant improvements when adopting his advice, “Four days later, our guys had started to think outside the box again.” Don’t you want your teams to be thinking outside the box?

    • X.Org 2016 Elections Commence: Will They Merge With The SPI?
    • X.org Election Time — Vote Now

      It’s more important than usual to actually get your vote in — we’re asking the membership to vote on changes the the X.org bylaws that are necessary for X.org to become a SPI affiliate project, instead of continuing on as a separate organization. While I’m in favor of this transition as I think it will provide much needed legal and financial help, the real reason we need everyone to vote is that we need ⅔ of the membership to cast ballots for the vote to be valid. Last time, we didn’t reach that value, so even though we had a majority voting in favor of the change, it didn’t take effect. If you aren’t in favor of this change, I’d still encourage you to vote as I’d like to get a valid result, no matter the outcome.

    • PCI Microconference Accepted into 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference

      Given that PCI was introduced more than two decades ago and that PCI Express was introduced more than ten years ago, one might think that the Linux plumbing already did everything possible to support PCI.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

    • RDO Delivers OpenStack Mitaka for CentOS Linux

      This week, the RDO community announced the general availability of its freely-available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack, the popular open source project for building private, public, and hybrid clouds.

    • Google’s Cloud Gets an OpenStack Backup Driver

      The thirteenth version of the OpenStack cloud platform, Mitaka, has just arrived, and right on its heels, Google announced in a blog post that the Mitaka release includes a native option to back up OpenStack Cinder storage volumes to its public cloud.

      Cinder is used in many OpenStack deployments to house virtual machine data and other data at rest. OpenStack includes a native backup driver that permits Cinder to be backed up to various storage platforms. Now, Google cloud users can choose the native backup option for Cinder as a seamless choice.

  • Google

  • CMS

    • What to expect in Drupal 8

      Max Bronsema is the chief architect and director of web communication technologies for Western Washington University (WWU) in Bellingham, Washington. Previously, he was the lead Drupal architect at the university, leading a small student team developing innovative Drupal solutions for the public-facing sites at WWU.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF Blogs: Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: April 15th
    • gnuplot – command your graphs

      It’s 1990, or thereabouts. Linux is not even a twinkle in Torvalds’ eye and GNU is a six-year old showing real promise. An astrophysics PhD student a few years my senior is sitting at a Sun workstation enthusing about a new plotting program he’s found. It strikes me as being simple yet powerful and also a bit odd. I spend some time learning it, grow to like it and go on to use it to create all the plots in my PhD thesis. But during the late 1990s spreadsheets and other software tools became more powerful and ubiquitous and I fell into using them. However, a quarter of a century later, when writing an article for this very magazine, I stumble across gnuplot again and find, to my amazement, that it’s still being developed and it’s just as odd and useful as it ever was. So, let’s take a look at the curious beast that is gnuplot.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Spain publishes file archive tool as open source

      Spain’s Ministry of Finance and Public Administrations has published as open source Archive. This web-based solution creates archives of electronic files that are stored in compliance with the country’s eGovernment and interoperability regulations.

    • EC unveils Drupal module for explanatory maps

      The European Commission is working on an open source module for the Drupal content management system that will make it easy for website editors and site contributors to create explanatory EU maps. Using the NextEuropaMap module does not require users to know Javascript, and map-creation is presented in the system’s content interface.

    • Is the government’s embrace of open source going off track? [Ed: Microsoft-connected ‘news’ site (1105 Media) is attacking FOSS adoption in US government]

      The policy both reaffirms and broadens a goal laid out in the Obama administration’s Second Open Government National Action Plan for improved access to custom software code developed for the federal government. The plan emphasized use of (and contributing back to) open source software to fuel innovation, lower costs and benefit the public. It also furthers a long-standing ‘default to open’ objective going back to the early days of the administration.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • How this open source platform is weaving stories of communities in their own languages

      Stories are at the very core of YourStory. It is through stories that the world passes the lore. It was about time for stories to help languages make a grand comeback whilst inspiring the leaders of tomorrow’s world.

    • “ZeMarmot” at Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 and London Gallery West

      We will showcase a small video on the workflow of ZeMarmot Open Movie in the “Libre Graphics Culture and Practice” exhibition hosted at London Gallery West, art gallery of the University of Westminster.

    • How open source can accelerate the circular economy shift

      The shift to a circular economy presents a wicked, multidimensional problem: how can we redesign our operating system so that it works in the long term, and reflects the current context in terms of resources, energy and economic pressures?

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Home Furnishings Go Open Source with FABrics Easy to Make Chairs

        When something is open source, that means that all of the resources that the creators used are available for anyone else to use, either for their own projects or to customize and improve upon the work that was already done. While the concept of something being open source has traditionally been applied to software, it really didn’t take long for the term to to be co-opted for all types of new technologies and ideas. Today there are open sourced plans for hardware, open sourced scientific research, open sourced encyclopedias and even open sourced music. And now there is open sourced home furnishings, designed to be made by anyone, anywhere with easy to access technology and materials.

      • Open Source Robotics With WireBeings

        Everyone needs a cute robotic buddy, right? [Matthew Hallberg] created WireBeings, an open source 3D printed robotic platform. Looking like a cross between Wall-E and Danbo, WireBeings is designed around the Arduino platform. We do mean the entire platform. You can fit anything from an Arduino micro to a Mega2560 stacked with 3 shields in its oversized head. There’s plenty of room for breadboards and custom circuits.

  • Programming/Development

    • Kite’s Coding Asssitant Spots Errors, Finds Better Open Source

      Kite’s self-titled product acts as a sidebar that sits next to a your code editor and enables you to search for open source code that they can incorporate into your programs. It attempts to provide relevant documentation and code examples as you type and tries to spot any errors you might have made while staying out of the way, unlike Microsoft’s infamous digital assistant “Clippy.”

    • C And C++ Programming Languages — Biggest Differences And Comparison

      C vs C++ — which one is better? What is a procedural programming language and what is a modular programming language? Which one should be used for better and faster output? Well, we answer all the aspects of using C vs C++ against each other in this article.

    • Node.js Foundation Survey Shows Strong Enterprise Developer Adoption

      A new Node.js Foundation survey shows full stack demand for Node.js, along with developers using it with containers and for IoT development.

      The Node.js Foundation, a consortium of organizations fostering the development of the Node.js platform, today announced the results of its first Node.js User Survey Report.

      Node.js is an event-driven server-side JavaScript development environment based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. Mikeal Rogers, community manager for the Node.js Foundation, said there are more than 3.5 million Node.js users. And with an annual growth rate of 100 percent, Node.js is emerging as a universal platform used for Web applications, the Internet of things (IoT) and the enterprise, he said.

    • What “Sad Affleck” and an open source debacle teach us about success

      And the “left-pad” fiasco was about an “npm module”. Npm is a package manager for Javascript, which is a way for developers to list web “dependencies” to include in their application. These might be files they’ve written, but often they’re open source contributions from someone else.

      Well, left-pad’s developer, Azer Koçulu, was upset by a trademark dispute with another company, so he decided to pull all the modules he had made from npm. Not a big deal if no one besides you uses those modules. But left-pad is depended on by many apps and developers. And when it disappeared, it crippled apps all over the web.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open Standards, Move Over

      Back in 2003, over 800 blog posts ago, I decided to launch something I called the Standards Blog. Not surprisingly, it focused mostly on the development, implementation and importance of open standards. But I also wrote about other areas of open collaboration, such as open data, open research, and of course, open source software. Over time, there were more and more stories about open source worth writing, as well as pieces on the sometimes tricky intersection of open standards and open source.

Leftovers

  • Apple did not invent emoji

    But, Internet, I’ve noticed a worrying trend. Both popular media and a lot of tech circles tend to assume that “emoji” de facto means Apple’s particular font.

  • Twitter has outsized influence, but it doesn’t drive much traffic for most news orgs, a new report says

    Twitter generates 1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations, according to a new report from the social analytics company Parse.ly that examined data from 200 of its client websites over two weeks in January. (You’ll need to give Parse.ly your email address to access the full report.) Parse.ly’s network includes publishers like Upworthy, Slate, The Daily Beast, and Business Insider.

  • Does Twitter Matter for News Sites?

  • Health/Nutrition

    • These images show how quickly Jeremy Hunt has bankrupted healthcare in England

      “Breathtaking. It took just two years for Jeremy Hunt to completely wreck our NHS,” writes Dr Eoin Clarke on Twitter.

    • Ambulance privatisation descends into ‘total shambles’

      Hundreds of patients including people with cancer and kidney failure have missed important appointments for treatment because ambulances did not arrive to take them to hospital, after privatisation of NHS non-urgent transport services in Sussex this month.

      Some elderly patients have had to wait more than five hours for ambulances and been stuck at hospital for long periods after their appointments because the transport service, now run by the private firm Coperforma, has proved so unreliable.

      Patients, relatives, NHS bodies and local MPs have severely criticised the service’s performance, and a trade union representing ambulance crews said it was an “absolute shambles”. The NHS organisations that awarded the four-year, £63.5m contract have now launched an investigation.

      A host of problems have arisen since Coperforma replaced the NHS’s South East Coast ambulance service (Secamb) as the provider of non-emergency patient transport services on 1 April.

    • We CAN save our NHS from TTIP without Brexit – but let’s not declare premature victory

      Gail Cartmail of Unite the Union says their legal advice shows the EU still threatens our National Health Service – but that Cameron could fix that without the need for Brexit.

    • Disturbing New Evidence About What Common Pesticides Can Do to Brains

      For defense against the fungal pathogens that attack crops—think the blight that bedeviled Irish potato fields in the 19th century—farmers turn to fungicides. They’re widely sprayed on fruit, vegetable, and nut crops, and in the past decade, they’ve become quite common in the corn and soybean fields (see here and here for more). But as the use of fungicides has ramped up in recent years, some scientists are starting to wonder: What are these chemicals doing to the ecosystems they touch, and to us?

    • Meet Monsanto’s Evil Twin, an Industry That Does Major Damage and Gets Shockingly Little Attention

      According to the USDA, the average U.S. nitrogen fertilizer use per year from 1998 to 2007 was 24 billion 661 million pounds. To produce that nitrogen, the manufacturers released at least 6.7 pounds of GHG for every pound produced. That’s 165 billion, 228 million pounds of GHGs spewed into the atmosphere every year, just for the manufacture of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Most of those emissions are nitrous oxide, the most damaging emissions of U.S. agriculture.

    • Feeling Hungry? Have a Deep-Fried Butter Ball.

      To know for sure, we need two things. First, researchers with an open mind. Second, reliable nutritional studies. Unfortunately, since forcing mental patients to be saturated-fat guinea pigs is no longer on the table, it’s as hard as ever to conduct reliable studies. Still, keep in mind that the weakness of nutritional studies works both ways: all the evidence that saturated fats are bad and vegetable oil is good is pretty thin too. Go ahead and smear some butter on that toast.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Linux Foundation: The internet is crumbling

      The open source infrastructure of the internet is crumbling because of poor maintenance, the Linux Foundation warned today.

      Likening open source to the “roads and bridges of the internet”, Linux Foundation CTO Nicko van Someren said that underpaid developers are struggling to patch dangerous bugs and keep the open aspects of the web up to date.

    • Open source runs the world and needs better security, claims Linux Foundation CTO

      Security is the biggest plague of open source software, and more people are needed to work together squashing bugs and plugging holes in the code on which much of the internet relies.

      That’s according to Nicko van Someren, chief technology officer at the Linux Foundation, who explained that huge swathes of the internet and companies with online business models rely on open source code, software and infrastructure.

    • Security is the biggest bug of open source, says Linux Foundation CTO

      CYBER SECURITY is the plague of open source software, and more people are needed to work together squashing bugs and plugging holes in the code on which much of the internet relies.

      That’s according to Nicko van Someren, chief technology officer at the Linux Foundation, who explained that huge swathes of the internet and companies with online business models rely on open source code, software and infrastructure.

      “Open source projects are the roads and bridges of the internet. Pretty much everything we do on the internet relies on open source,” he said in a keynote speech at Cloud Expo in London.

    • Linux Computers Targeted by New Backdoor and DDoS Trojan

      After being bombarded with new malware towards the end of last year, the Linux ecosystem is rocked again by the discovery of a new trojan family, identified by security researchers as Linux.BackDoor.Xudp.

      The only detail that matters is that this new threat does not leverage automated scripts, vulnerabilities, or brute-force attacks to infect users and still relies on good ol’ user stupidity in order to survive.

    • Let’s Encrypt free security certificate program leaves beta

      Let’s Encrypt has announced that the free secure certificate program is leaving beta in its push to encrypt 100 percent of the web.

    • What happened with Badlock?

      Here’s the thing though. It wasn’t nearly as good as the hype claimed. It probably couldn’t ever be as good as the hype claimed. This is like waiting for a new Star Wars movie. You have memories from being a child and watching the first few. They were like magic back then. Nothing that ever comes out again will be as good. Your brain has created ideas and memories that are too amazing to even describe. Nothing can ever beat the reality you built in your mind.

    • Microsoft rated 6 of 13 security updates as critical, Badlock bug fix rated important

      For April 2016 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released 13 security bulletins, with six being rated as critical for remote code execution flaws and the patch for Badlock being among those rated only as important.

    • Apple Bug Exposed Chat History With a Single Click

      IN THE MIDDLE of intense public debate over whether Apple should be forced to help the government decrypt iPhones for criminal investigations, the company quietly closed a six-month-old security vulnerability in its Messages app. Newly published details reveal just how severe that vulnerability was, allowing the exfiltration of chat history, including photos and videos, if the user could be tricked into clicking a single malicious link.

      The bug, which affected Apple’s laptop and desktop computers from September through March, highlights just how hard it is for companies like Apple to effectively secure sensitive data — even before those companies begin fielding requests from the government for special access. Tech companies like Apple are nearly unanimous in their agreement that creating “backdoors” through which the government may access protected data undermines even the most basic security measures, including those designed to protect against vulnerabilities like the Messages bug.

    • New Threat Can Auto-Brick Apple Devices

      If you use an Apple iPhone, iPad or other iDevice, now would be an excellent time to ensure that the machine is running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system — version 9.3.1. Failing to do so could expose your devices to automated threats capable of rendering them unresponsive and perhaps forever useless.

    • Execs: We’re not responsible for cybersecurity

      More than 90 percent of corporate executives said they cannot read a cybersecurity report and are not prepared to handle a major attack, according to a new survey.

      More distressing is that 40 percent of executives said they don’t feel responsible for the repercussions of hackings, said Dave Damato, chief security officer at Tanium, which commissioned the survey with the Nasdaq.

      “I think the most shocking statistic was really the fact that the individuals at the top of an organization — executives like CEOs and CIOs, and even board members — didn’t feel personally responsible for cybersecurity or protecting the customer data,” Damato told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.

    • Brits suffer more than 2,000 ransomware attacks each day

      The security firm said that the enemy is now more organised than ever before, and that most groups have the same kind of resources, skills and support as nation-state hacker groups.

      “Advanced criminal attack groups now echo the skills of nation-state attackers. They have extensive resources and a highly skilled technical staff that operate with such efficiency that they maintain normal business hours and even take the weekends and holidays off,” said Kevin Haley, director of Symantec Security Response.

      “We are even seeing low-level criminal attackers create call centre operations to increase the impact of their scams.”

      These sophisticated hackers are often the first to embrace zero-day vulnerabilities, which increased by 125 percent in 2015 to 54.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • I am on the Kill List. This is what it feels like to be hunted by drones

      I am in the strange position of knowing that I am on the ‘Kill List’. I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again. Four times missiles have been fired at me. I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive.

      I don’t want to end up a “Bugsplat” – the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized.

      I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered.

    • Drive to Release 9/11 Docs Gains Strength After 60 Minutes Report

      Things have been moving fast since a momentous 60 Minutes report on the drive to declassify 28 pages on foreign government financing of 9/11. Here’s your personal briefing on all the latest developments.

    • Two Years After the Nigerian Girls Were Taken

      Late last month, amid a spate of suicide bombings planned by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria and across the border in the far north of Cameroon, something strange happened. A vigilante force in a Cameroonian town called Limani stopped a twelve-year-old girl and a thirty-five-year-old woman who were carrying explosives, and subsequently handed them over to authorities. While they were being questioned in custody, the girl said she had been sent by Boko Haram to detonate herself, which wasn’t in itself unusual—one of every five suicide bombings that the group has staged or inspired over the past two years has been executed by children, usually young girls. But the girl also said that she had ended up with the Islamist group after it kidnapped her and more than two hundred schoolgirls in the Nigerian town of Chibok, in a mass abduction that began on the evening of April 14, 2014, two years ago this Thursday.

    • John Kerry, and the Legacy of Hiroshima

      U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and fellow envoys from the G7 visited Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park on the margins of their summit meeting this week.

      Kerry was the highest ranking American government official to visit the Peace Park, the memorial dedicated to the victims of the world’s first nuclear attack on August 6, 1945.

    • When Will the ‘28 Pages’ From 9/11 Commission Report Be Declassified?

      The 15-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is this September, and we still don’t know the whole story.

      On Sunday’s edition of “60 Minutes,” Steve Kroft looked into a gaping hole that remains in the narrative—the “28 pages.” They are the final chapter from the report of the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, and the redacted pages are believed to offer insights into what role Saudi Arabia played in the 9/11 attacks on America.

      Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and the country has been considered the chief source of funding for al-Qaida for many years. Since the 9/11 report was made public on Dec. 11, 2002, Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time, has worked to reveal all Saudi links to terrorists, but no link has been proved.

      Kroft spoke with Graham and others who want the Obama administration to declassify the 28 pages, and the former senator said he remains “deeply disturbed by the amount of material that has been censored from this report.”

    • Victims Of A Gang War Rooted In Los Angeles Now Fleeing To The U.S. In Mass

      Threats to police officers and their families have become increasingly common as the death toll from the gang war in El Salvador rises to the same level of violence as its bloody civil war.

    • President Killary

      Hillary Clinton is proving to be the “teflon candidate.” In her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she has escaped damage from major scandals, any one of which would destroy a politician. Hillary has accepted massive bribes in the form of speaking fees from financial organizations and corporations. She is under investigation for misuse of classified data, an offense for which a number of whistleblowers are in prison. Hillary has survived the bombing of Libya, her creation of a failed Libyan state that is today a major source of terrorist jihadists, and the Benghazi controversy. She has survived charges that as Secretary of State she arranged favors for foreign interests in exchange for donations to the Clintons’ foundation. And, of course, there is a long list of previous scandals: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate. Diana Johnstone’s book, Queen of Chaos, describes Hillary Clinton as “the top salesperson for the ruling oligarchy.”

    • Hillary’s “I’m Not a Crook” Moment

      As the Battle of New York looms, an underground shadow war flirts with High Noon. After nearly one year, the FBI has finally investigated the treasure trove contained in Hillary Clinton’s subterranean private email server. The FBI has refused to release any records. Remember, this is a criminal investigation.

      Former State Department IT official Bryan Pagliano – who essentially set up Clinton’s personal server – was granted immunity in exchange for cooperating with the FBI’s investigation. A whodunit applies on whether Pagliano was told this server might be the conduit of secret State Department communications as well as top secret National Security issues.

    • The Enemy Within: Terrorist Enablers on the Potomac

      Hillary Clinton and CIA director David Petraeus had a brilliant idea: they would fund, arm, and train a proxy army in Syria, overthrow the regime of strongman Bashar al-Assad, and jump on the rapidly moving train of the “Arab Spring” to extend US influence in the region. What could go wrong?

      Plenty.

      The “Free Syrian Army” created by Washington is, today, fighting alongside al-Qaeda and its Salafist allies, filling the vacuum left behind by the “Islamic State”/ISIS as it contracts under fire from Russian war planes and the Syrian army.

    • Noam Chomsky on How the U.S. and British Invasion of Iraq Caused the Syrian Refugee Crisis (Video)

      In a discussion with acTVism, the renowned linguist and political commentator offers context to the seemingly endless turmoil in the Middle East.

    • As Ukraine Collapses, Europeans Tire of US Interventions

      I have no doubt that the previous government was corrupt. Corruption is the stock-in-trade of governments. But according to Transparency International, corruption in the Ukrainian government is about the same after the US-backed coup as it was before. So the intervention failed to improve anything, and now the US-installed government is falling apart. Is a Ukraine in chaos to be considered a Washington success story?

    • Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?

      If Clinton becomes President, she will be surrounded by a neocon-dominated American foreign policy establishment that will press her to resume its “regime change” strategies in the Middle East and escalate its new and dangerous Cold War against Russia.

    • Hillary Clinton Claims Honduran Government ‘Followed The Law’ In Ousting Its President in 2009

      Leaked State Department cables revealed that the U.S. ambassador in Honduras pleaded with Clinton to call what happened in Honduras a military coup, as did members of Congress. But she refused, and worked instead to broker a deal that elected a new government that was much friendlier to multinational corporations and the U.S. military.

    • The End of the American Empire

      Americans like to forget we ever had an empire or to claim that, if we did, we never really wanted one. But the momentum of Manifest Destiny made us an imperial power. It carried us well beyond the shores of the continent we seized from its original aboriginal and Mexican owners. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. But the American empire was never limited to that sphere.

      [...]

      In 1893, the United States engineered regime change in Hawaii. In 1898, we annexed the islands outright. In that same year, we helped Cuba win its independence from Spain, while confiscating the Spanish Empire’s remaining holdings in Asia and the Americas: Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Beginning in 1897, the U.S. Navy contested Samoa with Germany. In 1899, we took Samoa’s eastern islands for ourselves, establishing a naval base at Pago Pago.

      [...]

      From 1899 to 1902, Americans killed an estimated 200,000 or more Filipinos who tried to gain independence for their country from ours. In 1903, we forced Cuba to cede a base at Guantánamo to us and detached Panamá from Colombia. In later years, we occupied Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, parts of Mexico, and Haiti.

    • Behind Ukraine’s Leadership Shake-up

      In this sense, the Dutch referendum was surely the trigger for the removal of Yatsenyuk to show Europe and the world that Ukrainian leaders were trying to consolidate their power in order to proceed with deep reforms. But Kiev’s political leadership is not where the real power in the country lies.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • The Wall Street Journal Cons Its Readers Yet Again

      George Bush! Who knew he was such a climate change advocate?

      [...]

      I continually wonder why Wall Street Journal readers enjoy paying good money to get lied to so routinely. There’s almost literally nothing true about that passage above. And yet, apparently this is what the Journal’s audience craves. Why?

    • Summer-Like Temperatures Smash Ice Melt Records For Greenland

      Blistering temperatures and rainfall over Greenland have jump-started the summer melt season weeks early. On Monday, a stunning 12 percent of Greenland’s massive ice sheet was melting — “smashing by a month the previous records of more than 10 percent of the ice sheet melting,” according to the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI).

      DMI scientists were “at first incredulous.” One DMI climate scientist said, “We had to check that our models were still working properly.” But in fact, temperatures over parts of Greenland this month have been measured as high as 17.8°C — a scorching 64°F.

      “Even weather stations quite high up on the ice sheet observed very high temperatures on Monday,” explained Robert Fausto of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS). At one “site at 1840 meters [1.1 miles] above sea level, we observed a maximum temperature of 3.1°C [37.6°F]. This would be a warm day in July, never mind April.”

    • Who gets to decide how the media talks about climate change?

      Sometimes, it’s simple. Sometimes, a newspaper editor gives their coal-baron buddy a column from which to repeatedly deny the climate science whose conclusions threaten his wealth. Or they imply the dubious claims of a report from a dodgy anti-science ‘think-tank’ are ‘peer-reviewed’. Or they launch a smear campaign against climate scientists, trying to ‘prove’ that normal statistical techniques amount to ‘doctoring data’.

    • 5 Ways Bernie Might Be the Best Choice for the Environment

      Sanders burnishes his green scorecard with a key endorsement from one of the most pro-environment senators.

    • Oil Industry’s Suppression of Climate Science Began in 1940s, Documents Reveal

      A trove of newly uncovered documents shows that fossil fuel companies were explicitly warned of the risks of climate change decades earlier than previously suspected.

      And while it’s no secret—anymore—that the companies knew about those dangers long ago, the documents, published Wednesday by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), reveal even more about the broader industry effort to suppress climate science and foment public doubt about global warming.

      Industry executives met in Los Angeles in 1946 to discuss growing public concern about air pollution. That meeting led to the formation of a panel—suitably named the Smoke and Fumes Committee—to conduct research into air pollution issues.

      But the research was not meant to be a public service; rather, it was used by the committee to “promote public skepticism of environmental science and environmental regulations the industry considered hasty, costly, and potentially unnecessary,” CIEL writes.

  • Finance

    • Why ‘Modern’ Work Culture Makes People So Miserable

      Dan Lyons’ account of his time at the software company HubSpot describes a workplace in which employees are disposable, “treated as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded.” And HubSpot is scarcely unique: The description of Amazon’s work environment is just one of many similar cases. An increasing number of companies offer snacks, foosball, and futuristic jargon to keep employees’ minds off their long hours and omnipresent economic insecurity.

    • Verizon CEO Attack on Bernie Sanders Receives Gushing Praise — From Fellow Execs

      AS 40,000 VERIZON workers went on strike Wednesday to protest cuts to health care and pensions, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders rallied with some of them in New York City, blasting the company’s practices.

      “This is just another major American corporation trying to destroy the lives of working Americans,” Sanders told the workers, who decided to strike after failing to reach a contract. “Today you are standing up not just for justice for Verizon workers, you’re standing up for millions of Americans who don’t have a union.”

      Meanwhile, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam published a lengthy essay on LinkedIn titled “Feeling the Bern of Reality — the Facts About Verizon and the ‘Moral Economy,’” in which he called Sanders’s views “contemptible.”

    • Sanders Responds to Disgruntled CEOs: ‘I Welcome Their Contempt’

      Bernie Sanders’ response to Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s charge that the Democratic presidential candidate has “contemptible” views? Bring it.

      Sanders on Wednesday joined striking Verizon workers on a picket line in New York City. He applauded them, saying, “Today you are standing up—not just for justice for Verizon workers—you are standing up for millions of Americans.”

      The Manhattan march was one of many the roughly 40,000 members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBW) unions staged on the East Coast to protest what they described as the communication behemoth’s “devastating” cuts.

      “They want to take away the health benefits that you have earned,” Sanders said. “They want to outsource to decent paying jobs. They want to give their CEO $20 million a year in compensation,” he told the workers.

    • Who Are The Non-Celebrities In The Panama Papers?

      In the first stories about the Panama Papers, we got the names of a bunch of politicians, a few criminals, sports and other celebrities and one or two names of rich people. But in focusing solely on this kind of person, we miss the major point about tax havens. They are used by hundreds of thousands of people, including many who are not billionaires and who are not famous or otherwise newsworthy. They are commonly used by doctors, lawyers, accountants, small business owners and those who inherited money from such people.

      Here’s a chart from the New York Times showing the mix of people making up the top 1% in income in the US; the chart is from 2012 and uses 2007 data. The cut-off for this level is the Census Bureau figure of $380K, while other studies put it higher. The Fed Survey of Consumer Finances, a better survey, has it at $690K in 2007. The cut-off for the top 1% in wealth was estimated at nearly $8.4 million in 2007. Those numbers went down after the Great Crash, but recovered smartly. By 2013, the cut-off for the top 1% in wealth was back to nearly $8 million, and climbing.

    • 2,500 Years of Class Hatred

      Boots Riley’s recent article, posted in The Guardian, systematically dispels the myth of black-on-black crime advocated by Bill Clinton. Rather than pointing the image of failure at black people in the US, Riley insists, the mirror should be redirected to class war and the failure of liberal democracy. The condition of black people will advance with economic prosperity, not punitive drug laws.

      The attempts to demean black people in the US, while specific to modern racism, has its roots in old fashioned class hatred interwoven within the fabric of western civilization.

    • Elizabeth Warren Takes on Tax Preparation Industry With New Legislation to Make Filing Easier
    • Elizabeth Warren Wants To Take Down TurboTax

      Elizabeth Warren wants to make tax filing season simpler and cheaper for most Americans.

      On Wednesday, the Democratic senator introduced a bill with seven cosponsors, including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, seeking to make significant reforms to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Under the bill, Americans with simple tax obligations would have the option not to complete a tax return at all, but to instead receive a pre-prepared return from the IRS with their liability or refund already calculated for them. The IRS already gets most employer and bank information on taxpayers’ obligations — such as W2s and interest earned — so all it would have to do is calculate what they would owe for them.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • US Chamber Of Commerce Actually Just US Chamber Of Our Highest-Paying Members

      The US Chamber of Commerce is an organization that’s always carried a completely undeserved air of legitimacy. For one, its name makes it sound as though it’s actually an extension of the federal government, rather than what it is: a lobbying group representing a variety of trade interests.

      It also gains unearned legitimacy by its name being a reflection of thousands of local chambers of commerce, which are far more representative of its members than the national version. The US Chamber of Commerce continues to push for legislation and regulation that isn’t aligned with the views of its membership as a whole, but rather just its most generous contributors.

    • Majority of Americans Believe Sanders Is the Only Compassionate and Likable Candidate

      The poll, conducted March 31-April 4, found that 48 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Sanders, while 39 percent view him unfavorably. Compare that with delegate leaders Trump and Clinton, whose unfavorable ratings blow Sanders out of the water. Fifty-five percent of Americans say they have unfavorable views of Clinton, while 40 percent say they have a favorable take.

    • I.F. Stone – an inspiration for us all

      His starting point was that reporters should not assume governments and corporations are telling the truth, but verify all their claims as much as possible. I wonder how many Norwegian reporters can be said to follow the principles of I. F. Stone. They are definitely in short supply. If you, like me half a year ago, have never heard of him, check him out.

    • The New Propaganda War

      Despite Western media dominance, the U.S. government wants to stop the world from hearing the “other side” on foreign disputes by “countering” or discrediting those voices, explains Jonathan Marshall.

    • An ‘Unqualified’ Success at Media Manipulation

      Political strategists know well that attacks can backfire, especially for candidates with high negatives such as Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, the Clinton campaign attacked Sanders through a common political maneuver: They used surrogates.

      [...]

      Though as FAIR (4/7/16) pointed out, the banking issue was a red herring. (“When asked how he would break up the big banks, Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks,” economist Dean Baker wrote. “That’s exactly the right answer.”) But by Wednesday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe (4/6/16) had already picked up the Clinton campaign’s talking points. Host Joe Scarborough repeatedly tried to get Clinton herself to weigh in on whether Sanders was “unqualified” to be president. Instead of answering yes or no, she reiterated the campaign’s carefully massaged strategy: “I think he hadn’t done his homework, and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions.”

      [...]

      The next move revealed the sophisticated media-handling of Clinton campaign strategists. Clinton operatives Christina Reynolds and Brian Fallon went on the offensive with, as Salon (4/8/16) put it, “sanctimonious incredulity,” saying, “This is a ridiculous and irresponsible attack for someone to make.” They complained that Clinton herself had never said such a thing, yet Sanders opened his comments with “quote, unquote.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Banning Cameron: the pointlessness of campus censorship

      I know that many students disagree with Cameron’s political views. He’s too left-wing for my liking. But unlike SU politicos I don’t consider differences of opinion as a justification for censorship. Many of my fellow students today seem to lack the capacity to engage with ideas contrary to their own, to the extent that dissenting views make them feel ‘unsafe’ or ‘threatened’. These people need to get a grip on reality and realise that the world will not bow down to their fragile egos.

    • Prevent: this is state censorship, not ‘safeguarding’

      The Prevent Duty – which put the existing Prevent Strategy measures on a legal footing – is, ostensibly, about protecting and caring for students. It spells out the safeguards universities are required to have in place before allowing speakers on campus. When prime minister David Cameron announced the new measures in September, he said it was every public institution’s responsibility to deny all extremist ideas ‘the oxygen they need to flourish’. But, rhetoric aside, it was clear that this was aimed squarely at Islamist hate preachers.

    • New Hampshire Complaint Censorship Chills Viral Video on YouTube, Uses False Privacy Claim

      Complaint censorship is a rising tide on YouTube, threatening to scrub the internet clean of video recorded in public, which people want to take back years later.

      A New Hampshire citizen journalist recorded a public conversation on a sidewalk and posted it to YouTube (see below) where it went viral, getting over 1,000,000 views, but now someone is using complaint censorship to claim a privacy right, on a public sidewalk.

      Complaint censorship uses illegitimate claims to bog down news and public interest videos on YouTube.

    • Scholar: Why U.S. college censorship reminds me of authoritarian regimes

      The one place where freedom of expression and the open mind should prevail is on college campuses, right? Isn’t that what liberal education is supposed to be about — the free and open inquiry into history, science and the arts in order to understand how humanity has understood itself for millennia?

      But if that is so, why has the university become its opposite: an astonishingly illiberal institution where speech codes, “safe spaces,” and other controls of freedom of expression are intended to close down debate? Why is it increasingly a “space” where prominent people like former Harvard University President Larry Summers are forbidden to speak, where professors who buck the party line are suspended from teaching, and where some schools even try to control how people address one another in public (“Ze” and “hir” instead of Mr., Miss or him or her)?

    • Comedian Could Face 3 Years In German (Not Turkish!) Jail For Mocking Notoriously Thin-Skinned Turkish President

      Exactly as Böhmermann doubtless intended, this has caused a huge political stink. The broadcaster ZDF took down the video, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, told Turkey’s prime minister that the poem was a “deliberately offensive text” that she personally disapproved of. Most significantly, the Turkish government has filed a formal request for Böhmermann’s prosecution. So what? you might ask. Germany isn’t Turkey, and so surely there’s no way that somebody would be prosecuted just for a few rude lyrics about a foreign leader.

    • Texas Prison System Unveils New Inmate Censorship Policy

      The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is getting in the digital censorship game with a new policy that would punish an offender for having a social media presence, even when someone on the outside is posting updates on their behalf.

    • Texas Bans Social Media Accounts For Inmates

      Texas is banning inmates from having any kind of social media accounts. The ban includes accounts run in their name by friends or family members.
      Included in the latest version of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s offender handbook updated April 1, the new rule prohibits all inmates from “maintaining active social media accounts for the purposes of soliciting, updating, or engaging others.”

    • Israel’s state archivist opens up about censorship, digitization

      Israel’s state archivist confirms that nearly half a million pages have been sent to the IDF Censor, which has redacted historical documents that already saw the light of day, and talks about why he didn’t foresee the storm that erupted over his decision to end access to paper documents.

    • The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech

      Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in. A recent grad of California State University, Chico, Mora-Blanco had majored in art, minored in women’s studies, and spent much of her free time making sculptures from found objects and blown-glass. Struggling to make rent and working a post-production job at Current TV, she’d jumped at the chance to work at an internet startup called YouTube. Maybe, she figured, she could pull in enough money to pursue her lifelong dream: to become a hair stylist.

    • UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet

      UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show.

      The payments were made as the university was trying to boost its image online and were among several contracts issued following the pepper-spray incident.

      Some payments were made in hopes of improving the results computer users obtained when searching for information about the university or Katehi, results that one consultant labeled “venomous rhetoric about UC Davis and the chancellor.”

      Others sought to improve the school’s use of social media and to devise a new plan for the UC Davis strategic communications office, which has seen its budget rise substantially since Katehi took the chancellor’s post in 2009. Figures released by UC Davis show the strategic communications budget increased from $2.93 million in 2009 to $5.47 million in 2015.

      “We have worked to ensure that the reputation of the university, which the chancellor leads, is fairly portrayed,” said UC Davis spokeswoman Dana Topousis. “We wanted to promote and advance the important teaching, research and public service done by our students, faculty and staff, which is the core mission of our university.”

      Money to pay the consultants came from the communications department budget, Topousis said.

    • British Culture Ministers Ponder Anal Sex

      The U.K. Department for Culture, Media & Sport is concerned about the prevalence of anal sex in online pornography. In a report on age-verification rules for British porn websites, the department frets that anal sex is not sufficiently pleasurable for women and wonders whether porn may be pressuring the poor dears into it.

    • Charlie Hebdo, Terrorism, and the Culture of ‘You Can’t Say That’

      So yes, a mask has slipped. The Charliephobes’ mask. Their claim to be against “punching down,” to care about ordinary, vulnerable people, has been exposed as utter bunkum. In truth, they’re all about protecting a global religion, an ideology, from ridicule, and in the process they’re doing more damage to freedom and social solidarity in Europe than they could ever understand.

    • Former girlfriend of controversial blogger to enter defence for insulting Muslims
    • Malaysian ‘sex blogger’ acquitted of charge under censorship act
    • Former sex blogger Vivian Lee to give evidence
    • ABC’s China website gives in to censorship
    • How the ABC sold out news values to get access to China
    • ABC celebrates first anniversary of China portal

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Secure Cars, but Not Phones? Government Doublespeak on Cybersecurity

      PRIVACY ADVOCATES SAY government officials are talking out of two sides of their mouths when it comes to cybersecurity. The latest case in point: Assistant Attorney General John Carlin calling for super-secure, hack-proof cars at an automotive conference on Tuesday, even as FBI Director James Comey continues to pressure phone manufacturers and technology companies to roll back their security to allow for law enforcement access.

      “There are things you can do to mitigate the risk, protect yourselves and your companies, and ultimately, the cybersecurity of the United States,” Carlin said at the SAE 2016 World Congress conference in Detroit. “First, design with security in mind.”

      But driving a car in 2016 is not totally different from using a cellphone — and protecting either of them against hacking raises the same issues. These days, dozens of networked electronic control units manage things like braking and accelerating by communicating with each other, and more and more cars are connected to the internet, or accessible via Bluetooth. Securing the conversation between your brake pedal and your brakes is a lot like securing your banking app or your intimate phone conversation.

    • GCHQ stopped a Harry Potter leak, but what do the books say about government surveillance?

      A significant portion of the Harry Potter series is devoted to critiquing the invasions of a surveillance state.

    • Cyber-security pro? Forget GCHQ, BT wants to hire 900 of you

      Former state monopoly BT is on the hunt for 900 security bods to help it meet the “surge” in customer demand for those skills, following a number of high-profile security and data breaches.

    • Burr & Feinstein Officially Release Anti-Encryption Bill, As Wyden Promises To Filibuster It

      Last week, we wrote about a “discussion draft” of Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein’s new anti-encryption bill that would effectively require any company doing anything with encryption to make sure that encryption was flat out broken, putting everyone at risk. Feinstein and Burr’s offices refused to comment on the criticism of the draft, insisting that they were still working on the bill. Well, late Wednesday Burr officially released a copy of the bill and it’s basically the same insane bill we saw last week. As far as I can tell, the only real change is further defining what is meant by a “court order.” It used to just say any court order, but now says only court orders for specific issues, but it’s a pretty broad list: crimes involving serious bodily harm, foreign intelligence, espionage, terrorism, sexual exploitation of a minor, a “serious violent felony,” or a serious drug crime. So, I guess we should feel relieved that it won’t be used for cases where someone’s caught trespassing or something? It’s still a ridiculous bill (and it still doesn’t explain what the penalties are).

    • Victory: California Smartphone Anti-Encryption Bill Dies in Committee

      The California Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection has scuttled A.B. 1681, the anti-smartphone encryption bill that EFF has been fighting for the last few months. The bill was unable to get a second in committee, so it died without a formal vote.

      A.B. 1681 was introduced in January of this year, and originally required that every smartphone sold in California have the technical ability to be decrypted and unlocked at the time of sale by the manufacturer or operating system provider. The bill was then amended to penalize companies that couldn’t decrypt the contents of a smartphone pursuant to a state court order.

      The bill, both before and after it was amended, posed a serious threat to smartphone security. It would have forced companies to dedicate resources to finding ways to defeat their own encryption or insert backdoors to facilitate decryption. As a result, the bill would have essentially prohibited companies from offering full disk encryption for their phones.

    • Sixth Circuit Disregards Privacy in New Cell Site Location Information Decision

      This week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held, in United States v. Carpenter, that we lack any privacy interest in the location information generated by our cell phones. The opinion shows a complete disregard for the sensitive and revealing nature of cell site location information (CSLI) and a misguided response to the differences between the analog technologies addressed in old cases and the data-rich technologies of today.

      In 2011, the FBI was investigating a string of robberies in and around Detroit. Relying solely on a court order, the FBI got several months of round-the-clock CSLI data on the two defendants in an attempt to link them to the crimes. CSLI are phone company records of cell phone towers your phone connects to at a given time and date. After the case was appealed to the federal appellate court, we joined the ACLU, the Brennan Center, CDT, and NACDL in arguing that acquiring this sensitive long-term, historical location information without a warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.

    • Obama Should Reject Anti-Encryption Legislation and Protect Digital Security

      Dozens of nonprofit organizations, companies, and academics sent a joint letter today urging President Obama to take a strong stance against backdoors and oppose legislation that would undermine security.

      The coalition effort—which included EFF, Access Now, Fight for the Future, and others— was organized after The Hill published a draft of anti-security legislation written by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The draft bill would create a new obligation on device manufacturers, software developers, ISPs, online services and others to decrypt encrypted data or offer “such technical assistance as is necessary” if ordered to do so by any court in the country.

    • FBI’s Latest Story about the Hack of Farook’s Phone

      There’s one more thing that is getting lost in this debate. Comey and others keep talking about the use of this for an intelligence function, as if to justify keeping this exploit secret. I know that’s the convenient part of using a terrorism case to raise the stakes of back dooring phones. But this is ultimately a law enforcement issue, not an intelligence one, no matter how much FBI wants to pretend we’re going to find out something going forward. And as such it should be subject to greater standards of disclosure than a pure use of an exploit for intelligence purposes would.

    • Here are 79 California Surveillance Tech Policies. But Where Are the Other 90?

      That’s why last weekend more than 30 citizen watchdogs joined EFF’s team to hold California law enforcement and public safety agencies accountable. Together, we combed through nearly 170 California government websites to identify privacy and usage policies for surveillance technology that must now be posted online under state law.

      On January 1, 2016 two new laws went into effect in California: S.B. 34 requires agencies that use automated license plate recognition (ALPR) or access ALPR data to publish privacy and usage policies, while S.B. 741 requires public policies for cell-site simulators, a type of cellphone tracking technology often referred to as “Stingrays” and “Dirtboxes.” These policies must be posted “conspicuously” on their websites.

    • Is Canada Using Stingrays to Spy on Its Own Citizens?

      It’s no secret that OpenMedia is worried about the use of Stingrays.

      Just weeks ago, we launched a new campaign to Stop Stingray Surveillance, and almost 30,000 people have already spoken up against invasive cell phone spying.

      The campaign builds on our detailed policy intervention we filed last month with the B.C. Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, as a part of its investigation into the Vancouver Police Department’s failure to respond to access to information requests on the potential use of Stingrays.

      Well, now we’re taking the fight national.

    • EFF Supports Rep. Goodlatte’s Manager’s Amendment to The Email Privacy Act (H.R. 699)

      The House is finally moving forward with updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), one of the main laws protecting the privacy of online communications. This year, The Email Privacy Act (H.R. 699), which updates ECPA to ensure all of our private online messages are protected by a warrant, garnered 315 cosponsors, almost three-quarters of the entire House. This impressive number of cosponsors makes a powerful statement. And it’s why Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, scheduled a committee meeting on Wednesday to advance the bill.

      Today, Rep. Goodlatte announced that he will be moving his own amendment to The Email Privacy Act through the House Judiciary Committee. While we would prefer the committee pass a clean version of the Email Privacy Act, we support Rep. Goodlatte’s amendment.

    • Former Reuters Journalist Matthew Keys Sentenced to Two Years for Hacking

      On Wednesday, the former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys was sentenced to two years in prison for computer hacking.

      Keys, who once worked for Tribune Company-owned Sacramento television station Fox 40, left that job in 2010 and went on to copy and paste login credentials for the Tribune Company’s content management system (CMS) into a chatroom where members of the hacking collective Anonymous planned out their operations. (Keys still denies all allegations.)

      An unknown person under the username “sharpie” then went on to log into the CMS and deface a Los Angeles Times article. The article’s headline and dek (the subtitle beneath the headline) remained defaced for about forty minutes before an editor noticed and changed it back.

    • FBI paid professional hackers to gain access to San Bernardino iPhone – report

      The FBI reportedly bought a previously unknown security bug from a group of professional hackers to gain entry to the San Bernardino iPhone 5C, according to the Washington Post.

      The report suggests hackers supplied at least one so-called zero-day flaw in the iPhone 5C’s security that allowed the FBI to circumvent the lockscreen and automatic wipe feature that kicks in after 10 wrong passcode entries.

      The hack meant the FBI dropped its attempt to force Apple to create software to unlock the iPhone 5C, which the company said would put all iPhones at risk.

      The FBI has already clarified that the hack bought for a one-time-fee cannot break into newer iPhones, including the iPhone 5S or later, but the hack could affect any iPhone 5C or older, including the iPhone 5 and 4S.

    • House panel approves bill to protect older email from government snooping

      A key House panel voted Wednesday to pass an email privacy bill that would stop the government from being able to read Americans’ old emails without a warrant.

      The House Judiciary Committee voted 28-0 to approve the Email Privacy Act, a bipartisan bill that would replace a 1986 law that allows government investigators to peruse emails at will if the communications are at least six months old. The bill would require federal officials to obtain a warrant before they can read or view emails, texts, photos or instant messages — regardless of when the data was sent.

    • Silverpush Stops Using Sneaky, Inaudible TV Audio Tracking Beacons After FTC Warning

      ISPs and cable companies already track and sell your online behavior, your location data, and effectively everything you do on the Internet (to the second). Now broadcasters and app developers are cooking up a new technology that uses so-called “smart audio beacons” emitted during television programs to help track user viewing habits. These tones, inaudible to the human ear, are picked up by applications which use your smartphone or tablet microphone to listen and record them. That data can then be used to build a profile that potentially matches your existing online data with your viewing habits.

    • Maybe The NSA Has Already Broken Every Security System, Not By Hacking Computers, But By Hacking The Entire Industry

      The novel solution is for the NSA to exploit “raw capitalism,” and to “throw money at the problem” by playing the role of a friendly local venture capitalist that wants to turn the idea into a company. At the same time, the NSA finds a relevant patent held by one of its “friends” in the industry, and then asks those friends to send around their patent lawyers to the new startup it is funding, to get it shut down in a perfectly non-suspicious way.

    • Did NSA underestimate the insider threat?

      In this edition of the Irari Report, Ira Winkler and Araceli Treu Gomes continue their interview of Chris Inglis, former Deputy Director of NSA. In this segment, they focus on how an organization that is so aware of the insider threat can be compromised by a person like Edward Snowden.

      Inglis highlights how trust is critical to function, but verification must be implemented. This relies upon a stringent screening process, as you have to extend to trust to the people you hire. While Snowden was one traitor among 250,000, the damage one person can cause is clear, and it must be accepted as an eventuality.

    • NSA, Parsons Facilitate 2016 Cyber Defense Exercise; Mary Ann Hopkins Comments [Ed: NSA puff piece]
    • ‘I bet it’s those snobs at GCHQ who want it done’: Residents question need for PE Way resurfacing

      Princess Elizabeth Way – one of the main routes to GCHQ and Gloucester through Cheltenham is to be resurfaced later this month – and motorists have been warned of delays.

    • Inspector General Says FBI Not Doing Enough To Prevent Abuse Of Cell Phone Forensic Equipment By Law Enforcement Officers

      The FBI’s Inspector General has released a report on the New Jersey FBI branch’s Computer Forensics Laboratory. For the most part, the report is positive and shows this branch tends to handle its forensics work competently. The problem comes when it opens up its tools up to local law enforcement.

    • A paper shield does not protect privacy: Privacy International’s analysis of the “Privacy Shield” safeguards on surveillance

      On 29 February 2016, the European Commission and the US government released the details of the proposed EU-U.S. “Privacy Shield”. The “Privacy Shield” replaces the now defunct so-called “Safe Harbor”.

      The Privacy Shield is in fact a significant number of documents from various parts of the U.S. administration, which merely outline the existing, weak U.S. safeguards applicable to personal data of EU citizens. These documents are meant to serve as the basis for an “adequacy” decision by the European Commission that the U.S. has a data protection regime that is essentially equivalent to that applicable in the EU. In making that decision, the European Commission must also review issues related to government surveillance and consumer data protection.

      Last month Privacy International joined other European and American NGOs in expressing concerns that the “Privacy Shield” will put users at risk, undermine trust in the digital economy, and perpetuate the human rights violations that are already occurring as a result of surveillance programs and other activities.

      We have now analysed in detail the government surveillance aspects of the proposed personal data transfers arrangements, and have found the shield isn’t operational.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Airport sniffer dogs find ‘cheese and sausages’ but no Class A drugs

      The use of sniffer dogs at Manchester Airport has been criticised after dogs there failed to discover any Class A drugs in a seven-month period.

      But one dog, trained to detect illegal animal products, often found “small amounts of cheese or sausages” carried by holidaymakers, a report said.

      The review, by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, assessed border checks at the airport.

    • Helen Clark

      I very much hope that Helen Clark becomes the new UN Secretary-General.

      [...]

      For these reasons Clark is not the preferred candidate of the US or UK governments for the Secretary General position. But her independence does mean she is ultimately acceptable to Russia and China, whose agreement is essential as the appointment is confirmed by the Security Council. The Russians in particular feel they made a mistake in agreeing to the disappointing Ban Ki-Moon last time.

    • Bernie Backstage: Here’s How a President Sanders Would Rally the Grass Roots (Video)

      Footage of a private meeting with local leaders before Bernie Sanders’ rally at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Tuesday provides insight into how he might work with grass-roots activists to pursue a national populist agenda.

      Sanders spoke directly with Dutchess County Democratic legislators Francena Amparo and Joel Tyner, labor leaders and activists about issues of immigration, economic fairness and climate change. Cheers from the crowd nearby erupted intermittently.

      “I just want to thank you for your strong opposition to … fossil fuel infrastructure,” one woman said. “We are fighting the first crude oil pipeline project in New York State in over 100 years, and we need you.”

    • Illinois Police Department Gives up on Body Cameras Because They’re Tired of People Asking for Videos

      The police chief said he was happy with the cameras but dismayed with what he felt were excessive requests for footage from suspects and their lawyers.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Sprint Customer Listening Tour Goes Sour, Company Has To Pull Ad Calling T-Mobile A ‘Ghetto’

      Poor Sprint. Ever since T-Mobile became the darling of the wireless industry simply for treating consumers well (ingenious!), Sprint hasn’t quite known what to do with itself. After T-Mobile leap-frogged Sprint to become the nation’s third-largest carrier last year, Sprint has been trying desperately to convince customers that hey, it’s really cool too. But Sprint has found it hard to shake the image that it’s little more than a decidedly unhip copycat with a less competent network. A lot of Sprint’s PR struggles have been thanks to the fact that it hasn’t been easy keeping up with T-Mobile’s foul-mouthed, hipster-esque CEO, John Legere.

    • Verizon won’t fix copper lines when customers refuse switch to fiber

      Verizon has reportedly switched 1.1 million customers from copper to fiber lines over the past few years under a program it calls “Fiber Is the Only Fix.” But some phone customers have refused the switch to fiber because they prefer to keep their copper lines—even though Verizon apparently is refusing to fix problems in the copper infrastructure.

      The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that it obtained internal company documents that describe the effort to switch problematic copper lines to fiber. Verizon customers with copper-based landline phones who call for repairs twice in 18 months “will be told that their ‘only fix’ is to replace decades-old copper line with high-speed fiber as Verizon won’t fix the copper,” the report said.

    • Obama Is Threatening to Veto the GOP’s Latest Assault on Net Neutrality

      President Obama has long been a vocal supporter of net neutrality, the idea that all content on the internet should be equally accessible—and now he’s backing up his principles with policy.

      In a “Statement of Administration Policy” released Tuesday, Obama signaled that he intends to veto Republican-backed legislation that open internet advocates say could eviscerate federal net neutrality protections.

      Earlier this year, a GOP-controlled House subcommittee approved the “No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act,” (H.R. 2666) which net neutrality supporters say could severely undercut the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to police the nation’s largest cable and phone companies.

    • Net Neutrality Rules in Danger

      The FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order was the culmination of years of net neutrality advocacy and a big step toward a free and open Internet. This week, a vote in Congress could undo a lot of that work.

      H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act, might sound good in theory, but in practice, it could seriously undermine the FCC’s ability to protect the open Internet.

  • DRM

    • The 5 Biggest Things Facebook Announced This Week

      As Facebook has expanded its video ambitions, YouTube creators have cried foul about “freebooting,” or the practice of stealing a YouTube video and posting it on Facebook without permission. Facebook finally seems prepared to take the issue seriously now that media companies and celebrities are embracing Facebook Live, the company’s new broadcasting tool. Facebook is rolling out a new rights management system that will let creators upload reference videos so that duplicates are automatically flagged and, hopefully, removed much faster.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Ideologies Fly In Discussion Of WIPO Pharma Report Calling For Less Ideology

      A study commissioned by the World Intellectual Property Organization to analyse which essential medicines on the 2013 World Health Organization Essential Medicines List were under patent found that over 90 percent of medicines on the list were off patent, and advocated more transparency in patent information. The study’s release set off an outcry among public health advocates who viewed the report as biased toward pharmaceutical companies.

    • WIPO Scrutinised For Development Dimension, Involvement In UN Panel On Medicines

      Brazil said the statement made by a WIPO representative during a presentation briefing in February caused great concern because it apparently questioned the High Panel’s mandate (IPW, Public Health, 1 February 2016).

    • Mr Justice Arnold finds American Science’s mobile X-ray scanner patent valid

      AS&E argued that Rapiscan infringed the patent. During trial Rapiscan admitted it had committed the acts, but that the patent was invalid. Rapiscan argued that the patent was obvious on the basis of a paper by Roderick Swift entitled “Mobile X-ray Backscatter Imaging System for Inspection of Vehicles” published on 19-20 November 1996 in the Proceedings of the SPIE conference (“Swift”). The Swift article introduces AS&E’s MobileSearch system, which at that time was a prototype, and provides background for AS&E’s earlier CargoSearch system (a system for inspecting vehicles crossing the border from Mexico to the US). CargoSearch was a mixed transmission and backscatter system. The vehicle or target was then towed slowly through the scanning area at a fixed speed. MobileSearch was a combined backscatter and transmission system (Swift explains that the prototype was designed only to include backscatter but could be upgraded to provide transmission imaging). Swift describes the objective of the prototype of being a fully mobile, self contained large-scale system. The occupants of scanned vehicles are required to exit before a scan is started. This very much removes the “covert” element needed to tackle security threats.

    • If you need to prove use as part of your opposition, this is for you

      The following post from former Guest Kat Valentina Torelli explores the question of having to prove use as part of an opposition proceeding and the differences of opinion between the courts in ruing on this challenging question.

    • Trademarks

      • How to protect your brand when your endorser goes rogue

        Sports sponsorship is big business, and can bring benefits to both the brand owner and the endorser. Nisha Kumar discusses how you can minimise the damage when things go wrong

      • REPORT: Trademark law: 2015 year in review

        This article summarises some of the more noteworthy Canadian trademark law decisions and developments from 2015.

      • How Two Breweries Did What Politicians Can’t: Amicably Resolve Dispute Over Convention-Themed Beers

        It’s political season here in America, which means that it’s time for everyone to disagree as violently as possible and to such a degree that all conversation is at an impasse. You know, basically just like every other time in America, except now we televise this stuff because the brains of our citizenry might still have a little meat left on the bone that can be melted away through “debates.” But two companies are bucking that trend in a way readers here might not expect: two breweries are dealing amicably with having come up with politically-themed beer brews named very similarly to one another.

        Thirsty Dog Brewing in Ohio had recently announced its latest beer, Unconventional Ale, named after the RNC convention set to take place in Cleveland. The convention is of course gaining even more attention than usual this presidential cycle, mostly because reports on the machinations of the party suggest it might be exactly the best kind of shit show to watch from the outside. That notoriety explains why Platform Beer Co. too had announced it was releasing a new brew, entitled UnconventionAle. So the names are similar to the point of being nearly identical. I’m sure you’re already bracing for the nasty threats and legal filings. But no, these two breweries have managed to do what our politicians won’t: talk to each other.

    • Copyrights

      • Court of Appeals Vacates Injunction Against Mississippi Attorney General in Case Against Google

        Last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an injunction issued by a federal district court judge last year. The injunction would have prevented Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood from enforcing his massively large and demanding administrative subpoena against Google. The injunction would also have prohibited the Attorney General from bringing civil or criminal charges against the company for making third-party content accessible to Internet users.

      • Piracy Fails to Prevent Another Box Office Record

        Piracy is not killing the movie business. According to the MPAA’s Theatrical Market Statistics report the industry has just turned in a record year, with $38.3b taken at the box office. Meanwhile, MPAA chief Chris Dodd is set to meet Napster founder Sean Parker, whose Screening Room threatens to upset box office revenues……

      • Facebook Launches Its Own Version Of ContentID, Which Will Soon Be Abused To Take Down Content

        Last year, after a bunch of YouTube video creators started slamming Facebook for allowing people to re-upload their videos to Facebook (they called it “freebooting”), Facebook insisted that it, too, was building a ContentID-like system to automate the process of taking down videos based on infringement claims. Last fall, the company announced that it would be using the same system basically everyone other than Google uses: Audible Magic as the backend system of that tool. And now Facebook has officially announced its product, called “Rights Manager.”

      • Led Zeppelin ‘Stairway To Heaven’ Copyright Case Will Go To A Jury… Meaning Band Will Almost Certainly Lose

        This isn’t surprising, even if it is a bit disappointing. Led Zeppelin has long been accused of copying others songs, and there are actually a bunch of videos on YouTube detailing examples.

      • Walking Dead Producer Claims Real Cable Set Top Box Competition Will Result In Piracy Armageddon

        As we’ve been discussing, the FCC has started working more seriously on opening the cable set top box to real competition. As it stands, 99% of consumers currently pay about $231 annually in rental fees for aging hardware that’s often worth about half that much. The FCC’s goal is ultimately to let consumers access cable content using the hardware of their choice, creating a healthy new competitive market, and by proxy better hardware at lower prices. But monthly set top box rental fees represent $20 billion in annual revenue to cable providers, which is why they’ve been having a hissy fit about the FCC’s plan.

04.13.16

Links 13/4/2016: Wine 1.8.2, Enlightenment DR 0.21 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • What You Need to Know About Upcoming Passport Changes

    Why the sudden uptick? In 2007, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative was put into effect, mandating that American citizens entering the U.S. by air from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean carry a passport, triggering a backlog in renewals for millions of applicants – a scenario that could easily occur again. Flash forward to today, and many travelers are also concerned about whether they’ll need to show an alternate form of acceptable identification for domestic flights to comply with the REAL ID Act, which will be put into effect on Jan. 22, 2018, and will impose more stringent ID requirements. And besides the chance to dodge a delayed – or cumbersome – process later on, there’s also the matter of entry requirements imposed by international countries. With a number of places requiring a minimum of six months left on your passport, there’s never been a better time to be passport-ready for smooth, stress-free travel.

  • Science

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Leaving Beta, New Sponsors

      Let’s Encrypt is leaving beta today. We’re also excited to announce that founding sponsors Cisco and Akamai have renewed their Platinum sponsorships with 3-year commitments, Gemalto is joining as our newest Gold sponsor, and HP Enterprise, Fastly, Duda and ReliableSite.net are our newest Silver sponsors.

    • Mozilla-supported Let’s Encrypt goes out of Beta

      In 2014, Mozilla teamed up with Akamai, Cisco, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Identrust, and the University of Michigan to found Let’s Encrypt in order to move the Web towards universal encryption. Today, Let’s Encrypt is leaving beta. We here at Mozilla are very proud of Let’s Encrypt reaching this stage of maturity

      Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated and open Web certificate authority that helps make it easy for any Web site to turn on encryption. Let’s Encrypt uses an open protocol called ACME which is being standardized in the IETF. There are already over 40 independent implementations of ACME. Several web hosting services such as Dreamhost and Automattic, who runs WordPress.com, also use ACME to integrate with Let’s Encrypt and provide security that is on by default.

    • Experts crack nasty ransomware that took crypto-extortion to new heights

      A nasty piece of ransomware that took crypto-extortion to new heights contains a fatal weakness that allows victims to decrypt their data without paying the hefty ransom.

      When it came to light two weeks ago, Petya was notable because it targeted a victim’s entire startup drive by rendering its master boot record inoperable. It accomplished this by encrypting the master boot file and displaying a ransom note. As a result, without the decryption password, the infected computer wouldn’t boot up, and all files on the startup disk were inaccessible. A master boot record is a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned hard drive, while a master boot file is a file on NTFS volumes that contains the name, size and location of all other files.

    • Open source code is rarely patched when vulnerabilities are found [Ed: propaganda from Microsoft proxies makes it through to other sites]

      Open source code is a convenient and cost-effective way for developers to build apps. However, as CIO noted in a recent article, once that code makes its way into an app, it’s rarely ever updated to fix vulnerabilities that are found later. CIO offered up some tips on how to keep open source products secure.

    • Let’s Encrypt Internet Security Initiative Exits Beta
    • Let’s Encrypt is Leaving Beta, Has New Sponsors

      Lets Encrypt is leaving beta today. Were also excited to announce that founding sponsors Cisco and Akamai have renewed their Platinum sponsorships with 3-year commitments, Gemalto is joining as our newest Gold sponsor, and HP Enterprise, Fastly, Duda and ReliableSite.net are our newest Silver sponsors.

    • Federal News Radio: Robert Silvers Named DHS Cyber Policy Assistant Secretary
    • DHS warns on cyber risks of open source
    • Meet The Cryptoworm, The Future of Ransomware

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Candidates, Here’s Your Iraq/Syria/Libya Mess to Fix

      Candidates, one of you will be the fifth consecutive American president to make war inside Iraq. What will you face on day one of your administration?

      You learned with us recently of the death of a Marine in Iraq, which exposed that the United States set up a fire base in that country, which exposed that the Pentagon used a twist of words to misrepresent the number of personnel in Iraq by as many as 2,000. It appears a second fire base exists, set up on the grounds of one of America’s largest installations from the last Iraq war. Special forces range across the landscape. The Pentagon is planning for even more troops. There can be no more wordplay — America now has boots on the ground in Iraq.

    • Death Squads Are Back in Honduras, Activists Tell Congress

      THREE WEEKS AGO, Honduran activist Gaspar Sanchez spoke at a briefing on Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to support an impartial investigation into the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres.

      Cáceres had mobilized native communities to speak out against the Agua Zarca Dam, a hydroelectric project backed by European and Chinese corporations, before being killed by two unknown gunmen last month.

      Last week, back in Honduras at a protest outside the Honduran Public Ministry in Tegulcigalpa, Sanchez unfurled a banner demanding justice for Cáceres’s murder.

    • The 28 Pages

      On Sunday, President Obama said this about about Hillary’s email scandal: “There’s classified & then there’s classified.”

      Perhaps that’s what has led him to decide, after 15 years, the 28 pages on the Saudis’ role in 9/11 can finally be released (or at least reviewed for declassification; given the way the 60 Minutes script ignored evidence about Bandar bin Sultan, I suspect they’ll still protect him).

    • Trial of Saddam Hussein was victor’s justice’ – Ex-tribunal judge to RT

      The former chief judge that presided over Saddam Hussein’s trial told RT in an exclusive interview how the tribunal, which was dependent on the US, lacking in legitimacy, and overshadowed by the killing of lawyers, sentenced the Iraqi strongman to death.

    • ‘Yats’ Is No Longer the Guy

      The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine’s future leaders, not plotting to oust one government and install another.

    • “EU or bust?” is the wrong question for Ukraine

      On 6 April in the Netherlands, just over 30% of potential voters took part in a referendum on the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement. This was one of numerous Free Trade Area Agreements established between the EU and countries all around the world, from Mexico to Mozambique. Less than two years ago, president Petro Poroshenko signed this agreement, and since that time has been partially implemented. It was ratified by all the EU-member states and, for the most part, garnered no political response from the public, with the exception of the Netherlands. Here, a liberal-right political initiative, GeenPeil, launched a collection of signatures calling for a referendum on ratification of the Agreement.

    • How an Iran War Was Averted

      A decade ago, the Bush administration was eager to bomb Iran but U.S. intelligence analysts challenged the casus belli by finding that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb, recalls ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

    • Military Keynsianism, American Exceptionalism, and Trump

      This sphere of influence Empire, on top of being horrible for the rest of the world, is also sucking the US dry internally.

    • Bernie Sanders Did Confuse Numbers of Dead and Wounded in Gaza War, but Israel’s Mass Killing of Civilians Is a Fact

      In an opinion piece for the News on Friday, Yair Lapid, who was a member of the governing coalition’s security cabinet at the time of the Gaza offensive, then accused Sanders of helping Hamas by bolstering the Islamist militant group’s “narrative that it is the real victim.” Lapid also asserted, without offering any evidence for the claim, that “the Israeli government found most of those killed in the operation were terrorists.”

    • Has the movement to prevent gun violence hit a tipping point?

      Ladd Everitt, of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, agrees that support for gun control has reached unprecedented levels. “People are finally demanding a change,” he said, citing multiple new initiatives like Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Americans for Responsible Solutions as evidence of this burgeoning engagement. Many of these groups focus on local anti-violence measures — such as the “Groceries Not Guns” campaign calling for a ban on open carry in Kroger supermarkets. “Moms head to the grocery store on a weekly, sometimes daily basis — often with kids in tow,” reads the campaign mission statement. “We don’t expect to face armed strangers when we shop with our families.”

    • DOJ Places David Barron’s Anwar Awlaki Memos on the “Not Selected for Publication”

      Particularly given the timing, I’m wondering whether any change in DOJ’s views about these memos would affect American citizens overseas, such as Liban Haji Mohamed, a Somali American who was put on the Most Wanted List last year, then detained (never to publicly have shown up in an American court) on March 2, 2015. Unlike Anwar al-Awlaki, Mohamed (who is the brother of Gulet Mohamed, who has had a whole different set of problems with the government) has actually been indicted.

    • Anti-Islam Activists To Hold Armed Rally In Atlanta, Shred Copy Of The Quran

      A group of armed, right-wing activists are planning a non-permitted anti-Islam rally in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend, where organizers say they will shred a Quran alongside pictures of president Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other politicians.

    • Inside Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force

      One of the mechanics soon recognized Echo Papa from news photos — he was Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater. Several of the Airborne staff whispered among themselves, astonished that they had been working for America’s best-known mercenary. The secrecy and strange modification requests of the past four months began to make sense. In addition to surveillance and laser-targeting equipment, Airborne had outfitted the plane with bulletproof cockpit windows, an armored engine block, anti-explosive mesh for the fuel tank, and specialized wiring that could control rockets and bombs. The company also installed pods for mounting two high-powered 23 mm machine guns. By this point, the engineers and mechanics were concerned that they had broken several Austrian laws but were advised that everything would be fine as long as they all kept the secret.

      [...]

      The story of how Prince secretly plotted to transform the two aircraft for his arsenal of mercenary services is based on interviews with nearly a dozen people who have worked with Prince over the years, including current and former business partners, as well as internal documents, memos, and emails. Over a two-year period, Prince exploited front companies and cutouts, hidden corporate ownership, a meeting with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout’s weapons supplier, and at least one civil war in an effort to manufacture and ultimately sell his customized armed counterinsurgency aircraft. If he succeeded, Prince would possess two prototypes that would lay the foundation for a low-cost, high-powered air force capable of generating healthy profits while fulfilling his dream of privatized warfare.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Is the U.S Intelligence Chief Serious About Fixing Overclassification? Time Will Tell

      EFF has long been critical of overbroad government secrecy, which has been used to cover up everything from illegal activities to questionable legal justifications for mass surveillance.

      Given that government officials default to withholding important details from the public regarding national security, we were pleasantly surprised to read a memo that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sent to intelligence agencies last month.

      Clapper’s memo directs the heads of several intelligence agencies, including the NSA and CIA, to substantially overhaul the government’s formal classification system as part of a process known as the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Clinton Foundation Called On to Cut Ties with Fossil Fuels Sector

      Citing big-dollar donations from three fossil fuel giants—Chevron, Conoco Philips, and Exxon—a leading climate justice group is calling on the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative to stop investing in or accepting money from the industry that’s driving the global climate crisis.

    • ‘Why Is It That the Safety of Those Coal Miners’ Lives Does Not Matter Enough?’

      Janine Jackson: Twenty-nine men died April 5, 2010, in an explosion at Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. The mine was run by Massey Energy, and Massey Energy was run by Don Blankenship. A looming figure in the region whose tight control over his workplace was notorious, Blankenship racked up profits and political capital along with safety violations, while saying cartoon-villainous things like, “I don’t care what people think; at the end of the day, Don Blankenship is going to die with more money than he needs.”

    • Fracking Is Now Banned In This Maryland County

      Prince George’s County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., voted Tuesday to ban fracking, the controversial oil and gas extraction method that has helped spur a natural gas boom across the country.

      “We really are with this vote taking a lead in his state and in the nation,” Councilmember Mary Lehman said at the hearing. “I could not be more proud of this county.”

    • Greenland sees record-smashing early ice sheet melt

      Scientists ‘incredulous’ at abnormally high numbers for April, with melting across nearly 12% of ice sheet

  • Finance

    • Shoe Company New Balance Says US Gov’t Basically Offered It A Bribe To Support TPP

      We’ve mostly focused on the impact of the TPP and trade deals on the internet (and also on national sovereignty), because that’s the kind of stuff that interests us most around here. We’ve spent a lot less time looking at the more traditional free trade arguments, in part because that’s not nearly as controversial, and in part because — despite claims to the contrary — there really aren’t that many tariff-related barriers that make a big difference any more. It’s generally good to reduce such tariffs, and in response you see the typical response from firms based on whether or not they benefit from those reduced tariffs. The “benefits” of free trade tend to be focused on the companies looking to expand into those markets where tariffs are being lowered or abandoned — and not so much for companies competing against products from those same countries. Frankly, I find arguments that the companies who freak out about trade deals because it will mean more competition against them a bit tiresome, because I tend to believe competition is a good thing for innovation. We’ve mostly focused on the impact of the TPP and trade deals on the internet (and also on national sovereignty), because that’s the kind of stuff that interests us most around here. We’ve spent a lot less time looking at the more traditional free trade arguments, in part because that’s not nearly as controversial, and in part because — despite claims to the contrary — there really aren’t that many tariff-related barriers that make a big difference any more. It’s generally good to reduce such tariffs, and in response you see the typical response from firms based on whether or not they benefit from those reduced tariffs. The “benefits” of free trade tend to be focused on the companies looking to expand into those markets where tariffs are being lowered or abandoned — and not so much for companies competing against products from those same countries. Frankly, I find arguments that the companies who freak out about trade deals because it will mean more competition against them a bit tiresome, because I tend to believe competition is a good thing for innovation.

    • Trans-Atlantic & Trans-Pacific “Partnerships” Complete Corporate World Takeover

      As I have emphasized since these “partnerships” were first announced, their purpose is to give corporations immunity from the laws in the countries in which they do business. The principle mechanism of this immunity is the granting of the right to corporations to sue governments and agencies of governments that have laws or regulations that impinge on corporate profits. For example, France’s prohibitions of GMO foods are, under the “partnerships,” “restraints on trade that impinge on corporate profits.

    • Goldman Sachs: Just 5 Billion dollar Fine Compared to 13 Billion Dollar Taxpayer Bailout

      The ultimate irony is that the 5 billion dollar fine is dwarfed by the 13 billion dollar taxpayer bailout they received after the banks’ immoral antics caused massive economic collapse. So the net result of their appalling behaviour has been that they collect not only the profit from those bets the system would collapse, but an eight billion dollar net payment from ordinary taxpayers thrown in. Which eight billion dollars has been just a contribution to the bonuses and partner remuneration which have continued to bulge in their over-stuffed pockets since 2008, uninterrupted by the crash, thanks to the generosity of poor taxpayers struggling to balance their personal budgets.

    • New Balance accuses Pentagon of reneging on sneaker deal

      New Balance is renewing its opposition to the far-reaching Pacific Rim trade deal, saying the Obama administration reneged on a promise to give the sneaker maker a fair shot at military business if it stopped bad-mouthing the agreement.

      After several years of resistance to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact aimed at making it easier to conduct trade among the United States and 11 other countries, the Boston company had gone quiet last year. New Balance officials say one big reason is that they were told the Department of Defense would give them serious consideration for a contract to outfit recruits with athletic shoes.

      But no order has been placed, and New Balance officials say the Pentagon is intentionally delaying any purchase.

    • Bernie does have a plan to break up the big banks. That’s why the establishment is so rattled

      The recent kerfluffle about Bernie Sanders purportedly not knowing how to bust up the big banks says far more about the threat Sanders poses to the Democratic establishment and its Wall Street wing than it does about the candidate himself.

      Of course Sanders knows how to bust up the big banks. He’s already introduced legislation to do just that. And even without new legislation a president has the power under the Dodd-Frank reform act to initiate such a breakup.

      But Sanders threatens the Democratic establishment and Wall Street, not least because he’s intent on doing exactly what he says he’ll do: breaking up the biggest banks.

    • EU’s TTIP position: regulations to be made for and by big business

      The free trade agreement being negotiated between the EU and the US will affect how laws are made in the European Union, to the benefit of corporations and at the expense of our health, our environment, and our rights. Despite growing concerns among the European public, the new EU proposal on regulatory cooperation in TTIP does nothing, not even little, to address the upcoming democratic threats.

    • Think Medicine is Expensive Now? Public Health Groups Warn of TPP’s Gifts to Big Pharma

      Doctors Without Borders and more than fifty other organizations sent a letter calling on lawmakers to reject the pending trade pact

    • The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year

      In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law meant to close the wage gap between working men and women. But more than 50 years later, women on average earn just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. And according to a new report by the National Partnership for Women and Families that was released before National Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, the persistent wage gap means women lose a combined $500 billion every year.

    • Trump’s clash with Las Vegas union highlights his unpredictability

      Ever since the vote, Donald Trump’s managers have fought unionization every step of the way. They filed 15 objections with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging intimidation and forgery by union officials. After the claims were either withdrawn by Trump or dismissed by the labor board, the unions were officially certified as bargaining agents last month.

      But the Trump Organization still refused to negotiate, and last week, at the last possible moment, the hotel filed for a review of the case with the labor board in Washington, further putting off contract talks.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • “This system is so rigged”: Outrage as undemocratic superdelegate system gives Clinton unfair edge over Sanders

      “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists,” the DNC chair calmly explained, in a moment of shockingly blunt honesty.

    • Clintons May Not Win the Prize. “Bernie Sanders Could become the Next President”

      Sanders has brought on the unthinkable—instead of seeing her as locking up the Democratic Party nomination on Super Thursday in March, Clinton’s camp had begun to project April—following the April 19 New York primary, which she had hoped to win in double digits.

      Now, that strategy has become doubtful in the backwash from the collapse of the Clintons’ “go nuclear” attack last week. The attack failed with Sanders labeling her “unqualified”; Sanders’ campaign manager Jeff Weaver saying Hillary had made a “deal with the devil” vis-à-vis her megabuck donors; Black-Lives-Matter co-creator Alicia Garza telling the Clintons, “My back is tired of being the path to the White House”; and the amazing coincidence of Sanders’ Vatican invitation.

    • Cable News Devotes 30 Seconds to Mass Arrests Protesting Political Corruption

      THE DEMOCRACY SPRING, a protest movement calling on Congress to “end the corruption of big money in our politics” and “ensure free and fair elections,” converged on Capitol Hill on Monday, staging a nonviolent sit-in that resulted in over 400 arrests — a massive number by Washington sit-in standards.

    • The Whittingdale file: a plea for better journalism

      It’s a mystery as to why the national newspapers chose not to expose a juicy story about the UK culture secretary. But claiming that his policies were ‘influenced’ by the ‘suppression’ of the story is pure conjecture.

    • Restrictive Rules Leave New York Voters Shut Out of Pivotal Primary

      Registration deadlines in New York passed months ago—but many voters, particularly those who support Bernie Sanders, say they didn’t know

    • Sanders Annoys Democratic Establishment

      The Democratic establishment is growing impatient with Bernie Sanders who continues to delay the party’s long-planned coronation of Hillary Clinton, a vexation expressed by Paul Krugman and criticized by Rick Sterling.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Game Studio’s Plan To Deal With Critic Of Games: Sue Him To Hell

      There are lots of dumb ways for companies to combat online critics. You can simply claim copyright over the criticism as a way to try to silence it, although that tends to end poorly for the silencer thanks to public backlash. You can go to the court to ask for an injunction against the critic as a way to try to silence it, although that tends to end poorly for the silencer thanks to the Streisand Effect. Or you can ask the courts to test whether the criticism amounts to defamation, although, again, The Streisand Effect, the public backlash, and the fact that those types of suits are rarely successful.

    • Germany Could Charge Comic for Insulting Turkey’s President

      Americans wondering what life might be like in the near future — after a President Donald Trump acts on his promise to “open up our libels laws,” so that politicians with easily bruised egos can sue reporters or commentators for hurting their feelings — should pay attention to what is happening this week in Germany.

    • Tax Prep Company Tries To Sue Unhappy Customer Into Silence; Hit With Damages In Anti-SLAPP Order

      An anti-SLAPP win has just been handed down in Nevada, one of the few states with a strong anti-SLAPP law. At the center of the failed defamation lawsuit is (you guessed it) a negative review of a business posted at Yelp.

    • Censorship at Edinburgh University ‘out of control’, says student

      A student at the University of Edinburgh has claimed that on-campus censorship at the institution is “out of control.”

      Writing for online magazine spiked, first-year Charlie Peters’ comments have come amid the ongoing debate that the stifling of free speech at universities – particularly among students’ union – is becoming “an epidemic.”

      The student described how, upon starting at the Russell Group institution last September, he realised he was “foolish” to have thought university was meant to encourage unfettered debate.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA [Ed: essential reading]

      Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.

    • The Obama Administration Almost Doubled Down on Yoo’s Illegality

      I’m not sure I’m convinced. After all, the Administration claims it is not examining the contents of all international letters, but rather only looking at those where selected identifiers show up in data packets. Yeah, I know it’s a bullshit argument, but they pretend that’s not searching the contents, really. Moreover we have substantial reason to believe they were doing (some) of this anyway.

      But there is a curious relationship between a claim Yoo made in his letter and the Obama Administration’s views on FISA.

    • MP calls for limit on UK surveillance powers as EU test case opens

      The British government is “treating the entire nation as suspects” by ignoring safeguards on retaining and accessing personal communications data, according to the Conservative MP David Davis.

      Speaking before the opening of a test case at the European court of justice (ECJ), the former home affairs spokesman called for improved protections to prevent state abuses through bulk interception of private emails and online exchanges.

    • NSA expert recites the basics of malware[Ed: stenography for NSA]

      You’ve probably heard your mattress gets heavier and heavier each year from the feces of dust mites that eat the dead skin you leave behind. Still, you go to bed every night. What choice have you got?

    • Princess Elizabeth Way from GCHQ to Kingsditch to be resurfaced, motorists warned of delays [Ed: cost of espionage]
    • NE students hear about NSA job prospects [Ed: reputation laundering/recruitment]
    • NSA appoints first transparency officer [Ed: reputation laundering]

      The National Security Agency has appointed its first transparency officer — three years after leaks made by former contractor Edward Snowden exposed the agency’s surveillance programs and led to calls for increased public disclosures.

    • Why Doesn’t The Anti-Encryption Bill List Any Penalties?

      We’ve already written a bit about the technologically ignorant bill from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein that basically outlaws any encryption system that doesn’t include backdoors for law enforcement. However, there are still some points in the bill that have left some folks scratching their heads. In particular, the lack of any penalty at all has some commenters wondering what the bill actually does. The bill both says that it doesn’t “require or prohibit any specific design or operating system,” but at the same time does require that anyone offering or supporting any kind of encryption be able to pass along unencrypted versions of the communication to law enforcement when presented with a legitimate court order or warrant (so not just a warrant…). As Orin Kerr noted, the bill mandates assistance, rather than using the more typical requirement of “reasonable” assistance.

    • Obama Administration’s Expansion Of Domestic Spying Powers Dwarfs The ‘Good Old Days’ Of Bush And John Yoo

      I guess the real accomplishment of “The Most Transparent Administration” is how much it exposed Americans to domestic surveillance. I suppose that’s its own form of “transparency.”

      Just Security’s Patrick Toomey notes that this administration has embraced legal theories wilder and more expansive than those presented by John Yoo on behalf of the Bush administration. Yoo, despite his willingness to treat the collection of communications like a DUI checkpoint for terrorism, had his limits. This administration, however, has seen those limits and lowered them.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Prosecutor Disciplined For Using Fake Facebook Profile To Meddle In Murder Case

      An assistant county prosecutor assigned to a murder case decided he could crack the case by pretending to be the jilted lover of one of the suspects. The attorney, Aaron Brockler, made several questionable moves on his way to being fired and having his license to practice law suspended by the Supreme Court of Ohio. (h/t Courthouse News)

    • Two Smooth Faces of Evil

      It is put to me frequently that people like McDonald, who were merely implementing a policy of torture, are not evil.

    • CIA Officers Didn’t Carry Out Waterboarding

      A lot of people are pointing to John Brennan’s assurances that CIA won’t ever torture again as if it means anything (usually ignoring Brennan’s motivation from institutional preservation, not efficacy or morality or legality).

    • Death by Gentrification in SF Part 2 with Rebecca Solnit & Adriana Camarena

      We are on the road in San Francisco, as we continue our conversation about the 2014 police killing of Alex Nieto and a slew of other police killings—Mario Woods, Amilcar Pérez-López and now Luis Gongora. Three of four of these killings happened in San Francisco’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, the Mission District and Bernal Heights. We speak about the link between these police killings and gentrification in San Francisco, with author Rebecca Solnit and community organizer Adriana Camarena.

    • Here’s Why Capitol Cops Arrested a Bunch of Senior Citizens Today

      The day after more than 400 people were arrested on Capitol Hill, US Capitol Police on Tuesday arrested 85 mostly elderly activists who were blocking the south entrance of the Capitol. They were all participating in “Democracy Spring,” a weeklong series of rallies and marches on the Capitol aimed at bringing attention to the control of money over politics in Congress and what organizers say are unfair voting laws.

    • Bombings in Turkey – a blip on your newsfeed?

      One particular post that garnered a great deal of attention and support was written by a British expat living in Turkey. He described the outrage he felt at the seemingly total apathy expressed by the international community. In his post, he eloquently outlined the hypocrisy of those who “were” Charlie Hebdo, and who changed their profile pictures to the French flag when Paris was hit with simultaneous, horrific attacks earlier this year, yet were nowhere to be seen when we needed support. He perfectly exemplified the outrage, frustration, and humiliation experienced here in reaction to this internet version of a callous shrug. And in his statement, he supposed that perhaps the reason for the lack of western empathy in particular was because the west sees Turkey as being part of the Middle East, a categorisation he is quick to dismiss. We are not the Middle East, we are Europe, and therefore it is an outrage that we are being treated as though violence is normal or permissible here.

    • The Origins of Totalitarianism: Conclusion

      The point of this series was to examine the conditions which led to the rise of Fascism in the 1930s to see if there are useful insights that might guide our understanding of conditions in the US today. In introduction to this series, I suggested several points of convergence, and over the last three months I have tried to flesh out those ideas.

      [...]

      Neoliberalism is also an excuse for hating immigrants and Muslims, who are coming here to take the jobs of deserving people, so it actually works to deflect the anger of the first group of scapegoats, at least for those who take the bait.

      [...]

      As I reread the posts in this series, I realized how angry I am about the way politics operates here. I am repulsed by the elites who act as if there were no alternative. I am nauseated by liberal wonks whose views of what is possible are claustrophobic. They are the descendants of the liberals who told me and my generation that nothing could be done about the murderous war in Viet Nam. I cannot stomach the conservative elites. They are the scum who think their mission on earth is to undo the New Deal; the direct spawn of the John Birchers and the McCarthyites and the rest of the fear-mongers. They are the wreckers.

      Polanyi says that when a social structure imposes too much stress on too many people it has to change. We don’t know how many disaffected people there are In the US, but it is clear that there is an enormous number, in both parties and among the unaffiliated, and that change will come. The US has always prided itself on its openness to change. We believe that everything will work out for the best, because we are the exceptional people, the City on the Hill. We assume that change will be for the best. Arendt points out the sickening reality: some changes are deadly.

    • After 11 Suicide Attempts In Just One Day, Canadian Community Declares State of Emergency

      Since September, the small community of 2,000 has seen 101 attempted suicides. That’s around 5 percent of the population.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • As ISPs Push Harder On Usage Caps, House Pushes Bill Preventing The FCC From Doing Anything About It

      In recent weeks, we’ve noted how ISPs are now moving beyond broadband usage caps and overage fees, and have begun charging users a $30-$35 premium if they want to avoid usage caps entirely. While the industry often dresses this up as everything from “improved flexibility and choice” to something necessary for the sake of fairness, it is, quite simply, an aggressive rate hike on uncompetitive markets. Users are being socked with dramatic new limits and fees — simply because most have no real competitors to flee to.

  • DRM

    • Save Comcast!

      The W3C’s Encrypted Media Extensions system is specifically designed to prevent anyone from making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if those uses are allowed by law. With EME, companies get to decide which software can access the videos they send out, and what features that software is allowed to have.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WIPO Member States Seek Details Of UN Investigation On Alleged Misconduct

      A longstanding inquiry about alleged misconduct at the top of the World Intellectual Property Organization may be moving toward resolution one way or the other.

    • Trademarks

      • Brewer Threatens Restaurant For Using The Word ‘Hofbrau’

        Hofbrau Steak House and American Grille has been serving up German food in Northern Michigan for over six decades. Staatliches Hofbrauhaus has been brewing beer and operating eateries since the late eighteen-hundreds. Yet it was only recently that the brewer sent letters to Hofbrau demanding it change its name, claiming that it had a trademark on “hofbrau.”

      • EU design cases looking up

        2015 was a year of definite improvement over 2014 for design decisions from the Court of Justice and the General Court in Luxembourg. David Stone explains, however, that progress still needs to be made to provide certainty for designers and practitioners

    • Copyrights

      • RIAA Says YouTube is Running a DMCA Protection Racket

        In the latest broadside in the content takedown debate, RIAA chief Cary Sherman has suggested that Google-owned YouTube is short-changing the labels by operating a DMCA-protected protection racket. Unsurprisingly Google sees things quite differently, noting that the tools already exist to take down unauthorized content on a permanent basis.

      • Lucasfilm Threatens And Threatens Non-Profit Over Lightsaber Battle Event

        While we’ve certainly seen a fair share of ridiculous intellectual property protectionism stemming from the Star Wars Franchise, including overreaches like trying to silence people from photographing legally purchased toys and keeping breweries from making beer-themed puns, one area where Lucasfilm was generally pretty good on was fan participation, at least before the acquisition of the Star Wars rights by Disney. This included fan-fiction and films, gatherings, and role-playing events. That’s what makes it so strange to see Lucasfilm decide to bully a non-profit group for daring to put together a “lightsaber battle” event.

04.12.16

Links 12/4/2016: MythTV 0.28 Released, ZFS Jar of Worms Opened

Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • 5 reasons to use Docker for productivity software installation

      When Docker brought new life to Linux containers at the beginning of 2013, the technology quickly gained popularity among software developers. Today Docker has millions of container downloads, thousands of community contributors, and countless third party projects who are using it. What explains this extraordinary popularity?

  • Kernel Space

    • The linux-stable security tree project

      Hi all,

      I’d like to announce the linux-stable security tree project. The purpose
      is to create a derivative tree from the regular stable tree that would
      contain only commits that fix security vulnerabilities.

    • Linux Foundation’s Role, Combining Linux ZFS, Mint News

      Today in Linux news Richard Stallman posted a Free Software Foundation statement on ZFS in a GPL2 Linux and Software Freedom Conservancy is pleased with his conclusions. Elsewhere, Eben Moglen discussed the Linux Foundation’s role in the Linux community. Sam Varghese today said that Ubuntu may be everywhere, but Canonical is still operating in the red and Clement Lefebvre introduced some of the changes coming in Mint 18. The Fedora 24 supplemental wallpaper selection is in the voting phase and a new Pisi video has Megatotoro scratching his head.

    • How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation?

      The opinions offered here are my own. I am not expressing the views of any SFLC clients, the Free Software Foundation, or Richard M. Stallman.

      There has been much recent controversy concerning the relationship between the Linux Foundation and “community,” or non-commercial organizations in the world of free software. I’ve been somewhat confused by the dynamics of that conversation, which has spilled out from private mailing lists into the public eye occasionally, and I have found it useful in clarifying my own views to state my thoughts on the subject, which I’ve now decided to share.

    • The mind behind Linux

      A video uploaded on Ted.com this month features a question-and-answer session with Linux creator Linus Torvalds recorded in February at TED 2016 in Vancouver.

      In the interview with TED curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds talked openly about the personality traits that prompted his unique philosophy of work, engineering and life.

      Some highlights from the chat, edited for brevity:

    • Linus Torvalds: The mind behind Linux

      Linus Torvalds transformed technology twice — first with the Linux kernel, which helps power the Internet, and again with Git, the source code management system used by developers worldwide. In a rare interview with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds discusses with remarkable openness the personality traits that prompted his unique philosophy of work, engineering and life. “I am not a visionary, I’m an engineer,” Torvalds says. “I’m perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds … but I’m looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that’s right in front of me before I fall in.”

    • Linus hasn’t given up on the year of the Linux desktop

      Much has been written, over and over again, about the fabled (and some would say mythic) year of the Linux desktop. But Linux creator Linus Torvalds has not given up on the idea. Linus thinks that someday Linux could come to dominate desktop computing.

    • Linux 4.6-rc3
    • Live Kernel Patching Microconference Accepted into 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference

      Live kernel patching was accepted into the Linux kernel in v4.0 in February 2015, so we can declare the 2014 LPC Live Kernel Patching Microconference to have been a roaring success! However, as was noted at the time, this is just the beginning of the real work. In short, the v4.0 work makes live kernel patching possible, but more work is required to make it more reliable and more routine.

      Additional issues include stacktrace reliability, patch-safety criteria for kernel threads, thread consistency models, porting to non-x86 architectures, handling of loadable modules, compiler optimizations, userspace tooling, patching of data, automated regression testing, and patch-creation guidelines.

    • Linux-Stable-Security Kernel Tree Announced

      Sasha Levin of Oracle has announced the formation of the Linux-Stable Security Tree.

      This new tree will be based off the mainline Linux stable tree but focus on just carrying fixes for security vulnerabilities. Other changes normally found in stable Linux point releases wouldn’t be integrated.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel Has New DRM Linux Driver Code Ready For Testing: More Atomic Goodness

        Daniel Vetter of Intel OTC has sent out an announcement about another round of i915 DRM kernel driver code that’s ready for testing by developers and the community.

        The latest drm-intel-testing work continues with more atomic-related driver work. One of the more prominent atomic changes in this latest Git branch is making the Intel color manager support fully atomic. Some race conditions were also fixed up in their driver, many small improvements to the GEM memory management code, GuC firmware loading fixes, PLL clean-ups for Cherryview and Valleyview, reworked DisplayPort detection, and various other improvements.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • A Pisi Video!

      This is an animated short video featuring some known characters from Pisi Linux.

    • Reviews

      • Isolating processes with Qubes OS 3.1

        There are several approaches to computer security. One method is to try to make every component work as correctly and error-free as possible. This is called security through correctness. Another approach is called security by obscurity and it involves hiding secrets or flaws. A third approach to security is isolation, which is sometimes called security by compartmentalization. This third method keeps important pieces separate so if one component is compromised, the other components can continue to work, unaffected.

        These different styles of security might make more sense if we look at an example from the non-digital world. Imagine we have some valuables we want to keep locked away and we decide to buy a safe to store our precious documents, jewels and money. If we buy a high quality safe that is hard to force open, that is security through correctness. If we hide our safe behind a picture or in a secret room, that is security through obscurity. Buying two safes and placing half of our valuables in each so if one is robbed then we still have half of our items is an example of security by compartmentalization.

    • New Releases

      • HandyLinux 2.4 Is Based on Debian GNU/Linux 8.4, Iceweasel Replaced with Firefox

        The developers of the Debian-based HandyLinux distribution have announced the immediate availability for download of HandyLinux 2.4, a maintenance release in the 2.x stable series of the OS.

        HandyLinux 2.4 comes only ten days after the release of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 “Jessie” operating system, on which the French distro is now based, offering users new installation mediums that include the latest security patches and software updates pushed upstream.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, QCT Partner On OpenStack Hardware System

        Quanta Cloud Technology is teaming with Red Hat to produce a ready-to-plug-in package of OpenStack, Linux, and Ceph storage loaded on Quanta servers, storage, and switches.

      • Red Hat Linux Developer Suite

        Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now available for free to developers who are members of the Red Hat Developers Program.

        The idea is to make it easier for developers to carry out serious Linux development for Enterprise Linux. The new non-production developer subscription is unsupported, but gives you a strong development environment for programming enterprise applications.

        When you register for the subscription, you get Red Hat Enterprise Linux (as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Suite) along with the entire Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio and the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK). You also get a number of open source compilers, dynamic languages, development tools, databases, web servers and other middleware. Available software is grouped into software repositories that are used to segregate packages by type, source, or support life cycle.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Moving Down the Hall

          I’m moving! Today is my first day on the Release Engineering Development team (RED team) of the PnT DevOps organization at Red Hat. After I get my bearings, I’ll be working on “Factory 2.0″ which, while still quite a nebulous and undefined thing, boils down to focusing on the next-generation build and release pipeline for RHEL and other Red Hat products. What’s cool about this is that, since it’s future-facing work, I get to focus on how to knit the effort with what’s been going on in Fedora releng. We’ll have lots to talk about and hack on, I’m sure.

        • Fedora 24 Wallpapers: Vote now!

          Nearly two months ago, the submission phase for the Fedora 24 Supplemental Wallpapers were opened. Now, the submission phase is closed and the voting phase is now open. If you have a FAS account and are CLA+1 status, you can cast your vote in Nuancier.

        • Fedora nightly image finder

          Finding nightly Fedora builds has always been a bit of a pain. For quite a while we had this page, which just linked to a couple of canned Koji searches. It kinda worked, but it was terribly slow and the results weren’t the nicest thing to look at; it also couldn’t find you installer images, as they don’t come out of Koji. It doesn’t work any more, as the Koji tasks it searches for are no longer correct; it could easily be ‘fixed’ but it’d still be a bad experience.

        • BrickHack 2016 and Fedora: Event Report

          As an event sponsor, the Fedora Ambassadors of North America had a table for the event. The Ambassadors offered mentorship and assistance to BrickHack 2016 programmers, gave away some free Fedora swag, and offered an introduction to Linux, open source, and the community. This report is a recollection of some highlights from the event and also focuses on the impact we made as an event sponsor.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Best Things in Life are Free

    On the other hand, software is still scarce — which is a problem because without software a computer is basically a paper weight. Yes, distributing software is nearly costless. However unlike hardware which involves costly manufacturing processes, the cost of making software consists almost completely of finding intelligent people to write it — and intelligent people are just as scarce as they’ve always been. Luckily, there’s a solution to this dilemma: open source. This idea isn’t new, but I think it’s really important so I wanted to write about it.

    Open source software is software that is distributed freely. Now, this may sound like a terrible idea. People are altruistic — but only to a certain point. Why would people contribute to software for no reward? The key is that open source software is not only free, the process behind making it is transparent. You can change it. Open source projects start when people share code they wrote for their individual needs. Many times making this software publicly available is more cost effective than selling it. Since the source code is publically available, people can adapt the code, and fix problems as they arise.

  • Chatty Puppets on Atlassian HipChat

    HipChat is a team communications platform that provides ‘persistent’ one-on-one chat, group chat, video chat, file sharing and integrations.

  • Open Source Audio Video Apps: 36 Top Apps

    In the media-saturated world we live in, having an array of top-notch audio-video tools really comes in handy. Trim a file, edit a video, maximize your audio – we all need to feed our social media streams, and companies always need audio-video content to best communicate with users.

    This list of audio video apps is potentially a major cost saver. The following open source apps replace expensive commercial AV apps, often with very similar functionality.

    If you have addition AV apps you’d like to recommend, please use the Comments section below. Happy downloading!

  • Using behavioral patterns to build awesome communities

    Human beings are complicated animals. We are packed with ambitions, fears, desires, anxieties, and other nuggets of the human condition. Of course, the extent and manifestation of these different elements varies from person to person, across cultures, and in different environments.

    This makes building human systems—such as communities or companies—complicated. To some (typically bureaucrats), it can be tempting to ignore what makes us human and instead create seemingly logical processes, despite the processes not matching our human attributes well, and then convince people to use them. If you want to build engaging communities, don’t try to model people in spreadsheets; rarely does it work well.

  • Is your open team fully awesome, or too cool for school?

  • Events

    • 2016 EuroLLVM Videos Now Available
    • Community Leadership Summit 2016

      On 14th – 15th May 2016 in Austin, Texas the Community Leadership Summit 2016 will be taking place. For the 8th year now, community leaders and managers from a range of different industries, professions, and backgrounds will meet together to share ideas and best practice. See our incredible registered attendee list that is shaping up for this year’s event.

      This year we also have many incredible keynotes that will cover topics such as building developer communities, tackling imposter syndrome, gamification, governance, and more. Of course CLS will incorporate the popular unconference format where the audience determine the sessions in the schedule.

    • Chariot Solutions Partners with Open Source Hazelcast

      The software development specialist Chariot adds open source Hazelcast 3.6 to its enterprise portfolio as the two companies announce partnership at the Philly ETE 2016 conference.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Firefox 45.0.2 Released for Linux, Windows & Mac OS X with More Bugfixes

        Today, April 11, 2016, Mozilla has announced the general availability of the second point release of the Mozilla Firefox 45.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

      • Welcome Sean White, Vice President of Technology Strategy

        Dr. Sean White joins the Mozilla leadership team this week as a Vice President of Technology Strategy.

      • firefox vs rthreads

        Firefox is too slow. OpenBSD is too slow. The combination is too too slow. This situation was known for some time, but resolution was also slow for quite some reasons.

        Many Firefox on OpenBSD users, particularly developers, only use OpenBSD so the extent of the performance gap between platforms went unnoticed. Web browsing would grow ever slower, but the only page that matters would continue to load as quickly as ever, once the slumbering lizard had awoken. Clearly the reason it takes me thirty seconds to view a single tweet was idiot kids and their infernal javascript frameworks.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • 16 Most Used Microsoft Office Alternatives for Linux

      Productivity on any operating system is without doubt one of the most important things that can make or break a platform however, execution is the key – if done right, enterprise adaptation would be shortly underway.

      Linux today is most certainly an ultimate viable alternative to Windows – both in the general consumer and business market.

  • BSD

    • FreeBsd Vs OpenBsd

      There are a number of Unix-like operating systems based on or descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) series of Unix variants. The three most notable descendants in current use are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, which are all derived from 386BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite, by various routes. Both NetBSD and FreeBSD started life in 1993, initially derived from 386BSD, but in 1994 migrating to a 4.4BSD-Lite code base. OpenBSD was forked in 1995 from NetBSD. Other notable derivatives include DragonFly BSD, which was forked from FreeBSD 4.8, and Apple Inc.’s iOS and OS X, with its Darwin base including a large amount of code derived from FreeBSD.

    • Linux Top 3: CoreOS 1010.1.0, FreeBSD and PC-BSD 10.3

      Yes of course, we *know* that FreeBSD isn’t Linux, but aside from using a different kernel (a big aside of course), there are a lot of common areas between modern BSD and Linux.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • White House misses big opportunity with open source push

      To me — as a lawyer, a software developer, and a former government technologist — the question of open source versus closed source when it comes to government software shouldn’t even be a question. With a few obvious exceptions for things like national or operational security, if taxpayers fund the creation of software, they should have the right to access that software. This is increasingly true as government agencies automate the traditionally human-based process they use to regulate industry and deliver citizen services each day. When such processes begin to be shielded behind commercial copyright or self-induced bureaucratic necessity, our government quickly becomes a black box.

    • Storming the government castle

      Open source software seems like a perfect fit for government IT projects. Developers can take advantage of existing code bases and, it’s hoped, mold that code to their needs quickly and at less cost than developing code from scratch. Over the last few years, governments in the U.S. and abroad have been more closely embracing open source. However, agencies at all levels of U.S. government are still wary of open source and can be reluctant to adopt it. It’s still not easy for government projects to use open source or for developers employed in the public sector to contribute their work to open source project.

    • Urgent – Help until 10 April to influence how 750 millions will be spent

      We were notified of a very interesting consultation by the European Commission. The European Commission is about to allocate 750 million Euro over the next years on the “future internet”, but the really important subjects (like: everything we learned from Edward Snowden) are not on their radar – yet.

      However, if we bundle our efforts that is something that is definitely within reach. At the moment we are told there are only a couple of dozens of submissions from mostly the usual suspects, so your response would (at least on paper) count for influencing a few million Euro of this budget. It really makes a difference if you submit something, even if it is really short.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • A French paperback edition of the book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig is now available

      I’m happy to report that the French paperback edition of my project to translate the Free Culture book by Lawrence Lessig is now available for sale on Lulu.com. Once I have formally verified my proof reading copy, which should be in the mail, the paperback edition should be available in book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble too.

      This French edition, Culture Libre, is the work of the dblatex developer Benoît Guillon, who created the PO file from the initial translation available from the Wikilivres wiki pages and completed and corrected the translation to match the original docbook edition my project is using, as well as coordinated the proof reading of the final result. I believe the end result look great, but I am biased and do not read French. In addition to the paperback edition, the book is available in PDF, EPUB and Mobi format from the github project page linked to above.

    • Open Data

      • Open Government integral part of Smart Cities

        Open Government initiatives should be an integral part of Smart Sustainable Cities. They ensure access to government data, stimulate citizen participation, and facilitate innovation. This is one of the recommendations made in the ‘Smart Sustainable Cities — Reconnaissance Study’ published last month by the Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance at United Nations University (UNU-EGOV).

      • Updated Austrian Manual for Data Managers available

        Last month, Austria published an updated ‘Handbuch für Dateneinsteller’ (Manual for Data Managers). It provides the country’s public administration with all the information needed by agencies to get started using the national Open Government Data portal www.data.gv.at.

        The manual explains the OGD Austria initiative, the open data principles, the why, how, and by whom of publishing open data, followed by all the legal, procedural, organisational and technical details.

        The ‘Handbuch für Dateneinsteller’ is written in German and is freely available from the OGD Austria website.

  • Programming/Development

    • Give your Git Repository an Open Source Web Interface

      Git is a very popular open source version control system. Many developers use Git on a desktop machine and push their updates to a central server running on a service like GitHub or GitLab. Although such services are great, this may lead some to think of Git as a client-server model with local checkout of code and updates that are always being pushed back to the single central server.

    • pypy: suprisingly good

      That’s better than I expected for the JIT technology.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Obama: The Word ‘Classified’ Means Whatever We Need It To Mean

      How do we know whether information is classified? Well, because the government tells us it is. But what does that mean? It turns out it means whatever the government wants it to mean, subject to time, place, personnel involved, etc.

      Classified material handed over to movie producers by Leon Panetta? Probably not a big deal. Classified material handed over to journalists by whistleblowers? That’s a prosecutin’.

      No one explains this slippery approach to classification better than President Obama, who was gamely trying to answer questions about an ongoing investigation (Hillary Clinton and her famous emails) during an interview with Fox News.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • From DC’s Deficit Panic to Flint’s Poisoned Water

      We know that the Washington Post editors really hate Bernie Sanders and rarely miss an opportunity to show it. Dana Milbank got in the act big time today as he once again denounced Sanders (along with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz) in his column.

    • Water Woes Divide California into Haves, Have Nots

      People have long predicted that California could eventually collapse into the ocean following a mega earthquake. Now, an eerily similar true-life scenario is playing out — but it’s thanks to the weather.

      The Gold Rush State has sunk more than 45 feet since 1935 – something the U.S. government calls the “largest human alteration of the earth’s surface.” But earthquakes aren’t the cause. It’s happening because of excessive groundwater mining brought on by drought, and geologists say all the rain in the world won’t reverse cave-ins of dirt and rock in underground aquifers.

    • National Weather Service will stop using all caps in its forecasts

      New forecast software is allowing the agency to break out of the days when weather reports were sent by “the wire” over teleprinters, which were basically typewriters hooked up to telephone lines. Teleprinters only allowed the use of upper case letters, and while the hardware and software used for weather forecasting has advanced over the last century, this holdover was carried into modern times since some customers still used the old equipment.

  • Finance

    • Rothschild says Ukraine president’s trust up to international standards

      The wealth management arm of Rothschild Group set up a trust it handles for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in line with international standards for the treatment of assets of politicians in office, the company said on Thursday.

      Poroshenko has had to defend himself repeatedly against accusations he tried to evade tax after the “Panama Papers” data leak on Sunday showed he had placed his Roshen confectionary business assets in an offshore account.

      Rothschild said Poroshenko had appointed it as a trustee of a blind trust to hold his shares in Roshen.

      “The trust has been modelled on international standards for politicians requiring trusts to hold their assets while they are in office,” it said in emailed comments.

    • Dennis Skinner: Why I called the Prime Minister ‘Dodgy Dave’ – and would do it again

      I, like most people in the country, view tax havens as dodgy.

      Cameron looked after himself by maxing out the taxpayers’ credit card to pay a mortgage on expenses in Oxfordshire and even claimed to cut the wisteria off his chimney.

      So I, like most people in the country, think it dodgy he now earns a small fortune renting out a house in Notting Hill while living in Downing Street and Chequers.

    • All PFI Contracts Should Be Cancelled and the Assets Nationalised

      The Private Finance Initiative was always a scam. It was yet another way to divert money from ordinary tax-payers to the super rich. Instead of schools and hospitals being built and paid for by the taxpayer, they were built and paid for by the bankers, hedge fund managers and other “financial services” sharks, giving state guaranteed returns averaging 7% from the taxpayer, when we now have negative interest rates. It is such a massive scam that every man, woman and child in the UK owes £3,000 to PFI financiers. Like so many far right Tory ideas, its most fervent practitioners were Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

    • Poor People Should Just Go Die

      Imagine that — in one of the world’s richest countries, people die simply because we can’t find a way to provide them good healthcare as does the rest of the civilized world.

    • Starvation in Australia: Utopia’s dirty secret

      I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the “red heart” of Australia. The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the oldest, most continuous human presence on earth.

      Rosalie was distressed, defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, Utopia, with a searing description of a discarded people: “We are not wanted in our own country.” She has described the legacies of a genocide: a word political Australia loathes and fears.

    • Menace To Tax Dodgers David Cameron Has His Own Tax Dodging Exposed By The Panama Leaks

      One of the more darkly entertaining aspects of the massive Panama Leaks has been watching exposed politicians attempting to reconcile past promises to get tougher on financial wrongdoers with their own tax-dodging efforts.

      UK Prime Minister David Cameron has spent several years in crackdown mode, as the New York Times notes. Going all the way back to 2012, Cameron has made a habit of promising better regulation, stricter enforcement and harsher penalties for tax-dodging corporations while selling himself to voters and small businesses. He also singled out individuals, like comedian Jimmy Carr, for his use of “dodgy tax-avoiding schemes.” He also promised to close a loophole that allowed wealthy UK residents to avoid paying taxes and suggested those that did should face prison time.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Empire Strikes Back

      Several people have argued with my reference to “corporate media”, as the consortium includes state organisations such as the BBC. My response to that is that the BBC has become in the last few years a mouthpiece for state propaganda with no effective independence of government, and that the politicians are very much in the pocket of the corporations who fund them. The BBC therefore promotes corporate interests just as much as those outlets directly owned by corporate interests. It is simply a question of direct or indirect control.

    • The GOP’s worst kept secret: More people voting hurts Republicans — so they’re openly trying to prevent it

      By now it should be more than obvious. Republicans continue to push for new voter ID laws, which, of course, they publicly insist are all about weeding out rampant voter fraud, even though the likelihood of significant voter is virtually nil.

      Over the last four years, however, one GOP operative after another has proved the adage that you can’t keep a secret among a large group of people. Indeed, they continue to blab about the true motive behind voter ID laws — that it’s all about disenfranchising Democratic voters and keeping turnout low. The fewer Democratic voters, and, yes, the lower the overall turnout, the better Republicans fare.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Aggies preform highly in NSA Codebreaker Challenge [Ed: puff piece/marketing]

      Cybersecurity is one of this century’s newest and most complex challenges. Data is becoming more and more difficult to protect, but an National Security Administration challenge aims to train the next generation of computer engineers to be able to handle the task.

      The NSA Codebreaker challenge gave students around the country a chance to put their coding skills to use in a difficult context with a variety of interesting applications.

    • US Gov’t Wants to Use NSA Spy Data to Prosecute Citizens – Advocacy Group

      The US government is developing a policy that would allow the Justice Department to prosecute criminals based on evidence acquired secretly by the National Security Agency (NSA), Human Rights Watch said in a press release.

    • WATCH: Exclusive Interview by Glenn Greenwald with Former Brazilian President Lula da Silva
    • Is The Government Getting Stingier With Cyber Threat Data?

      In late February, the University of California, Berkeley, announced a hack into a school financial system that compromised the Social Security or bank account numbers of about 80,000 students, alumni and vendors.

      For more than two years, suspected Chinese and other nation-state hackers nestled inside computers at Penn State’s engineering school, which happens to develop sensitive technology for the Navy, Bloomberg reported in May 2015.

    • University Says Government’s Pretty Terrible At Sharing Cyberthreat Information

      Multiple government agencies have gone all-in on cybersecurity. CISA was pushed through late last year — dumped into the back pages of a “must pass” omnibus spending bill. Just like that, the government expanded its surveillance power and cleared its cyberthreat inboxes to make way for all the information non-governmental entities might want to share with it. It promised to share right back — making this all equitable — but no one really believed the government would give as much as it would take.

    • Congress’s New Encryption Bill Just Leaked, And It’s As Bad As Experts Imagined

      In the aftermath of Apple and the FBI’s high-profile battle over an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooter suspects, observers on Capitol Hill have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of new Congressional bill that would force tech companies to provide assistance to police in accessing their customers’ data, even if it means building software tools to circumvent their own security measures.

    • Burr And Feinstein Plan One Sided Briefing For Law Enforcement To Bitch About ‘Going Dark’

      With the world mocking the sheer ignorance of their anti-encryption bill, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein are doubling down by planning a staff “briefing” on the issue of “going dark” with a panel that is made up entirely of law enforcement folks. As far as we can tell, it hasn’t been announced publicly, but an emailed announcement was forwarded to us, in which they announce the “briefing” (notably not a “hearing”) on “barriers to law enforcement’s ability to lawfully access the electronic evidence they need to identify suspects, solve crimes, exonerate the innocent and protect communities from further crime.” The idea here is to convince others in Congress to support their ridiculous bill by gathering a bunch of staffers and scaring them with bogeyman stories of “encryption caused a crime wave!” As such, it’s no surprise that the panelists aren’t just weighted heavily in one direction, they’re practically flipping the boat. Everyone on the panel comes from the same perspective, and will lay out of the argument for “encryption bad!”

    • The right to delete your own data

      We have more protection for your credit card data than the information someone can use to set up a fake credit card in your name.

      If you do anything online, your data is at risk. Always. Every time you open an account somewhere, you provide a bunch of personal information. Some sites don’t ask for much more than an email address and a password. Other sites require more data about you. And other sites don’t require many details to get started, but you add more anyway.

    • MIT Tech Review Tries To Blame Apple Encryption For Wrongful Arrest
    • FBI, DEA Taking Two Different Approaches To Pending All Writs Orders Directed At Apple

      Some of the other iPhones the FBI tried to pretend weren’t going to be the beneficiaries of a precedential All Writs order are apparently not even the beneficiaries of the agency’s Break Into an iPhone Using This One Simple Trick! anticlimax in the San Bernardino case.

      Director James Comey noted there were still more windmills to tilt at after discovering the still-secret exploit only works on a smallish subset of Apple’s offerings. In two other cases, the agency has explored its available options. In one case in Massachusetts, it appears to be on the verge of abandoning its quest to force Apple to break into a phone for it, as Motherboard reports.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Sheriff And Deputy Somehow Manage To Screw Up Forfeiture Badly Enough To Be Indicted On Extortion Charges

      The situation is not unlike hundreds of others that have occurred over the years. Colbert and Gragg stopped a motorist, found cash and drug paraphernalia, seized the cash and then proceeded to not file criminal charges against the driver.

    • Grand jury indicts Wagoner County sheriff, calls for his removal

      Indicted Wagoner County Sheriff Bob Colbert will fight an accusation that he took a $10,000 bribe after a traffic stop, his attorneys said Thursday.

      “This money was earmarked for fighting drug trafficking to help protect the citizens,” his attorney, Michon Hughes, said. “The accusations remain politically motivated. We are so sad for the sheriff.”

      The state’s multicounty grand jury on Thursday indicted Colbert, 60, and Capt. Jeff Gragg, 48, on three felony counts. The grand jury also called for Colbert’s immediate suspension and eventual removal from public office on misconduct grounds.

    • Supreme Court Says Government Can’t Take Your Money And Lock You Out Of Your Choice In Representation

      This decision was handed down by the Supreme Court more than a week ago, but it’s worth reporting. Late last year, the Court decided to take a look at an issue related to asset forfeiture and the implications it has for the Sixth Amendment.

      In this case, the defendant, Sila Luis, argued that the government’s seizure of her assets — pre-conviction — denied her the right to defend herself fully against its charges. She could still use an attorney, but it would have to be one appointed to her or one willing to work for deferred compensation (in the hopes that assets would eventually be returned).

      The problem here isn’t a small one. The government has the power to seize assets pre-conviction using nothing more than a grand jury’s indictment as the basis. This is done to provide some sort of assurance that the accused can compensate those wronged (as well as pay any fines, fees, etc. associated with the conviction) when the trial is concluded.

    • A Pirate’s First Month in Government

      In the mean time, tomorrow I am due to give a talk at Bath University on all things Pirate Party UK and how our first “Pirate in Power” is doing.

      All in all, I’d say we Pirates have had a pretty successful month. We’re already pushed back against the AMs bad call on the environment and immediately represented the constituents while making connections with the investing parties, unions and charites.

    • Some of Globe’s ‘Predictions’ for Trump’s America Have Already Come True

      On Sunday, the Boston Globe published a mock front page, filled with ominous headlines and half-joking prognostications, to “warn” the GOP against nominating Donald Trump. A accompanying editorial proclaimed that Trump’s “vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.”

      But what’s strange about this “satire” is how most of the things it’s warning about are already underway, or have long existed. Indeed, Trump’s vision isn’t un-American; it’s America on steroids.

    • Leaflets calling for Ahmadi Muslims to be killed if they do not convert found in south London mosque

      Leaflets calling for the killing of members of the Ahmadi sect of Islam have been found in a south London mosque.

      A pile of the flyers, which were found in Stockwell Green Mosque, seem to endorse the killing of Ahmadis if they do not convert to mainstream Islam.

      It has been speculated that they were printed by Khatme Naubwwat – a group which says on its official website that its “sole aim has been and is to unite all the Muslims of the world to safeguard the sanctity of Prophethood and the finality of Prophethood and to refute the repudiators of the belief in the finality of Prophethood of the Holy Prophet Hazrat Muhammad”.

    • Cybersecurity Expert Caught in FBI Mass Hack Gets Two Days Jail Time

      The Department of Justice has charged at least 137 people in the US with child pornography related crimes, after the FBI used a hacking tool to identify visitors of a large site on the so-called dark web. Many of those people are facing years in prison.

      One person caught has avoided any serious jail time altogether though: Brian Haller, a former cybersecurity employee at Booz Allen Hamilton who himself has ties to the government. Haller was sentenced on Friday to time served—two days and one night, according to court documents and local media reports.

      Haller pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child pornography, court documents state. Haller was also sentenced to 10 years of supervised release, in which his computer will undergo constant monitoring (except devices that are used as part of his employment), and he was ordered to pay a fine of $1,000.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Comcast doesn’t like its customers using their own routers, and it’s fighting back

      It’s rare that you hear a positive story about the business practices of American mass media corporation Comcast, and the latest news item doing the rounds doesn’t break from that tradition. Customers are reporting that the company is injecting its own ads into their Web browsers.

      On the surface, this might seem like just another addition to the list of frustrations Comcast users are expected to endure on a daily basis. However, the product being advertised and the strategy underpinning this campaign are noxious enough to set this apart from the now-standard tales of the company’s disregard for its customers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Dov Seidman Now Suing His Agent Over The Use Of The Word ‘How’ By Third Party Ad Agency

        You may recall a story from a few years back involving self-proclaimed “corporate virtue advisor” Dov Seidman and his quest to sue Chobani for using the phrase “How food is made matters” and the social media hashtag #howmatters. Seidman’s problem with all of this? He had a trademark registered for the word “how.” Yeah, seriously. Seidman claimed that his super-awesome transformational use of “how” as a noun instead of a verb had been trademarked and that this somehow meant that a company that sells yogurt couldn’t use the word in any way similar.

      • USPTO proposes first TTAB changes for nine years

        The USPTO has suggested 29 pages-worth of changes to Trademark Trial and Appeal Board practice, including to electronic filing, service and electronic communication, streamlining discovery and pre-trial procedures, and making trials more efficient.

    • Copyrights

      • MPA: We’ve Reached a Turning Point on Piracy

        The president of the MPAA’s European operation says he believes a turning point has been reached on piracy, with service providers and search engines beginning to understand they all have a role to play. However, it’s also clear that Hollywood is fearful of opening up content across Europe, which in itself could contribute to piracy.

      • U.S. ISPs Refuse to Disconnect Persistent Pirates

        The U.S. broadband association USTelecom, a trade association representing many ISPs, is taking a stand against abusive takedown notices and a recent push to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. They argue that ISPs are not required to pass on takedown notices and stress that their subscribers shouldn’t lose Internet access based solely on copyright holder complaints.

      • Appeals Court Says Google Must Take Further Abuse From AG Jim Hood Before It Can Challenge Hood’s Abusive Behavior

        Towards the end of 2014, Google filed for an injunction against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose close ties with the MPAA had led to a sustained campaign of harassment over Google’s supposed lack of interest in policing the entire internet for infringing material.

        Early in 2015, the district court granted Google’s requested injunction against Hood’s 79-page subpoena, which the court noted was a “burdensome fishing expedition” that went beyond the bounds of what a state AG could actually demand. Not only that, but the court noted that many of Hood’s actions were blocked by Section 230 of the CDA because the content in question had been uploaded by third parties.

        Unfortunately for Google, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court has reversed the lower court’s decision and vacated the injunction. It’s being portrayed as a victory for the MPAA and its kept man, Jim Hood, but those actually reading the decision will find the reversal is just procedural. TL; DR: Google must face additional legal harassment from Jim Hood before it can challenge said legal harassment in a federal court.

04.11.16

Links 11/4/2016: Krita 3.0 Alpha, New Linux RC

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • GNU/kWindows

    There has been a lot of talk lately about a most unique combination: GNU—the fully free/libre operating system—and Microsoft Windows—the freedom-denying, user-controlling, surveillance system. There has also been a great deal of misinformation. I’d like to share my thoughts.

    [...]

    Free software is absolutely essential: it ensures that users, who are the most vulnerable, are in control of their computing—not software developers or corporations. Any program that denies users any one of their four freedoms is non-free (or proprietary)—that is, freedom-denying software. This means that any non-free software, no matter its features or performance, will always be inferior to free software that performs a similar task.

    Not everyone likes talking about freedom or the free software philosophy. This disagreement resulted in the “open source” development methodology, which exists to sell the benefits of free software to businesses without discussing the essential ideological considerations. Under the “open source” philosophy, if a non-free program provides better features or performance, then surely it must be “better”, because they have outperformed the “open source” development methodology; non-free software isn’t always considered to be a bad thing.

    [...]

    Secondly, when you see someone using a GNU/kWindows system, politely ask them why. Tell them that there is a better operating system out there—the GNU/Linux operating system—that not only provides those technical features, but also provides the feature of freedom! Tell them what free software is, and try to relate it to them so that they understand why it is important, and even practical.

    It’s good to see more people benefiting from GNU; but we can’t be happy when it is being sold as a means to draw users into an otherwise proprietary surveillance system, without so much as a mention of our name, or what it is that we stand for.

  • Good bye “open source”; hello “free software”

    Everyone has at least a good reason to prefer software freedom over non-free software products.

  • Rancher Labs Release Rancher 1.0, An Open Source Cross-Cloud Container Management Platform

    Rancher Labs have released version 1.0 of their open source Rancher container management platform, which allows the deployment of Docker containers via Docker Swarm, Kubernetes or Rancher Labs’ Cattle across a range of underlying infrastructure. Rancher manages the underlying compute fabric, exposing control via a web-based UI that can be secured via RBAC/ACL, and can be deployed across a combination of multiple public cloud vendors, private virtualised clouds and bare metal. The platform also includes integrated load balancing and persistent storage services.

  • Events

    • OSCAL ’16 | Open Source Conference Albania 2016

      OSCAL (Open Source Conference Albania) is the major international tech conference in Albania organized by Open Labs Hackerspace, the open source and free software community in Albania. The conference promotes software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, global movements which originally started more than 30 years ago.

      The third edition of the the annual OSCAL conference will take place once again in Tirana on 14 & 15th of May and will gather more than 400 free libre open source technology enthusiasts, developers, students, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the idea that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop and customize to its needs; that knowledge is a communal property and free and open to everyone.

    • Document Freedom Day 2016: Singapore

      Document Freedom Day is a day where we celebrate and raise awareness of Open Standards. It is held annually, on the last Wednesday of March. However, this year, the Ambassadors in Singapore decided to celebrate it on 24 March, 2016.

    • KubeCon part 2: 1.3 and the CNCF

      In the “State of The Union”, David Aronchik, Kubenetes Project Manager for Google, brought folks up to date with what’s happened in the Kubernetes community and what’s ahead for version 1.3 and beyond.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Is your open source community optimized for contributors?

        Josh Matthews is a platform developer at Mozilla. He’s a programmer who writes Rust code and is active in the development of Firefox. His development experience has led him to enjoy mentoring new contributors in open source projects.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • What’s new in MySQL?

      This year at the Percona Live Data Performance Conference I’ll be talking about MySQL. MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database, enabling the cost-effective delivery of reliable, high-performance and scalable web-based and embedded database applications, including all five of the top five websites.

      My interest in databases grew while working in banking in the late nineties. Back then I implemented back-end ATM servers using HP-UX and Sybase as the development platform. I remember we had an allowed maintenance window from 2am-5am, and struggled with finishing a blocking create index operation on our main table with 30 million rows. I remember thinking “Why can’t this be done while the database is online?”

    • Open Source Leader MariaDB Rockets into Analytics Market

  • Education

    • Mining for Education

      Students are not taught word processing, they are taught Microsoft Word. They are not taught presentation skills, they are taught Microsoft Powerpoint. They are required to present their work, be it essay, slideshow, or graph, in Microsoft-owned proprietary formats, recorded onto thumb-drives formatted with a Microsoft-patented file systems. Nothing else will do.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • MediPi open source telehealth kit piloted in NHS

      An open source telehealth kit built using a Raspberry Pi will be piloted with heart patients at a southern NHS trust this financial year.

      Richard Robinson, a technical integration specialist at HSCIC, developed the telehealth prototype called MediPi to prove that “telehealth is affordable at scale”.

      He said eight months ago his wife, who works for a charity helping socially isolated older people, was asked to find volunteers for a telehealth pilot.

      “She came home with the kit and it was all high-end tablets, 3G and Bluetooth enabled devices and I was really shocked by what I thought would cost,” explained Robinson.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • 6 steps to calculate ROI for an open hardware project

        Free and open source software advocates have courageously blazed a trail that is now being followed by those interested in open source for physical objects. It’s called free and open source hardware (FOSH), and we’re seeing an exponential rise in the number of free designs for hardware released under opensource licenses, Creative Commons licenses,or placed in the public domain.

  • Programming/Development

    • What’s awful about being a {software engineer, tech lead, manager}?

      I’ve been building software professionally for over 10 years now. I love what I do and I hope to be an old programmer someday. But along the way, I’ve encountered many terrible things that have made me hate my job. I wish that someone had given me a roadmap of what to expect earlier in my career, so when some new and unfortunate awfulness occurred that I wouldn’t have felt so alone and frustrated.

      This post is meant to be such a guide. I have three goals.

    • FAQ: Node.js

      We still have nightmares about GeoCities too, and yes, JavaScript has historically been used for things like that. It originated at Netscape in the mid 90s as a lightweight scripting language to add interactive properties to web pages, but it has come a long way since then. Sure, many programmers look down on JavaScript, and it’s massively overused on some websites, but it also has plenty of fans.

    • A single Node of failure

      The web-development community was briefly thrown into chaos in late March when a lone Node.js developer suddenly unpublished a short but widely used package from the Node Package Manager (npm) repository. The events leading up to that developer’s withdrawal are controversial in their own right, but the chaotic effects raise even more serious questions for the Node.js and npm user communities.

      npm itself is a module repository for Node.js code, akin to the Python Package Index or similar repositories for other languages and frameworks. Users can install a package with a simple npm install foo, but the service is also widely used by Node.js developers to automatically fetch and install dependencies: projects list their dependencies in the package.json file, and they are recursively fetched from npm and installed when the package is built. Using npm in this manner is standard operating procedure, allowing complex JavaScript applications to be written on top of multiple third-party frameworks in minimal lines of code. The service, however, is run by a private company called npm, Inc., rather than by the Node.js project.

Leftovers

  • Google Is Interested In Buying Its Rival Yahoo’s Web Business — Report
  • What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Negotiation

    The next president of the United States will need to be an extremely effective negotiator. Armed conflict, political deadlock, and diplomatic crises abound. The president will be called upon to resolve the war in Syria, manage complex relationships with Russia and Iran, handle hot spots such as North Korea, Libya, and Ukraine, navigate competitive tensions with China, and revive a modicum of bipartisanship in Congress. Ironically, the only presidential candidate who has been asserting his prowess as a great negotiator is someone who has precisely the wrong instincts and experience for the types of conflicts the president will face. The Donald Trump approach to negotiation would be not only ineffective but also disastrous — and there are clearly identifiable reasons for this.

  • Typing on a MacBook Could Soon Be as Awful as Typing on an iPad
  • Apple Patent Imagines a Keyboard without Keys
  • Apple patented a MacBook design that is all touchpad and no keys
  • Apple files patent for a ‘keyless’ touchpad keyboard

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Children Wrongfully put on ADHD Medication

      A recent study showed that 1 in every 4 children in preschool is taking medication for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The majority of kids that age have a tough time paying attention to extended periods of time because their brain and body is nowhere close to being fully developed. Medication shouldn’t be the first option when it comes to treating kids who have ADHD or who we think have ADHD.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Britain’s top secret kill list: How British police backed by GCHQ fed names of drug lords to a US assassination unit, which – under cover of the war on terror – wiped out an innocent family with a missile strike

      British law enforcement and intelligence services have helped draw up an extra-judicial ‘kill list’ to assassinate the world’s most wanted terrorists and drug smugglers in foreign countries.

      The sensational claims, which raise disturbing questions about Britain’s involvement in the targeting of aircraft and drone strikes, will be revealed in a 50-page report by the Reprieve human rights charity to be published tomorrow.

      It will state that the UK has been a key, long-standing partner in America’s ‘shoot to kill’ policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, targeting not only alleged terrorists, but also supposed drug traffickers, and earmarking them for drone and missile strikes – often on the basis of unsubstantiated ‘intelligence’ which has never been tested in court.

      Although the top secret ‘kill list’ has been in existence for years and is continually revised, Britain’s contribution has never been sanctioned by Parliament.

      The startling evidence, drawn from leaked official documents, reveals the two agencies involved are the electronic eavesdropping organisation GCHQ, and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), now rebranded as the National Crime Agency (NCA).

    • Top secret “28 pages” may hold clues about Saudi support for 9/11 hijackers

      Current and former members of Congress, U.S. officials, 9/11 Commissioners and the families of the attack’s victims want 28 top-secret pages of a congressional report released. Bob Graham, the former Florida governor, Democratic U.S. Senator and onetime chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, says the key section of a top secret report he helped author should be declassified to shed light on possible Saudi support for some of the 9/11 hijackers. Graham was co-chair of Congress’ bipartisan “Joint Inquiry” into intelligence failures surrounding the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, that issued the report in 2003. Graham speaks to Steve Kroft for 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, April 10 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

    • U.S. Bombs Were Used in Saudi-Led Attack on Market in Yemen, Rights Group Finds

      ONE OF THE deadliest airstrikes in Yemen since a Saudi Arabia-led coalition began bombing the country used munitions supplied by the United States, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

      The March 15 attack targeted a crowded market in the village of Mastaba in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. HRW said it found remnants of a “GBU-31 satellite-guided bomb, which consists of a U.S.-supplied MK-84 2,000-pound bomb mated with a JDAM satellite guidance kit, also U.S.-supplied.” The group said it also reviewed evidence provided by British news channel ITV, which found remnants of an “MK-84 bomb paired with a Paveway laser guidance kit.”

      The report provides yet more evidence of U.S. complicity in the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Yemen. The Obama administration has been a key military backer of Saudi Arabia in its yearlong campaign against a rebel movement in Yemen known as the Houthis. In addition to billions of dollars in arms sales, the Pentagon has provided the Saudi-led coalition with logistical and intelligence support. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. role may make it “jointly responsible” for war crimes.

    • GCHQ working on joint ‘shoot to kill list’

      According to the article in the paper, one Afghan family were killed by a missile strike after they were mistaken for a member of the Taliban.

    • Covering Up Hillary’s Libyan Fiasco

      Despite Libya’s bloodshed and chaos, ex-Secretary of State Clinton still defends her key role in the 2011 “regime change,” but her reasons don’t withstand scrutiny, as Jonathan Marshall explains.

    • Tomgram: William Hartung, What a Waste, the U.S. Military

      From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades. Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represents chump change in the Pentagon’s wastage sweepstakes and in the context of its $600-billion-plus budget, but think of it as indicative of the absurd lengths the Department of Defense will go to when what’s at stake is throwing away taxpayer dollars.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate change will wipe $2.5tn off global financial assets: study

      Climate change could cut the value of the world’s financial assets by $2.5tn (£1.7tn), according to the first estimate from economic modelling.

      In the worst case scenarios, often used by regulators to check the financial health of companies and economies, the losses could soar to $24tn, or 17% of the world’s assets, and wreck the global economy.

      The research also showed the financial sense in taking action to keep climate change under the 2C danger limit agreed by the world’s nations. In this scenario, the value of financial assets would fall by $315bn less, even when the costs of cutting emissions are included.

    • What Will Happen When Genetically Engineered Salmon Escape Into the Wild?

      In late 2015, the Food and Drug Administration gave the greenlight to AquaBounty, Inc., a company poised to create, produce and market an entirely new type of salmon. By combining the genes from three different types of fish, AquaBounty has made a salmon that grows unnaturally fast, reaching adult size twice as fast as its wild relative.

      [...]

      Unfortunately, outside of Alaska, our poor management of an enormous fishing industry and important habitat has depleted fish stocks all along our coasts. Salmon species, in particular, are sensitive to environmental changes. The development and industrialization of our coast has polluted and dammed the rivers they depend on to breed. Although salmon used to be abundant on both the east and west coasts, large, healthy populations of salmon now exist mostly in Alaska.

  • Finance

    • Tory donor was trusted middleman for oil firm involved in bribes inquiry

      David Cameron’s troubles deepened on Saturday night as a Tory donor named in the Panama Papers was revealed as a trusted middleman for a company raided by the Serious Fraud Office, which is investigating what has been described as the world’s biggest bribery scandal.

      [...]

      Unaoil is at the centre of allegations that the business “systematically corrupted the global oil industry” by delivering millions in bribes on behalf of well-known multinationals to secure contracts.

      A week ago, authorities in Monaco raided the headquarters of the company, as well as the homes of some of its bosses, as part of a British-led investigation into a corruption scandal implicating businesses all over the world.

    • Still in the Dark on TTIP: Trade Agreement with the European Union Is a Black Box

      Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have been concluded. Citizens now have access to the 30-chapter agreement that is several thousand pages long. The TPP has been opposed by four major presidential candidates, and faces criticism in Congress. Nevertheless, it is likely that the trade deal will get a vote sometime this year.

    • Hillary Clinton Fundraiser Hosted by All-Star Cast of Financial Regulators Who Joined Wall Street

      As Hillary Clinton questions rival Bernie Sanders over the depth of his financial reform ideas this week, a group of former government officials – once tasked with regulating Wall Street and now working in the financial industry or as Wall Street lobbyists — are participating in a fundraiser for her in the nation’s capital.

      The invitation for the April 6 fundraiser, obtained by Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time, describes a “conversation” with Hillary finance chair Gary Gensler and Senators Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

    • Texas nurses supersizing salaries for more money at McDonald’s

      “You know, you can start off at McDonald’s at $13-$14 an hour in some cases, you could certainly find easier jobs for more money and that’s a real problem when you’re trying to keep good people in your facilities,” said Scott Kibbe with the Texas Health Care Association.

    • Bitcoin and Ethereum are Driving Factors of Open Execution Initiative

      The Bitcoin network has been supporting the Open Execution principle for quite some time now, as services owners can’t run away with people’s bitcoins, and no one else can use your coins and send them to somebody else. Moreover, no additional money can be created out of thin air.

    • No, Bill Clinton, You Can’t Blame Welfare Reform’s Failures On Republicans

      While speaking to a crowd in Philadelphia on Thursday, former president Bill Clinton was interrupted by protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement carrying signs criticizing the crime bill and welfare reform bill that he signed into law in the 1990s.

      In response, Clinton gave a misleading defense of welfare reform. “They say the welfare reform bill increased poverty,” he said of the protesters. “Then why did we have the largest drop in African-American poverty when I was president?”

    • “Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First”

      For as long as people have yearned for more stuff, intellectuals have chastised them for that desire. Even Plato’s “Republic” followed the “decline of a virtuous, frugal city as it was corrupted by the lust for luxurious living,” Trentmann reminds readers. But his true nemesis is more recent: John Kenneth Galbraith, author of “The Affluent Society” (1958), in which the late economist argued that modern society seeks not only to fulfill our needs but also to create new ones, propelling us to live beyond our means, go into debt and thus strengthen the power of business. Though Trentmann acknowledges that the book has been enormously influential in cementing popular notions of consumerism, he dismisses it as “not a sober empirical study but a piece of advocacy to justify greater public spending.”

    • The Pillaging of America’s State Universities

      America’s great public research universities, which produce path-breaking discoveries and train some of the country’s most talented young students, are under siege. The result may be a significant weakening of the nation’s preeminence in higher education. Dramatic cuts in public spending for state flagship universities seem to be at odds with widespread public sentiment. Americans say they strongly believe in exceptional educational systems; they want their kids to attend excellent and selective colleges and to get good, well-paying, prestigious jobs. They also support university research. After 15 years of surveys, Research! America found in 2015 that 70 percent of American adults supported government-sponsored basic scientific research like that produced by public universities, while a significant plurality (44 percent) supported paying higher taxes for medical research designed to cure diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s. Nonetheless, many state legislators seem to be ignoring public opinion as they essentially starve some of the best universities—those that educate about two-thirds of American college students.

    • Wall Street Should Pay a Sales Tax, Too

      In case there was any doubt, the presidential election fight has confirmed that blasting Wall Street, even eight years after the financial crisis, is still a vote-getter.

      Hillary Clinton has said she’d like to jail more bankers. Donald Trump has skewered the hedge fund managers who are “getting away with murder.” And Bernie Sanders has made Wall Street accountability a centerpiece of his campaign.

      Of course, financial industry lobbyists aren’t about to take this lying down. In recent weeks, they’ve turned up the heat on lawmakers to block one particular measure that Sanders has mentioned in nearly every stump speech: taxing Wall Street speculation.

      Americans are used to paying sales taxes on basic goods and services, like a spring jacket, a gallon of gas, or a restaurant meal. But when a Wall Street trader buys millions of dollars’ worth of stocks or derivatives, there’s no tax at all.

      Sanders has introduced a bill called the Inclusive Prosperity Act, which would correct that imbalance by placing a small tax of just a fraction of a percent on all financial trades. It wouldn’t apply to ordinary consumer transactions such as ATM withdrawals or wire transfers.

    • NY Daily News Claims FDR Unfit to Be President: “No Concrete Plans, Only Platitudes”

      [The following is an imagined 1932 New York Daily News editorial board interview with Franklin Roosevelt during his presidential campaign. The Daily News comments below derive from the editorial board’s interview with Bernie Sanders on April 1, 2016. The Roosevelt statements are taken primarily from his 1933 inaugural address and his 1936 campaign speech at Madison Square Garden.]

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Sanders Takes 30-Point Bite out of Clinton Lead in NY

      A poll released Friday shows that Bernie Sanders has significantly narrowed the lead Hillary Clinton once claimed in New York.

      The new Emerson College poll (pdf) shows Clinton leading Sanders among Democratic primary voters in the state by 18 points—56 percent to 38 percent. That marks a significant drop in support for the former secretary of state since the same poll was taken less than one month ago.

    • GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, Now Slamming Sanders, Once Said It Was His “Task to Outsource”

      BACK IN 2014, in an interview with the magazine Chief Executive, General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt explained that starting in the 1980s, “most of us” — i.e. GE executives — “saw it as our task to outsource manufacturing, to move it to low-cost countries. This continued through the 1990s and into the very early 2000s.”

      Immelt’s statement of the obvious is relevant because Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said essentially the same thing about GE this week, which triggered an angry response from Immelt.

      In a meeting on Monday with the New York Daily News editorial board, Sanders was asked to name a corporation that he believed was “destroying the fabric of our nation.” Sanders said that GE was a “good example” because it had shut down “many major plants in this country. Sending jobs to low-wage countries. … That is saying that I don’t care that the workers, here have worked for decades. … The only thing that matters is that I can make a little bit more money. That the dollar is all that is almighty.”

    • Activists Launch Fight for Media Fairness for Sanders in Tight New York Primary
    • Grassroots revolt against Hillary: Occupy activists launch “Battle of New York” to fight Clinton machine, anti-Sanders bias in belly of beast

      “The corporate media and establishment keep counting us out, but we keep winning by large margins,” the Bernie Sanders campaign tweeted triumphantly, after the Vermont senator won the Wisconsin primary by a large margin this week.

      Journalists and activists in New York — the site of what may be the most important primary in the election — have noticed. And they are organizing in response.

      Enter Operation Battle of New York.

      It is the name of a new campaign launched by the editorial groups of The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal, left-wing citizen journalist publications that have served as important voices for American social movements for more than a decade.

      “We can expect corporate media to do everything it can to prop up Clinton and ignore or mischaracterize Sanders and the increasingly broad and diverse movement that supports him,” Operation Battle of New York writes in the description accompanying its Indiegogo campaign.

    • We’re speeding toward a climate change catastrophe — and that makes 2016 the most important election in a generation

      Before dropping out of the presidential race last month, Marco Rubio repeatedly declared that the 2016 presidential election is “the most important in a generation.” Such language is, of course, not uncommon to hear during election seasons. Politicians have been assuring the public for decades that the “next election” will be more significant than ever before, and that if the opposition party wins, the consequences will be catastrophic. As Rubio once stated in overtly apocalyptic language, “if we don’t get this election right, there may be no turning back for America.”

    • Hillary’s Inability to Grapple With Inequality Is Making Her Vulnerable to Bernie in New York

      Establishment politicians running for high office live and breathe elaborate focus group-tested lines. In time, they become those lines. But every now and then, extreme political pressures can force a few unscripted words to slip through. And when that happens, we gain a rare glimpse of the candidate’s deeper understanding of their world and our world, and the gap between the two.

      Hillary Clinton suffered such a moment on Tuesday afternoon while speaking at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Before taking the podium she already knew from internal polling that Sanders was going to win handily in Wisconsin. That meant she would be a loser in six of the last seven states, and by landslides, no less. Her staff is telling her not to worry; all the math on her side. Her delegate lead is so large Sanders can’t possibly overtake her.

      But Hillary is not stupid. She saw Sanders draw 18,000 people in the Bronx, virtually all people of color, and that was before his latest Wisconsin victory. She knows that nothing is set in stone if your opponent is clobbering you in primary after primary. Political momentum is something to fear and could infect the big states like New York and California.

      On top of that, young people are giving Bernie more than 80% of their votes. Even large majorities of young black and Latino voters are flocking to Sanders. How can that be?

    • Sanders Catches Clinton

      Sanders had the support of 47 percent of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters while Clinton had 46 percent—a narrow gap that fell within the poll’s 2.5 percent margin of error. The national survey was conducted in the days before the Vermont senator handily defeated the former secretary of state in the Wisconsin primary, and it tracks other polls in the last week that found Sanders erasing Clinton’s edge across the country. In a poll that PRRI conducted in January, Clinton had a 20-point lead.

    • US government, Soros funded Panama Papers to attack Putin – WikiLeaks

      On Wednesday, the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), “which targets Russia and [the] former USSR.” The “Putin attack” was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, WikiLeaks added, saying that the US government’s funding of such an attack is a serious blow to its integrity.

    • ‘Chalking’ officially a problem as pro-Trump messages set off new storms

      If three is officially a trend, chalking is now a trendy — and highly controversial — way for Donald Trump fans to show their love.

      This week, two schools — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga — jumped into the chalking fray, joining the headlines made in March at Emory University with pro-Trump messages scrawled on campus grounds.

      Following a now-familiar timeline, the chalked messages appeared and the storms followed. At UTC, it hit the student government.

    • Paul Krugman Is Annoying

      Krugman being Krugman, that means he’s been flooding the zone with anti-Bernie columns and blog posts.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • China’s “Panama” Censorship & The Implications For Encryption, Bitcoin

      The Panama Papers will have political and social fallout for months and years to come, much like the Libor scandal or the Edward Snowden leaks. A vote of no confidence for Iceland’s prime minister and Internet censorship in China are likely but the beginning.

    • Easier film censorship norms ahead?

      Is the government considering to relax the process of film certification? Also will filmmakers be able to get certification online instead of going through a long and winding process as is the case now?

    • When Pennsylvania was the censorship capital of America

      Can media affect behavior? Can a violent movie or video game provoke violence? Can visiting obscene, racist or misogynistic websites breed anti-social behavior? Should government step in to stop or regulate them?

      While the Internet now provides easy access to the darkest corners of the imagination, these concerns are not new. Even when the first films unspooled a century ago, authorities worried that the cinema would corrupt our communities. Pennsylvania became the first state to pass a law regulating motion pictures.

    • The architect of China’s Great Firewall embarrassed after needing to use VPN in front of live audience

      Fan Binxing, architect of the China’s infamous Great Firewall, was put in the embarrassing position of having to use a VPN in front of a live audience when trying to access a blocked web page.

      On April 3 Fang Binxing was giving a speech on internet safety at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute Technology. During the speech, he presented a defense for internet sovereignty and used North Korea’s own version of the system as a talking point.

    • Majome blasts censorship board

      Harare West legislator Jessie Majome says the censorship board is concerned with controlling political space, leaving information considered immoral and misappropriate finding its way into national radio and television.

    • The Naked Truth About Censorship In Uzbekistan

      Censorship was a key instrument for controlling the masses during Soviet times. These days Uzbekistan’s ageing President Islam Karimov — who served as the First Secretary of Soviet Uzbekistan’s Communist Party before independence — regularly rages against anything and everything connected to the old Union.

      Nevertheless, the system he has fashioned in the Central Asian country of 30 million remains remarkably similar to the one it emerged from in 1991.

    • Campuses are places for open minds – not where debate is closed down

      Last month, in the early hours, an act of traumatising racist violence occurred on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Students woke up to find that someone had written, in chalk, the words “Trump 2016” on various pavements and walls around campus. “I think it was an act of violence,” said one student. “I legitimately feared for my life,” said another; “I thought we were having a KKK rally on campus”. Dozens of students met the university president that day to demand that he take action to repudiate Trump and to find and punish the perpetrators. Writing political statements in chalk is a common practice on American college campuses and, judging from the public reaction to the Emory event, most Americans consider the writing to be an act of normal free speech during the national collective ritual of a presidential election. So how did it come to pass that many Emory students felt victimised and traumatised by innocuous and erasable graffiti?

    • A global guide to using Shakespeare to battle power

      Hitler was a Shakespeare fan; Stalin feared Hamlet; Othello broke ground in apartheid-era South Africa; and Brazil’s current political crisis can be reflected by Julius Caesar. Across the world different Shakespearean plays have different significance and power. The latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine, a Shakespeare special to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, takes a global look at the playwright’s influence, explores how censors have dealt with his works and also how performances have been used to tackle subjects that might otherwise have been off limits. Below some of our writers talk about some of the most controversial performances and their consequences.

    • China Internet regulator says Web censorship not a trade barrier
    • China Internet Regulator Says Web Censorship Not a Trade Barrier

      China’s online censorship system protects national security and does not discriminate against foreign companies, the country’s Internet regulator said, after the United States labelled the blocking of websites by Beijing a trade barrier.

      The US Trade Representative (USTR) wrote in an annual report that over the past year China’s web censorship has worsened, presenting a significant burden to foreign firms and Internet users.

    • Blizzard Erases Gaming History By Axing a Fan-Made ‘World of Warcraft’ Server

      Last week attorneys representing Blizzard Entertainment sent a cease-and-desist letter to the administrators of Nostalrius Begins, a private “legacy” server that had been running a version of World of Warcraft as it existed between 2004 and 2005 since February 28 of 2015. As of last night a Change.org petition to Blizzard CEO and co-founder Michael Morhaime had garnered more than 55,000 signatures in protest, but the plea for survival went unanswered, and the server shuts down forever effective today.

      Blizzard, of course, is acting within its rights. Nostalrius’ existence essentially amounts to piracy (particularly since the game proper is still going strong), and such things are expressly forbidden by Blizzard’s own terms of use. In a sense, this was inevitable, and it’s frankly surprising that Blizzard let it thrive for so long without taking action.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Leaked Encryption Draft Bill ‘Ignores Economic, Security, and Technical Reality’

      “This bill makes effective cybersecurity illegal.”

    • Edward Snowden Shows How To Tweet Like A Boss After Panama Papers Leak

      In a short span of time, Edward Snowden has built an impeccable reputation on Twitter.

    • Surveillance Debate Gets a Needed Dose of Racial Perspective

      ALVARO BEDOYA HAS been working on surveillance, privacy, and technology in Washington for years now. Before founding Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, he served as chief counsel to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.

      But as surveillance became a major national issue thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Bedoya saw something disturbing amid the Washington wonkery: a huge gulf between the discussions of government spying, on the one hand, and aggressive policing tactics in minority communities on the other.

    • The Internet of Things has a dirty little secret

      A year ago when the Internet of Shit account was spawned, it started as a personal joke: I was hearing a lot about internet-connected smart devices, but they all sounded like terrible ideas.

      In recent times, however, we’ve seen a new slew of devices pouring onto the market with no real specific purpose, as far as anyone can tell. At first I was just making jokes about these things, but the situation is worse than I initially thought.

      [...]

      The opportunities are delicious for bloated internet companies: now a software company could know how warm your home is, what times of day are noisy, whether you have a pet, when you turn on your lights or if you listen to music while having sex.

      Smart devices are sold as a way to improve your life — and in many ways, they do to an extent — but it also means those gadgets are incredible troves of data that could eventually turn into Software-as-a-Service money makers, just like Nespresso did to coffee.

    • A cashless society as a tool for censorship and social control

      The Atlantic had the excellent idea of commissioning Sarah Jeong, one of the most astute technology commentators on the Internet (previously), to write a series of articles about the social implications of technological change: first up is an excellent, thoughtful, thorough story on the ways that the “cashless society” is being designed to force all transactions through a small number of bottlenecks that states can use to control behavior and censor unpopular political views.

      Even if you like the idea of racists and jihadis and human traffickers being limited in their crowdfunding and financial ambitions, the power to control commerce at a fine-grained level, combined with the scale at which transactions flow, means that these restrictions end up being a dragnet, not a speargun. When you fish with a dragnet, you always catch some dolphins along with your tuna.

    • College Grad Looking For a Job? The NSA Wants YOU!

      If you want an indication as to how the surveillance state is growing, take a look at college recruitment by the National Security Agency (NSA). The agency routinely recruits students with internships and scholarships around the United States but now the NSA is looking for employees in the backyard of its controversial Utah Data Center.

    • Senate encryption bill draft mandates ‘technical assistance’

      A long-awaited Senate Intelligence Committee encryption bill would force companies to provide “technical assistance” to government investigators seeking locked data, according to a discussion draft obtained by The Hill.

      The measure, from Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and ranking member Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), is a response to concerns that criminals are increasingly using encrypted devices to hide from authorities.

      While law enforcement has long pressed Congress for such legislation, the tech community and privacy advocates warn that it would undermine security and endanger online privacy.

    • Fierce legal battle over data retention in Sweden

      There is a rather interesting legal battle concerning data retention going on in Sweden. Parties are the ISP Bahnhof and the government oversight authority Post- & Telestyrelsen (PTS).

      Two years ago, to the day, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated the EU data retention directive — stating that it is in violation of human rights, especially the right to privacy.

    • Facebook Opens The Floodgates to ‘Sponsored Content’

      That’s because Facebook has changed its rules around sponsored content. On Friday, the social network announced that it will now let publishers, celebrities, and brands post sponsored or branded content on their Facebook pages as long as they follow a couple of rules, including getting a verified by Facebook and using a special tag for each of these posts.

    • GCHQ wizards kept Harry Potter’s secret [Ed: grooming and whitewashing GCHQ for Sunday]
    • Defence Against the Dark Arts: British spies guarded against Harry Potter leak
    • Defense Against the Dark Arts: UK spies guarded against Harry Potter leak
    • Harry Potter and the Spooks of GCHQ: Bizarre story of how British spies battled to stop internet leak of JK Rowling book
    • How GCHQ was called in to keep Harry Potter under wraps
    • Harry Potter and the curious tale of GCHQ
    • Facebook Users Are Sharing Fewer Personal Updates and It’s a Big Problem

      If you haven’t posted anything personal on Facebook FB in awhile, you’re not alone. A damning report published by The Information on Thursday revealed that Facebook has been struggling to reverse a 21% decline in “original sharing,” or personal updates, from its 1.6 billion monthly active users.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Innocent 60-year-old man free after 30 years in prison

      A man who spent more than three decades serving time for crimes he did not commit was finally released from a Virginia correctional facility.

      60-year-old Keith Allen Harward got his first taste of freedom Friday afternoon, thanking his lawyers, whom he called “heroes,” and lamented the fact that his parents could not see him walk free.

      “That’s the worst part about this, is my parents,” said Mr Harward, holding back tears as he addressed media outside the prison. “It killed them. It devastated them.” He added that he was not allowed to attend their funeral because of the sentence.

    • AP Analysis: Arab Democracies? Not So Fast, Say Some

      A new-old idea is rattling around the Middle East five years after the Arab Spring stirred democratic ambition: that restoring stability, especially if accompanied by some economic and political improvements, should be reform enough for the moment.

      This discourse appears to be taking front and center these days, most obviously in Egypt — the region’s most populous country and the one that raised the highest hopes for democracy advocates when the military in 2011 removed longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak as millions rallied against him and his Western support collapsed.

    • Canada’s Blackwater

      Last week students at L’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) disrupted a board meeting after learning administrators planned to sign a $50 million, seven-year, contract with security giant GardaWorld. Protesters are angry the administration has sought to expel student leaders and ramp up security at the politically active campus as they cut programs.

    • Convicted of a Crime That Never Happened: Why Won’t Texas Exonerate Fran and Dan Keller?

      THE 1992 PROSECUTION of Fran and Dan Keller was based on a trifecta of credulousness, hysteria, and bad evidence.

      The middle-aged couple was living quietly in Austin, Texas, where they ran a small drop-in day care out of their home, when the unimaginable happened: A little girl occasionally left in the Kellers’ care made a claim of abuse at the hands of the couple. At first, the allegation was simple: Dan Keller had spanked her, the 3-year-old told her mother in the summer of 1991. But rather quickly — in part due to repeated questioning by her mother and a therapist who had treated the girl for behavioral problems before she’d ever visited the Kellers — the allegation morphed into accusations far more lurid.

    • SCOTUS Declines Opportunity to Limit Random Border Patrol Stops

      Today the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to impose limits on a disturbing exception to the Fourth Amendment that allows random detention of motorists within 100 miles of a border—a zone that includes two-thirds of the U.S. population. Since the rationale for these stops is immigration enforcement, they are supposed to be very brief. Yet in 2010 Richard Rynearson, an Air Force officer who brought the case that the Court today declined to hear, was detained at a U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint in Uvalde County, Texas, for a total of 34 minutes, even though there was no reason to believe he was an illegal alien or a criminal.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • (Legal) Moonshiner and University Battle Over Rights to ‘Kentucky’

        Moonshine packs a punch in this corner of Appalachia, where making hooch is steeped in local lore. But when Colin Fultz, the grandson of a bootlegger, opened a gourmet distillery here last fall, he ran afoul of a spirit even more potent than white lightning: University of Kentucky basketball.

        With his outlaw grandfather — who spent 18 years behind bars for smuggling — very much on his mind, Mr. Fultz, a businessman and onetime coal miner, set out to carry on his family’s tradition in a legal, and thoroughly modern, way.

        He tinkered with recipes, blending peaches and blackberries into mash brewed in his garage. He hired a lawyer — “My wife got on me, said I was going to get into trouble,” he said — and renovated an old car dealership, where he now distills and sells fruit-infused whiskey, serving it in thimble-size cups from an exposed-brick tasting bar.

    • Copyrights

      • Netflix Disappears From MPAA’s ‘Legal’ Movie Search Engine

        Less than two years ago the MPAA launched its search engine WhereToWatch, offering viewers a database of alternatives to piracy. However, those who try the search engine today will notice that results for Netflix, the largest entertainment platform in the United States, are no longer listed. Is there a feud going on behind the scenes?

      • UK government warns about piracy shakedown letters

        THE UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published information on what people should do if they receive one of those scary shakedown letters from firms accusing them of breaching piracy laws and owing money.

        Take them with a pinch of salt is the very short version of this, but the IPO has a bit more information.

        The organisation is alerting people to the sort of missives sent by companies like Goldeneye that have a very fishy smell and a bad reputation. The messages are sometimes described as speculative invoices.

      • BPI Buys Up ‘Pirate’ Domains To Foil Pro-Piracy Activists

        Internet pirates are a swarthy bunch that have been known to hijack anti-piracy projects to further their own aims. The BPI is aware of these kinds of efforts and has registered a whole heap of ‘pirate’ domains to avoid a similar fate befalling the UK’s Get it Right From a Genuine Site campaign.

04.09.16

Links 10/4/2016: MATE 1.14, LibreOffice 5.1.2

Posted in News Roundup at 2:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source geeks in a world of silos

    Bryan Lunduke is well known in free software circles. He’s a writer of books and Network World articles. He co-founded the Linux Action Show and is a co-host of the Bad Voltage podcast. In between hobbies, he has a day job doing marketing for SUSE and serving on the openSUSE board. Perhaps his longest-lasting contribution, though, is the Linux distro building simulator game Linux Tycoon.

    At LinuxFest Northwest, Bryan will be debating James Mason on the subject of Open source geeks in a world of silos. We asked him some questions and turned him loose.

  • Qubole releases SQL optimizer as open source

    Big data-as-a-service provider Qubole Inc. has open-sourced its Quark cost-based SQL optimizer that simplifies and optimize access to data across multiple hosts.

    Quark essentially chooses between popular big data open source query systems such as Hive, RedShift and Presto/Impala to select that which will deliver the best query results. “All of these query engines are good at some things and bad at others,” said Ashish Thusoo, co-founder and CEO of the 90-employee Qubole. “Subsuming that intelligence allows the machine to decide what engine is best used for that query.”

  • Building Bonobo, the Guardian’s open source API key management tool

    We built the application using the Play Framework and Scala – the programming language that the Guardian widely uses for backend development. This required a lot of patience as the community for these technologies is still quite small and the documentation can be rather limited. However, having very talented Scala developers in our team allowed us to make mistakes and guided us in the right direction. They made a big difference.

  • Signal desktop app with end-to-end encryption now open to all
  • Signal, the open-source encrypted messaging app, is now available for desktop
  • Open-source software provides new opportunities

    Crashes happen. Open-source software can remedy that. It’s known for higher security and fewer code errors. The numbers speak for themselves: Linux, a major developer of open-source software has an average of 0.17 bugs per 1000 lines. Proprietary software has an average of 20 to 30 bugs per 1000 lines.

  • Events

    • ELC 2016

      I got home from ELC on Wednesday night. I’m not doing embedded work on a day to day basis as much anymore but I gave a talk on Ion which was my primary reason for attending. IoT was unsurprisingly a big theme of the conference. I was amused to hear other people referring to IoT as “embedded Linux plus the cloud” which is what my mental model has always been. I didn’t go to many (any?) of the sessions about various IoT solutions mostly because there are too many to choose from. I’m not in a position right now where I’m directing IoT strategy and if that ever were to change my information would be out of date anyway. The useful sessions were mostly covering specific aspects of IoT or general Linux.

    • FOSDEM 2016 notes

      While being on the committee for the FOSDEM MySQL & friends devroom, I didn’t speak at that devroom (instead I spoke at the distributions devroom). But when I had time to pop in, I did take some notes on sessions that were interesting to me, so here are the notes. I really did enjoy Yoshinori Matsunobu’s session (out of the devroom) on RocksDB and MyRocks and I highly recommend you to watch the video as the notes can’t be very complete without the great explanation available in the slide deck. Anyway there are videos from the MySQL and friends devroom.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Introducing Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map, Our New Blueprint for Teaching People About the Web

        Within the next decade, the number of individuals with access to the Internet will rise to five billion. These billions of new users, many from emerging markets, have the potential to experience unprecedented personal, civic and economic opportunity online — but only if they have the necessary skills to meaningfully wield the Internet.

        To this end, Mozilla is dedicated to empowering people with the knowledge they need to read, write and participate online. We define this knowledge as “web literacy” — a collection of core skills and competencies like search engine know-how, design basics, online privacy fundamentals, and a working understanding of sharing, open source licensing and remixing.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.1.2, Ubuntu Numbers, OS is Dead

      The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1.2, the second update in the 5.1 Fresh branch. Nearly 90 bugs were squashed this cycle dealing heavily with rendering and placement issues. In other news, Red Hat touts a new client and Canonical is still trying to convince folks of their hundreds of millions of users. Matt Asay said today that the OS is dead thanks to the cloud and that “developers are becoming babies.”

    • LibreOffice 5.1.2 available for download

      Berlin, April 7, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.1.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family.

    • LibreOffice Receives Better OpenGL Rendering Support

  • Education

    • Teaching teachers to teach open source

      This seems obvious, but the ability to learn independently is very important to successful student participation in HFOSS projects. Students have to be able to learn in a variety of manners from a range of different sources, and they need to take ownership of their learning in order to flourish in an open source community.

      Communication, teamwork and the ability to problem solve are also critical skills. While understanding technologies such as version control is emphasized by most open source communities, students who don’t understand how to navigate a professional environment by communicating clearly or who can’t work on a team won’t even get to the point of using those technologies. These process skills can sometimes be more difficult to teach than teaching a student Java.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.3 vs. Linux Benchmarks

      With FreeBSD 10.3 having been released followed by the desktop-oriented PC-BSD 10.3 release that’s running rather nicely, I decided to run some open-source performance benchmarks atop PC-BSD 10.3 x64 compared to various Linux distributions.

      Originally I also aimed to run some PC-BSD vs. Linux gaming tests using the updated Linux binary compatibility layer in FreeBSD 10.3′s kernel, but sadly, that didn’t pan out. As noted in the aforelinked article, I’ve been running into a variety of issues that made my usual test candidates not run on PC-BSD 10.3 with either the x86 or x86_64 Linux binaries. If you want to see my old tests, there is FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux? from a few years ago.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: April 8th
    • When Free Software Depends On Non-Free

      When a program is free software (free as in freedom), that means it gives users the four freedoms (gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) so that they control what the program does. In most cases, that is sufficient for the program’s distribution to be ethical; but not always. There are additional problems that can arise in specific circumstances. This article describes a subtle problem, where upgrading the free program requires using a nonfree program.

  • Public Services/Government

    • GSA’s 18F Assembles Open Source Code Repositories on GitHub

      The General Services Administration‘s 18F organization has assembled repositories that contain open source code on its GitHub account in an effort to help federal government employees reuse the code for their work and personal use.

      Britta Gustafson, content designer at 18F, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday that the code repositories include client projects, guides, prototypes and open source tools 18F plans to adapt.

    • 18F surfaces code for 35 useful projects

      Although the General Services Administration’s 18F digital services shop publicly shares code from its projects as a matter or course, finding useful code among the hundreds of entries in the 18F GitHub repository can be time consuming.

    • Talend latest firm to back open source training network in France

      Talend, a specialist in Big Data integration software, has joined Acquia, Open Wide, OW2 and Red Hat as a Founding Partner of France’s national Open Source School, an institution dedicated to higher education training and continuing education for open source solutions (OSS).

    • Make your voice heard: take part in an open public consultation on Interoperability in Europe

      As of this week, through this public consultation, administrations, businesses and private organisations, research centres, academic institutions, standardisation organisations and others can all have their say in setting up an interoperability framework and strategy in Europe.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • OpenTraffic for Manila, US agencies to release 20% code as open source, and more news
    • FABrics: Open Source Furniture

      FABrics are open source chairs designed to be manufactured locally by the user. The chairs consist of CNC routed plywood and laser-cut leather. They are assembled together using 3D printed connectors.

      The aim of this project was to create a collection of lounge furniture that can be made anywhere in the world using universal materials and technologies. These digital processing technologies can be found in local facilities and in Fab Labs or Maker Spaces around the world. The manufacturing process is designed to be simple and straightforward in order to accommodate a large variety of users.

    • Open Access/Content

      • A letter to Carlos Moedas on open science

        “I’m offering to come to Brussels and demonstrate on my (or your) laptop the value of text and data mining for open science,” says Peter Murray-Rust of Cambridge University, as he presses the EU to go further on copyright reform

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Happy Hardware Freedom Day!

        Today is the new selected date for Hardware Freedom Day. We did a community survey a few months back and that was by far the most popular time. While our website is back up the wiki and registration are still down though. Considering the status we’re hoping to get things back up and encourage people who missed the date to celebrate a HFD on their schedule. Following up our mail list you may know there are events in Barcelona and India or can simply ping us there.

      • An Open Source Two Stroke Diesel

        With a welder and a bunch of scrap, you can build just about anything that moves. Want a dune buggy? That’s just some tube and a pipe bender. Need a water pump? You might need a grinder. A small tractor? Just find some big knobby tires in a junkyard. Of course, the one thing left out of all these builds is a small motor, preferably one that can run on everything from kerosene to used cooking oil. This is the problem [Shane] is tackling for his entry to the 2016 Hackaday Prize. It’s an Open Source Two-Stroke Diesel Engine that’s easy for anyone to build and has minimal moving parts.

  • Programming/Development

    • Which Is The Most Complex Programming Language?

      Very often we talk about the most popular and most loved programming languages, but we skip the discussion dealing with the most complex programming languages. Here’s an infographic that outlines the complexities in JavaScript and other modern programming languages.

    • Face it: Developers are becoming babies

      Way back in the dawn of the open source era, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) uncovered an interesting fact: Open-source developers weren’t anarchists and didn’t sport purple mohawks (usually). Typically, developers in the open source community were comfortably middle-aged (30 years old, on average), generally bringing 11 years of experience to their craft.

    • Software ‘developer fatigue’, it’s now a thing

      JNBridge’s core message is as follows: it’s not Java OR Microsoft .NET, it’s Java AND .NET — working on this premise, JNBridge has become a supplier of Java/.NET interoperability tools for software developers.

Leftovers

  • ‘Taxi Driver’ Oral History: De Niro, Scorsese, Foster, Schrader Spill All on 40th Anniversary
  • Yahoo’s once-great website eyed by Google, Verizon
  • Verizon to plan Yahoo bid, Google weighs offer
  • Verizon, Google said to be planning bids for Yahoo

    Verizon Communications Inc. plans to make a first-round bid for Yahoo Inc.’s Web business next week, and is willing to acquire the company’s Yahoo Japan Corp. stake to help sweeten the offer, according to people familiar with the matter.

  • Mashable mixes it up, lays off staff as it shifts focus

    Hot on the heels of snagging $15 million in funding from Turner/Time Warner, Mashable Inc. decided to put a number of its employees on the chopping block.

    The tech and lifestyle site now wants to be an online video and TV production company. As part of that reorganization, New York-based Mashable is laying off a number of staffers. It is also deemphasizing its world news and politics coverage, preferring to focus more on technology, science, social media, entertainment and lifestyle.

  • The executive deficit of the European Union

    The oft-repeated mantra of ‘more coordination’ won’t provide a real solution to Europe’s political crises unless the EU’s dual executive architecture is first rationalized and democratized.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • 20 million people in Bangladesh are drinking water laced with arsenic, Human Rights Watch survey finds

      Each year, 43,000 Bangladeshis die as a result of drinking arsenic-contaminated water, a figure which has not significantly altered since steps were taken to clean up Bangladesh’s water supply at the turn of the century.

      Corruption and international neglect are to blame for the fact 20 million people in Bangladesh are still drinking water laced with arsenic, more than a decade after the extent of the problem was made clear, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

    • VA bosses in 7 states falsified vets’ wait times for care

      Supervisors instructed employees to falsify patient wait times at Veterans Affairs’ medical facilities in at least seven states, according to a USA TODAY analysis of more than 70 investigation reports released in recent weeks.

      Overall, those reports — released after multiple inquiries and a Freedom of Information Act request — reveal for the first time specifics of widespread scheduling manipulation.

      Employees at 40 VA medical facilities in 19 states and Puerto Rico regularly “zeroed out” veteran wait times, the analysis shows. In some cases, investigators found manipulation had been going on for as long as a decade. In others, it had been just a few years.

      In many cases, facility leaders told investigators they clamped down the scheduling improprieties after the Phoenix scandal, but in others, investigators found they had continued unabated.The manipulation masked growing demand as new waves of veterans returned from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as Vietnam veterans aged and needed more health care.

  • Security

    • ‘BillGates’: Linux botnet is launching DDoS attacks on online gaming services

      IRONY ALERT: Bill Gates-themed software wants to get on as many computers as possible and not budge.

      Not Windows, of course, but a botnet called BillGates. The malware has been around since 2014 but now seems to be leaping forwards (not over a chair) and making a nuisance of itself, according to Akamai.

    • Mumblehard spam-spewing botnet floored

      Security researchers have teamed up with authorities in Ukraine to take down a spam-spewing Linux-infesting botnet.

      Security firm ESET teamed up with CyS-CERT and the Cyber Police of Ukraine to take down the Mumblehard botnet.

    • Authorities Shut Down Botnet of 4,000 Linux Servers Used to Send Spam

      The six-year-old Mumblehard botnet is no more, ESET reports, explaining that a joint effort with CyS Centrum LLC and the Cyber Police of Ukraine has finally allowed them to sinkhole the botnet’s main C&C (command and control server).

    • Mumblehard Linux Spamming Botnet Finally Taken Offline

      Thousands of servers running Linux and BSD had been affected by one of world’s most damaging botnets

    • Academics claim Google Android two-factor authentication is breakable

      Computer security researchers warn security shortcomings in Android/Playstore undermine the security offered by all SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA).

    • Google adds Cloud Test Lab integration to new Android Studio 2.0

      Google has updated its key Android development tool, Android Studio, to version 2.0 and added cloud test integration, a GPU debugger, and faster emulation and resource allocation.

      Mountain view touts the instant run feature as just about the most important new feature in the upgrade, as it analyses Android app code as it runs and determines ways it can be deployed faster, without requiring app re-installation.

    • Heartbleed Remains a Risk 2 Years After It Was Reported

      A vulnerability publicly disclosed in the open-source OpenSSL project two years ago continues to have an impact today.
      On April 7, 2014, CVE-2014-0160, better known as Heartbleed, was publicly disclosed by the OpenSSL project, affecting millions of users and devices around the world. Today, two years to the day it was first reported, the vulnerability remains a risk, and the trend of branded vulnerabilities it created continues to have an impact.

    • Friday’s security advisories
    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Nation-wide radio station hack airs hours of vulgar “furry sex” ramblings

      Some Tuesday morning listeners of KIFT, a Top 40 radio station located in Breckenridge, Colorado, were treated to a radically different programming menu than they were used to. Instead of the normal fare from Taylor Swift, The Chainsmokers, or other pop stars, a hack by an unknown party caused one of the station’s signals to broadcast a sexually explicit podcast related to the erotic attraction to furry characters. The unauthorized broadcast lasted for about 90 minutes.

      KIFT wasn’t the only station to be hit by the hack. On the same day, Livingston, Texas-based country music station KXAX also broadcast raunchy furry-themed audio. And according to an article posted Wednesday by radio industry news site RadioInsight.com, the unauthorized broadcasts from a hobbyist group called FurCast were also forced on an unnamed station in Denver and an unidentified national syndicator.

    • Maryland hospital: Ransomware success wasn’t IT department’s fault

      MedStar refused to respond to Ars Technica’s inquiries about the attack. In the statement released to media, MedStar’s spokesperson said, “As we have said before, based on the advice of IT, cybersecurity and law enforcement experts, MedStar will not be elaborating further on additional aspects of this malware event. This is not only for the protection and security of MedStar Health, its patients and associates, but is also for the benefit of other healthcare organizations and companies.” The spokesperson claimed the hospital had “no evidence of any compromise of patient or associate data… furthermore, we are pleased that we brought our systems back up in what can only be viewed as a very rapid recovery led by dedicated MedStar and external IT expert partners.”

    • Its a good thing SELinux blocks access to the docker socket.

      I have seen lots of SELinux bugs being reported where users are running a container that volume mounts the docker.sock into a container. The container then uses a docker client to do something with docker. While I appreciate that a lot of these containers probbaly need this access, I am not sure people realize that this is equivalent to giving the container full root outside of the contaienr on the host system. I just execute the following command and I have full root access on the host.

    • New Malware Headlines, Fedora Stickers, New RMS Article

      A new Linux botnet named BillGates is making headlines today. The Russian-based Asian designed malware seems to be focusing on gaming sites. Elsewhere, Richard Stallman posted a new article today explaining the problem when free software requires non-free to function and Matt Hartley explained the difference between GNOME, Unity, and MATE. Then, for some fun, the new Plasma 5.7 wallpaper was revealed, a new Linux poll beckons, and Fedora announced a partnership with UnixStickers.com.

    • A perfect storm of broken business and busted FLOSS backdoors everything, so who needs the NSA?

      In 2014, Poul-Henning Kamp, a prolific and respected contributor to many core free/open projects gave the closing keynote at the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Belgium, and he did something incredibly clever: he presented a status report on a fictional NSA project (ORCHESTRA) whose mission was to make it cheaper to spy on the Internet without breaking any laws or getting any warrants.

    • Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines
    • Mumblehard Linux botnet eliminated as a threat: ESET

      Security researchers at ESET reported that the spam-dispensing Mumblehard Linux botnet is no longer active due to the combined efforts of ESET, the Cyber Police of Ukraine and CyS Centrum.

    • OSVDB Shuts Down, Firefox Add-ons Unsafe & More…

      Speaking of vulnerabilities: We lost an open source security asset this week. On Tuesday we received word that OSVDB, or the Open Sourced Vulnerability Database project, an organization that’s cataloged computer security flaws since 2002, is closing up shop. The news came by way of an OSVDB blog that said, “We are not looking for anyone to offer assistance at this point, and it [the database] will not be resurrected in its previous form.” As for why the database is being shut down, the post went on to somewhat cryptically explain, “The industry simply did not want to contribute and support such an effort.” A good analysis of the details by Jon Gold was published Thursday on Network World.

    • Do You Think Linux Is More Secure Than Other OS?

      There’s an old school of thought that says that Linux is more secure than other operating systems. This topic has been hotly debated over the years. What’s your opinion? Do you think Linux is more secure than other OS?

    • Adobe Issues Emergency Update to Flash After Ransomware Attacks
    • FBI: $2.3 Billion Lost to CEO Email Scams

      The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week warned about a “dramatic” increase in so-called “CEO fraud,” e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs a message from the boss and tricks someone at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudsters. The FBI estimates these scams have cost organizations more than $2.3 billion in losses over the past three years.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Pulling the Trigger: An Interview With the ‘Eye in the Sky’ Filmmaker Gavin Hood

      I had the opportunity recently to see Gavin Hood’s new film, “Eye in the Sky,” at a screening hosted by Reprieve. The film weaves together the lives of ordinary people in Nairobi living in the shadow of a largely secret drone war, the high-level deliberations between British and American officials concerning a fictional drone operation, and the individual moral responsibility of a U.S. drone operator sitting safely in Nevada who must ultimately decide whether or not he will pull the trigger. Although some of the technology shown in the film is more advanced than what we know to be available today, the questions it explores are starkly contemporary: What are the costs of conducting a secret war with ambiguous boundaries and goals? Who gets to decide when civilians are to be put in danger? What is the lived experience of those people who live below the buzz of drones, and the pilots half a world away who are charged with pulling the trigger?

    • The Revolt Against NATO

      This has the foreign policy Establishment in a panic, with legions of “experts” rising up to denounce Trump’s heresy as misguided, absurd, and – of course! – “isolationist.” Yet the politicians can’t afford to be so dismissive: after all, they have to listen to their constituents, at least to some extent. And it’s quite telling what Sen. Corker – who has warned the “Never Trump” crowd to back off – had to say to Stoltenberg:

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • 77% of Freedom of Information Act Requests Not Fully Answered

      On his election, President Obama promised greater governmental transparency to the American people. In practice, the Obama administration has set a record for failures to find and produce government documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. Signed into law by President Johnson in 1966, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) encourages and enforces government disclosures to the people with only nine specific exemptions. As Ted Bridis and Jack Gillum reported for the Associated Press’s Big Story, in response to the public’s FOIA requests, 129,825 times (or more than one in every six cases), government searchers said they came up empty-handed last year. Bridis and Gillum write, “People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record.” The 77% figure represents a twelve percent increase, compared with the first full year after President Obama’s election.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Bruce Stanley on Coal-Industry Crime

      When Massey Energy, the biggest coal company in Appalachia, polluted the groundwater of the community Massey CEO Don Blankenship lived in, he had employees run a private water line direct to his mansion, while fighting off the lawsuit from his poisoned neighbors. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and it’s decades of that behavior, as much as the 2010 explosion that killed 29 people at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine, that led to Blankenship’s sentencing this week to a year in prison on a charge of conspiracy to violate mine safety standards.

    • Australia Is Letting the Great Barrier Reef Die Over a Lot of Coal

      If there was one thing Australia could’ve done to save the Great Barrier Reef, it would’ve been to block the development of the country’s largest coal mine, which its state government approved with resounding confidence this week.

      The Great Barrier Reef, true to its name, is the most expansive reef ecosystem in the world. It’s the largest living organism on the entire planet, and is so big we can actually see it from outer space. Remember the Seven Natural Wonders of the World? It’s one of those, too.

      But its vast size will not keep it from dying—which it is—at an astounding rate, thanks to humans.

  • Finance

    • EU trade secrets law under fire in wake of Panama papers

      In the light of the Panama papers scandal, a soon-to-be adopted EU law on trade secrets has come under renewed scrutiny over fears it will hamstring journalists and whistleblowers.

      New EU rules to protect trade secrets could prevent leaks like the Panama papers from coming to light in future, member of European Parliament (MEPs) and activists fear.

      According to MEPs and activists, a draft EU directive on the “protection of undisclosed know-how and business information (trade secrets)” focuses on protecting companies over private individuals and freedom of expression.

    • Labour says PM ‘losing trust’ over offshore fund row

      Labour has said David Cameron’s admission that he owned shares in an offshore fund set up by his late father has undermined public trust in him.

      On Thursday, the PM said he sold the shares before he entered Number 10 in 2010 and had paid all UK taxes due on profits from the £30,000 sale.

      He said the firm, Blairmore Holdings, had not been set up to avoid tax.

      But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the PM had “misled the public” and “lost the trust of the British people”.

    • In recent test, blockchain brings transparency to notorious credit default swaps

      On Thursday, Wall Street’s bookkeeper announced that it had successfully tested blockchain technology to manage single-name credit default swaps (CDS) among four big banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan.

    • ‘Please do not feed the animals’: Oklahoma GOP Compares Food Stamp Recipients to Park Animals

      In America, we have a very crude understanding of social welfare programs. For most Americans, anything the government gives to its people (i.e., us) to keep us healthy, fed and educated, is a “handout” to lazy people who don’t deserve it.

      Helping each other, using our tax money for us, as does most of the civilized world, is somehow wrong. In America, we’d prefer you starve to death, quietly if possible, as the rest of us are binge watching Netflix whilst eating Doritos.

    • Predatory Tactics by For-Profit Colleges Affecting Students Nationwide

      In March 2016, Annie Waldman, writing for ProPublica, reported how Corinthian College used disingenuous recruiting tactics to mislead impoverished, prospective students to sign up for programs they offered, with the intention to make a profit. Legal documents have been filed against the school for misconduct and there are several suits pending. The college allegedly coerced students who were homeless and/or had low self-esteem to enroll. They encouraged students to take out federal student loans, despite their financial position.

    • Downing Street Protest Attracts Attention Of Anarchist Group Class War

      The Metropolitan Police say that appropriate plans are in place ahead of a protest outside Downing Street due to take place on Saturday.

      Facebook events for the Panama-themed demonstration show over two thousand people as attending, including the singer Lily Allen, inspired by the Panama Papers revelations.

      Abi Wilkinson, one of the event’s organisers, said: “We’re hoping to have a fun, tropical party vibe and to get ordinary people out rather than committed activist types.”

    • What time is the David Cameron tax havens protest and where does it start?

      Thousands are expected to take to the streets of London on Saturday to demand David Cameron resign as Prime Minister.

      It follows the Prime Minister’s admission that he trousered thousands of pounds in profits from an offshore firm owned by his father.

      He and his wife finally admitted to having owned 5,000 shares in Blairmore Holdings, a firm set up Dave’s stockbroker dad Ian Cameron.

      The fund was set up in Panama to avoid paying UK corporation and capital gains tax.

      The protest gained a boost in interest last night, after fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden retweeted it to his 1.9m followers, urging Brits to rise up against Mr Cameron’s leadership.

    • Edward Snowden: ‘Demand Cameron’s resignation over tax dodging’

      Cameron came clean about his tax affairs on Thursday evening, admitting that between 1997 and 2010 he and his wife, Samantha Cameron, owned shares in his father’s Blairmore Investment Trust – a multimillion-pound offshore trust fund.

    • Cameron odds-on to step down

      BOOKIES rushed to cut David Cameron’s odds to step down to 11/2 yesterday after the PM admitted he had profited from his father’s offshore dealings.

      Paddy Power labelled the dramatic shortening of its original 20/1 odds “the equivalent of a first fence faller” in the Grand National.

      A spokesman for the betting agency said: “Forget Many Clouds in the Grand National tomorrow, this is the real one-horse race right now.”

    • Timeline of David Cameron’s scathing attacks on those who evade tax

      After four days of dodging ­questions about his tax affairs, David Cameron finally cracked and admitted he did profit from his dad’s offshore investment fund.

      The embarrassed PM revealed he and his wife Samantha held £30,000 of shares in Bahamas-based Blairmore Holdings, one of the firms named in the explosive Panama Papers .

      Mr Cameron is facing calls to quit over his bombshell confession, which after intense pressure from the Mirror.

      He had arrogantly brushed off his tax affairs as a private matter then insisted he had not benefited from any offshore funds, before finally coming clean in a TV interview.

    • The Conservatives may live to regret this shameless generational discrimination

      How broke is the Government? It depends who’s asking. If you’re unemployed, then things are impossibly tough: far more cuts are needed from the welfare budget because there is no alternative. If you’re at school, then things are not quite so bad. The school budget is being “protected,” which is a nice way of saying “frozen”. But if you’re a pensioner, then David Cameron has some great news for you. Thanks to the “difficult decisions” his government has taken, he can now afford the largest increase to the state pension in 15 years. The new, enlarged cheque will be in the post this week.

    • Why Cameron went public over Blairmore shares

      When a politician is under pressure, facing questions about their family and their finances, their natural instinct is to protect their privacy and say as little as possible.

    • ‘Resign Cameron’ protests: Thousands to gather at Downing Street to ask Prime Minister to step down

      Thousands of protersters are expected to move on Downing Street to call for tough action on tax avoidance – or David Cameron’s resignation.

      Following the revelations about his tax affairs in the Panama papers, demonstrators are asking Mr Cameron to either “close tax loopholes or resign”. The protests are being organised around the hashtags “Resign Cameron” and “Close tax loopholes”, and have gained support from high-profile figures including Edward Snowden and Lily Allen.

    • UK ministers humiliated after Cayman and BVI leaders repeatedly ignore requests for meetings

      The governments of two notorious tax havens have repeatedly ignored UK ministers’ requests to meet about cracking down on corporate tax avoidance of the kind detailed on the so-called Panama Papers, The Independent can reveal.

      Official letters obtained using freedom of information rules show humiliated ministers “disappointed” at being stood-up after “numerous attempts” to meet with the premiers of the British Virgin Island and Cayman Islands.

      Campaigners reacted to the letters by berating the Government’s “meek” and “softly-softly” approach towards the havens, while Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has accused the Government of “pussyfooting” around the issue.

    • David Cameron protest: Live updates as thousands call for PM’s resignation after Panama Papers scandal
    • Law to make all company ownership transparent in UK dependencies & territories

      As the Panama Papers prove the British Virgin Islands is one of the world’s capitals of tax avoidance, evasion and money laundering. The territory has 600,000 companies registered there with a population of around 30 thousand.

    • David Cameron: I could have handled tax row better

      Prime Minister David Cameron has said he could have handled the row over his financial affairs “better”, admitting it had “not been a great week”.

      Addressing the Tories’ spring forum, he said he was to blame for the handling of revelations about his holding in his late father’s offshore fund.

      Days after questions were first raised, the PM admitted this week he had owned and later sold units in the fund.

    • VIDEO: ‘Thousands’ descend on Downing Street for ‘Resign Cameron’ protest
    • Crowds march in London to demand Cameron resignation following Panama Papers leak (IMAGES)

      A massive protest has gathered in front of PM David Cameron’s residence at Downing Street 10, calling for his resignation. The rally follows the so-called Panama Papers leak, which among others exposed the offshore dealings of Cameron’s late father.

      “Cameron must go!” and “Tories out!” read the placards held by the demonstrators, RUPTLY’s live feed showed. A huge paper pig was erected by the protesters, with Cameron’s image pinned to its face.

    • Thousands gather outside Downing Street calling on David Cameron to resign

      Thousands of people were expected to march through London this morning calling on David Cameron to close tax loopholes or resign.

      We went along to the protest in Whitehall – watch our live feed here and see if you can spot the Hawaiian shirts, pig pinatas and shouts of ‘We hate you Cameron, we do!’

      Our reporters have been talking to people both for and against David Cameron to see why some feel so strongly that he needs to go.

    • Hold a General Election in 2016

      The General Public were purposefully misguided before the 2015 election.The lies David Cameron told before the election have now been widely acknowledged as such, and it is only reasonable that the public should be allowed to vote with full knowledge about his true agenda in 2016.

    • David Cameron: blame me for mishandling Panama Papers revelations

      Addressing the Conservative party spring forum, the prime minister admitted it had “not been a great week”, to laughter from the gathered supporters.

      Cameron said he would publish details of his tax return “later on” as he attempts to assuage calls for further transparency about his financial dealings.

      “I know I should have handled this better,” he said. “I could have handled this better. I know there are lessons to learn and I will learn them. And don’t blame No 10 Downing Street, or nameless advisers, blame me. And I will learn the lessons.”

    • “Resign Cameron” Protest Targets Conservative Spring Forum As PM Tells Party To Blame Him For Tax Fallout

      Thousands of protesters in London called on prime minister David Cameron to resign on Saturday, after he admitted owning shares in his father’s offshore fund that avoided paying corporation tax in Britain.

    • Defence Secretary blames journalists for not asking Cameron the right questions

      Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, has provided the most bizarre defence yet of David Cameron and Downing Street taking five attempts before admitting the Prime Minister had benefited from the offshore fund created by his father, impying it was journalists’ fault for failing to ask the right questions.

    • Downing Street protesters call for Cameron to resign
    • David Cameron did not declare his earnings from the offshore fund either

      It would be reasonable to say that benefitting from an offshore trust may influence Cameron’s view on whether such trusts should be tightly regulated or not.

    • Pyramid vs. obelisk

      Doctors and attorneys have employer-independent credibility, being vouched-for by their professional associations…

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • CIA’s Work With Filmmakers Puts All Media Workers at Risk

      The CIA’s history of producing or helping to produce films goes back decades. The Agency, for example, secretly bought the rights to Animal Farm after Orwell’s death in 1950 and produce an animated adaptation centered on demonizing the Soviet Union rather than capturing Orwell’s broader critiques of power.

      And as the CIA got involved in film production, Hollywood players have likewise taken part in covert operations. For years, legendary film producer Arnon Milchan (Pretty Woman, Fight Club, back-to-back Oscar winner for Best Picture in 2014 and 2015) worked for Israeli intelligence to deal arms and obtain technologies Israel needed to make nuclear weapons. “At the peak of his activities,” according to the Guardian, he was “operating 30 companies in 17 countries and brokering deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” an arrangement that, Milchan told the BBC (11/26/13), involved Sydney Pollack—director of Sabrina, Tootsie and, ironically enough, Three Days of the Condor.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EU-US Privacy Shield may not pass muster, according to leaked extract

      Leaked extracts from an imminent assessment of the EU-US Privacy Shield replacement for Safe Harbour suggests that a key group of EU data protection authorities will not support it in its present form.

      It is expected that the Article 29 Working Party will say that it is “not yet in a position to confirm that the current draft adequacy decision does, indeed, ensure a level of protection [in the US] that is essentially equivalent to that in the EU.” Any transatlantic data transfer scheme that does not provide an “essentially equivalent” level of protection is unlikely to withstand a legal challenge in the EU courts.

    • How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother

      In 2014, Cass Sunstein—one-time “regulatory czar” for the Obama administration—wrote an op-ed advocating for a cashless society, on the grounds that it would reduce street crime. His reasoning? A new study had found an apparent causal relationship between the implementation of the Electronic Benefit Transfer system for welfare benefits, and a drop in crime.

    • The Burr-Feinstein Proposal Is Simply Anti-Security

      Sens. Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein recently released a draft bill forcing nearly all U.S. companies to decrypt any encrypted data they may handle. Specifically, it would place a new, sweepingly broad duty on device manufacturers, software developers, ISPs, online services and others to decrypt encrypted data or offer “such technical assistance as is necessary” if ordered to do so by any court anywhere in the country.

      The draft reflects an ignorance of everyday computer security practices that safeguard your devices and information from criminals. As currently written, the draft likely even outlaws forward secrecy, an innovative security feature that many major tech providers, including WhatsApp, have implemented to limit the damage to user privacy in the event encryption keys are compromised.

    • The California Bill to Undermine Smartphone Encryption Actually Got Worse

      State lawmakers recently introduced some misguided changes to California’s Assembly Bill 1681, which would require that manufacturers and operating system providers be able to decrypt smartphones sold in the state. On first glance, the amendment to A.B. 1681 might seem to address some of EFF’s previous criticisms, but the new version actually makes an already bad bill even worse. EFF has signed on to a new letter in opposition to the bill, and you can still join our action calling on lawmakers to vote against it.

    • Bill That Would Ban End-to-End Encryption Savaged by Critics

      A LONG-ANTICIPATED DRAFT of anti-encryption legislation written by the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee circulated late Thursday night and left may critics apoplectic.

    • HTTPS Everywhere: Encryption for All WordPress.com Sites
    • WordPress Upgrades All Websites To HTTPS Encryption For Free

      WordPress.com is enabling HTTPS encryption for all of its websites. This change is an automatic one and the website owners don’t have to do anything to enable HTTPS redirect on their websites. This new step will benefit millions of websites on the web and help to make it a more secure place.

    • “The Internet of Broken Things”

      Third, resist the temptation for gee-whiz devices. Do you really need a refrigerator that can talk to the Internet? Do you really need a “smart” thermostat that can fail due to a software bug and leave you freezing, with no way to fix it? Prefer simple, autonomous devices over complex, networked gadgets.

    • Maryland Court Says Cops Need Warrants To Deploy Stingray Devices

      The Baltimore Police Department’s warrantless deployment of Stingray devices has come to an end. It may have gotten away with more than 4,300 times so far, but the Maryland Special Appeals Court has declared these devices operate as searches under the Fourth Amendment.

      The 74-page opinion — which belatedly follows its two-page order from nearly a month ago, indicating which side it had taken in this dispute — dives into every issue implicated by the warrantless use of Stingray devices and examines them alongside a long list of Fourth Amendment-related Supreme Court decisions and the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court’s precedent-setting US v. Graham opinion on cell site location info.

    • New Reports On Terror Attacks Underline Why Crypto Isn’t A Serious Problem: It’s Hard To Use And Easy To Get Wrong

      The picture that emerges from these two reports is of a large, well-established network of terrorists located across several European countries. Many of them were known in multiple ways to the authorities, which repeatedly failed to bring all this crucial information together, probably because there was too much, not too little, to sift through. What is conspicuous by its absence is any suggestion that the would-be attackers escaped arrest by using encrypted communications. Both stories do, however, reveal that ISIS-trained terrorists have used encryption tools, but in a non-standard way.

      @thegrugq has written a good piece on Medium analyzing the system. It seems the discontinued encryption program TrueCrypt was provided by ISIS on a USB drive. The program was used to place one or more messages inside an encrypted volume, which was then uploaded to an inconspicuous online site. By employing a shared password to encrypt the volume, more than one person could read the messages in a relatively secure and anonymous way. The system creates a kind of digital dead letter drop that can’t be addressed simply by mandating crypto backdoors.

    • Coalition opposes allowing NSA to share surveillance data

      “Considering the extent and scope of the information collected under EO 12333, the policy changes under consideration could allow agencies like the FBI to circumvent constitutional protections and will pose new threats to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans,” the letter stated.

    • Juniper Completes Removal of Dual_EC

      Juniper Networks hopes to remove any clouds of uncertainty that its networking gear might still have a backdoor that could allow the NSA or hackers to snoop on traffic running through its hardware.

      On Thursday, Juniper completed an update to the way its ScreenOS software handles encryption. Juniper said it has integrated the company’s widely used random number generator component into the ScreenOS software, abandoning older controversial methods.

    • Are Pins, Posts, Tweets and Likes Appropriate for Use in Selecting Jurors?

      When you hear the name of someone you can’t place or don’t know much about, what do you do? Chances are, you “Google” them. Well that is what attorneys are doing to learn more about prospective jurors too! But they are not stopping there. They are looking at a number of social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to learn about the profiles, likes, dislikes, friends, hobbies, biases, religion, and preferences of individuals in the jury pool. This practice has raised a number of issues related to ethics, privacy, and responsibility. To date, courts have taken positions ranging from banning these searches to practically requiring them.

    • Illinois Law Requiring Sex Offenders To Report All Internet Activity Violates Free Speech Rights

      With the goal of keeping tabs on sex offenders, the state of Illinois has veered way off course. Its offender registration statute requires individuals to report every nook and cranny of their online activities to law enforcement—or face jail time. Every Internet site they visit, every online retailer account they create, and every news story comment they post must be reported to police.

    • Richard Burr’s Encryption (AKA Cuckoo) Bill, Working Thread

      A version of Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein’s ill-considered encryption bill has been released here. They’re calling it the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” but I think I’ll refer to it as the Cuckoo bill. This will be a working thread.

      (2) Note the bill starts by suggesting economic prosperity relies on breaking encryption. There are many reasons that’s not true, most obviously that it will put US products at a disadvantage in other countries.

      (2) Note this only applies to “providers of communications services and products (including software).” Does it apply to financial companies? Because they’re encrypting data between themselves that should be accessible to law enforcement. Does it apply to car companies? IoT companies?

      (2) Note they mention “judicial order” and “court order” here. It’s clear (and becomes clearer later) that this includes orders that aren’t warrants, so FISA orders. Which suggests they’re having a problem with encryption under FISA too.

      (3) The Cuckoo Bill builds in compensation. That’s one way companies could fight this: to make sure it would take a lot to render data intelligible.

      (4) I suspect this license language would expand to do scary things with other “licensing” products.

      (4) Note that they’ve expanded the definition of metadata to include “switching, processing, and transmitting” data. I bet that has already been done in secret somewhere.

      (5) The language on destination and switching suggests they’re trying to include location data in metadata.

    • Burr And Feinstein Release Their Anti-Encryption Bill… And It’s More Ridiculous Than Expected

      They’ve been threatening this for months now, but Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have finally released a “discussion draft” of their legislation to require backdoors in any encryption… and it’s even more ridiculous than originally expected. Yesterday, we noted that the White House had decided to neither endorse nor oppose the bill, raising at least some questions about whether or not it would actually be released. Previously, Feinstein had said she was waiting for the White House’s approval — but apparently she and Burr decided that a lack of opposition was enough.

      The basics of the bill are exactly what you’d expect. It says that any “device manufacturer, software manufacturer, electronic communication service, remote computing service, provider of wire or electronic or any person who provides a product or method to facilitate communication or the processing or storage of data” must respond to legal orders demanding access to said information. First off, this actually covers a hell of a lot more than was originally expected. By my reading, anyone providing PGP email is breaking the law — because it’s not just about device encryption, but encryption of communications in transit as well. I wonder how they expect to put that genie back in the bottle.

    • Former NSA Chief Urges U.S.-Silicon Valley Deal on Encryption
    • Former NSA Chief Urges U.S.-Tech Deal on Encryption
    • Liberty advocates warn of NSA’s massive new threat to privacy

      In a letter to Defense Intelligence Agency head James Clapper, the groups said the NSA is making policy changes that “would fatally weaken existing restrictions on access to the phone calls, emails, and other data the NSA collects.”

    • Here’s the latest travesty of secrecy from the NSA

      Now, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Security Agency is withholding its own ethical and legal guidelines, calling them “top secret.” This is ridiculous.

    • GCHQ is having problems meeting Osborne’s 2020 recruitment target

      Blighty’s surveillance and security agency GCHQ is facing significant challenges in meeting the government’s targets for recruitment over the next four years.

      Last year the chancellor promised that 1,900 new recruits would be hired by the intelligence agencies by 2020 – with the lion’s share expected to head to GCHQ in Cheltenham, as total “cyber spending” rises to £3.2bn (by Osborne’s maths).

      However, independent sources close to GCHQ have complained to The Register that the agency would struggle to land the best candidates, with one Cheltenham staffer telling us that they simply didn’t know where the new talent was going to come from.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Leveraging Shame And The Presumption Of Guilt To Destroy Lives And Punish Consenting Adults

      The criminal justice system theoretically operates on a presumption of innocence. An arrest booking is hardly an indicator of guilt, but try telling that to millions of people who believe being accused is no different than being found guilty by a jury. Everyone knows this presumption of guilt exists, despite it being wholly contrary to the basis of our justice system.

      Cops know this best. A high-profile bust is as good as a guilty verdict. So it’s no surprise that they’ve increasingly turned to the greatest shaming mechanism known to man: the internet.

    • NYPD Raises Middle Finger To Public, Oversight In Inspector General’s Year-End Roundup

      The NYPD’s Office of the Inspector General has just released its year-end report summarizing its 2015 oversight work. We covered its use of force report late last year — a report which found the NYPD completely uninterested in policing itself. The report noted the NYPD has “historically… failed to discipline officers who use force without justification.”

      This report points to the OIG’s investigation of chokehold use by NYPD officers — the tactic that ended Eric Garner’s life during his arrest. As is the case with most other excessive uses of force, this tactic — which has been forbidden by department policy — tended to be greeted with shrugs from PD supervisors and a middle finger raised to the general public.

    • Chokehold Audit Paints Grim Portrait of NYPD

      In a report prompted by the death of Staten Island resident Eric Garner, city investigators found the New York City Police Department failed to put officers on trial for using chokeholds in 10 substantiated cases.

    • Stand Your Ground, Unless You’re a Battered Woman

      When victims defend themselves, they put themselves at risk of becoming doubly victimized—first by their abusers, then by the criminal justice system.

    • When Hatred Is Just Around the Corner

      Escaping civil war in Lebanon, my family landed in Dearborn, Michigan, in 1986. Like many immigrants, my parents still speak of Lebanon with the same familiarity they did in the weeks after my aunt opened her doors to her brother, his wife, and their four kids — including me, their clever but slightly odd four-year-old.

      I had one friend, a cousin, and spoke only a few words of English (the necessities: food-related words, “no,” and “dude”). During this time, my social butterfly of a mother tried to convince me through broken English, “You don’t need friends; you have family.” I wasn’t helping my cause. I often wore a cheap red pleather jacket and pants suit with frayed fingerless gloves painted with glitter and told everyone I was Michael Jackson from the Thriller music video.

    • Sharia Villages: Bosnia’s Islamic State Problem

      Radical Islamists have found a new refuge in Bosnia. They recruit fighters, promote jihad and preach a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam — just across the border from the European Union.

    • Bangladeshi student blogger known for secular views hacked to death

      Three motorcycle-riding assailants hacked and shot a student activist to death as he was walking with a friend in Bangladesh’s capital, police said Thursday.

      The killing on Wednesday night follows a string of similar attacks last year, when at least five secular bloggers and publishers were killed, allegedly by radical Islamists.

      Police suspect 28-year-old Nazimuddin Samad was targeted for his outspoken atheism in the Muslim-majority country and for supporting a 2013 movement to demand capital punishment for war crimes involving the country’s independence war against Pakistan in 1971, according to Dhaka Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Nurul Amin.

    • The Body-Worn Camera As State’s Witness: How Cops Control Recordings

      Abusive conduct by police officers — up to and including killing someone for, say, holding a plastic bucket — has always flown under the “your word against ours” radar. But now everyone has a camera, even the cops.

      The push for body-worn cameras is still a good idea, but it has many, many flaws. It won’t save the nation from police misconduct but it will put a dent in it. Back when the NYPD was ordered to begin a body camera pilot program, then-Mayor Bloomberg said the devices would become nothing more than another way to play “gotcha” with good cops.

      [...]

      Officers are actors and directors in their own scenes. Even when performances are captured by bystanders and their cell phones, there’s still plenty of “drama.” Multiple cops swarm the same suspect, blocking the body from view. Officers shout “Stop resisting!” even when subjects are prone with hands behind their back and under the weight of four or five cops. This allows officers to deliver extra amounts of force, instantly justified by the repeated shouts about resistance.

      This scenario has played out again. Footage captured by police body cameras appears to show a tough, physical struggle to subdue a suspect. Shouts of “stop resisting” continue throughout the recording. The up-close-and-personal body cam footage gives every appearance that officers are wrestling with a highly-combative suspect. But footage captured by another camera shows an entirely different scenario.

    • Wrongly-convicted Virginia inmate released from prison

      A man has been released from a Virginia prison after serving more than three decades for crimes authorities now say he didn’t commit.

      Keith Allen Harward walked out of the Nottoway Correctional Center on Friday after the Virginia Supreme Court agreed that DNA evidence proves he’s innocent of the 1982 killing of Jesse Perron and the rape of his wife in Newport News.

      Harward was a sailor on the USS Carl Vinson, which was stationed close to the victims’ home. The prosecution in Harward’s case leaned heavily on the testimony of two experts, who said Harward’s teeth matched bite marks on the woman’s leg.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • The FCC Is Pushing A ‘Nutrition Label’ For Broadband Connections

      A report last year by the GAO (pdf) found that most consumers have no real idea what kind of a broadband connection they’re buying. The report argued that caps, interconnection squabbles, throttling, and other line limitations make it virtually impossible for many consumers (especially the more Luddite-inclined among us) to understand what they’re buying, or compare it with competing services. As a result, the FCC this week proposed a new “nutrition label” (pdf) for broadband that would include not only connection speed — but any network management, latency, usage caps, overage fees, or other conditions impacting the line.

    • Tennessee Man Builds His Own Gigabit Network Thanks To State’s Protectionist Broadband Law

      We’ve noted how Tennessee is one of twenty states that has passed state laws, quite literally written by companies like AT&T, prohibiting towns and cities from wiring themselves with broadband — even if nobody else will. When the FCC announced it would be taking aim at these protectionist broadband laws last year, Tennessee politicians threw a hissy fit, suing the FCC for “violating states rights.” That incumbent ISPs are being allowed to write awful state law that’s hampering a generation of business development in the state? Not apparently much of a concern.

  • DRM

    • 80% of people have no idea about the Netflix price hike that’s coming next month

      Netflix is going to raise prices on around 17 million of its standard accounts next month, and most people have no idea.

      In May of 2014, Netflix raised the price of its standard streaming plan, for new subscribers, to $9.99 per month. Existing subscribers, however, were grandfathered into the plan at $7.99 per month for the two-stream, “HD” quality plan.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • ‘Corn Thins’ trade mark found to be descriptive

        The Cancellation Division also found that the evidence submitted, showing that ‘Thins’ had been used descriptively on many other products, was not relevant because they either post-dated registration or were undated. The Division asserted that evidence regarding descriptive use of the word in the food sector had to be prior to the date of registration. They found that the arguments asserting distinctiveness under Article 7(1)(b) were also based on the arguments asserting descriptiveness and thus failed for the same reasons.

      • Trademark For ‘Square Donuts’ At Heart Of Trademark Dispute Despite It Being Entirely Descriptive

        One of the rules that is supposed to keep trademark law from creating language-lock insanity is the prescription against trademarking purely descriptive terms. That’s why you get a trademark on Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but not on “soda.” It’s why “computer” is not a valid trademark term. Were this not the case, companies could simply lock up the language of their marketplaces, restricting terms not to the benefit of the consumer, but purely as a monopolizing strategy.

      • English Brewer And French Wine Group In Trademark Dispute Over ‘Champ’

        The Comite Champagne, or CIVC, has never bothered to pretend it is anything other than a jealous protector of the word “champagne.” The trade group and its winery members have made quite a name for themselves ensuring that nobody else anywhere could possibly market a product that in any way suggests it is champagne. This is supposedly done to ensure the reputation of wine from the Champagne region of France remains as sparkling as the product, but predictably devolves into the kind of protectionist racket too often seen in trademark cases.

    • Copyrights

      • The FCC’s Plan To Unlock Your Set-Top Box Is About Competition, Not Copyright

        This isn’t about control over copying, but c of TV watching, from the studio to your eyeballs, and over search and discovery as well as viewing. Open competition could bring many more options, like new TV interfaces that present recommendations from various critics and tastemakers, or from your friends. New video devices could take you straight to those shows and movies in one step, no matter which of your pay-TV or Internet video services they appear on. This could be a boon for niche and non-mainstream programs of all kinds.

      • The Ultimate In CwF: How Lovers Of Stardew Valley Fought Piracy By Buying The Game For Pirates

        Our advocating for the Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy equation (CwF+RtB) being a solution to piracy has become something of a mantra for us here at Techdirt. And we’ve seen an absolute ton of success stories of people implementing some version of it. But, really, if you want a recent story of a creator going about this in a way that appears to hit every single note just about perfectly, you need only look toward the latest PC gaming hit: Stardew Valley.

      • Linking to Pirated Content Is Not Copyright Infringement, Says EU Court Adviser

        Linking to pirated content that is already available to the public can not be seen as copyright infringement under the European Copyright Directive. This is the advice Advocate General Melchior Wathelet has sent to the EU Court of Justice, in what may turn out to be a landmark case.

      • UK Govt Issues Advice on Dealing With Copyright Trolls

        The UK government has just published advice for people receiving cash demands from so-called copyright trolls. The Intellectual Property Office says that bill payers who are not necessarily infringers are receiving these letters and it is for the copyright holder to prove who committed the alleged offenses.

      • EU Consults On “Neighbouring Rights” For Publishers And “Panorama” Copyright Exceptions

        The European Commission is considering giving publishers the same “neighbouring” rights currently available to broadcasters and producers of someone else’s copyrighted content, it said in a 23 March consultation document. The inquiry is part of the EC’s digital single market initiative to boost Europe’s digital economy.

04.08.16

Links 8/4/2016: OpenMandriva Lx3 Beta 1, ubuntuBSD 15.10 Beta 4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Free Software’s ultimate irony is its pretended lack of credibility

    Fortunately, this issue is evolving in a more positive way as the industry realizes the ubiquity of Free Software and the existence of FOSS successful businesses; change is a bit too slow to my taste however. I’ve already written this many times and I’ll write it again: FOSS is here to stay, and no amount of proprietary offers will pose a true existential threat to it. What threatens Free Software is neither bad licensing, compliance or failed projects. It’s the twisted attitude of some who refuse to consider Free Software as a viable choice while using it to generate revenue without fairly compensating its authors. A sad irony, in the end.

  • Signal: Now You Can Use Snowden’s Favorite Open Source And Encrypted Chat App

    Snowden’s favorite messaging app Signal is now available to public as there is no more invite-only option. Signal works in Chrome and can be downloaded from Chrome app store. This app is also an open source software and its code is available to view on GitHub. It biggest strength is the end-to-end encryption feature.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • OpenStack Mitaka, the 13th Version, Arrives

      The evolution of OpenStack continues. The OpenStack community has released Mitaka, the 13th version of the open cloud platform, with a focus on manageability, scalability and end-user experience. The latest version is positioned as “an integration engine that can manage bare metal, virtual machines, and container orchestration frameworks with a single set of APIs.”

    • Hadoop Player MapR Wraps in SQL and JSON with Apache Drill 1.6

      MapR Technologies, which offers a popular distribution of Apache Hadoop that integrates web-scale enterprise storage and real-time database capabilities, announced the availability of Apache Drill 1.2 in its distribution back in Octobrer of last year. The company also announced a new Data Exploration Quick Start Solution, and had previously wrapped Apache Spark into its platform. Steadily, primarily through embracing cutting-edge open source tools, MapR has building out what it refers to as a fully “converged data platform.”

  • Databases

    • Customers no longer “at the mercy” of Oracle with release of ColumnStore open source analytics engine – says MariaDB CTO ’Monty’ Widenius

      After making SQL databases accessible and affordable with its open source solution MariaDB has added a big data analytics tool to its portfolio

      The godfather of the open source MySQL database Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius and CTO at MariaDB says customers no longer have to be “at the mercy” of vendors like Oracle following the announcement of its ColumnStore big data analytics engine.

    • MariaDB continues assault on competitors

      Open Source database vendor MariaDB has announced its latest update a big data analytics engine called MariaDB ColumnStore. The company claims that this is a significant milestone for the MariaDB open source community and that the release is: “… the industry’s first to enable transactional and massively parallelized analytic workloads under the same roof.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • IceCat 38.7.1 release

      GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

      https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

    • GNUnet und Informationsmacht: Analyse einer P2P-Technologie und ihrer sozialen Wirkung

      This thesis studies the GNUnet project comprising its history, ideas and the P2P network technology. It specifically investigates the question of emancipatory potentials with regard to forms of information power due to a widely deployed new Internet technology and tries to identify essential suspensions of power within the scope of an impact assessment. Moreover, we will see by contrasting the GNUnet project with the critical data protection project, founded on social theory, that both are heavily concerned about the problem of illegitimate and unrestrained information power, giving us additional insights for the assessment. Last but least I’ll try to present a scheme of how both approaches may interact to realize their goals.

  • Public Services/Government

    • US Federal Source Code Policy: embrace more open source to save taxpayer dollars

      The United States White House and the federal government have already been widely reported to have adopted a degree of open source software, tools and platforms — but this trend is now officially set to increase.

    • White House wants agencies to open source their code

      The US government is deepening its commitment to open source principles, proposing that federal agencies share software tools and release their code to developers.

      By the start of July, all federal agencies will be required to release at least 20 per cent of the software they have had specially developed.

    • Talend Announces Support for France’s Inaugural Open Source School

      “We are very proud to support the open source community by participating in this public/private partnership and contributing to the establishment of the first school dedicated to open source,” said Laurent Bride, CTO, Talend. “Talend and its staff will lend their technical expertise to help develop the next generation of leaders in the field of open source, who will help further the advancement of major initiatives such as Big Data, IoT, and machine learning.”

      Recruitment for the school has already begun and its six campuses located in Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Montpellier, Nantes and Paris will open in September.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Linux botnet attacks increase in scale

      Hackers are using malware which targets Linux to build botnets to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS attacks) security researchers have warned.

      The so-called BillGates Trojan botnet family of malware – apparently so named by the virus writers because it targets machines running Linux, not Windows – has been labelled with a “high” risk factor in a threat advisory issued by Akamai’s Security Intelligence Research Team.

    • Mumblehard takedown ends army of Linux servers from spamming

      One year after the release of the technical analysis of the Mumblehard Linux botnet, we are pleased to report that it is no longer active. ESET, in cooperation with the Cyber Police of Ukraine and CyS Centrum LLC, have taken down the Mumblehard botnet, stopping all its spamming activities since February 29th, 2016.

      ESET is operating a sinkhole server for all known Mumblehard components. We are sharing the sinkhole data with CERT-Bund, which is taking care of notifying the affected parties around the world through their national CERTs.

    • Ubuntu patches Linux kernel security bugs
    • Linux Kernel Security Bugs Patched

      Ubuntu users can install the update via the Unity Dash. To update, search the Unity Dash for the Software Updater utility and allow the program to reload the software repositories and search for new drivers. Once the Software Updater has found the updates, simply click on the “Install All” button to install them on your machine. Since this is a kernel update, you will need to reboot your device after the update. Canonical notes that the kernel updates have been given a new version number, which may require some users to recompile and reinstall all third party kernel modules.

    • Google reveals its shift to an open security architecture

      Google has revealed how it completely changed its security architecture, shifting from a traditional infrastructure to a more open model in which all network traffic is treated with suspicion.

      The project, called BeyondCorp, shifted the company from a perimeter security model to one where access to services and tools are not gated according to a user’s physical location or their originating network, but instead deploys access policies based on information about a device, its state and associated user.

    • Several Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in Ubuntu

      Several patches have been released for Ubuntu, addressing vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, including a use-after-free and a timing side-channel vulnerability.

    • DDoS Attacks with BillGates Linux Malware Intensify

      Over the past six months, security researchers from Akamai’s SIRT team have observed a shift in the cyber-criminal underground to using botnets created via the BillGates malware to launch massive 100+ Gbps DDoS attacks.

    • Cisco Pushing Open-Source Snort and ClamAV Forward

      Martin Roesch, started the open-source Snort network intrusion prevention system project in 1998, eventually evolving into the base of SourceFire which he sold to Cisco for $2.7 billion in 2013. Now Roesch is the Chief Architect for the Cisco Security Business Group and Snort is still very much on its mind.

    • OSVDB shutdown leaves questions for vulnerability databases
    • Open-source vulnerabilities database shuts down
    • Vivaldi 1.0.435.42 Update Now Live to Patch Address Bar Spoofing Vulnerability

      We’ve just been informed by Ruarí Ødegaard of Vivaldi about the immediate availability for download of the first minor point release in the stable branch of the web browser.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Introducing the Open Source Policy Center

      Wikipedia’s content and the Android phone software are examples of the open source philosophy. Open sourcing policy analysis means that the public is empowered to contribute its skills, expertise, and passion to make government better.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Two widely used pesticides likely to harm 97% of endangered species in US

      Almost all of the 1,700 most endangered plants and animals in the US are likely to be harmed by two widely used pesticides, an alarming new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis has found.

      Malathion, an insecticide registered for use in the US since 1956, is likely to cause harm to 97% of the 1,782 mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and plants listed under the Endangered Species Act. Malathion is commonly used to treat fruit, vegetables and plants for pests, as well as on pets to remove ticks.

      A separate pesticide, chlorpyrifos, is also a severe risk to 97% of America’s most threatened flora and fauna. Chlorpyrifos, which smells a little like rotten eggs, is regularly deployed to exterminate termites, mosquitoes and roundworms.

      A third pesticide, diazinon, often used on cockroaches and ants, threatens 79% of endangered species. The EPA study is the first of its kind to look at whether common pesticides harm US wildlife.

    • Volkswagen Picks Mirantis to Build Massive OpenStack Cloud

      Mirantis on Wednesday announced that Volkswagen Group has selected Mirantis OpenStack to power its cloud applications.

      The selection process involved a series of cloud-to-cloud performance trials between Red Hat and Mirantis, one of the last pure-play OpenStack companies that hasn’t been shut down or acquired. It’s ideally positioned to pursue and win large-scale deals like the Volkswagen project, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

  • Finance

    • Strauss-Kahn’s LSK Set Up Offshore Firms in Tax Havens: Le Monde

      Leyne, Strauss-Kahn & Partners, the bankrupt Luxembourg investment company tied to Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s name, helped several clients open offshore firms in tax havens, according to French daily Le Monde.

      The names of as many as 31 offshore firms set up by a LSK subsidiary were found in the registers of Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based law firm at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, Le Monde reported Wednesday. The subsidiary’s offshore activity began before Strauss-Kahn became board chairman at LSK, according to Le Monde.

      Offshore companies can created for legitimate purposes. Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, Jean Veil, didn’t reply to requests for comment.

    • Job Totals Trail Pre-Recession Levels in 10 U.S. States

      Every candidate shouts about job creation, and some talk about the recovery from the last recession. Every month the Department of Labor releases new statistics about how many jobs have been created, improvements in the unemployment rate, and on and on.

    • DC Press Corps Spins Itself Silly Over Sanders’ Specifics

      The Washington press corps has gone into one of its great feeding frenzies over Bernie Sanders’ interview with New York Daily News. Sanders avoided specific answers to many of the questions posed, which the DC gang are convinced shows a lack of the knowledge necessary to be president.

      Among the frenzied were the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, The Atlantic‘s David Graham and Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen, with CNN‘s Dylan Byers telling about it all. Having read the transcript of the interview, I would say that I certainly would have liked to see more specificity in Sanders’ answers, but I’m an economist. And some of the complaints are just silly.

      When asked how he would break up the big banks, Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks. That’s exactly the right answer. The government doesn’t know the most efficient way to break up JP Morgan; JP Morgan does. If the point is to downsize the banks, the way to do it is to give them a size cap and let them figure out the best way to reconfigure themselves to get under it.

    • David Cameron admits he profited from father’s offshore fund

      After three days of stalling and four partial statements issued by Downing Street he confessed that he owned shares in the tax haven fund which he sold for £31,500 just before becoming prime minister in 2010.

      In a specially arranged interview with ITV News’ Robert Peston he confirmed a direct link to his father’s UK-tax avoiding fund, details of which were exposed in the Panama Papers revelations in the Guardian this week.

      Admitting “it has been a difficult few days”, the prime minister said he held the shares together with his wife, Samantha, from 1997 and during his time as leader of the opposition. They were sold in January 2010 for a profit of £19,000.

    • David Cameron Offshore Fund Admission Prompts Inventive ‘Curses’ From Critics

      Cameron’s admission over the fund, which was revealed in the leaked Panama Papers, prompted commenters to curse him with diabolical plagues, from having unevenly-flavoured crisps, to broken biscuits, and permanently crinkly shirts.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • FAIR Activists Get Two Responses From NPR on Fossil-Fuel Funding Controversy

      FAIR.org readers took action in response to “Did Sanders Lie About Clinton’s Oil Money? NPR Factchecker Can’t Be Bothered to Check” (4/1/16). They got a response from NPR ombud Elizabeth Jensen (4/5/16) and a do-over from NPR factchecker Peter Overby (4/6/16)—but NPR’s coverage still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of forthrightly addressing the issue of fossil-fuel funding in the Democratic presidential race.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Texas Electric Grid Security Summit Ignores Threat of NSA

      The threat posed to our liberty by the NSA is very real.

    • FBI Plays It Coy Regarding Their iPhone Exploit

      Every since the FBI announced that it had found its own way into Syed Farook’s iPhone, people have been wondering exactly how it managed to do so, and how many people the exploit puts at risk. Unsurprisingly, the agency declined to share any details with Apple and tried to downplay the possibility that they’d be breaking into phones left and right — despite pretty quickly entertaining the idea of doing exactly that.

    • What WhatsApp is not encrypting

      WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned popular messaging service, has turned on end-to-end encryption for its 1 billion users globally. This monumental move was announced on Tuesday in a blog post by company founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton: “From now on when you and your contacts use the latest version of the app, every call you make, and every message, photo, video, file, and voice message you send, is end-to-end encrypted by default, including group chats.

    • FBI crack could hit iPhone sales

      According to a poll carried out by Fortune, the FBI’s cracking of the San Bernardino attacker’s iPhone could have a knock-on effect on sales at a critical time for Apple.

    • Poll: Don’t Help Government Unencrypt Devices

      The results of our “Apple vs. the FBI” encryption poll are in. Most of our readers agree with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s decision to stand up to the FBI.

      Often when we run a poll on FOSS Force, the results only go to confirm what we already know. Our latest completed poll is an example. What we got was exactly what we expected. You don’t think the makers of encrypted devices, or encryption software, should help the G-Men get inside — not even with a warrant.

      The poll was our effort to check the pulsebeat of our readers during the recent attempts by the feds to force Apple to crack open the iPhone used by alleged terrorist Syed Farook, who killed 14 and wounded 27 coworkers in San Bernardino in December. Although the FBI’s actions, both their botched attempts to open the device and their ever shifting legal claims, seemed much like something out of a Keystone Cops flick from 100 years ago, the implications were too chilling for most of us to be disposed to do much laughing.

    • Open Letter from the OLN to the WP29 and the European Parliament on the Privacy Shield

      The Privacy Shield, a framework for personal data transfers towards US-based companies, is currently under negotiation. This new agreement follows the invalidation of the Safe Harbor by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), who ruled that it did not uphold a substantially equivalent protection for personal data of people protected under European law, and suggested new measures to address it. Since the draft Privacy Shield does not take these measures into account, the resulting agreement is bound to reduce the fundamental rights of Europeans.

    • Opposition mounts to NSA’s data-sharing plans

      Civil liberties and government transparency groups are rallying to oppose a new plan that would allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to share more of the information that it collects about people’s communications and activity on the Internet with other federal agencies.

      On Thursday, 33 advocacy groups signed on to a letter insisting the changes “could allow agencies like the FBI to circumvent constitutional protections and will pose new threats to the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans.

      “Moreover, the reported changes would fatally weaken existing restrictions on access to the phone calls, emails, and other data the NSA collects,” they added.

      The changes, which top intelligence community lawyer Robert Litt attempted to outline last month, will give more agencies access to the reams of data the NSA picks up as part of its work.

    • California Lawmakers Manage To Turn Encrypted Phone Ban Legislation Into Encryption Backdoor Legislation

      The California Assembly has been tinkering with Assemblyman Jim Cooper’s smartphone encryption ban… and for the worse. First noticed by EFF Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker, legislators have turned the proposed ban into something that accomplishes the same goals without actually “banning” anything.

    • Back Door Legislation Won’t Have The White House’s Support (Nor Its Opposition, Most Likely)

      Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr have been talking about legislation that forces tech companies to help law enforcement break into encrypted devices for quite a while now. Nearly a month ago, they suggested it was almost ready to be formally introduced, but indicated that the White House’s response would determine when exactly that happened.

      Now, Reuters is reporting that sources in the administration told them backdooring encryption will not have the President’s support, adding another question mark to when we’ll actually see this bill (though there’s a chance it will show up this week).

    • Adding End-To-End Encryption To WhatsApp Is Great…But Not Quite As Secure As People May Think

      Der Spiegel notes that end-to-end encryption is only available if all the participants in a conversation are using the latest version of the software. If one of them isn’t, group chats will be unencrypted. That lack of consistency will make it very easy to communicate in the mistaken belief that everything is hidden, when in fact it is taking place out in the open.

    • NSA data-sharing plan opens door to mass surveillance, say rights groups

      A coalition of more than 30 civil liberty groups says that a potential change in how the National Security Agency shares data with other US agencies could jeopardize millions of Americans’ privacy.

      The group that includes the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging the NSA not to pursue efforts to more widely distribute intelligence information it gathered for fear it would give law enforcement agencies access to warrantless domestic surveillance.

      “Sharing such information with US law enforcement agencies would allow them to circumvent the strict, constitutionally mandated rules of evidence gathering that govern ordinary criminal investigations,” according to a letter sent Thursday to NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • FOIA Documents Expose Details On TSA’s $47,000 Coin Flipping App

      Time for yet another episode of “Your Tax Dollars Faffing About.” According to documents liberated by Kevin Burke, the TSA spent a ridiculous amount of money on an iPad app that randomly generates a left or right arrow.

    • The TSA Randomizer iPad App Cost $1.4 Million

      You may have seen the TSA Randomizer on your last flight. A TSA agent holds an iPad. The agent taps the iPad, a large arrow points right or left, and you follow it into a given lane.

      How much does the TSA pay for an app that a beginner could build in a day? It turns out the TSA paid IBM $1.4 million dollars for it.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Verizon’s Attempt To Woo Millennials Is Equal Parts Creepy, Expensive And Sad

      For some time now Verizon’s made it very clear it wants nothing to do with its core fixed-line broadband business. Instead, Verizon’s taking a huge bet that it can transform ye olde phone company into a huge advertising and streaming media empire, with a focus on wooing (read: selling ads to) Millennials. To that end Verizon acquired AOL and its ad technology for $4.4 billion last year. It developed a highly-controversial stealth ad tech that can track these youngsters around the Internet without their consent, and it created its own “Go90″ streaming video service specifically aimed at Millennials.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • South African Trade Minister Opens WIPO Conference With Call For Appropriate IP

      A two-day international conference on intellectual property and development opened today at the World Intellectual Property Organization with calls from speakers for the IP system to be applied by nations in ways appropriate to their economies, even if it means allowing copying – just as the biggest IP-holding nations did when they were developing years ago. The theme was set by the opening keynote speaker, South African Trade Minister Rob Davies.

    • Copyrights

      • Hollywood Forced SlySoft DVD Ripping Software Out Of Business, Only To Have It Return As RedFox

        It never made much sense that ripping CDs in the US is considered legal, while ripping DVDs is somehow horrible piracy. If anything, it seemed to be an artifact of history. Either way, it was much more difficult for people to rip DVDs. However, whenever the issue would come up, most people would point to SlySoft’s AnyDVD product, which was a clunky, but functional bit of software for getting around DRM and ripping DVDs. The company was based in Antigua and had been around for years. So it took some people by surprise when it announced it was shutting down due to regulatory changes earlier this year. It looked like Hollywood had done what it normally does and scared an innovative company it didn’t like out of business. But, as reader Derek points out to us, it looks like it only took a week or so before former SlySoft employees resurfaced in Belize with a new offering called RedFox, using a somewhat similar logo.

      • Copyright Troll Tries To Silence Anti-Troll Blogger With Law Enforcement Threats

        Okay, let’s dive right into this one, because there are some details that need to be summarized before we get into the meat of this story. TCYK is a a company named after a Robert Redford film, The Company You Keep, which the company attempted to use as as a profit center by sending out threat letters to suspected copyright pirates in the UK, including to an 82 year old woman, because why the hell not? Copyright trolling and threat and settlement letters from folks like these aren’t especially news-worthy, but what makes TCYK interesting is the convoluted shell-game it plays by operating from the United States and partnering with local UK businesses that barely exist just to extort money out of the public.

      • AG Wathelet: linking to unlicensed content should not be a copyright infringement per se

        GS Media was successfully sued before the Amsterdam District Court and the Amsterdam Court of Appeal, although these courts considered different aspects. The former held that by posting those hyperlinks, GS Media’s conduct had been unlawful because it encouraged visitors to GeenStijl to view the photographs illegally posted on Filefactory.com which, without those hyperlinks, would not have been easy to find. In contrast, the Court of Appeal held that, on the one hand, GS Media had infringed copyright by posting a cut-out of one of the photographs on the GeenStijl website but, on the other hand, had not made the photographs available to the public by posting the hyperlinks on its website.

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