09.26.13

GNOME Desktop Approaches 3.10 and Finds Wider Acceptance

Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux at 6:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: GNOME, the popular GNU/Linux suite of applications, is back in the groove

GNOME, as a desktop environment, suffered some backlash when the third branch came out. It’s similar to KDE when its fourth branch came out. But things appear to be changing for the better in GNOME [1] and a new release is fast approaching [2-6] under the leadership of Karen Sandler [7] who is a strong advocate of software freedom. GNOME Music is being introduced [8] and GNOME applications generally reach out to more environments like MATE and XFCE [9], not just KDE (through QtCurve and other bridges). Other GNOME projects [10,11] show signs of life in this age when we can easily forget GNOME or simply take it for granted, just like KDE.

Several years ago we criticised GNOME for its stance on Mono. After Miguel de Icaza had stepped down things gradually improved and GTK-based Mono-dependent applications mostly died (no longer maintained). Techrights has no opposition to GNOME or the GNOME Foundation. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Gnome 3 Love

   Anyway, Gnome 3 shell is everyone’s favorite punching bag. For us old-timers, it certainly is unusual in its approach to work flow. But, I tried to adapt to vanilla Gnome Shell. I really did. I don’t want to live in the past.

   Nope. Still don’t love the vanilla Gnome 3 experience.

2. CSDs came to stay in GNOME 3.10!

   Today I installed Fedora 20 (from Nightly Build) that comes with GNOME 3.10 Beta and it (Fedora) feels amazingly stable (except the really buggy installer) for a pre-alpha release.

3. GNOME Shell 3.10 Is Ready To Shine On Wayland

   GNOME Shell 3.9.92 was released this morning as the GNOME Shell 3.10 release candidate. With this latest release of the core GNOME 3 user-interface, the Wayland branch has been merged!

4. What Should You Expect from GNOME 3.10

   GNOME 3.10 should be released this month, on September 25, and every Linux users who uses it expects the unexpected, so we thought it would be a very good idea to preview some of its upcoming features.

5. GNOME Shell 3.10 RC Getting Ready for Full Wayland Support

6. Gnome upcoming features

   Gnome 3.10 is just about a week away and the upcoming features list of version 3.12 is already forming. What are the new features that will empower and extend Gnome’s usability on the “good ten” that’s coming, and what kind of new features are seeing complete fruition on the next version?

7. Interview: Karen Sandler (part 1)

   In Linux Format issue 176, Graham Morrison and Andrew Gregory spoke to Karen Sandler, executive director of the Gnome Foundation. We were so absorbed by what she had to say that we almost missed the free lunch in the canteen. Of the many subjects that the conversation touched upon (we’ll be putting the full interview up on TuxRadar soon), the most time-sensitive is the Gnome Outreach Programme For Women. This does pretty much what it says on the tin: it’s an initiative aimed at getting more women into free software, not just Gnome.

8. GNOME Music

9. GNOME Software on MATE and XFCE

   Long version: In the software application we have the problem where applications have the same name and summary, but are targeted against different desktops. We know when an app targets a specific desktop from the AppStream metadata (which currently uses a heuristic from the .desktop file) so we could filter these out client side. At the moment searching for notes gives you two similarly looking results results provided by two different applications: bijiben (GNOME) and xfce4-notes (XFCE). Also, because of the shared history, a lot of the MATE applications have the same name as the GNOME ones. This makes bad UI.

10. GNOME Break Timer: Week 13

    I’m nearing the end of a very busy few weeks, and getting very close to that soft pencils down date! With school starting up again this hasn’t been my most productive week on the GNOME Break Timer front, but I’m pretty happy with what’s been done.

11. AppData validation tool

    A upstream maintainers have contacted me about some kind of validation tool for AppData files. I’ve spent a couple of days creating and then packaging appdata-tools which includes the appdata-validate command. This returns non-zero if there are any syntax or style issues with the AppData file.

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Microsoft Moles in HP, the Bill Hilf Edition

Posted in HP, Microsoft at 5:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Working for the b0rg more effectively through another company

Summary: Bill Hilf is joining several other Microsoft executives who now occupy key positions inside HP; the ugly details behind Elop’s entryism begin to lay bear

HP, a massive company in the desktops and servers sectors (and back doors facilitator [1, 2]), has already had some Microsoft executives occupy key positions in recent years (Ozzie is a recent example). Remember this when HP is rationalising FOSS-hostile decisions inside the company. HP recently collaborated in Microsoft’s anti-GNU/Linux FUD [1, 2] and based on this reported it hired Microsoft’s anti-Linux and pro-patents, fear-mongering bully Bill Hilf [1, 2]. The conflict of interest is clear because this man pushed hard for Windows on servers and patent tax on GNU/Linux servers. Several years ago he was probably the most hated guy (alongside Ballmer) to have come from Microsoft, as viewed by the GNU/Linux community.

We really ought to learn from experience the threat of Microsoft moles and entryism.

“San Francisco investment firm takes more active role as CEO Steve Ballmer plans retirement,” says this report. But as one of our readers put it, “who is behind ValueAct Capital?” Gates-funded sites (with Microsoft spyware on page) say “Microsoft averts proxy battle” and Microsoft friends like Dina Bass call ValueAct an “activist”. The timing was interesting: “Redmond announced the “cooperation agreement” in the late hours of Friday afternoon in San Francisco before the Labor Day three day weekend, which is an ideal time to bury news.”

Let’s also recall the case of Nokia, where Elop’s involvement now starts to smell like fraud.

Nokia Admits Giving Misleading Information About Elop’s Compensation

Nokia’s board of directors seems caught in a tragicomedy of epic proportions. The latest twist is Finland’s largest newspaper claiming that Nokia made a false statement about CEO’s bonus package last Friday. Pressed by Finnish and international media last week, chairman Siilasmaa had claimed then that the bonus structure of Stephen Elop’s contract in 2010 was “essentially the same” as the one the previous CEO had received. But the largest daily of the country, “Helsingin Sanomat”, decided to dig into SEC filings to investigate the matter. By early Tuesday morning, the newspaper had uncovered evidence that Nokia’s board had made fundamental changes in Elop’s contract compared to his predecessors.

Check out this other article about Elop, who wants to be compensated having totally destroyed Nokia. To quote an English version: “According to the early Wednesday morning edition of Finland’s biggest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Nokia has pleaded with former CEO Stephen Elop to accept a smaller bonus in order to silence the roar of disapproval and protest now roiling Finland. Drama in Nokia’s home country escalated on Tuesday as it was revealed that Risto Siilasmaa, Nokiia’s chairman of the board, had misrepresented facts last weeks when he claimed that Elop’s bonus arrangements were similar to those of previous chief executives. Nokia was forced to admit on Tuesday morning that Elop had in fact received a contract that seemed to have been designed to guarantee a quick $25 million pay-off if Elop was able to sell the handset unit. According to Helsingin Sanomat, Nokia is now scrambling to contain the public relations damage the ongoing drama is causing. Asking Elop to accept a smaller bonus might silence some of the critics — on Tuesday, the head of Finland’s Equity Investor Association called Siilasmaa’s mistaken claims about Elop’s bonus package “unforgivable.””

Elop should be sued for more than $25 million. He pretended to serve Nokia, but in reality he was a Microsoft investor, whose house remains near Microsoft and whose only goal is to feed Nokia to Microsoft and feed patent trolls who pose a threat to Android/Linux. There should be prosecution here, not compensation. If anyone deserves compensation here, it’s Nokia’s shareholders. Elop should personally compensate them. He was Ballmer’s henchman. █

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Another Financial ‘Collapse’ is Coming, We Need to Facilitate Banking Whistleblowers

Posted in Finance at 4:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Will you help this man?

Summary: Why the world needs more conscientious people who speak out against banks and show where fraud is used to facilitate pillaging and plundering by plutocrats who ‘crash’ the economy (privatise/confiscate whatever is still public)

SEVERAL years ago Rudolf Elmer (shown above) gave Wikileaks material which showed serious crimes of banks. In a sense, Wikileaks’ technical skills helped combat corruption. This is where geeks can really help fix the world.

For those who don’t pay much attention to financial news (by “news” we don’t mean channels bankrolled — indirectly — by the financial sector), there’s indication that the plutocrats will crash the economy again in their never-ending pursuit of total ownership of everything, even what was publicly-owned (nationalised). To give some examples from this month’s news, Detroit is being stolen [1] by the rich and powerful (privatisation) and here in Britain the 500-year-old mail service is now being considered for privatisation [2]. China, which sells debt to much of the West, is buying sizeable chunks of Ukraine [3], which is ironic and sad because in the land of tragic famine they now help prevent Chinese famine (as if the problem can be addressed by feeding another nation).

“Pessimists say that there is no way to fight all this corruption and pillaging will always prevail.”The rich and powerful are doing extremely well [4,5] (no financial crisis) and the rest of us sink to oblivion [6]. Plutocrats share the religion of greed [7], which they have private meetings about [8] as well as propaganda campaigns [9]. The corporate media is using propaganda right at this very moment in order to usher in a man responsible for the previous financial ‘collapse’ (Larry Summers) into the Fed [10-15]. Higher education is being relegated again to a luxury of rich kids [16] (perpetuating poverty cycles) and Forbes, perhaps the worst offender when it comes to glorification of greed, allegedly “Calls Goldman CEO Holier Than Mother Teresa” [17].

Pessimists say that there is no way to fight all this corruption and pillaging will always prevail. They say that even Occupy protests failed. The truth of the matter is, what we need are the facts; we need to expose the perpetrators and make them step out in shame. For this, we need technical edge and we need to facilitate whistleblowers. They do exist even if at present they are some sort of conscientious objectors who are potential whistleblowers (afraid to ruin future careers). If tools are created and deployed to facilitate secure and private passage of data (the NSA would loathe such a thing with deep conviction and passion), then we will win the information war and leave no crooked executive unaccountable. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Forced Bankruptcy and Privatization of the City of Detroit: Law Suit in Federal Court

   This extraordinary hearing had provided only a small window of time for legal action. Many of the people that testified were retirees, city workers, community organizers and professionals who met the deadline set by the Judge Steven Rhodes to submit their objections.

2. Britain to float Royal Mail within weeks

   Britain embarked on its largest privatization in decades on Thursday as the government unveiled plans to sell the majority of the near 500-year-old state-owned Royal Mail postal service.

3. China just bought 5% of Ukraine

   China has inked a deal to farm three million hectares (paywall), or about 11, 583 square miles of Ukrainian land over the span of half a century—which means the eastern European country will give up about 5% of its total land, or 9% of its arable farmland to feed China’s burgeoning population.

4. Rich Man’s Recovery

   A few days ago, The Times published a report on a society that is being undermined by extreme inequality. This society claims to reward the best and brightest regardless of family background. In practice, however, the children of the wealthy benefit from opportunities and connections unavailable to children of the middle and working classes. And it was clear from the article that the gap between the society’s meritocratic ideology and its increasingly oligarchic reality is having a deeply demoralizing effect.

5. Executive Excess 2013: Bailed out, Booted, and Busted

   Nearly 40 percent of the CEOs on the highest-paid lists from the past 20 years were eventually “bailed out, booted, or busted.”

6. Organized labor’s decline in the US is well-known. But what drove it?

7. Don’t Celebrate Yet

   There is no obvious reason why the Western powers should care whether it was the friends or the family of Mohammed which took over the leadership of his movement upon his death. However there is plainly an agenda led by the USA to support the Sunnis in their spiralling regional conflict with the Shia.

   This is not hard to rationalise. The ultra wealthy members of the Gulf regimes continue to act as the West’s proxies in the region and provide harbour to its neo-imperialist armed forces, while at the same time maintaining themselves a obscurantist version of Islam which would have horrified Mohammed and breaks virtually every precept of the Koran, particularly as regards treatment of women and of minority religions within their territory.

8. Fears of Changing Global Economy Underscore G20 Summit

9. Bill Black: Not with a Bang but a Whimper – the SEC Enforcement Team’s Propaganda Campaign

   The New York Times has one of those “inside” stories that unintentionally demonstrate the collapse of justice and financial reporting. This genre involves the media reporting gravely (and uncritically) the administration’s claims that its failure to prosecute any elite for the largest and most destructive financial frauds in history actually demonstrates the exceptional ethical rectitude of the non-prosecutors and non-enforcers. Journalists, unlike alchemists, can transmute dross into gold. In the NYT’s account a pathetic failure of competence, integrity, and courage at the SEC is reimagined as a fantastic triumph of vigor and ethics on the part of the SEC enforcement attorney who refused to seek to hold Lehman’s senior officers accountable for their violations but otherwise became the scourge of elite frauds. In the end, he is promoted for his dedication to “justice” and is now the anti-enforcement leader of the SEC’s enforcement group.

10. The media’s disgraceful acquiescence to Larry Summers’ White House boosters

    Summers’ record should bar him from the Fed chair. Why is the press letting anonymous administration officials promote him?

11. Larry Summers and Financial Crises: Is He Being Graded on Attendance?

    In short, if we look at Larry Summers track record in dealing with crises it is pretty abysmal. But on attendance, he gets an “A.”

12. Joseph Stiglitz: Why Janet Yellen, Not Larry Summers, Should Lead the Fed

13. The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis

    The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

    The memo is authentic.

14. Failing Up to the Fed, A Reporters’ Guide to the Paper Trail Surrounding Larry Summers

    The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein reports that Larry Summers is the “overwhelming favorite” of the Obama team for the job as Federal Reserve chairman. To convince the American public that one of the chief architects of the 2008 financial crisis should be the chief regulator of the U.S. financial system, supporters of Summers have their work cut out for them.

15. FIVE YEARS AFTER LEHMAN’S: DID WE LEARN ANYTHING?

    Or, at least, not much. While it would be nice to believe that Larry Summers had to withdraw from the race to take over the Fed because of his substantial role in creating the global financial collapse, I think it had more to do with his outsized personality. Before you start celebrating his defeat remember that Goldman Sachs still must approve any choice and President Obama may yet choose one of its anointed candidates over Janet Yellin.

16. The student loan bubble is starting to burst

    The largest bank in the United States will stop making student loans in a few weeks.

    JPMorgan Chase has sent a memorandum to colleges notifying them that the bank will stop making new student loans in October, according to Reuters.

17. Forbes Calls Goldman CEO Holier Than Mother Teresa

    I got a lot of letters from folks this week about an online column for Forbes written by a self-proclaimed Ayn Rand devotee named Harry Binswanger (if that’s a nom de plume, it’s not bad, although I might have gone for “Harry Kingbanger” or “Harry Wandwanker”). The piece had the entertainingly provocative title, “Give Back? Yes, It’s Time for the 99% to Give Back to the 1%” and contained a number of innovatively slavish proposals to aid the beleaguered and misunderstood rich, including a not-kidding-at-all plan to exempt anyone who makes over a million dollars from income taxes.

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Former Novell Staff Still Pushing the Linux Foundation Into Restricted Boot Territory, Ignoring the Real Threat (Back Doors)

Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Novell, Security at 3:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Photo by Sebastian Oliva

Summary: Back doors in code, embedded in blobs, and even shoehorned into encryption is the overlooked security threat, which gets pushed aside in favour of phantom threats which Microsoft ‘sells’ through former Novell staff (i.e. funded by Microsoft)

A MONTH or two ago we mostly ignored exaggerated (sexed-up) reports about something called “Hand of Thief”. When there’s a Windows security threat the press does not call out Windows, but when it relates to GNU/Linux then tabloids like ZDNet scream from the rooftops. This thing called “Hand of Thief” is basically a malicious program which GNU/Linux users need to install themselves in order for it to do malicious things. It is not a virus, it does not spread, and it hardly even uses social engineering to get itself installed. We cited some reports which stress these facts and now comes a belated one too [1]. LynuxWorks is now offering some “Linux rootkit detector” [2] as if rootkits on GNU/Linux are a common issue. In a sense, since the Linux Foundation seems to insist on helping UEFI restricted boot, we are led to the belief that bootkits are a common threat to Linux. As the Linux Foundation’s site put it, as in the words of the employee it acquired from Novell:

Now that The Linux Foundation is a member of the UEFI.org group, I’ve been working on the procedures for how to boot a self-signed Linux kernel on a platform so that you do not have to rely on any external signing authority.

Greg K-H has been working on all sorts of other kernel-level projects that help Microsoft. He did this while being paid by Novell, which was in turn being given money by Microsoft. That’s the power of money. Other former Novell employees also helped promote UEFI restricted boot, as we showed before. Rogue influence by Novell in the Linux Foundation is a subject we have written about for half a decade, showing numerous examples.

The bigger security issue right now might be back doors, which might also exist in Linux, even in encryption form [3] (giving away passwords over the network for example), so hard-to-crack passwords [4] might not be enough. Microsoft’s and Sony’s network compromises sure reveal the massive financial effects of system intrusions, so this subject should not be taken lightly.

UEFI restricted boot is actually a security threat, not a security solution, especially when a signature is provided and managed by some rogue company in the United States — one which has been secretly in bed with the NSA. With UEFI restricted boot, hardware can be bricked remotely. In a way, UEFI restricted boot deserves the name “unsecure boot”. In some devices it can block the user from accessing his/her own computer. Nobody should promote such treacherous computing. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Hand of Thief, Not

   Linux’s biggest vulnerability is the software that users install with full “superuser” privileges. If you just install applications from your distro’s official repository, that’s not a problem. But if you download software from dubious web sites, or if you add a mysterious repository to your package manager, you’re opening yourself up for an infection. Always, always make sure you know what software you are installing, why you are installing it, and where it’s from.

2. Linux rootkit detector adds hardware punch to security scanning

   LynuxWorks is stepping up the battle with the release of the first hardware-based rootkit detection system powered by the LynxSecure separation kernel. Called the RDS5201, it combats and detects stealthy advanced persistent threats. Built on the LynxSecure 5.2 separation kernel and hypervisor, this small form factor appliance has been designed to offer a unique detection capability that complements traditional security mechanisms as they try to protect against the growing number and complexity of cyber threats.

3. RSA warns developers not to use RSA products

   In today’s news of the weird, RSA (a division of EMC) has recommended that developers desist from using the (allegedly) ‘backdoored’ Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator — which happens to be the default in RSA’s BSafe cryptographic toolkit. Youch.

4. How-to make hard-to-crack passwords you can easily remember

5. Australian who boasted of hacking to plead not guilty to charges stemming from raid

   Dylan Wheeler, who claimed in February to have breached Microsoft’s and Sony’s networks, has not been charged with hacking

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Coming Soon: Richard Stallman Interview for 30th GNU Anniversary

Posted in FSF, GNU/Linux at 2:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The GNU operating system does not depend on Linux

Summary: A glance at the GNU project, whose important anniversary is coming at the end of this month

GNU is turning 30 this week. It is nearly as old as yours truly and it is a source of inspiration to many, including the founder of the World Wide Web.

GNU’s anniversary is mostly mentioned by FSF/GNU-related sites [1-5] because the corporate press chooses to ignore it, for reasons that are the subject worth dealing with another day. Stallman is going to give many talks very shortly and events are being organised [6-11]. Be sure to check if an event is being organised near you. As new updates from the GNU project show us (e.g. [12-18]), GNU is very much alive and we oughtn’t confuse that with Linux, which is a smaller part of the GNU/Linux operating system (many people erroneously refer to it just as “Linux”).

“Stallman is going to give many talks very shortly and events are being organised.”We should soon publish an interview regarding the anniversary of GNU and then resume video interviews with Stallman.

Those who ignore or dismiss the importance of the GNU project don’t seem to care about what’s true and important; instead they promote their own agenda, which sometimes gets motivated by corporate interests (the corporate press deserves much of the blame). This is why Linux has been so highly regarded (and groomed) over the past decade or two, essentially overriding and taking a lot of credit away from GNU. To use an analogy, imagine a laptop being referred to as “Wi-Fi”. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. GNU system, free software celebrate 30 years

   The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced plans to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the GNU operating system. The celebratory activities will include a 30th anniversary hackathon at MIT in Cambridge, MA, satellite events around the world, and ways for people to celebrate online.

2. GNU

   30 years. Think of it. 3 decades. A whole generation of programmers and users have benefitted from what started as an annoying printer and became a movement to keep software, developers and users free of stupid, boring, expensive, complicated and irrelevant restrictions on how software can be obtained and used.

3. Software Freedom Is Spreading

4. Celebrate GNU’s big “three-o”

5. GNU 30

6. Let’s have dinner at the GNU 30th!

   The FSF has made some reservations at local restaurants for the GNU 30th in Cambridge on Saturday September 28th. If you’re in the area please sign up and come have Indian food with me and other GNOME folks. Sign up soon so I can get excited about seeing you.

7. “Digital technology: free (libero) or subjugating (soggiogante)”

   This speech by Richard Stallman will be nontechnical, admission is free, and the public is encouraged to attend.

8. Richard Stallman to speak in San Francisco

9. 30th anniversary celebration: GNU get-together/workshop on Saturday September 21 in Paris, France

10. Richard Stallman to speak at GNU Project 30th anniversary celebration

11. Richard Stallman to speak at Paris’s GNU 30th anniversary celebration

12. Proposed Antisipate UI Visual Introduction

    Antisipate, our first GNU Free Call client, is not like most other sip user agents.

13. GNU Aris 2.1.1 Released

    GNU Aris is a logical proof program.

14. GNU’s Framework for Secure Peer-to-Peer Networking: New Developer Documentation for HOSTLIST

15. FreeIPMI 1.3.2 Released

16. GnuCash 2.5.5 (Unstable) released

    The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.5.5, the sixth release in the 2.5.x series of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software which will eventually lead to the stable version 2.6.0. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris and Mac OSX.

17. GNU Alive 2.0.2 available

18. How to participate in GNU Telephony Development

    Sometimes people ask how they can participate in the development of our packages, such as sipwitch and antisipate. We have worked on making it very easy for people to participate directly on our code. One of the special things we have done is create a git repo that checks out and builds all our packages together in a single source tree.

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09.25.13

Linux Back Door Question Revisited in the Age of Government Surveillance Crimes

Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel, Security at 7:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: In the age of government lawlessness regarding privacy we recall Torvalds’ sarcastic remarks

LINUX is commonly being run with many blobs in it. Some are very large, especially graphics drivers. Recently, Linus Torvalds was dodging a question regarding a backdoor in Linux and this was covered by the British press.

“The lust for surveillance is a national thing and the bigger the nation is, the more capable it is of carrying out surveillance at a massive scale.”Now that “The UN High Commissioner Says Privacy Is a Human Right” [1] we should take this matter seriously knowing that cross-national bodies stand not for surveillance. The UN, reveal recent leaks, was itself a victim of US/NSA espionage. The lust for surveillance is a national thing and the bigger the nation is, the more capable it is of carrying out surveillance at a massive scale. It’s not just a US thing. The NSA is probably interested in putting back doors in Linux [2] and now that complicity turns out to be behind some NSA back doors [3] Free software leaves more hope for some who appreciate privacy [4], not those who use social networks in an irresponsible way [5-8] or those who trust the keepers of medical records [9,10] (here in the UK there is currently a push to share more such data, with opt-out being an option, for now). The Brazilian president says US surveillance a “breach of international law” [11] and there is some talk about building a new ‘Internet’ alternative [12] as backlash increases [13] over the Pentagon-built Internet. Irrespective of the location of an Internet company, surveillance is unstoppable [14] on the Internet. The UK is part of the problem [15] because it’s part of the empire. Concerns are being raised here [16] because our government is breaking European laws and cracks systems in ally nations [17], showing just how corrupt a government can be when given the power to carry out surveillance [18]. Don’t buy this whole ‘metadata’ excuse. It’s essentially what makes a concise profile of all of us. A lot can be derived from metadata, which BT’s Bruce Schneier (BT is a massive surveillance entity) says “Equals Surveillance” [19].

Some graphics drivers for Linux were previously found to be severely flawed (even enabling remote access through compromise). If one looks for a Linux back door, that’s a good place to start. What’s reassuring, however, is the news that NVIDIA will begin publishing open GPU documentation [20], much like ATI/AMD. If underlying code is being released, then it gets harder to conceal back doors. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. The UN High Commissioner Says Privacy Is a Human Right

2. NSA: GNU/Linux TOO SECURE

   When did the role of the National Security agency change from keeping USA safe to sabotaging the world’s IT? From the beginning…

3. Major US security company warns over NSA link to encryption formula

4. Goodbye, Encryption; Hello, FOSS

   Indeed, the NSA has not cracked good crypto; what it has done is inserted backdoors and such in closed software,” Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien pointed out. “The key word here is ‘closed.’ That makes Linux even more important since anyone can view the code.

5. Redmond’s Used iPads, Spy Wars Escalate & More…

   If an employee makes a post on Facebook using a privacy setting that excludes the boss from seeing it, that post is off limits to the employer. Unless, that is, the poster has a turncoat friend who willingly supplies the post to the employer with no prodding to do so. That’s evidently the gist of a ruling handed down in August, as reported by PCWorld on Sunday.

6. LinkedIn Accused of Hacking Customers’ E-Mails to Get Contacts

7. ‘I only shared it with eight friends’ says Emily Sheffield after posting picture of napping PM

   Emily Sheffield uploaded the image of her sister Alice smiling for the camera and holding a glass of champagne ahead of her wedding two weeks ago.

8. Viral pictures of politicians highlight dangers of revealing more than intended online

   On her wedding day, Alice Sheffield would have been entirely within her rights to expect to be the centre of attention.

   But a family photo of the bride-to-be smiling with a glass of champagne just hours before the ceremony ended up going viral due to her brother-in-law being pictured in the background, taking a nap on a four-poster hotel bed.

   While this may not sound to be too interesting in its own right, users of photo-sharing app Instagram who viewed the image were shocked to spot that the sleeping guest was none other than David Cameron. The British Prime Minister could clearly be seen dozing barefoot on the bed, curled up next to a red box of ministerial paperwork.

9. NHS 111 workers may get access to private medical records

   The government has announced proposals that would provide thousands of unqualified NHS 111 workers access to our private medical records, posing a massive risk to patient privacy.

10. GPs threaten to boycott NHS database

    Their concerns are entirely reasonable. Patients have had zero direct communication from the NHS about the program, patient information posters are wholly uninformative and have only been displayed in GP surgeries, rather than being sent to patients. If you don’t visit your GP every few weeks then it’s likely you wouldn’t see the poster before it was too late (and even if you did read the poster, it’s likely you’ll have no idea what it’s talking about.)

11. Brazilian president: US surveillance a ‘breach of international law’

12. The BRICS “Independent Internet” Cable. In Defiance of the “US-Centric Internet”

    Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington’s widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

    President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company’s network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

13. International Day of Privacy, Berlin Demo

    The Inter­na­tional Day of Pri­vacy was cel­eb­rated glob­ally on 31 August, with the cases of Chelsea Man­ning and Edward Snowden bring­ing extra energy and res­on­ance to the subject.

14. The lunacy of trying to avoid NSA spying by moving e-mail and cloud out of the US

    Some people are ao much in a panic about the NSA spying on them that they’re going to move their e-mail and cloud services out of the US entirely to “safer” foreign companies.

15. Yahoo! joins transparency club as more UK requests refused

    Yahoo! has just added its own statistics to those of Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others. We blogged last week on Facebook’s new data and the questions that now urgently need answering about how powers to access data are being used and the oversight of surveillance powers.

16. Edward Snowden has raised ‘real issues’, says head of UK spy watchdog

    Sir Malcolm Rifkind defends UK intelligence agencies’ techniques but appears to concede laws may need review

17. State sponsored cyber attack: Will we practice what we preach?

    GCHQ is responsible for a cyber attack on Belgacom.

    [...]

    It appears then that this message is only relevant to the countries that we seek, quite rightly, to condemn rather than to ourselves and our allies. The information leaked by Edward Snowden, and reported on by Der Spiegel, indicates that the goal of “Operation Socialist” was “to enable better exploitation of Belagcom” and to improve understanding of the provider’s infrastructure. It also appears that GCHQ used spying technology that had been developed by the NSA.

18. Spy Agencies Are Doing WHAT?

    The government is spying on essentially everything we do.

19. Metadata Equals Surveillance

    Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people — including President Obama — discounted the seriousness of the NSA’s actions by saying that it’s just metadata.

20. NVIDIA To Begin Publishing Open GPU Documentation

    This week at XDC2013 NVIDIA made one of the biggest surprise announcements… NVIDIA will begin publishing NDA-free GPU programming documentation. They already have released some documentation and more is on the way as they seek to assist the Nouveau graphics driver developers in writing a full open-source 3D Linux graphics driver for GeForce GPUs.

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Public Services and Government Branches Compelled to Adopt Free/Libre Software

Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software at 5:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Democracy requires accountability

Summary: As Free (as in freedom) software becomes the norm it is evident that proprietary software companies — not Free/Open Source software proponents — need to work hard to justify procurement through them

Desktop GNU/Linux is coming to more store shelves [1], even if it’s being branded “Chromebook” or whatever [2]. It is abundantly clear — and Intel agrees — that GNU/Linux is the future of the desktop, branding questions aside. Linux/Android already dominates mobile.

It has become harder to dismiss GNU/Linux or Free software as “hype” or “passing fad”. Governments are being pressured by voters to explore Free/libre options and in this process of public advocacy we see changes across Europe [3-5]. Ben Balter calls for “[o]pen standards, open formats, [and] open systems” [6] because only by freeing up data and code can the government earn trust.

There are many success stories for Free software this month. In a matter of days the movement of Free software will officially turn 30. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Retail Shelf-space For GNU/Linux PCs

   I was reading a decent article about buying PCs with GNU/Linux installed. It all comes down to retail shelf-space and even in a country like Brazil where millions of GNU/Linux PCs are manufactured each year, it is difficult to find them on retail shelves.

2. Exploring the Samsung ARM Chromebook 3G

   Back in late 2010, Google announced a “Chromebook”—a low-cost, entry-level netbook that would run Google’s own operating system, ChromeOS. Google’s vision of ChromeOS, although based on Linux, basically would be a giant Web browser, with all the apps on the machine running in the browser. ChromeOS would be a nearly stateless computer, with all the user’s apps based in Google’s cloud, running the Google Apps suite.

3. France’s Defence ministry dutiful studies free software

4. Open source to formalise European railway specifications

5. Touring Norway’s municipalities kindles open source interest

   A two-month tour by Friprog, Norway’s free and open source software resource centre group, visiting all municipal administrations, helped to raise the profile of this type of software solutions, says Morten Amundsen, the centre’s director. “We turned up several applications that the administrations want to share with others; and helped broker a deal with a proprietary software supplier to support a connection with an open source application.”

6. Four tips for building better apps for government

   Government CIOs have ample resources to do a great job for their communities and citizens. They have smart, well-intentioned people working for them and more low-hanging fruit than most private-sector CIOs dream of.

   [...]

   Open. Barriers to the free-flow of information just add friction and more often than not, you just end up shooting yourself in the foot. Make open the default. Open standards, open formats, open systems. Expose process. Prefer social and cultural norms to technical constraints. Don’t lock it down unless you absolutely have to. Trust people.

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As the World ‘Progresses’ Protest is Being Banned in the United States and Its Allies

Posted in Courtroom at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Not just Russia…

Summary: How any effective protest (in its newer, online gown) is being banned and severely punished for in the West, with jail sentences far longer than Pussy Riot’s members have to endure

FREE SPEECH is dying and new forms of protest, which evolve to deal with an increasingly digital world, are being treated like crime worse than even rape and murder in some cases. Journalism that is favourable to protesters (or whistleblowers) is also being criminalised.

The control grid in the United States is expanding [1] with more and more biological footprints of more and more people. The NSA is basically taking digital footprints of just about anyone in the world who uses a phone, the Internet, a bank account, etc. Scary stuff.

Barrett Brown helped show that Anonymous, an amorphous group which thrives in anonymity while it protests online, is not just criminalised but even those who help explain what it does are being criminalised [2]. This is US law that’s being used against Barrett Brown, not something from a nation like North Korea.

Make no mistake. The US government can also harass, prosecute, and almost abduct anyone it doesn’t like right now [3]. Russia even warns about it openly [4]. Just look what’s being done to Julian Assange, which the US government is trying to sort of kidnap via Sweden (that ‘nuisance’ called International Law is the only thing allowing Ecuador to defend Assange from the US government’s allies in the UK). What this comes to show is that Sweden — like the UK — is like a branch of the US now. It helps the US spy on Russia (Snowden’s leaks show this clearly) and Obama has just gone to Stockholm to disrupt the city for a bit [5,6].

Don’t believe for a second that we in the West are so much morally superior. It’s the façade we are encourage to blindly accept if we habitually watch state and corporate media in our language. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Biometrics Center to open next summer

   A year from now, employees of two federal agencies will be searching for potential terrorists from a new 360,000-square-foot building on the FBI’s Clarksburg campus.

2. Mapping the evidence that connects the law firm Barrett Brown investigated with his prosecution

3. “Homeless hacker” Commander X quits Anonymous, retreats to robot lab

   Last year, I traveled to Canada to write a long profile of “homeless hacker” Christopher Doyon, who goes by the name “Commander X” and who is on the run from the US government. (Doyon brought down a California county’s website for 30 minutes, with the help of Anonymous, as part of his protest over an “anti-sleeping” law targeting homeless people; he is under indictment in the Northern District of California and is the only known Anon who has jumped bail to live “in exile.”) Doyon’s life has been by turns bizarre and dramatic, but last week the online drama surrounding Anonymous proved too much even for him—and he quit.

   [...]

   “So I quit. I am closing down the PLF. I have replaced all those sites three times this summer. I can take no more. I am done. Trolls win.”

4. Russia Issues Travel Warning to Its Citizens About United States and Extradition

   Countries often issue travel advisories warning citizens of danger abroad: war, for instance, or a terrorist threat or an outbreak of disease. The Russian Foreign Ministry posted advice of a somewhat different nature on Monday, cautioning people wanted by the United States not to visit nations that have an extradition treaty with it.

5. Stockholm braces for Obama traffic circus

6. Stockholm police: Don’t drive during Obama visit

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