• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Beware: Windows 10 Signature Edition Blocks Installing Linux

  Microsoft opening the source code of a lot of its projects in the last months convinced some people that the company – under its new management – is now good, and that it “loves Linux”, however, this assumption came to be wrong today with the latest monopoly try from Microsoft.

  In a TL;DR format: Some new laptops that ship with Windows 10 Signature Edition don’t allow you to install Linux (or any operating system) on it; the BIOS is locked and the hard drives are hidden in a way you can’t install any OS. Those news are not some rumors from the Internet, Lenovo for example confirmed that they have singed an agreement with Microsoft for this.

• Best Linux Desktop for Customization

  Is customizing your Linux desktop important to you? Run Linux for even a few months, and the ability to customize a desktop environment according to your preferences can become a right.

  Customization options start with the fact that more than one Linux desktop is available, and many of these desktop environments allow some customization of the desktop and panel. However, others include options for almost everything you can see or use.

Server

• How blockchain will grow beyond bitcoin

  Since its advent in 2009, bitcoin’s decentralized, broker-less and secure mechanism to send money across the world has steadily risen in popularity and adoption. Of equal — if not greater — importance is the blockchain, the technology that supports the cryptocurrency, the distributed ledger which enables trustless, peer-to-peer exchange of data.

• The end of Moore’s Law and the expansion of Linux; what do these mean to IBM?

  As many organizations are finding out, open-source computing is a game-changer. Many businesses now rely on open-source tools to lower costs, increase flexibility and freedom, and enhance security and accountability.

  Stefanie Chiras, VP of IBM Power Systems Offering Management, Systems of Engagement, at IBM, joined Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during IBM Edge, held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV, to discuss the changing landscape around open source, the end of Moore’s Law, and how the cloud drives innovation for clients.

• Cloud Foundry launches its new Docker-compatible container management system

  Cloud Foundry, the Pivotal- and VMware-incubated open source platform-as-a-service project, is going all in on its new Diego container management system. For a while now, the project used what it called Droplet Execution Agents (DEA) to manage application containers. After running in parallel for a while, though, the team has now decided to go all in on its new so-called “Diego” architecture. Thanks to this, Cloud Foundry says it can now scale to running up to 250,000 containers in a single cluster.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland 1.12 Officially Released

    While it’s coming a few days later than anticipated, Wayland 1.12 along with the adjoining Weston 1.12 compositor update is now officially available.

    Bryce Harrington has announced Wayland 1.12 as the newest version of Wayland.

  • X.Org’s XDC2016 Will Be Livestreamed This Week

Applications

• wlc 0.6

  wlc 0.6, a command line utility for Weblate, has been just released. There have been some minor fixes, but the most important news is that Windows and OS X are now supported platforms as well.

• Proprietary

  • Opera 40 Released With Built-In VPN Support, Chromecast

  • Opera offers browser with free built-in VPN

  • Hands-on: Opera’s free, unlimited browser VPN is ready for secure surfing

  • Opera brings its desktop VPN to the mainstream

  • Synopsys’ Coverity

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Dig into DNS: Part 3

  • How to uninstall obsolete dependent packages

  • Tasksel – Easily and Quickly Install Group Softwares in Debian and Ubuntu

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine Staging 1.9.19 Implements CIF Reader, Active Setup Download Functionality

    A new version of the Wine Staging software for running various Windows apps and games on your Linux box has been released, 1.9.19, with various new features and improvements.

    Coming hot on the heels of Wine 1.9.19, and after only one week from the previous maintenance update, namely Wine Staging 1.9.18, the new version includes, as expected, all the improvements introduced upstream, such as an experimental udev bus driver for HID, better joystick support, metafile support in GDI+, and the new DC rendering functionality in Direct2D.

• Games

  • LASTFIGHT, a pretty good looking fighting game just released on Linux

    Now this looks like some good fun! LASTFIGHT [Official Site, Steam], a fighting game where you can pick up any object and smash your enemy with it is now on Linux.

  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night release has been delayed

    Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night the gothic, exploration-focused action platformer has been delayed back into the first half of 2018.

  • The GameCube and Wii emulator ‘Dolphin’ can now boot every GameCube game

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDevelop 5.0.1 Open-Source IDE Brings Multiple Bug Fixes, General Improvements

    The development team behind the open-source KDevelop IDE (Integrated Development Environment) software announced the release and immediate availability of the first maintenance update to the KDevelop 5.0 stable series.

    KDevelop 5.0 was released just a month ago, and it brought lots of goodies, the biggest one being the port to the latest KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 technologies. Other features include improved C/C++ support, CMake support, and QML/JavaScript support.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Parsix Normalizes GNOME

    The Parsix project’s goal is to provide a ready-to-use and easy-to-install Debian operating system with the latest stable release of the GNOME desktop environment. The Parsix distro meets that goal and even goes beyond it.

    The developer community is far more independent than other Debian testing-based derivatives. The Parsix community keeps four software repositories enabled by default. Official repositories contain packages maintained by project developers that are built on the community’s own build servers.

    Content repository is a snapshot of Debian’s stable branch. Wonderland repository contains multimedia-related software packages and is a snapshot of Debian multimedia repositories.

    Even better is the fact that the community maintains its own security software repository for both the stable and testing branches. Parsix Developers closely follow Debian Security Advisories and port them to the distro’s own security repository.

  • MATE 1.16 Ready For Release, More GTK2 GNOME-Forked Code Ported To GTK3

    The various components of the GNOME2 desktop forked MATE code were checked in as version 1.16 today in preparation for announcing this next release.

    MATE 1.16 is being released in time to hopefully make it in Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 25, which are among the goals for this release. During MATE 1.16 development that began following MATE 1.14 in April, there’s been more porting of GTK+ 2 code to GTK+ 3.

  • A Look At The Exciting Features/Improvements Of GNOME 3.22

    If all goes well, GNOME 3.22 will be officially released tomorrow, 21 September. Here is a recap of some of the new features and improvements made over this past six month development cycle plus some screenshots of the near-final desktop that will power the upcoming Fedora 25 Workstation.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 104 released

    This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 104.
    This update brings you a new kernel under the hood and a from scratch rewritten Guardian.

  • IPFire 2.19 Linux Firewall Gets New Intrusion Prevention System, Kernel 3.14.79

    Today, September 20, 2016, IPFire’s Michael Tremer announced the release of yet another Core Update to the IPFire 2.19 stable Linux-based firewall distribution and system.

    IPFire 2.19 Core Update 104 appears to be a big release with many interesting changes, starting with the latest version of Linux 3.14 kernel, build 3.14.79, and continuing with a brand new Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) called Guardian, and all the latest software updates and security patches. But first, we should warn you that the Linux kernel 3.14 series reached end of life last week, and users are urged to move to Linux 4.4 LTS.

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Now Includes GCC 6.2, GNU Binutils 2.26.1 & GDB 7.11.1

    SUSE’s Andreas Jaeger reports on the availability of an updated toolchain for the SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 operating system, bringing the latest tools designed for application development.

    The updated toolchain included in SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 comes with some of the latest and most advanced development utilities, such as GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6.2, GDB (GNU Debugger) 7.11.1, and GNU Binutils 2.26.1, thus enabling app developers to use the newest technologies when creating their amazing projects.

• Slackware Family

  • Slackware-Based Absolute 14.2 Linux OS Arrives with Up-to-Date Components

    Absolute Linux developer Paul Sherman announced the release of version 14.2 of his Slackware-based GNU/Linux operating system for personal computers and laptops.

    Based on Slackware 14.2, Absolute 14.2 comes, as expected, with many updated components, most of them borrowed from upstream. But it looks like there are some newly implemented things as well, such as an “Autoinstall” option in the installers to allow automatic installation of the OS on a user-selected partition or disk drive.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat links Java to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code

    Using a newly minted protocol for language and IDE interoperability, Red Hat is expanding Java developers’ ability to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor.

  • IBM Power Systems and Red Hat Extend Collaboration for Next-Generation Cloud Platforms

  • Power Play: Red Hat, IBM expand collaboration

  • Finance

    • Shares of International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) & Bristol-Myers Squibb Co (NYSE:BMY) Stocks News Update: Monday

    • Stocks Logging Active Run- International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM), SeaWorld Entertainment (NYSE:SEAS), Encana (NYSE:ECA)

    • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Shares Sold by Strs Ohio

    • Smith Asset Management Group LP Has $70,571,000 Stake in Red Hat Inc. (RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Media Writer Test Day – 2016-09-20

      The idea is the new tool will be sufficiently capable, reliable, and cross-platform to be the primary download for Fedora Workstation 25. The main ‘flow’ of the Workstation download page will run through the tool instead of giving you a download link to the ISO file and various instructions for using it in different ways. This would be a pretty big change, and of course, it would be a bad idea to do it if the tool isn’t ready.

      So this is an important Test Day! We’ll be testing the new version (Fedora, Windows, and macOS) of the tool to see whether it’s working well enough and catch any remaining issues. It’s also pretty easy to join in. All you’ll need is a USB stick you don’t mind overwriting and a system (or ideally more than one!) you can test booting the stick on (but you don’t need to make any permanent changes to it).

• Debian Family

  • Reproducible Builds: week 73 in Stretch cycle

    Ximin Luo started a new series of tools called (for now) debrepatch, to make it easier to automate checks that our old patches to Debian packages still apply to newer versions of those packages, and still make these reproducible.

  • Derivatives

    • Tails 2.6 Anonymous Linux Live CD Is Out, Brings Tor 0.2.8.7 & Tor Browser 6.0.5

      Just a few moment ago, the Tails development team proudly announced the official and general availability of the Tails 2.6 anonymous Live CD Linux operating system based on the latest Debian technologies.

      Earlier this month, we reported on the availability of the first development version of Tails 2.6, the RC1 build, which also appeared to be the only one, and now, nearly three weeks later, we can get our hands on the final release, which brings many updated components and several new features.

      According to the release notes, the biggest new features in Tails 2.6 are the enablement of the kASLR (kernel address space layout randomization) in the Linux kernel packages that ship with the popular amnesic incognito live system, protecting users from buffer overflow attacks.

    • Linux Top 3: Tails 2.6, Android-x86 6.0 and Deepin 15.3

    • Debian-Based Q4OS 2.2.1 “Scorpion” Linux OS Ships with LXQt Alongside Trinity

      Today, September 20, 2016, the Q4OS development team informs Softpedia about the immediate availability of an updated version of their work-in-progress Q4OS 2.0 “Scorpion” GNU/Linux operating system.

      Q4OS 2.2.1 is out now, and it comes as a drop-in replacement for the previous development release, namely Q4OS 2.1.1, bringing all sort of updated components and new technologies based, of course, on the upstream Debian Testing repositories. These include Linux kernel 4.6, Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) 14.0.4, and GCC 6.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 Officially Released for All Ubuntu Phones and Tablets

        We reported yesterday on the upcoming availability of the Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 software update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices, and it looks like Canonical finally started the phased update earlier today.

        Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak informs us that the main OTA-13 images have been successfully copied from the rc-proposed channel to the stable one for users to update but, as expected, it’s phased during the next 24 hours, so not everyone will get it at the same time.

      • Ubuntu tees up OpenStack on IBM’s iron

        Canonical’s OpenStack spin has landed on IBM’s Power hardware as part of zSystems’ Linux stack.

        The Ubuntu shop’s cloud has been released for IBM’s zSeries IBM LinuxOne and on IBM Power Systems.

        Canonical’s cloud will run on IBM’s planned LC servers, announced in April. The servers run OpenPOWER – from the group building customised POWER CPUs.

      • Get your own $80 private cloud server kit with Nextcloud Box!

        Nextcloud, an open source, self-hosted file sync and share and communication app platform, has teamed up with Canonical and WDLabs to release a Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu Linux powered cloud server called Nextcloud Box for homes and offices.

        According to the company, the Nextcloud Box is a secure, private, self-hosted cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) platform. It makes hosting a personal cloud simple and cost effective whilst maintaining a secure private environment that can be expanded with additional features via apps.

        “It has been a great co-operation with amazingly agile teams at Canonical and WDLabs,” said Frank Karlitschek, Founder and Managing Director, Nextcloud.

      • Simple Weather Indicator for Ubuntu Now Has Its Own PPA

        A new version of the ‘no frills’ weather indicator that I use on my Ubuntu desktop is available to download — and it finally has a PPA.

Devices/Embedded

• Start-up sells a stamp-sized Linux server for $5

  A start-up has completed a crowdfunding campaign for a stamp-sized Linux server development kit that has integrated Wi-Fi and on-board flash storage for DIYers to build hardware or IoT applications.

  Boston-based Onion Corp. began its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign in July and by Aug. 23 had already received more than $773,400 in pledged funding — 4,400 times its funding goal.

• Open source machine vision board and robot run Linux and Arduino

  Hicat’s open source, “Livera” machine vision board runs Linux on an ARM9 Hi3518 camera SoC, and Arduino on an Atmel 32u4 MCU, and has an optional robot kit.

  A startup called Team Hicat has gone to Kickstarter to launch a Hicat Livera machine vision development board and robot kit that runs both Linux and Arduino. The CERN-licensed design is available in early bird packages of $39 for the Livera board with built-in 720p ready camera, and $49 for a Pro version that includes a Motor Driver board. The full robot kit, which adds motors, servos, and more, goes for $69. The campaign lasts through Nov. 16, and the devices ship in December.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google Maps’ shining blue beam guides Android users’ travels

    • Google’s Android search may drop the ‘Now on Tap’ name

    • Stock Android might have a “Restart” option starting with Android 7.1

    • Android Banking Trojan First to Gain Root Privileges

    • Android takes on Apple’s tvOS with open-source Poplar developer board

      Android isn’t as popular in TVs as tvOS, which powers the Apple TV media box. But Linaro, a non-profit organization that champions Android, wants to change that.

      A new $79.99 open-source TV board called Poplar, made by Tocoding, brings Android to enthusiasts who want to make set-top boxes at home for broadcast TV and streaming media. It was made based on specifications set by Linaro, which is working hard to make Android a viable TV OS.

      Poplar is capable of processing and delivering 4K video. It can work with external tuner cards to deliver video streams from cable or satellite sources, but you’ll need to hook up extra hardware for that.

    • Google wants to show Samsung and Huawei what Android should look like

      Google has always been a reluctant hardware maker, even though its Android operating system powers more than 80 percent of smartphones around the globe. But next month it plans to launch two new “Made by Google” smartphones running a unique version of Android with new features unavailable on any other phone.

      Google’s hope is that by producing unique phones — and selling lots of them — it can take back control of Android, which is used freely by smartphone manufacturers from Samsung to Huawei which barely mention Android and are increasingly adding their own apps and services on top to stand out, and diluting Google’s vision of Android in the process.

    • Non-blurry photos of the Google Pixel and Pixel XL leak

    • BlackBerry DTEK60 running Android spotted on company website

    • Google gets more time to counter EU antitrust charge on Android [Ed: Microsoft initiated this whole mess]

21 Open Source Projects for IoT

The Internet of Things market is fragmented, amorphous, and continually changing, and its very nature requires more than the usual attention to interoperability. It’s not surprising then, that open source has done quite well here — customers are hesitant to bet their IoT future on a proprietary platform that may fade or become difficult to customize and interconnect.

In this second entry in a four-part series about open source IoT, I have compiled a guide to major open source software projects, focusing on open source tech for home and industrial automation. I am omitting more vertical projects related to IoT, such as Automotive Grade Linux and Dronecode, and I’m also skipping open source, IoT-oriented OS distributions, such as Brillo, Contiki, Mbed, OpenWrt, Ostro, Riot, Ubuntu Snappy Core, UCLinux, and Zephyr. Next week, I’ll cover hardware projects — from smart home hubs to IoT-focused hacker boards — and in the final part of the series, I’ll look at distros and the future of IoT.

Samsung open sources its HbbTV media player

Samsung’s Hybrid boradcast broadband TV (HbbTV) media player has now taken the open source path which the company announced in a press release earlier today. The project is available on GitHub as HbbPlayer and app developers as well as broadcasters can utilize it to test their services on any HbbTV 1.5 compliant TV which most of Samsung’s smart TVs are.

Secure messaging environment delivers safe online collaboration

Riot Launches Introducing Open Source Encrypted Collaboration for Business

Riot looks to launch a chat revolution with open platform

Riot is trying to knock down the walled gardens of the messaging space

Building businesses out of open-source solutions

The open-source movement is taking over business software. There are benefits; open source is usually less expensive, it’s easy to add on functionality and there’s a community to draw on. The trick, though, is making a business out of open-source solutions. One such business is Rackspace, Inc., a managed cloud computing company.

To gain some insight into how open-source business works, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the IBM Edge 2016 conference in Las Vegas. There, they sat down with Major Hayden, principal architect at Rackspace, Inc.

Abigail Cabunoc Mayes: How to Bring Open Source to a Closed Community

Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, who works for the Mozilla Foundation as the lead developer for open source engagement, recently gave a lively talk explaining open source inclusion practices. View this engaging video here.

Coreboot Is Being Ported To A New Intel Skylake-Y System

Those wishing to use Coreboot on a modern Intel system (albeit with the closed-source FSP) will soon have another option to consider with an open-source, physically secure computer powered by a Skylake-Y SoC moving ahead with a port to Coreboot.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 49 Released, This Is What’s New

    Mozilla has released Firefox 49 for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest update to the popular open-source web browser introduces a range of (always) welcome improvements. Among them, Firefox 49 ships with native support for the Widevine CDM on Linux. This enables you to watch Netflix (and other DRM-protected HTML5 video content) without any cumbersome workarounds.

  • Latest Firefox Expands Multi-Process Support and Delivers New Features for Desktop and Android

    With the change of the season, we’ve worked hard to release a new version of Firefox that delivers the best possible experience across desktop and Android.

  • Mozilla shortlists four designs in open-source rebrand project

    Four designs have been shortlisted in the search to find a new brand identity for software company Mozilla.

    Mozilla is best known for its web browser Firefox, though its latest rebrand project is an attempt at dispelling the myth that this is the only thing the company does.

    It is working with design consultancy Johnson Banks on its open-source rebrand project, which has seen it seeking feedback from the Mozilla community and general public through the comments section on the Mozilla blog, social media and live events over the last few months.

    Involving the community in its rebrand aims to show the company’s “transparent” and “open” philosophy, Mozilla says. However, the company has made it clear that this is not a crowd-sourcing project, which would involve public voting, but instead a way of harbouring thoughts and opinions.

SaaS/Back End

• Despite a Skills Gap, Forecasts for Big Data Growth are Rosy

Databases

• CouchDB 2.0

  The Apache CouchDB development community is proud to announce the immediate availability of version 2.0.

• Apache CouchDB 2.0 Released

  For users of Apache’s CouchDB document-oriented NoSQL database system, version 2.0 was announced today.

• Apache Announces Availablity of CouchDB 2.0 Database

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

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Chess 6.2.3

  GNU Chess is a chess-playing program. It can be used to play chess against the computer on a terminal or, more commonly, as a chess engine for graphical chess frontends.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• The Coral Project launches open-source ‘Ask’ form builder

  New open-source software designed to allow newsrooms to crowdsource information from readers was made available to publishers on request today (19 September) by The Coral Project.

  Ask is the second in a trio of products from The Coral Project, a collaboration between The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Mozilla Foundation.

  Greg Barber, director of digital news projects at the Post, and strategy and partnerships at The Coral Project, likened Ask to an enhanced version of Google Forms which allows journalists to request information from readers, such as opinions, personal anecdotes, or suggestions on topics to cover.

Programming/Development

• GitHub 101: A Beginners Guide For Contributing To GitHub Open Source Software Projects

  Since launching in 2009, GitHub has become the biggest Git repository hosting service in the world and is used by millions of individuals and businesses to manage software projects. It has also become a playground for open-source software projects that often involve a large number of contributors. When there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, it can become chaotic and scare off beginners. If you are a software developer that’s ready to enter the GitHub fray, we have some advice on what to do — and what not to do — when you’re contributing to a project in a Git repository.

  As of April 2016, GitHub has over 14 million users and 35 million repositories. Many of the projects hosted on GitHub are open source. The nature of the service allows for large groups of people from all corners of the world to collaborate and improve the code in these projects. But the nature of group work, especially when individuals come from diverse backgrounds, means maintaining and participating in a project can become problematic. Which is one reason why GitHub brought in a feature that allows project owners of public repositories to block troublesome users.

  It can be intimidating to start contributing to an open source project and it can be a bit of a learning curve for newbies. First off, let’s talk about taking the plunge. To do this, you’ll need to create a GitHub account. We have a guide on how to do this here.

  Once you’ve done that, it’s best to start off on a project that is beginner-friendly.

Health/Nutrition

• ‘Superbug’ scourge spreads as U.S. fails to track rising human toll

  Fifteen years after the U.S. declared drug-resistant infections to be a grave threat, the crisis is only worsening, a Reuters investigation finds, as government agencies remain unwilling or unable to impose reporting requirements on a healthcare industry that often hides the problem.

• The Hidden Toll of Drug-Resistant Superbugs

  Just 17 days old, Josiah Cooper-Pope died in the hospital after he was infected with a drug-resistant bacteria, but no one added his death to the toll from the deadly bug.

  As Reuters reported earlier this month, hospital officials told Josiah’s mom about the infection, but not that her son was the fourth patient out of 12 who would eventually become infected during an outbreak. The hospital also didn’t notify public health officials as the law required. And the final record, Josiah’s death certificate, did not report the superbug as a cause of death. As the story said, it’s as if the killer got away.

Security

• Security updates for Tuesday

• Aid Security Incident Statistics: 18-month trends based on open source reported events affectng aid infrastructure (December 2014 to May 2016)

• Easy Secure Web Serving with OpenBSD’s acme-client and Let’s Encrypt

  s recently as just a few years ago, I hosted my personal website, VPN, and personal email on a computer running OpenBSD in my basement. I respected OpenBSD for providing a well-engineered, no-nonsense, and secure operating system. But when I finally packed up that basement computer, I moved my website to an inexpensive cloud server running Linux instead.

  Linux was serviceable, but I really missed having an OpenBSD server. Then I received an email last week announcing that the StartSSL certificate I had been using was about to expire and realized I was facing a tedious manual certificate replacement process. I decided that I would finally move back to OpenBSD, running in the cloud on Vultr, and try the recently-imported acme-client (formerly “letskencrypt”) to get my HTTPS certificate from the free, automated certificate authority Let’s Encrypt.

• iPhone passcode bypassed with NAND mirroring attack

  Passcodes on iPhones can be hacked using store-bought electronic components worth less than $100 (£77), according to one Cambridge computer scientist.

  Sergei Skorobogatov has demonstrated that NAND mirroring—the technique dismissed by James Comey, the director of the FBI, as unworkable—is actually a viable means of bypassing passcode entry limits on an Apple iPhone 5C. What’s more, the technique, which involves soldering off the phone’s flash memory chip, can be used on any model of iPhone up to the iPhone 6 Plus, which use the same type of LGA60 NAND chip. Later models, however, will require “more sophisticated equipment and FPGA test boards.”

  In a paper he wrote on the subject, Skorobogatov, a Russian senior research associate at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory’s security group, confirmed that “any attacker with sufficient technical skills could repeat the experiment,” and while the technique he used is quite fiddly, it should not present too much of an obstacle for a well-resourced branch of law enforcement.

  The attack works by cloning the iPhone’s flash memory chip. iPhones generally allow users six attempts to guess a passcode before locking them out for incrementally longer periods of time; by the complex process of taking the phone apart, removing its memory chip, and then cloning it, an attacker is able to have as many clusters of six tries as they have the patience to make fresh clones. Skorobogatov estimates that each run of six attempts would take about 45 seconds, meaning that it would take around 20 hours to do a full cycle of all 10,000 passcode permutations. For a six-digit passcode, this would grow to about three months—which he says might still be acceptable for national security.

• Seagate NAS hack should scare us all

  No fewer than 70 percent of internet-connected Seagate NAS hard drives have been compromised by a single malware program. That’s a pretty startling figure. Security vendor Sophos says the bitcoin-mining malware Miner-C is the culprit.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Hillary Clinton ‘dropped climate change from speeches after Bernie Sanders endorsement’

  Hillary Clinton has dropped the words “climate change” from most of her public addresses since winning the endorsement of her party rival Bernie Sanders, according to Climate Home analysis.

  While the presidential candidate talks regularly about her plan for the US to become a “clean energy superpower”, in recent months she has rarely made reference to the planetary crisis that necessitates it.

  On Monday, when she launched her pitch to millennials online, she could find no room for an issue that will affect that voting cohort more than any other.

  The rhetorical shift undermines hopes that climate change might emerge as a key campaign issue in 2016. Boosted by the disparity between Clinton and her Republican opponent Donald Trump, a self-professed non-believer in climate change.

• Austrian farmer horrified by sheep slaughter in fields

  Under Austrian law the killing of sheep has to take place in official slaughterhouses but the sheep in the field in Styria simply had their throats cut and were left to die.

  Horrified locals raised the alarm with police, who rushed to the area to stop the massacre and managed to save 52 of the 131 sheep that had been put in the field.

  The other 79 had already been slaughtered as part of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, also known as the Sacrifice Feast, which is the second of two Muslim holidays celebrated worldwide each year and considered the holier of the two.

  Muslims who can afford it sacrifice their best animals as a symbol of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son to God.

Finance

• Store wars: Brussels in food fight with Eastern Europe

  The European Commission has opened a new front in its deepening conflict with Central and Eastern European governments over restrictions on big foreign supermarkets.

  The battle became bloodier Monday when Brussels said it was launching an in-depth investigation to determine whether Warsaw was using a new tax to favor smaller local supermarkets over big foreign retailers. The Commission insisted that the Poles must not levy their new tax until the probe was complete.

  Poland’s Finance Minister Paweł Szałamacha hit back Tuesday, slamming the European Commission’s move as a “success for lobbyists.”

• Leaks Show TISA No Easy Trade Deal; Civil Rights Groups, Unions Alarmed

  Greenpeace, European Digital Rights, Public Services International and the International Transport Worker’s Federation today presented a collection of leaked papers on the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA). As negotiators from a dozen countries currently gathered in Geneva for officially the 20th round to close the deal on better trans-border service trading, the civil rights activists and trade union representatives warned that TISA partners would commit to give up their options to regulate in the public interest through a secret deal.

• Amazon Says It Puts Customers First. But Its Pricing Algorithm Doesn’t.

  One day recently, we visited Amazon’s website in search of the best deal on Loctite super glue, the essential home repair tool for fixing everything from broken eyeglass frames to shattered ceramics.

  In an instant, Amazon’s software sifted through dozens of combinations of price and shipping, some of which were cheaper than what one might find at a local store. TheHardwareCity.com, an online retailer from Farmers Branch, Texas, with a 95 percent customer satisfaction rating, was selling Loctite for $6.75 with free shipping. Fat Boy Tools of Massillon, Ohio, a competitor with a similar customer rating was nearly as cheap: $7.27 with free shipping.

  The computer program brushed aside those offers, instead selecting the vial of glue sold by Amazon itself for slightly more, $7.80. This seemed like a plausible choice until another click of the mouse revealed shipping costs of $6.51. That brought the total cost, before taxes, to $14.31, or nearly double the price Amazon had listed on the initial page.

• The Stronger the Boycott, the Thicker the Hype

  What readers would have no clue about would be the four years of organizing, the walkouts, picket lines and lawsuits over labor violations leading to Driscoll’s being the subject of a high-profile international boycott. Wage theft, poverty wages, hostile and unhealthy conditions—all of these have been reported. One of the workers lawsuits went to the Washington state supreme court; they won a 2015 decision that ensured paid rest breaks for farmworkers statewide.

• Google may face over $400 million Indonesia tax bill for 2015 – government official

  Indonesia plans to pursue Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google for five years of back taxes, and the search giant could face a bill of more than $400 million for 2015 alone if it is found to have avoided payments, a senior tax official said.

  Muhammad Haniv, head of the tax office’s special cases branch, told Reuters its investigators went to Google’s local office in Indonesia on Monday.

  The tax office alleges PT Google Indonesia paid less than 0.1 percent of the total income and value-added taxes it owed last year.

• Federal judge says Bitcoin is money in case connected to JP Morgan hack

  The defendant is Anthony Murgio of Florida, who was arrested in July 2015 in connection with a number of other American and Israeli men who allegedly hacked into JP Morgan Chase, ETrade, and News Corp., among others. Murgio was not directly charged with conducting any of the hacks, but the Justice Department did claim that Murgio ran a sketchy Bitcoin exchange website called Coin.mx with Gery Shalon, the alleged mastermind of the JP Morgan hacks. According to a 2015 indictment, Murgio and others were able to accept shady money from co-conspirators through Coin.mx.

  Murgio is also accused of misrepresenting his business to financial institutions by creating a front for Coin.mx called the “Collectables Club,” as well as with bribing a small New Jersey credit union to process its electronic payments. Judge Alison Nathan’s Monday order did not impact those charges.

  In his motion to dismiss the unlicensed money transfer business charges, Murgio claimed that, because Bitcoins are not considered “funds,” he was not operating an illegal business.

• Taxi price regulation to be abolished

  Government leaders reached a compromise on planned taxi industry reforms on Tuesday. While operation of a taxi will still require a license, regulations on pricing will be abolished – but there will be no limit to the number of taxi licenses that can be issued. The changes will take effect in July 2018.

• Christian Engström at the Nordic Conference on Basic Income 2016 in Copenhagen

  When someone on basic income starts to make money the basic income will be reduced, but never with 100%, so there is always an incentive to work if you can. The cost of this system would be covered in full by letting the basic income replace the current systems for social assistance (försörjningsstöd), student aid and unemployment benefits, and by removing the VAT discounts that certain industries enjoy. To make the proposal politically realistic, there would be no raise in income taxes, and no reduction of current sickness or family benefits.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Two-Party Tyranny: Ralph Nader on Exclusion of Third-Party Candidates from First Presidential Debate

  It’s official: When the first presidential debate takes place next Monday, a week from today, it will exclude third-party candidates from the debate stage. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Friday that both Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party failed to qualify by polling at 15 percent or higher. This comes as polls show Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are among the least popular major-party candidates to ever run for the White House. We get reaction from four-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who has previously been excluded from debates. He has a new book titled “Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think.”

• Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low

  Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.

• WikiLeaks’ Guccifer 2.0: Obama Sold Off Public Offices to Donors

  On September 13, WikiLeaks lived up to its promise of releasing more Democratic National Committee (DNC) documents. This time they were from hacker Guccifer 2.0, serving as a teaser for larger and likely more embarrassing leaks from the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign.

  Both the Democratic Party and Clinton campaign have attempted to insulate themselves from the content of the releases by alleging the hacks were organized by the Russian government. The claims are a mix of paranoia and PR/damage control, and will have enduring consequences. It may lead to what former Secretary of Defense William Perry referred to as a drift back into Cold War mentalities.

  The leaks include more evidence of overt corruption within the DNC. One email dated May 18, 2016, from Jacquelyn Lopez, an attorney with the law firm Perkins Coie, asked DNC staff if they could set up a brief call “to go over our process for handling donations from donors who have given us pay to play letters.”

  Included in the leak was a list of high-profile donors from 2008 and the ambassadorship they received in exchange for their large donation to the DNC and Barack Obama’s Organizing For Action (OFA). Essentially, Obama was auctioning off foreign ambassador positions and other office positions while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. The largest donor listed at contributions totaling over $3.5 million, Matthew Barzun, served as U.S. Ambassador to Sweden from 2009 to 2011, served as President Obama’s National Finance Chair during his 2012 reelection campaign, and now serves as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Researchers: Canadian firm helping Bahrain censor the web

• Canadian tech company Netsweeper helped Bahrain censor websites, says report

  Canadian technology company Netsweeper helped the Bahraini government block opposition party websites, various news websites and content critical of Islam, according to a new report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

• Italy Proposes Law To Make Mocking People Online Illegal

  Yes, mockery on the internet could get you a €100,000 fine. Mockery. The internet. The internet is made for mockery. And now is the time that everyone should be mocking this idiotic law — and the politicians who proposed it without having the slightest idea of how such a thing would be abused all the time.

• Facebook Algorithms Take Down WordPress Lawyer’s Post About Idiocy Of Algorithmic Takedowns

  We’ve had a lot of talk lately about the idiocy of automated content blocking, whether done by Facebook or by big movie studios like Warner Bros. issuing automated DMCA takedowns on its own site. Paul Sieminski*, the General Counsel for Automattic, was asked by Corporate Counsel magazine for his opinions on the WB takedowns (warning: possible registration or paywall).

  [...]

  Facebook claims that posting about automated takedowns and how they’re problematic somehow violates its Community Standards. Obviously, this is a mistake (yet another one) by Facebook’s autotakedown system, but it really does help highlight the point of how problematic this kind of system can be, when perfectly legitimate speech is silenced, because a bot thinks it’s bad.

• Introducing spiked’s Safe Space Bingo

  For the uninitiated, a Safe Space is a space – physical or hypothetical – where students are protected from offensive opinions, words, jokes, gestures and even items of clothing. They are places where students are able to express themselves free from hateful phrases like, ‘I disagree with you’. But, even before Safe Spaces hit the headlines, universities and students’ unions were cooking up all manner of nonsensical restrictions in the name of protecting students from offence.

• Censorship in the 21st Century

  The freedom you see on the internet means there is someone out there fighting for this freedom for our benefit. Just like there are freedom rights organizations in the physical world, the virtual world has freedom rights companies that stand for the truth they believe in and refuse to fabricate any information. They upload facts as they are in their raw form and just like in any aspect of life, there are supporters and critics in this field as well.

• Powell emails expose depth of media self-censorship re Israeli nukes

  It is of course an open secret of nearly 50 years standing in Washington that Israel has nuclear weapons. But a hypocritical American policy was also set 50 years ago: the White House would repeat Israel’s promise not to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Behind the scenes the U.S. cooperated with the nuclear program, and urged Israel to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but publicly, our government would parrot the claim of “nuclear ambiguity.”

  President Obama has continued the charade.

  And meantime Colin Powell states the fact openly to a man-about-town business partner (who has given a ton of money to Democratic and Republican establishment candidates and was married by Rudy Giuliani and gossips about Hillary Clinton’s health issues).

  The most important element of the Powell revelation, though, is the context. A friend points Powell to Netanyahu’s speech (to a dual loyalty Congress) against the Iran deal; and this is Powell’s very first argument. “Iranians can’t use one if they finally make one.” Because Israel has a ton of nukes. Not even the old Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine that preserved peace between the U.S. and the F.S.U. — but self-destruction.

• Those Terrible Takedowns Aren’t Mistakes, They’re Intentional Fakes

  Usually, when we see stupid and dangerous DMCA errors like Warner Bros. taking down its own website and Paramount taking down legitimate Linux torrents, it’s the studios we call out first for their wanton abuse of the system. But of course that’s only part of the story — there is a system of broken incentives both inside and outside the studios that has created an entire “anti-piracy” ecosystem. It started with the third parties that many studios and other rightsholders hire: self-styled copyright enforcement experts who charge a fee to piss an endless stream of DMCA notices into the wind of piracy. Some studios, like NBCUniversal (who we’ll be talking about in a moment) choose instead to build this function into their internal structure with anti-piracy divisions staffed by the same kind of folks. Thanks to the willingness of copyright holders to pay out for this pointless service, it’s grown into a whole industry — and it’s an industry for which the never-ending, whac-a-mole nature of the takedown game is a plus, since it means the job will never be done. While there’s plenty of blame to go around among media companies and lawmakers, it’s these takedown “experts” who are the most directly responsible for the epidemic of botched and fraudulent takedown notices.

  And it’s easy to see why: they need to pad the numbers. If we accept that the whole exercise is pointless (it is) and there’s no actual end goal (there isn’t) then what makes one anti-piracy outfit better than another? Why, sheer volume of pointlessness, of course! The executive who hired the firm that takes down two-million links can brag about his competence compared to the executive who only got one-million for the same price, and the executive who designed the internal division that hit three-million for even less is a damn hero — even though they’re all just futilely pecking away at “infinity”. And so, since there’s no real penalty for abusing the DMCA, these groups have zero incentive to fret about only sending fair and accurate takedowns. But that’s not all — they also have every incentive to actively pad their numbers with takedowns they know are bullshit, and as TorrentFreak discovered last month and recently demonstrated again in pretty undeniable terms, that’s exactly what they’re doing…

• Web Security Firm Sitelock Uses DMCA to Censor Critics

  Sitelock, one of the world’s leading website security companies, is using the DMCA to silence a vocal critic. Web design and services outfit White Fir Design has published several articles about Sitelock, but now the company has hit back by filing DMCA notices against screenshots included in White Fir’s reports.

• Pahlaj Nihalani’s censorship hurts Gajendra Chauhan

  Chauhan told ET it was wrong on the part of the CBFC to decide that “the killings never happened” without consulting historians. He added that he took up the role only after researching on the killings. “I have researched deeply and groomed myself to fit into the character of someone I respect a lot, in terms of appearance and character. I sometimes felt Prasadji’s aatma has come into me, that is my level of involvement in the project.” He said the film has shown only what happened. “I can proudly say that Mookerjee is the reason why Bengal is part of India. Jinnah wanted West Bengal to be a part of Pakistan and Mookerjee fought against that. He is the father of the ideology people voted for power in India. I feel the nation has not given Syama Prasadji his due. He unfurled the national flag in J&K in 1953. He was a great ideologue and the film will educate people about his personality which sadly has not gotten justice.”

• Sexually explicit Sunday Sport ads banned despite ‘censorship’ claim

Privacy/Surveillance

• If I see an ending, I can work backward.

  As an example the first time you visit a page on www.example.foo.invalid you might receive a cookie with the domain example.foo.invalid so next time you visit a page on www.example.foo.invalid your browser will send the cookie along. Indeed it will also send it along for any page on another.example.foo.invalid

  A supercookies is simply one where instead of being limited to one sub-domain (example.foo.invalid) the cookie is set for a top level domain (foo.invalid) so visiting any such domain (I used the invalid name in my examples but one could substitute com or co.uk) your web browser gives out the cookie. Hackers would love to be able to set up such cookies and potentially control and hijack many sites at a time.

  This problem was noted early on and browsers were not allowed to set cookie domains with fewer than two parts so example.invalid or example.com were allowed but invalid or com on their own were not. This works fine for top level domains like .com, .org and .mil but not for countries where the domain registrar had rules about second levels like the uk domain (uk domains must have a second level like .co.uk).

• Max Schrems shows how one privacy activist can make a global difference

  Max Schrems is at it again: after having made the sharing of private European data to corporations in United States banned by the European Court of Justice, he’s now seeking class action status for a privacy lawsuit against Facebook. This is one individual calling out the highest executive offices on the purest of bullshit, and succeeding with it – he does not just set an example for others, but shows all of us that one individual can end global wrongs.

  There was a small notice in a few news outlets yesterday, about how somebody is seeking class action status against a privacy lawsuit against Facebook. A TechCrunch article mentions his name, but not before calling him “privacy campaigner”, just like the BBC calls him “a privacy activist”, and only mentions his name halfway down the article. But to those of us who read court papers with all the boredom and dryness of an imminent dust explosion, the name Maximillian Schrems immediately rang bells from such court papers from a year ago.

  It used to be that the European Commission – the executive branch of the European Union – gave away private data on European citizens to U.S. corporations freely, obviously without asking said citizens first, on some sort of goodwill assumption that European privacy laws would be followed (which they couldn’t be in the first place, as the US has the NSA). This was called “The Safe Harbor agreement” for European private data.

• Unprecedented and Unlawful: The NSA’s “Upstream” Surveillance

  The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) — the statute the government uses to engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications — is scheduled to expire in December 2017. In anticipation of the coming legislative debate over reauthorization, Congress has already begun to hold hearings. While Congress must address many problems with the government’s use of this law to surveil and investigate Americans, the government’s use of “Upstream” surveillance to search Internet traffic deserves special attention. Indeed, Congress has never engaged in a meaningful public debate about Upstream surveillance — but it should.

  First disclosed as part of the Snowden revelations, Upstream surveillance involves the NSA’s bulk interception and searching of Americans’ international Internet communications — including emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic — as their communications travel the spine of the Internet between sender and receiver. If you send emails to friends abroad, message family members overseas, or browse websites hosted outside of the United States, the NSA has almost certainly searched through the contents of your communications — and it has done so without a warrant.

  The executive branch contends that Upstream surveillance was authorized by the FAA; however, as others have noted, neither the text of the statute nor the legislative history support that claim. Moreover, as former Assistant Attorney General for National Security David Kris recently explained, Upstream raises “challenging” legal questions about the suspicionless searching of Americans’ Internet communications — questions that Congress must address before reauthorizing the FAA.

  Because of how it operates, Upstream surveillance represents a new surveillance paradigm, one in which computers constantly scan our communications for information of interest to the government. As the legislative debate gets underway, it’s critical to frame the technological and legal issues that Congress and the public must consider — and to examine far more closely the less-intrusive alternatives available to the government.

• ‘It Looks Like You’re Trying To Harvest Cell Phone Data…:’ Quick-Start Guides For IMSI Catchers Leaked

• After Equation Group Dump, Cisco Finds New Zero-Day Flaw

• Cisco customers targeted by hackers using leaked NSA hacking tools

• Cisco finds new Zero-Day Exploit linked to NSA Hackers

• Shadow Brokers’ Cisco vulnerability exploited in the wild

• Cisco customers targeted using leaked NSA hacking tools

• Cisco warns of exploitation of new flaws linked to Shadow Brokers exploits

• NSA hacking tools used against Cisco customers

  Leaked NSA hacking tools are now being used on Cisco customers, according to the tech giant. The company published an advisory on Friday saying that NSA grade hacking tools are now being used against customers.

  The authors wrote that the “Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of exploitation of the vulnerability for some Cisco customers who are running the affected platforms.” Cisco have not yet identified those that have fallen prey to the exploit.

  The vulnerability affects a variety of Cisco product and by extension, anyone who is using them including any Cisco PIX firewalls and Cisco products running affected releases of Cisco iOS software, iOS XE software and iOS XR software. However, the company are currently checking whether the vulnerability affects any more of their products.

• UK Proposes Great Firewall, Can Digital India Do It?

  There is a ‘cyber-ideological war’ brewing in Britain; GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) in the UK have proposed what is being called the ‘Great British Firewall’, which will give the organization, greater surveillance powers, to keep malicious websites out of the reach of British enterprises. Privacy groups have started raising serious concerns, as the firewall could potentially open up private user information to British authorities in the process.

  GCHQ apparently has a reputation similar to that of NSA (National Security Agency) when it comes intrusive activities for the civilian population. Thomas Falchetta, the legal officer for Privacy International, paraphrased it, by saying “Given the broad scope of GCHQ’s hacking operations both domestically and abroad, this seems like the fox protecting the chicken.”

• UK might be planning a ‘Great British Firewall’

  You’ve probably heard of the Great Firewall of China, the virtual fortification that allows the Chinese government to monitor and restrict internet traffic to and from the world’s most populous nation.

  Well, the cyber-security chief of the UK Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) has suggested early plans for what sounds rather like a “Great British Firewall”.

  Privacy groups immediately sounded the alarm that it might pose a risk to freedom of speech, and offer the potential for Britain’s secret services to get up to no good. So what exactly is GCHQ proposing and should we be worried?

• Does the UK need or even want a ‘Great British Firewall’?

  You’ve probably heard of the Great Firewall of China, the virtual fortification that allows the Chinese government to monitor and restrict internet traffic to and from the world’s most populous nation. Well, the cyber-security chief of the UK Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) has suggested early plans for what sounds rather like a “Great British Firewall”. Privacy groups immediately sounded the alarm that it might pose a risk to freedom of speech, and offer the potential for Britain’s secret services to get up to no good. So what exactly is GCHQ proposing and should we be worried?

  Firewalls are standard tools for computer defence. They are essentially filters which can control what traffic enters and leaves a network. You are probably protected by a firewall right now, at your workplace or at home, that runs either on your computer’s operating system or on the hardware that provides your connection to the internet.

  A firewall can be configured to reject certain types of traffic deemed undesirable or potentially harmful. This might be a connection request from an untrustworthy source, such as a web address known to harbour hackers or spammers, for example. Or it could block a file that looks like it might contain a computer virus or other malware. While deflecting this sort of undesirable traffic the firewall allows standard traffic such as web browsing and email to pass through.

• Will The Washington Post Give Back Its Pulitzer And Stand Trial With Snowden?

  We already know that the Washington Post editorial board has some cognitive dissonance when it comes to Ed Snowden. Three years ago, right after the Washington Post itself, via reporter Barton Gellman, broke a bunch of the initial stories around the Ed Snowden documents — including the first public report on the Section 702 PRISM program — the editorial board wrote a piece condemning Snowden’s leaks. Now, it’s true (as many point out) that the editorial board is separate from the reporters who work at the paper, but it still is really quite amazing that the editorial board would not only burn a source like that but basically complain about its own journalism.

  It appears that three years later, the Post’s editorial board has not changed its perspective. In response to the campaign to pardon Snowden, the Washington Post has come out with a tone deaf editorial against pardoning Snowden, calling for him to be prosecuted, and insisting that Snowden caused real harm with the revelations. Here’s the really incredible part. The Post focuses its complaint on the revelation of the PRISM program — and that is the story that the Post broke. Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian had the first story, about the Section 215 mass phone records surveillance program. But it was the Post that had the first story about PRISM. And yet, the Washington Post now says that while revealing the 215 program may have been a public service, revealing PRISM was a crime.

  [...]

  Remember that, while many people falsely think that Snowden is the one who revealed these programs to the public, that’s not the case. He gave the documents to certain journalists, saying that he trusted them to sort through them and determine what was newsworthy, what was not, and what should be kept secret. It was the Washington Post that determined the PRISM program — which is still subject to legal challenges (though so far has been found to be legal) — was serious enough for news coverage. Not Ed Snowden. And yet now the Post says Snowden should be prosecuted for the journalistic decision it made, which earned it a Pulitzer.

• Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” is great entertainment and an important argument for pardon

  I just saw Oliver Stone’s Snowden. It’s an excellent film, no doubt, and also an important rebuttal to ongoing efforts by propagandists to limit America’s conversation to who Edward Snowden is, rather than what this whistleblower revealed.

• Why Global Privacy Should Matter to Americans: A Reply to Jack Goldsmith

  Jack Goldsmith’s response to my call for a pardon for Edward Snowden deserves a reply. I also have a few thoughts on what Susan Hennessey and Ben Wittes have now added to the debate.

  Jack and I agree that the reforms instituted since 2013 would not have happened without Snowden and have helped the NSA become more transparent, accountable and effective. We agree that this is a good thing because NSA operations are vital to national security and international stability. We also agree that Snowden should not be punished for exposing a program of domestic collection of telephone records approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that was—at best—of marginal value and legally questionable, was ruled illegal by another federal court and has now been ended by Congress.

• As a source — and a patriot — Edward Snowden deserves a presidential pardon

  President Obama’s administration has an unfortunate record of prosecuting whistleblowers, some of whom have been important sources for journalists.

  That’s not a legacy any president should want.

  In the waning days of his administration, the president can turn that around, not entirely, but in an important way by pardoning the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and allowing him to return to the United States from his Russian exile without facing charges.

  Obama absolutely should do so. Snowden did an important — and brave — service for the American public and, in fact, the world, when he made it possible for news organizations to reveal widespread government surveillance of citizens. Some of that surveillance broke the law; some, although within the law, was nevertheless outrageous and unacceptable. And, afterward, some of the wrongs were righted through legislative reform.

  One of the beneficiaries was The Washington Post, which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for stories made possible by Snowden’s leak of more than a million documents. (The Guardian U.S. shared in that award, given in 2014.) Some see it, then, as hypocritical for The Post’s editorial board to weigh in against a pardon, as it did in Saturday’s paper — even though the editorial-writing side is separate from the newsroom.

  In awarding its highest honor to both publications, the Pulitzer board cited The Post’s revelations “of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security”; in the Guardian’s case, for aggressive reporting that sparked “a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.”

  At the time of the revelations, the president himself declared that national debate important and worthwhile, although he criticized Snowden for breaking the law in making the classified documents public.

• FBI director: Cover up your webcam

  The head of the FBI on Wednesday defended putting a piece of tape over his personal laptop’s webcam, claiming the security step was a common sense one that most should take.

  “There’s some sensible things you should be doing, and that’s one of them,” Director James Comey said during a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

  “You go into any government office and we all have the little camera things that sit on top of the screen,” he added. “They all have a little lid that closes down on them.

  “You do that so that people who don’t have authority don’t look at you. I think that’s a good thing.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Mike Pence Just Gave The Dumbest And Most Dangerous Answer Of The Entire Campaign

  O’Donnell asked Pence if profiling can violate rights. He answered, “Well, of course, it can,” and then talked more about the importance of common sense.

  Pence never answered the question about how Trump’s plan to profile immigrants would work. His answer was some idiotic nonsense about political correctness and common sense.

  The Republican Party was the party of individual liberty, but under Donald Trump, the “common sense” of the president overrides the constitutional rights and protections of the American people. Gov. Pence’s answer wasn’t just idiotic. Pence expressed a form of idiocy that presents a danger to fundamental individual rights that are the backbone of the republic.

• Find A Good Kid Who Tries To Do The Right Thing And Suspend Him From School For A Year

  The idiots running the schools there later reduced his suspension to 30 days.

  A suspension that shouldn’t exist at all. (The message to kids: “If you see something, say nothing.”)

  On a positive note, this should teach Kyle things he wouldn’t have learned at school — like to always question authority.

• Death in County Jail ruled homicide; cause of death was dehydration

  The death of an inmate in the Milwaukee County Jail has been ruled a homicide, four months after corrections officers reportedly cut off his water supply for an extended period of time.

  The cause of death was dehydration, with other significant conditions including bipolar disorder, according to autopsy results released Thursday by the Milwaukee County medical examiner’s office.

  Terrill Thomas, 38, was found unresponsive in his cell on April 24, nine days after being arrested for shooting a man in the chest and later firing two shots in the Potawatomi casino.

  His family said he was in the throes of a mental breakdown when he was arrested. At the time of his death, he was awaiting a court-ordered psychiatric examination.

• Video Released in Tulsa Shooting Incident

  Police released video Monday of the scene where a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man Friday in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby fatally shot Terence Crutcher, 40, on Friday evening, after responding to an abandoned car blocking the road, according to The New York Times.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Nashville Council Member Admits AT&T & Comcast Wrote The Anti-Google Fiber Bill She Submitted

  We’ve been talking about how the next great battlefield in broadband is utility pole attachment reform. In many cities, the incumbent broadband provider owns the utility poles, giving them a perfect opportunity to hinder competitors. In other cities, the local utility or city itself owns the poles, but incumbent ISPs have lobbied for laws making it more difficult for competitors to access them quickly and inexpensively. Google Fiber has been pushing “one touch make ready” rules in several cities aimed at streamlining this bureaucracy by letting a licensed, third-party installer move any ISP’s gear (often a matter of inches).

• Is dialup still an option?

  Is the Internet usable on Dialup in 2016? No. You can’t even pretend it’s maybe usable. It pretty much would suck rocks to use the Internet on dialup today. I’m sure there are some people doing it. I feel bad for them. It’s clear we’ve hit a place where broadband is expected, and honestly, you need fast broadband, even 1 Megabit isn’t enough anymore if you want a decent experience. The definition of broadband in the US is now 25Mb down 3Mb up. Anyone who disagrees with that should spend a day at 56K.

• AT&T and Comcast helped elected official write plan to stall Google Fiber

  As the Nashville Metro Council prepares for a final vote to give Google Fiber faster access to utility poles, one council member is sponsoring an alternative plan that comes from AT&T and Comcast.

  The council has tentatively approved a One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) ordinance that would let a single company—Google Fiber in this case—make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself. Ordinarily, Google Fiber must wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send construction crews to move their own wires, requiring multiple visits and delaying Google Fiber’s broadband deployment. The pro-Google Fiber ordinance was approved in a 32-7 preliminary vote, but one of the dissenters asked AT&T and Comcast to put forth a competing proposal before a final vote is taken.

DRM

• HP Launched Delayed DRM Time Bomb To Disable Competing Printer Cartridges

  For decades now, consumers have been lured into a sour deal: pay for a relatively inexpensive printer, then spend a lifetime paying an arm and a leg for viciously overpriced printer cartridges. As most have learned first-hand, any attempt to disrupt this obnoxious paradigm via third-party printer cartridges has been met with a swift DRM roundhouse kick to the solar plexus. In fact if there’s an area where the printer industry actually innovates, it’s most frequently in finding new, creative and obnoxious methods of preventing cartridge competition.

  Hoping to bring this parade of awfulness to its customers at scale, HP this week unearthed the atomic bomb of printer cartridge shenanigans. HP Printer owners collectively discovered on September 13 that their printers would no longer even accept budget cartridges. Why? A firmware update pushed by the company effectively prevented HP printers from even detecting alternative cartridges, resulting in HP printer owners getting messages about a “cartridge problem,” or errors stating “one or more cartridges are missing or damaged,” or that the user was using an “older generation cartridge.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • From OHIM to EUIPO

    The great changes at EUIPO will continue with further reforms coming into force next year, including the abolition of the “graphical representation” requirement for EUTMs. Luis Berenguer, Head of the Communication Service of EUIPO, discusses the changes in an interview

• Copyrights

  • Most Young Millennials Love Piracy and Ad-Blockers

    More than two-thirds of all millennials admit to having downloaded or streamed pirated content, a new survey from Anatomy Media finds. The same group also has a high preference for ad-blocking, which is believed to be directly related to the high prevalence of invasive ads on pirate sites.

  • Microsoft sues Wisconsin man (again) for copyright infringement (again)

    Microsoft is hoping the third time will be the charm in its efforts to shut down a man once again being accused of pirating its products.

    The Redmond giant has filed suit [PDF] in the US District Court in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, against Anthony Boldin for illegally selling product activation keys for its products. The complaint seeks damages and a court order barring Boldin from selling its products without a license.

    Microsoft said that, through various websites he owned and operated, Boldin was selling decoupled product activation keys that allowed users to authenticate pirated copies of its software.

    The keys – obtained for use with academic, supplier, and internal copies of Microsoft Windows and Office – were sold by Boldin’s sites to customers who were then directed to other download sites (including Microsoft’s own sites) to get the software itself. To gather proof, Microsoft investigators made a handful of purchases directly from the sites.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Oracle vs Amazon: Oracle’s public cloud milestones so far

  The centrepiece of Oracle OpenWorld 2016 this week is a plan to go head to head with Amazon Web Services within the infrastructure as a service market. Oracle is a relative latecomer to the public cloud market but boldly claims its Generation 2 IaaS can take on AWS’ offerings. It’s ambitious to say the least: a Gartner report last year said AWS’s IaaS cloud is ten times bigger than the next 14 competitors combined, not that you’d know it from Oracle’s bullish language.

Kernel Space

• Bcache File-System Has Initial Encryption Patches

  It’s been a while since last having anything to talk about with regard to Bcachefs as a file-system aiming for speed while having ZFS/Btrfs-like capabilities and being spun out of the Bcache caching code. This file-system now has tentative patches for complete encryption support.

• GENIVI Alliance Announces New Open Source Vehicle Simulator Project

  The GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit alliance focused on developing an open in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and connectivity software platform for the transportation industry, today announced the GENIVI Vehicle Simulator (GVS) open source project has launched, with both developer and end-user code available immediately.

• Graphics Stack

  • libinput and the Lenovo T460 series trackstick

Applications

• mrxvt looking for maintainers

  mrxvt is a cool light-weight terminal emulator, not tied to a specific desktop environment and with minimal dependency. This was also one of my very first bigger contributions to Free Software. Well I had patches here and there before, but that’s one project where I stuck around longer and where I was quickly given commit rights. So it is dear to my heart. It was also my first big feature attempt since I started a branch to add UTF-8 support (actually any-encoding support), which is the normal way of things now but at the time, many software and distributions were still not working with UTF-8 as a default. Then I left for years-long wandering our planet on a motorcycle (as people who know me are aware) and because of this, drastically slowed down FLOSS contributions until a few years ago. Back as a contributor, mrxvt is not my main project anymore (you know which these are: GIMP and ZeMarmot!). I moved on.

• Flowblade 1.8 Released, Supports Keyboard Trimming, Clip Snapping

  The open-source video editor Flowblade has a new release available for download.

  Flowblade 1.8 arrives with a batch of key improvements into, including the ability to trim clips using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

  This way of working, say the Flowblade team, feels “more convenient and precise then always working with a mouse

• News about Blender second release candidate and other projects.

  The Chairman Blender Foundation and producer Blender Institute, Mr. Ton Roosendaal comw with this news about second release candidate and other projects…

• Proprietary

  • Microsoft Updates Skype for Linux to Version 1.8 [Ed: malicious software]

  • Adobe Flash Player Update with Critical Bug Fixes

  • Adobe Flash Player Update Download Available with Bug Fixes on Linux

  • Opera for Desktop Gets Free VPN on Windows, Linux, and Mac

    After bringing its free VPN services to iOS and Android, Opera has now released a free, no-login VPN for desktop users as well. The VPN is bundled in to the Opera browser and requires no sign-in or any setup – using it is as simple as the press of a single button. What this does is make using a VPN simple even for users who are not technologically-inclined. Opera’s browser VPN was first launched as a beta in April this year.

    A month later, Opera VPN was available as a standalone app on iOS. The VPN was then launched for Android in August before finally rolling out the final version for desktop users now.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Atop – Monitor real time system performance, resources, process & check resource utilization history

  • “PAM Mastery” ebook now out

  • The curious case of the switch statement

  • Get Started Writing Web Apps with Node.js: Using the All Powerful NPM

  • Microsoft SQL Server from PHP

  • Mirroring Keystone Delegations in FreeIPA/389DS

• Games

  • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Mac and Linux versions on the way

    Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is full of all sorts of strange allegories around prejudice. The game expects us to be surprised that people are distrusting and fearful of the augmented humans that could kill them in a heartbeat with their swiss army penis augmentation, when fact the augmented humans did in fact try and kill all of the regular folk towards the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution where a broadcasted signal – a bit like in Kingsman: The Secret Service – sent them all into a murderous rage. (Sorry, spoilers.)

    It’s certainly a strange thing, but if you can get your head around it (read: suspend your disbelief, ignore the pseudo-lofty stupidness, and generally crack on with things) then it’s a rather excellent game.

  • Some thoughts on ‘Siralim 2′, the never ending monster battling RPG

    You don’t need to play the first game, as they stand completely apart with their own story and introductions.

  • Dogma: Eternal Night is an in-development vampire MMO that will have Linux support [Ed: Microsoft Mono insider, so watch out]

    I have to say I think it looks pretty cool, the idea of being a vampire like that in an MMO would be pretty fun.

  • Unigine Is Working On Perhaps The Most Beautiful GPU Benchmark, Coming Later This Year

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kubuntu needs some K/Ubuntu Developer help this week

    Our packaging team has been working very hard, however, we have a lack of active Kubuntu Developers involved right now. So we’re asking for Devels with a bit of extra time and some experience with KDE packages to look at our Frameworks, Plasma and Applications packaging in our staging PPAs and sign off and upload them to the Ubuntu Archive.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • WebKitGTK+ 2.14

    These six months has gone so fast and here we are again excited about the new WebKitGTK+ stable release. This is a release with almost no new API, but with major internal changes that we hope will improve all the applications using WebKitGTK+.

  • Looking forward GNOME 3.22

    is still true! Between backend reworks, Summer of Code projects and spontaneous contributions from awsome random contributors, here are the things that I’m looking forward with GNOME 3.22 release.

  • We’re going to partay, karamu, fiesta, forever

    GNOME release 3.22 happens to be during one of the core days of the Libre Application Summit Hosted by GNOME (LAS GNOME) On top of a high rise, in Portland Oregon, we’re going to celebrate GNOME 3.22 in grand style with the conference participants and end the core days at LAS GNOME!

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Q4OS 2.2, Scorpion, testing

    Q4OS development team is pleased to announce immediate availability of the new significant update of the Q4OS ‘Scorpion’ desktop, version 2.2. This is a testing version of the Q4OS desktop, based on the recent Debian 9 Stretch release with the upgraded Linux kernel 4.6, GCC 6 and the Trinity 14.0.4 desktop environment. The alternative LXQT desktop is supported in Q4OS, so users can have Trinity and LXQT desktops alongside installed and choose which one to log in. Q4OS 2.2 ‘Scorpion’ continues to be under development so far, and it will stay as long as Debian Stretch will be testing. Q4OS ‘Scorpion’ will be supported at least five years from the official release date.

  • Absolute 14.2 released

    Based on Slackware 14.2

    Comes in a 32 as well as a 64-bit version. Same basic functionality, but most everything updated under the hood. No longer fits on a single CD — the usual installation method is a USB stick. With this size-constraint removed, larger apps like LibreOffice and Calibre are now included in the base installation.

  • OMV3 beta amd64/i386 images

    The amd64 and i386 ISO images for 3.0.36 (beta) can be downloaded for testing here. Please do not use them for production systems.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

  • Announcing upcoming Mageia 5.1 ISOs and an update on Mageia 6 progress

    As a community-led distro with a limited amount of resources and contributors, we stand by “Release when it’s ready” and don’t want to rush a release out until we are fully happy with it. Obviously, we are not yet fully happy with Mageia 6, though it is shaping up pretty well! On the other hand, we are still very pleased with Mageia 5 and want to continue supporting it until Mageia 6 is ready to take over.

• Red Hat Family

  • International Business Machines Corp. & Red Hat Inc Expand Collaboration on Enhancing Hybrid Cloud

    Both hardware and software businesses are poised on making the lives of their consumers easier through further extension of their partnership to provide better solutions

  • Red Hat Prepares for OpenStack Newton Improvements

    The next major milestone release of OpenStack, dubbed “Newton,” is currently scheduled to debut the week of October 3. While the release is not yet finalized, product teams at Red Hat already have a grip on what they see as the big improvements that OpenStack Newton will bring.

  • Herzog dons a Red Hat in a private Cloud

    HTI chose to build its new PTC system on a “private Cloud” powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and managed by Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms. The Enterprise Linux platform “allows for easier scaling for IoT (Internet of Things)-type network deployments and helps minimize the hosting footprint in Herzog’s datacenter, thanks to the flexible, stable foundation that it provides,” HTI said. Red Hat CloudForms, an “open hybrid Cloud management platform,” has helped Herzog transform its existing virtualized infrastructure into a private Cloud, through its on-demand scaling functionality. Red Hat Satellite helps Herzog maintain greater platform security and compliance with various regulatory standards, as well as manage its software lifecycle from testing through production. Herzog also worked with Red Hat Consulting to help bring its new offering to market.

  • How to partner with external marketing agencies

    A community-powered approach to working with the broad ecosystem of marketing agencies—to which more and more firms are turning these days—can produce new and inspiring results.

    I’ve seen it myself since I began leading marketing at Red Hat, especially during something we call our annual agency workshop. The workshop is our opportunity to strengthen the relationships, values, and shared knowledge that bind our community of marketing firms together.

  • Finance

    • What to Expect When Red Hat (RHT) Posts Q2 Results

    • Red Hat (RHT) Q2 Earnings: What’s in the Cards this Time?

    • Red Hat Earnings On Tap: Margin Expansion Key

  • Fedora

    • AsciiBind all the things!

      I have finally finished a, probably way too long, proposal for implementing a new Fedora Docs publishing toolchain using AsciiBinder.

      The proposal, also published using AsciiBinder, suggests that we definitively adopt AsciiDoc and convert our DocBook sources to it without delay. Further we should begin publishing with AsciiBinder, ideally by Fedora 26.

    • What is the Fedora Code of Conduct?

      We all live in a society. Every society has customs, values, and mores. This is how homo sapiens are different from other species. Since our childhood, in school, then college, and then at work, we follow a shared set of social values. This shared set of values creates a peaceful world. In the open source world, we strive for values that lead to us all being welcoming, generous, and thoughtful. We may differ in opinions or sometimes disagree with each other, but we try to keep the conversation focused on the ideas under discussion, not the person in the discussion.

      Fedora is an excellent example of an open source society where contributors respect each other and have healthy discussions, whether they agree or disagree on all topics. This is a sign of a healthy community. Fedora is a big project with contributors and users from different parts of the world . This creates a diverse community of different skills, languages, ages, colors, cultural values, and more. Although it is rare in Fedora, sometimes miscommunication happens and this can result in situations where the discussion moves from the idea to the person.

    • Wheee, another addition.

      I’m thrilled to announce that Jeremy Cline has joined the Fedora Engineering team, effective today. Like our other recent immigrant, Randy Barlow, Jeremy was previously a member of Red Hat’s Pulp team.

• Debian Family

  • Debian 8 Updated, Kubuntu Help Wanted, Mageia 5.1

    The Debian project announced an update to their stable Debian 8 branch, the sixth such update since its release. This update is primarily to address security issues. Elsewhere, the Mageia folks announced an update to version 5, released last summer, to hold users over since 6.0 has been delayed. The Linux Grandma put out the call for help today as they’re running a bit low on developers over there and the Free Software Foundation as well as Richard Stallman replied to the accusations of discrimination in the case of LibreBoot.

  • Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” Live ISO Editions Are Now Available for Download

    Just yesterday, September 18, 2016, we reported on the official availability of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” operating system, but no installation mediums of Live editions were announced.

    That changes today, September 19, 2016, as we’ve received a tip from one of our readers that both the installation-only and Live ISO editions have been released on the official channels and are now available for download (see the links below if you want to get them now).

  • Updated Debian 8: 8.6 released

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Our Poll Results Suggest Few People Use 32-Bit Ubuntu

        92% of omgubuntu.co.uk readers say they use a 64-bit version of Ubuntu as their primary OS, with just 7% relying on an Ubuntu 32-bit install.

Devices/Embedded

• Tiny $2.10 WiFi module taps ESP8285 WiFi SoC

  Itead has launched a $2.10, 14 x 13.5mm “PSF-A85” WiFi module based on the ESP8285 SoC, a version of the ESP8266 that adds 1MB SPI flash.

  In recent months, before releasing the faster, Bluetooth enabled ESP32 big brother to its popular ESP8266 WiFi SoC, China-based Espressif released a follow-on to the ESP8266 called the ESP8285. Now, Itead, which also makes various Sonoff-branded WiFi-enabled IoT gizmos, has released what appears to be the first third-party WiFi module based on the chip: the $2.10 (without antenna) PSF-A85.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung’s JerryScript gets a stable 1.0 version release

      JerryScript isn’t the only lightweight Engine that is working with embedded hardware right now. Other engines like Duktape, tiny-js and MuJS, D7, etc are also actively working on bringing Javascript support to embeddable devices. But Samsung’s backing here gives a clear edge to JerryScript and help it go mainstream.

    • Does your WhatsApp say the version has expired? Here is a Temp Fix

    • Video: How To – Apply a Voucher Code in the Samsung Galaxy Apps Store / Gear Manager

  • Android

    • [Oops] It looks like Nest accidentally aired a commercial featuring the Google Pixel

    • Google Play Books is getting much smarter with book recommendations

    • Pet peeves: things we wish Android handled differently

    • Android Studio v2.2 released to stable channel with new layout designer and ConstraintLayout, test recorder, APK Analyzer, and much more

    • Google’s upcoming Pixel XL won’t be the powerhouse phablet Android fans were hoping for

    • New Desire 10 Pro and Lifestyle: mid-range specs and HTC 10-inspired designs

    • HTC Desire 10 preview: Flashy outside, ordinary within

    • Google Trips: This iOS, Android app gives you all your travel data plus offline access

    • ZTE Axon 7 updated, Android 7.0 Nougat in the pipeline

Why China is the next proving ground for open source software

Western entrepreneurs still haven’t figured out China. For most, the problem is getting China to pay for software. The harder problem, however, is building software that can handle China’s tremendous scale.

There are scattered examples of success, though. One is Alluxio (formerly Tachyon), which I detailed recently in its efforts to help China’s leading online travel site, Qunar, boost HDFS performance by 15X. Alluxio CEO and founder, Haoyuan Li, recently returned from China, and I caught up with him to better understand the big data infrastructure market there, as China looks to spend $370 million to double its data center capacity in order to serve 710 million internet users.

Samsung releases Open Source HbbTV media player

Samsung Electronics announced that its Hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV) media player will be available as an open source project named HbbPlayer on github, an open source developer community. This will enable broadcasters and application developers who are writing HbbTV applications to test and validate them on a platform which can be implemented on any HbbTV 1.5-compliant TV.

How to make Open Source work for you

Business today is all about adapting, pivoting and expanding quickly. With market conditions changing ever so rapidly, open source has become the key to helping companies modify their solutions while keeping their IT expenditures and development time to a minimum.

Today, we’re starting to see a new crop of developers who grew up using open source methodologies to develop open source components. As these developers make their way into enterprise IT departments, they’re bringing their familiarity with and desire for open source with them.

Accordingly, we’ve been seeing tremendous amounts of innovation come from open source projects. The focus of many open source projects is on helping to solve the complex technology challenges that most businesses face today such as how to work with big data and how to build the best cloud applications.

So how can and should enterprises go about making open source work for them in the best way possible? Here are some factors to take note of.

Do you have a business or a hobby? Open source versus proprietary in the real world

The open-source world is an endlessly interesting and exciting place for developers. The inventory of technologies is always growing, and bleeding-edge software platforms often debut in open source marketplaces. For these same reasons, however, enterprises can grow weary of open source, a seemingly endless tweaking and tinkering game to customize software for business purposes. Some say a proprietary solution that utilizes open source is preferable for businesses that need to make moves in real life.

Events

• Manchester GNOME 3.22 Release Party – Friday 23rd Sept. @ MADLab [Ed: we're planning to be there.]

• LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME Conference Takes Place September 19-23

  Today, September 19, 2016, was the first day of the first-ever LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME open source conference for GNU/Linux application developers.

  As you might have guessed already, the event is being organized by the GNOME Project, the same non-profit organization that’s behind the popular GNOME desktop environment used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems around the globe, and an important part of the Free Software ecosystem.

  LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME conference’s main goal is to encourage the growth of the Linux application ecosystem among small and medium-sized businesses, as well as various educational institutions. It also aims to expand the collaboration between the Linux kernel and major GNU/Linux operating systems.

• Headed to LAS GNOME!

  By the time this gets posted on the blog, I will be headed to LAS GNOME. I’m really looking forward to being there!

  I’m on the schedule to talk about usability testing. Specifically, I’ll discuss how you can do usability testing for your own open source software projects. Maybe you think usability testing is hard—it’s not! Anyone can do usability testing! It only takes a little prep work and about five testers to get enough useful feedback that you can improve your interface.

• Fedora 24 release party in Paris

• HackMIT

  One of the core missions of a Fedora Ambassador is to represent the Fedora Community at events. On the weekend on September 17 and 18, 2016 I attended HackMIT as a representative of Fedora with Justin Flory. I was also honored to serve as a mentor to several teams.

• Tickets for systemd 2016 Workshop day still available!

  We still have a number of ticket for the workshop day of systemd.conf 2016 available. If you are a newcomer to systemd, and would like to learn about various systemd facilities, or if you already know your way around, but would like to know more: this is the best chance to do so. The workshop day is the 28th of September, one day before the main conference, at the betahaus in Berlin, Germany. The schedule for the day is available here. There are five interesting, extensive sessions, run by the systemd hackers themselves. Who better to learn systemd from, than the folks who wrote it?

• [LPC] Preliminary Microconference Schedule Up

  Every year we get a number of constraints on Microconferences which we try hard to accommodate. Accounting for all of those, we’ve put the preliminary schedule up here. If you notice any problems, please email contact@linuxplumbersconf.org and we’ll try to fix it

  Also note, this is preliminary, the Microconferences may still move around as we get requests to change them. Also note that the times of talks within Microconferences is highly likely to change (please see the MC leaders if you want this to change).

• World Port Hackathon 2016 concludes successfully

  Last month, the fourth edition of the World Port Hackathon took place in Rotterdam. Several teams worked on problems identified by representatives of the port community in workshops leading up to the hackathon. This year’s event was organised in co-creation with the Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) of Singapore.

• Nexenta to Showcase Its Open Source-driven Software Defined Storage Solutions at OpenStack Days Nordic 2016

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 49.0 Is Now Available

    While being delayed one week due to last-minute bugs, Firefox 49.0 is now available this morning.

    Firefox 49 ships with Linux Widevine support for handling this CDM similar to the existing Windows support for being able to play more protected HTML5 video content.

  • Mozilla emits JavaScript debugger for Firefox and Chrome

    Mozilla developers have released a new JavaScript debugger for Firefox.

    It’s hoped the new “Debugger.html” will replace todays XUL-based debugger, which the project’s Bryan Clark describes as “incredibly hard to change”.

    That may not necessarily happen, because Clark notes there’s another team in Firefox that’s working on refactoring the existing debugger code.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle pledges continued support for Java and NetBeans

  Last week, Oracle disowned NetBeans. The company announced it was turning its Java-based NetBeans over to the Apache Software Foundation. Now, Oracle is changing its tune on both NetBeans and Java Enterprise Edition (JEE).

  Oh, don’t get me wrong. Oracle still doesn’t want to manage NetBeans. But Oracle claims it’s not just dumping the NetBeans integrated developer environment (IDE) code. In an email, Bill Pataky, VP of Oracle Mobile Development Program and Developer Tools, told me, “Oracle is opening the governance model of NetBeans, not dropping support. Oracle has three products that depend on NetBeans.” These are:

Education

• Dear younger self, here are four tips for reaching your goals

Healthcare

• How a free mobile app fights Ebola and other global epidemics

  Luckily an open medical record platform already existed: OpenMRS. In 2015, Save the Children International identified the need for medical data collection in the Ebola treatment centers and reached out to the OpenMRS community. Around the same time, Google Crisis Response and Doctors Without Borders were working on a similar project Project Buendia, an Android client built on top of an OpenMRS server.

  Founded in 2004, OpenMRS is a free, modular open-source electronic medical record platform used in more than 60 low- and middle-income countries. As the OpenMRS site explains, OpenMRS is a multi-institution, non-profit collaborative led by Regenstrief Institute, a medical informatics research leader, and Partners In Health, a Boston-based philanthropic organization with a focus on improving the lives of underprivileged people worldwide through health care service and advocacy.

  OpenMRS includes many features out of the box, such as a centralized dictionary that allows for coded data, user authentication, a patient repository, multiple identifiers per patient (i.e., patient can have multiple medical record numbers), data entry for electronic forms, data export, patient workflows (so patients can be put into programs and tracked through various states), relationships (to track relationships between two people, such as relatives and caretakers), and reporting tools. Add-on modules are also available or can be developed.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Were New York, Minnesota Attacks Open-Source Jihad?[Ed: Microsoft-connected ‘news’ channel MSNBC. No comment needed. Microsoft loves Linux.]

Funding

• Armed with $5M, Boston open-source startup to expand in RTP

  Mautic, a Boston-based open-source marketing automation firm, has disclosed a $5 million fundraise – cash one of its executives says will fuel growth across the company, including in the Triangle.

  David Hurley, the company’s co-founder and chief finance officer, is based in Raleigh. He says the firm is focused on expanding in the area.

  “We’ve been building the team from an engineering and infrastructure standpoint,” he said Monday in an interview. “We’re really focusing on the things Raleigh does well. We’ve got an awesome talent pool in the area.”

• Open source marketing automation platform Mautic picks up $5M Series A and a new CEO from Applause

• Mautic Raises $5 Million Series A Round; also Announces Applause Executive, Matt Johnston, as CEO

• Mautic Gets $5M, Adds Applause Exec as CEO to Boost Open Source Marketing Tools

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Emacs 25.1 released

Licensing/Legal

• LLVM contemplates relicensing

  The LLVM project is currently distributed under the BSD-like NCSA license, but the project is considering a change in the interest of better patent protection. “After extensive discussion involving many lawyers with different affiliations, we recommend taking the approach of using the Apache 2.0 license, with the binary attribution exception (discussed before), and add an additional exception to handle the situation of GPL2 compatibility if it ever arises.”

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• Netflix’s Meridian, an open source benchmark disguised as a original program

  The 12 minute long Netflix Original “Meridian” might not be the most exciting program they’ve ever released but it is among one of the most interesting. The program is available to anyone, via the Creative Commons license they attached to it, up to an including competitors such as iTunes and Hulu. This seemly strange move is because it is actually a benchmark for encoding streamed video and the more people that see it the more information Netflix and others will gain. It is originally filmed in 4k resolution at 60fps, which is far more than most displays can handle and much larger than residential data infrastructure is used to handling.

• Vienna, KDZ release Open Government Implementation Model

  The City of Vienna and KDZ have released version 3.0 of their Open Government Implementation Model to the public in German as well as English. The Model describes five stages of a strategy as well as practical recommendations for politicians and administrations to implement open government.

• Open Data

  • Tube Heartbeat open data project reveals pulse of London Underground

    Oliver O’Brien, a Senior Research Associate at University College London (UCL), has created a wonderful visualisation of the volume of passengers traveling the London Underground on a typical workday. His Tube Heartbeat project builds on the outcomes of the TfL Rolling Origin and Destination Survey (RODS), which was made publicly available under the UK Open Government Licence (OGLv2). It shows the numbers entering and exiting each of the 268 stations and the numbers traveling each of the 762 links in between.

Science

• Star Trek: inspiring people and their tech since 1964

  Star Trek has inspired fans, technologies, and careers ever since its creation in 1964 by Gene Roddenberry.

Hardware

• We tear apart a hard drive and SSD to show you how they work

  It’s the day everybody dreads: You power up your PC and it sits dormant, failing to boot because your hard drive or SSD is dead. But after you stop cursing and reaching for your backups—you do create backups regularly, right?—you might as well make the best of things.

  There’s a world of small wonders hidden inside every storage drive if you take the time to dig around. Since storage drives die far less frequently than they used to, the opportunities for dissection are rare. So we’ve broken out our screwdrivers and dissected both a solid-state drive and a traditional hard drive for you, to reveal what makes them metaphorically tick. If your drives start actually ticking, back up your data now and start looking for a new one pronto.

Security

• Security advisories for Monday

• Why do we do security?

  I had a discussion last week that ended with this question. “Why do we do security”. There wasn’t a great answer to this question. I guess I sort of knew this already, but it seems like something too obvious to not have an answer. Even as I think about it I can’t come up with a simple answer. It’s probably part of the problems you see in infosec.

  The purpose of security isn’t just to be “secure”, it’s to manage risk in some meaningful way. In the real world this is usually pretty easy for us to understand. You have physical things, you want to keep them from getting broken, stolen, lost, pick something. It usually makes some sort of sense.

• New release: usbguard-0.6.2

• DNSync

  While setting up my new network at my house, I figured I’d do things right and set up an IPSec VPN (and a few other fancy bits). One thing that became annoying when I wasn’t on my LAN was I’d have to fiddle with the DNS Resolver to resolve names of machines on the LAN.

• The Cryptographic Key That Secures the Web Is Being Changed for the First Time

  Soon, one of the most important cryptographic key pairs on the internet will be changed for the first time.

  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the US-based non-profit responsible for various internet infrastructure tasks, will change the key pair that creates the first link in a long chain of cryptographic trust that lies underneath the Domain Name System, or DNS, the “phone book” of the internet.

  This key ensures that when web users try to visit a website, they get sent to the correct address. Without it, many internet users could be directed to imposter sites crafted by hackers, such as phishing websites designed to steal information.

• Oracle will acquire cloud security vendor Palerra [iophk: "one cannot vend security"]

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• IN PHOTOS: Copenhagen holds car-free day

  The car-free day began with the Copenhagen Half Marathon, where roughly 22,000 runners pounded the pavement for 21.0975 kilometres on a course that began at Fælledparken in Østerbro and wound its way through Nørrebro, Frederiksberg and the inner city.

• Six US States Declare Emergency after Major Gasoline Pipeline Spill; Media Almost Silent

  The Colonial Pipeline spill has caused 6 states (Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and North Carolina) to declare a state of emergency. Gasoline (petrol) prices on the east coast are likely to spike. Yet, most puzzling is how this vast emergency and its likely effect on cost of living has gone unnoticed by mainstream media outlets. The pipeline is owned by Koch Industries: is this why the media is silent?

• Haze from Indonesian fires may have killed more than 100,000 people – study

  A smog outbreak in Southeast Asia last year may have caused over 100,000 premature deaths, according to a new study released Monday that triggered calls for action to tackle the “killer haze”.

  Researchers from Harvard and Columbia universities in the US estimated there were more than 90,000 early deaths in Indonesia in areas closest to haze-belching fires, and several thousand more in neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia.

• Study estimates 100,000 deaths from Indonesia haze

  Indonesian forest fires that choked a swath of Southeast Asia with a smoky haze for weeks last year may have caused more than 100,000 deaths, according to new research that will add to pressure on Indonesia’s government to tackle the annual crisis.

  The study by scientists from Harvard University and Columbia University to be published in the journal Environmental Research Letters is being welcomed by other researchers and Indonesia’s medical profession as an advance in quantifying the suspected serious public health effects of the fires, which are set to clear land for agriculture and forestry. The number of deaths is an estimate derived from a complex analysis that has not yet been validated by analysis of official data on mortality.

  The research has implications for land-use practices and Indonesia’s vast pulp and paper industry. The researchers showed that peatlands within timber concessions, and peatlands overall, were a much bigger proportion of the fires observed by satellite than in 2006, which was another particularly bad year for haze. The researchers surmise that draining of the peatlands to prepare them for pulpwood plantations and other uses made them more vulnerable to fires.

• Think California’s current drought is bad? Past incarnations have lasted hundreds of years

  California is now five years deep into one of its most severe droughts on record, and scientists are continually probing the different factors that affect the state’s climate, and how much those are related to the overall warming of the globe. Increasingly, this means looking back into the past for clues about how the region has changed over the last few thousand years and what influences might shape its future.

  In this connection, new research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports suggests the Pacific Ocean may play a bigger role than anyone thought — and an unexpected one. Moreover, it suggests that massive long-term droughts can hit the region in conjunction with cycles of ocean warming and cooling — and that if these patterns continue to hold, another megadrought could lie in the future.

  “What this paper provides is a new analysis of the link between what happens in the ocean and what happens in terms of the water availability on the land,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate system expert at Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study.

Finance

• Zuckerberg’s “compound” raises red flags for housing board

  An advisory board recommended a California city refuse Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to demolish and rebuild four homes around his property because of privacy concerns, saying it won’t support the building of a “compound.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Tom Watson plot to rid Labour of registered supporters in bid to stop Left-wing seizing leadership again

  Tom Watson has unveiled plans to axe Labour’s registered supporters and give MPs a greater say in appointing the party’s future leaders in a bid to prevent another Left-wing takeover.

  The deputy leader is also taking plans to Labour’s ruling body today which would see the return of shadow cabinet elections in which more moderate MPs could enter Jeremy Corbyn’s top team.

• I Protected Hillary Clinton In The Secret Service – Here’s Why Her ‘Fainting’ Video Really Scares Me

  I protected First Lady Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and their family while I served in the Secret Service Uniform Division as an officer from 1991-2003.

  By now, you have most likely seen the startling video of Hillary Clinton ‘fainting.’ Through the lens of my 29-year-career in The Service, I can see what a naked-eyed media pundit cannot: There is something seriously wrong with Mrs. Clinton.

  Pneumonia or overheating are highly suspect excuses and I’ll explain why.

  My analysis is not partisan. I cared for and protected the Clintons for many years. It was my duty to guard Mrs. Clinton in the Secret Service and I was so close to the First Family that the Supreme Court subpoenaed me to testify on the details of Bill Clinton’s late-term scandals.

• What Are They Afraid Of?

  If all the major TV networks got together and decided to televise a presidential debate restricted to Republican nominee Donald Trump and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, while barring Democrat Hillary Clinton, it would be recognized as an act of media bias. But what if the debates this fall are restricted to just Trump and Clinton? That, too, needs to be recognized as an intentional act of media exclusion.

  Since 1988, televised presidential and vice-presidential debates have been controlled by a private organization with no official status: the Commission on Presidential Debates. The commission grew out of a deal cut in the 1980s by GOP and Democratic leaders. Today, even though the U.S. public largely distrusts the two major parties’ presidential candidates, TV networks seem willing to let them again dictate the terms of debate, including who gets to participate.

  Presidential debates have been televised in every campaign since 1976. (They rarely happened before then; the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 were an exception.) From 1976 through 1984, they were sponsored and run by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters. In 1980, the League insisted on including independent candidate John Anderson.

  In 1985, the national chairs of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf, signed an agreement that referred to future debates as “nationally televised joint appearances conducted between the presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the two major political parties. . . It is our conclusion that future joint appearances should be principally and jointly sponsored and conducted by the Republican and Democratic Committees.”

• How Trump May Win Ohio and Pennsylvania

  The every-four-years parade of east coast journalists trooping out into the Rust Belt of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and their neighbors has begun.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Brazilian Court Agrees Wikipedia Can Use Publicly-Available Personal Information For An Article

  A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about a victory in the courts for Creative Commons licenses, noting that such judgments were still rather few and far between. That’s unfortunate, in the sense that some people still think CC licensing is weird, rarely-used or even invalid. The situation regarding Wikipedia is similar. Even though it has been around for 15 years — just like Creative Commons — it too suffers from continuing doubts about its aims and methods, and a relative dearth of legal cases helping to clarify the status of both.

  Here’s one from Brazil, which has recently been settled in favour of Wikipedia’s parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. It concerns the Brazilian musician Rosanah Fienngo, who had brought a lawsuit objecting to information about her personal life being included on her Portuguese Wikipedia page.

• Journalist says YouTube tried to manipulate her interview with EU Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker

  A journalist has claimed that YouTube tried to manipulate her interview with the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker – days after his office backed a new tax that could cost the firm millions.

  Laetitia Birbes, a popular videoblogger, interviewed Mr Juncker for a project hosted by YouTube but says representatives of the service had asked her to run difficult questions past a press officer beforehand.

  “I found out they expected for me to ask only very soft questions,” Ms Birbes said in a video posted on Facebook on Sunday.

• Andy Hall: Thai court finds UK activist guilty of defamation

  A UK activist who campaigned for the rights of migrant workers in Thailand’s fruit industry has been found guilty of defamation and computer crimes.

  Andy Hall, from Lincolnshire, was given a three-year suspended jail term and fined 150,000 baht ($4,300; £3,300).

  Hall had contributed to a report by a Finnish watchdog, Finnwatch, in 2013 alleging the Natural Fruit Company mistreated its workers.

• MuckRock & Vice Announce Fellowship To Investigate Peter Thiel

  Vice’s Motherboard tech site has also stepped up and agreed to double the amount so that even more people can file Thiel-related FOIAs.

  Of course, the name MuckRock chose for this is a clear play on the well-known Thiel Fellowship, in which he gives $100,000 to entrepreneurial college students to work on building companies, rather than completing school.

  And while I’m not so sure how much Thiel-related info is really FOIA-able, this may put to the test Thiel’s stated claim that he wasn’t against journalism that made him look bad, in funding lawyer Charles Harder to sue Gawker into oblivion, but rather to “send a message” about protecting privacy. Of course, when you try to silence the press, there’s always a chance that the press decides to turn an even bigger spotlight on you. I guess now we have to wait and see if Harder starts threatening MuckRock with trademark infringement claims over the name…

• If You Build A Censorship Machine, They Will Come

  If you have the power to censor other people’s speech, special interests will try to co-opt that power for their own purposes. That’s a lesson the Motion Picture Association of America is learning this year. And it’s one that Internet intermediaries, and the special interests who want to regulate them, need to keep in mind.

  MPAA, which represents six major movie studios, also runs the private entity that assigns movie ratings in the U.S. While it’s a voluntary system with no formal connection to government, MPAA’s “Classification and Ratings Administration” wields remarkable power. That’s because most movie theaters, along with retail giants like Wal-Mart and Target, won’t show or sell feature films that lack an MPAA rating. And a rating of “R” or “NC-17” can drastically limit the audiences who are allowed to view or buy a movie.

  Power creates its own temptation. MPAA itself has been accused of rating independent films more harshly than those produced by MPAA’s own member studios. And this year, a class action lawsuit seeks to force MPAA to use its ratings system to eliminate tobacco imagery from children’s films. The lawsuit, Forsyth v. MPAA, claims that MPAA has a special legal duty to avoid harm to children, and because of that duty, MPAA should be required to give an “R” rating to every film that contains smoking or other tobacco use.

• Palekar approaches HC against pre-censorship of play’s script

  Noted filmmaker and actor Amol Palekar has approached the Bombay High Court challenging rules which make pre-censorship of the scripts of plays mandatory by the Maharashtra State Performance Scrutiny Board.

  Palekar, in his petition, has said the rules are ‘arbitrary’ and violative of the fundamental rights of a citizen guaranteed under the Constitution.

• Zuckerberg accused of ducking responsibility by Norwegian editor

• Norwegian editor challenges Zuckerberg to discuss censorship

• With Facebook’s flaws in the spotlight, Mark Zuckerberg’s silence is deafening

• 1,000,000 People Fell for This Mark Zuckerberg Hoax, Here’s Why It Could Never Actually Happen

• ‘Facebook is faceless’ – Jack Tame has a go at ‘crazy’ censorship of Kiwi tattoo artist’s creation

• Māori tattoo expert wants more consultation over censorship of moko images on social media

• ‘Censorship no-no, but artists should set limit’

• Amol Palekar challenges pre-censorship of plays

• Amol Palekar moves HC against pre-censorship of play scripts

• Amol Palekar approaches HC against pre-censorship of play’s script

• Amol Palekar moves Bombay HC against pre-censorship of scripts

• Van Damme vows DA will fight censorship of internet and social-media websites

• South Africa: Internet Censorship Bill Unconstitutional – DA

• DA blasts Internet ‘censorship’ Bill

• DA believes new internet censorhip bill is unconstitutional

• DA blasts new ‘Censorship Bill’

• The Internet Censorship Bill must be blocked – Phumzile Van Damme

• Censorship Bill under fire

• DA tears Internet Censorship Bill apart

• Anonymity: worth defending

  “If anonymity wasn’t allowed any more, then I wouldn’t use social media,” a 14-year-old told me over the kitchen table a few weeks ago. He uses forums on the website Reddit to have debates about politics and religion, where he wants to express his view “without people underestimating my age”.

  Anonymity to this teenager is something that works for him; lets him operate in discussions where he wants to try out his arguments and gain experience in debates. Anonymity means no one judges who he is or his right to join in.

• Does anonymity need to be defended? Autumn magazine 2016

• KPI Responds to Blurred Swimmer Image Argument

• Broadcasting Commission Washes Hands of Censorship as Indonesia Loses Focus

• Indonesian swimmer sparks censorship debate

Privacy/Surveillance

• Leaked Oversight Report Shows Illegal Surveillance, Massive Constitutional Violations By Germany’s Intelligence Service

  Unfortunately, the violations found by the Data Protection Commissioner have since been codified into law. The BND is harvesting even more than it was when it was inspected, having just finished a 300 million euro revamp of its surveillance tech. Much like here in the US pre-Snowden, the oversight in Germany is relatively toothless. Whatever exists will be actively thwarted by intelligence agencies (the report states that BND deleted logs the Commissioner asked to examine) or by other legislators who are always willing to sacrifice the public’s rights for national security.

• Photos of the Submarine Internet Cables the NSA Probably Tapped

  The words “mass surveillance” usually bring to mind wiretaps, security cameras, and the NSA hoovering unfathomable quantities of cellphone metadata and Internet activity. Few pause to consider the physical aspect of that last type of data collection: The government taps hundreds of cables that snake across the ocean floor, carrying data around the world.

  Artist Trevor Paglen reveals some of those cables in a recent series, offering a visual reminder of how vulnerable your data is, and how easily it is accessed. “Once you start looking into the infrastructure, it becomes obvious very quickly that 99 percent of the world’s information goes through little tubes under the ocean,” Paglen says. “Those are very juicy targets for someone who wants to surveil the world.”

• Cars will make up 98% of mobile-to-mobile traffic by 2021 [Ed: 'smart' means surveillance]

  Internet radio and information services will generate approximately 6,000 petabytes of data a year

• ‘Snowden,’ a picture of the cybersecurity state

  The impact of all this information has been enormous, both for the U.S. government and Snowden’s own personal life. Since releasing the information to the world, he has been holed up in Russia, with only temporary permission to stay. His American passport has been revoked. He cannot move around freely or communicate easily, for fear of U.S. covert agents seeking to apprehend him – or worse.

  The movie doesn’t depict much of his Russian life, a decision that tends to reinforce the film’s message that there is no privacy anymore. If it showed more about how Snowden communicates now, it might provide useful insights into how Americans – and others around the world – could potentially use encrypted software to communicate without being subject to government surveillance.

• Oliver Stone’s Snowden: The NSA is “running a dragnet on the whole world”

  Veteran American filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has been directing since the mid-1980s, has made a movie about National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden follows its titular character’s evolution from his enlistment in 2004 in the US Army Reserve as a Special Forces candidate, at which time he was a “patriot” and firm supporter of the war in Iraq, to his decision in 2013 to expose the NSA’s illegal efforts at universal surveillance.

• Why were there three loud bangs and an evacuation at GCHQ today?

• RECAP Three loud bangs and evacuation at GCHQ as ‘incident’ simulated in Cheltenham [Ed: trying to get the population accustomed to panic and terror, maintaining power]

• UK spy agencies to combat modern slavery – Theresa May [Ed: so GCHQ is doing immigration now]

• Spies will join fight against slavery gangs, May declares

• UK spy chiefs to join Theresa May’s anti-slavery taskforce

• British spies will join anti-slavery task force to stamp out ‘evil’ of modern-day exploitation

• Theresa May orders spy chiefs to block illegal immigration routes into the UK

• Spies to join fight against slave trade ‘evil’, Theresa May announces

• Theresa May announces British spy chiefs will join battle against modern slavery

• Theresa May tasks UK intelligence with combatting slave trade suring UN summit

• British PM says spy chiefs to join new taskforce to ‘stamp out’ modern slavery

• Britain’s spooks have a new mission – to fight people trafficking and stop illegal immigration and modern slavery [Ed: They told us GCHQ was to stop terrorism and now it does immigration, copyright enforcement and what not?]

  THERESA MAY has controversially ordered spy chiefs into the fight against illegal immigration and modern slavery – as she demands global action against the scourge.

  The PM today urged world leaders to make tackling people trafficking as important an issue as winning the war on drugs.

  And she revealed the heads of Mi5, Mi6 and GCHQ would be joining Ministers on a new ‘anti-slavery’ taskforce.

• Student Hackers Dive into NSA Challenge [Ed: Pedowashing puff pieces abound]

• Hackers hit some Cisco customers using new vulnerability from leaked NSA hacking tools

• Shadow Brokers BENINGCERTAIN Tool Deployed in Live Attacks

• Some Cisco Customers Are Being Hacked With NSA’s Exploit Tools

• Leaked NSA cyber weapons were more damaging to Cisco than originally thought

• Hackers Hit ‘Some’ Cisco Customers With Leaked NSA Hacking Tools

• Cisco patches Equation group exploit

• Cisco discloses PIX firewall, IOS software security holes

• Cisco Warns of IOS Flaw Vulnerable to ShadowBrokers Attack

• Cisco Warns of Second Firewall Bug Exposed by Shadow Brokers

• Cisco reveals third remote flaw in NSA group hack

• Cisco warns of another ‘Shadow Brokers’ leaked zero-day

• Cisco plugs another ‘Shadow Brokers’ hole

• Cisco warns of NSA-linked information disclosure risk in ‘multiple’ products

• Boys Noize gives an NSA crash course in new video for ‘Snowden’

• Boys Noize’s ‘Mayday’ Video Is a Truth Bomb Set to a Beat

• Washington Post turns on Snowden despite receiving Pulitzer Prize for his NSA leaks

  The Washington Post says whistleblower Edward Snowden should not be granted a presidential pardon from Barack Obama. This is despite the newspaper receiving a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting of the NSA leaks sent to the Post by Snowden.

• House Intelligence Committee’s List Of ‘Snowden’s Lies’ Almost Entirely False

  So, last week, I wrote up a long analysis of the House Intelligence Committee’s ridiculous smear campaign against Ed Snowden, highlighting a bunch of misleading to false statements that the report made in trying to undermine Snowden’s credibility as he seeks a pardon from President Obama. The Committee insisted that it had spent two years working on the report, but it seems like maybe they just needed all that time because they couldn’t find any actual dirt on Snowden.

  In my analysis, I pointed to some of Snowden’s public responses, highlighting how the House Intel Committee was either completely misinformed or lying about Snowden. But Barton Gellman, one of the four reporters who Snowden originally gave his documents to, and who has done some amazing reporting on the Snowden leaks (not to mention, who is writing a book about Snowden) has responded to the report as well, and highlights just how incredibly dishonest the report is.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Just under 30 percent of French Muslims reject secular laws – poll

  Just under 30 percent of France’s 3 to 4 million Muslims reject the country’s secular laws, according to an Ifop poll published by the French weekly Journal du Dimanche.

  When asked if they considered the Islamic legal and moral code of sharia to be more important than the French Republic’s laws, 29 percent of respondents answered “yes.”

  The poll found that 20 percent of male Muslim respondents and 28 percent of female Muslim respondents were in favour of the face veil, the niqab, and of the burqa which covers both face and body.

  Another 60 percent said they were in favour of letting girls and women wear a head scarf at schools and universities which is forbidden at France’s secular public institutions.

• ‘No matter the price’, Amal Clooney seeks justice for Yazidi sex slaves

  Islamic State militants who have enslaved, murdered and raped Yazidi women and children must be brought to justice, no matter the price, international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney said on Monday.

  Clooney, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, is on a mission to prosecute the Islamist group through the International Criminal Court for their crimes against the Yazidi community.

  She announced in June she would represent Yazidi women in Iraq who have been victims of sexual slavery, rape and genocide by Islamic State militants, also known as ISIS.

• Black man shot by Tulsa police had hands ‘in the air,’ says pastor who reviewed video of the shooting

  A 40-year-old black man who was fatally shot by a Tulsa police officer had his hands up and appeared unarmed when one officer Tasered him and another fired at him, according to a local pastor who reviewed footage of the incident Sunday.

  The department hasn’t commented publicly on the video or said whether police recovered a weapon from the scene.

  Terence Crutcher died in the hospital Friday evening after being shot once, Tulsa police told the Associated Press. Police said two officers found Crutcher standing by his SUV, which had broken down in the middle of the road.

  As Crutcher approached the officers, he refused commands to raise his hands and instead reached into the vehicle, AP reported police saying. At that point, one officer fired a Taser and another fired a round, police told AP.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• How Pirates Shaped The Internet As We Know It

  Today is “International Talk like a Pirate Day.” While it’s a lot of fun to act like a pirate, drink rum and catch up on Errol Flynn movies, piracy is also a serious issue with real economic and legal significance. As electronic devices become an increasingly ubiquitous part of our lives, the content we consume has moved from analog to digital. This has made copying – as well as pirating – increasingly easy and prevalent.

  Adding fuel to the flames of this rising “pirate generation” has been the content industry’s recalcitrant and often combative attitude toward digital markets. Piracy, and the reactions to it, has had an immense impact on the daily lives of ordinary Americans, shaping their digital experience by determining how they can share, transfer and consume content.

  As soon as electronic storage and communication technology was sufficiently developed, digital piracy became accessible. Whether it’s a song, movie, video game or other piece of software, you could suddenly reproduce it without having to steal it off a shelf or obtain any specialized machinery to counterfeit it. Additionally, if you wanted to listen to an mp3 of the latest Britney Spears album on your computer, there weren’t many lawful options. This led to a surge in online piracy and helped foster a culture of online file-sharing.

  Out of this period came some ridiculous anti-piracy campaigns, but also major legislation both good and bad (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Communications Decency Act) as well as legal battles that would set key precedents for how we access the digital world.

• Making Sense of Modern Pornography

  Pornography helped shape the Internet—for instance, with its need for high-bandwidth technology—and it reflects and magnifies its trends. The triumph of porn has come at a cost to the industry itself, which can no longer produce a Jenna Jameson. Despite MindGeek’s near-monopoly of the tube sites (which, like other Internet platforms, are underregulated), their content is increasingly crowd-sourced. Mass production in the San Fernando Valley has been replaced by an amateur landscape in which everyone is a potential producer, and in which our fantasies and worst aspirations—our greed, our desire to humiliate, to dominate—are fed back to us in larger quantities than ever before. Decentralization hasn’t led to diversification (except at the margins, where buying ethical porn is like buying vinyl). Most porn remains conservative, brutal, and anonymous. It’s rapid-fire, often monotonous, and even if, or because, it does the trick, much of it is pretty depressing. It’s hard to see how local protests, however admirable, can resist a business model that already profits from decentralized, unregulated, amateur production. Except for the few companies that have profited from distribution, it’s unclear who makes money from porn, and how that money connects either to the work of performers or to how they are treated. With the decline of the industry, pornography, like the Internet itself, seems ever harder to control. Some will find that cause for horror, others, for celebration. Every era gets the porn it deserves. ♦

• Open WiFi hotspots, city-WiFi and anonymity

  It is not reasonable to expect a café owner to keep a database of all local WiF users. That would require an extensive and very privacy sensitive register that cannot be tampered with and that can stand up to legal procedures. And still, it would do nothing to identify an individual user on the cafés single IP address. At least not with the relatively cheap and simple WiFi equipment normally used in such places.

  It all quickly gets complicated and expensive. This would effectively kill free WiFi with your coffee.

  The same general questions can be raised when it comes to Juncker’s free city WiFi. But there is a difference. Public sector operated WiFi will have more money and can apply common technical standards. As the number of users in a city-WiFi can be expected to be substantially higher that at a single café – there would not only need to be some sort of password protection but also individual user names, linked to personal identity. At least if you want to meet with the ECJ ambition to be able to identify single users.

  In both cases, anonymity will be more or less impossible.

  And when it comes to city-WiFi, we can expect various law enforcement and intelligence agencies to show a keen interest.

DRM

• HP confirms that its printer firmware blocks some remanufactured cartridges

  EVIDENCE IS growing that printer maker HP put a ‘self-destruct’ protocol into a firmware update that would kill off printers using hooky cartridges.

  The news follows the revelation that thousands of people started getting the same error message about their cartridge on the same day, 13 September. Not a Friday.

  One third-party ink supplier carried out an investigation and it was discovered that the end-of-life date was programmed into a firmware update in March 2016.

  A statement to Dutch media explained that HP does indeed take steps to block cartridges “to protect innovation and intellectual property”.

  However, this could have been handled better. HP could have, you know, told people and that.

  HP, one of the companies that has been forced to raise prices post-Brexit, has never made any secret of how it doesn’t like third-party cartridges, but it really should have been explicit if it was going to do this.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Colour combinations: getting back to WYSIWYG

    Guidance on protecting colour combinations in Europe has evolved over time. But in the light of recent decisions is further clarification needed? Roland Mallinson investigates

• Copyrights

  • Copyright Is Not an Inevitable or Divine Right, Court Rules

    The Delhi High Court has delivered a landmark judgment which allows a local university copyshop to print course packs, using parts of commercial educational books. The judge held that copyright is not an inevitable or divine right. Copying for educational use is fair dealing, whether it’s done by hand or automatically in an organized fashion.

  • Former Disney Digital Boss Says He “Loves Piracy”

    Entertainment industry workers usually speak about illegal downloading in the harshest of terms but for one former Disney executive, it has its upsides. Speaking at the huge All That Matters conference, Samir Bangara admitted that he “loves” piracy as it’s a great indicator of content popularity.

  • Guy Arrested Over KickassTorrents Blocked From Talking To His US Attorney

    Just a few weeks ago, we had lawyer Ira Rothken on our podcast (it’s a really great episode, so check it out if you haven’t heard it yet). Rothken has been involved in lots of big copyright cases, but is probably most well-known these days as Kim Dotcom’s US lawyer. In that episode we talked a lot about the Kim Dotcom situation, but also spent a fair amount of time on the case of Artem Vaulin, who was arrested in Poland for running the search engine KickassTorrents. The US is seeking to extradite him to stand trial in Illinois. On the podcast, Rothken expressed some concerns that he hadn’t been able to speak directly to Vaulin and noted that he was working on it.

  • Former UMG Exec: Major Label Music Should Cost More And DMCA Safe Harbors Should Be Destroyed

    If you’re going to argue against YouTube, Spotify, etc. and the supposed wholesale screwing of artists, it helps if:

    A. You’re not a former member of an entity with decades of experience in screwing artists, and

    B. You have some grasp of basic economic concepts.

    Paul Young, a former director of licensing for Universal Music Group, has an op-ed posted at The Hill decrying the unfairness of streaming services and the wrongness of the DMCA. But any point he’s trying to make is buried under ignorance and the demand that some artists be treated more equally than others.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Duo Collaborates With Google to Provide Verified Access for Chrome OS

  At Duo, we’re heavy users of Chromebooks. In fact, over a quarter of our employees use Chromebooks daily for their jobs. Chromebooks are excellent choices for many of our internal needs and are relatively easy to administer. People in all different roles across the company are using Chromebooks, and we’re steadily increasing our adoption where it makes sense – yes, even members of our DevOps team are using Chromebooks.

Server

• Parity Check: Beware the Public Cloud Bandwagon [Ed: uses the Clown Computing buzzword]

  To determine how far along a company is in their cloud migration, McKinsey asked over 800 CIOs and senior IT executives if at least one corporate workload was primarily run on a particular cloud tier. For large enterprises, only 24 percent were using a virtual private cloud in 2015, but that skyrockets to 71 percent in 2018. Ditto public cloud, with large enterprise use going from 10 percent in 2015 to 51 percent in 2018.

• Oracle Takes On Amazon in Cloud Infrastructure

  Oracle set its sights on cloud infrastructure leader Amazon Web Services on Sunday, introducing a new cloud platform to combine the elasticity of private cloud with the performance, security and regulatory compliance of on-premises computing.

  Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and CTO, announced the new services from the opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, the company’s big customer conference, which kicked off Sunday.

• Mesos at Strava

• DevOps: How to Persuade Your Boss to Buy In [Ed: uses the DevOps buzzword]

  So there you are, you and your ace tech team, all excited about DevOps. You know that DevOps is the methodology that will move you past “yak shaving” and into building an IT infrastructure that will streamline and move your company forward. But how do you sell this to your bosses, and especially your non-technical bosses? Victoria Blessing, Operations Engineer for the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University, described the basics in her LinuxCon North America 2016 presentation.

  To start, Blessing explained the meaning of “yak shaving,” which was coined by Carlin Vieri at MIT. It refers to a series of tasks that must be completed in order for you to be able to do what you were trying to do in the first place. While it can really be applied to any aspect of life, it’s something that we, in IT, constantly fall victim to. Getting caught up in the little details it takes to get things done, and then we’re constantly fighting fires. It’s a part of the culture problem that we have.”

Kernel Space

• Linux 4.8-rc7 Kernel Released: Final In 1~2 Weeks

  Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 4.8-rc7 a few minutes ago and it’s looking like this release cycle will likely drag on with a 4.8-rc8 release being likely next week.

• Linux Kernel 4.8 Could Land October 2 as Linus Torvalds Announces the Seventh RC

  Linus Torvalds just made his regular Sunday announcement to inform the community about the availability of the seventh and last Release Candidate (RC) development build of the forthcoming Linux 4.8 kernel series.

  According to Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel 4.8 Release Candidate 7 is once again bigger in patches than he was expected. Last week, we reported that things are calming down and that this series will be a normal one with seven RCs, but it now looks like it won’t happen, and there should be one more RC released next week, September 25, 2016.

• Linux 4.8-rc7

  Normally rc7 is the last in the series before the final release, but by now I’m pretty sure that this is going to be one of those releases that come with an rc8. Things did’t calm down as much as I would have liked, there are still a few discussions going on, and it’s just unlikely that I will feel like it’s all good and ready for a final 4.8 next Sunday.

• 2016 LiFT Scholarship Winner Ksenija Stanojevic: Learning Linux Driver Development

  A few years ago I decided to try Linux and it was surprisingly easy to install and use. Since I started with Ubuntu there were already lots of tutorials online for beginners. Initially I was interested in learning about the Linux kernel but using Linux led me to discovery of new tools such as vim, git, and bash shell.

  I started experimenting with the kernel over a year ago when I wrote a simple hello module and loaded it into the kernel. After that I started making simple fixes using scripts such as checkpatch.pl and submitting patches. My confidence grew and eventually I joined the Eudyptula challenge to deepen my knowledge and I started making even bigger changes to the kernel tree. After being accepted into the Outreachy program, I had the opportunity to learn more about driver development and also got to work on embedded ARM devices running the Linux operating system.

• It’s official, Linux was released on September 17, 1991

  25 years ago, on August 25, 1991 Linus Torvalds announced the kernel he was working on. That kernel later became Linux. August 25th is celebrated as the birthday of Linux. But the interesting fact is that August 25 is not the date when Linux was released.

  In an interview during LinuxCon North America (Toronto), Torvalds told me that the first release of Linux (version 0.01) was never announced publicly. He uploaded it to an FTP server and sent an email about it to people who showed interest in it.

  When I asked about the date for the first release, he said that didn’t remember the date as he lost all the emails about it. Later, during a keynote discussion with Dirk Hohndel (VP and chief open source officer of VMware) at LinuxCon, he said that the only way to find the date is by finding the tarball of the first release and check the time-stamp.

• More Intel DRM Changes For Linux 4.9, Including DMA-BUF Implicit Fencing

• What is cloud native computing?

  Cloud native computing as championed, advocated and evangelised by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) itself is an approach that uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices.

• Graphics Stack

  • [ANNOUNCE] xorg-server 1.18.99.901

  • X.Org Server 1.19 Release Candidate 1

    The first release candidate of the X.Org Server 1.19 is now available along with some last-minute API/ABI breaks.

    On Friday we knew new X.Org Server 1.19 was being finalized with release manager Keith Packard putting out an early test release and a call for any final API/ABI changes. This morning were some final API/ABI changes relating to cursor warping that were led by Jonas Ådahl in working on XWayland support. Those two changes are the only new commits since Friday’s premature release.

  • As Prelude To Merging Gallium3D Driver, Etnaviv Libdrm Support Lands

Applications

• GnuCash 2.6.14 released

  The GnuCash development team announces GnuCash 2.6.14, the fourteenth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

• GnuCash 2.6.14 Free Accounting Software Improves Investment Lots, Fixes SQL Bugs

• Avidemux 2.6.14 Open-Source Video Editor Supports Lagarith Lossless Video Codec

  The open-source video editor Avidemux, received a new maintenance update (version 2.6.14) the other day, September 17, 2016, and it is now available for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac, and Windows.

  Avidemux 2.6.14 is both a feature and bugfix release, coming exactly one month after the unveiling of the previous stable build, namely Avidemux 2.6.13. According to the release notes, the new version implements automatic check for new versions of the Qt interface (check are performed once a day), re-implements support for Windows XP (for those still using it) by adding support for the MXE cross-compiler.

• Calibre 2.68 eBook Converter and Organizer Released for Linux, Windows, and Mac

  Kovid Goyal released yet another weekly update of his popular, cross-platform, and open-source Calibre ebook library management software for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.

• Kodi v17 “Krypton” Beta 2

  Kodi 17 features a huge amount of work in areas like video playback, live TV and PVR/DVR, the music library, skinning and more. It features a new default skin, as well as a new default touchscreen skinned, named Estuary and Estouchy, respectively. With all this work done over the months some bugs might slip through and were hoping to quickly squash the coming beta releases.

• Kodi 17 Steps Closer With Krypton Beta 2

• Kodi 17 “Krypton” Beta 2 Adds New Android 7.0 Nougat Passthrough Audio API

• After Ten Years, Vim (Vi IMproved) 8.0 Open-Source Text Editor Is Here

  After ten long years, the popular Vim (Vi IMproved) open-source and cross-platform text editor used by many programmers worldwide has received a major update that brings lots of interesting new features and improvements.

• Proprietary

  • Remember The Milk Now Has an Official Linux App

    Remember The Milk, a popular web-based to-do and task management service, has introduced an official desktop Linux app to its herd of official clients.

  • Adobe Flash Player Update Download Available Now<

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Switch to Overcloud with Network isolation been setup via TripleO Master branch

  • lftp a sophisticated ftp client – file handling

• Wine or Emulation

  • Wine-Staging 1.9.19 Released

    Wine-Staging 1.9.19 was released this weekend as the latest experimental patch-set atop of the newest bi-weekly Wine release.

  • Release 1.9.19

    The Wine Staging release 1.9.19 is now available.

• Games

  • Dragon Bros action platformer release in Early Access with Linux support

    We certainly aren’t short on action platformers! Dragon Bros [Official Site, Steam] recently released with Linux support in Early Access.

  • Check out ‘Binaries’ if you fancy an eye bending challenge on Linux

    The developer of ‘Binaries’ [Official Site, Steam] sent me a copy of their game to check it out and it’s impressive. It’s a platformer where you’re controlling two balls at the same time, each in slightly different level layouts, it’s genius.

    The game was quietly released for Linux a few months after the Windows version and the developers forgot to even announce it. They only announced it at the start of this month. So you can be forgiven for not knowing about it.

    The game is made by Ant Workshop Ltd, who come from my own homeland of the UK. That hasn’t swayed me towards it at all though (honest!), it’s just a brilliantly designed game. It also has a small amount of our terrible humour in it.

  • Face hell in ‘Devil Daggers’, now available for Linux

    Are you ready to face hell? I sure wasn’t apparently. Devil Daggers [Official Site, Steam] is now out for Linux and I took a little look.

    Devil Daggers is a first-person arena style shooter, you’re essentially always trying to beat your previous scores, and everyone else. What’s really cool is you can download a replay of anyone’s game to see how they did it. The game is rather simplistic, but it’s brilliantly designed to hook you in.

  • Unigine 2.3.1 Now Supports GPGPU Computing Via Compute Shaders, Renderer Improvements

  • Stellaris: Leviathans DLC announced, making space feel a little less empty

  • PPSSPP, the Best Free PSP Emulator, Now Lets Users Record Their Video Games

    A new stable release of the PPSSPP free, cross-platform, and open-source PSP (PlayStation Portable) emulator application has been made available for download, version 1.3.

    PPSSPP 1.3 is here seven months since the release of the previous maintenance update, namely PPSSPP 1.2, and adds various interesting additions, such as better support for Android-based Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphones, as well as any device running Apple’s iOS 9 or later mobile operating system.

    There’s also improved support for 64-bit Android TV platforms, a memory leak patch for Raspberry Pi single-board computers, the implementation of the latest FFmpeg multimedia backend, and a workaround for some rendering issues on Tegra K1 and Tegra X1 mobile processors.

  • Devil Daggers, a very highly rated fast-paced shooter should come to Linux soon

    The developer of Devil Daggers [Official Site] has teased a Linux version to come soon, exciting, as it looks great and has very positive reviews overall.

  • Become a box in ‘What The Box?’ a rather funny online shooter that has Linux support

  • Fantasy role-playing game ‘The Dwarves’ set to release on December 1st

  • Freespace 2 looks set to gain an open source mission editor

    Freespace 2 was released in 1999 and still to this day holds up as one of the best space shooters around, and my own personal favourite. The mix of seriously intense space battles with an interesting story I thought was really well done overall. One day I would love to see it gain another game in the series. In 2002 Volition release the source code to Freespace 2!

  • GNOME Games Levels Up With Gamepad, Fullscreen & PlayStation Support

    Despite being an avid retro gamer I’ve never used the GNOME Games app — and I’ve really been missing out.

  • ‘Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’ Mac And Linux Versions Announced, Marking Series Linux Debut

    Get yourself some augmentations no matter your operating system.

  • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to make its way to Linux and Mac

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDevelop 5.0.1 released

    One month after the release of KDevelop 5.0.0, we are happy to release KDevelop 5.0.1 today, fixing a list of issues discovered with 5.0.0. The list of changes below is not exhaustive, but just mentions the most important improvements; for a detailed list, please see our git history.

    An update to version 5.0.1 is highly recommended for everyone using 5.0.0.

  • Qt Graphics with Multiple Displays on Embedded Linux

    Creating devices with multiple screens is not new to Qt. Those using Qt for Embedded in the Qt 4 times may remember configuration steps like this. The story got significantly more complicated with Qt 5’s focus on hardware accelerated rendering, so now it is time to take a look at where we are today with the upcoming Qt 5.8.

  • Qt’s Comprehensive Display/Graphics Options

    Qt developer Laszlo Agocs has written a thorough walkthrough for the official Qt blog about the different Qt graphics options with multiple displays on embedded Linux.

    This walkthrough provides a look at the state of Qt graphics on Qt 5.7~5.8, particularly for the embedded use-case. Among the backend options for Qt with EGLFS are KMS/DRM using GBM buffers, KMS/DRM with EGLStreams, Vivante fbdev, Broadcom Dispmanx (Raspberry Pi), Mali fbdev, and X11 full-screen windows. Yes, Qt does support KMS/DRM with EGLStreams/EGLDevice for NVIDIA’s Linux driver support — for those that didn’t know, the approach NVIDIA has been pursuing for NVIDIA Wayland support.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Media Player Indicator Is A Slick Sound Menu for GNOME Shell

    Sound Menu in Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, Raven’s player controls appear for all apps that sport MPRIS2 integration.

  • Epiphany 3.22 (and a couple new stable releases too!)

    It’s that time of year again! A new major release of Epiphany is out now, representing another six months of incremental progress. That’s a fancy way of saying that not too much has changed (so how did this blog post get so long?). It’s not for lack of development effort, though. There’s actually lot of action in git master and on sidebranches right now, most of it thanks to my awesome Google Summer of Code students, Gabriel Ivascu and Iulian Radu. However, I decided that most of the exciting changes we’re working on would be deferred to Epiphany 3.24, to give them more time to mature and to ensure quality. And since this is a blog post about Epiphany 3.22, that means you’ll have to wait until next time if you want details about the return of the traditional address bar, the brand-new user interface for bookmarks, the new support for syncing data between Epiphany browsers on different computers with Firefox Sync, or Prism source code view, all features that are brewing for 3.24. This blog also does not cover the cool new stuff in WebKitGTK+ 2.14, like new support for copy/paste and accelerated compositing in Wayland.

  • You’re Invited to the UK GNOME Release Party This Friday

    Are you in the UK? Within reasonable reach of Manchester? And a fan of the GNOME desktop? You’re invited to the UK GNOME Release Party taking place this Friday…

  • GNOME’s GUPnP Released After A Decade Of Development

    Version 1.0 of GNOME’s GUPnP has been released after about a decade in development along with the associated GSSDP project.

    GUPnP provides a framework around creating UPnP (Universal Plug n Play) devices and control points. GUPnP is designed around GNOME technologies like GObject. GSSDP is what implements the SSDP resource discovery and announcements.

Distributions

• Rolling Release Vs. Fixed Release Distros — Which Linux Distributions Are Better?

  Different methods are available for updating Linux distributions. On this basis, we can broadly classify various distros as rolling distributions and fixed release distributions. Rolling means that the updates are pushed as soon as they are coded. In fixed release, the updates are tested thoroughly and pushed at once.

• Solus Users Are the First to Get the Mozilla Firefox 49 Web Browser, Update Now

  The Solus developers announced a few moments ago on their project’s official Twitter account that the latest Mozilla Firefox 49.0 web browser has landed in the main software repositories.

• New Releases

  • 4MLinux 20.0 Promises to Be a Special Version, Final Release Launches November 1

    4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today, September 18, about the release and immediate availability for download of the Beta development milestone of his upcoming 4MLinux 20.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

    And it looks like he has some big plans for the final, stable release of 4MLinux 20.0, which should hit the streets on November 1, 2016, promising users that it will be a special version of his independent operating system for personal computers, which always includes the latest and most advanced software versions and GNU/Linux technologies.

  • Black Lab Linux 7.7 Officially Released with Latest Security Updates from Ubuntu

    Today, September 19, 2016, Black Lab Software’s CEO Robert J. Dohnert informs Softpedia about the release of the seventh maintenance update to the long-term supported Black Lab Linux 7 computer operating system series.

  • Black Lab Linux 7.7 Released

• Arch Family

  • You can now run Arch Linux on Windows using AWSL

    Linux users often want to run Windows software on Linux, but Windows users may want to run Linux software, too. Linux not only has a lot of features that saves your time but also makes your working a little less boring. The best part is that Live Installations allow you to try out the software before you wipe your entire hard drive.

• OpenSUSE/SUSE

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Provides Operating Environment for SAP HANA®, Express Edition

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s new installer lets you spin up a private cloud in just 4 hours

    Red Hat Inc. wants to help organizations deploy private clouds faster, and to that end has just unveiled a new tool called the QuickStart Cloud Installer (QCI) that should make it possible. The new installer comes just one week after the company rolled out Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, based on the OpenStack Mitaka release.

    Red Hat’s new installer differs from previous installation tools the company has released in that it’s an all-in-one solution for installing various technologies from its product suite, including CloudForms, OpenShift and Red Hat Virtualization as well as OpenStack. Based on Red Hat’s Satellite system management technology, QCI allows users to create a fully functional private cloud environment in less than four hours, the company claims.

  • Understanding evdev

    evdev is a Linux-only generic protocol that the kernel uses to forward information and events about input devices to userspace. It’s not just for mice and keyboards but any device that has any sort of axis, key or button, including things like webcams and remote controls. Each device is represented as a device node in the form of /dev/input/event0, with the trailing number increasing as you add more devices. The node numbers are re-used after you unplug a device, so don’t hardcode the device node into a script. The device nodes are also only readable by root, thus you need to run any debugging tools as root too.

  • A Detailed Look At The Evdev Protocol

  • IBM (IBM), Red Hat (RHT) Enter Expanded Could Collaboration

    IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, announced enhancements and growth in their long-standing alliance to better help clients embrace hybrid cloud. Through joint engineering and deeper product collaboration, the two companies plan to deliver solutions built on key components of Red Hat’s portfolio of open source products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability offerings. This move will help position IBM Power Systems as a featured component of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud strategy spanning platform infrastructure located both on and off premises.

  • Finance

    • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Set to Announce Quarterly Earnings on Wednesday

    • Worth Watching Stocks: Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT), Triumph Group Inc (NYSE:TGI), Owens Corning (NYSE:OC)

    • Red Hat (RHT) Q2 Earnings: What’s in the Cards this Time?

    • Research Reports Coverage on Application Software Stocks — Cadence Design Systems, Red Hat, Intuit, and LifeLock

    • Notable Analysts Assessment of Stock: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Ayoub Elyasir: How Do You Fedora?

      Ayoub Elyasir was born and raised in Tripoli, Libya. He currently works as a data engineer at Almadar. He says he’s passionate about “humanity, technology, open source, literature and poetry,” and enjoys swimming, body building and reading. Ayoub includes Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as childhood heroes. His favorite food is grilled chicken and hummus.

      Ayoub started using Linux years ago. In fact, he told us, “My migration to Linux dates back to 2008 with openSUSE 11.” Ayoub started to use Linux as a curiosity. However, today he uses Linux and open source products completely. He gradually shifted from KDE and openSUSE to Fedora with GNOME.

    • Chapeau 24 “Cancellara” Distribution Is Now in Beta, Based on Fedora 24 Linux OS

      Just a few days after informing the community about the plans for the upcoming Chapeau 24 “Cancellara” GNU/Linux distribution, developer Vince Pooley is now releasing the first Beta milestone into the wild.

      Yes, you’re reading it right, a first Beta of Chapeau 24 “Cancellara” is now available for download so you can get an early taste of those awesome new features that we revealed for our readers in an initial report. And, as expected, the development release is based on the Fedora 24 operating system and ships with Linux 4.7 kernel.

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” Officially Released, Brings over 90 Security Fixes

    The Debian Project announced the release of the sixth maintenance update to the stable Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” operating system series, Debian 8.6, which brings new installation mediums with up-to-date components.

    Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 “Jessie” is here to add various important improvements to almost 80 packages, as well as to integrate all the security updates that have been released in the distribution’s official software repositories since the release of Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 “Jessie.” Approximately 95 security updates are included in the new stable release, including the latest kernel version.

  • Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 Released With Updated Components

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical Releases New Linux Kernel Updates for Ubuntu 16.04, 14.04 & 12.04 LTS

        Just a few moments ago (September 19, 2016), Canonical published several security advisories to inform the Ubuntu Linux community about the availability of new Linux kernel updates for all supported Ubuntu releases.

      • Ubuntu OTA-13 lands with new keyboard languages and more

        Although not very popular, Canonical has been ploughing ahead with its Ubuntu Touch OS. Today, the latest over-the-air update has arrived on devices. OTA-13 brings with it several improvements including to language support and performance.

        Ubuntu OTA-13 introduces Copy and Paste on legacy applications, Korean and Latvian keyboards, an improved Emoji keyboard and various app startup time improvements (calendar, calculator, camera, dialer). The release also brings with it various synchronization improvements: users will now be able to sync multiple calendars and have the option to sync these calendars with the open-source cloud solution, OwnCloud.

      • The 5 Best New Features in Ubuntu Phone OTA-13

        See what’s new in Ubuntu OTA-13, the latest update to the Ubuntu touch operating system for phones and tablets.

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 Launches This Week for Ubuntu Phones, Here’s What’s New

        Today, September 19, 2016, Canonical was supposed to launch the OTA-13 update for Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices, but it didn’t happen. Lukasz Zemczak is back, and he informs us that the update should arrive for all users later this week.

        However, Canonical did publish the complete list of new features implemented in the Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 update, and we would like to tell you all about them. Let’s start with the copy/paste support, which has been updated to work with legacy X11 applications as well.

      • Ubuntu OTA-13 Released With Copy/Paste Support For Legacy Apps

      • Private cloud server and IoT gateway runs Ubuntu Snappy on RPi

        The “Nextcloud Box” is a private cloud server and IoT gateway that combines a Raspberry Pi, running Snappy Ubuntu Core, with a WDLabs 1TB HDD.

        Nextcloud, Canonical, and WDLabs have collaborated on launching the Nextcloud Box, defined as “a secure, private, self-hosted cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) platform.” The private cloud device provides the open source Nextcloud storage, syncing, and communication software on Snappy Ubuntu Core running on a Raspberry Pi 2. The system also includes a 1TB PiDrive HDD from WDLabs, and a SanDisk microSD loaded with Snappy. Apache, MySQL and Nextcloud 10 are pre-installed on the HDD.

      • Nextcloud Box: A cloud for your office or living room

      • Nextcloud Joins Up with Western Digital, Canonical to Drive Private Clouds

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Revisited: Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE + Xfce

          The KDE and Xfce editions of Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” recently came out. Over a month ago, I had reviewed the MATE edition, and while I was generally happy with how it worked, there were a handful of minor usability issues and other niggles that detracted from the experience enough that I couldn’t recommend that a newbie install it by him/herself. Given that, I wanted to see if maybe the KDE or Xfce editions could make up for the deficiencies that I observed in the MATE edition. Follow the jump to see what each is like. Given that the main base of Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” is common to all of these editions, I’m not going to spend too much time rehashing things like application installation for their own sake; instead, these reviews will be shorter, and will focus on the differences relative to the MATE edition.

        • Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Zorin OS 12 Linux Enters Beta with Many New Features

Devices/Embedded

• Universal prototyping shield supports numerous Arduino models

  On Indiegogo, Awesome PCB’s $13 “ArduShield” prototyping shield supports a wide variety of Arduino boards, including the Uno R3, Mini, Mini Pro, and Nano.

  The ArduShield “universal” prototyping shield is notable for supporting a wide variety of Arduino boards, including the Mini and Mini Pro. Created by Polish developer Szymon Mackow at his company, Awesome PCB, the ArduShield is available for $13 for another 23 days on Indiegogo, where it has successfully funded. (The $8 early birds are all gone.) A $17 version adds a breadboard, and $22 gives you two ArduShields. All packages ship in November. A stretch goal has added a footprint for a WS2812 RGB LED.

• Raspbian Likely To Use Firmware-Based KMS For Raspberry Pi As Temporary Measure

  Eric Anholt has been working at Broadcom for more than two years to develop the “VC4″ open-source Linux graphics driver stack consisting of the DRM/KMS kernel driver and VC4 Gallium3D driver in user-space. While there’s been 2+ years of work and tons of progress made, it’s still not feature-complete compared to the older proprietary driver and as an interim solution Eric has hacked up a firmware-based KMS path.

• Turn Your Feature TV Into A Smart TV For $30

  I used Android rather than a Linux distribution because wanted to add smart TV capabilities to my basic TV and not use it as a desktop PC. Beyond that, Android has a far richer app ecosystem than desktop Linux. Whether you are talking about Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime or whatever,…everything is available on Android as an app. And, if you want to use it as a casual gaming system then everything from Angry Birds to Asphalt is available, too. You just need to find a compatible Bluetooth game controller that works with Android.

  Although this is a full-fledged smart TV setup with 4K support, it can also support casual web browsing and let you get some work done.

• HackADay: Controlling computers and stuff with the mind

  I am very slothful. I let computers do my work. That’s why I became a sysadmin. In this article I am going to describe how I lifted up my lazyness to the next level by triggering a command with my mind to install a new virtual machine with: MariaDB, Nginx and WordPress.

  [...]

  In the next video clip, I recorded a proof of concept. First I got a connection with my headset (the light turns blue), then it took me a while to be focused. As soon as I have a focus level of 80, my program will turn on a LED and call ansible-playbook. In the clip we will see that in my Amazon AWS-Console a new virtual machine will start and install WordPress, MariaDB and Nginx. At the end of the clip, I will copy the IP-address of the new host and connect to the WordPress-Page on it.

• What Drones Did for the Sky, Robot Subs Are About to Do for the Sea

  One of the first in this field was OpenROV, a group that uses Linux computers and Kickstarter funding to develop their submersibles. Led by NASA engineer Eric Stackpole, the group launched a 5 lb. consumer/educational ROV the size of a laptop in kit form for just $900 in 2012. Their latest model, shipping in November, is the Trident. This sub is small enough to fit in a rucksack under an airplane seat. Trident’s tether connects to a floating, towed buoy with a Wi-Fi connection to the operator, giving a new level of freedom.

• Artificial Intelligence, The Search For The Perfect Slave

  Take, as first example, Mycroft, which started as “a friendly AI virtual assistant for Linux users” but, as you will see, can find its “places” at home to help. And, it is open source. So, there is no limit to what you can adapt it to.

• i.MX6 UltraLite COM offers up to 64GB on-board eMMC

• Skylake box-PC targets transportation applications

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Tizen Store to Support More Countries for Samsung Z2 Launch

      The Samsung Z2 has already been succesfully launched in India and South Africa, with indicators showing the Kenya launch will be soon. This is the third Tizen based Smartphone that has been released by Samsung. Previous models were the Z1 which was launched in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, and the Z3 which was only distributed in India.

      Now, looking at the Tizen Store website, we see that the site itself now supports languages in the following countries and implies these will be the launch markets for the Z2: Sri Lanka, South Africa, Nigeria, Nepal, Kenya, India, Ghana, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The store has already started accepting payment in some of these countries.

    • Samsung Tizen Store Now Available to Users in Indonesia

    • Grab a FREE 3D Tizen Experts Watch Face Courtesy of LuxuryWatches

      LuxuryWatches has made a special edition 3D Tizen Experts watch face and is giving away copies of it for FREE to our readers. This new 3D looking watch face has been made specifically for the Gear S2, and it should work with the Gear S3 once it releases in early October. The watchfaces have also been programmed to alter brightness depending on external light on it by making use of the S2’s Internal light sensor.

  • Android

    • Android-x86 6.0 Marshmallow Uses Mesa 12.0, Adds F2FS File-System

      While Android 7 “Nougat” is available as the latest upstream from Google, the Android-x86 folks have finally put out their first stable release of Android-x86 6.0 Marshmallow.

      In addition to pulling in the latest code from the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) with those improvements made by Google for Android Marshmallow, the Android-x86 developers have as usual added in various extra features.

    • The HTC 10 Review

      It probably goes without saying right now that HTC has been a troubled company for some time now. With the One M8 we finally saw that they were making a recovery, but with the Snapdragon 810 and One M9 HTC suffered a massive blow as their offerings just weren’t competitive with the Galaxy S6 or Galaxy Note5 for the time. Realistically speaking, any phone with a Snapdragon 810 or 808 just couldn’t really compete. With the launch of the Snapdragon 820, it seems that Qualcomm had finally launched an SoC that was a real improvement over the Snapdragon 801 and 805, and in the time since then we’ve seen a return to normalcy in the smartphone market.

      A a result, HTC has been under fairly enormous pressure to perform this product cycle. Their attempt to meet that pressure is the HTC 10, which is the best of what HTC has to offer distilled into a single package. That distillation starts at the name, it seems, as this phone isn’t called the One M10. There’s no One branding anymore, and the phone is just their tenth, and HTC is hoping that it’s a “perfect 10” in every respect.

    • Android Studio 2.2 Beta Ships With Beta GPU Debugger

      Android developers announced the release today of the Android Studio 2.2 integrated development environment with many changes.

      Android Studio 2.2 features a new user interface designer to quickly create app UIs, a new flexible layout manager as well, improved C++ support as well as CMake support, an APK analyzer, Instant Run improvements, an experimental build cache to reduce compile times, virtual sensors support in the Android emulator, an Espresso Test Recorder to record UI interactions with apps, and much more.

    • Android Studio 2.2 Adds Layout Editor, More

    • Android Studio 2.2

      Android Studio 2.2 is available to download today. Previewed at Google I/O 2016, Android Studio 2.2 is the latest release of our IDE used by millions of Android developers around the world.

    • 5 NEW iOS 10 Features Android ALREADY HAS!

      iOS is the new software that powers the latest iPhones, packed with all kinds of new features… features that Android users have been enjoying for a while now. Here are the top five new features on iOS that already exist on Android.

    • Samsung’s latest Note 7 battery fix violates Android compatibility docs [Updated]

    • Android Central 306: Note 7 Armageddon

    • Galaxy Note 7 UK exchange program begins [Updated]

    • The unlocked Xperia X Compact is available for pre-order on Amazon for $500, plus a $50 credit

    • Xperia C4, C4 Dual and C5 Ultra Dual getting Android 6.0 Marshmallow

    • Must read: top 10 Android stories

    • More leaked images of Samsung’s high-end Android clamshell are here

    • Google Pixel phones might be able to dual boot Android ROMs

    • Update: Google Allo rumored to be launching on September 21

    • Leak: Google Pixel XL To Run Android 7.1 Based On Benchmark

    • Xperia C5 and C5 Ultra receive update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow

    • Morning brief: Allo, is it Mi you’re looking for?

    • 5 world-building games for Android and iOS inspired by Minecraft

    • Android 6.0 Marshmallow finally arrives on Xperia C5 Ultra

    • Nexus 5 gets a taste of Nougat via unofficial Android 7 ROM

    • Remix OS Player Makes It Simple To Run Android Games In Windows

    • Play Video in Background With Chrome Beta for Android

    • XDA is Sponsoring The Big Android BBQ, Discounts Codes Galore!

    • Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime debuts in India for Rs. 18,790 ($280)

    • Latest Google Photos update makes sharing photos much, much easier

    • ‘Don’t Starve’ Comes to Android in Open Beta

    • Xiaomi-backed Yi Technology launches an affordable mirrorless camera

    • Taskbar updated to version 1.2, can now completely replace your home screen

    • Pricing for the smaller Google Pixel phone could start at $649, but financing will be available

    • Pixel phones could run a brand new version of Android – and another OS too

    • Google Slides now supports using Android Wear to control presentations [APK Download]

    • ‘Super Mario Run’: Miyamoto Talks Origins, Android Release Date And Why Nintendo Won’t Become A Mobile Game Company

Overcoming language and distance barriers in open source projects

Open source communities were among the first to use the Internet to make the physical distance between people irrelevant. The Internet is a great tool, since it helps us collaborate wherever we are. It doesn’t matter if you’re having lunch at the Eiffel Tower or waking up in sunny San Francisco, the Internet has helped us connect people on deeper levels.

I am from Peru, and have always lived in Peru. I study in Peru, and the Internet has helped me find valuable information for projects and life in general. However, when I joined the the Linux community, my life changed radically.

A beginner’s bumpy journey to find a few good bugs

I’d been trying to contribute to open source for about two years. Yes. Two years. And there’s one thing I can tell you with a lot of certainty—it is intimidating. It’s tough to get started. You have to learn how to work within a large code base. You have to learn and adhere to a project’s coding style guides. Nothing makes sense: the control flow, how different modules interact, how and why the code is organized the way it is—it’s all one big maze. You need to muster a lot of courage to ask questions, dive into the code base knowing next to nothing, and keep fighting with it. (This is a generalization about how some projects operate, but many have difficulty making their projects accessible to new contributors.)

Top 10 Open Source CRM

Clearly, finding the right open source CRM (customer relationship management) for your business isn’t as simple as randomly selecting one. To be sure, there are plenty of good open source CRM apps, but still: you must carefully weigh features, function, licensing and support, for your own needs.

In this article, I’ll share my top open source CRM picks. And with any luck, you’ll find one that’ll be a great match for your business!

Adept Releases Open-Source Energy Measurement Tools for Parallel Hardware

Over its three-year lifespan, Adept has investigated energy consumption in parallel hardware and software. Energy efficiency is becoming a serious consideration for developers of high-performance and high-throughput computing systems. As computers become more powerful, they inevitably consume more energy – unless the technology is improved so they become more efficient.

[...]

The Adept Tool Suite consists of three parts: a benchmark suite, power measurement infrastructure, and power and performance prediction tool.

Riot wants to be like Slack, but with the flexibility of an underlying open source platform

In the ‘old days’ there were plenty of messaging apps and aggregators, but they survived in an open source world. Today, business models dictate that platforms like Slack must keep their messages to themselves.

It would be nice if open-source alternatives could bring back the days of flexibility, combined with today’s world of excellent user experience. What if Slack were simply an excellent tool running on an underlying open-source platform? Could it create the same value?

Riot (formerly known as Vector while it was running in Beta) is a new UK-borne app hoping to have a crack at that.

Orange to test AT&T’s open source ECOMP platform

Orange’s R&D division Orange Labs Network plans to test ECOMP, an open source platform designed by AT&T for creating and managing software-centric network services. ECOMP, which stands for Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy, will be released to the wider telecom industry as an open source offering managed by the Linux Foundation.

MongoDB cofounder explains what to do when a project has gone off track

It has happened to nearly every technology leader. A project that seemed like an excellent idea when you started it either drifted off course, proved too ambitious or not as useful as originally thought. What do you do when you’re in the middle of a project that you realize is not going well?

Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of open source database company MongoDB, knows this problem first-hand. In an interview with The Enterprisers Project, he explains what happened when he and his co-founder realized they had to pull the plug on the original version of their technology.

Open Source OpenPokeMap Project Will Enable Anybody To Run A Pokemon Go Tracker

The 3rd party development community around Niantic’s hyper successful Pokemon Go game is not slowing down. A new project will enable everybody interested to run his own Pokemon Go map service. OpenPokeMap is an open-source, open-infrastructure map for Pokemon Go. The developer behind FastPokeMap is supporting the project as a “consultant.” He says that OpenPokeMap is similar to FastPokeMap.

SaaS/Back End

• IBM (IBM), Hortonworks (HDP) Announce Open Source Distribution on Power Systems

  IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Hortonworks (NASDAQ: HDP) today announced the planned availability of Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP®) for IBM Power Systems enabling POWER8 clients to support a broad range of new applications while enriching existing ones with additional data sources.

  HDP’s secure, enterprise-ready open source Apache Hadoop distribution provides clients with a highly scalable storage platform designed to process large data sets across thousands of computing nodes. For enterprise users running POWER8-based systems, the first microprocessor designed for big data and analytics, Hortonworks provides a new distribution option for selecting a cost-effective platform for running their big data and analytics workloads. This open source Hadoop and Spark distribution will complement the performance of Power Systems by allowing clients to quickly gain business insights from their structured and unstructured data.

• Canonical and IBM Deepen Their OpenStack Partnership

  Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is spreading out with its OpenStack eforts. It has announced that Ubuntu OpenStack is now available for IBM customers who want to manage their own OpenStack cloud across IBM platforms such as IBM z Systems, IBM LinuxONE and IBM Power Systems, including IBM’s newly announced OpenPOWER LC servers. This is an expansion of the companies’ hybrid cloud partnership, and many instances of OpenStack already run on top of Ubuntu.

  As the OpenStack marketplace shifts, there is a shortage of people available to build secure and private clouds. IBM reports that it is following in the footsteps of companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Tele2, Bloomberg and Time Warner Cable in making Ubuntu OpenStack available to customers as a tested and supported cloud solution.

• Making installation easy, Hackathon winners, and more OpenStack news

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• NetBeans Going to Apache: Is Java Next?

  Most followers of open source probably weren’t surprised by Wednesday’s fuss over NetBeans’ possible move from Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation. If you missed it, it started with an announcement on the NetBeans website that “Oracle has proposed contributing the NetBeans IDE as a new open-source project within the Apache Incubator.”

  The announcement goes on to indicate the move is being made out of the goodness of Oracle’s heart. “Oracle is relinquishing its control of NetBeans and introducing it to Apache’s widely accepted governance model, which will provide new opportunities to the NetBeans community and stimulate further code contributions.”

CMS

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Does Microsoft really love Linux?

  Microsoft has always had an…uneasy…relationship with Linux, to say the least. But a writer at The Verge is convinced that Microsoft does indeed love Linux these days, and that its stormy Linux past is now behind the Redmond giant.

• PerfView is now Open Source On GitHub [Ed: Microsoft uses PerfView in an openwashing effort in order to market proprietary Visual Studio, which adds surveillance to compiled code]

  The readme associated with the GitHub repository has getting started information (how to fetch the repository, how to build, test and deploy the code. We use Visual Studio 2015. You can download a free copy of Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition that has everything you need to clone, build test and deploy PerfView. Thus you can get going with PerfView RIGHT NOW. The instructions on the PerfView repository tell you how to get started even if you know nothing about GIT (although knowing something about GIT and Visual Studio certainly helps).

• Microsoft will close its Skype office in London [Ed: in recent years, as Microsoft pretends to be “Open” (it’s the opposite), layoffs have become routine at the company]

  Microsoft is going to close Skype’s London office, in a move that could impact the jobs of the nearly 400 people employed there. The company told the Financial Times that is will “unify some engineering positions,” but that it “will be entering into a consultation process to help those affected by the redundancies.”

  The London office is a key part of Skype’s history, since it was the primary engineering site and headquarters of the company before Microsoft acquired it, and it also survived Skype’s strange interlude under the ownership of eBay before it was acquired by the big M.

  While the move is no doubt a blow to London’s tech scene, some former insiders told the FT that it’s also not a surprise to see it go, largely because a steady stream of executive departures over the last few years have foretold a shift in the locus of power at the company. Post-acquisition, Microsoft has also done a lot of product work on Skype, with plenty of integration with Office 365 and a number of feature introductions that bring it closer in line with Slack.

• Microsoft (MSFT) news recap: Microsoft loves open source, Garage gets a new look and more [Ed: Microsoft advocacy site repeats the Big Lie; Microsoft still lobbies against FOSS, e.g. in India this year]

BSD

• FreeBSD 11.0 RC3 Released, OS Still Trying To Get Out This Month

  The third release candidate to FreeBSD 11.0 is now available with this release cycle running now a few weeks behind schedule

• FreeBSD 11.0-RC3 Now Available

• FreeBSD 11.0 Gets One Last Release Candidate Build, Final Version Is Coming Soon

  FreeBSD’s Glen Barber announced the other day that the third, and hopefully the last Released Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming FreeBSD 11.0 operating system is now available for public testing.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Discord at Libreboot Over GNU Withdrawal

  A member of the Libreboot development team has painted a picture of a lead developer who is out-of-control.

  It will probably not come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the news about Libreboot’s sudden withdrawal from the GNU Project that not everyone connected with the Libreboot project is in agreement with project lead Leah Rowe’s recent actions.

• Nextcloud’s $79 Box, Vim Gets an Update & More…

  The biggest story in FOSS this week was really something of a nonstory about Libreboot suddenly leaving the GNU project. We’ve already covered the initial story, as well as responses by both RMS and the FSF, so no need to flog this horse again.

• Emacs 25.1 Released With Cairo Drawing, Better Network Security

• Emacs 25.1 Released With Tons Of New Features

• Code Editor Wars Redux: Vim, Emacs Fire Salvoes

• GNU Emacs 25.1 Text Editor Arrives with Enhanced Network Security Features

Public Services/Government

• #SoftwareFreedom: India’s Lukewarm Relationship with FOSS Needs to Change

  For a over decade, the third Saturday of every September has been celebrated as Software Freedom Day in dozens of countries around the world. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement, which grew in the 1980s out of frustrations with restrictions on use of copyrighted software, has changed considerably in the last decade. Barring a few exceptions, there has been a dilution in the focus on replacing Windows’ domination of mainstream computing. But FOSS, which some people may know as Linux, still forms the backbone of our technological lives. In developing countries like India, where scaling affordable access to technology is an admitted priority of the government, the promotion and adoption of FOSS seems to be a viable and pragmatic policy decision.

  Whether one is aware of it or not, FOSS is behind the majority of all computing that makes modern, digital life possible. FOSS runs most of all smartphones, supercomputers, ATMs, servers and websites around the world. In India, two massive citizen-facing projects, our railway booking website IRCTC, and Aadhaar’s online infrastructure, use Linux servers too. But why should you care for FOSS?

• Commission makes a list of its open source solutions

  The European Commission is about to make a public inventory of the open source solutions used by the Commission and the European Parliament. A methodology for creating the inventory was just accepted by the EC’s Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT), as part of its ‘EU Free and Open Source Software Auditing’ (EU-Fossa) project.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• LA launches open source business portal

  The open source LA Business Portal was funded by the Small Business Administration’s Start Up In A Day initiative and used the codebase of San Francisco’s Business Portal as a foundation for LA’s code.

  As an open source project, the LA Business Portal can help cities without the resources or capacity to build a solution from the ground up improve their business climate, officials said. The startup guides and starter kits for popular business types will be made available to be adapted and used by other local government entities.

Programming/Development

• Ada Gets Promoted To Being A First-Class Language In Coreboot

  Coreboot has mainlined a months-old patch to make the Ada programming language “a first class citizen” in this low-level open-source project.

  As of today in Coreboot GNAT runtime system was also added today for the Ada code.

• LLVM Still Pursuing Apache 2.0 License + GPLv2 Compatibility

  COMPILER –
  It’s been a while since last talking about the discussions among LLVM developers about re-licensing the project. The re-licensing is moving forward and they are settling on the Apache 2.0 license plus explicitly stating compatibility with GPLv2.

  For the past year they’ve been eyeing the Apache 2 license for the LLVM stack over their University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which is similar to the three-clause BSD license.

• Update on Node.js npm Tool and Express Module

  The second day at Node Interactive Europe last week had two keynotes that concentrated on specific tools and modules. Kat Marchán talked about the npm packaging tool, and Doug Wilson explored the state of the express module.

• Git Developers Want Your Feedback (2016 Git Survey)

The Mystery of Scandinavia’s Car-Burning Spree

What’s behind the spate of vehicle arsons that have swept Scandinavia’s cities this year? Over the summer, cars have been set on fire across the region in a spree that shows no sign of abating just yet.

Between June and mid-August, 134 vehicles were set ablaze in Stockholm, 43 in Sweden’s second city of Gothenburg, and 108 in its third city, Malmö. Meanwhile, across the water in Copenhagen, there were 30 arson attacks on vehicles in August alone, until the arrest of a 21-year-old suspect led police to hope the streak would end. It didn’t, and this week Copenhagen’s car burnings began again, as they also did in neighboring areas of Sweden. Internationally at least, this isn’t what people expect from a region that is usually a byword for prosperity and social order.

Health/Nutrition

• Exclusive: How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down

  In a searing investigation into the once lauded biotech start-up Theranos, Nick Bilton discovers that its precocious founder defied medical experts—even her own chief scientist—about the veracity of its now discredited blood-testing technology. She built a corporation based on secrecy in the hope that she could still pull it off. Then, it all fell apart.

• Monsanto Merges with Bayer, “Their Expertise is War”. Shady Historical Origins, IG Farben, Part of Hitler’s Chemical Genetic Engineering Cartel

  The expertise of these companies are those of war. IG Farben – Hitler’s economic power and pre-war Germany’s highest foreign exchange earner – was also a foreign intelligence operation. Herman Shmitz was President of IG Farben, Shmitz’s nephew Max Ilgner was a Director of IG Farben, while Max’s brother Rudolph Ilgner handled the New York arm of the ‘VOWI‘ network as vice president of CHEMNYCO.

  Paul Warburg – brother of Max Warburg (Board of Directors, Farben Aufsichsrat) – was one of the founding members of the Federal Reserve System in the United States. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Max Warburg and Hermann Schmitz played a central role in the Farben empire. Other “guiding hands” of Farben Vorstand included Carl Bosch, Fritz ter Meer, Kurt Oppenheim and George von Schnitzler. Every one of them were adjudged ‘War Criminals’ after World War II, except Paul Warburg.

• Bayer Purchased Monsanto (And We Are All Screwed)

  Cash. That makes it the biggest deal ever in the history of blah blah blah, who gives a shit, are we right?

  If you’re anything like us, your brain turns off when you hear numbers that big being transferred from one giant group of white guys to another. And traditionally, that’s exactly the way giant groups of white guys want it. Especially this one. See, there’s reason to believe this particular group of rich white guys shouldn’t be trusted with the awesome power they’d have after combining.

• No jail time in Flint water crisis plea deal for former state epidemiologist

  A deal between Flint water crisis prosecutors and a former state epidemiologist includes no incarceration for Corinne Miller, who pleaded no contest to failing to warn hospitals and the public about a Legionnaires’ disease epidemic in Genesee County.

  Miller, 65 of Dewitt, former director of the state Department of Health and Human Services’ Bureau of Epidemiology, pleaded to the least serious charge against her on Wednesday, Sept. 14 — a midemeanor count of neglect of duty by a public officer.

• Who are Suspect 1 and Suspect 2? Flint water crisis prosecutor won’t say

  Special Flint water crisis prosecutor Todd Flood won’t name two individuals identified only as “Suspect 1″ and “Suspect 2″ in a plea agreement filed in Genesee County District Court this week.

  But after reaching a deal for former state epidemiologist Corinne Miller to plead no contest to a misconduct charge and to cooperate with prosecutors, Flood said the unnamed suspects are evidence that his investigation “is far from over.”

  “You just saw in that plea agreement … obviously there was Suspect 1 and Suspect 2,” Flood said when asked if he expects more criminal charges related to Flint water.

  Miller was the director of the Bureau of Disease Control, Prevention and Epidemiology at Department of Health and Human Services until November 2015, but 10 months earlier, she was “tasked by Suspect 1″ to provide a report regarding a 2014 outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Genesee County and to meet with Suspect 2, according to Miller’s plea agreement.

• Lansing Politicians Slow To Enact Policy Reforms After Flint Water Crisis

  In the year since Flint’s man-made drinking water crisis exploded and was exposed primarily as a failure of state government, Michigan has allocated $234 million toward the public health emergency that exposed children to lead and has been linked to a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak.

  The state has been much slower, however, in enacting policy reforms to address problems uncovered.

  It’s likely that no major action in the Republican-led Legislature will occur until 2017, angering Democrats who are pushing for changes to the emergency manager law and lead testing.

  It’s been four months since a bicameral legislative committee concluded hearings about Flint’s crisis. It has yet to issue a report and recommendations.

  They are now expected by year’s end. Democrats say there’s no reason to wait to start debating legislation.

Security

• HDDCryptor Ransomware Overwrites Your MBR Using Open Source Tools [Ed: Windows ransom but the headline only says “Open Source”]

  Most of the research on this infection has been done by Marinho, who says that his company was called in to investigate and fix a massive infection at a multi-national company that affected computers in its Brazil, India, and US subsidiaries.

• The power of protocol analyzers

  In the complicated world of networking, problems happen. But determining the exact cause of a novel issue in the heat of the moment gets dicey. In these cases, even otherwise competent engineers may be forced to rely on trial and error once Google-fu gives out.

  Luckily, there’s a secret weapon waiting for willing engineers to deploy—the protocol analyzer. This tool allows you to definitively determine the source of nearly any error, provided you educate yourself on the underlying protocol. The only catch for now? Many engineers avoid it entirely due to (totally unwarranted) dread.

• Bitcoin: A Sequence of Proofs

  A potential solution to the growing pains of Bitcoin is the use of proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work. An attacker which has a stake in the history already on the blockchain is unlikely to jeopardize it. In proof-of-stake, the cryptocurrency is paid by the miners into the bets of the next block to win. If an attacker bets on multiple chains, then they’re guaranteed to lose money. This, combined with the fact that buying a lot of currency is more expensive than a lot of computer power, makes proof-of-stake practical. We will cover Peercoin later, which does proof of stake and has other mitigations for certain attacks.

  An interesting idea is vote tattling. When an attacker votes on one block with a predecessor, and then votes on another with the same predecessor, peers can observe this. They can report double voting by using the votes as cryptographically-verified evidence, and taking the attacker’s vote-money.

• Why real hackers prefer Linux over Windows and Mac

  We have published many tutorials for hackers and security researchers. You may have noticed that most tutorials are based on Linux operating systems. Even the hacking tools out there are based on Linux barring a few which are written for Windows and Mac. The moot question here is that why do hackers prefer Linux over Mac or Windows?

  Today we look at the reason why hackers always prefer Linux over Mac, Windows, and other operating systems. You may have your own reasons for choosing Linux but what do hackers really look forward to while working with Linux.

• Why Hackers are Choosing Linux Over its Competitors

Defence/Aggression

• The Barrel Bomb Conundrum

  It is of course only part of the media distortion around the Syria debacle. Western intervention is aimed at supporting various Saudi backed jihadist militias to take over the country, irrespective of the fact that they commit appalling atrocities. These the media label “democratic forces”. At the same time, we are attacking other Saudi controlled jihadists on the grounds that they are controlled by the wrong kind of Saudi. You see, chopping off the heads of dissidents and gays is OK if you are one of the Saudis who directly controls the Saudi oil resources. It is not OK if you do it freelance and are one of the Saudis who is merely acting at the covert behest of the other Saudis who control the Saudi oil resources.

• US, Israel sign massive military aid deal for $38 billion over 10 years

  The United States and Israel have signed a new aid deal that will give the Israeli military $38 billion over the course of 10 years. It’s the largest such agreement the U.S. has ever had with any country.

• After Orlando Massacre, Queer Art Takes a Political Turn

  In the past month, Efrem Zelony-Mindell has transformed a small gallery in New York City into a space for LBGTQ reinvention. His show, n e w f l e s h, seeks to redefine gender and sexual identities through novel representations of the queer community — a task that Zelony-Mindell, a curator and visual artist, considers uniquely pressing in the face of increasingly visible anti-LGBTQ violence. His approach: to abstract, obscure, or remove the body entirely from the works on display. “We tend to see queerness portrayed as a physical or corporeal matter,” he told The Intercept. “This thinking is dehumanizing, and that dehumanization inevitably leads to violence.”

• Suicides among military bomb techs at crisis level

  In June 2010, after a day of drinking at an American Legion Post in Wyoming near the family’s home, Jeff Hackett downed a couple more swigs of alcohol, said “cheers” and shot and killed himself.

  Among the highly skilled and elite ranks of military explosive ordnance disposal technicians — the men and women who have been on the front line of the war on terror since Sept. 11, 2001 — suicide is a growing concern.

  “It is literally an epidemic,” said Ken Falke, a former EOD technician and founder of the Niceville-based EOD Warrior Foundation, which supports current and former military EOD techs and their families.

• The couple and their army of retired police officers taking £5m a year from taxpayers to pursue British soldiers around the globe

  For hundreds of British troops, the prospect of being prosecuted for events that took place in Iraq 13 years ago remains a very real nightmare.

  Almost 1,500 cases of abuse of Iraqis, including allegations of torture and even murder, are being investigated by a special team set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

  Soldiers are terrified of being arrested more than a decade on from the occupation of Iraq, and are dismayed and disgusted by the length of time the investigations are taking. But for one husband and wife team, the British occupation of southern Iraq has proved a cash bonanza.

• NATO planes bomb Syrian government forces

  The diplomatic row rumbles on after US-led air strikes hit Syrian government forces in Deir ez-Zour, killing 62 soldiers and injuring over 100. This happened only a few days into a week-long trial ceasefire designed to be a precursor to US-Russian joint operations against ISIS.

  It has now been reported that British forces were involved and, needless to say, that the ceasefire is over, with the Russians and the Syrians naturally being blamed.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Julian Assange says he’ll turn himself in if Obama pardons Chelsea Manning

  WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would turn himself in to US authorities if President Barack Obama grants clemency to Chelsea Manning, the organization said on Twitter Thursday. WikiLeaks’ statement was released one day before a Swedish appeals court decided to maintain a warrant for Assange’s arrest over a 2010 rape charge. Assange has said that extradition to Sweden would lead to his eventual extradition to the US, where he could face charges related to WikiLeaks’ publication of secret government documents.

• 5 Reasons The WikiLeaks Guy Is Losing His Mind [Ed: attack piece]

  And so, for the past four years, Assange has been working long days in a one-and-a-half-room apartment. He’s not getting any fresh air, he doesn’t get many social calls, and the Ecuadorian government doesn’t have much of a budget. His bathroom doubles as a makeshift gym. He has friends, supporters, and an internet connection, but that can only do so much when you have less variety in your day than most prisoners. And goddamn, is it ever showing.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• On Solidarity with Standing Rock, Executive Clemency and the International Indigenous Struggle

  I call on all my supporters and allies to join the struggle at Standing Rock in the spirit of peaceful spiritual resistance and to work together to protect Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth. I also call upon my supporters and all people who share this Earth to join together to insist that the US complies with and honors the provisions of international law as expressed in the UNDRIP, International Human Rights Treaties and the long-neglected Treaties and trust agreements with the Sioux Nation. I particularly appeal to Jill Stein and the Green Parties of the US and the world to join this struggle by calling for my release and adopting the UNDRIP as the new legal framework for relations with indigenous peoples.

  Finally, I also urge my supporters to immediately and urgently call upon President Obama to grant my petition for clemency, to permit me to live my final years on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. Scholars, political grassroots leaders, humanitarians and Nobel Peace Laureates have demanded my release for more than four decades. My Clemency Petition asks President Obama to commute, or end, my prison term now in order for our nation to make progress healing its fractured relations with Native communities. By facing and addressing the injustices of the past, together we can build a better future for our children and our children’s children.

• Native American Activist Winona LaDuke at Standing Rock: It’s Time to Move On from Fossil Fuels

  While Democracy Now! was covering the Standing Rock standoff earlier this month, we spoke to Winona LaDuke, longtime Native American activist and executive director of the group Honor the Earth. She lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. She spent years successfully fighting the Sandpiper pipeline, a pipeline similar to Dakota Access. We met her right outside the Red Warrior Camp, where she has set up her tipi. Red Warrior is one of the encampments where thousands of Native Americans representing hundreds of tribes from across the U.S. and Canada are currently resisting the pipeline’s construction.

• Arrests After #KeepItInTheGround Activists Occupy Interior Department

Finance

• 300,000 Join Massive Protests in Germany Against US-EU Corporate Trade Deals

  Hundreds of thousands took to city streets across Germany on Saturday as they marched against a pair of corporate-backed trade deals they say will undermine democracy, attack workers and local economies, and accelerate the threats posed by corporate hegemony and global warming.

  Taking aim at both the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), European Union deals with the United States and Canada respectively, opponents say the agreements are not really concerned with expanding trade but rather increasing corporate power.

• Warren Slams ISDS Provision in Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday said that the investor-state dispute settlement provision in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would allow corporations to challenge foreign laws before private arbitration panels outside of the traditional legal system.

  “It allows companies to challenge foreign laws they don’t like and potentially win millions or even billions of dollars from taxpayers,” Warren (D-Mass.) told reporters on a conference call, which was hosted by left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen and included economist Jeffrey Sachs and law professors Cruz Reynoso and Alan Morrison.

• Uber accused of cashing in on bomb explosion by charging almost double to take terrified New Yorkers home

  TRAUMATISED families caught up in the New York bomb blast have accused Uber of cashing in on the tragedy by charging almost double to take them home.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Bernie Sanders, who launched career on protest votes, dismisses Gary Johnson and Jill Stein as protest votes

  Bernie Sanders is one of the most electorally successful non-major party candidates in United States political history. And he said Friday that voting for a third-party candidate for president in 2016 would amount to a “protest vote.”

  “Before you cast a protest vote — because either Clinton or Trump will become president — think hard about it,” Sanders said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This is not a governor’s race. It’s not a state legislative race. This is the presidency of the United States.”

• Two parties use legitimate means to mask rigged debates

  For several election cycles, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) – a self-proclaimed “non-partisan” private organization that sponsors the debates – has required a 15% average in hand-picked polls as the criteria for debate inclusion. This threshold makes it difficult for candidates outside of the traditional Democratic and Republican parties to appear on stage.

  Like most Americans, I’ve generally accepted these polls at face value. However, a review of publicly available information shows that not only are most of the polls in question inherently unscientific, but that the CPD and its hand-picked pollsters are engaged in a concerted effort to elect establishment candidates in general, and Hillary Clinton in particular.

  There are five polls being used to inform the 15% average. Two of these show blatant scientific problems: Fox News polls under-samples independents by more than 20%, and the CNN-ORC poll admits to dramatically under-sample Millennials. The polling staff have failed to return repeated requests for clarification. This level of unresponsiveness is unheard of within the formal scientific community. Thus, are the polls scientific?

  Almost every reputable scientific journal asks scientists who hope to publish in its pages to disclose any conflicts of interest. The implication is that, if the researcher, or those funding or sponsoring the research favor a specific research outcome, the data might be tainted. Using publicly available information alone, I’ve uncovered massive conflicts of interests that have laid dormant for years.

• Democrats: A Vote for Third Party is a Vote for Trump?

  The most recent appeal from the Democratic party “warning” voters that a vote for a third party candidate is like a vote for Trump is evidence of a real shift in the awareness of the American people. First, let me clarify: A vote for Trump is a vote for Trump; A vote for Clinton is a vote for Clinton. Using fear to persuade voters to support political parties that have continually disappointed on major issues from foreign policy, education, healthcare and the economy, is the epitome of a failed democracy. Second, let’s address the fact that the Democrats are admittedly launching a “multimillion-dollar digital campaign that talks about what’s at stake and how a vote for a third-party candidate is a vote for Donald Trump.” Yet they refuse to #OpenTheDebates. It’s interesting how quickly millions of dollars get thrown at attempts to control the minds and opinions of the people when over half of the workers in this country make less than $30,000 a year.

• Donald Trump’s birther event is the greatest trick he’s ever pulled

  Donald Trump is, at heart, a showman. He rose to national fame thanks to star turns on reality TV in which he played the tough-talking boss to a group of aspirants hoping to become as successful as he has been in business. His great gift is the ability to draw attention — and then use that attention for his own, usually commercial, purposes.

  Trump may have outdone himself on Friday morning. He and his campaign touted a “major” announcement at his newly opened hotel in Washington, D.C., at 10 a.m. The word was that Trump would walk away from his past skepticism about President Obama’s citizenship while also laying the blame for the birther movement at the feet of Hillary Clinton. (That, of course, isn’t true — according to numerous fact-checkers — but no matter: Trump planned to say it anyway.)

• Merkel’s party loses support in Berlin state election

  Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party endured a second setback in a state election in two weeks on Sunday, as many voters turned to the left and right in Berlin, according to projections based on exit polls.

  The Social Democrats (SPD) and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) emerged from the Berlin state election as the strongest two parties, but both lost enough support that they won’t be able to continue a coalition government, the projections show.

• The Mini Film Studio Operating Inside Clinton’s Campaign

  The shot comes about two minutes and thirty-four seconds into the video. A mother in her late 60s, dressed in a cream-colored suit, stands in an almost empty room, watching her daughter on TV. As her daughter speaks, the mother turns to the woman who is seated next to her, and squeals: “Ohhhh she looks so prettyyyyy!”

  It’s a show of motherly pride so natural it would be completely unremarkable were it not for the fact that the the mother in the room is Hillary Clinton, the daughter is Chelsea Clinton, and the clip is part of a backstage compilation video about the 2016 Democratic National Convention, produced by the Clinton campaign.

• GOP Lobbyist Offers Reward in Murder of DNC Staffer in Hopes of Laying Rumors to Rest

  Around the same time this piece was published, however, WikiLeaks Editor in Chief Julian Assange spoke of a possible connection between Rich’s death and the DNC email leak. “I’m suggesting that our sources take risks,” he said in a video interview on the Dutch television program “Nieuwsuur,” although Assange refused to say whether Rich was a WikiLeaks source.

  “It’s quite something to suggest a murder,” the interviewer responds, “and that’s basically what you’re doing.”

  “Well, others have suggested that,” Assange carefully replies. “We are investigating to understand what happened in that situation, with Seth Rich. I think it is a concerning situation, but there’s not a conclusion yet.”

• Monopolizing the Debates

  Soon most of the country will be watching the debates. To be told that you will be watching the ‘debates’ is an insult to your intelligence. They’re not forums to inform and enlighten the electorate, but spectacles where the candidates preen and pander to the viewers; political performances to showcase the triumph of form over substance. I was wondering why they are even called debates instead of grudge matches? This year features two of the most unlikable wrestlers, I mean candidates, in history. In this corner we have Donald “The Demagogue” Trump and in the other corner we have Hillary “The Crusher” Clinton.

  The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) is a non-profit, tax exempt organization. In their mission statement they talk about providing: “the best possible information to viewers and listeners” and how voter education is one of their goals. Any person reading this might think that the CPD is just another charitable organization demonstrating their altruism. Nothing could be further from the truth! Even though the CPD claims to be independent of the two major parties, their past and present leadership consists of democratic and republican politicians (with an occasional media acolyte). Because none of the members is a current office holder, the CPD likes to claim they are non-partisan. As the Libertarian SuperPAC claims in their open letter to the CPD: “Bi-partisan is not the same as non-partisan”. The debates always did highlight the two duopoly candidates, but the CPD seeks to make sure any non-duopoly candidates with a different point of view aren’t heard.

  Throughout the years, the number of debates has varied between two and four. Recently the CPD has settled on four debates, with one of them between the vice-presidential candidates, but it’s their decision to limit the debates to candidates with over 15% in the polls that has drawn scrutiny. They initiated this 15% threshold to be included in the debates in 2000. In the hundred years before this decision, there were some presidential candidates who received less than 15% of the vote, yet won votes in the electoral college. That hasn’t happened in almost 50 years, thanks in large part to duopoly members controlling who is in the debates.

• Green Party’s Stein and Baraka on ballot for 90% of US voters

  The Green Party campaign for presidential candidate Jill Stein and vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka has completed its 2016 ballot access drive. Stein-Baraka will be on the ballot in 45 states, including Washington, D.C., and they will be official write-in candidates in three more states. Ballots cast for official write-in candidates are counted, whereas unofficial write-in ballots are not.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history

  After a string of high-profile cyberbullying and revenge-porn incidents, the Italian Chamber of Deputies has put forward a bill that will do nothing to prevent these abuses, and everything to allow for rampant, unaccountable censorship of the Italian internet, without rule of law or penalty for abuse.

  Under the proposed law, the “site manager” of Italian media, including bloggers, newspapers and social networks would be obliged to censor “mockery” based on “the personal and social condition” of the victim — that is, anything the recipient felt was personally insulting. The penalty for failing to take action is a fine of €100,000. Truthfulness is not a defense in suits under this law — the standard is personal insult, not falsehood.

• The No-Censorship Approach to Life

  Students at my institution, Columbia University, exist in a world where virtually every human thought ever conceived is open to study, examination, consideration, acceptance, rejection, debate, and analysis. To be sure, we have standards that guide us as we move through this vast wilderness of the human mind — we insist on notions like reason, fact, nonpartisanship — but nothing is out of bounds for intellectual inquiry.

  Over the past couple of years, there have been a number of controversies on campuses across the country, including mine, which were all more or less about speech — the speech of fellow students, of residence-hall administrators, of faculty, of institutions through the naming of buildings and the display of pictures, and of outside people invited to the campus. The debate, in part, has been about what to do about speech that was considered offensive or dangerous. Sometimes there were calls for bans on speech and official punishments.

• Corporate rights have a long history

  This argument could contain some merit, especially if “corporate personhood” were a new concept — but it’s not.

• Video blogger claims YouTube ‘threatened’ her over Juncker interview

  A French video blogger selected to interview European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Sunday she was pressured by YouTube to ask “soft questions” during the webcast.

  “I found out they expected for me to ask only very soft questions,” said Laetitia Birbes in a Facebook video about her interactions with YouTube before last week’s interview. “The whole point was to give advertisement to Juncker.”

  The interview was conducted online Thursday, a day after Juncker had delivered his “State of the Union” address, and was sponsored by YouTube, Euronews and the Debating Europe online platform.

  Birbes, a blogger from the outskirts of Paris, told French news website Rue 89 she was “assured” by YouTube that she was free to ask any question, but that a representative from the video site suggested she ask Juncker questions such as “What is happiness?” and for details on his vintage Nokia phone and dog “Plato.”

  But Birbes said YouTube balked at accepting some “more important questions.” She said a YouTube representative advised her he would need to speak to Juncker’s spokeswoman Natasha Bertaud about potential “red-flag” questions.

• Anti-Piracy Outfits Caught Fabricating Takedown Notices

  Not all anti-piracy vendors play fair when it comes to removing copyright-infringing content from the Internet. In fact, there is clear and convincing evidence that several companies ‘make up’ links that have never even existed, perhaps in part to boost their own numbers.

• Tattooed man rubbishes Facebook censorship of his bum, says ‘if you don’t like, don’t look’

  Sweide Lum-Wairepo had the puhoro done on his buttocks, thighs and upper back by tattooist Hirini Katene, who posted videos and photos of the work on Facebook.

  However, the video was taken down after it was deemed to violate the community guidelines and only the photos have been allowed to remain online.

  The video shows the man’s back then spins to his front, where he can be seen cupping his genitals to obscure them from the camera.

  However, a thatch of pubic hair remains visible.

  Mr Lum-Weirepo said that if people didn’t like it, they didn’t have to watch it.

  “I thought it was pretty s*** … because it’s just something cultural,” he said.

• Montenegro: Mayor accused of repeatedly undermining press freedom

  Kolasin, which is the centre of a regional municipality of about 10,000 people, has a small media market that includes just one local newspaper named Kolasin and four correspondents working for the national dailies — Pobjeda, Dan, Vijesti and Dnevne Novine. There is no local TV station. The local government is run by a coalition of opposition parties — Democratic Front, the Social Democratic Party of Montenegro (SDP) and the Socialist People’s Party of Montenegro — while the Democratic Party of Socialists is the majority party in the national parliament and it runs the Government.

• Censoring the terrors of war

• Facebook reverses ‘napalm girl’ photo censorship following media pressure

• Our Father, who art Facebook: is the social media giant getting too big for its boots?

• Norwegian newspaper calls out Facebook’s founder

• Facebook takes U-turn over ‘Napalm girl’ photograph

  Numerous posts were deleted but Isaksen’s was still up Friday afternoon. Hansen said he received an email Wednesday from the social network requesting that the image be taken down.

  Facebook is facing criticism over its regulation of content as it aims to find a universal standard to apply to its 1.7 billion monthly users, and bans on pornography prevent posting art or historic photographs like the one at the heart of the controversy in Norway.

• TV self-censorship takes toll on National Games

• CNN Indonesia Extends Apology to KPI over Blurred Images

• Indon swimmer sparks censorship debate

• Broadcasting Commission Washes Hands of Censorship as Indonesia Loses Focus

• Overzealous censors return: TV station blurs out National Games swimmer’s entire body

• Indon swimmer sparks censorship debate

Privacy/Surveillance

• Assange, Manning and Snowden, Standing with the Conscience of Truthtellers

  Last week, Oliver Stone’s biopic “Snowden” hit the theaters. The film illuminates the life of Edward Snowden between 2004 and 2013, aiming to humanize one of the most wanted men in the world. Just before its release, a public campaign was launched urging President Obama to pardon this renowned NSA whistleblower.

  The massive US government persecution of truthtellers over the past years has exiled conscience from civil society, locking it behind bars and driving it into asylum. Yet, despite these attacks, it refuses to die.

  From prison where she is serving 35 years, Chelsea Manning is standing up for her dignity. Recently, she protested her dehumanizing treatment by engaging in a hunger strike. All the while, WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange keeps publishing, giving asylum to the most persecuted documents, while being arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian embassy for the last 4 years. As this struggle continues, the torch for transparency and courage that kindled hearts and has sparked public debate keeps shedding light on the state of the world we live in.

• Why Is HPSCI’s Snowden Report So Inexcusably Shitty?

  There’s now a growing list of things in the HPSCI report on Snowden that are either factually wrong, misleading, or spin.

  One part of the spin the report admits itself: the committee assessed damage based on the 1.5 million documents Snowden touched — an approach the now discredited General Michael Flynn presented in briefings to the committee — rather than the far more limited set the Intelligence Community included in its damage assessment.

• Why Obama Should Pardon All Leakers and Whistleblowers — Not Just Edward Snowden

  Of course President Obama should pardon Edward Snowden — and Chelsea Manning, too.

  But this story is not about the excellent reasons for thanking rather than locking up the two most famous whistleblowers of the post-9/11 era. Plenty of people are already calling for that in powerful ways. A new petition on Snowden’s behalf has been signed by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey as well as Steve Wozniak, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aragorn (also known as Viggo Mortensen). Organizations coming out in support of a pardon for Snowden, who is currently a political refugee in Moscow, include the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. And Oliver Stone has just released “Snowden,” a movie that emphasizes his good and patriotic intentions.

  But the unfortunate truth of our times is that Obama is not going to pardon Snowden and Manning. His administration has invested too much capital in demonizing them to turn back now. However, there are other leakers and whistleblowers for whom the arguments in favor of pardons are not only compelling but politically palatable, too. Their names are Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake. All of them were government officials who talked with journalists and were charged under the Espionage Act for disclosures of information that were far less consequential than the classified emails that Hillary Clinton stored on her server at home or the top secret war diaries that David Petraeus shared with his biographer and girlfriend. Petraeus, a former general and CIA director, got a fine for his transgressions. Clinton got a presidential nomination.

• The Washington Post is wrong: Edward Snowden should be pardoned

  With the launch of Oliver Stone’s Snowden film this past weekend came a renewed push for a pardon for Edward Snowden from the world’s leading human rights organizations.

  But predictably, not everyone agreed that he should be pardoned. On Saturday, the Washington Post editorial board deplorably editorialized against it despite its own paper winning the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on his leaked documents.

• Why President Obama should pardon Edward Snowden

  Cases like Edward Snowden’s are precisely the reason the president’s constitutional pardon power exists.

  Historically, outgoing presidents have often invoked this power in the last days of their terms — at times on behalf of people who’ve committed reprehensible acts — under the premise that mitigating circumstances outweigh the rationale for punishment.

  President Obama now has the opportunity to use this power proudly, in recognition of one of the most important acts of whistleblowing in modern history.

  Since Snowden first disclosed documents in 2013 detailing the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, we’ve seen an unprecedented global debate about the proper limits of government spying. This debate has had a transformative effect: on privacy laws and standards, on the security of the devices we depend on to communicate with one another and store sensitive information, and on how we understand our relationship to the institutions that govern us.

• Commentary: How ‘Snowden’ the movie could help win a pardon for Snowden the man

  The days leading up to last Friday’s release of director Oliver Stone’s Snowden looked like one long movie trailer.

  The American Civil Liberties Union and other human-right groups on Wednesday announced a campaign to win a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contract employee who leaked hundreds of thousands of its highly classified documents to journalists. The next day, the House Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan letter to the president that advised him against any pardon and claimed Snowden “caused tremendous damage to national security.”

  The week before, Stone had invited me to a private screening of his movie in Washington. I once worked in an NSA facility, and I’ve written about the agency for decades, so I was surprised and pleased by how successful Stone was in creating an accurate picture of life in the NSA.

  He did a remarkable job of capturing the sense of how rare, difficult and risky it is for anyone in the agency to challenge the ethics and legality of its operations. I was astounded by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s doppelganger-like portrayal of Snowden. At one point in the film, when the real Snowden appeared, it took me a moment or two to realize the switch.

• Limehouse author Sinclair Mckay is exploring Cold War codebreaking in The Spies Of Winter [Ed: GCHQ puff pieces again]

  “If you think Europe is having a crisis now, go back to 1946 when the entire continent was blasted back to medieval times,” says Sinclair McKay, author of The Spies Of Winter, which delves into the lives of The GCHQ codebreakers, who fought the Cold War and knew the darkest secrets of British Intelligence at that time.

  After World War Two had ended, the devastation left across Europe was tremendous, as hundreds of people were displaced and millions had been slaughtered.

  There was also a lingering fear that the war wasn’t really over and would break out again at any second. However, this time around there was also a much bigger threat as the world had moved in to the age of nuclear weapons where mass destruction was a clear and present danger.

• UK explores national DNS filtering system

  Ciaran Martin, current Director-General Cyber at GCHQ and the first Chief Executive of the new National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), has set out a new UK approach to cyber security. Speaking at the Billington Cyber Security Summit in Washington DC, Martin outlined how the new NCSC will adopt a more active posture in defending the UK from the range of cyber threats, as well as the need for government, industry and law enforcement to work in even closer partnership.

• Britain’s GCHQ looks at creating nationwide Internet firewall

• Op-Ed: Why Obama should pardon Edward Snowden

  I have signed on to the letter asking President Obama to pardon Edward Snowden that was released today. I know this will be an unpopular position among many of my former colleagues in the national security community. My reasons for doing so are not fully captured by that letter. They are different from those who see Snowden simply as a hero and the NSA as the villain. I have concluded that a pardon for Edward Snowden, even if he does not personally deserve one, is in the broader interests of the nation.

• Chicago woman launches lawsuit against Canadian maker of app-based vibrator

  An American woman has launched a proposed class-action lawsuit against the Canadian-owned maker of a smartphone-enabled vibrator, alleging the company sells products that secretly collect and transmit “highly sensitive” information.

  The Chicago-area woman, identified in a statement of claim only as N.P., has made her complaints against Standard Innovation (US) Corp., which is owned by the Ottawa-based Standard Innovation Corp, over a “high-end” vibrator called the We-Vibe.

  The lawsuit, which was filed earlier this month in an Illinois court, explains that to fully operate the device, users download the We-Connect app on a smartphone, allowing them and their partners remote control over the Bluetooth-equipped vibrator’s settings.

  In particular, the app’s “connect lover” feature — which promises a secure connection — allows partners to exchange text messages, conduct video chats and control a paired We-Vibe device, the woman’s statement of claim said.

• How an Art Exhibit on Surveillance Says Too Little by Showing Too Much

  Photography and video are powerful mediums for these sorts of topics. They are inherently entwined in tools of surveillance, but they allow artists to play with and document surveillance. Photography can really make us think about the meaning of privacy, and the best work in “Public, Private, Secret” proves that to be true. But the exhibit, trying to say everything, doesn’t say much.

• “We Are Adopting Principles of Fascism”

  Retired Army JAG Major Todd Pierce explains how his perspective on U.S. foreign policy and politics has changed as he watched the nation’s slide into “perpetual war,” in Part Two of an interview with Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss.

• The Value of Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’

  As Stone emphasized in person at a screening that I attended, the film is not a documentary and was decidedly fictionalized for dramatic effect. That said, many specifics and incidents are true — and Stone remained true to Snowden in terms of his intelligence, temperament and reasoning that helped shape the actions he took.

  This riveting film — Stone’s latest foray into the dangers and excesses of the National Security State — has all the ingredients that we’ve come to expect from the frequent Academy Award winner and nominee. Stone’s touch is everywhere evident in the film.

  The story that Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald weaves is compelling. The characters grow and evolve over the course of the film. The score is evocative. Shots are artfully crafted to make a rich movie-going experience. The visuals — and in one particular sequence, visualizations — are stunning.

  Stone takes us along on Snowden’s personal journey of discovery in a film that is anchored by the love story between initially political opposites who grow, change and learn to make sacrifices to protect each other.

• Cyber Command, NSA split could affect west county

  Fort George G. Meade and the surrounding area could see an increase in military contracts and investments with a unified U.S. Cyber Command that is separate from the National Security Agency.

  By becoming a combatant command, U.S. Cyber Command would become a more influential institution within the Department of Defense, with the ability to directly procure resources for its operations and have its own contracting arm, as opposed to going through the NSA.

  The debate has resurfaced whether the two agencies should have a single leader, with officials examining how such a split would work.

  “By elevating it, it’s a big broadcast mechanism for the state of Maryland and for this region,” said Tim O’Farrell, president of the Fort Meade Alliance.

• CyberCom and the NSA need a divorce

  Separating the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command is the right thing to do and would correct the mistake made by combining them in the first place.

• Can the NSA Stop the Next Snowden?

  William Evanina has never met Edward Snowden, but the two are intimately bound. As national counterintelligence executive—essentially the man in charge of American counterintelligence—Evanina is tasked with fixing the damage that leaks like Edward Snowden’s have done to the U.S. intelligence community, and preventing new ones.

  In the summer of 2013, Evanina was assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office. When the Snowden breach was announced, he was put on the case.

• WashPost Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)

  Three of the four media outlets which received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden – The Guardian, The New York Times and The Intercept – have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a newspaper, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which – by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them – implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

  But not The Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU-and-Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page not only argued today in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — their paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” “accept[] a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Glenn Beck: Empathy for Black Lives Matter

  In a recent speech to a group of conservatives, I made what I thought was a relatively uncontroversial point about the commonalities between Trump supporters and Black Lives Matter activists. I thought this was a simple idea, but the criticism was immediate and sharp: How dare I try to understand the “other side”?

• One in 4 French Muslims in ‘revolt’ against secular laws

  Around one in four French Muslims, mostly young people, support an ultra-conservative form of Islam, including the wearing of the full-face veil, but the vast majority accept France’s strict secular laws, a study showed Sunday.

  The Ifop survey carried out for a major study of French Muslims by Institut Montaigne, a liberal think-tank, showed that the vast majority of people who identify as Muslim accept curbs on religion in public.

  But 60 percent considered girls should nonetheless be allowed to wear the headscarf in school, 12 years after it and other religious symbols were banished from the classroom, the survey published in Le Journal du Dimanche weekly showed.

  And around one in four — 24 percent — supported the wearing of the burqa and niqab, the full-face veils that were banned in public places in 2010.

  The survey of 1,029 people aims to inform the government’s plans to overhaul French Muslim bodies in the wake of several jihadist attacks, most of them the work of French extremists.

• Inspector General Says FBI Probably Shouldn’t Impersonate Journalists; FBI Says It Would Rather Impersonate Companies Anyway

  The FBI’s impersonation of an AP journalist during an investigation raised some serious questions about what the agency considered to be acceptable behavior when pursuing suspects. The outing of this tactic led to a lawsuit by the Associated Press, which was naturally unhappy its name was being used to deliver malware to a teenaged bomb threat suspect.

  The FBI performed its own investigation of the matter (but only after it had become public knowledge — seven years after the incident actually occurred) and found that rules may have been broken by this impersonation of a news agency. Certain approval steps were skipped, making the investigatory tactic not exactly by the book. But in the end, the report congratulated the FBI on using the ends to justify the means.

• Green Party VP Ajamu Baraka on Human Rights Violations in the United States

  In an interview with Sharmini Peries, Baraka discusses Black Lives Matters, the Flint water crisis, shelter, immigration, and more

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Town Loses Gigabit Connections After FCC Municipal Broadband Court Loss

  Back in February the FCC voted to use its Congressional mandate to ensure speedy broadband deployment to dismantle protectionist state laws intentionally designed to hinder broadband competition. But the FCC recently found itself swatted down by the courts, which argued the agency lacks the authority to pre-empt even the worst portions of these laws. As a result municipal broadband providers continue to run face first into protectionist provisions written by incumbent ISP lawyers and lobbyists solely concerned about protecting the current broken broadband market.

DRM

• “HP pre-programmed failure date of unofficial/ non-HP ink cartridges in its printers”

  Investigation of an online printer ink retailer shows that HP has programmed a date in its printer firmware on which unofficial non-HP cartridges would fail. Thousands of HP printers around the world started to show error messages on the same day, the 13th of September 2016.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The gold standard for trade secret theft (or is that the way of the world)? Robert Fortune and Chinese tea

  By the 1830’s, a significant feature of economic life of the British Empire was about opium and tea. Opium was raised in the Indian east and delivered, mainly by inland waterways, to the Indian west coast (think Calcutta), and from there smuggled for sale in China, despite the protestations of the Emperor. With the proceeds, the English purchased quality Chinese tea, which it then brought home (“[n]early one in every ten pounds sterling collected by the government came from the import and sale of tea” (p. 1). The English loved their tea, but all agreed that Chinese tea was far superior to what was being produced in India. However, the Chinese took careful measures to keep secret their tea industry, including control both of the tea plants and their means of production.

  This worked well enough for a while, but one side-effect of the First first Opium War (1839-1942), which opened up Chinese markets to English traders, was that China began to raise locally the poppy seeds from which opium was derived. Should this continue, England would have less Indian-sourced opium to sell, meaning it would have less revenues from which to purchase Chinese tea. The solution: develop an Indian-based tea industry that would produce tea of Chinese quality. To do this, they needed to find tea terroir similar to that in China (think the Darjeeling area and the Himalayan foothills). More importantly, they had to learn as much as possible about the secrets of the Chinese tea industry. The person tasked with this mission was a Scottish botanist/adventurer named Robert Fortune.

• After Two-Year Hiatus, WIPO Resumes Discussions On Protecting Traditional Knowledge [Ed: WIPO talks about preserving knowledge whilst attacking (illegally) its staff for speaking out]

  How can traditional knowledge be protected against misappropriation and who should benefit from this protection is at the heart of discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organization this week. After over a two-year hiatus, WIPO delegates are resuming discussions this week on a potential treaty protecting traditional knowledge. The week’s focus is to find common understanding of core issues, such as the definition of traditional knowledge, and the scope of protection.

  The 31st session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore is taking place from 19-23 September.

• Copyrights

  • Indian Court Says ‘Copyright Is Not An Inevitable, Divine, Or Natural Right’ And Photocopying Textbooks Is Fair Use

    Last week there was a big copyright ruling in India, where a court ruled against some big academic publishers in ruling that a photocopying kiosk that sold photocopied chapters from textbooks was not infringing on the copyrights of those publishers. We wrote about this case over three years ago, when it was first filed. It’s actually fairly similar to a set of cases in the US that found college copyshops to be infringing — leading to a massive increase in educational material costs for college students.