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… of this laptop. Here’s the result—not your typical 2-minutes superficial tour…

Dell’s new Precision mobile workstation PCs available with Ubuntu or Windows

Dell is updating its Precision mobile workstation line of powerful laptop computers with new models sporting Intel Kaby Lake processors, optional NVIDIA graphics, and a choice of Windows or Ubuntu software.

Talos, For Those Needing Powerful Computing

FSF (Free Software Foundation) is backing a …

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/10/kodachi-linux-3-7/feed/ 0 Links 9/1/2017: Civilization VI Coming to GNU/Linux, digiKam 5.4.0 Released http://techrights.org/2017/01/09/digikam-5-4-0-released/ http://techrights.org/2017/01/09/digikam-5-4-0-released/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:51:29 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98205

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Game’s changed in 6 years: open source ecosystem thrives

    Chen Bo, a 37-year-old software developer with Beijing-based Cheetah Mobile, remembers clearly how isolated and closed China’s software environment was in 2010. That was a time when the mobile internet revolution was taking hold of the world’s most populous country.

    “Every app developer saw his or her software codes as the most precious assets and would never share them with others. You could say the scene was equivalent to people securing their family jewelry in plastic wraps and locking it in burglar-resistant safes,” Chen said.

    That was also a time when even employees were allowed access to only a part of the codes they were working on, to pre-empt information leaks to competitors.

    But the scene has changed over the last six years. China has blossomed into one of the world’s most dynamic hubs for software developers.

  • Open source server simplifies HTTPS, security certificates

    For administrators seeking an easier method to turn on HTTPS for their websites, there is Caddy, an open source web server that automatically sets up security certificates and serves sites over HTTPS by default.

    Built on Go 1.7.4, Caddy is a lightweight web server that supports HTTP/2 out of the box and automatically integrates with any ACME-enabled certificate authority such as Let’s Encrypt. HTTP/2 is enabled by default when the site is served over HTTPS, and administrators using Caddy will never have to deal with expired TLS certificates for their websites, as Caddy handles the process of obtaining and deploying certificates.

  • Communities Over Code: How to Build a Successful Project by Joe Brockmeier, Red Hat
  • Communities Over Code: How to Build a Successful Software Project

    Healthy productive FOSS projects don’t just happen, but are built, and the secret ingredient is Community over code. Purpose and details are everything: If you build it will they come, and then how do you keep it going and growing? How do you set direction, attract and retain contributors, what do you do when there are conflicts, and especially conflicts with valuable contributors? Joe Brockmeier (Red Hat) shares a wealth of practical wisdom at LinuxCon North America.

  • Open technology for land rights documentation

    Technology is only one part of the solution, but at Cadasta we believe it is a key component. While many governments had modern technology systems put in place to manage land records, often these were expensive to maintain, required highly trained staff, were not transparent, and were otherwise too complicated. Many of these systems, created at great expense by donor governments, are already outdated and no longer accurately reflect existing land and property rights.

  • Web Browsers

    • Min Browser Muffles the Web’s Noise

      Min is a Web browser with a minimal design that provides speedy operation with simple features.

      When it comes to software design, “minimal” does not mean low functionality or undeveloped potential. If you like minimal distraction tools for your text editor and note-taking applications, that same comfort appeal is evident in the Min browser.

      I mostly use Google Chrome, Chromium and Firefox on my desktops and laptop computers. I am well invested in their add-on functionality, so I can access all the specialty services that get me through my long sessions in researching and working online.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Servo Begins Firming Up 2017 Goals

        Among their proposed goals for Servo in 2017 are finishing Stylo (Servo’s CSS style system into Gecko), extending WebRender as the GPU accelerated back-end, experimenting with initial layout integration in other products, exploring Flexbox, extending and better supporting embedding APIs, and implementing other high priority DOM APIs. Among the research proposed for this year is a magic DOM and JavaScript optimizations along with software transactional memory.

      • Mozilla Calls for “Responsible IoT”

        As the Internet of Things (IoT) gains momentum, there is a need for collaboration, open and interoperable tools, and governance. In fact, all the way back in 2015, Philip DesAutels, the AllSeen Alliance’s leader, told us that: “In five years, I think all of this will be around us everywhere, in everything. The next phase is going to be the really transformational phase. “Systems around you will have a whole lot more information. They’ll be able to deliver a lot more value.”

        Now, Mozilla, which has been keeping track of the convergence of open source and the Internet of Things, is out with a new report calling for “responsible IoT.”

  • SaaS/Back End

    • What is DataOps?

      DataOps describes the creation & curation of a central data hub, repository and management zone designed to collect, collate and then onwardly distribute data such that data analytics can be more widely democratised across an entire organisation and, subsequently, more sophisticated layers of analytics can be brought to bear such as built-for-purpose analytics engines.

    • Essentials of OpenStack Administration Part 5: OpenStack Releases and Use Cases

      OpenStack has come a long way since 2010 when NASA approached Rackspace for a project. With 1,600 individual contributors to OpenStack and a six-month release cycle, there are a lot of changes and progress. This amount of change and progress is not without its drawbacks. In the Juno release, there were something like 10,000 bugs. In the next release, Kilo, there were 13,000 bugs. But as OpenStack is deployed in more environments, and more people are interested in it, the community grows both in users and developers.

    • How to find your first OpenStack job

      We’ve covered the growth of OpenStack jobs and how you can become involved in the community. Maybe that even inspired you to search for OpenStack jobs and explore the professional opportunities for Stackers. You probably have questions, so we’re here to answer the frequent questions about working on OpenStack professionally.

    • OpenStack becomes ‘de facto’ private cloud

      A mixed year for OpenStack with HPE and Cisco seeming to step away from the community.

    • OpenStack under the radar
    • Angel Diaz talks about OpenStack Interop

      At the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, 16 vendors stood on stage and demonstrated interoperability. This was a major breakthrough for OpenStack. It marked a significant departure from just 18 months earlier when the OpenStack Foundation had chided vendors for creating lots of proprietary solutions. Enterprise Times sat down with Angel Diaz, IBM Vice President, Cloud Architecture and Technology to talk about this achievement.

    • How to take a leadership role in OpenStack

      On top of her job as a system architect at Nokia, Afek has taken an active role in the OpenStack community as the project team lead (PTL) of Vitrage and a voice in gender equality in the technology field with the Women of OpenStack. You may have also seen her taking center stage at the recent OpenStack Summit Barcelona, where she took part in a daredevil demo.

    • Landing a job, becoming the de facto private cloud, and more OpenStack news

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Top LibreOffice Alternatives

      More people than ever are enjoying the benefits of LibreOffice. It’s free to use and open source. But what about LibreOffice alternatives? Are there any good LibreOffice Alternative sand should you try them for yourself? This article is going to share some of the best LibreOffice alternatives and provide links where you can learn more about each of them.

    • Ubuntu Tablet – quick test LibreOffice

      Ubuntu Tablet – quick test Libre Office in desktop mode tablet Bq Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition running Unity 8 bluetooth mouse + keyboard

  • CMS

    • WordPress, Silverstripe, TYPO3 & More: Keeping Up With Open Source CMS

      December is a traditionally quiet month across most industries, but the world of open source CMS never truly rests.

      Sure, open source vendors (and their contributing communities alike) cooled their jets a little as the new year approached — but there was still plenty going on.

      If you happened to miss any of it, here are the latest open source CMS headlines.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • NetBSD 7.1_RC1 available

      Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-7 branch or use the netbsd-7-1-RC1 tag.

    • NetBSD 7.1 RC1 Released

      The first release candidate of the upcoming NetBSD 7.1 is now available for testing.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 7 Getting Closer To Release, But Running Behind On Regressions

      Jakub Jelinek of Red Hat has provided the latest status report concerning the state of the GNU Compiler Collection 7 code compiler.

      GCC 7 has been in “stage three” for a while now meaning only bug/general fixes landing, but they are planning to enter stage four on 19 January. When stage four begins, only wrong-code fixes, bug fixes, and documentation fixes will be accepted.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open source tool for wave and tidal arrays

        Wave and tidal energy design tool DTOcean has been launched as an open source software package. The tool’s developers say it will assist project developers to design wave and tidal energy arrays by identifying optimal layouts, components and procedures.

        An active but growing user community is emerging around DTOcean, which industry and research communities are encouraged to join.

      • CES 2017: ARM gets an assist in Renault’s open-source electric vehicle, Twizy

        The open source movement has had a profound impact on the tech sector over the last two decades, and now those notions are moving beyond software and operating systems to form the basis for flexible yet standardized complete systems – including automobiles.

      • Open Source Reaches Processor Core

        Whether for budgetary, philosophical, or other reasons, an increasing number of embedded systems are being designed using open source elements. For the most part, these elements are software based, although there are some open source board designs in use as well. Now, the microcontroller that empowers a PCB design is available as an open source design.

      • 3D Printing Market to More Than Double by 2020

  • Programming/Development

    • How to get started as an open source programmer

      Looking out at the world of technology is exciting. It has a lot of moving parts, and it seems the further you dig into it, the deeper it gets, and then it’s turtles all the way down. For that very reason, technology is also overwhelming. Where do you start if you’re keen to join in and help shape the way the modern world functions? What’s the first step? What’s the twentieth step?

    • RcppCCTZ 0.2.0

      A new version, now at 0.2.0, of RcppCCTZ is now on CRAN. And it brings a significant change: windows builds! Thanks to Dan Dillon who dug deep enough into the libc++ sources from LLVM to port the std::get_time() function that is missing from the 4.* series of g++. And with Rtools being fixed at g++-4.9.3 this was missing for us here. Now we can parse dates for use by RcppCCTZ on Windows as well. That is important not only for RcppCCTZ but also particularly for the one package (so far) depending on it: nanotime.

Leftovers

  • The Couple Who Saved China’s Ancient Architectural Treasures Before They Were Lost Forever

    Architectural preservation is rarely so thrilling as it was in 1930s China. As the country teetered on the edge of war and revolution, a handful of obsessive scholars were making adventurous expeditions into the country’s vast rural hinterland, searching for the forgotten treasures of ancient Chinese architecture. At the time, there were no official records of historic structures that survived in the provinces. The semi-feudal countryside had become a dangerous and unpredictable place: Travelers venturing only a few miles from major cities had to brave muddy roads, lice-infested inns, dubious food and the risk of meeting bandits, rebels and warlord armies. But although these intellectuals traveled by mule cart, rickshaw or even on foot, their rewards were great. Within the remotest valleys of China lay exquisitely carved temples staffed by shaven-headed monks much as they had been for centuries, their roofs filled with bats, their candlelit corridors lined with dust-covered masterpieces.

  • Photos: Some of the earliest color images of life around the world

    The fantastic ambitions of rich men should never be underestimated. Throw enough cash at something and even a failure can have staying power.

    When Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and philanthropist, decided he wanted to commission a photographic “archive of the planet” he wasn’t joking. And though the idea of cataloging the earth seems whimsical in scope today, the pictures he helped create between 1909 and 1931 hold our attention like few others from the era.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Trump Has to Rescue Obamacare or Admit He’s a Liar

      It didn’t take long. During the first week of 2017, the new Republican Congress has begun efforts to dismantle America’s health-care system. Their long-standing goal, consistent with their right-wing ideology, is to take away health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, privatize Medicare, make massive cuts to Medicaid and defund Planned Parenthood. At the same time, in the midst of grotesque and growing income and wealth inequality, they’re preparing to allow pharmaceutical companies to increase drug prices and to hand out obscene tax breaks for the top one-tenth of 1 percent.

    • Forest Service OKs land swap for proposed PolyMet mine

      A proposed copper-nickel mine for northeastern Minnesota has passed another milestone.

      The U.S. Forest Service on Monday signed off on a proposed land swap with PolyMet Mining. The deal exchanges 6,650 acres of federal land in the Superior National Forest that PolyMet needs for about the same amount of privately owned land within the forest.

      • Now what? PolyMet applied to open its copper-nickel mine

      PolyMet CEO Jon Cherry calls it “a win for both parties,” giving Superior National Forest lands with better public access.

      But Executive Director Paul Danicic of the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness says no exchange of land “can undo the damage” that PolyMet would do to the area.

    • Expensive Medicines Increase The Pressure

      When Gilead brought its new antiviral medicine – Sovaldi – for the treatment of Hepatitis C to the US market for USD 84,000, it triggered a storm of protest. Demand for this revolutionary treatment was so high that the price (despite reductions) became an enormous burden on the American healthcare system. Although the product is cheaper in Switzerland at CHF 48 307, treatment is rationed for reasons of cost.

    • Could Amgen’s Patent Victory Be Bad For Medicine?

  • Security

    • Stolen NSA Windows hacking tools now for sale

      The Shadow Brokers, the hacker or hackers who stole and are now claiming to sell NSA surveillance software, are now selling the agency’s package of Windows hacking tools.

      Like all Shadow Brokers wares, the tools are at least three years old. But codes used to pass through security that were released by the Shadow Brokers in August worked when tested at that time, sparking concerns.

    • New CloudLinux 5 Kernel Released to Patch Important Use-After-Free Vulnerability

      CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi is informing users of the CloudLinux 5 series of server-oriented operating systems based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 about the availability of a new kernel update that patches an important security vulnerability.

    • MongoDB Apocalypse Is Here as Ransom Attacks Hit 10,000 Servers [Ed: due to misconfiguration, not a flaw]
    • MongoDB Ransomware Impacts Over 10,000 Databases
    • How to secure MongoDB on Linux or Unix production server

      MongoDB is a free and open-source NoSQL document database server. It is used by web application for storing data on a public facing server. Securing MongoDB is critical. Crackers and hackers are accessing insecure MongoDB for stealing data and deleting data from unpatched or badly-configured databases. In this tutorial you will learn about how to secure a MongoDB instance or server running cloud server.

    • MongoDB Ransomware Attacks Grow in Number

      Last week when the news started hitting the net about ransomware attacks focusing on unprotected instances of MongoDB, it seemed to me to be a story that would have a short life. After all, the attacks weren’t leveraging some unpatched vulnerabilities in the database, but databases that were misconfigured in a way that left them reachable via the Internet, and with no controls — like a password other than the default — over who had privileges. All that was necessary to get this attack vector under control was for admins to be aware of the situation and to be ready and able to reconfigure and password protect.

    • FTC will pay you to build an IoT security checker

      The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wants the public to take a crack at developing tools to improve security around Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

      Specifically, the FTC is hosting a competition challenging the public to create a technical solution that would, at a minimum, help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software. Contestants have the option of adding features, such as those that would address hard-coded, factory default or easy-to-guess passwords.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Security Advice: Bad, Terrible, or Awful

      As an industry, we suck at giving advice. I don’t mean this in some negative hateful way, it’s just the way it is. It’s human nature really. As a species most of us aren’t very good at giving or receiving advice. There’s always that vision of the wise old person dropping wisdom on the youth like it’s candy. But in reality they don’t like the young people much more than the young people like them. Ever notice the contempt the young and old have for each other? It’s just sort of how things work. If you find someone older and wiser than you who is willing to hand out good advice, stick close to that person. You won’t find many more like that.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • When Fear Comes

      When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq, reporters and editors lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be touched by the same career-killing contagion. They wanted to protect their status at the institution. Retreat into rabbit holes is the most common attempt at self-protection.

      [...]

      This kind of valor, he knew as a combat veteran, requires a moral courage that is more difficult than the physical courage encountered on the battlefield.

      “This unanimous quiet defiance of a power which never forgave, this obstinate, painfully protracted insubordination, was somehow more frightening than running and yelling as the bullets fly,” he says.

      The coming arrests mean that a wide range of Americans will experience the violations that poor people of color have long endured. Self-interest alone should have generated sweeping protest, should have made the nation as a whole more conscious. We should have understood: Once rights become privileges that the state can revoke, they will eventually be taken away from everyone. Now those who had been spared will get a taste of what complicity in oppression means.

    • As Families In Charleston Share Stories and Pain, Dylann Roof Shows No Remorse

      Mrs. Pinckney was the first in a long line of witnesses called by federal prosecutors in the sentencing trial of Dylann Roof last week. The avowed white supremacist was convicted in December for gunning down Reverend Pinckney and eight parishioners during a Bible study at the historic Emanuel AME Church on June 17, 2015. The crime shook the country. President Obama gave a stirring eulogy at Rev. Pinckney’s televised memorial service, singing Amazing Grace. The next day, in a brazen act of civil disobedience, activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole at the state capitol to take down the Confederate flag; soon after, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed legislation to remove the flag from the statehouse, in dedication to the Emanuel Nine. Across the country, Americans marveled at the expressions of forgiveness shown by grieving relatives who spoke at a bond hearing for Roof within days of the crime. But in Charleston, others remained torn, overwhelmed by grief and anger. A year and a half later, many struggle to define what justice would mean.

    • Politicizing Victimhood: Human Rights as a Propaganda Weapon in Aleppo and Mosul

      Despite continued clashes between the government and rebel forces, the ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia appears to have significantly reduced the violence in Syria. Following the fall of Aleppo to Assad’s forces, we should be reflecting upon what lessons can be drawn from Syria. I would offer a few. First, in wars that involve officially designated enemies of state, such as Syria and Russia, there is little reason to think that one will be exposed to reasoned, sensible discourse in the U.S. media. Similarly, on “the other side” – Russia in this case – one sees a similar effort to exonerate the government from responsibility for human rights violations. A second, broader lesson from Syria is that “human rights” inevitably serve as a rhetorical weapon, used on “both sides” by powerful societal actors, including officialdom and the press, to advance their own strategic interests.

    • On Whitewashing Russia: Power-worshippers Only See Black-and-White

      The trouble with this latest fairy tale is that the media has swallowed the state-sponsored story without demanding a scintilla of evidence, and has turned the entire factitious endeavor into a witch hunt aimed at alternative media. The binary constructs of the Bush era are being reanimated for another Halloween of imbecilic fearmongering. So those that apply the withering lens of the scientific method to this latest mythmaking program are quickly labeled as pro-Russian, anti-Democratic, or worse, traitors.

    • Those Diplomatic Expulsions

      There is a fascinating precedent for Putin’s refusal to retaliate for the expulsion of 32 Russian diplomats by Obama, an easy diplomatic win on the international stage. In 1985, my first year in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Margaret Thatcher expelled 25 Soviet diplomats identified as spies by a defector (from memory Gordievsky), and later a further six.

    • The Russians, Trump and the Deep State (Rising)

      People talk of the Deep State, a kind of shorthand to refer to the entrenched parts of the government, particularly inside the military, intelligence, and security communities, who don’t come and go with election cycles. The information they hold, and their longevity, allows them to significantly influence, perhaps control, the big picture decisions that change the way America works on a global scale. Who the enemies are, where the power needs to be applied, which wars will start and what governments should fall.

      One of the features of the Deep State is that it prefers to work behind the scenes, in the shadows if you like. The big name politicians are out front, smiling for the cameras, and the lesser pols have to tend to the day-to-day stuff of government. The Deep State doesn’t trouble itself with regulating agriculture or deciding which infrastructure bill to fund. That is in large part why there will never be a full-on coup; why would the Deep State want to take on responsibility for the Department of Transportation?

      When the Deep State does accidentally expose itself, it is often by accident, such as in the panic right after 9/11 when the president was sitting around reading a children’s book while Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld were calling the shots. Same for in the 1980s when a set of cock-ups exposed U.S. arms sales to Iran to pay for U.S. proxy forces in Central America while with U.S. support the Saudis paid for jihadists to fight in Afghanistan, laying the early groundwork for what would become the War on Terror.

    • Meryl Streep calls out Trump: Having Bully-in-Chief Coarsens whole Culture

      Michael Moore denounced the Iraq War.

      So we now have another such moment, as Meryl Streep tearfully addressed the stars assembled at the Golden Globes about her anxieties and distress at the advent of the Trump era in the United States.

    • Donald Trump calls Meryl Streep ‘overrated’ after Golden Globes speech

      US President-elect Donald Trump has hit back at Meryl Streep’s criticism of him as she received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes.

      He tweeted: “Meryl Streep, one of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes.

      “She is a Hillary flunky who lost big,” Mr Trump added of the three-time Oscar-winning actress.

      She said: “When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”

    • Hollywood Gets a Clue About Inclusion, Meryl Streep Gets Political at 2017 Golden Globes (Video)

      Remember last year’s hashtag-fueled protest—#OscarsSoWhite – decrying the lack of diversity at Hollywood’s most hyped awards event?

      On Sunday night, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association showed up the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by rewarding a wider range of talent at the 2017 Golden Globes. Stories by and about African-Americans were recognized at the HFPA’s annual awards-fest, and the night’s biggest honor, the best drama statue, went to a coming-of-age film about a young gay black man growing up in Miami.

    • The Age of Great Expectations and the Great Void

      The third theme was all about rethinking the concept of personal freedom as commonly understood and pursued by most Americans. During the protracted emergency of the Cold War, reaching an accommodation between freedom and the putative imperatives of national security had not come easily. Cold War-style patriotism seemingly prioritized the interests of the state at the expense of the individual. Yet even as thrillingly expressed by John F. Kennedy — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — this was never an easy sell, especially if it meant wading through rice paddies and getting shot at.

      Once the Cold War ended, however, the tension between individual freedom and national security momentarily dissipated. Reigning conceptions of what freedom could or should entail underwent a radical transformation. Emphasizing the removal of restraints and inhibitions, the shift made itself felt everywhere, from patterns of consumption and modes of cultural expression to sexuality and the definition of the family. Norms that had prevailed for decades if not generations — marriage as a union between a man and a woman, gender identity as fixed at birth — became passé. The concept of a transcendent common good, which during the Cold War had taken a backseat to national security, now took a backseat to maximizing individual choice and autonomy.

    • Trump must slay the ‘sacred cow’ of the budget: Defense spending

      The Pentagon is filled to the gills with cronies and crony capitalism. And Republicans have encouraged this “waste and abuse” – this is the kind way of saying it, and it is on a massive scale – for too long. Do the right thing for once Congress. CUT SPENDING especially on the military civilian bureaucracy which is a taxpayer funded gravy train if there ever was one.

    • The Real Purpose of the U.S. Government’s Report on Alleged Hacking by Russia

      The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.

      The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • China raises its low carbon ambitions in new 2020 targets

      China’s 13th Five-Year-Plan on Energy Development (Energy 13FYP) might be one of the most anticipated energy blueprints in the world for its far-reaching implications for the carbon trajectory of the planet’s largest emitter.

      On Jan 5, 2017, the National Energy Administration finally unveiled the plan to reporters, with a set of 2020 targets covering everything from total energy consumption to installed wind energy capacity. Before we delve into details of the plan, one thing is worth noting: with the Energy 13FYP, China might have once again raised ambitions for its low-carbon future, highlighting the urgency that this smog-ridden country attaches to moving away from fossil fuels.

    • A Sushi Boss Bought a Single Tuna for $632,000

      A single bluefin tuna sold for $632,000 on Thursday, the second highest amount ever paid for such a fish, according to a report.

      The sale of the 470-pound fish, reported by the Associated Press, was made to sushi chain owner Kiyoshi Kimura.

    • Of Grizzly Bears and Bureaucrats: The Quest for Survival

      The last known grizzly in So Cal was shot in 1916 by Cornelius Birket Johnson, an industrious farmer living at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in north Los Angeles. The hungry bear trampled the man’s newly planted vineyard, chomping on his young grapes for three straight nights. Ol’ Johnson wasn’t about to let the pesky bear get away with such thievery and destruction, so one night he lured the grizzly with a slab of beef and snagged him in a trap, but like all feisty grizzlies, this young guy wouldn’t go down easy. Johnson later shot the bear dead after finding it gravely injured, exhausted, bloodied and suffering, having dragged the metal trap far from where it was originally set. Thus, at the hands of Johnson, the extinction of the So Cal grizzly was complete.

    • Radioactive Waste is Good for You, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rick Perry as Energy Secretary

      But Perry had a similar relationship with another Texas billionaire, Harold Simmons, owner of WCS. And in return, under Gov. Perry, WCS’s lucrative radioactive waste dumping activities underwent major expansion.

    • California floods, America burns, irony explodes

      The bloated orange president-elect is in love with dumb-thug Russians, tweets about himself in the third person and is readying his murder of conspiracy-minded billionaire-idiots to lead the nation into the darkest, most shamelessly corrupt period in our short history, all undertaken with a sexual predator’s shrug and an engraved gold pinky ring that spells out #-l-o-s-e-r.

      Meanwhile, the 7th-largest economy in the world just underwent truly biblical flooding – and not necessarily the helpful kind – following a half-decade of being parched to the bone, thanks to weather extremes wrought, unstoppably, of climate change.

      Cars are going driverless, homes are going Big Brother, women are being slammed back to 1950, immigrants are in mourning, Democrats are going underground and stunned Millennials are moving back in with their wary parents as the planet records yet another year as the hottest on human record, shuddering and sighing and girding for much – and with Trump, we do mean much – worse to come.

  • Finance

    • Pound hit by Brexit fears as FTSE 100 touches fresh record high – business live

      Brexit uncertainty hasn’t hit the UK housing market, according to new figures from the Halifax today.

      Halifax reports that house prices jumped by 1.7% in December, surprising economists who only forecast a 0.2% rise. On a annual basis, prices were 6.5% higher.

    • Trump’s Cabinet, the Church of Neoliberal Evangelicals

      Professor Henry Giroux says Trump’s appointments signal a future of more war, violent military interventions, and an embrace of Islamophobia

    • Ohio communities, counties have nearly $1.2B less in aid for 2017 because of state cuts

      Cuts in local government funds and tax changes made at the state level will cost Ohio counties and communities nearly $1.2 billion in 2017, as compared to 2010, a new report shows.

      Chief among those cuts were elimination of the state’s estate tax, the halving of local government funds and accelerated phase-outs of local business taxes, a report from the liberal leaning think tank Policy Matters Ohio found.

      But the report drew criticism from Gov. John Kasich’s administration, which argues that focusing solely on cuts tells only part of the story. Growth in income and sales tax revenues as Ohio’s economy recovers from the recession have helped offset the cuts, a spokeswoman said, citing alternative research.

    • Assuring EU citizens of right to stay ‘would lose UK negotiating capital’

      The UK would lose “negotiating capital” in Europe if it unilaterally granted EU citizens the right to remain after Brexit, the government has said.

      In a letter to a group of EU citizens from the office of the home secretary, Amber Rudd, the government said it “recognises that EU nationals make an invaluable contribution to our economy and society”.

      However, in an apparent hardening of the official position, the letter warned that the government cannot do anything to address their position after Brexit until it has assurances that British citizens in Europe will receive reciprocal protection in the country where they have settled.

      “Agreeing a unilateral position in advance of these negotiations would lose negotiating capital with respect to British citizens in EU member states and place the UK at an immediate disadvantage,” said the letter signed by Peter Grant, an official in the free movement policy team of the immigration and border policy directorate of the Home Office.

    • Politico Is Mistaken, It Would Be Fun and Easy for Donald Trump to Divest

      Politico badly misled readers this morning in an article that said Trump “can’t simply divest from his businesses.” The article cited a number of experts who explained how difficult and complicated it would be for Trump to sell off his various businesses, many of which have complex ownership arrangements, along with debts and other legal obligations.

      While selling Trump’s business enterprises in short order would be complicated, as I explained shortly after the election, this is not what is necessary for Donald Trump to avoid conflicts of interest. The key to the process I outline in that piece is that Trump arrange to get independent teams of auditors to provide assessments of the property. I suggested he go with the middle assessment provided by three teams of auditors. This would limit the likelihood of a major error in the assessment.

      Trump would then buy an insurance policy that would guarantee him the estimate from this middle audit. The enterprises would then be turned over to an executor who would run and offload the businesses with the goal of maximizing the value. When the businesses are sold off the proceeds would be placed in a blind trust. If the cumulative value from the sales exceeds the estimate, then the proceeds go to a charity of Trump’s choosing, but not under his control. If the proceeds from the sales are less than the value of the estimate he collects on the insurance policy.

    • A horrifying prospect for public schools

      Betsy DeVos has never gone to public schools. Her children have never attended public schools. She has never taught or served as an administrator in public schools. She has made a career out of funding schemes to cripple or destroy public schools. And now Donald Trump has a new way to put Betsy DeVos and public schools in the same sentence: Let Betsy DeVos help shape the future of public schools as head of the Education Department.

      Is it any wonder why a public school teacher like me — someone who knows the value of this institution both as educator and as student — finds this idea nothing short of horrifying?

    • Americans can’t afford to lose Richard Cordray or the CFPB

      At the height of the financial crisis in 2008, an estimated one out of every 54 homeowners lost their homes. Workers and seniors lost lifetimes’ worth of savings or retirement accounts, small businesses went under, and vulnerable consumers fell victim to toxic and manipulative financial products offered by Wall Street and the big banks.

      [...]

      At the helm of the bureau is Director Richard Cordray, who has proven to be a tireless and effective leader. Under his watch, the CFPB has cracked down on the tricks and traps of payday lenders, credit cards companies, debt collectors and bad actors in the industry from taking advantage of unsuspecting Americans.

      In its five years as an agency, the CFPB has recovered more than $11 billion for 27 million consumers harmed by illegal practices of financial institutions. The bureau has secured relief in more than 100 cases, directly putting money back in the pockets of American consumers who have been victimized by companies that refuse to follow the law.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Assange Criticizes U.S. Effort To Conflate WikiLeaks Publications With Russian Hacking

      Editor-in-chief Julian Assange called the report “embarrassing to the reputation” of U.S. intelligence services because it more resembled a “press release” than an actual intelligence report. “It is clearly designed for political effect,” which has happened in the past with the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War as well as intelligence reports claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

      “Critical question here is whether the allegation is that Russian intelligence services themselves or people under their direction hacked the Democratic National Party and [Clinton campaign chairman] John Podesta with the intent of favoring Donald Trump,” Assange suggested.

      “Even if you accept that the Russian intelligence services hacked Democratic Party institutions, as it is normal for the major intelligence services to hack each others’ major political parties on a constant basis to obtain intelligence,” you have to ask, “what was the intent of those Russian hacks? And do they connect to our publications? Or is it simply incidental?”

      Assange accused U.S. intelligence agencies of deliberately obscuring the timeline. He said they do not know when the DNC was hacked.

    • The ‘Post-Truth’ Mainstream Media

      Once East Aleppo fell to government forces, it turned out that there were less than 90,000 people there, about what the Syrian government estimated but only a fraction of the much higher numbers confidently repeated ad nauseam by Western officials and media.

      Part of the reason for this misreporting was that Syrian rebels had publicly killed Western and independent journalists to secure a monopoly on information coming out of rebel-controlled areas. Given the West’s disdain for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and sympathy for his opponents, the mainstream Western media then became reliant on anti-government rebels and allied activists for what was going on in those parts of Syria.

    • Pity the sad legacy of Barack Obama

      Eight years ago the world was on the brink of a grand celebration: the inauguration of a brilliant and charismatic black president of the United States of America. Today we are on the edge of an abyss: the installation of a mendacious and cathartic white president who will replace him.

      This is a depressing decline in the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. It could easily produce a pervasive cynicism and poisonous nihilism. Is there really any hope for truth and justice in this decadent time? Does America even have the capacity to be honest about itself and come to terms with its self-destructive addiction to money-worship and cowardly xenophobia?

      Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville – the two great public intellectuals of 19th-century America – wrestled with similar questions and reached the same conclusion as Heraclitus: character is destiny (“sow a character and you reap a destiny”).

    • Why Has Israeli Spy Shai Masot Not Been Expelled?

      There is no starker proof of the golden chains in which Israel has entangled the British political class, than the incredible fact that “diplomat” Shai Masot has not been expelled for secretly conspiring to influence British politics by attacking Britain’s Deputy Foreign Minister, suggesting that he might be brought down by “a little scandal”. It is incredible by any normal standards of diplomatic behaviour that immediate action was not taken against Masot for actions which when revealed any professional diplomat would normally expect to result in being “PNG’d” – declared persona non grata.

      Obama has just expelled 35 Russian diplomats for precisely the same offence, with the exception that in the Russian case there is absolutely zero hard evidence, whereas in the Masot case there is irrefutable evidence on which to act.

      [...]

      The two stories – Russian interference in US politics, Israeli interference in UK politics – also link because the New York Times claims that it was the British that first suggested to the Obama administration that Russian cyber activity was targeting Clinton. Director of Cyber Security and Information Assurance in the British Cabinet Office is Matthew Gould, the UK’s former openly and strongly pro-Zionist Ambassador to Israel and friend of the current Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev. While Private Secretary to David Miliband and William Hague, and then while Ambassador to Israel, Regev held eight secret meetings with Adam Werritty, on at least one occasion with Mossad present and on most occasions also with now minister Liam Fox. My Freedom of Information requests for minutes of these meetings brought the reply that they were not minuted, and my Freedom of Information request for the diary entries for these meetings brought me three pages each containing only the date, with everything else redacted.

    • Registered Voters Who Stayed Home Probably Cost Clinton The Election

      Registered voters who didn’t vote on Election Day in November were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out, according to a post-election poll from SurveyMonkey, shared with FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Donald Trump probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton had Republican- and Democratic-leaning registered voters cast ballots at equal rates.

      Election-year polls understandably focus on likely voters. Then, after the election, the attention turns to actual voters, mainly using exit polls. But getting good data on Americans who didn’t vote is more difficult. That’s why the SurveyMonkey poll, which interviewed about 100,000 registered voters just after Election Day, including more than 3,600 registered voters who didn’t vote, is so useful.1 It’s still just one poll, and so its findings aren’t gospel, but with such a big sample we can drill down to subgroups and measure the demographic makeup of nonvoters to an extent we couldn’t with a smaller dataset.

    • The Left’s Challenge in Age of Trump

      Left activists plan to take on President Donald Trump from Day One, with tens of thousands of protesters promising to show up in Washington to protest his inauguration on Jan. 20 and a major women’s march scheduled the next day.

      But the challenge for the Left goes deeper than protesting Trump and some of his policies. The difficulty also involves how to build a progressive agenda that is not compromised by corporate Democrats at election time. I discussed these questions with Norman Solomon, media activist, author, former delegate for Bernie Sanders Delegate and Rootsaction co-founder.

      Dennis Bernstein: Norman Solomon, welcome back. […] Say a little bit about your background. I want people to know where you’re coming from and, if I’ve got it right, you sort of came in the activists door.

    • Thinking About Fascism

      The 2016 presidential election made me think about 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power. I’ve known that he came to power through constitutional means and then used that power from the inside to destroy a constitutional system of government. This seemed like a good time to better understand the way that someone who was a megalomaniac, not taken seriously by elites, brought to power by pandering to people’s fears, could take control of the levers of power.

      I just read Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. For me it helped clarify the tasks before us. In discussing Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise to power Paxton says it is important to look at the means through which these fascists translated an ability to mobilize popular discontent into an almost unlimited ability to control the machineries of governmental power.

      His core claim is that both Hitler and Mussolini gained support by being emotionally satisfying nationalist alternatives to the left. Mainstream conservatives were willing to go along with their programs, distasteful as many found them, because working together in coalition, they were the only viable way to keep from making concessions to economic policies that would favor the working class over the elites. The mainstream conservatives and business elites made a pact with the devil in order to gain power.

    • Democrats Who Oppose Betsy DeVos Have Nothing To Lose

      In “an unprecedented break” from tradition, Democrats in the US Senate are expected to challenge as many as eight of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, including Betsy DeVos for US Secretary of Education, according to a report by the Washington Post.

      The opposition to DeVos, Politico reports, comes from “more than a dozen Democratic senators from all wings of the party” who “will portray DeVos’ views as being outside the education mainstream.”

    • Trump, the Banks and the Bomb

      When pro-nuclear disarmament organisations last October cheered the United Nations decision to start in 2017 negotiations on a global treaty banning these weapons, they probably did not expect that shortly after the US would elect Republican businessman Donald Trump as their 45th president. Much less that he would rush to advocate for increasing the US nuclear power.

      The United Nations on Oct. 27, 2016 adopted a resolution to launch negotiations in 2017 on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons, putting an end to two decades of paralysis in world nuclear disarmament efforts.

      [...]

      The global ani-nuke movment, however, soon saw its joy being frustrated by the US president-elect Donald Trump, who in a tweet on Dec. 22, 2016, wrote:

      Donald J. Trump Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump : “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

      Trump’s announcement, if materialised, would imply one of the most insourmountable hardles facing the world anti-nuclear movement.

    • GOP Tries to ‘Jam’ Through Nominees Not Yet Vetted, Ethics Office Warns

      The head of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) sent a letter to Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Chuck Schumer (NY) on Saturday expressing “great concern” over the fact that the hearings are set to begin on Tuesday and his office had not yet received financial disclosure reports for some of the scheduled nominees.

      “As OGE’s director, the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” wrote Walter Shaub, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013. wrote in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

      The current confirmation schedule, which has six nominees scheduled for the same days as well as a Trump press conference and a Senate ‘vote-o-rama,’ he wrote, “has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews.”

    • What The US Intelligence ‘Russia Hacked Our Election’ Report Could Have Said… But Didn’t

      By now it’s quite clear that many in the US intelligence community believe strongly that Russia tried to influence the US election, and part of that included hacks into the DNC’s computer systems, a spearphishing attack on Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails and some exploratory surveillance hacking into the computer systems of state election systems (but not into the voting machines themselves). The US intelligence services said it back in October. And they said it again last month. And, they said it again on Friday with the release of an unclassified “incident attribution” report.

      Because the debate over this issue has gotten quite silly in some places — and ridiculously political as well — let’s start with a few basic points: It is absolutely entirely possible that the Russians hacked into all these systems and that it was trying (and perhaps succeeding?) to influence the election. Nothing in what I’m saying here is suggesting that’s not true. What I am concerned about is the evidence that’s presented to support that claim — mainly because I think we should all be terrified when we escalate situations based on secret info where the government just tells us to “trust us, we know.” And, yes, governments (including the US) have done this going back throughout history. That doesn’t make it right.

    • Allegations Against Russia Less Credible Every Day

      The U.S. government has now generated numerous news stories and released multiple “reports” aimed at persuading us that Vladimir Putin is to blame for Donald Trump becoming president. U.S. media has dutifully informed us that the case has been made. What has been made is the case for writing your own news coverage. The “reports” from the “intelligence community” are no lengthier than the New York Times and Washington Post articles about them. Why not just read the reports and cut out the middle-person?

      The New York Times calls the latest report “damning and surprisingly detailed” before later admitting in the same “news” article that the report “contained no information about how the agencies had collected their data or had come to their conclusions.” A quick glance at the report itself would have made clear to you that it did not pretend to present a shred of evidence that Russia hacked emails or served as a source for WikiLeaks. Yet Congresswoman Barbara Lee declared the evidence in this evidence-free report “overwhelming.” What should progressives believe, the best Congresswoman we’ve got or our own lying eyes?

    • Europe’s Mixed Feelings About Trump

      European governments are nervous about a Trump presidency, but – for economic and other reasons – many on the Continent would welcome a friendlier approach toward Russia, reports Andrew Spannaus.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Congressman Appoints Himself Censor, Removes Painting Critical Of Cops From Congressional Halls

      Can’t get legislators off their asses to pass a budget in a timely manner or, I don’t know, step up to do anything about the DOJ’s Rule 41 changes, but you can count on them to apply long-dormant self-motivation to personal agendas.

      Rep. Hunter, offended on behalf of an entire nation unions offended on behalf of their members, saw to it that painting, which the police unions bitched at length about, was removed from the public eye. Not that there was any outrage shown by a majority of constituents, who most likely first heard about this painting after it was removed. Here’s the most offending part of the painting, as captured by the Independent Journal Review.

    • Freedom of expression and censorship

      “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These are the dramatic opening lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s immensely powerful treatise “The Social Contract.” Freedom is the most fundamental pillar of democracy: in its absence democracy turns into autocracy.

      The French Revolution of 1789 made Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the most sacrosanct values of humanity. Any ruler or government that ensnared man away to a life of bondage has always met with perdition eventually. Their lives and reigns have been written in blood in the annals of history for posterity to remember them with derision and disdain.

    • Milo Yiannopoulos peddles hate. It’s not censorship to refuse to publish it

      A coalition of free speech organisations rallied together last week to defend Simon & Schuster’s choice to publish professional irritant Milo Yiannopoulos’s autobiography, Dangerous, saying that boycotting the book, as so many people have called for, would have “a chilling effect” on free speech.

      I’m sure that having his book (which hit the No 1 spot on Amazon’s pre-sale charts the day after it was announced) pulled from shelves or dropped from S&S would catapult it to even greater success at another publisher, but never mind. It’s clear that this coalition of organisations are standing up for what they believe in, and feel it is important to defend Yiannopoulos’ well-rehearsed right to speak his mind.

      Defending free speech often means finding yourself in the difficult position of having to defend people who say disgusting things. People who make jokes about rape; Holocaust deniers; straight-up racists. Though we might not like what these people say, it’s important that they’re allowed to say it. You can’t go around censoring people just because you don’t agree with them. If we can’t all express what we think, then we can’t talk to each other about our ideas. We can’t have a discussion; we can’t improve; we can’t function as a society.

    • From graphic live-streams to breast bans: A look back at Facebook’s problematic relationship with censorship

      As calls come for Facebook to crackdown on how it moderates Live posts, The Drum looks back at some of the challenges the social network has faced over the past year when it comes to self-censorship.

      At the end of last week Facebook faced mounting pressure to impose stricter measures on its Live video feature after allowing a disturbing video depicting torture to resurface on the site.

      Just days after being removed for violating the platform’s community standards, the video showing the attack of a young man with disabilities in Chicago resurfaced again within Facebook’s walls having been repackaged and re-uploaded by right wing news site the Daily Caller, attracting millions of new viewers.

    • Censorship in America: NYC Removes Birth Index Books from the Public Library

      New York City. The Statue of Liberty glistens in its harbor. The ultimate symbol of what this country stands for. Ellis Island is just a stone’s throw away – the gateway to America. The Freedom Tower, the Empire State Building, the hustle and bustle of busy, free New Yorkers and visitors from around the world. It’s the last place you would expect censorship. But that’s just what we got this past year when the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) decided to pull its Birth Index Books that were on loan to the New York Public Library (NYPL) in order to keep the public from viewing their contents.

      Genealogists lost a valuable resource that day. Adoptees who were born in New York City lost even more. The Birth Index Books contain information that may be key to their identities, something that most people take for granted, but what many adoptees yearn for and live painfully without. When I found my given name listed in the 1971 book a few years ago, I felt a sense of joy. There it was – a record of my truth. Something most people take for granted.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Russia gets LinkedIn banned on Android and iOS

      THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT is continuing to make it difficult for locals to use LinkedIn and has now ensured that the application is not available through either the Apple or the Google app stores.

      This is bad news for anyone in the country that hasn’t decided that they do not want to sign up to LinkedIn yet, but must be reassuring to a government that likes to stop people from communicating at times, and is really not keen on the business social network with more leaks than a colander.

    • FBI Releases A Stack Of Redactions In Response To FOIA Request For Info On Its Purchased iPhone Hack

      As the result of an FOIA lawsuit brought by the Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice, the FBI has finally released documents about the one-time iPhone exploit/hack it purchased from an unknown foreign vendor. Well, more accurately, the FBI released a bunch of paper with nearly nothing left unredacted, as USA Today’s Brad Heath pointed out multiple times on Twitter.

    • Why the UK is unlikely to get an adequacy determination post Brexit

      This article adds two reasons to why I think a post-Brexit UK is very unlikely to offer an adequate level of protection in terms of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

      One reason relates to recent comments made by Prime Minister Theresa May about human rights. The other relates to the non-compliance of the national security agencies with their existing data protection obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA).

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Riyadh, strike against non-payment of salaries: immigrants arrested and flogged

      A Saudi court has sentenced dozens of migrant workers to imprisonment and flogging, employees of the construction giant Binladin Group, for having gone on strike against non-payment of back wages.

      The Saudi press has not yet specified the nationality of the workers who were on strike over arrears in monthly salaries; the protests eventually escalated into street violence, which led to the arrests.

      The first to report the incident was Arab newspaper Al-Watan et Arab News, which, however, it did not clarify the nationality of migrant workers. Some diplomats contacted by AFP were unable (or unwilling) to clarify the affair, claiming to not know the details.

    • Work: it’s time for a new year’s revolution

      Feeling burned out in your work for peace and social justice? A new book provides essential guidance.

    • Young Black Men Still Predominant Victims of Police Violence

      Despite the protests, media scrutiny, and all around heightened national attention, young black men in 2016 continued to be the predominant victims of police violence in the United States.

      According to year-end figures published Sunday by the Guardian database The Counted, “[b]lack males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year,” and were “killed at four times the rate of young white men.”

      Overall, the number police killings fell slightly—1,091 last year, according to the Guardian tally, from 1,146 in 2015—but the pattern of brutality has remained consistent.

    • Future Crimes

      There was a jaw dropping but not unexpected article at The Guardian this week. It was actually part of a series of pieces at that paper that have sought to manufacture a legacy for Obama, the outgoing president, since his actual legacy is one of imperialist foreign policy, CIA support of jihadists, right wing coups, and most acutely, perhaps, a massive subverting of free speech and civil liberties. What Robert Parry has called a ‘war on dissent’. The Guardian piece took the form of asking novelists, public intellectuals {sic} and TV hacks what they perceived to be Obama’s legacy — and even the use of that word, *legacy* is a loaded indicator of the direction this piece was headed. What struck me most was not the predictable support for Obama policy (more on that later) but the utter banality of the writing. There were writers in this group who I have admired (Richard Ford for one, Marilynne Robinson, as well) but the sentiments were so stupefyingly superficial, so fatuous and fawning that it was hard not to see this as a kind of mini referendum on the state of Western culture.

    • Obama Pardons: How Many Has Obama Made In 2016 And Since Taking Office? Will Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning Be Next?

      With less than two weeks remaining in his eight-year administration, President Barack Obama will be under heavy pressure from public advocacy groups to grant high-profile pardon decisions. But Obama has not been shy about granting pardons and commuting prison sentences, particularly as a lame duck president.

      Obama pardoned 78 people and commuted the sentences of 153 others Dec. 19, further cementing his legacy as the most generous grantor of clemency in modern presidential history.

      The Department of Justice official website says Obama has granted 148 presidential pardons in his time in office, a number that exceeds the combined total of the last six presidents. In 2016, he pardoned 82 federal inmates, more than his seven previous years combined. Most of the pardons have been for drug offenders.

    • The FBI Is Apparently Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence Of Criminal Activity

      Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example. It also has a number of government employees working for the TSA, keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious” amounts of cash it can swoop in and seize.

      Unsurprisingly, the FBI also has a number of paid informants. Some of these informants apparently work at Best Buy — Geek Squad by day, government informants by… well, also by day.

    • National Police Union President Says Asset Forfeiture Abuse Is A ‘Fake Issue’ Generated By The Media

      Chuck Canterbury, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, has been given an editorial megaphone over at the Daily Caller. Canterbury’s using this platform to defend the pretty much indefensible: civil asset forfeiture.

      Colloquially known as “cops going shopping for things they want,” asset forfeiture supposedly is used to take funds and property away from criminal organizations. In reality, it’s become an easy way for law enforcement to take the property of others without having to put much effort into justifying the seizures. In most states, convictions are not required, meaning supposed criminal suspects are free to go… but their property isn’t.

    • Prosecutors Looking Into $2 Field Drug Tests After Investigation, Figure Defense Attorneys Should Do All The Work

      The fallout from cheap field drug tests continues. The lab that does actual testing of seized substances for the Las Vegas PD had previously expressed its doubts about the field tests’ reliability, but nothing changed. Officers continued to use the tests and defendants continued to enter into plea bargains based on questionable evidence.

      The Las Vegas PD knew the tests were highly fallible. After all, the department had signed off on a report saying as much and handed it into the DOJ in exchange for federal grant money. But cops still used them and prosecutors still relied on them when pursuing convictions.

    • Parliamentary report: immigrants ‘should be made to learn English’ before arriving in the UK

      Following last month’s controversial report by Dame Louise Casey warning of “worrying” levels of segregation in the UK, an interim report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Social Integration has gone further to say that all immigrants should have either learnt English before coming to the UK, or be required to sign up to classes when they arrive.

      The All Party group described speaking English as a “prerequisite for meaningful engagement with most British people”. Labour MP, and chair of the group, Chuka Umunna has defended the report arguing that integration is a “two-way” street. He said that whilst there is a role for migrants there is also an obligation on Britain to fund English language classes.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Net Neutrality Hating, SOPA-Loving Marsha Blackburn Pegged To Chair Key Technology & Telecom Subcommittee

      If you were to sit down and consciously select a politician that best represents the stranglehold giant telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have over the legislative process, you probably couldn’t find a better candidate than Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn. From her endless assault on net neutrality, to her defense of awful state protectionist laws written by ISP lobbyists, there has never been a moment when Ms. Blackburn hasn’t prioritized the rights of giant incumbent duopolists over the public she professes to serve.

      Blackburn has been fairly awful on technology policy in general, from her breathless support of SOPA to her claim that fair use is just a “buzzword” obscuring our desperate need for tougher copyright laws. As such, there should be little surprise that Blackburn has been selected to head the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. The subcommittee tackles most of the pressing internet-related issues, with Blackburn replacing Oregon Representative Greg Walden.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/09/digikam-5-4-0-released/feed/ 0 Links 9/1/2017: Dell’s Latest XPS 13, GPD Pocket With GNU/Linux http://techrights.org/2017/01/09/gpd-pocket-with-gnu-linux/ http://techrights.org/2017/01/09/gpd-pocket-with-gnu-linux/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2017 21:00:47 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98203

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Mac’s share falls to five-year low

    Net Applications pegged Linux’s user share at 2.2% in December, slightly off the 2.3% peak of November.

  • A 2016 retrospective

    In 2012, your editor predicted that LibreOffice would leave OpenOffice (which had been recently dumped into the Apache Software Foundation) in the dust. That prediction was accounted as a failure at the end of the year. Four years later, though, it has become clear that that is exactly what has happened. Your editor happily takes credit for having been a bit ahead of his time, while pointing to something shiny to distract you all from the fact that he didn’t see the issue coming to a head in 2016.

  • Desktop

    • Dell’s latest XPS 13 DE still delivers Linux in a svelte package

      Over the course of its four-year lifespan, Dell’s extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition line has become known for one thing—bringing a “just works” Linux experience to the company’s Ultrabooks.

      Of course, today Dell is just one of many manufacturers producing great Linux machines. System76 makes the Oryx Pro (still my top pick for anyone who needs massive power), and companies like Purism and ZaReason produce solid offerings that also work with Linux out of the box. Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of the box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow.

    • Meet the GPD Pocket, a 7-inch Ubuntu Laptop

      The GPD Pocket is a 7-inch laptop that’s small enough to fit in to a pocket — and it will apparently be available with Ubuntu!

      As reported on Liliputing, GPD (the company) is currently only showing off a few fancy renders right now, but as they have form for releasing other (similar) devices, like the GPD Win, and Android gaming portables, this is unlikely to be outright vapourware.

  • Kernel Space

    • SipHash Is Being Worked On For Further Security In The Linux Kernel

      Jason Donenfeld who has been working on the WireGuard secure network tunnel for Linux has also been working on another security enhancement: adding the SipHash PRF to the Linux kernel.

      Donenfeld is now up to his third version of patches for integrating the SipHash pseudorandom functions into the Linux kernel. For those wanting some background about SipHash, there is an explanation via Wikipedia while a lot more technical information can be found via this SipHash page.

    • Linux 4.10-rc3

      So after that very small rc2 due to the xmas break, we seem to be back
      to fairly normal. After a quiet period like that, I tend to expect a
      bigger chunk just because of pent up work, but I guess the short break
      there really was vacation for everybody, and so instead we’re just
      seeing normal rc behavior. It still feels a bit smaller than a usual
      rc3, but for the first real rc after the merge window (ie I’d compare
      it to a regular rc2), it’s fairly normal.

      The stats look textbook for the kernel: just under 2/3rds drivers,
      with almost half of the rest arch updates, and the rest being “misc”
      (mainly filesystems and networking).

      So nothing in particular stands out. You can get a flavor of the
      details from the appended shortlog, but even more importantly – you
      can go out and test.

      Thanks,

      Linus

    • Linux 4.10-rc3 Kernel Released

      Linux 4.10-rc3 is now available as the latest weekly update to the Linux 4.10 kernel.

    • Linus Torvalds Announces a Fairly Normal Third Linux 4.10 Release Candidate

      A few moments ago, Linus Torvalds made his Sunday evening announcement to inform us about the general availability of the third RC (Release Candidate) snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.10 kernel.

      According to Linus Torvalds, things appear to be back to their normal state, and it looks like Linux kernel 4.10 RC3 is a fairly normal development release that consists of two-thirds updated drivers, and half of the remaining patch are improvements to various hardware architectures. There are also some minor networking and filesystems fixes.

    • Linux Kernel 4.9 Gets Its First Point Released, Updates Drivers and Filesystems

      We’ve been waiting for it, and it’s finally here! The first point release of the Linux 4.9 kernel was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman this past weekend, which means that most modern GNU/Linux distribution can finally start migrating to the series.

      Yes, we’re talking about Linux kernel 4.9.1, the first of many maintenance updates to the Linux 4.9 kernel branch, which is now officially declared stable and ready for production. It’s also a major release that changes a total of 103 files, with 813 insertions and 400 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.

    • Benchmarks

      • Open-Source Nouveau Linux 4.10 + NvBoost vs. NVIDIA Proprietary Linux Driver Performance

        Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks showing the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver performance on Linux 4.10 with the new NvBoost capability for finally being able to hit the “boost” clock frequencies with Kepler graphics cards when using this reverse-engineered driver. While the manual re-clocking and enabling NvBoost is able to increase the Nouveau driver’s performance, how do these results compare to using the closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver? These benchmarks answer that question.

      • 26-Way Intel/AMD CPU System Comparison With Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 Kernel

        In preparation for Intel Kaby Lake socketed CPU benchmark results soon on Phoronix, the past number of days I have been re-tested many of the systems in our benchmark server room for comparing to the performance of the new Kaby Lake hardware. For those wanting to see how existing Intel and AMD systems compare when using Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 and the latest Linux 4.10 Git kernel, here are those benchmarks ahead of our Kaby Lake Linux CPU reviews.

      • Xeon HD Graphics P530 With OpenGL & Vulkan On Mesa 13.1-dev + Linux 4.10

        It’s been quite a number of months since last trying out the HD Graphics P530 and thus while having a Xeon E3-1245 v5 running Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 for some fresh benchmarks after changing out the motherboard, I figured I would see how the graphics performance for this Xeon CPU compares to the Core IVB / HSW / BDW / SKL results from yesterday.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Latest Cinnamon Release Lands in Antergos, but Read This Before Updating Python

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Krita 3.1.x Best Alternative To Photoshop for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

        Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, although it has image processing capabilities, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters. Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering. Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with a snappy response.

        Krita is the full-featured free digital painting studio for artists who want to create professional work from start to end. Krita is used by comic book artists, illustrators, concept artists, matte and texture painters and in the digital VFX industry. Krita is free software, licensed under the GNU Public License, version 2 or later.

      • KDE neon Now Available on Docker

        Our mission statement above is what we try to do and having continuous integration of KDE development and continuous deployment of packages is great, if you have KDE neon installed. You can test our code while it’s in development and get hold of it as soon as it’s out. But wait, what if you want to do both? You would need to install it twice on a virtual machine or dual boot, quite slow and cumbersome. Maybe you don’t want to use neon but you still want to test if that bug fix really worked.

        So today I’m announcing a beta of KDE neon on Docker. Docker containers are a lightweight way to create a virtual system running on top of your normal Linux install but with its own filesystem and other rules to stop it getting in the way of your OS. They are insanely popular now for server deployment but I think they work just as well for checking out desktop and other UI setups.

      • KDE Neon Goes Docker, Lets People Test Drive the Latest KDE Software Releases

        Ex-Kubuntu maintainer and renowned KDE developer Jonathan Riddell was proud to announce the availability of the KDE Neon operating system on Docker, the open-source application container engine.

        KDE Neon is currently the only GNU/Linux distribution allowing users to enjoy the newest KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, as well as KDE Frameworks and Applications software suite as soon as they’re out. If you’re a bleeding-edge user and love KDE, then KDE Neon is the distro you need to use in 2017.

      • More focused Planet KDE posts

        My blog has been syndicated on Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu for a long time, but sometimes topics I want to write about are not really relevant to these aggregators, so I either refrain from writing, or write anyway and end up feeling a bit guilty for spamming.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

        Your editor, who is normally not overly worried about operating-system upgrades, approached the Fedora 25 transition on his laptop with a fair amount of trepidation. This is the release that switches to using Wayland by default, pushing aside the X.org server we have been using for decades. Such a transition is bound to bring surprises, but the biggest surprise this time around was just how little breakage there is. There is one exception, though, that brings back some old questions about how GNOME is developed.

        The problematic change is simple enough to understand. While X sessions are started by way of a login shell in Fedora (even though the user never sees that shell directly), Wayland sessions do not involve a shell at all. As a result, the user’s .bash_profile and .bashrc files (or whichever initialization files their shell uses) are not read. The place where this omission is most readily noticed is in the definition of environment variables. Many applications will change their behavior based on configuration stored in the environment; all of that configuration vanishes under Wayland. It also seems that some users (xterm holdouts, for example) still run applications that use the old X resources configuration mechanism. Resources are normally set by running xrdb at login time; once again, that doesn’t happen if no login shell is run.

  • Distributions

    • What’s the best Linux distro for you?

      When it comes to desktop operating systems, there are three main camps into which people fall: Windows, Mac and Linux. In the case of the latter camp things can be confusing because there are endless distros to choose from — but which is best?

      The beauty of Linux is that it can be tweaked and tailored in so many ways. This means that while the plethora of choice can seem overwhelming, it is also possible to find the perfect distro for just about any scenario. To help you make the right choice, here’s a helpful list of the best distros to look out for in 2017.

    • What’s New in BlankOn X Tambora

      BlankOn X operating system finally launched at January 1st 2017 as the 10th release codenamed “Tambora”. BlankOn is a GNU/Linux distribution from Indonesia, a low-resource operating system with ultimate aim for desktop end-users. In this Tambora release, BlankOn brings the latest Manokwari desktop with improvements, along with its own BlankOn system installer, and some other stuffs. This Tambora release is a continuation of the BlankOn 9 release in 2014 named Suroboyo. This article sums up what’s new for BlankOn in this Tambora version.

    • This Year In Solus (2016 Edition)

      2016 was an incredible year for Solus. We went from having our first release in December of 2015, to completely switching to a rolling release model. We had multiple Solus releases, multiple Budgie releases, several rewrites of different components of Solus, ranging from the Installer to the Software Center. We introduced our native Steam runtime and improved both our state of statelessness as well as optimizations.

      When I first started talking about Solus at the beginning of 2016, I used the analogy that what we were building was the engine for our vehicle, one to deliver us to our goals for Solus. While we’re still building that engine, we’re in a drastically better shape than we were in 2016, and we’re more confident, and bolder, than ever.

    • Reviews

      • Maui Linux 2.1 Blue Tang – Aloha!

        Maui Linux 2.1 Blue Tang is a surprisingly and yet expectedly good Plasma system, using some of that Mint-like approach to home computing. It’s what Kubuntu should have been or should be, and it delivers a practical, out-of-the-box experience with a fine blend of software, fun and stability. That’s a very sensible approach.

        Not everything was perfect. Plasma has its bugs, the printer and the web cam issues need to be looked into, and on the aesthetics side, a few things can be polished and improved. The installer can benefit from having some extra safety mechanisms. But I guess that is the sum of my complaints. On the happy side, you get all the goodies from the start, the application collection is rich, the distro did not crash, and the performance is really decent for a Plasma beastling. A fine formula, and probably the best one we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so. Good news if you like KDE. And indeed, this is definitely one of the distros you should try. 9/10. I’m quite pleased. Have a maui day.

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Linux receives update for new year.

        Manajro Linux recently released a new version of operating system but they also keep their package updated. So some time ago Manjaro team updated some packages and introduced new features to main distribution. According to official announcement new feature called Brisk-menu is introduced in MATE edition of Manajro which is actually developed by Solus team. Thunderbird received some security update, linux48 will soon upgrade to linux49. Broadcom-wl, calamares, fightgear and few Ruby packages are updated.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat releases latest version of CloudForms 4.2

        According to the vendor, the new Red Hat CloudForms will enable IT teams to increase service delivery while focusing on critical, business-impacting issues. The Red Hat CloudForms, based on the open source ManageIQ project, provides an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual and cloud IT environments, including Linux containers. CloudForms helps IT organisations offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It can also define and enforce advanced compliance policies for new and existing IT environments, better enabling operators to optimise the costs of a given environment and system.

      • ​Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 beta out now

        Yes, Red Hat’s forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.9 will come with stability and security improvements. That’s not the real news. The big story is it supports the next generation of cloud-native applications through an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 base image.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Kernel 4.8.7 & Realtek Wireless – Fedora report

          A handful of weeks and hundreds of GB down the road, my Lenovo G50 machine is in a much better shape when spinning the kernel 4.8.7 than anything else before, but there are still situations where the network might drop down. This means I will need to reserve my previous observation, from the original report. Good but not perfect. Part of that Nirvana has gone back to Valhalla. Fedora 25 is the salvation you seek, though.

          Under ordinary circumstances, most people will probably not hit the issue, unless they have hundreds of idle HTTP connections that are slowly being closed, causing the driver to get a little confused. This could happen if you download like mad from the Web and then go calm. That’s why I said ordinary users, then again, Fedora and Manjaro folks aren’t really the Riders of the Gaussian. Still, something to look forward to being fixed eventually. Now that we have this 99% fix, the rest should be easy. More to come.

        • Fedora/EPEL Mirrormanager problems in Asia Pacific countries.

          We have been getting a lot of reports of people unable to get updates for EPEL or Fedora at various times. What people are seeing is that they will do a ‘yum update’ and it will give a long list of failures and quit. At this moment we seem to have pinpointed that most of the people having this problem are in various Asia Pacific nations (primarily Australia and Japan). The problem for both of these seems to be a lack of cross connects between networks.

          In the US, if you are on Comcast in say New Mexico and going to a server on Time Warner in North Carolina, your route is usually pretty direct. You will go from one network to various third party providers who will then send the packets the quickest path to the eventual server. If you use a visual grapher of locations, you even find that the path usually follows a linear path. [You might end up going to say California or Seattle first but that is only when Texas and Colorado cross connects are full.] Similarly in most European countries you also see a similar routing algorithm.

    • Debian Family

      • My Debian Activities in December 2016

        This month I marked 367 packages for accept and rejected 45 packages. This time I only sent 10 emails to maintainers asking questions.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The move to snap
          • TedPage: Snapping Unity8

            For the last little while we’ve been working to snap up Unity8. This is all part of the conversion from a system image based device to one that is entirely based on snaps. For the Ubuntu Phones we basically had a package layout with a system image and then Click packages on top of it.

          • We Never Said Ubuntu Phone Is Dead. Here’s What We Actually Wrote Line-by-Line

            I didn’t want to write this post but a lot of people are raging at us for writing an article we didn’t. So, join me as I go through we actually wrote, line-by-line.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Cinnamon 3.2.8 Desktop Out Now for Linux Mint 18.1 with Menu Applet Improvements

              Clement Lefebvre has published a new update of the beautiful, modern and responsive Cinnamon desktop environment, for the latest 3.2 stable series, of course, versioned 3.2.8.

              It’s been a little over two weeks since the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment received an update, and Cinnamon 3.2.8 is here to add many improvements to the Menu applet, which have all been contributed by Michael Webster. Among these, we can notice that the Menu applet is now capable of constructing only one context menu for recent files.

              Of course, this context menu can be re-used for other files as required, and we can’t help but notice that the Menu applet will no longer reconstruct recent files, just re-order, remove, or add them, if necessary. When refreshing the installed applications, the Menu applet won’t be very destructive.

            • Redesigning Bluetooth Settings

              At elementary, redesigns don’t necessarily happen purely as sketches or mockups and they may not even happen all at one time. Many times, we design iteratively in code, solving a single problem at a time. Recently we built out a new, native bluetooth settings pane to replace the one we inherited from GNOME. We took this time to review some of the problems we had with the design of this pane and see how we could do better. Pictured below is the bluetooth settings pane as available today in elementary OS Loki…

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Transpile And Run Python Code Into Go Program With Google’s Open Source ‘Grumpy’
  • Yelp Open-Sources Latest in Data Pipeline Project, Data Pipeline Client Library

    Services consume from the pipeline via the client library, and at Yelp feed into targets like Salesforce, RedShift and Marketo. The library reportedly handles Kafka topic names, encryption, and consumer partitioning. Centralizing service communications through a message broker while enforcing immutable schema versioning helps protect downstream consumers and is also a primary motivation behind the broader data pipeline initiative.

  • The importance of the press kit

    I’d like to share a few lessons I’ve learned about creating a press kit. This helped us spread the word about our recent FreeDOS 1.2 release, and it can help your open source software project to get more attention.

  • Events

    • Vault CFP deadline approaching

      The Vault Storage and Filesystems conference will be held March 22 and 23 in Cambridge, MA, USA, immediately after the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. The call for presentations expires on January 14, and the conference organizers would really like to get a few more proposals in before then. Developers interested in speaking at a technical Linux event are encourage to sign up.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox “Reader Mode” and NoScript

        A couple of days ago I blogged about using Firefox’s “Delete Node” to make web pages more readable. In a subsequent Twitter discussion someone pointed out that if the goal is to make a web page’s content clearer, Firefox’s relatively new “Reader Mode” might be a better way.

  • BSD

    • Get your name in the relayd book

      There’s a long tradition amongst science fiction writers of selling bit parts in books in exchange for charity donations. It’s called tuckerization.

      I see no reason why science fiction writers should have all the fun.

      I need a sample user for the forthcoming book on OpenBSD’s httpd and relayd. This user gets referred to in the user authentication sections as well as on having users manage web sites. They will also get randomly called out whenever it makes sense to me.

      That sample user could be you.

      All it would cost is a donation to the OpenBSD Foundation.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • Rcpp now used by 900 CRAN packages

      Today, Rcpp passed another milestone as 900 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time.

Leftovers

  • This Wand Remote makes couch surfing magical again

    I’ve seen the Kymera Magic Wand selling for as low as $60.00 on ebay and as much as $100.00 Amazon and I have to say it’s a treat every time I can avoid picking up my old remotes.

  • Science

    • The Death Of Expertise

      I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy. When I say something on those subjects, I expect that my opinion holds more weight than that of most other people.

      I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial. Today, any assertion of expertise produces an explosion of anger from certain quarters of the American public, who immediately complain that such claims are nothing more than fallacious “appeals to authority,” sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy.

      [...]

      Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James Schall, once wrote many years ago that “students have obligations to teachers,” including “trust, docility, effort, and thinking,” an assertion that would produce howls of outrage from the entitled generations roaming campuses today.) As a result, many academic departments are boutiques, in which the professors are expected to be something like intellectual valets. This produces nothing but a delusion of intellectual adequacy in children who should be instructed, not catered to.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Almost No One Likes the GOP’s ‘Repeal and Delay’ Plan for Obamacare

      Since June 2009—before the Affordable Care Act even became law—congressional Republicans have promised to be weeks away from proposing their own blueprint for health-care reform. More than seven years later, House Speaker Paul Ryan still seems confused about whether his party does or does not have a plan ready to replace the ACA. “We already know what we’re replacing with. We’ve been extremely clear with what replace looks like,” Ryan insisted in an interview on Wednesday. The following day found him pleading with a reporter for more time. “We’re just beginning to put this together,” Ryan admitted.

      Regardless, Republicans are moving quickly to gut the ACA. Repeal will be the “first order of business” for the new administration, vice president–elect Mike Pence said on Wednesday after speaking to GOP lawmakers on the hill. That same day Senate Republicans began laying the groundwork for a budget maneuver that would allow them to roll back parts of the law with a simple 51-vote majority, thus skirting a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Despite the fast pace, the plan is remarkably shaky—not just in detail but also for the lack of political support behind it. Almost no one outside Congress thinks the GOP’s current strategy is a good idea, and even a few Republican lawmakers are getting skittish.

    • The Three Big Reasons Republicans Can’t Replace Obamacare

      Republicans are preparing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and have promised to replace it with something that doesn’t leave more than 20 million Americans stranded without health insurance.

      But they still haven’t come up with a replacement. “We haven’t coalesced around a solution for six years,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton admitted last week. “Kicking the can down the road for a year or two years isn’t going to make it any easier to solve.“

      They won’t solve it. They can’t and won’t replace Obamacare, for three big reasons.

    • True British Values and the #NHScrisis

      The total amount thrown at the banks by the taxpayer to enable their casino banking scams and cocaine fuelled lifestyles to continue, was £1.16 trillion, courtesy of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. By one of life’s more meaningful coincidences, that is precisely ten times the annual budget of the NHS for the whole UK. Equally neatly, the latest contingency for quantitative easing announced by Mark Carney – money given directly to financial institutions by the central bank in exchange for junk – is £250 billion, which is precisely ten times the total hamstringing debts of the NHS.

    • A learning experience

      openDemocracy is a political discussion site so how could I end this contribution without some discussion of politics. Very shortly after I returned home I became involved in an interchange of emails with some American friends about the election of Trump and what has become known as Obama Care. Here is my response:

      When I discuss American politics and get to Obama care I often end up kind of dumbfounded like someone who has just been told that the moon is actually made of green cheese. I get the same feeling when watching Fox news on the same topic. Where do obviously intelligent people get such crazy ideas? And what do you say to them in reply? Well this is my reply now.

    • As more Southerners benefit from it, Medicaid expansion faces congressional death threats

      Date on which North Carolina’s newly sworn-in Gov. Roy Cooper (D) announced he’d take executive action to expand Medicaid, the public health insurance program for the poor, under the Affordable Care Act: 1/4/2017

      Year in which North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law barring the executive branch from expanding Medicaid under ACA, complicating Cooper’s efforts: 2013

      Number of North Carolinians who could benefit from expansion of Medicaid, which in that state is currently available only to children, people with small children, or those who are pregnant, disabled, or in a nursing home: up to 600,000

      Amount of investment Medicaid expansion would bring to North Carolina: $2 billion to $4 billion

    • NY Nuke Plant to be Shuttered, But Will Cuomo Turn to Dirty Gas Instead?

      New York’s “dangerously decrepit” Indian Point nuclear power plant will officially shut down by April 2021, according to an agreement reached this week between the state and Entergy utility company.

      A source “with direct knowledge of the deal” told the New York Times that one reactor will “cease operations by April 2020, while the other must be closed by April 2021,” the paper reported on Friday.

      In recent years, radioactive tritium-contaminated water had been leaking from the aging Westchester County facility, which sits on the bank of the Hudson River, just 25 miles north of New York City, spurring calls for its closure from activists and concerned residents.

      Recognizing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s history of supporting New York’s upstate nuclear facilities, including a $7.6 billion bailout this August for four other plants, anti-nuclear campaigners reacted to the news with caution.

  • Security

    • 6 ways to secure air-gapped computers from data breaches

      How do you avoid this? Depending upon the nature of the data contained within the air-gapped system, you should only allow certain staff members access to the machine. This might require the machine to be locked away in your data center or in a secured room on the premises. If you don’t have a data center or a dedicated room that can be locked, house the computer in the office of a high-ranking employee.

    • Possibly Smart, Possibly Stupid, Idea Regarding Tor & Linux Distributions

      I will admit that I have not fully thought this through yet, so I am
      writing this in the hope that other folk will follow up, share their
      experiences and thoughts.

      So: I have installed a bunch of Tor systems in the past few months -
      CentOS, Ubuntu, Raspbian, Debian, OSX-via-Homebrew – and my abiding
      impression of the process is one of “friction”.

      Before getting down to details, I hate to have to cite this but I have been
      a coder and paid Unix sysadmin on/off since 1988, and I have worked on
      machines with “five nines” SLAs, and occasionally on boxes with uptimes of
      more than three years; have also built datacentres for Telcos, ISPs and
      built/setup dynamic provisioning solutions for huge cluster computing. The
      reason I mention this is not to brag, but to forestall

    • [Older] Introducing rkt’s ability to automatically detect privilege escalation attacks on containers

      Intel’s Clear Containers technology allows admins to benefit from the ease of container-based deployment without giving up the security of virtualization. For more than a year, rkt’s KVM stage1 has supported VM-based container isolation, but we can build more advanced security features atop it. Using introspection technology, we can automatically detect a wide range of privilege escalation attacks on containers and provide appropriate remediation, making it significantly more difficult for attackers to make a single compromised container the beachhead for an infrastructure-wide assault.

    • Diving back into coreboot development

      Let me first introduce myself: I’m Youness Alaoui, mostly known as KaKaRoTo, and I’m a Free/Libre Software enthusiast and developer. I’ve been hired by Purism to work on porting coreboot to the Librem laptops, as well as to try and tackle the Intel ME issue afterwards.

      I know many of you are very excited about the prospect of having coreboot running on your Librem and finally dropping the proprietary AMI BIOS that came with it. That’s why I’ll be posting reports here about progress I’m making—what I’ve done so far, and what is left to be done.

    • Web databases hit in ransom attacks

      Gigabytes of medical, payroll and other data held in MongoDB databases have been taken by attackers, say security researchers.

    • Why HTTPS for Everything?

      HTTPS enables privacy and integrity by default. It is going to be next big thing. The internet’s standards bodies, web browsers, major tech companies, and the internet community of practice have all come to understand that HTTPS should be the baseline for all web traffic. Ultimately, the goal of the internet community is to establish encryption as the norm, and to phase out unencrypted connections. Investing in HTTPS makes it faster, cheaper, and easier for everyone.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Those Times the NSA Hacked America’s Allies

      The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about the Russia Today cable channel, which proves nothing.

      My complaint is that American television news reports all this as if it is The First Time in History Anyone has Acted like This. But the head of the Republican Party in the early 1970s hired burglars to do the same thing– break into the Watergate building and get access to DNC documents in hopes of throwing an election. Dick Nixon even ordered a second break-in. And it took a long time for Republican members of Congress to come around to the idea that a crime had been committed; if it hadn’t been for the Supreme Court, Nixon might have served out his term.

    • Former CIA & NSA Officials Team Up To Debunk “Russian Hacking” Conspiracy Theory

      Two former high-ranking intelligence officers teamed in an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun that ripped apart the Obama administration’s unproven claim that The Russians interfered with the U.S. election by way of hacking systems of the Democratic establishment to lock in Donald Trump’s win.

    • ‘US intel community lost professional discipline’: Ex-NSA tech director on ‘Russia hacking’ report

      The undisguised and clearly politically motivated report on the alleged 2016 US “election hack” displays a severe lack of “professional discipline” in the intelligence community, former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Edward Binney told RT.

    • The Same Officials Who Pushed the Iraq War Are Now Stirring Up Anti-Russia Hysteria

      The main U.S. intelligence official pushing claims that Russia hacked the Democratic party is James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence.

    • Senate Hearing on Russian Election Mischief Again Fails to Prove Anything

      The Russian hacking hysteria in the US media, and among parts of the public — especially liberal Democrats — is becoming increasingly embarrassing.

      Over and over we have been told that the government, whether in the form of the departing President Obama or unidentified “intelligence sources” cited in news reports, or statements by private security contractors with their vested interest in trying to show how vulnerable America’s (and the Democratic Party’s!) servers are, that they have solid evidence that the Russians hacked DNC emails and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails, only for it to turn out to be more of the same innuendos, circumstantial “evidence,” suspicions, and inevitably ridiculous and embarrassing errors (like the Washington Post’s breathless and false story that the Russians had hacked the Vermont power grid and could shut off the heat during a cold snap).

    • Truck ramming kills 4 in Jerusalem

      A truck rammed into a group of Israeli soldiers who were disembarking from a bus in Jerusalem Sunday, killing four people and wounding 15 others, Israeli police and rescue services said.

      Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the truck veered off course and rammed into the group. She said the attacker was shot dead.

      The attack comes amid a more than yearlong wave of Palestinian shooting, stabbing and vehicular attacks against Israelis that has slowed of late. Sunday’s incident marks the first Israeli casualties in three months.

    • The Declassified Report on Russia’s Election Hacking Says Nothing New

      If you were on the edge of your seat, waiting for the US government to drop its much-anticipated report on Russian hacking operations against American targets and particularly targeting the 2016 presidential election, I’m really sorry to say, you’ll be truly disappointed.

    • It’s official: US election systems designated as critical

      The designation came the same day that US intelligence officials published an unclassified version of a report concluding that Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin directly ordered intelligence agencies to collect data from the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and other organizations. The agencies then oversaw an effort to discredit Clinton, the Democratic party, and the US democratic political process through “information operations,” according to the report, which was jointly written by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the FBI.

    • Fear and Misunderstanding of Russia

      Much of America’s recent demonization of Russia relates to deep cultural and even religious differences between the two countries, requiring a deeper understanding of the other’s strengths and weaknesses, writes Paul Grenier.

    • Pushing for a Lucrative New Cold War

      The New Cold War promises untold riches for the Military-Industrial Complex, causing hawks inside the Obama administration to push for more hostilities with Russia, as in a Syrian case study dissected by Gareth Porter for Truthdig.

      [...]

      When Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, spoke to reporters at a press briefing outside a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the U.S. attack on Syrian troops, he asked rhetorically, “Who is in charge in Washington? The White House or the Pentagon?”

    • Hillary Clinton and the Installation of Authoritarian Right-Wing Regimes in the Americas

      Seven years after the Hillary-backed Honduran coup, Mrs. Clinton and the capitalist-imperial U.S. Deep State she has long served helped place the thin-skinned megalomaniac and right-wing quasi-fascist Donald Trump atop the executive branch of the world’s most powerful state.

      [...]

      But what pre-existing “democracy” is Trump “taki[ng] control” of, exactly? It is well known and established that the United States’ political order is an abject corporate and financial plutocracy – an oligarchy of and for Wealthy Few. You don’t have to be a supposedly wild-eyed leftist radical to know this. Just ask the establishment liberal political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page (Northwestern). Over the past three plus decades, these leading academic researchers have determined, the U.S. political system has functioned as “an oligarchy,” where wealthy elites and their corporations “rule.” Examining data from more than 1,800 different policy initiatives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Gilens and Page found that wealthy and well-connected elites consistently steer the direction of the country, regardless of and against the will of the U.S. majority and irrespective of which major party holds the White House and/or Congress. “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” Gilens and Page write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.” As Gilens explained to the liberal online journal Talking Points Memo two years ago, “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.” Such is the harsh reality of “really existing capitalist democracy” in the U.S., what Noam Chomsky has called “RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked.’”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Finance

    • UK at risk of Brexit ‘catastrophe’ warns Canadian trade expert

      Britain risks a “catastrophic” Brexit because the government is so dismissive of the concerns of trade experts, according to one of the figures behind the EU-Canada trade deal which took a decade to negotiate.

    • Koch Astroturf Army Cheers Union Busting in Kentucky

      On the first day that the Kentucky legislature got underway with a newly elected Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican governor, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity group blew the whistle and legislators jumped to do their bidding.

      This week, the Speaker of the House Jeff Hoover rammed through the legislature three bills to break the back of unions and lower wages for highly-skilled construction workers.

      It was bare-knuckled partisan politics. “We can pretty much do whatever we want now!” crowed GOP Kentucky Rep. Jim DeCesare behind closed doors.

      You have only to look at Trump’s narrow victory in Rust Belt states to understand why the GOP is desperate to get rid of the Democratic Party’s boots on the ground.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • WikiLeaks, D.N.C. Hacks and Julian Assange’s Years-Old Vision

      At first blush, there’s a baffling, inside-out quality to Julian Assange’s latest star turn in our shambolic national story.

      He belongs in jail for “waging his war” against the United States by exposing its secrets, the conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has said of him. An “anti-American operative with blood on his hands,” Sarah Palin once called him.

      Yet last week brought the sight of Mr. Hannity speaking with Mr. Assange in glowing terms about “what drives him to expose government and media corruption” through Clinton campaign hacks that American intelligence has attributed to Russia. And Ms. Palin hailed him as a great truth teller, even apologizing for previous unpleasantries. (Cue sound of needle sliding across record album.)

    • Federal Judge Doesn’t Let Debate Commission Off Easy

      The U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. heard oral arguments today in the lawsuit filed by Level the Playing Field (LPF) challenging the nonprofit status of the Commission on Presidential Debates, just under two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn into office.

      LPF’s lead attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, provided extensive evidence, analysis, and historical background to support the plaintiffs’ claim that the Commission on Presidential Debates uses unfair criteria to keep competitive voices outside the two major parties out of presidential debates.

      Specifically, LPF takes issue with the 15% rule that requires candidates outside the Republican and Democratic Parties to poll at 15% in 5 national polls selected by the debate commission to gain entry into the debates.

      “The two parties have rigged the system… CPD board members are big funders to candidates and campaigns… and the 15% is an impossible threshold,” Shapiro said.

    • Trump mentioned Wikileaks 164 times in last month of election, now claims it didn’t impact one voter

      President-elect Trump says that information published by Wikileaks, which the U.S. intelligence community says was hacked by Russia, had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.” This was not the view of candidate Trump, who talked about Wikileaks and the content of the emails it released at least 164 times in last month of the campaign.

      ThinkProgress calculated the number by reviewing transcripts of Trump’s speeches, media appearances and debates over the last 30 days of the campaign.

      Trump talked extensively about Wikileaks in the final days of a campaign that was ultimately decided by just 100,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania combined.

    • How RT became the star of CIA, FBI & NSA’s anticlimactic ‘big reveal’

      The eagerly awaited Director Of National Intelligence’s (DNI) report “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” didn’t need such a long winded title. They could have just called it: “We Really Don’t Like RT.”

      Almost every major western news outlet splashed this story. But it was probably the New York Times’ report which was the most amusing. America’s “paper of record” hailed the DNI’s homework as “damning and surprisingly detailed.” Then a few paragraphs later admitted the analysis contained no actual evidence.

    • CIA and NSA Veterans on Russia, Trump and Obama

      ABC reports: “Showdown at Trump Tower as President-Elect Set to Receive Intel Briefing.” Politico reports: “Pompeo’s confirmation hearing for CIA director set for Jan. 11.”

      [...]

      Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years; he briefed the president’s daily brief one-on-one to President Reagan’s most senior national security officials from 1981-85.

    • Algorithm and Blues: Why Hillary’s Moneyball Strategy Failed

      When I wrote on election night that the Clinton campaign had forsaken class politics for “politics by algorithm,” I had no idea that they really had such an “app” or that they had named it after Lord Byron’s daughter, the brilliant Ada Lovelace, the real brains behind the first computer. (Ada would have run a better campaign.) Apparently, Clinton campaign gameboy Robbie Mook ran 500,000 simulations of the election on his Xbox. How many of them had 90,000 Michigan voters leaving their choice for president blank? How many results showed her losing the white women vote by 10 percent? How many showed the vote in union households split nearly 50-50?

      As we know from the Wikileaks dumps, Clintonian paranoia extended far beyond her decision to set up a private email server and began to infect the campaign itself. Nargiza Gafurova was an analytics specialist for one of the database companies doing contract work for the Clinton campaign. “Our company worked with her campaign on their data needs – they’ve been extremely secretive about the data and algorithms they use,” Gafurova told me. “Secrecy was so deep that we couldn’t help them effectively as they didn’t even tell us who they want to target.”

    • Barack Obama’s Neoliberal Legacy: Rightward Drift and Donald Trump

      In a parting shot near the end of his depressing, center-right presidency, Barack Obama wants the world to know that he would have defeated Donald Trump if the U.S. Constitution didn’t prevent him from running for a third term. It was a stab at Hillary Clinton as well as the president-elect.

      I suspect Obama is right. Like Bill Clinton, Obama is a much better fake-progressive, populism-manipulating campaigner than Hillary. Also like Bill, he has more outward charm, wit, charisma, and common touch than Mrs. Clinton. Plus, he’s a male in a still-sexist nation, and he would have had some very sharp election strategists on his side.

    • Resisting the Congressional Watchdog

      Not that political corruption doesn’t happen with divided government, but with Republicans controlling all three branches, the prospects for more Abramoff-type scandals rise, warn Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.

    • The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking’

      Mr. Trump’s skepticism is warranted not only by technical realities, but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved. Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony regarding the extent of the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans. Four months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was “clearly erroneous.” That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.

      Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.

      [...]

      Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA’s formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

      Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

      Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any “hacked” emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.

      Lastly, the CIA is almost totally dependent on NSA for ground truth in this electronic arena. Given Mr. Clapper’s checkered record for accuracy in describing NSA activities, it is to be hoped that the director of NSA will join him for the briefing with Mr. Trump.

    • US Report Still Lacks Proof on Russia ‘Hack’

      Repeating an accusation over and over again is not evidence that the accused is guilty, no matter how much “confidence” the accuser asserts about the conclusion. Nor is it evidence just to suggest that someone has a motive for doing something. Many conspiracy theories are built on the notion of “cui bono” – who benefits – without following up the supposed motive with facts.

    • The Trump Bubble

      Donald Trump has a plan for dealing with the stock market bubble. Make it bigger.

      Before the election candidate Trump blasted Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen for keeping interest rates too low for too long to keep the economy humming along while Obama was still in office. The president elect accused Yellen of being politically motivated suggesting that the Fed’s policies had put the country at risk of another stock market Crash like 2008.

      “If rates go up, you’re going to see something that’s not pretty,” Trump told Fox News in an interview in September. “It’s all a big bubble.”

      Yellen of course denied Trump’s claims saying, “We do not discuss politics at our meetings, and we do not take politics into account in our decisions.”

      As we shall see later in this article, Yellen was lying about the political role the Fed plays in setting policy, in fact, last week’s FOMC statement clearly establishes the Fed as basically a political institution that implements an agenda that serves a very small group of powerful constituents, the 1 percent. If serving the interests of one group over all of the others is not politics, than what is it?

      [...]

      First of all, slashing taxes for the wealthy does not boost growth. We know that. It doesn’t work. Period.

      [...]

      Trump’s tax plan will increase inequality by making the rich richer. He wants to reduce the top tax rate from 39.6% to 33% which means that people “making $3.7 million or more in a year, would receive $1 million in annual tax savings.” (USA Today) The plan is bad for the economy, bad for the deficits and bad for working people who will see more aggressive attacks on Social Security to make up for the losses in revenue.

    • Beyond ‘post-truth’: confronting the new reality

      We are told we are living in a “post truth” world in which fake news proliferates and the established news media, once a bastion of civil society and a pillar of democracy, has lost its influence. As we should expect, alarmist statements such as these, have one foot in fact and the other resting on a shifting foundation of clicks, likes and shares. Alarming headlines work better on social media but they also reduce complex ideas to a series of half understood slogans.

      Much is changing in the way in which we find and share news stories but these changes are a product of many factors. Some rest in national media systems, others are a product of technical changes and all are influenced by, or have an influence upon, the shifting geopolitical situation. Fake news is not responsible for the rise of right wing populism in Europe and America but it has certainly fed the fire.

      The decline of trust in the mainstream media is genuine but it is not global. In the Northern European countries, where commercialisation has been tempered by firm statutory intervention and clear professional conventions, trust is still relatively high. In the rampantly commercial systems of the UK and the USA trust has plummeted. The UK press has the lowest level of public trust of any European country (with higher levels for TV) while the US media has low levels of trust for both TV news and the press (Aarts, Fladmoe, & Strömbäck 2012).

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Snowden: “Right and Wrong is a very different standard from Legal and Illegal”

      There are times when you have tons of historical research lined up for a column about legal structures making bad assumptions based on facts that are no longer true, and then something just comes along that makes you wipe your desk and say “no. scrap all of this work. This. I need to post this, and I need to post this now.”

      Right now is such a time. The topic of cost structures of publishing in the 1800s will wait for another day (it’s already waited for over 200 years, after all).

      In this interview (cut courtesy of Fight for the Future), Edward Snowden does one of the things he excels at – he summarizes very complex topics in such an accessible way that he practically turns long legal debates into one soundbite.

    • Interview 1240 – Rick Falkvinge on Rule 41 and the New Online Order

      Rick Falkvinge, founder of the original pirate party and head of privacy at PrivateInternetAccess.com, joins us to discuss his recent article, “Today, the FBI becomes the enemy of every computer user and every IT security professional worldwide.” We dissect the new “Rule 41” that gives American law enforcement unprecedented leeway to break into any computer in the world, the implications this has for a world in which privacy is increasingly a thing of the past, and what people can do to protect themselves from the New Online Order of global FBI operations.

    • FBI Releases Documents Related to San Bernardino iPhone

      The FBI on Friday released 100 pages of heavily censored documents related to its agreement with an unidentified vendor to hack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters, but it did not identify whom it paid to perform the work or how much it cost.

      The records were provided in response to a federal lawsuit filed against the FBI by The Associated Press, Vice Media and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today.

      The media organizations sued in September to learn how much the FBI paid and who it hired to break into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife killed 14 people at a holiday gathering of county workers in December 2015. The FBI for weeks had maintained that only Apple Inc. could access the information on its phone, which was protected by encryption, but ultimately broke or bypassed Apple’s digital locks with the help of an unnamed third party.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Alleged Crackas With Attitude associate Justin Liverman signs plea deal

      Computer science student Justin Liverman, who was arrested by the FBI in September on suspicion of involvement with Crackas with Attitude (CWA), has signed a plea agreement. CWA claimed to have accessed emails from the AOL account of CIA Director John Brennan in late 2015, which were later published by WikiLeaks as the Brennan emails.

    • Malek Fahd: Islamic Council refuses to hand over land to school

      Australia’s peak administrative Islamic body is refusing to relinquish land being used by one of the state’s largest schools despite the potential for it to save the school from being shut down.

      The Administrative Appeals Tribunal upheld the federal Department of Education’s decision to strip funding from the 2400 student school on Thursday after it found the school was operating for a profit through millions of dollars in inflated rent payments and loans made to the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.

    • Indigenous children at risk of forced religious conversion

      There is an alarming presence of forced religious conversion of indigenous children at the hands of radicals in Bandarban.

      Muslim fanatics seduce underprivileged families with scopes of a better education and lifestyle for their children, and forcefully convert the children in madrasas in Dhaka without their parents’ knowledge.

      Over the past seven years, police have rescued 72 children from this crime ring.

    • Trump and Sessions: Great for the Private Prison Industry, Terrible for Civil Rights

      Donald Trump’s victory has been nothing but good news for the private prison industry.

      The day after the election, shares of the two biggest private prison corporations — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — jumped 43 and 21 percent, respectively.

    • In Statehouses Won By Republicans, the First Move Is to Consolidate Power By Weakening Unions

      Republicans stormed to power in state elections across the country in November on a promise to take on the establishment and return government to the average citizen.

      But in state capitals where they gained control, they moved quickly to do something else entirely: They’ve consolidated their newfound power — and rewarded their corporate donors — by delivering death blows to a longtime enemy: organized labor.

      In Kentucky, Missouri, and New Hampshire, three states that flipped to unified Republican control, legislators have prioritized passing Right to Work, a law that quickly diminishes union power by allowing workers in unionized workplaces to withhold fees used to organize and advocate on their behalf.

      That might seem odd to voters who heard promises to “drain the swamp,” but its what Republican partisans and business lobbyists have been demanding for years.

    • Donald Trump’s Pick for Spy Chief Took Hard Line on Snowden, Guantanamo, and Torture

      In 2013, just one week after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden came forward as the source of documents revealing the global extent of the NSA’s mammoth surveillance regime, Coats penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal lambasting the disclosures and the ensuing media coverage.

      “Unfortunately, the Obama administration — especially of late — has fueled people’s distrust of government, which has made the reaction to Mr. Snowden’s leak far worse,” he wrote, pleading with his colleagues in Congress to stop “mischaracterizing” the surveillance programs Snowden exposed.

      Coats said the NSA’s programs, including its bulk collection of American telephone records, were “legal, constitutional and used under the strict oversight of all three branches of government” — though courts later disagreed, and Congress amended the law to end the American records collection program, as Snowden pointed out on Twitter on Thursday.

    • Pain and torture: state violence in Egypt

      After the coup of 2013, the practice of torture in Egypt has taken a qualitative shift to the worse.

      The use of torture and violence by the police is nothing new to Egypt; to the contrary, Mubarak was regularly condemned by various international human rights organizations for the use of torture and violence against political opponents and regular citizens who were unlucky enough to be arrested for petty crimes.

      However, after the coup of 2013 and the inauguration of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, this practice has taken new forms. There has been a proliferation of sexual violence against detainees including children, as well as an alarming increase in forced disappearances and torture.

      Some of the kidnapped reappear after a few months, others meet an unknown fate. The most prominent, and international example was the murder of Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student who was tortured to death and subjected to “animal like” violence for conducting research on the Egyptian labor movement. It is believed that the Egyptian security services were behind this heinous crime.

    • Alabama NAACP Not Backing Down After Jeff Sessions’ Office Lashes Out

      “We are trying to stop Jeff Sessions from becoming the Attorney General of the United States,” Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, told AlterNet over the phone. “We are not backing down at all.”

      Just days ago, Simelton was one of dozens who staged a sit-in at Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama office, an action timed to coincide with the onset of the 115th Congress. Media attention and support from across the country poured in.

      [...]

      Sessions was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1986 as a federal judge, but rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee—some of them Republicans—on the grounds that he was too racist to serve.

    • Some initial thoughts before a Trump presidency

      The youth in the United States don’t support Trump; people of color in in the US don’t support Trump; the majority of women don’t support Trump. Those, like Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who now hail Trump as “their” President whom they do not want to see fail, are normalizing a stolen election. They are abdicating their responsibility as stewards of representative democracy.

    • Faux Real: What’s in Your Worldview?

      We had to know this was coming. It was always here, but now it can be seen more clearly through the unvarnished lens of protofascism. Retrenchment and revanchism arrive with a new pitchman, selling rollbacks disguised as opportunities and promising to reclaim that which has been lost after decades of social progress and cultural liberalization. This isn’t a “new normal” but rather an old one reemerging, and the only sort of normality it represents is that which is perversely defined by a type of mass insanity.

      Things have been heading in this direction for a long time now, but the pace obviously has accelerated in the digital age. The lamentations about the demise of truth and the advent of bogus “news” are legion, as are the observations about the omnipresence of technology and the implications thereof. But all this hasn’t happened to us — it has veritably been demanded. Obscured by the handwringing and finger-pointing is the deeper reality of a culture obsessed with on-demand indulgences, no matter the cost.

      This is a manifestation of convenient compartmentalization, as if what happens in one realm has no bearing on another. Mass consumption of artificial foods, infotainment tidbits, contrived “reality” fare, and “brain candy” is seen as innocuous or just a guilty pleasure if it’s even thought about at all. Yet when politics are shown to be dominated by artifice, and when sensationalism trumps responsible journalism, suddenly there are waves of consternation and disbelief. How could this happen? Well, how could it not.

    • Obama’s Propaganda Gift to Trump

      On December 23, 2016 Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a federal law that is passed every year. NDAA authorizes defense appropriations but it is also used as a Trojan horse to hide attacks on civil liberties. In 2011 the NDAA authorized indefinite detention of anyone deemed a terrorism suspect. Tucked inside this year’s NDAA was the passage of the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act which establishes the little known or discussed Global Engagement Center.

      The title seems benign enough until one reads its mission. “The purpose of the Center shall be to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.”

      In plain English, this act establishes an official propaganda arm of the United States government. Of course there has always been governmental coordination used to spread lies about American foreign policy. The government doesn’t even have to work very hard because the corporate media usually march in lock step and repeat their every claim uncritically. But these are dangerous times for the American hegemon. Its ability to continue exercising imperial control has been damaged by foreign governments successfully resisting its efforts and by the election of Donald Trump.

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/09/gpd-pocket-with-gnu-linux/feed/ 0 Links 7/1/2017: Linux 4.9.1, Wine 2.0 RC4 http://techrights.org/2017/01/07/linux-4-9-1/ http://techrights.org/2017/01/07/linux-4-9-1/#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2017 20:14:15 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98181

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 2017 And The FUD Still Flows

    Well, here it is 2017 and folks are still trotting out the arguments against GNU/Linux they were using fifteen years ago.

  • Do People Really Use That? 15 Weird Linux Operating System Names

    When you see the word Windows capitalized, do you even think about the glass panes that let you see outside your house? How often does the “mac” in macOS make you think of burgers? Once a name gets popular enough, we all collectively disregard how peculiar it is.

    Linux isn’t that popular, so it doesn’t get this pass. For those of you unfamiliar with the open source operating system, you don’t install Linux itself — you install one of its many versions, which are known as distributions (“distros”). Many of these distros have odd names.

    I’ve put together a list of 15 distros with odd or comical names, in no particular order. Some of them are relatively popular in the Linux world. Others, even if they were mainstream, would still sound downright silly. Tell me if you agree.

  • These Linux myths need to die

    A Reddit user recently started a thread in which they asked which myths and misconceptions about Linux annoy users the most.

    The post spawned a lively discussion with points being raised for and against Linux.

    The prominent myths raised in the Reddit thread, along with several which have been doing the rounds for a while, are listed below.

  • Linux Marketshare Up To 3% According To One Popular Website

    According to one popular NSFW web-site, the 53rd most popular web-site in the world ranked by Alexa, their Linux traffic went up 14% in 2016.

  • Desktop

    • $89 Pinebook Linux Laptop Expected to Launch in February

      If you’ve heard the name Pine64 before, it’s most likely in relation to the Pine A64 single-board computer sold by the company as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi$40.99 at Amazon. However, Pine64 is branching out and will launch a couple of extremely cheap laptops next month.

      The so-called Pinebook laptop will ship in two forms, both offering the same internal components while one has an 11.6-inch screen and the other a larger 14-inch panel. Inside you’ll find a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex A53 processor running at 1.2GHz coupled with 2GB DDR3 RAM. Graphics will be handled by the embedded dual-core Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and storage, as with most cheap laptops, is limited to a 16GB eMMC flash drive. According to OMG!Ubuntu!, power is provided by a 10,000mAh LiPo battery and there will be two USB 2.0 ports, a MicroSD card slot, headphone jack, and mini HDMI out.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.9.1

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.9.1 kernel.

      All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at:
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y
      and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

      http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

    • Linux 4.8.16
    • Linux 4.4.40
    • Heterogeneous Memory Management v15 For The Linux Kernel

      Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has published his first set of Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) revisions for 2017.

      This long-in-development work for the Linux kernel to implement Heterogeneous Memory Management allows device memory to be used inside any process transparently and without modification. The HMM patches also allow mirring a process address space on a device. NVIDIA is one of the vendors working on support for their binary NVIDIA Linux driver and Nouveau open-source to make use of HMM with their latest GPUs.

    • VMware joins Open-O project targeting NFV, SDN orchestration

      The Linux Foundation-based open source group Open-O snares VMware as “premier” member joining the likes of China Mobile, Huawei.

      The Open-O Project recently welcomed new member VMware to the open source organization hosted by The Linux Foundation.

    • 10 years with util-linux project!

      Yes, we had util-linux before (and many thanks to Adrian Bunk and Andries E. Brouwer), but I believe that with git and close collaboration between Linux distributions and Linux kernel community it better now :-)

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Skylake With The Latest Linux/Mesa Open-Source Drivers

        I’m in the process of testing a lot of my different CPUs/APUs in preparation for some Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks next week with the Core i5 7600K and Core i7 7700K. Along the way with the different CPU benchmarks I’ve also been running some fresh integrated Linux graphics tests on the newer and interesting hardware.

        The integrated graphics tests are still early on and will have much more data when the weekend is through. But so far with numbers from an AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” APU compared to Skylake-based Core i5 6500 and Core i5 6600K, those numbers alone were interested so I figured I’d share those early numbers this morning.

      • How AMD Kaveri’s Graphics Performance Has Evolved Under Linux

        As mentioned earlier when posting some fresh AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Linux graphics benchmarks, I have some fresh AMD A10-7850K “Kaveri” APU numbers with running the latest Ubuntu 16.10 + Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1-dev stack on many of my benchmarking systems in the basement server room. With having an A10-7850K Kaveri system running with the latest Linux open-source driver code, I figured I’d compare it to some of my older Kaveri results.

        [...]

        Following these initial results in this article are some more numbers going back further to then look at the Ubuntu 14.10 and fglrx 14.20/14.50 performance. All of these OpenGL benchmarks were done in a fully-automated manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

      • AMD Developer Posts X.Org Modesetting “MS_ALL_IN_ONE” Patches
      • PlayStation 4 Running Linux Can Now Use AMDGPU-PRO With Vulkan

        The work to run Linux on the PlayStation 4 continues to advance and previously we reported on those behind it managing to exploit the Radeon graphics found on the AMD APU powering the PS4. The latest milestone is they now have Vulkan running on the PS4.

      • Deus Ex: Mankind Divided On Linux With Latest RadeonSI – Up To 2~3x Faster

        With Marek’s latest set of RadeonSI Gallium3D patches, which are said to improve the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance by around 70%, having landed in Mesa Git, here are some fresh benchmarks with a Radeon RX 480 and R9 Fury.

        The “before” results were from the Christmas-timed 31-Way NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon Linux OpenGL Comparison – End-Of-Year 2016 and then the “new” results are using Linux 4.10 and Mesa 13.1-dev Git as of today. The RX 480 and R9 Fury were used for benchmarking.

      • There Are A Few More Performance Changes With RadeonSI From Mesa Git

        With Marek’s optimizations having landed in Mesa Git that targeted Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I ran benchmarks and found Deus Ex: MD is generally much faster and can be 2~3x faster, much more than the 70% originally thought by Marek. Now that more time has passed, I have carried out some more Linux gaming tests.

      • Polaris 12 Support Being Sent In To Linux 4.10 Kernel

        AMD is looking to land initial support for upcoming “Polaris 12″ graphics processors into the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel.

        AMD published initial Polaris 12 open-source Linux driver support back in December. This new revision of Polaris is expected to be for lower-end GPUs while waiting for Vega on the high-end. Details on Polaris 12 remain scarce. But in terms of the Linux driver support, it’s basically adding in the new PCI IDs and sharing the existing code-paths with Polaris 10/11.

      • RADV Vulkan Driver Gets Its First Fix From A Valve Developer

        It appears Valve Linux developers are doing a bit more tinkering with the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma 5.8.5 and Applications 16.12 by KDE now available in Chakra

        The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma and Applications series are now available to all Chakra users, together with other important package upgrades.

        Plasma 5.8.5 provides another round of bugfixes and translation to the 5.8 release, with changes found mostly in the plasma-desktop, plasma-workspace and kscreen packages.

        Applications 16.12.0 is the first release of a new series and comes with several changes. kdelibs has been updated to 4.14.27.

      • KaOS 2017.01 released as new year’s gift

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Weather updates with OpenWeather GNOME Shell extension

        If you have ever wanted weather updates on your Desktop, one of the easiest and neatest ways with the OpenWeather GNOME Shell extension. This nifty extension provides an always-visible display of the current weather status and temperature in the top bar of Fedora Workstation. If you open up the weather status monitor, it will also provide you with more details on the current weather, including a forcast for upcoming days, wind, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and sunrise & sunset times for the current location.

  • Distributions

    • The Best Linux Distros for 2017

      The new year is upon us, and it’s time to look toward what the next 365 days have in store. As we are wont to do, Linux.com looks at what might well be the best Linux distributions to be found from the ever-expanding crop of possibilities.

      Of course, we cannot just create a list of operating systems and say “these are the best,” not when so often Linux can be very task-oriented. To that end, I’m going to list which distros will rise to the top of their respective heaps…according to task.

      With that said, let’s get to the list!

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Release update: Soft freeze for stretch
      • Debian Stretch Enters Its Soft Freeze, Full Freeze In One Month

        The soft freeze is now upon us for Debian 9.0 “Stretch” while the full freeze will happen in February.

        The soft-freeze means that no new source packages will enter Stretch. The full freeze will then happen on 5 February, after which point all changes will require approval to land.

      • RFH: screen that hurts my eyes

        Two years ago, I bought myself a new fancy motherboard (a Asus B85M-G C2) with a new fancy Intel-based processor with built-in graphics (an Intel Core i7-4770) and memory to go with it. I installed it in the place of my old AMD-based motherboard, keeping everything else (my hoard of hard drives and such) excepted the graphics card, which was not needed anymore. I immediately noticed my eyes were aching when using the computer. I was quite surprised since I had been using the screen very heavily for almost 10 years before that, without any problems. I attributed that to Intel Graphics, so I tried putting back the old graphics card, but it did not help. The situation was very frustrating, since working on the computer for an hour or so was making my eyes hurt for several days. This problem was specific to this computer, I could keep on using my computer at work and my laptop without problems.

      • Getting to know diffoscope better

        Let me just say that I was a Debian user for years when I discovered it is taking part in Outreachy as one of organisations. Their Reproducible Builds effort has a noble goal and a bunch of great people behind it – I had no chances not to get excited by it. Looking for a place where my skills could be of any use, I discovered diffoscope – the tool for in-depth comparassion of files, archives etc. My mentor, Mattia Rizzolo, supported my decision to work on it, so now I am concentrating my efforts on improving diffoscope.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Mint 18.1 Xfce Nearing, Weird Names, Die Linux Myths

              Clement Lefebvre today announced a beta release of Mint 18.1 Xfce with updated software, refinements, and “many new features.” MakeUseOf chuckled at some of the crazy names folks pin on Linux distributions and Jan Vermeulen picked up on a Reddit conversation discussing Linux myths that “need to die.” Elsewhere in Linux news, Bruce Byfield compared and contrasted Debian and Ubuntu while Mark Shuttleworth discussed Snappy vs. Flatpak.

            • Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce – BETA Release

              This is the BETA release for Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce Edition.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • What is Open Source Software and How Can You Use it For Business?

    Small businesses are always looking for ways to save time and cut the operating costs of their business. One way to do this is by using open source software (OSS) to run their business.

  • AT&T now an open source believer

    Networked data traffic will only grow moving forward, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, and making ECOMP open-source will allow the network to adjust.

    For many of those giants looking to modernize, open source has been the answer, as it allows for flexibility and a vast trove of material to draw from.

    Other legacy companies like GM and GE have also been working hard to reinvent themselves for the digital age, recognizing that they must evolve or face potential extinction. GE CEO Jeff Immelt wants to make GE a leading software company by 2020, while General Motors CEO Mary Barra is working to shift that company to become more of a tech innovator and incubator.

  • The impact of Open Source on operators, systems integrators and vendors

    Open source refers to the ability to access and modify source code, develop derived works, and sell or distribute software. Open source does not imply free of charge. In the context of telecom networks, open source builds on Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). While open source refers traditionally to software, it can apply to hardware in which case a reference design is shared in an open community. The construct of open source leads to collaborative communities, and a product development philosophy that is based on a relatively fast iterative process. This contrasts with the relatively slow ‘waterfall’ process used in the development of telecom network equipment and services.

  • Hyperledger Blockchain Project Announces ‘Technical Working Group China’ Following Strong Interest

    The Hyperledger Project, a cross-industry collaborative effort to study, develop and implement open-source blockchain solutions and standards has set up a working group as an extended arm in China.

  • In the 2017 Tech Job Pool, Open Source Skills Rule

    Here it is: 2017. As the year gets going, the cloud computing and Big Data scenes are absolutely flooded with talk of shortages in people with deployment and management expertise. There just are not enough skilled workers to go around. The OpenStack Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and other organizations are now taking some important steps to address the situation.

    Here are some of the best ways to start the new year by getting certified for the open source cloud and Big Data tools that are makng a difference.

    As part of its efforts to grow the OpenStack talent pool and global community, the OpenStack Foundation has announced professional certification programs that are meant to provide a baseline assessment of knowledge and be accessible to OpenStack professionals around the world. Some of the first steps in advancing the program are taking place now, and Red Hat is also advancing OpenStack certification plans..

  • Ford, Toyota to challenge Apple CarPlay, Android Auto

    Wednesday’s announcement establishes the SmartDeviceLink Consortium, a non-profit group that will manage the open source software in SmartDeviceLink. Ford’s AppLink, a part of Ford Sync, is the underlying software in SmartDeviceLink. Ford deeded AppLink to the open source community in 2013. The idea is individual automakers can then build their own center stack display interfaces that look and feel different, while still retaining the voice and instrument panel controls already created by SDL. Right now, Apple CarPlay looks about the same on a $25,000 Chevrolet Cruze (image above) and a $60,000 Audi, to the annoyance of all automakers.

  • Riot: An open team collaboration tool for everyone

    How many times have you wished you had a quick access to a collaboration tool in the palm of your hands? And how many times have you wished that same tool could not only reach out to a team of your choosing, but to a community of similar users?

    Such is the way of Riot. This particular open source take on collaboration (available on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux) makes working with others on ideas and issues as easy as possible. Not only can you join the myriad available rooms, you can create your own rooms and make them either public or private. Riot even allows for room encryption, to ensure security.

  • CyanogenMod’s death and rebirth, new open source automotive group, and more news

    In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at Cyanogen Inc. pulling the plug on CyanogenMod, Toyota and Ford forming the SmartDeviceLink Consortium, and more.

  • Haiku OS Gaining Ground On UEFI, FreeBSD Compatibility Layer, Remote Debugging

    For those interested in the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system, they have issued their latest monthly progress report to end out 2016.

  • Events

    • Crossing the AI chasm

      I recently presented those learnings at ApacheCon, and in this article I’ll share my top four lessons for overcoming both the technical and product chasms that stand in your path.

    • Call for Presentations at LinuxFest NorthWest, May 6-7, 2017

      Freedom, Friends, Features, First. The theme of this years LinuxFest NorthWest is ‘The Mechanics of Freedom’.

      Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things are becoming even more integrated in the lives of regular citizens. Along with these changes comes concern over the trade-offs between convenience and privacy. For example: Privacy in the age of relentless online tracking, How bots can help you onboard new community members, Training driverless vehicles, How the Internet of Things took down DNS.

  • Web Browsers

    • 2016 sees Internet Explorer usage collapse, Chrome surge

      At the start of 2016, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was still the most commonly used browser on the Web; it finished 2015 being used by about 46 percent of Web users, with 32 percent preferring Chrome, and 12 percent using Firefox. But Explorer’s days have been numbered ever since Microsoft essentially ended its development. While the venerable browser is still supported and still gets security updates, its features and standard support have been frozen since 2015. Instead, Microsoft shifted active development to Edge, its new browser. While Edge is faster, more secure, and boasts much better support for Web standards, it’s only available for Windows 10, which greatly limits its audience.

  • CMS

    • Launching a Site or Blog? Open Source Creation Tools Give You Many Choices

      Late last year, Datamation came out with an extensive evaluation of which open source content management systems (CMS) really stand out, which is a topic near and dear to us here at OStatic. Our site runs on Drupal, which is an open source platform that powers many sites around the web, but there are key differences between CMS offerings, and if you’re looking for the right solution, we have some good resources for you.

      The Datamation story provides a nice overview of the open CMS space, but here are some of our newly updated, favorite ways to go about evaluating which is the right CMS for you.

      Marking a true renaissance for tools that can help anyone run a top-notch website or manage content in the cloud, open source content management systems (CMS) have come of age. You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.

  • Microsoft Cuts

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Officially Boots Libreboot

      FSF and GNU decide to grant Libreboot lead developer Leah Rowe’s wishes. The project is no longer a part of GNU says RMS.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • SiFive rolls out fully open source chip for IoT devices

        SiFive has also released an Arduino based software development board called HiFive1, along with the FE310 chip. In addition to that, the company has also released the RTL (register-transfer level) code for FE310 under an open source license that will allow chip designers to customize their own SoC on top of the base FE310.

        I talked with Jack Kang, VP of Product and Business Development at SiFive, to understand the chip’s impact on IoT world.

      • CES 2017 – Renault create world’s first open-source mass market vehicle

        The new vehicle POM, based on Renault’s popular Twizy, will be available to start-ups, independent laboratories, private customers and researchers, allowing them to customise the software and driving experience.

  • Programming/Development

    • Top 50 Developer Tools of 2016

      It took a bit of time to comb through the data, but there are some killer insights in here. To piece this list together, we aggregated usage from 40K+ tech stacks, over a million unique visits, and thousands of developer comments, reviews, and votes across all of 2016 (more on methodology below). Through it, we found some of the top tech trends coming into 2017 and what should be on your bucket list. Let’s get started!

    • Keynote: State of the Union: node.js by Rod Vagg, NodeSource

      During his keynote at Node.js Interactive in November, Rod Vagg, Technical Steering Committee Director at the Node.js Foundation talked about the progress that the project made during 2016.

    • Node.js: The State of the Union

      By all metrics, it has been a good year for Node.js. During his keynote at Node.js Interactive in November, Rod Vagg, Technical Steering Committee Director at the Node.js Foundation talked about the progress that the project made during 2016.

    • RcppTOML 0.1.0

      Big news: RcppTOML now works on Windows too!

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Finnish brain drain picks up speed, entire research groups now moving abroad

      Cuts to universities and state-funded research centres are contributing to growing brain drain from Finland and increasing unemployment among the highly educated, says Petri Koikkalainen, the head of the Finnish Union of University Researchers and Teachers.

      The incidence of highly-educated people moving abroad has increased by one-third in the last few years, while the increase in the number of researchers leaving Finland behind is only slightly behind this percentage. According to Statistics Finland, 2,223 individuals with top academic degrees moved abroad in 2016.

      This brain drain has grown steadily since 2011, the researcher and teacher’s union president Koikkalainen said in a Radio Suomi interview on January 5.

      “The problem is not that people are moving abroad from Finland; the problem is that they never come back. We can’t attract highly-educated international experts to Finland, either,” Koikkalainen said.

      “There’s no use debating whether the shrinking university resources are contributing to the growing brain drain. At this point, we should just concede the obvious.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • China’s Airpocalypse Paves a Path for New Cancer Medicines

      The thick haze of pollution blanketing northern China this winter is a grim reminder of the nation’s new growth industry: lung cancer drugs.

      China logged more than 700,000 new cases of the disease in 2015, the product of a surge in air pollution, high smoking rates and unhealthy lifestyles as China has prospered in recent decades. Lung cancer is now the most common type of cancer in the country and its spread has spawned new listings as well as billion-dollar market values for Chinese companies like Betta Pharmaceuticals Co. and Hutchison China MediTech Ltd., which are attempting to build blockbuster treatments.

      Zhejiang, Hangzhou-based Betta Pharma, which sells just one lung cancer drug called Conmana, shot up to as much as $5.6 billion in market value late last year after raising about $110 million in a public offering on the Shenzhen exchange in November. Hutchison China MediTech, whose pipeline of experimental therapies is also heavily focused on lung cancer, also attracted $110 million in a new listing on the Nasdaq in March.

    • ‘Elephants are not the only victims’: the lament of China’s ivory lovers

      In a tiny workshop at his home in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong, 84-year-old Au Yue-Shung shows me an ivory carving he has been working on for months. Measuring just 5×10 inches, Nine Sages in Mount Xiang depicts the 9th-century poet Bai Juyi and eight of his peers in full creative flow in Henan province, far from the imperial court that Bai once served. The point of the story is that the sages tried to maintain their integrity by staying close to nature and art, and away from the ugly politics of the time. This is a piece that Au created for himself rather than a client. It is his statement about life after going through many ups and downs.

      Born during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, Au joined Guangzhou’s Daxin ivory carving factory at the age of 13 as an apprentice. With only one year’s formal education and with no one caring to teach him, he taught himself drawing and carving in his spare time. Unable to afford drawing paper, he drew on toilet paper. His gift was soon recognised and by the late 1960s he had become a key carving artist at Daxin. Later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he decided that he had had enough of the political and artistic repression.

    • State cannot shut people out when it comes to Flint water crisis

      How many more insults can the state lob at the city of Flint?

      The latest came this week when the state Michigan Department of Environmental Quality tried to sneak through an invitation-only town hall meeting on the condition of Flint water.

      In a city where no one can safely drink the water without a filter, the state apparently thought it was perfectly acceptable to hold a public session with a handpicked selection of people.

      A city spokeswoman said the state dropped the invite-only rule Tuesday, Jan. 3, at Flint Mayor Karen Weaver’s urging after city and state officials were asked about the program by MLive-The Flint Journal.

    • 2016 was the worst year in NHS history – we must fight for its survival

      The last 12 months have been the worst in the history of the NHS. Our health system is under pressure like never before. The moment of crisis many warned of has arrived, and it is not clear that the NHS can be retrieved from this state of affairs.

      We used to say that flailing A&Es represented an early warning sign that the health service was under pressure. And so that has proven to be. England’s major A&Es are under record strain with black alerts being regularly sounded, and in some instances wards turning patients away. Last year the A&E crisis spread to other sectors.

    • The Breakthrough: The $2 Drug Test

      We’re calling it The Breakthrough. We’re kicking things off today with two ProPublica reporters, Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders, talking about how they discovered police departments nationwide use a $2 test for detecting drugs that can send innocent people to jail.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • FBI dispute with DNC over hacked servers may fuel doubt on Russia role

      The FBI may have been forced into a misstep when investigating whether Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee — the agency never directly examined the DNC servers that were breached.

      Instead, the FBI had to rely on forensic evidence provided by third-party cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which the DNC hired to mitigate the breach.

      “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed,” the agency said on Thursday in a statement.

      [...]

      CrowdStrike didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But it wasn’t the only private security firm to examine the breach. Fidelis Cybersecurity was brought in to look at the malware samples, and concluded that suspected elite Russian hackers were behind the intrusion.

      Nevertheless, the FBI should have conducted its own review of the hacked servers, Bambenek said. “This is a highly political case, and perception matters,” he said. “In this situation, they need to be building credibility.”

      Critics might now question if the FBI missed pieces of evidence in its investigation or if U.S. intelligence agencies rushed to blame Russia for the hack.

    • Fort Lauderdale shooting leaves ‘mutiple people’ dead, eight hospitalized: authorities

      As many as five people may have been killed and eight people wounded following a shooting by a reported lone gunman at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood Airport on Friday afternoon, according to law enforcement authorities, social media, and local and national media reports.

      The suspected gunman, who has not been identified, is in custody, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office. It confirmed via Twitter that “multiple people are dead” and that “eight people were injured and transported to an area hospital.”

      BSO officials said they received a call around 12:55 p.m. about shots fired at the airport. Airport officials tweeted that “there is an ongoing incident in Terminal 2, Baggage Claim,” but gave no other details.

    • The Ft. Lauderdale Airport Shooter And How TSA Dumbthink Makes Us Less Safe

      And then there’s the photo of him making that one-fingered salute that’s the sign of the tawhid — “the absolute unity of the godhead.”

      If we actually had real security — security that was meaningful in any way — the guy wouldn’t be running around with a gun…checking his gun in at the airport, no less.

      So, we have this expensive, huge bureaucracy, and people being put on the no-fly list because they have the same name as some terrorist, but nobody thinks to put any little notiepoo in the TSA files about a guy who’s reportedly hearing voices from ISIS?

      Think about that, the next time some repurposed mall food court worker is (screw probable cause!) batting at your balls or sticking her hand up your hoohoo.

    • Alleged Target of Drone Strike That Killed American Teenager Is Alive, According to State Department

      The U.S. State Department confirmed on January 5 that the man the U.S. government once claimed was the target of the drone strike that killed American teenager Abdulrahman Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen is alive. The department announced that it has designated Ibrahim al Banna “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224.” The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to al Banna’s killing or capture.

      Al Banna’s name was floated by anonymous U.S. officials as the target of the October 14, 2011, drone strike that killed Awlaki, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen born in Colorado. Awlaki’s family insists he was having dinner with his teenage cousin and some others in Shebwah, Yemen, when they were killed in the strike. The Obama administration has never explained why Awlaki was killed, other than anonymous officials implying he was with a terror target at the time or that it was a lethal mistake. Awlaki’s estranged father, Anwar al Awlaki, was a radical pro-al Qaeda imam whose sermons influenced and inspired many terrorists in the English speaking world. The elder Awlaki, who was also a U.S. citizen, was an enigmatic figure who supported George W. Bush’s 2000 election campaign, spoke at the Pentagon shortly after 9-11, and went on to become an important propaganda figure for the growing radical Islamist movement after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks before his son was killed.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • ‘Hannity’ Exclusive: Wikileaks’ Assange: Governments ‘Hate Transparency. They Loathe It’

      “We’re in the business of publishing information about power,” Assange said. “Why are we in the business of publishing information about power? Because people can do things with power, they can do very bad things with power. If they’re incompetent, they can do dangerous things. If they’re evil, they can do wicked things.”

    • WikiLeaks or US Intelligence?: CNBC journalist trolled for asking ‘who Americans believe’

      CNBC Chief Washington Correspondent John Harwood, whose cosy relationship with the Clinton campaign was exposed in the Podesta Leaks, asked which source Americans believe regarding the hacking of the Democratic National Committee – WikiLeaks or US Intelligence.

      The Twitter poll comes as President-elect Donald Trump’s refusal to accept US Intelligence reports that claim Russia is behind the DNC hacking escalated tensions between the incoming and outgoing White House administrations.

    • Christmas tale from CIA, NSA and FBI: Elusive ‘Russian hacker’ is Putin
    • WikiLeaks Is What It Is Today Because Of U.S. Government And Media

      If a report from the United States intelligence community is to be believed and WikiLeaks knows the Kremlin used their organization to undermine a United States election, then the U.S. government and press bear some responsibility for the organization’s lack of concern about it.

      The U.S. government launched a grand jury investigation into the media organization and held the grand jury’s first session in 2011. According to a “Manhunting Timeline,” it encouraged Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries to file criminal charges against the organization’s editor-in-chief, Julian Assange.

      WikiLeaks’ most prominent and arguably important source in the organization’s history, Chelsea Manning, was abused by the Marines in pretrial confinement and zealously prosecuted by the U.S. military as if she were a spy, who aided al Qaida terrorists. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison for Espionage Act-related offenses. Her disclosures were motivated by whistleblowing and yet, as her legal team argues, she received “far and away the most severe sentence ever adjudged.”

      For the most part, U.S. establishment media outlets went along with the U.S. government’s commitment to criminalizing and isolating WikiLeaks. Even with the revelation of Google search warrants against WikiLeaks staff, editorial boards and journalists remained largely silent about an investigation that could have profound implications for freedom of the press, particularly now that someone like Trump will be president for the next four years.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days

      London has breached its annual air pollution limits just five days into 2017, a “shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution”, according to campaigners.

      By law, hourly levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide must not be more than 200 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m3) more than 18 times in a whole year, but late on Thursday this limit was broken on Brixton Road in Lambeth.

      Many other sites across the capital will go on to break the annual limit and Putney High Street exceeded the hourly limit over 1,200 times in 2016. Oxford Street, Kings Road in Chelsea and the Strand are other known pollution hotspots.

      NO2 pollution, which is produced largely by diesel vehicles, causes 9,500 early deaths every year in London. Most air quality zones across the country break legal limits and the crisis was called a “public health emergency” by MPs in April. This week scientists said that one in 10 cases of Alzheimer’s in people living near busy roads could be linked to air pollution.

    • US energy analysis sees renewable electricity passing coal by 2030

      Yesterday, the US Energy Information Administration released its energy outlook for 2017. These annual reports provide projections of current energy trends out to 2040, and they provide policymakers with a sense of where the country could be decades from now, should things continue as they have been.

      Anyone who’s up on current trends wouldn’t be surprised by many of the EIA’s results. With coal’s continued decline, natural gas becomes the dominant source of energy in the US, followed by renewable generation. Most of the scenarios the report considers see the continued growth in US energy production far outstripping a sluggish growth in demand. This pattern will transform the country into a net exporter of energy by the 2030s.

      But EIA reports are notoriously conservative in their projections, and this can lead to completely unrealistic results. In the past, for example, the EIA’s projections didn’t foresee the radical drop in photovoltaic prices, and so the organization had solar playing little role in US energy markets. This year’s version is no exception, as it suggests installation of wind power in the US will essentially stop once tax incentives run out in the early 2020s.

    • Giant iceberg poised to break off from Antarctic shelf

      A thread of just 20km of ice is now preventing the 5,000 sq km mass from floating away, following the sudden expansion last month of a rift that has been steadily growing for more than a decade.

      The iceberg, which is positioned on the most northern major ice shelf in Antarctica, known as Larsen C, is predicted to be one of the largest 10 break-offs ever recorded.

    • The Stuff You Buy Is Destroying Animals Around the World

      There are certain products that everyone knows are directly destructive to wildlife. As such, most people and countries around the world generally try to avoid them. Using ivory for trinkets causes elephant slaughter; eating shark fins—you guessed it—is not good for sharks. But those are easy to give up, because a.) we don’t need any of them, and b.) they very blatantly come from certain wild animals.

      Much of the things we use in daily life, however, from iPhones, to jeans, to Ikea furniture, also have negative impacts on endangered wildlife around the globe. But how can you tell? In an attempt to answer that question, scientists from Norway and Japan used a global trade model to trace consumer demands around the world to threats on endangered wildlife. They’ve created a series of maps based on their findings that show the threat “hotspots” around the world and what countries are endangering them. The rationale is that if you know where in the supply chain you’re doing the most damage, you can take steps to alleviate it. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

    • Warmer Winters
    • Another pipeline through Indian land – this time in Mexico

      The Yaqui community is less that pleased about the Agua Prieta pipeline’s projected route, which goes straight through their territory. Things went from bad to worse on October 21, when the pipeline’s supporters attacked a group of protesters, killing one, wounding eight, and causing substantial property damage.

      The Yaqui tribe, which has endured a long history of repression, has also a history of resistance. Like other indigenous communities in Mexico, several members of the Yaqui tribe have lost their lives fighting against invasive private companies and non-indigenous authorities. Just two years ago, before the conflict over the Agua Prieta pipeline, the Yaquis protested against a large-scale aqueduct that would have diverted what was left of their sacred river to the city of Hermosillo.

    • Exxon predicts 25% rise in energy demand

      The world’s biggest oil conglomerate says it expects global energy demand to increase by a quarter in the next 23 years.

      ExxonMobil is the largest of the world’s big oil companies, the supermajors. Up to the end of 2016, Rex Tillerson, who has been nominated by US President-elect Donald Trump as his Secretary of State, was Exxon’s chairman and CEO.

      In this year’s annual Outlook for Energy, a look-ahead to 2040, Exxon says: “Over the next 25 years, growing economies and an expanding middle class will mean better living standards for billions, through increased access to better education and health care as well as new homes, appliances and cars. This means the world will need more energy, even with significant efficiency gains.”

      With world population expected to grow by 1.8 billion people to a total of 9bn by 2040, the company believes global energy demand will increase by 25% – and that India and China together will account for 45% of that increase.

  • Finance

    • Farmers could ‘reap a post-Brexit bonus when Britain leaves the EU’

      Farmers will reap a post-Brexit bonus as Britain is liberated from “over-bureaucratic” European Union rules on agriculture, according to a new report.

      It argued that departure from the bloc will enable the government to better target financial help at the farmers who need it most.

      The report from the Centre for PolicyStudies (CPS) said that Theresa May has a “strong hand” to deploy in Brexit negotiations because of the UK’s £16.7bn annual deficit in food and drink with the EU.

    • Finland Will Give 2000 Unemployed People $590 Every Month, No Strings Attached, Even After They Get A Job

      As that indicates, this isn’t a universal basic wage, since it’s aimed at just a few of those receiving unemployment benefit, and the money will replace existing financial support. On the other hand, it isn’t just some kind of creative accounting, because they will continue to receive the monthly sum even if they find work. There are already plans to roll it out more widely.

      As the Guardian notes, other parts of the world, including Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland, are also looking to try out the idea. At a time when there are fears that automation may well reduce the total number of workers needed in industry, it’s great to see these experiments exploring an approach that could help to alleviate social problems arising from this shift.

    • Sir Ivan Rogers, UK’s ambassador to the EU quits

      Sir Ivan, the man who would play a main role in the negotiations with the EU during the UKs extraction has resigned, sending a 1400-word thank you letter to his staff setting out his problems with why he felt his position was untenable and the current Governments position with regards to leaving the EU.

    • Kamala Harris Fails to Explain Why She Didn’t Prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s Bank

      Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation.

      “It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.

      “We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris said. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • NYT Makes the Case for Trump Via Racialized Rural Mythology

      Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi wrote a piece last month (12/9/16) reporting that “major newspapers, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months.” Perhaps that explains why some of the Trump-sympathizing columns they do manage to turn up—like a piece that ran today in the Times (1/5/17)—leave a lot to be desired in terms of logic and accuracy.

      To be fair, the Times op-ed wasn’t written by a self-professed Trump fan, but by Robert Leonard, the news director for an Iowa country music station, who says, “I consider myself fairly liberal,” and confesses that he has “struggled to understand how these conservative friends and neighbors I respect—and at times admire—can think so differently from me.”

      [...]

      Voting for Trump, though, with the idea that he will do something about the hospitals-too-far-away problem would be childish. If op-ed pages can’t find writers who can make a grown-up case for Trump, perhaps they should be willing to allow the case to go unmade.

    • Speaker Paul Ryan, After Passing Regulatory Rollback, Parties With Lobbyists at Fundraiser

      Just hours after passing the very first bill of the new Congress on Wednesday — one designed to roll back a range of environmental and consumer regulations — House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., celebrated with a corporate lobbying firm at a fundraiser for his campaign committee.

      The vote on the Midnight Rules Relief Act of 2017 took place at 4:48 p.m. on Wednesday. The fundraiser, at the offices of the BGR Group, a major lobbying firm, started at 7 p.m.

      The bill would amend existing law to allow Congress to repeal en masse multiple regulations finalized since the end of May last year. The law is believed to be aimed at rolling back a rule designed to deter mining companies from polluting drinking water sources, rules designed to curb hazardous methane emissions from fracking sites, and a rule that extends the threshold for overtime pay to workers, among others.

    • Clinton quite effective at discrediting herself’ Ex-CIA analyst blasts hacking claims

      Larry C Johnson branded the newly declassified US intelligence report “as a farce and a charade”, adding Russian attempts to discredit the Democrat candidate Hilary Clinton were unnecessary because “she was quite effective at it herself”.

      On Friday, intelligence officials published their findings into alleged Russian hacking during November’s US election.

      The report claimed the Russian president personally ordered an online campaign to influence the outcome of the ballot in Trump’s favour.

      It said Mr Putin’s goal was to undermine the democratic process and denigrate Mrs Clinton, by using intermediaries such as DCLeaks.com, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks to publicly expose private emails acquired from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and top level Democrats.

    • Trump Already Demanding Leak Investigation and He’s Not Even President Yet

      President-elect Donald Trump isn’t waiting until his inauguration to push for investigations of leaks to the press — an indication that he’ll emulate and possibly surpass President Obama’s practice of criminalizing disclosures to the media.

    • Underwhelming Intel Report Shows Need for Congressional Investigation of DNC Hack

      After President Obama and Donald Trump were briefed on a classified report explaining the United States Intelligence Community’s belief that Russia hacked the Democratic Party, the public has received its own, declassified version. Unfortunately for us, it appears virtually anything new and interesting was removed in the redaction process, leaving us without the conclusive, technical evidence we were hoping for — and that the American people are owed. Failing a last minute change of heart, the next best (and perhaps last) hope for the government to show us its work would be a formal, bipartisan probe.

    • Conservatives Plot Their Course on the Rising ‘Sea of Red’ in State Capitals

      The American Legislative Exchange Council — a nonprofit better known as ALEC — briefed its members and allied groups on the bright future for its agenda now that Republicans will effectively control 68 of the nation’s 99 state legislative bodies, as well as 33 governor’s mansions. Among other things, group members said they would push bills to reduce corporate taxes, weaken unions, privatize schooling and influence the ideological debate on college campuses.

    • Glenn Greenwald: Democrats Eager to Blame “Everybody But Themselves” for Collapse of Their Party

      As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies at a Senate hearing on Russian cyberthreats ahead of a highly classified briefing today with President-elect Donald Trump, we speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has faced an onslaught of criticism for questioning the premise of Russian hacking of the U.S. election. “Because Democrats are so desperate to put the blame on everybody but themselves for the complete collapse of their party, they’re particularly furious at anybody who vocally challenges this narrative,” Greenwald says. “And since I’ve been one of the people most vocally doing so, the smear campaign has been like none that I have ever encountered. I have been accused of being a member of the alt-right, of being an admirer of Breitbart, of being supportive of Donald Trump, of helping him get elected and, of course, of being a Kremlin operative.”

    • Facebook’s New Head of News Partnerships, Campbell Brown, Has Deep Ties to Trump Nominee

      Facebook announced Friday that former CNN host and education reform activist Campbell Brown will be leading its news partnership team.

      Brown wrote in a statement on her Facebook page that she will “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook. I will be working directly with our partners to help them understand how Facebook can expand the reach of their journalism, and contribute value to their businesses.”

      Brown’s hiring should raise eyebrows given her close ties to Betsy DeVos, the president-elect’s nominee to lead the Education Department. DeVos is a Michigan-based billionaire heiress who has poured millions of dollars into organizations supporting school vouchers and charter schools.

    • Donald Trump Demonstrating How Much Of Our Political System Is Based On Tradition & Custom, Not Rules

      And… that’s really quite interesting, because of how little many people — especially policy experts — have really stopped to consider how much of the way we do things is based on custom, and not actual rules. There are two ways of looking at this. First, there absolutely are serious problems with “the way things have always been done.” So there’s potential value in having someone who doesn’t feel hamstrung by traditions and customs that might not make sense. But, the flip side of that is that there are often really good reasons for the way many of these things are done. And, so far, the customs and traditions that Trump has been indicating he’ll ignore, are ones that do seem to be based on solid reasoning, rather than just silly legacy reasons. Intelligence reports, secret service protection, and anti-nepotism rules make sense.

    • The Internet Archive is building up a Trump presidential library — of everything he’s ever said, on video

      The Internet Archive launched Thursday a huge Trump Archive dedicated to housing videos of everything Trump’s said on video: in everything from broadcast speeches, debates, interviews, and newscasts about the President-elect. The archive currently contains more than 700 videos — that’s more than 520 hours of Trump — compiled by way of the TV News Archive, the Internet Archive’s broadcast tracking resource, and currently dates back to December 2009 (Trump formally announced his candidacy June of 2015).

    • Ignoring anti-Trumpers: Why we can expect media blackout of protests against Trump’s inauguration

      On Jan. 20 — 16 years ago — thousands of protesters lined the inauguration parade route of the incoming Republican president. “Not my president,” they chanted. But despite the enormity of the rally, it was largely ignored. Instead, pundits marveled over how George W. Bush “filled out the suit” and confirmed authority.

      “The inauguration of George W. Bush was certainly a spectacle on Inauguration Day,” marvels Robin Andersen, the director of Peace and Justice studies at Fordham University, in the 2001 short documentary “Not My President: Voices From the Counter Coup.”

      It’s nearly impossible not to anticipate the eerie parallels between George W. Bush’s inauguration and that of Donald Trump.

    • Drunk tweets? Foul-mouthed Vicente Fox challenges Trump, ‘I’m not paying for that f**kin’ wall’

      Fox tweeted: “I am not paying for that f*cken wall. Be clear with US taxpayers. They will pay for it.”

    • Betraying Campaign Promise, Trump Now Says US Taxpayers Will Pay for Wall

      Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), congressional liaison for the Trump transition team, doubled down on Trump’s position in comments to CNN: “When you understand that Mexico’s economy is dependent upon U.S. consumers, Donald Trump has all the cards he needs to play,” Collins said. “On the trade negotiation side, I don’t think it’s that difficult for Donald Trump to convince Mexico that it’s in their best interest to reimburse us for building the wall.”

      However, Mexico’s president has vociferously and repeatedly said that the country will not pay for Trump’s promised wall. “We’re not going to pay for that fucking wall,” former president Vicente Fox added last March, as Common Dreams reported.

    • ‘US intel community lost professional discipline’: Ex-NSA tech director on ‘Russia hacking’ report

      The undisguised and clearly politically motivated report on the alleged 2016 US “election hack” displays a severe lack of “professional discipline” in the intelligence community, former NSA technical director and whistleblower William Edward Binney told RT.

    • Poor People, Don’t You Know You Have Jobs?

      It’s not Trump you have to worry about. You’re thinking short-term.

      As people struggle to find third-parties to blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat (pick one or more: Putin, Bernie Bros, Comey, The Media, Electoral Collegians, the Racist/Misogynist Hordes), an amorphous group has emerged as a popular domestic target: stupid poor white people who do not understand how much better they have had it over the last eight years.

      These slack-jawed yokels just can’t seem to grasp that they have great jobs in a growing economy. The numbers prove it: the U.S stock market is at record highs and unemployment at its lowest level since the Great Recession.

    • Circus of Liars: How Trump & GOP are Twisted into Pretzels over Putin Hack

      The US NSA hacked the whole world for many years until Ed Snowden blew the whistle on them.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court Says 791 Days Of Warrantless Location Tracking ‘Unreasonable,” But Refuses To Toss Evidence

      A confusing and disturbing conclusion has been reached by a New York federal court. The court has decided that 791 days of location tracking with a GPS ankle bracelet is unreasonable, but somehow not worthy of evidence suppression. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      Kemal Lambus — the defendant challenging the evidence — was granted parole, but with certain conditions. One of those was imposed a few months after his release: wearing an ankle bracelet to ensure he abided by his curfew. This was in addition to the normal amount of diminished privacy afforded parolees, which includes any number of warrantless searches by parole officers.

    • Michael Rogers: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

      Another reason that Rogers has drawn criticism is that he failed to prevent further security breaches in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.

      In August 2016, for example, the FBI arrested an NSA contractor named Harold T. Martin III who they believed had stolen and disclosed 50 terabytes of data, according to The New York Times.

    • NSA seeks pay bump for its ‘high-end, exquisite civilian talent’ [Ed: due to brain drain]

      NSA Director Michael Rogers recently authorized the introduction of a specially tailored compensation package for the spy agency’s “high-end” cybersecurity workers.

    • Belgium Wants EU Nations To Collect And Store Personal Data Of Train, Bus And Boat Passengers

      It’s become pretty common for the authorities to collect personal information about passengers from airlines, supposedly to ensure security. It’s a sensitive area, though, as shown by the many years of fraught US-EU negotiations that were required in order to come up with a legal framework for transferring this data to the US when EU citizens were involved. However, not all EU countries are so concerned about that privacy thing. Belgium, for example, thinks that the current approach doesn’t go far enough, and that it should be extended to include all forms of mass transport. As this EurActiv article notes, the Belgian parliament has already voted to bring in a national system for trains, buses and boats by May 2018, and the country is calling for the rest of the EU to follow suit…

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • FBI Dismisses Child Porn Prosecution After Refusing To Hand Over Details On Its Hacking Tool

      The FBI has decided to let one of its Playpen defendants walk rather than turn over information on its Network Investigative Technique. The NIT, deployed all over the world on the back of a single warrant obtained in Virginia, unmasked Tor users by dropping code on Playpen visitors’ computers that sent back IP addresses and other information about the user’s computer.

      The warrant itself has been ruled invalid by a number of judges presiding over Playpen prosecutions, although not all of them have determined that the evidence obtained by the NIT should be suppressed. The FBI not only sent malware to site visitors, but it also ran (and possibly improved) the child porn website for two weeks while pursuing its investigation.

      Michaud’s lawyer asked the court to force the FBI to hand over information on the NIT. The FBI countered, saying it wouldn’t turn over the information even if ordered to do so. Judge Bryan, after an in camera session with the agency, agreed with the government that there was a law enforcement need to keep the details of the tool secret. But he also made it clear the government couldn’t have both its secrecy and its evidence. He ordered all evidence suppressed.

    • Judge Tells DOJ It Can’t Un-Suppress Evidence By Starting The Indictment Process All Over Again

      Sure, we like the DOJ when it’s handing down scathing reviews of local law enforcement agencies and belatedly issuing warrant requirements for IMSI catchers, but we’re not nearly as thrilled when it argues against warrant requirements for cell phone searches, demands backdoors in phone encryption, or beats mild miscreants over the head with the CFAA.

      In fact, there’s very little to like about the DOJ outside of its civil rights division. Here’s yet another reason why the Department of Justice often seems like a misnomer. (h/t Brad Heath)

      A decision [PDF] has been handed down by a federal court in Puerto Rico, presumably with an eyeroll and an exasperated sigh.

      In 2014, Homeland Security agents searched Jose Silva-Rentas without reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or a warrant. Silva happened to be next to somebody HSI agents did search with probable cause. Rentas moved to suppress the evidence and the court agreed that the government’s theory of probable cause osmosis wasn’t enough to salvage the search.

    • Jenna Jameson, newly Jewish, launches anti-Islam rant: ‘I don’t care about your false prophet’

      Jenna Jameson launched into an anti-Islam rant on Twitter this week, slamming the religion as one that “promotes child rape, female genital mutilation, butchering non believers and polygamy.”

      The former porn legend, who converted to Judaism last year ahead of her upcoming marriage to Israeli boyfriend Lior Bitton, spent the better part of the week defending her attacks against Islam and “spending all [her] free time” watching YouTube videos about the Quran by Christian apologist David Wood.

    • Briton ‘jailed for adultery in Bahrain’ released from prison

      A British woman jailed in Bahrain after being accused of adultery has been released amid a fundraising appeal by her mother to bring her home.

      Hannah James, said to originally be from Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, moved to the country with husband Jassim Alhaddar and their young son, but her mother, Shelley James, claims she was a victim of domestic abuse and wanted to leave Bahrain.

    • Six essays on media, technology and politics from Data & Society

      danah boyd writes, “Yesterday, a group of us at Data & Society put out six essays on ‘media, technology, politics.’ Taken together, these pieces address different facets of the current public conversation surrounding propaganda, hate speech, and the US election. Although we only allude to specifics, we have been witnessing mis/disinformation campaigns for quite some time as different networks seek to manipulate both old and new media, shape political discourse, and undermine trust in institutions and information intermediaries. In short, we are concerned about the rise of a new form of propaganda that is networked, decentralized, and internet-savvy. We are also concerned about the ongoing development of harassment techniques and gaslighting, the vulnerability of old and new media to propagate fear and disinformation, and the various ways in which well-intended interventions get misappropriated. We believe that we’re watching a systematic attack on democracy, equality, and freedom. There is no silver bullet to address the issues we’re seeing. Instead, a healthy response is going to require engagement by many different constituencies. We see our role in this as to help inform and ground the conversation. These essays are our first attempt to address the interwoven issues we’re seeing.

    • Obama Picks Up the Pace on Commutations, But Pardon Changes Still in Limbo

      Near the start of his second term, President Obama had granted clemency at a lower rate than any president in recent history. He had pardoned 39 people and denied 1,333 requests. He had used his power to commute a prisoner’s sentence just once.

      But as Obama enters the final days of his administration, he has dramatically picked up the pace. He’s now issued commutations to 1,176 people since entering office — more than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan put together. In December, Obama commuted the sentences of 231 people in a single day.

      Much of Obama’s increased activity can be attributed to an initiative begun in 2014 to shorten sentences of non-violent offenders who would likely have received less time for their crimes under current law and who had already served at least 10 years of their prison sentences. Low-level drug offenders have received most of the commutations, part of a broader push by the administration to reform sentencing guidelines.

    • Alleged Chicago Assault Reignites Issue of Hate Crimes Against Whites

      The meaning and enforcement of the Illinois hate-crimes statute seems destined for intense scrutiny with the arrest this week of four young black adults in Chicago in connection with the assault of a mentally disabled white man. The arrests by the Chicago Police Department resulted in part from what appeared to a livestreamed video of the disabled man being abused while bound and gagged. The recording captures one or more of the attackers making references to Donald Trump and white people.

    • Ellen Schrecker on the New McCarthyism

      This week on CounterSpin: The “what could possibly go wrong?” meme might be overused, but it’s hard not to think it, watching the government create new tools and powers for countering “disinformation” that will be handed to a president-elect who calls journalists “the lowest form of life.” Donald Trump didn’t create the present terrain, however, and pretending that fearmongering and watchlists and looking the other way are all newly minted will not serve us. In fact, we can look to history to help us understand what’s happening, and what we can do to resist it.

    • Signs Look Grim for Media Picking the Side of Liberty and Dissent

      This is a kind of “which side are you on?” moment for journalists. Will they defend the rights and liberties of the many communities under threat—Muslims, women, those reliant on government assistance? Will they keep alive a space for dissent and critical questioning in the face of a White House that declares itself indifferent to rules about conflicts of interest, among many other things, and that threatens revenge on those it calls “enemies”?

      [...]

      USA Today solved the problem, we’re told, by getting Trump and Pence themselves to write for them. Maybe the New York Times will adopt that strategy, given its editor’s statement that his paper “could have done better.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Canadian Regulators Declare 50 Mbps To Be The New Broadband Standard

      A few years back, the FCC here in the States bumped the base definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream, to 25 Mbps downstream, 4 Mbps upstream. This was done in large part to highlight the lack of competition (two-thirds lack access to speeds of 25 Mbps from more than one provider) at faster speeds, largely thanks to telcos that no longer really want to be in the residential broadband business and are refusing to upgrade their networks at any scale. Needless to say, neither ISPs — nor the politicians paid to love them — were happy with the new standard.

      Recently the Canadian government took things further, announcing new rules that make 50 Mbps downstream, 10 Mbps upstream the new industry standard. In addition to declaring that this 50 Mbps option should be considered “basic telecom service” moving forward, the CRTC announced that it’s requiring that Canadian ISPs at least offer users the ability to purchase an uncapped, unlimited broadband connection.

    • Utterly Tone Deaf To Cord Cutting, Cable Contract Feuds And Blackouts Skyrocket

      We’ve noted for years that as broadcasters and cable companies bicker over new programming contracts, already-annoyed customers are left in a lurch. Usually these feuds go something like this: a broadcaster demands a huge rate increase for the exact same content. The cable company balks, and the content is usually pulled out of the cable lineup. Customers aren’t given any sort of refund for this missing content, they’re just inundated with PR pitches from both sides trying to get them pissed at the other guy. Ultimately a new, confidential contract is struck, and the rate hikes are then passed on to the consumer.

      In short, consumers are repeatedly punished with blackouts and petty PR bitching between companies incapable of responsibly signing new contracts, after which they get a lovely new price hike. It’s no wonder that 2016 was a record year for cord cutting.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UN Establishes Technology Bank For Least-Developed Countries, Including An IP Bank [Ed: poor countries don’t need “IP”]

      The United Nations has established a “technology bank” for least-developed countries that aims to strengthen the science, technology and innovation capacity of LDCs that includes better management of intellectual property rights.

    • Trademarks

      • Bushy’s Brewery, Isle Of Man Govt. Have Trademark Hissy Fit Over Two Letters: TT

        If there is one lesson you take away from writing about trademark law and disputes, it’s how simple it would be to avoid a massive percentage of the conflicts by holding trademark applications to a far higher standard then they often are. If the world’s many trademark offices kept in mind that the entire point of this form of intellectual property is supposed to be keeping the public confident in their ability to determine the source of a given product or service by its trademarked branding, then it would be obvious that approved trademarks should be unique and distinct.

        As a counterexample to that line of thinking, consider the current dispute going on between Bushy’s Brewery, located on the Isle of Man, and the Manx government, all over the government’s trademark for exactly two letters: TT.

    • Copyrights

      • FACT Lawyer Reveals Challenges of Kodi Box Seller Prosecutions

        A lawyer who has worked on piracy cases for the Federation Against Copyright Theft has revealed the challenges posed by Kodi and IPTV box prosecutions. Ari Alabhai says that copyright can be complicated for a jury to understand, so prosecutions under the Fraud Act may be preferred. Even that has its complications, however.

      • Pirates across Europe… What can we expect in 2017?

        There are good reasons to keep an eye on the performance of the Pirates across Europe – as we know from the Icelandic experiance, strong showings in other countries can help support the UK Pirate Party as it brings knowledge of Pirate Politics to new people. There are also opportunities to ‘Pirate’ each others ideas and bring the best of what works in campaigns to the UK.

      • Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government

        The Pirate party, whose platform includes direct democracy, greater government transparency, a new national constitution and asylum for US whistleblower Edward Snowden, will field candidates in every constituency and has been at or near the top of every opinion poll for over a year.

        As befits a movement dedicated to reinventing democracy through new technology, it also aims to boost the youth vote by persuading the company developing Pokémon Go in Iceland to turn polling stations into Pokéstops.

        “It’s gradually dawning on us, what’s happening,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, leader of the Pirates’ parliamentary group, told the Guardian. “It’s strange and very exciting. But we are well prepared now. This is about change driven not by fear but by courage and hope. We are popular, not populist.”

        The election, likely to be held on 29 October, follows the resignation of Iceland’s former prime minister Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson, who became the first major victim of the Panama Papers in April after the leaked legal documents revealed he had millions of pounds of family money offshore.

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/07/linux-4-9-1/feed/ 0 Links 6/1/2017: Irssi 1.0.0, KaOS 2017.01 Released http://techrights.org/2017/01/06/kaos-2017-01-released/ http://techrights.org/2017/01/06/kaos-2017-01-released/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2017 10:57:03 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98174

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • There’s a Linux-powered car in your future

    Linux is everywhere. And, I mean everywhere. You name it, home electronics, smartphones, and, of course, computers. But, one place you probably didn’t think of Linux living is sitting in your driveway right now: Your car.

  • Watercooler won’t dispense until it finishes updating Windows

    Intel Director of Incident Response Jackie Stokes has captured the entirety of 2017 in a single image: a watercooler that won’t dispense water until it has installed a Windows upgrade (caption: “I just wanted some water…”).

  • Well, It’s One For The Money, Two For The Show….

    I was already a Linux user. My business and my home computers were both running Linux. So why did I bother to deploy these 15 XP machines? I did so on the advice of someone I respect greatly, and still do. His argument was, since the world ran on Microsoft Windows, I would be doing these kids a great disservice by putting Linux on their computers. They would have to fight with teachers and other students because the various formats and applications within Linux would not meld in with the Windows World.

    [...]

    What is important to know is that the computers which are being given to Reglue Kids today are powered by the sheer will of a Global Community. The Linux and Open Source Communities drive these machines. The machines that will guide today’s kids into tomorrow’s Chemical, nuclear and aerospace engineering and physics positions. These kids will bring back the Thorium-based nuclear power plants. They will not only fuel our nation’s energy needs at a fraction of today’s cost, they will push us farther out into space, and at speeds that seem almost impossible today.

  • Desktop

    • Samsung’s new Chromebooks are Google’s answer to the iPad Pro and Surface Pro

      Following months of leaks, Samsung is today making its latest Chromebook official. The new computer is actually two models — the Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Pro — and is the first one built from the ground up with support for Android apps. It’s also the first Chromebook to come with a stylus and support on-screen inking. The Chromebook Plus will be available starting this February for $449; the virtually-identical-save-for-a-different-processor Chromebook Pro will arrive later this year for a to-be-determined-but-definitely-higher price.

  • Server

    • Understanding Open vSwitch, an OpenStack SDN component

      Open vSwitch is an open-source project that allows hypervisors to virtualize the networking layer. This caters for the large number of virtual machines running on one or more physical nodes. The virtual machines connect to virtual ports on virtual bridges (inside the virtualized network layer.)

      This is very similar to a physical server connecting to physical ports on a Layer 2 networking switch. These virtual bridges then allow the virtual machines to communicate with each other on the same physical node. These bridges also connect these virtual machines to the physical network for communication outside the hypervisor node.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • KaOS 2017.01

        Starting the New Year with a fresh new look. All parts of the Midna artwork have been updated, most notably a new sddm theme that uses a layered QML model. This makes selecting between the default regular Plasma session or optional Wayland much clearer. New is also a move to a right vertical panel as default.

        As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.29.0, Plasma 5.8.5, KDE Applications 16.12.0 & not yet released ports of KDE Applications. All built on Qt 5.7.1.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Not a OpenMandriva Review, Integrated Steam, Endless Linux PCs

        Neil Rickert today shared his experiences with OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 leading to another account indicating 3.01 wasn’t quite soup yet. Elsewhere, Rajat Kabade reported that “Intel is all set to integrate Steam into its Clear Linux to make the existing gaming experience even better.” Endless Computers is bringing its Mission One and Mini Linux boxes to the US market and Michael Larabel reported today on the latest on DRM moving to user space.

      • OpenMandriva Lx 3.01 — not really a review

        Hmm, I have been neglecting this blog. It’s time to catch up. I’ve still been doing stuff, but have not recently blogged about it.

        There’s not much to report here, so this will be a short post.

        I saw the recent announcement from the OpenMandriva folk, and thought that I would give it a try. According to the announcement, this release comes with Plasma 5 with Wayland support.

    • Arch Family

      • Arch Linux 2017.01.01 Released, ISO Files And Torrents Available For Download

        Thanks to the hard-working Arch Linux developers, the first Arch Linux ISO images of 2017 are available for download. The latest release, i.e., Arch Linux 2017.01.01, is powered by Linux kernel 4.8.13. While the first time users can grab the ISO images and torrents from Arch’s website, the existing users can update their systems using `pacman -Syu.’

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian vs. Ubuntu

        For the last four years, Debian and Ubuntu have been in the top three Linux distributions on Distrowatch. Since 2005, neither has been out of the top six. But which Linux distro is right for you? You can’t go seriously wrong either way, but a useful answer depends upon what you want in a distribution.

        You may have heard that Debian is a distribution for experts, and Ubuntu for beginners. That is true, so far as it goes. However, that distinction is more historic than contemporary.

        It is true that after Ubuntu burst on to the scene in late 2004, it spent several years making the desktop easier to use, especially for non-English speakers. However, thanks to free licenses, Ubuntu’s improvements have spread to most desktop environments.

        Moreover, Ubuntu’s days of interface innovations are largely in the past. Today, Ubuntu development is focused largely on convergence — the development of its Unity desktop into a common interface for phones, tablets, and desktops. But since Ubuntu phones and tablets have limited availability, convergence is largely irrelevant to many users. Similarly, Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, seems more focused on its successful OpenStack division than on desktop development.

      • Derivatives

        • Debian-Based BlankOn 10.0 Released for Indonesian Linux Users After Three Years

          Today, January 5, 2017, Ahmad Haris, the release manager of BlankOn, a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution developed by and for the Indonesian Linux community, proudly announced the release of BlankOn Linux 10.0.

          Dubbed “Tambora,” BlankOn Linux 10.0 is here in its final, production-ready state approximately three years after the February 2014 release of BlankOn 9.0. As expected, there are numerous improvements, but the biggest new feature of BlankOn 10.0 is the in-house built Manokwari desktop environment, which is based on the GNOME 3 shell.

        • BlankOn 10.0 Tambora released

          Some time ago developers behind BlankOn Linux team released a new version 10.0 codenamed Tambora. BlankOn is based on Debian and originated in Indonesia. This is the tenth release of BlankOn which includes lots of changes and improvements.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Clarifies Ubuntu Phone State: Nothing Really Until Snap-Based Image Ready

            For those that shared your hopes for Ubuntu Phones in 2017, some of you were right: those that guessed nothing or very little. There isn’t going to be any new Ubuntu Phone releases or major OTA updates until there is a Snap-based image down the road.

            From all the frustrated Ubuntu Phone users begging for answers on the Ubuntu-Phone mailing list, Canonical’s Pat McGowan has responded to some of the comments.

            Pat shares that the Click-based Ubuntu Phone images are indeed on the way out, there will be no new Ubuntu Phone models until there is a “Snap image”, and they don’t plan to do an OTA-15 feature release. Canonical doesn’t plan to land any new features to the current stable PPA, but they will be providing security updates for important components.

          • Canonical Clarifies the Current State of Ubuntu Phones and Ubuntu Touch Updates

            In December 2016, a bunch of worried folks using various Ubuntu-based devices started an “Ubuntu Crickets” riot to force Canonical to reveal its upcoming plans for new Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Touch models/versions.

            It didn’t take long, and Canonical’s Pat McGowan joined the discussion earlier to inform the concerned community about general progress. Long story short, as many have already guessed, it would appear that there are no plans for an OTA-15 update of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, for now.

            “We do not plan to land any features to the current stable PPA, although we will provide security updates as they are available for example for the webrowser/oxide,” said Pat McGowan in the mailing list statement, where he also confirmed the fact that there won’t be any new Ubuntu Phone models released until there’s a Snap image.

          • No New Ubuntu Phones on the Horizon, And No Major Updates for Existing Ones, Either

            If you were hoping to see a new Ubuntu phone released sometime soon, we’ve some bad news for you.

            And if you already own an Ubuntu phone and were hoping to see a new update released soon, we’ve some bad news for you too.

            Bad news for everybody, it seems — or is there some silver lining in the grey clouds casting over the project?

          • uNav 0.64 Turn-by-Turn GPS Navigation App Now Available for Ubuntu Phones

            Marcos Costales, the developer of the very popular uNav map viewer and turn-by-turn GPS navigator for Ubuntu Phone devices, released a new version of his application, uNav 0.64.

            uNav 0.64 comes four months after version 0.63, which was a minor update improving the simulator, adding support for skipping confirmation of routes, rounding off the distance to the nearest turn in guidance mode, fixing the ‘¿¿¿’ string in POI names, adding CartoDB layers, as well as a bash script to generate translations.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 18.1 Xfce Edition Enters Beta, Based on Ubuntu 16.04 and Xfce 4.12

              A few moments ago, the Linux Mint team happily announced the release and general availability of the Beta milestone of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Xfce operating system for personal computers.

            • Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ Xfce Edition Beta operating system available for download

              Another day, and yet another version of Linux Mint with a different desktop environment. The operating system uses Mate and Cinnamon environments by default, but also offers KDE and Xfce editions as well.

              While some people — such as yours truly — think the project should redirect its focus by supporting fewer desktop environments, that apparently won’t be happening any time soon. Case in point, today, Linux Mint 18.1 ‘Serena’ Xfce Edition reaches Beta status. Will you download it?

            • Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 Daily Builds Are Now Available to Download, Screenshot Tour

              The Ubuntu Budgie devs are back from the Christmas and New Year’s break with a vengeance, and they’ve just announced the availability of daily build ISO images for the upcoming Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.

              At the end of 2016, they promised us that we’d be able to get our hands on the daily build ISO images of Ubuntu Budgie 17.04, and here they are, available for download as we speak for 64- and 32-bit hardware architectures from Canonical’s download servers, along with all the other official flavors.

              For your viewing pleasure, and ours, we downloaded the latest 64-bit Live ISO image to make a quick screenshot tour of the distribution, which is built around the lightweight Budgie desktop environment developed by the Solus Project (yes, the people behind the popular Solus distro).

            • Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 to Be Based on the GNOME 3.22 Stack, Now Ships Linux 4.9

              While the first Alpha development release of the upcoming Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system was skipped, we’d like to tell you a little bit about what you should expect from the next Alpha build.

              First things first, we recommend reading our initial report if you want to familiarize yourself with the new or upcoming features of Ubuntu 17.04, but in this article we’d like to tell you all about the Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 flavor, which is now proudly based on the GNOME 3.22 Stack.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Five Ways Open Source Software Can Benefit MSPs

    You know open source software, like Linux, is popular with geeks and enterprises. But do you know how it can help your managed services business? Here are five ways open source benefits MSPs.

    For the uninitiated, here’s a quick definition of open source: Open source software means programs whose source code is freely shared and can be viewed by anyone. Access to source code facilitates modification of the programs and provides users with other freedoms not available from closed-source software.

  • New in Open Source: Python-to-Go, Atom in Orbit, DeepMind Lab, More
  • Google, FCA Test-Drive New Open Source Infotainment System

    Google and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles this week showcased a new in-auto infotainment platform at CES in Las Vegas. The open source system combines Uconnect with Android Auto.

    The companies demonstrated their concept design inside a Chrysler 300 sedan at the show. The new system is built around Android 7.0, or Nougat, and an 8.4-inch Uconnect system.

    The integration of Android and Uconnect enables a system built for connectivity and compatibility with the universe of popular Android applications. The demo highlighted integration with Google Assistant, Google Maps, and popular Android apps including Pandora, Spotify, NPR One and Pocket Casts.

  • Apache Geode Spawns ‘All Sorts of In-Memory Things’

    Apache Geode is kind of like the six blind men describing an elephant. It’s all in how you use it, Nitin Lamba, product manager at Ampool, told a meetup group earlier this year.

    Geode is a distributed, in-memory compute and data-management platform that elastically scales to provide high throughput and low latency for big data applications. It pools memory, CPU, and network resources — with the option to also use local disk storage — across multiple processes to manage application objects and behavior.

  • Google’s Python Runtime Environment Goes Open Source

    Lots of organizations run Python code, but few run as much of it as Google does. The company runs millions of lines of Python code. The front-end server that drives youtube.com and YouTube’s APIs is primarily written in Python, and it serves millions of requests per second, according to Google engineers.

    Now, the company has open sourced Grumpy, the Python runtime environment for Go that was developed in-house to improve the performance of YouTube.

  • Voxeliens, a game I covered back in 2012 has gone open source

    The source is under the MIT license and hosted on bitbucket. The developers say it may be difficult to compile on Linux, as it was originally a commercial game and they haven’t really put much effort into compiling it on other platforms.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Developer Edition for Flatpak

        Our team maintains Firefox RPMs for Fedora and RHEL and a lot of people have been asking us to provide Firefox for Flatpak as well. I’m finally happy to announce Firefox Developer Edition for Flatpak.

      • Firefox Developer Edition Now Available as a Flatpak for Fedora 25, Ubuntu 16.10

        Red Hat’s desktop engineering manager Jiří Eischmann proudly announced today, January 5, 2017, the general availability of Mozilla’s Firefox Developer Edition web browser as a Flatpak package for various Linux distros supporting the technology.

      • Firefox Developer Edition Gets Flatpak’d

        Some great news for fans of distro-agnostic app distribution: Firefox Developer Edition is now available to install as a Flatpak! Yup, the dev-friendly flavour of the venerable open-source browser is available to install messing around with installers, RPMs or unpacking zip files to double-click on binaries tucked up inside.

      • Living Inside the Computer: Building Responsible IoT

        Today, we live online. The Internet intersects with everything from commerce and journalism to art and civic participation.

        But more and more, living online doesn’t mean sitting in front of a screen, mouse in hand. The Internet of Things — the networked computing environment that spans the globe — allows the web to permeate our clothes, our homes, our healthcare. The web is now made up of billions of connected devices and zettabytes of data. It’s pervasive.

        [...]

        What do we do? Philanthropies like Mozilla, Ford, Knight, MacArthur and Open Society are on the front lines of building a better Internet. And IoT will be the first big battle of 2017. In our paper, we share six guiding principles for better IoT. We’re also planning research, grantmaking and salons to further chart the future. And NetGain is seeking more technologists, activists and entrepreneurs for the movement.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Kubernetes tool saves eBay from its OpenStack woes

      Ebay’s work with OpenStack has yielded fruit: A new container administration tool that makes better use of Docker and Kubernetes.

      This is yet another thumbs-up for containers finding a place as as useful units of work within an organization, and for Kubernetes managing those workloads. But it’s also a sign that even the biggest and most engineer-heavy IT organizations that can bend OpenStack to their will are favoring other solutions out of developer convenience.

    • Open Source, Big Data, and the Governance Challenge

      Recently, John Schroeder, executive chairman and founder of MapR Technologies, Inc., one of the top players in the Big Data arena, was kind enough to give us his predictions on open source anb Big Data topics for 2017. He noted the following: “In 2017, the governance vs. data value tug of war will be front and center.”

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Richard Stallman: Goodbye to GNU Libreboot

      When Leah Rowe decided last year she wanted to withdraw Libreboot from being a GNU project, there was the ability for GNU to keep the project and appoint a new maintainer. There was a lot of fighting and rumors about what actually happened, but now Richard Stallman has written an email saying they are indeed going to drop Libreboot from the project.

    • Goodbye to GNU Libreboot

      When a program becomes a GNU package, in principle that relationship is permanent. The program’s maintainers undertake the responsibility to develop it on behalf of the GNU Project. Usually the initial maintainers are the developers that brought it into the GNU Project.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Open-source plant database confirms top US bioenergy crop

        Scientists have confirmed that Miscanthus, long speculated to be the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass in the U.S. using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction in plant science, climate change, and ecology research.

        “To understand yield trends and variation across the country for our major food crops, extensive databases are available—notably those provided by the USDA Statistical Service,” said lead author Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. “But there was nowhere to go if you wanted to know about biomass crops, particularly those that have no food value such as Miscanthus, switchgrass, willow trees, etc.”

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Pow! Renault Creates Twizy-Based Open-Source POM (It’s a Car, Sort Of)

        Renault is claiming that it has created the “world’s first open-source mass-market vehicle.” That sort of stretches the definition of mass market—the car, named POM (for Platform Open Mind), is based on the not-for-the-U.S. Twizy ultracompact EV—but the more pressing question is what Renault means when it calls this vehicle open source.

        Turns out the vehicle itself, which Renault introduced at the CES technology show, is not open source, but the software it runs on is. Renault partnered with software specialist OSVehicle and processor maker ARM to crack open the POM’s operating system and will offer the car to “startups, independent laboratories, private customers, and researchers.” The move allows “third parties to copy and modify existing software to create a totally customizable electric vehicle.” Sounds to us like any vehicle could be made to be open source—just take all the security measures off the software and declare it so! But maybe it’s not that simple.

      • Hands On With The First Open Source Microcontroller

        2016 was a great year for Open Hardware. The Open Source Hardware Association released their certification program, and late in the year, a few silicon wizards met in Mountain View to show off the latest happenings in the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

  • Programming/Development

    • Using Clang-format to ensure clean, consistent code

      Too often programmers underestimate the importance a consistent coding style can have on the success of a project. It makes the code base easier to read, reduces nonfunctional changes to fix inconsistent style, and outlines expectations for code submissions. Most large projects have a coding style, and once you have been working on code for a while you come to appreciate the consistency of a style. Some examples of specified style are where to place braces, whether tabs or spaces are used for indentation, how many spaces to indent by, and how to break up long lines.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Users Can Now Access Files in OpenDocument Formats from Android Versions of Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets

      Google has announced that it will be enhancing its documents applications that are available on Android. With the enhancements in place, importing and exporting files will be easy for users.

      Google Docs will now support importing of files in the OpenDocument Text (.odt) format as well as export the files later in the same format. In a similar fashion, OpenDocument Spreadsheets (.ods) files and OpenDocument Presentations (.odp) files will from now on be supported for importation and exportation on the Android versions of Google Sheets and Google Slides, respectively.

Leftovers

  • Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Says He’s No Longer an Atheist

    The pivot occurs the same year Mark Zuckerberg met with the Pope. In the past Zuckerberg has posted a photo of himself praying at a Buddhist pagoda and praised that religion. His wife, Priscilla Chan, practices Buddhism.

  • Is Mark Zuckerberg Eyeing the White House?

    Donald Trump may be the first U.S. president with no prior political or military experience, but clues from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggest he might not be the last.

  • Zuckerberg could run Facebook while serving in government forever

    Mark Zuckerberg is not limited to just two years working in the government while still controlling Facebook, as has been widely misreported. A closer examination of SEC documents reveals Zuck only needs to still own enough Facebook stock or have the board’s approval to be allowed to serve in government indefinitely.

    Combined with Zuckerberg’s announcement yesterday that his 2017 personal challenge is to meet and listen to people in all 50 states, this fact lends weight to the idea that Zuckerberg may be serious about diving into politics.

    Without the limit, Zuckerberg has the opportunity to be appointed or elected to a more significant office and have as much time as he wants to make an impact, rather than just dipping in potentially as a cabinet member whose terms typically last less than two years.

  • Twitter Co-Founder Ev Williams’ Medium Cuts One-Third of Staff

    Medium, the online publishing company started by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, is changing its business model and cutting a third of its staff.

    The company, which has raised $132 million in venture capital from investors including Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, relied on the same model as other media companies to make money: placing ads on articles. In a blog post Wednesday, Williams called that model “broken,” because it serves the goals of corporations and not the readers of content.

  • Twitter confirms that Vine will shut down on 17 January

    SOCIAL NETWORK Twitter has confirmed that its Vine video service will close on 17 January.

    The plan to close the video-looping service was announced last year, but this is the first time a set date for the closure has been confirmed.

    “On January 17 the Vine app will become the Vine Camera. We will notify you through the app before this happens,” Twitter said.

    The ‘Vine Camera’ that will still allow you to make videos of up to 6.5 seconds in length that can then be saved to the camera roll or posted to Twitter.

  • WhatsApp block about to stop older iPhones and Android handsets working with popular chat app

    Many WhatsApp users are about to find themselves cut off from using the hugely popular chat app.

    Users of older iPhones and Android handsets are to find the app has stopped working after it said it would stop support from the end of the 2016.

    WhatsApp said that the move had been made to ensure that the app could continue to introduce new features and stay secure, which relies on the app being used on newer operating systems. But it has been criticised by many users, particularly those in developing markets where both the app and older handsets are popular.

  • Fired Snap Employee Sues, Saying Company Inflated Growth Stats

    Snap Inc. was sued by a former employee who says the company, parent of the Snapchat social-media app, was inflating growth metrics ahead of a planned initial public offering.

    Anthony Pompliano, who was hired from Facebook Inc. in 2015 to focus on user growth and engagement, said he was fired after he refused to go along with the figures that made the company look better than it actually was, according to a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The court document redacts information about the disputed metrics.

  • Science

    • Noam Chomsky: You can’t educate yourself by looking things up online

      Fake news has been around long before Facebook, but it was the tech company’s goal to appear like a newspaper that eventually misled its users far more than ever before.

      “Technology is basically neutral,” author Noam Chomsky explained. “It’s kinda like a hammer . . . the hammer doesn’t care whether you use it to build a house or a torturer uses it to crush somebody’s skull . . . same with modern technology [like] the internet. The internet is extremely valuable if you know what you’re looking for.”

      Unfortunately, that’s almost the antithesis of Facebook. And while Paper, the ad-free Facebook news feed app ultimately failed, the social media network had by then successfully developed tools like Smart Publishing. The latter tool for publishers aimed to boost stories on Facebook that were popular with the user’s own network, amplifying the performance of fake news in a scandal-obsessed hyperpartisan era. But until five weeks after the election, there was little distinction on the platform between “news” published by conspiracy theorists and actual trusted news sources.

  • Hardware

    • COM Express modules build on Intel’s Kaby Lake

      MSC announced a pair of Linux-ready COM Express Compact and Basic modules built around Intel’s 7th Gen “Kaby Lake” U and EQ/E series, respectively.

    • Qualcomm Says It Shipped More Than A Billion IoT Chips

      To this date, Qualcomm has shipped over a billion of Internet of Things (IoT) chipsets, the San Diego-based semiconductor manufacturer revealed on Tuesday. While speaking at the CES Unveiled press event yesterday, the company’s Senior Vice President of Product Management Raj Talluri said that the firm is already serving all segments of the IoT industry, from smart TVs and thermostats to connected speakers, wearables, and home assistants. Talluri specifically pointed out that smartphones and tablets aren’t included in the one billion figure.

    • Apple’s 2016 in review

      This has been the winter of our discontent. 2016 was the year the tone changed. There’s always been a lot of criticism and griping about anything Apple does (and doesn’t do — it can’t win) but in 2016 I feel like the tone of the chatter about Apple changed and got a lot more negative.

      This is worrisome on a number of levels and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m used to watching people kvetch about the company, but this seems — different. One reason: a lot of the criticisms are correct.

      Apple, for the first time in over a decade, simply isn’t firing on all cylinders. Please don’t interpret that as “Apple is doomed” because it’s not, but there are things it’s doing a lot less well than it could — and has. Apple’s out of sync with itself.

      Here are a few of the things I think indicate Apple has gotten itself out of kilter and is in need of some course correction.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • GOP will strip Planned Parenthood of funding while repealing ACA

      As Republican lawmakers eagerly prepare to scrap President Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act, they’ve announced that while doing so, they’ll also strip funding from Planned Parenthood.

      In a press conference Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) confirmed that “Planned Parenthood legislation would be in our reconciliation bill” when asked about potential defunding. The reconciliation bill is the budgetary tool that Republicans plan to use to dismantle the ACA with a simple majority and without the potential for a filibuster. A straight repeal would require a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, which the Republicans don’t have. A straight repeal would also open the possibility of a filibuster. (For more on how that process would work, check out Ars’ previous coverage on this matter.)

  • Security

    • KillDisk Ransomware Now Targets Linux, Prevents Boot-Up, Has Faulty Encryption
    • KillDisk now targeting Linux: Demands $250K ransom, but can’t decrypt
    • lecture: What could possibly go wrong with (insert x86 instruction here)? [Ed: video]

      Hardware is often considered as an abstract layer that behaves correctly, just executing instructions and outputting a result. However, the internal state of the hardware leaks information about the programs that are executing. In this talk, we focus on how to extract information from the execution of simple x86 instructions that do not require any privileges. Beyond classical cache-based side-channel attacks, we demonstrate how to perform cache attacks without a single memory access, as well as how to bypass kernel ASLR. This talk does not require any knowledge about assembly. We promise.

      When hunting for bugs, the focus is mostly on the software layer. On the other hand, hardware is often considered as an abstract layer that behaves correctly, just executing instructions and outputing a result. However, the internal state of the hardware leaks information about the programs that are running. Unlike software bugs, these bugs are not easy to patch on current hardware, and manufacturers are also reluctant to fix them in future generations, as they are tightly tied with performance optimizations.

    • 8 Docker security rules to live by

      Odds are, software (or virtual) containers are in use right now somewhere within your organization, probably by isolated developers or development teams to rapidly create new applications. They might even be running in production. Unfortunately, many security teams don’t yet understand the security implications of containers or know if they are running in their companies.

      In a nutshell, Linux container technologies such as Docker and CoreOS Rkt virtualize applications instead of entire servers. Containers are superlightweight compared with virtual machines, with no need for replicating the guest operating system. They are flexible, scalable, and easy to use, and they can pack a lot more applications into a given physical infrastructure than is possible with VMs. And because they share the host operating system, rather than relying on a guest OS, containers can be spun up instantly (in seconds versus the minutes VMs require).

    • Zigbee Writes a Universal Language for IoT

      The nonprofit Zigbee Alliance today unveiled dotdot, a universal language for the Internet of Things (IoT).

      The group says dotdot takes the IoT language at Zigbee’s application layer and enables it to work across different networking technologies.

    • $25,000 Prize Offered in FTC IoT Security Challenge

      It appears as if the Federal Trade Commission is getting serious about Internet of Things security issues — and it wants the public to help find a solution. The FTC has announced a contest it’s calling the “IoT Home Inspector Challenge.” What’s more, there’s a big payoff for the winners, with the Top Prize Winner receiving up to $25,000 and each of a possible three “honorable Mentions” getting $3,000. Better yet, winners don’t have to fork over their intellectual property rights, and will retain right to their submissions.

      Of course, the FTC is a federal agency, and with a change of administrations coming up in a couple of weeks, it hedges its bet a bit with a caveat: “The Sponsor retains the right to make a Prize substitution (including a non-monetary award) in the event that funding for the Prize or any portion thereof becomes unavailable.” In other words, Obama has evidently given the go-ahead, but they’re not sure how Trump will follow through.

    • LG threatens to put Wi-Fi in every appliance it releases in 2017

      In the past few years, products at CES have increasingly focused on putting the Internet in everything, no matter how “dumb” the device in question is by nature. It’s how we’ve ended up with stuff like this smart hairbrush, this smart air freshener, these smart ceiling fans, or this $100 pet food bowl that can order things from Amazon.

    • Ex-MI6 Boss: When It Comes To Voting, Pencil And Paper Are ‘Much More Secure’ Than Electronic Systems

      Techdirt has been worried by problems of e-voting systems for a long time now. Before, that was just one of our quaint interests, but over the last few months, the issue of e-voting, and how secure it is from hacking, specifically hacking by foreign powers, has become a rather hot topic. It’s great that the world has finally caught up with Techdirt, and realized that e-voting is not just some neat technology, and now sees that democracy itself is at play. The downside is that because the stakes are so high, the level of noise is too, and it’s really hard to work out how worried we should be about recent allegations, and what’s the best thing to do on the e-voting front.

    • Five things that got broken at the oldest hacking event in the world

      Chaos Communications Congress is the world’s oldest hacker conference, and Europe’s largest. Every year, thousands of hackers gather in Hamburg to share stories, trade tips and discuss the political, social and cultural ramifications of technology.

      As computer security is a big part of the hacker world, they also like to break things. Here are five of the most important, interesting, and impressive things broken this time.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Gunshot wounds are contagious; bullets spread like the flu, study finds

      With our news reports speaking of gunfire epidemics, outbreaks, and plagues, firearm violence often sounds like a disease. But according to a new study, it often acts like one, too. In fact, catching a bullet may be a little like catching a cold—albeit a really bad one.

      Gun violence can ripple through social networks and communities just like an infectious germ, Harvard and Yale researchers reported Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. This may not seem surprising, because earlier work has found that gun violence often clusters in certain areas and groups, particularly those steeped in gangs and drugs. But this study is the first to show that gun violence spreads directly from person to person after shootings—it’s not just about growing up in the same rough neighborhood or having the same risk factors.

      The finding is good news, because, after decades of research, scientists are pretty good at predicting how infections cascade through populations. Applying disease-based theories and simulations to gun violence could help health workers get ahead of bullets and intervene before violence spreads. A more informed strategy could also cut down on intervention tactics that “rest largely on geographic or group-based policing efforts that tend to disproportionately affect disadvantaged minority communities,” the authors argue.

    • US Special Operations Forces Deploy to 138 Nations, 70 Percent of the World’s Countries

      They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have every year since 2001.

      For America, 2016 may have been the year of the commando. In one conflict zone after another across the northern tier of Africa and the Greater Middle East, US Special Operations forces (SOF) waged their particular brand of low-profile warfare. “Winning the current fight, including against the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other areas where SOF is engaged in conflict and instability, is an immediate challenge,” the chief of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), General Raymond Thomas, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year.

    • Potential New FCC Boss Blames Obama For The Washington Post’s Botched Russian Utility Hacking Story

      We’ve noted how one of Trump’s top telecom advisors is Jeffrey Eisenach, a long-time Verizon consultant and aggressive opponent of net neutrality. Eisenach’s one of three Trump advisors who have made it clear their top priority in the new administration will be to not only gut net neutrality, but to defang and defund the FCC as a consumer watchdog on telecom issues. Eisenach isn’t just an advisor, he’s also on the shortlist to be the next head of an agency he doesn’t believe in.

      But when Eisenach isn’t busy dreaming about dismantling net neutrality, he can apparently be found writing logically incoherent op-eds over at the Wall Street Journal. In a strange little tirade posted on January 3, Eisenach quite correctly ridicules the Washington Post’s recent false claim that Russians were busy hacking U.S. utilities. In short, a piece of common malware was found on one PC, and because the Washington Post couldn’t be bothered to even call the company in question, the paper created a bogus narrative, based entirely on anonymous sources, that casually pushed the country closer to war.

    • ‘Jihad! Jihad!’ Migrant gang turns Swedish city into war zone

      Photographer Freddy Mardell was planning on enjoying an evening out on Saturday when the mob launched their rampage in Malmo.

      Describing scenes of horror, the Swede said one thug was calling for “jihad” while standing on top of a car in the city centre.

      Mr Mardell told Friatider: “An Arab jumped on the roof of a car and yelled ‘Jihad! Jihad!’ repeatedly.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Emails were leaked, not hacked

      It has been several weeks since the New York Times reported that “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” led the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers” to help Donald Trump win the election. But the evidence released so far has been far from overwhelming.

      The long anticipated Joint Analysis Report issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI on Dec. 29 met widespread criticism in the technical community. Worse still, some of the advice it offered led to a very alarmist false alarm about supposed Russian hacking into a Vermont electric power station.

      Advertised in advance as providing proof of Russian hacking, the report fell embarrassingly short of that goal. The thin gruel that it did contain was watered down further by the following unusual warning atop page 1: “DISCLAIMER: This report is provided ‘as is’ for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within.”

    • Sputnik, RT – Grave Concern of Infamous Liar James Clapper

  • Finance

    • Fat Cat Wednesday: Top executives have already earned the average worker’s entire annual salary

      Senior executives have already made more money in 2017 than the average British worker will earn all year, new research shows.

      The High Pay Centre has dubbed today “Fat Cat Wednesday”, after finding that bosses will rake in the median salary of £28,200 by midday.

      With average hourly salaries of £1,000 an hour it has taken less than three days to out-earn the typical worker. Meanwhile the national living wage stands at £7.20 per hour.

    • EU’s Brexit strategy: Grab the popcorn

      Why should the European Union jump into the Brexit fight, when the United Kingdom is doing such a great job of fighting itself?

      For Brussels, the surprise resignation Tuesday of Sir Ivan Rogers, the U.K.’s seasoned and well-respected ambassador to the EU, provided the most dramatic and forceful validation yet of the bloc’s discipline in insisting that negotiations would not begin until the formal triggering of Article 50.

      Over the half-year since the vote in favor of Brexit, leaders of the remaining EU27 have watched, with dismay, and no small amount of disbelief, as Britain battled itself: the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron; the messy in-fighting among Tories to replace him; the disintegration of the UKIP leadership, which led to a physical altercation in the European Parliament; and every manner of dispute and disagreement over whether Brexit should be hard or soft, quick or gradual, blah, blah, blah.

    • Corporations Prepare to Gorge on Tax Cuts Trump Claims Will Create Jobs

      The official line from U.S.-based multinational corporations is that if they get a huge tax break, they’ll bring home the trillions of dollars in profits they’ve stashed overseas and use it to hire tons of Americans. (Nearly 3 million, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!)

      But now that Donald Trump’s election means it might really happen, corporate executives are telling Wall Street analysts what they’ll actually use that money for: enriching their shareholders and buying other companies.

      The Intercept’s examination of dozens of earnings calls and investor conference talks since Trump won the presidential election finds that many executives are telling analysts at large banks that they are eager to take the money to increase dividends and stock buybacks as well as snap up competitors. They demonstrate considerably less if any enthusiasm for going on a domestic hiring spree.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Bernie Sanders Brings Giant Printout of a Donald Trump Tweet to Senate Floor

      Bernie Sanders spoke on the Senate floor on Wednesday to urge Donald Trump to veto any cuts to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid—and used one of the President-elect’s own tweets to prove his point.

      As lawmakers debated the repeal of Obamacare, Sanders pointed out that Trump had previously said he would not cut the services through a giant printout of a tweet dating to May 2015.

      “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid,” Trump claimed at the time. “Huckabee copied me.”

    • GOP-style obstruction won’t work for Democrats: Column

      On Inauguration Day in 2009, top Republican leaders and strategists gathered for a private dinner at the Caucus Room restaurant to discuss how they were going to obstruct and derail Barack Obama’s presidency. It wasn’t a policy dinner about their ideological concerns, Robert Draper wrote in his 2012 book about the GOP-run House. It was a political dinner about obstruction as a tactic.

      Today, many Democrats — myself included — are asking whether our party leaders need to have a similar dinner on Jan. 20 to discuss how we can obstruct and oppose every move by the Trump administration.

      The theory goes that Republican obstruction was successful at stymieing the Obama administration, and that the strategy led to the GOP’s electoral successes. Some feel we should take it straight from their playbook and use it against them. I get the feeling. It’s partially an emotional reaction to this election and to eight years of unmitigated and unjustified obstruction.

    • The Confirmation Process Is an Opportunity to Expose Trump’s Big Lie

      Donald Trump’s reign of ruin began even before his inauguration, when the GOP House caucus voted to geld the independent Office of Congressional Ethics before its members were even sworn in, only to retreat in the face of public outcry and (ironically) Trump tweets. Once Congress convenes, the first order of business will be a reconciliation bill that would begin the repeal of the Affordable Care Act without a plan to replace it. The first skirmishes will come as Senate committees commence hearings on the billionaires, generals, and ideologues that Trump has chosen for his cabinet.

      Trump’s choices—economist Simon Johnson characterizes them as rule by “extreme oligarchy”—personify the president-elect’s own bait-and-switch, from the fake populist of the campaign trail to country-club reactionary. Their shared priorities include deep top-end tax cuts, wholesale deregulation of public protections, and the privatization of public services. They claim these measures will spark growth and generate jobs. In fact, they’ll open up a new era of predation, with CEOs salivating at the chance to gorge themselves on the public dime. At risk are the essential public services and protections on which Americans depend.

    • Glenn Greenwald on “Dearth of Evidence” Linking Russia to WikiLeaks Release of DNC Emails

      We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Glenn Greenwald as the Senate Armed Services Committee holds a hearing on alleged Russian cyber-attacks and top intelligence officials are briefing President Obama on a review of evidence that Russia hacked the email servers of the Democratic National Committee. President-elect Trump will be briefed on Friday. This comes as he is supporting statements by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that Russia was not the source for the mass leak of emails from the Democratic Party.

    • Debugging Democracy

      I began writing this column on November 9, 2016, on the balcony of a hotel in Istanbul, while a call to prayer echoed through the streets below. I took that as good advice, because a few hours earlier my country elected an Internet troll, Donald Trump, as its president Perhaps by now we’re calling this day 11/9, in the mold of 9/11. I’m an optimistic guy, but color me pessimistic about where my country is now heading, led by a world-class narcissist.

      And forgive me for obsessing not only about where this is going, but how we got here. Our country has been hacked, and that matters.

      Disclosure: I’m a political independent, and not a fan of Hillary Clinton, though I thought she was the only sensible choice, given Trump’s shortcomings, many of which should have disqualified him, flat out. But he won. Why?

    • The agony and the ecstasy of Kurt Eichenwald

      Amid the uproar of Donald Trump’s seemingly impossible rise to the highest office in the land, liberals hungered for an authoritative voice. They found it in Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald, a former Republican who regularly deals in histrionics, bombast, and questionable ethics. Eichenwald, whose self-hyped pieces have nary broken news, has become infamous both for his wrongness and for his regular Twitter meltdowns. And yet, he has more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, a legion of influential fans, and is a frequent guest on cable news. Why has a bad and possibly corrupt journalist become a voice of the left? In all of his essence, Kurt Eichenwald is the journalist that the left deserves, and maybe it’s time for his wild media ride to end.

      Eichenwald had a strong start as a newsman. He worked at The New York Times for more than 20 years, where he had a decorated career covering Wall Street, malpractice in kidney dialysis facilities, for-profit hospitals, and the fall of Enron. His run might have been remembered as a triumph of solid journalism, with Eichenwald cast as a modern Upton Sinclair. But, much like H. L. Mencken’s reporting on the Scopes Trial was later tarnished by his anti-Semitism, Eichenwald’s mainstream success led to a dramatic and tawdry fall that served to reduce his accomplishments to little more than a footnote.

    • FBI says Democrats refused access to hacked email servers

      The Democratic National Committee rebuffed requests by federal agents to inspect computer servers that had been breached last year during the presidential campaign, forcing them to rely on third-party cybersecurity data to investigate the hack, the FBI said.

      The revelation came hours before U.S. intelligence chiefs are set to brief President-elect Donald Trump on their assessment that Russia was behind the attack. On Capitol Hill Thursday, they rejected Trump’s repeated skepticism about their findings that senior Russian officials were to blame for the hacking and leaks of emails from Democratic officials and organizations backing Hillary Clinton.

    • Assange: Governments Lie & WikiLeaks Wants to Expose the Truth

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that governments, including here in the U.S., regularly lie and use propaganda to manipulate the minds of their citizens.

      In a “Hannity” exclusive interview, Assange said the goal of WikiLeaks is to expose that truth to people, without any political agenda.

      Assange explained that the media failed to do that during the U.S. election process because the majority of them felt like they were part of the same system as the Washington establishment.

    • Assange’s Advice for Trump: Learn From Democrats’ Mistakes

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange believes that the Democratic Party must have a “reformation” after a disastrous showing in the 2016 election.

      In an exclusive interview with Sean Hannity, Assange said that Democrats still haven’t come to terms with why they did so poorly.

      He said they must accept that they alienated voters by “rigging” the presidential primary process and not picking the strongest candidate.

    • The Coming State of Fear

      Despite not even being installed in office yet, the soon-to-be-leader of the United States brazenly deployed the platform to carry out government contracting cronyism, call for the imprisonment of flag-burners, and get death-threats rained down upon a unionist who contradicted one of the incoming administration’s best narratives.

      Trump, somehow, has managed to now top all these by using Twitter to announce the advent of a new nuclear arms race – a Cold War 2.0 against, oddly enough, Vladimir Putin.

      Every step Trump has taken since election day has confirmed many of the worst fears of anarchists and libertarians. This latest maneuver is a continuation, for nuclear arms build-up is one of the gravest threats to the possibility of a stateless society. It not only casts long-term doubts on the survivability of the human civilization (or even the species, for that matter); in the short-term it reinforces all the worst and repressive elements of the state. This stems from the undeniable fact that the mere presence of the nuclear weapon is little more than an act of state-sponsored terrorism. It exists solely to provoke fear, anxiety, existential dread. The crude and atrocious actions committed by the United States at the end of the Second World War hang like a pall over any arms build-up. To create a single nuclear weapon is to spell out a warning to the world: we will flatten your cities and incinerate your countryside. We will turn your citizens into dust.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The End of Democracy in Turkey

      Following the New Year’s Eve attack in Istanbul, democracy in Turkey is likely to enter a death spiral. The issue isn’t the attack itself, terrible as it was. On New Year’s Eve, a lone gunman made his way into the Reina dance club, which was jammed with revellers, and opened fire with an assault rifle, killing thirty-nine people and wounding dozens. The shooter has not yet been identified, but, in an Internet posting, the Islamic State claimed that one of its soldiers had done the job. In its typical deranged language, the group said that it had happily struck the revellers, “turning their joy into sorrows.” The attack, the group said, was in retaliation for air strikes and other military operations carried out by the “Turkish apostate government” against ISIS in Syria.

      If the shooting were an isolated event, the effect on Turkish society would probably be minimal. But it was the latest in a series of violent attacks against the Turkish state, which has prompted sweeping retaliatory measures that have seriously undermined Turkish democracy. Sunday morning’s massacre will no doubt trigger another wave of detentions and arrests.

    • Italy Urges Europe To Begin Censoring Free Speech On The Internet

      First it was the US, then Germany blamed much of what is wrong in society on “fake news”, and not, say, a series of terrible decisions made by politicians. Now it is Italy’s turn to call for an end to “fake news”, which in itself would not be troubling, however, the way Giovanni Pitruzzella, head of the Italian competition body, demands the European Union “cracks down” on what it would dub “fake news” is nothing short of a total crackdown on all free speech, and would give local governments free reign to silence any outlet that did not comply with the establishment propaganda.

      In an interview with the FT, Pitruzzella said the regulation of false information on the internet was best done by the state rather than by social media companies such as Facebook, an approach taken previously by Germany, which has demanded that Facebook end “hate speech” and has threatened to find the social network as much as €500K per “fake” post.

      Pitruzzella, head of the Italian competition body since 2011, said “EU countries should set up independent bodies — co-ordinated by Brussels and modeled on the system of antitrust agencies — which could quickly label fake news, remove it from circulation and impose fines if necessary.”

      In other words, a series of unelected bureaucrats, unaccountable to anyone, would sit down and between themselves decide what is and what isn’t “fake news”, and then, drumroll, “remove it from circulation.” On the other hand, coming one week after Obama give Europe the green light to engage in any form of censorship and halt of free speech that it desires, when the outgoing US president voted into law the “Countering Disinformation And Propaganda Act”, it should come as no surprise that a suddenly emboldened Europe is resorting to such chilling measures.

    • Apple bows to government demands and removes the New York Times from Chinese App Store

      APPLE HAS bowed to the demands of Chinese authorities and removed the New York Times from its Chinese App Store.

      According to a report at, er, the New York Times, Apple removed both the English-language and Chinese-language apps from the App Store in China on 23 December, and said the move came as part of a wider attempt by the Chinese government to prevent readers in the country from accessing independent news coverage.

      “The request by the Chinese authorities to remove our apps is part of their wider attempt to prevent readers in China from accessing independent news coverage by the New York Times of that country, coverage which is no different from the journalism we do about every other country in the world,” a spokesperson for the newspaper said.

      Apple said they had been informed the app violated Chinese regulations but did not say what rules had been broken.

    • China Internet Censorship: New York Times Apps Removed
    • Apple removes New York Times app in China
    • New York Times App Removed From App Store in China
    • Apple pulls NYT apps from China’s App Store to comply with “local regulations”
    • Single Choke Point Problems: Apple Removes NY Times App From Chinese App Store After Chinese Gov’t Complains
    • Censorship tool built as Facebook eyes China: report
    • Self-Proclaimed Inventor of Email Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Techdirt’s Mike Masnick

      Techdirt founder Mike Masnick will be going toe-to-toe in court with Charles Harder, the Hollywood attorney who famously represented Hulk Hogan in the sex tape lawsuit that brought down Gawker.

      On Wednesday, Harder’s client Shiva Ayyadurai filed a $15 million libel lawsuit in Massachusetts against Masnick, Leigh Beadon and Techdirt parent company Floor64 Inc. over articles that doubted Ayyadurai’s claim to have invented email.

      Ayyadurai previously sued Gawker in a lawsuit that many suspected was funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Ayyadurai recently settled the claim for $750,000. He and Harder now have a new legal target.

      For Techdirt, Masnick writes a wonky tech policy blog that has earned a loyal following for taking strong stances on issues like copyright, net neutrality, security issues and other topics. His name provokes eye-rolling among many studio lawyers thanks to his frequently hostile attitude toward aggressive intellectual property actions. He was one of the noisiest antagonists toward the Stop Online Piracy Act a few years ago. He’s also credited with coining the term, “The Streisand Effect,” to describe the phenomenon of how attempts to censor information often lead to more awareness of the very information someone is trying to hide. The phrase came after entertainer Barbara Streisand aimed more than a decade ago to suppress photographic images of her Malibu, Calif., residence.

    • ‘Inventor of Email’ Slaps Tech Site With $15M Libel Suit for Mocking His Claim

      A self-proclaimed inventor of email, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, has taken exception to doubts about his accomplishment by a website called TechDirt, and chosen to file a $15 million defamation suit against the site and its founder, Mike Masnick.

      The case is likely to raise alarm in media circles because Ayyadurai is being represented by Charles Harder, a Beverly Hills attorney. Harder became famous by directing a stealth legal campaign—bankrolled by billionaire Peter Thiel—against Gawker Media that ultimately drove the website into bankruptcy with a $140 million Florida jury verdict.

      In the new lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Boston, Ayyadurai claims that a series of posts on TechDirt amount to libel—in part because the posts call Ayyadurai a “fake email inventor” and a “fraudster” and calls his claims to have invented the technology “bogus.”

    • Free Speech in 2017: Is the Town Square Model of Democracy Dead?

      A year ago, preparing to teach my undergraduate free speech class I found myself questioning free speech fundamentalism. Struck by the unseemly reality of free expression and the unsettling insights of Kelefah Sanneh in The Hell You Say, the simple comforting notion that more speech is always better than less speech seemed suspect.

      Now, one must question the very assumptions of U.S. First Amendment (1A) jurisprudence, which have been laid bare by “post-truth” politics, in which the very concepts of truth and reality have been trumped. In 2016, volume prevailed over reason, and feelings over facts (for more, see here). A cynical carnival barker hoodwinked the citizenry, begging the question: Is the town square model of democracy dead?

    • IMDb Asks Court to Prohibit Enforcement of Actor Age Censorship Law

      Internet movie hub IMDb is asking the court to prohibit the enforcement of a new law that bars it from displaying an actor’s age on its site if the actor doesn’t want it posted.

      The controversial law was signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown in September. Its goal is to mitigate age discrimination in a youth-obsessed Hollywood, but since its passing it has been widely criticized as unconstitutional. IMDb sued California Attorney General Kamala Harris in November, arguing that the law chills free speech rather than addressing the root causes of age discrimination.

    • Sen. Tom Cotton Slams Apple Over China Censorship And FBI Dispute
    • When Facebook nixed a naughty Neptune
    • Facebook bans image of 16th-century statue’s buttocks for being “explicitly sexual”
    • Shoddy Facebook censorship strikes again as an image of sea god Neptune is deemed innapropriate

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • FTC takes D-Link to court citing lax product security, privacy perils

      The FTC, in a complaint filed in the Northern District of California charged that “D-Link failed to take reasonable steps to secure its routers and Internet Protocol (IP) cameras, potentially compromising sensitive consumer information, including live video and audio feeds from D-Link IP cameras.”

      For its part, D-Link Systems said it “is aware of the complaint filed by the FTC. D-Link denies the allegations outlined in the complaint and is taking steps to defend the action. The security of our products and protection of our customers private data is always our top priority.”

    • WikiLeaks data reveals close cooperation between German intelligence and NSA

      The German foreign secret service (BND) has not only delivered data to the US intelligence services on a massive scale, it has also worked directly with the NSA in developing detection software. This has been confirmed by extensive data published by the WikiLeaks platform at the beginning of December. It documents the close cooperation between German and American intelligence agencies and reveals new details.

      The data contains about 90 gigabytes of information. It consists of a total of 2,420 files, which were forwarded in 2015 to the German parliamentary committee that is currently investigating the activities of the intelligence services. According to WikiLeaks, the data originates from several German federal authorities, including the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection (BfV) and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

    • Top NSA defender departs agency

      Curtis Dukes, the top cyber defender at the National Security Agency, is leaving the agency for a leadership post at the Center for Internet Security, a not-for-profit cybersecurity organization.

      Dukes, who headed up the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, was bumped down the NSA org chart a bit during a recent reorganization – one of the biggest in its history – that combined the agency’s offensive and defensive capabilities and personnel.

    • NSA: Russia Is the Top U.S. Competitor in Cyberspace
    • It’s Now Clearer Than Ever That Snowden’s No Hero and Deserves No Pardon From Obama
    • Snowden and Vanunu: Spies, Whistleblowers, Movies and Books
    • Why President Obama Can’t Pardon Edward Snowden

      On September 14, 2016, days before the premiere of Oliver Stone’s hagiographic movie Snowden, Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International launched a well-funded campaign, with full-page ads in The New York Times, imploring President Barack Obama to pardon Edward Snowden, a former contract worker at the National Security Agency, for stealing a vast number of secret documents. “I think Oliver will do more for Snowden in two hours than his lawyers have been able to do in three years,” said Snowden’s ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner.

    • 29 Percent Of Americans Say Snowden Should Be Prosecuted

      A poll by the Economist indicated Wednesday only 29 percent of Americans want to see National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden prosecuted for stealing secrets, and 30 percent would support pardoning him.

      Snowden has been in Russian exile since 2013 when he leaked hundreds of classified documents published by the Guardian, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and WikiLeaks. He faces two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

    • End-to-End Encrypted group chats via XMPP

      It’s been over a year since my colleagues and I at the Progressive Technology Project abandoned Skype, first for IRC and soon after for XMPP. Thanks to the talented folks maintaining conversations.im it’s been a breeze to get everyone setup with accounts (8 Euros/year is quite worth it) and a group chat going.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Open letter to the European Parliament on Oettinger hearing

      Next week, you are asked to reply to European Commission President Juncker’s proposal to put Commissioner Günther Oettinger in charge of supervising the EU budget and managing the Human Resources of the European Commission.

      As organisations working towards equality, non-discrimination and campaigning for transparency and ethics, we do not think that Commissioner Oettinger is suitable to oversee Human Resources at the European Commission.

      Commissioner Oettinger has made racist, sexist and homophobic remarks on several occasions in the past, most recently at a speech he gave in an official capacity in Hamburg on 26 October.

      At this crucial moment for the EU, it is more vital than ever to have a strong and credible commitment from the European Commission to counter discrimination and act for equality for all. The Commissioner in charge of human resources must lead by example. He or she should have clear plans for action to make equality for all a reality and speak out against racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. How else would they be expected to inspire others to do the same? In our view, Commissioner Oettinger is not the right person for this task.

    • Man killed in Malmö shooting

      Police were called to the Docentgatan street in the southern Swedish city at around 8.30pm on Tuesday after residents in the area reported hearing the sound of gunshots.

    • Woman, 18, found with gunshot wounds in Malmö

      An 18-year-old woman has been taken to hospital after she was found with gunshot wounds in the Rosengård district of Malmö in the early hours of Tuesday.

      Police were called to a shooting at around 3.30am at a falafel restaurant at Västra Kattarpsvägen road in Malmö. When they arrived at the scene they found a woman with gunshot wounds.

    • Image insulting Islam not uploaded on Facebook using Hindu fisherman’s phone: PBI

      The image which led to the attacks on Hindus at Nasirnagar was not uploaded on Facebook from the phone used by a Hindu fisherman accused of ‘insulting Islam’, an investigation has revealed.

      The image was edited on the computer used by one Jahangir Alam, a cyber cafe owner in Harinberh Bazar, according to the Police of Bureau of Investigation.

      But the detectives were not sure if the same computer was used to upload it on the social media site.

    • Jakarta governor lambasts hardliner at blasphemy trial

      Jakarta’s Christian governor today shouted at an Islamic hardliner testifying against him in dramatic scenes at his blasphemy trial, seen as a test of religious tolerance in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.

      Hundreds of supporters and opponents of governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama rowdily traded insults as they rallied outside the hearing in the Indonesian capital, with thousands of police deployed to prevent clashes.

      The first Christian to govern the capital in more than 50 years, Purnama is on trial accused of blasphemy over remarks he made about the Quran while campaigning ahead of February elections for the Jakarta governorship.

      Hundreds of thousands of conservative Muslims have protested against the leader, known by his nickname Ahok, in recent months in the largest demonstrations in Indonesia in years, but he denies insulting Islam and his supporters say the case is politically motivated.

    • Bosnia’s main university suspends classes during Muslim prayers

      Bosnia’s main university will not hold classes during Muslim Friday prayers, prompting criticism from some that it represents a step towards Islamisation.

      The University of Sarajevo this week adopted a plan to halt activities for about an-hour-and-a-half each Friday during Muslim prayers.

    • Bahrain NSA powers limited to terror crimes
    • Bahrain, reversing reform, restores arrest powers to spies
    • Bahrain suspends, investigates 3 officials over prison break
    • Japan to recall envoy from South Korea over ‘comfort women’ statue

      Japan said on Friday it was temporarily recalling its ambassador to South Korea over a statue commemorating Korean women forced to work in Japanese military brothels during World War Two which it said violated an agreement to resolve the issue.

      The two nations agreed in 2015 that the issue of “comfort women”, which has long plagued ties between the two Asian neighbors, would be “finally and irreversibly resolved” if all conditions of the accord – which included a Japanese apology and a fund to help the victims – were met.

      The statue, which depicts a young, barefoot woman sitting in a chair, was erected near the Japanese consulate in the southern South Korean city of Busan at the end of last year.

    • Obama, Deporter in Chief, Should Pardon the Undocumented

      Donald Trump will soon sweep into the office of the U.S. presidency, buttressed by both houses of Congress firmly in Republican control. A wave of regressive executive orders and legislation are already being prepared to ensure that Trump’s first 100 days effectively erase the Obama presidency. Where Trump was once the most prominent “birther,” attempting to deny President Barack Obama’s legitimacy with a racist campaign accusing him of being born in Kenya, Trump now will wield a pen to legally undermine Obama’s legacy. But Barack Obama is still the president of the United States until Jan. 20, and retains the enormous executive powers that the office bestows. That is why a swelling grass-roots movement is now urging Obama to use executive clemency and the presidential pardon to protect the nation’s millions of undocumented immigrants from the mass deportations Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail.

    • In the Best Interest of Justice: Former Peltier Prosecutor Joins Urgent Activist Calls For Clemency

      In a “truly extraordinary” and evidently unprecedented act, a former prosecutor of Native American activist Leonard Peltier, now 72, ill, and in his 41st year in prison for a shooting he has unceasingly denied committing, has joined the decades-long demands of legal experts, indigenous leaders and rights advocates to free one of this country’s most high-profile political prisoners. Peltier’s conviction stems from the American Indian Movement’s 1973 siege at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, site of the Wounded Knee massacre of Lakota in 1890. After a long occupation protesting the federal government’s unjust treatment and broken treaties, two FBI agents and one Native American were killed. Peltier was eventually found guilty of shooting the agents, and sentenced to two life sentences.

      Peltier remains in prison despite years of legal battles and repeated claims that federal agents lied, coerced witnesses and withheld evidence at his trial; ultimately, the prosecution admitted they couldn’t prove who shot the agents. Peltier attorney and former federal prosecutor Cynthia Dunne calls the FBI’s case “yesterday’s equivalent of a Trump tweet that has lasted for 40 years.” Calling his ongoing imprisonment “one of the greatest injustices in the American justice system,” Dunne and other attorneys filed a clemency request last year to President Obama in hopes he will include Peltier in a final flurry of pardons. Their plea was one of many on behalf of Peltier, from Amnesty International to Standing Rock Sioux Chief Dave Archambault. If Obama fails to act, his attorneys say Peltier will die in prison.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Already Backing Off Its Biggest Time Warner Merger Promise: Cheaper TV

      AT&T has spent the last few months fending off critics of its planned $100 million acquisition of Time Warner. Most critics say the company’s ownership of Time Warner will make it harder for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete. Others warn that AT&T’s decision to zero rate (cap exempt) its own content gives the company’s new DirecTV Now streaming TV service an unfair advantage in the market. That’s before you get to the fundamental fact that letting a company with the endless ethical issues AT&T enjoys get significantly larger likely only benefits AT&T.

    • Ad Industry Wants New FCC Broadband Privacy Rules Gutted Because, Uh, Free Speech!

      We’ve noted repeatedly how Trump’s incoming telecom advisors have made it very clear they not only want to gut net neutrality, but defund and defang the FCC. That means rolling back all manner of other recent FCC policies, like the agency’s recently approved broadband privacy rules. While ISPs and advertisers threw a collective hissy fit about the rules, they really were relatively fundamental; simply requiring that ISPs not only make it clear what’s being collected and who it’s being sold to, but requiring they provide working opt-out tools to broadband subscribers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Trademark Dispute Between Coffee Companies Over ‘Detroit’ Trademark Demonstrates The USPTO’s Carelessness

        It bears repeating: far too many of the trademark disputes we cover here at Techdirt are in large part the fault of a USPTO all too willing to grant trademarks on terms that are overtly either broad or based on geography. One would hope that it went without saying that trademarks, designed to inform the public as to the source of the products they buy, cannot work to that end if the identifying marks are not specific or original within the marketplace. Yet the Trademark Office too often doesn’t seem to consider this when rubber-stamping applications.

    • Copyrights

      • Indian High Court Blocks Rent-Seeking Collection Societies From Seeking Any More Rent

        Once again, we have an entity supposedly looking out for artists doing what it can to prevent artists from earning a living. This is what they won’t be able to do now, thanks to a change in the nation’s copyright law.

        Blocking these societies from collecting performance royalties won’t do much for the artists signed to them. But then again, the collection societies weren’t doing much for artists in the first place. IPRS has been particularly shady. Many royalty collection societies are known for their extremely limited distribution of funds. Those that do pay out more regularly still tend to hand the bulk of it to charting artists, no matter who actually earned it.

      • Court: Fan-Funded Star Trek Film is Not ‘Fair Use’

        The lawsuit between Paramount Pictures and the crowdfunded Star Trek spin-off “Prelude to Axanar” is gearing up for a trial. This week the court ruled on motions for summary judgment from both parties. While the case could still go both ways, the court has decided that the fan-film is not entitled to a fair use defense.

      • What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017?

        Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1960 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2017, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2056.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/06/kaos-2017-01-released/feed/ 0 Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released http://techrights.org/2017/01/02/neptune-4-5-3-release/ http://techrights.org/2017/01/02/neptune-4-5-3-release/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2017 16:38:05 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98140

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop

    It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back.

    On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system.

    On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled.

  • The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016

    Last year I had written about the The Open-Source Linux Letdowns of 2015 and then Other Letdowns For Linux / Open-Source Users From 2015, which ended up being among the most viewed articles of 2016. So I figured I’d once again share a list of what personally was disappointing not to see happen in 2016 within the Linux/open-source space.

  • Desktop

    • Lenovo ThinkPad T460 – A Good Linux Laptop For Development

      After several years with my Dell Latitude E6400 I was searching for a new, more powerful Linux machine for my coding and performance tweaking tasks. And although the Dell XPS line sounded interesting due to the “native” Linux support, it was also expensive with 16GB RAM (>2200€) and several users reported problems with CPU whining. I didn’t want to risc this and also reviews of the Lenovo T460 suggested a more silent and longer lasting experience. So I finally bought the T460 and was just hoping to get a good Linux support. Here are my experiences after a usage for a few months. Keep in mind that everyone has different requirements so maybe the title should be “a good Linux laptop for a certain subset of development tasks”. E.g. I’ve not yet tested 3D suff / hardware acceleration.

  • Kernel Space

    • WireGuard Secure Network Tunnel Is Eyeing Mainline, Running On Android

      Back in June we reported on WireGuard as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. We haven’t heard much on WireGuard in recent months, but this New Year’s morning we received a message from their lead developer with a status update.

      WireGuard creator Jason Donenfeld emailed into Phoronix an update on the WireGuard project with their accomplishments for 2016 and a look ahead to 2017.

    • A Look Back At Some Of The Best Features Added To The Linux Kernel In 2016
    • Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017

      Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.

    • Linux 4.10-rc2

      Hey, it’s been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years
      Day, and I am not complaining at all.

      It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I
      almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless
      release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is.

      The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that
      really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on
      stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that.
      Even that wasn’t big, and the rest is trivial small fixes.

      I’m expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover
      from the holidays.

      Linus

    • Graphics Stack

      • GLSL Copy Propagation Optimizations For Mesa

        A developer has published a set of 14 patches providing copy propagation optimizations for Mesa’s GLSL/Nir code.

        Thomas Helland on Sunday sent out the set of optimizations to lower the overhead of the copy propagation pass in GLSL. This code isn’t yet ready to be merged but is at a “request for comments” stage.

    • Benchmarks

      • Intel Iris Pro OpenGL Benchmarks On Debian 9 Testing

        Debian Testing is currently making use of the Linux 4.8 kernel, GNOME Shell 3.22.2 as the default desktop environment, xf86-video-modesetting as the DDX over xf86-video-intel, X.Org Server 1.19.0, and Mesa 13.0.1.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Elementary icons for kde

        in my last post I’ll present two new icon themes La Capitaine and Papirus icon they are really sexy and work very well with Plasma and KDE Applications. As this two icon set’s are sort of monochrome icon set’s I’d like to resent you an non monochrome icon set like oxygen.

      • Summary of 2016

        So, 2016 has been a great year to me. Interesting in many aspects, but most has turned out to be for the better. I’ve gotten to know a bunch of awesome new people, I spoken about open source, Qt and Linux in Europe and USA, I’ve helped hosting an open source conference in Gothenburg, I’ve learned so much more professionally and as a person, and I’ve really enjoyed myself the whole time.

      • KDE releases beta of Kirigami UI 2.0

        Soon after the initial release of Kirigami UI, KDE’s framework for convergent (mobile and desktop) user interfaces, its main developer Marco Martin started porting it from Qt Quick Controls 1 to Qt Quick Controls 2, the next generation of Qt’s ready-made standard controls for Qt Quick-based user interfaces. Since QQC 2 offers a much more extended range of controls than QQC 1, the port allowed the reduction of Kirigami’s own code, while improving stability and performance. Kirigami 2 is kept as close to QQC 2′s API as possible in order to extend it seamlessly.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • A Look At The GTK4 Development In Early 2017

        Prolific GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has written a blog post about recent and ongoing work for GTK4 at the start of 2017.

      • GTK+ Happenings

        I said that I would post regular updates on what is happening in GTK+ 4 land. This was a while ago, so an update is overdue.

  • Distributions

    • Some of the smallest Linux distributions

      A lot of time and digital ink is dedicated to talking about features, new capabilities and ease of use. This week I want to go in another direction and talk about minimal Linux distributions, projects with low resource requirements and small (less than 100MB) installation media. Some people have limited Internet connections and/or lower-end equipment and this week I want to explore some of the distributions which are designed to require as few resources as possible.

    • New Releases

      • Neptune 4.5.3 Release

        We are proud to announce the third Neptune 4.5 service release.

        This version comes with the newest updates like Chromium 55 & Icedove 45.5 aswell as an upgraded graphicsstack based on Mesa 13.0.2. Besides that this version comes by default with the LTS Kernel 3.18.45. (Newer 4.4 based kernel releases can be found in our repository)

      • Netrunner Desktop 17.01 released

        The Netrunner Team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Netrunner Desktop 17.01 – 64bit ISO.

        Netrunner Desktop adds the usual selection of software applications like KDEnlive, Gimp, VLC, Libreoffice, Audacious, Steam, Skype, Transmission, Virtualbox, Krita, Inkscape and many more.

      • Solus Releases ISO Snapshot 2017.01.01.0

        We’re happy to be kicking off the new year with the release of our first ISO snapshot, 2017.01.01.0, across our Budgie and MATE editions.

      • OpenELEC 7.0 Linux OS Released Based On Kodi 16 Media Center

        This week a new and stable version of OpenELEC 7.0 Linux operating system has been released by its development team which is based on the Kodi 16 Media Center.

        OpenELEC 7.0 is a lightweight distro that is capable of running on older and lower specification PC systems breathing life into them once again and supports Intel, AMD, or ARM chips.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Progress Report

        After a lot of effort, I made significant progress with the Epson XP 231 in PCLinuxOS. Today, I managed to get it to work as it should. Some people are reporting my same problem with Steam on that OS, though…

        OpenMandriva Lx 3.1 pretty much does everything, except that Insync, which I believed was running, must be reinstalled every time to get it to work. You close the session and it’s gone. Bad.

        Mageia 5.1′s problem is the scanner. XSane reports that the usb port where it is found fails to open the device. I originally thought it was the file epwoka.conf at /etc/sane.d, but it does not seem to be the problem.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • !$##@%%%!!! UBUNTU!!!

        A notebook that TLW uses was the last machine in our house to run Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

        [...]

        The solution was simple. I installed Debian GNU/Linux over top of the crapware. The only real problem with that was I could not find a USB-drive anywhere. I had “loaned” them all out to various ladies who come and go here so they could do “this and that”. Finally, I remembered that the MP3 player I often used while hiking or working in my classroom up North also functioned as a USB-drive. I copied onto it as root (dd if=debian-8.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sd.. bs=1024k) a “net-install” image of the Debian-installer and booted the notebook from that. I also verified the download against its SHA512SUM (sha512sum debian-8.6.0-amd64-netinst.iso and grep … SHA512SUM). Worked like a charm. Further, there was a means to extricate the backup files from the notebook via a scripted web-server built in to Debian-installer. Cute.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 3 tips for effectively using wikis for documentation

    Using a wiki for documentation isn’t a new idea. Countless open source projects do. If you’re looking for a way to write and publish documentation quickly, a wiki can be a viable alternative to the many technical writing tools out there.

  • What is your open source New Year’s resolution?

  • Databases

    • SQLite 3.16 Released, Uses Less CPU Cycles & Adds Experimental PRAGMA Support

      SQLite 3.16.0 was released today and it’s quite a feature-packed release for being the first update of 2017.

      SQLite 3.16.0 now uses about 9% fewer CPU cycles, adds experimental support for PRAGMA functions, enhancements to date and time functions, changes to the look-aside memory allocator, faster LIKE and GLOB when using multiple wildcards, and various other changes.

  • Licensing/Legal

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Hungary government withdrawing from OGP

      This month, the government of Hungary has sent the Steering Committee of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) a letter announcing its immediate withdrawal from the partnership. The move was a response to an invitation by the OGP Criteria and Standards Subcommittee to discuss concerns regarding the deterioration of civil space in Hungary at the OGP Global Summit that took place earlier this month in Paris.

    • Open Data

      • Survey: open data already a reality for scientific researchers

        Open data is already a reality for scientific researchers, especially for those in Social Sciences. Researchers are making data openly available and — in turn — are re-using open data from others in their research. For a lot of researchers, a data citation has a much value as an article citation. These are some of the conclusions of a survey of over 2,000 researchers about their attitude and experiences in working with data, sharing it and making it open. The results were published this fall in the Figshare Digital Science Report ‘The State of Open Data’.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • RooBee One, an open-source SLA/DLP 3D printer

        [Aldric Negrier] is no stranger to the 3D printing world. Having built a few already, he designed and built an SLA/DLP 3D printer, named RooBee One, sharing the plans on Instructables. He also published tons of other stuff, like a 3D Printed Syringe Pump Rack and a 3D Scanning Rig And DIY Turntable. It’s really worth while going through his whole Instructables repository.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Languages still a major barrier to global science, new research finds

      English is now considered the common language, or ‘lingua franca’, of global science. All major scientific journals seemingly publish in English, despite the fact that their pages contain research from across the globe.

      However, a new study suggests that over a third of new scientific reports are published in languages other than English, which can result in these findings being overlooked – contributing to biases in our understanding.

    • Open sourcing Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil

      Forty years after she was discovered, Lucy, the world’s most famous fossil australopithecine, just might have a cause of death. In August of this year, a team of paleoanthropologists led by John Kappelman argued in Nature that Lucy died 3.2 million years ago by falling out of a tree. Their conclusion has been met with skepticism among fellow researchers, and Lucy’s death-by-tree-fall hypothesis has generated no shortage of debate within the scientific community of paleoanthropology.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Quietly, Trump and Republicans Are Gunning to Destroy Medicaid

      Medicaid, the nation’s healthcare program for the poor and disabled, is on the chopping block under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress—and it will take “intense focus by progressives” to ensure it doesn’t meet a dire fate.

      In fact, former National Economic Council director Gene B. Sperling wrote Sunday in a New York Times op-ed, “if Democrats focus too much of their attention on Medicare, they may inadvertently assist the quieter war on Medicaid—one that could deny health benefits to millions of children, seniors, working families, and people with disabilities.”

      As Democrats prepare for battles over the two programs, “the Republican effort to dismantle Medicaid is more certain,” Sperling warned—a prediction echoed this week by multiple news outlets.

    • The Sled Dogs that Stopped an Outbreak

      On a dawnless morning in the winter of 1925, a sled dog named Balto became an American hero. Nome, an Alaskan mining town past its heyday, teetered on the brink of a diphtheria outbreak. Children had begun to succumb to the disease, a bacterial infection that coats the esophagus in a suffocating layer of necrotic tissue. The city’s meager supply of antitoxin serum had passed its expiration date. Desperate, the only doctor in town placed sick children into quarantine and radioed for help.

    • France introduces opt-out policy on organ donation

      France has reversed its policy on organ donations so that all people could become donors on their death unless they join an official register to opt out.

      The new law presumes consent for organs to be removed, even if it goes against the wishes of the family.

  • Security

    • Smart electricity meters can be dangerously insecure, warns expert

      Smart electricity meters, of which there are more than 100m installed around the world, are frequently “dangerously insecure”, a security expert has said.

      The lack of security in the smart utilities raises the prospect of a single line of malicious code cutting power to a home or even causing a catastrophic overload leading to exploding meters or house fires, according to Netanel Rubin, co-founder of the security firm Vaultra.

      “Reclaim your home,” Rubin told a conference of hackers and security experts, “or someone else will.”

      If a hacker took control of a smart meter they would be able to know “exactly when and how much electricity you’re using”, Rubin told the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg. An attacker could also see whether a home had any expensive electronics.

    • London Ambulance Service hit by ‘computer system crash’ on New Year’s Eve

      Officials confirmed there was a systems fault in the early hours, though staff are trained for such situations, and they continued to prioritise responses as normal.

      Calls were reportedly logged manually between 12.30am GMT and 5:15am.

    • 33c3 notes

      Some notes and highlights from #33c3. In particular, some talks I found worth watching. I intentionally don’t mention any of the much interesting self-organized sessions and workshops I participated since these are not recorded. I’m just listing some interesting projects at the bottom. I wrote these notes quickly, so I’m certainly missing some stuff.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Five Dead After ‘Terror Attack,’ Explosion in China’s Xinjiang

      Chinese police have shot dead three suspects who they said killed two people in a “terrorist” attack on a branch office of the ruling Chinese Communist Party in the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang, official media reported on Thursday.

      The “rioters” detonated an explosive device during the attack on Wednesday afternoon, as well as launching a knife attack, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

      “At around 4:50 p.m. Wednesday … rioters entered the yard of Moyu County Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in a vehicle, attacked workers with knives and detonated an explosive device,” it cited the ministry of public security as saying.

      The attack killed an official and a security worker and injured three others, the report said, adding that three people were shot dead at the scene and that the case is now under investigation.

    • The Lauded Russian Hacker Whose Company Landed on the U.S. Blacklist

      The blacklist includes two people suspected of cybercrimes, and four others who are military intelligence officers. All are the kinds of figures one might expect to be on a list of people targeted by the Obama administration in retaliation for Russia’s malfeasance, including efforts to influence the 2016 election.

      Then there is the one who calls herself “mishacker,” a globe-trotter with a rebellious online persona who is perhaps the most intriguing of the newly revealed Russian spies.

      On what appears to be her personal website, called “Hello, stranger,” that person, Alisa Shevchenko, introduces herself and expounds on some of her digital accomplishments, including setting up a work space for hackers in Moscow.

    • Make Russia great again? Aleppo and a plea from another world

      During the last days of December, Russia will host a round of diplomatic talks with Iran and Turkey to try and find a definitive solution to the Syrian civil war. If Putin wants to “make Russia great again,” he should endeavor to honor that tradition. By doing so at least Russia will more probably err on the side of hypocrisy rather than on that of cynicism, and people who suffer the consequences of war would still have a chance to find solace behind the aegis of international law.

    • Trump and Israel’s Anti-Semitic Zionists

      Zioinism was supposed to liberate Israel from these old Jewish complexes. We were supposed to become a normal nation, Israelis instead of “exile” Jews, admired by other nations. Seems we have not quite succeeded.

      But there is a great hope. Actually, a giant hope. It has a name: Donald Trump.

      He has already tweeted that after he assumes power, everything regarding the UN will change.

      But will it? Does anyone – including himself – really know what he has in mind? Can Netanyahu be quite sure?

      True, he is sending a rabid Jewish-American ultra-right Zionist as his ambassador to Tel Aviv (or to Jerusalem, we shall see.) A person so right-wing that he makes Netanyahu himself almost look like a leftist.

      [...]

      Some time after the war, in Israeli captivity, Eichmann wrote down his memories. He stated that he believed that the Zionists were the “biologically positive” element of the Jewish race.

      Mahmood Abbas, by the way, as a student at Moscow University, wrote his doctoral thesis on Nazi-Zionist cooperation.

      Can Trump’s assistants now include rabid Zionists and rabid anti-Semites at the same time?

      Of course they can.

    • Thanks to Congress, Trump Will Have Nearly Unlimited Power to Wage War

      The failure of U.S. Congress to pass a formal authorization for the war against the Islamic State (ISIS) means incoming President Donald Trump—whose brash and impulsive approach to foreign policy has raised alarms—will have effectively unlimited war powers, Politico reported Thursday.

      In the absence of such a resolution, President Barack Obama has relied on the existing Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as justification for military action in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Attempts to replace or rein in the AUMF have failed.

    • Putin’s Real Long Game

      A little over a year ago, on a pleasant late fall evening, I was sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter. He was smoking a cigarette while we watched Southeast DC hipsters bustle by and talked about ‘the war’ — the big war, being waged by Russia against all of us, which from this porch felt very far away. I can’t remember what prompted it — some discussion of whether the government in Kyiv was doing something that would piss off the EU — but he took a long drag off his cigarette and said, offhand: “Russia. The EU. It’s all just more Molotov-Ribbentrop shit.”

      His casual reference to the Hitler-Stalin pact dividing Eastern Europe before WWII was meant as a reminder that Ukraine must decide its future for itself, rather than let it be negotiated between great powers. But it haunted me, this idea that modern revolutionaries no longer felt some special affinity with the West. Was it the belief in collective defense that was weakening, or the underlying certitude that Western values would prevail?

    • We Are Still Alive (Non-Hacked Russian Stooge and Terrorism Edition)

      This is a version of last year’s January 1 article, updated to reflect the new fears of the World’s Most Frightened Nation.

      I survived. America, and the world, and you, survived. We awoke the first day of 2017 to find that once again, using the extraordinary power of fear, we again held off the terrorists. And Putin. And Trump, nationalists, racists, hackers, alt-Right fascists, CNN, persons of all colors, genders, shapes, sizes, and goddamn religions.

    • What is the Obama Regime Up To?

      Obama has announced new sanctions on Russia based on unsubstantiated charges by the CIA that the Russian government influenced the outcome of the US presidential election with “malicious cyber-enabled activities.”

      The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a report “related to the declaration of 35 Russian officials persona non grata for malicious cyber activity and harassment.”

      The report is a description of “tools and infrastructure used by Russian intelligence services to compromise and exploit networks and infrastructure associated with the recent U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. government, political and private sector entities.”

      The report does not provide any evidence that the tools and infrastructure were used to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. The report is simply a description of what is said to be Russian capabilities.

    • Istanbul new year Reina nightclub attack ‘leaves 39 dead’

      At least 39 people, including at least 15 foreigners, have been killed in an attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey’s interior minister says.

      A gunman opened fire in Reina nightclub at about 01:30 local time (22:30 GMT), as revellers marked the new year.

      Suleyman Soylu said efforts were continuing to find the attacker, who was believed to have acted alone.

      At least 69 people were being treated in hospital, the minister added. Four were said to be in a serious condition.

    • Reliving Agent Orange: What if casualties don’t end on the battlefield, but extend to future generations?

      There are many ways to measure the cost of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War: in bombs (7 million tons), in dollars ($760 billion in today’s dollars) and in bodies (58,220).

      Then there’s the price of caring for those who survived: Each year, the Department of Veterans Affairs spends more than $23 billion compensating Vietnam-era veterans for disabilities linked to their military service — a repayment of a debt that’s supported by most Americans.

    • ISIS Will Lose the Battle of Mosul, But Not Much Will Remain

      Winners and losers are beginning to emerge in the wars that have engulfed the wider Middle East since the US and UK invaded Iraq in 2003. The most striking signs of this are the sieges of east Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, which have much in common though they were given vastly different coverage by the Western media. In both cities, Salafi-jihadi Sunni Arab insurgents were defending their last big urban strongholds against the Iraqi Army, in the case of Mosul, and the Syrian Army, in the case of east Aleppo.

      The capture of east Aleppo means that President Bashar al-Assad has essentially won the war and will stay in power. The Syrian security forces advanced and the armed resistance collapsed more swiftly than had been expected. Some 8,000 to 10,000 rebel fighters, pounded by artillery and air strikes and divided among themselves, were unable to stage a last stand in the ruins of the enclave, as happened in Homs three years ago, and is happening in Mosul now.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Online calculator cuts farms’ emissions

      It’s called the Cool Farm Tool (CFT) – an easy-to-use online calculator that helps farmers monitor their emissions of greenhouse gases.

      Agriculture accounts for about 15% of total global greenhouse gas emissions, though when fertiliser manufacture and use and the overall food processing sector are included in calculations, that figure is considerably higher.

      The land can also act as a vital carbon sink, soaking up or sequestering vast amounts of carbon: when soils are disturbed the carbon is released, adding to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

    • Thin Green Line: 20 Groups Standing Between You and Doom

      Finally, Sanders snapped back: “You know what? Hillary Clinton has been around there for a very, very long time. Some of these groups are, in fact, part of the establishment.”

      These groups responded with mock outrage, clustering before the cameras of MSDNC to denounce Bernie. How could Sanders possibly call us part of the “Establishment”! It’s ridiculous! He should be ashamed of himself!! He must apologize!!!

      But Sanders was absolutely right, of course. The Beltway network of liberal NGOS–from the Sierra Club to NOW–have become little more than dutiful subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. Many of them have enabled and abetted the party’s wholesale lurch toward neoliberalism without so much as a bleat, while howling against almost every minor infraction made by a Republican politician.

    • Top climate stories to watch in 2017

      2016 was something of a mixed bag for the global climate. On the one hand, renewable energy use has never been higher — but on the other hand, 2016 brought with it news of record fossil fuel consumption, as well.

      Meanwhile, the Paris Climate Agreement went into force on November 4, far sooner than anyone ever expected, signaling a new era of international climate action — but just a few days later, the U.S., the second-largest emitter in the world, elected a new president who has called global warming a hoax and pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as possible.

    • Record 3.5 tons of pangolin scales seized in China

      Pangolin scales, like rhinoceros horns, are just made of keratin, but that doesn’t stop traditional medicine practitioners from claiming they cure cancer and what-not. It’s why pangolins are the most trafficked animals in the world. China stopped a shipment worth around $2 million that required killing around 7,500 of the cure little anteaters.

    • The Fires of Standing Rock: How a New Resistance Movement was Ignited

      On Sunday, November 6, in Redwood Valley, California several hundred people gathered to listen to activists report back from Standing Rock where they had stood in solidarity with Native American Tribes, known as Water Protectors, opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline.

      One such speaker was Jassen Rodriguez, a Mishewal Wappo tribal member whose ancestral landbase includes much of Sonoma, Napa, and southern Lake counties. He had just returned from a three-week sojourn to North Dakota, where had had stayed at Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires, an encampment named for the seven bands of the Sioux people where a ceremonial fire has remained burning for many months.

  • Finance

    • Jean-Claude Juncker blocked EU curbs on tax avoidance, cables show

      The president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, spent years in his previous role as Luxembourg’s prime minister secretly blocking EU efforts to tackle tax avoidance by multinational corporations, leaked documents reveal.

      Years’ worth of confidential German diplomatic cables provide a candid account of Luxembourg’s obstructive manoeuvres inside one of Brussels’ most secretive committees.

      The code of conduct group on business taxation was set up almost 19 years ago to prevent member states from being played off against one another by increasingly powerful multinational businesses, eager to shift profits across borders and avoid tax.

    • Reducing Inequality in the Trump Era

      With Washington looking hopeless, it’s up to local communities to close the gap between the richest and the rest.

      [...]

      So if we can’t expect the Trump administration to work to stem rising inequality, how will we move forward?

      The victories of 2016, which involved organizing at the state and local levels to lift up workers and expand opportunities for all, show the type of innovative campaigns we’ll need. There are no illusions that change will come from Washington — the new team in town has made clear they’re not interested.

      That’s no reason to sit back and wait for another election. Progress can come from working within our own communities to push forward smart ideas that don’t need a sign-off from Congress or Trump.

      That work should start now. It remains, after all, the defining challenge of our time.

    • Trump Takes Credit for New Sprint Jobs He Had Nothing To Do With

      President-elect Donald Trump wasted no time taking credit for the thousands of new and returning American jobs announced by Sprint on Wednesday—opportunities which, as many are pointing out, the real estate mogul had very little to do with.

      Speaking to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump said Wednesday: “Because of what’s happening and the spirit and the hope I was just called by the head people at Sprint and they’re going to be bringing 5,000 jobs back to the United States.”

      “Also,” he continued, “OneWeb, a new company is going to be hiring 3,000 people so that is very exciting.”

      Later, he doubled down on that claim saying: “Because of me they’re doing 5,000 jobs in this country.”

    • What U.S. Tech Giants Face in Europe in 2017

      For American tech behemoths like Google and Facebook, Europe can be both a blessing and a curse.

      The region and its 500 million consumers are one of the companies’ most important overseas markets. And in cities from Lisbon to Ljubljana, people often can’t get enough YouTube videos, Amazon purchases and Twitter messages.

      Yet policy makers in the 28-member European Union have also become some of the most ardent critics of how Silicon Valley companies dominate much of the digital world. The criticisms include the companies’ perceived failure to pay local taxes and their collection of reams of personal information.

    • Defying Donald Trump’s Kleptocracy

      The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx predicted, would be marked by global capital being unable to expand and generate profits at former levels. Capitalists would begin to consume the government along with the physical and social structures that sustained them. Democracy, social welfare, electoral participation, the common good and investment in public transportation, roads, bridges, utilities, industry, education, ecosystem protection and health care would be sacrificed to feed the mania for short-term profit. These assaults would destroy the host. This is the stage of late capitalism that Donald Trump represents.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • We Do Not Live in “Post Truth” World, We Live in a World of Lies and We Always Have

      We do not live in a “post-truth” world, neither in the Middle East nor in the West – nor in Russia, for that matter. We live in a world of lies. And we always have lived in a world of lies.

      Just take a look at the wreckage of the Middle East with its history of people’s popular republics and its hateful dictators. They feast on dishonesty, although they all – bar the late Muammar al-Gaddafi – demand regular elections to make-believe their way back to power.

      Now, I suppose, it is we who have regular elections based on lies. So maybe Trump and the Arab autocrats will get on rather well. Trump already likes Field Marshal/President al-Sissi of Egypt, and he’s already got a golf course in Dubai. That he deals in lies, that he manufactures facts, should make him quite at home in the Middle East. Misogyny, bullying, threats to political opponents, authoritarianism, tyranny, torture, sneers at minorities: it’s part and parcel of the Arab world.

      And look at Israel. The new US ambassador-to-be – who might as well be the Israeli ambassador to the US – can’t wait to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. He seems to feel more antagonism towards the Jewish left in America than the Palestinians who claim East Jerusalem as a capital and whose state he has no interest in. Will Trump enrage the Arabs? Or will he get away with a little domestic rearrangement of the Israel embassy on the grounds that the Gulf Arabs, at least, know that Israel’s anti-Shiism – against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – fits in rather well with the Sunni potentates who’ve been funding Isis and Jabhat al-Nusrah and all the other jolly jihadis?

    • Trump’s Tweets Take a Turn for the Worse

      That Donald Trump is erratic, emotionally immature, and stunningly ignorant is hardly news. Neither is his fondness for communicating with the world via Twitter. What could be more fitting? One hundred forty characters are all that he can string together, and all his thoughts deserve.

      Lately, though, there is news about the Donald — not just because everything a President-elect does is newsworthy, but also because his tweets have taken a turn for the worse: from merely worrisome to downright alarming.

      Even the fools who voted for the Donald “to make America great again” must be noticing.

      All they ever wanted was the level of social and economic security of the years before the neoliberal (Clintonite) turn. They wanted to live in a world in which a man (always a man) could earn a family wage and in which “the American dream,” whatever that means (it seems to have something to do with upward social and economic mobility) is within every good (white) American’s reach; and in which troops, marching under the banner of Old Glory, always win the wars they fight. USA, Number One!

      Sore losers say Hillary lost because Trump voters were xenophobic and racist. Many of them were concerned about immigration — for dubious, but not entirely “deplorable,” reasons. Only a few were overtly racist, however. They weren’t even all white.

    • A Sour Holiday Season for Neocons

      Regarding Clinton’s defeat, her embrace of the neocon/liberal-hawk “regime change” obsessions siphoned off enthusiasm among the peace faction of the Democratic Party, a significant and activist part of the progressive movement.

      Clinton’s alignment with the neocon/liberal hawks may have helped her with the mainstream media, but the MSM has lost much of its credibility by making itself a handmaiden in leading the nation to wars and more wars.

      Average Americans also could feel the contempt that these elites had for the rest of us. The neocons and liberal hawks had come to believe in the CIA’s concept of “perception management,” feeling that the American people were items to be controlled, not the nation’s sovereigns to be informed and respected. Instead of “We the People,” Official Washington’s elites treated us like “Us the Sheep.”

    • Obama’s Support for International Law Draws Bipartisan Ire

      Here’s one way to look at it: The United States was the only country in the fifteen-member U.N. Security Council that did not support a resolution passed last week criticizing Israel for continuing to expand illegal settlements in the occupied territories.

      On the other hand, the Obama administration refused to veto the resolution—for which it is now drawing fire from both Republicans and Democrats. This opposition has come despite the resolution also calling on both the Israeli and Palestinian governments to prevent violence against civilians, condemn and combat terrorism, refrain from incitement, and comply with their obligations under international law.

    • Donald Trump victory sparks global women’s rights marches

      After a year of seismic shocks comes the protest and fightback. At least that is what activists plan with the first major demonstration of the year – the women’s march – planned for 30 cities around the world on 21 January, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the US.

      The women’s march on Washington has been given permission by state authorities to go ahead. Tens of thousands of women (and men, who are also welcome to join it) have already pledged to take part and plans for a sister rally in London are gaining support from writers, musicians and politicians.

      Organisers say the US election proved a “catalyst for a grassroots movement of women to assert the positive values that the politics of fear denies”.

    • Could It Have Been Different?

      Trump’s grandest promise — to “Make America Great Again” — is a resurrection of Ronald Reagan’s original 1980 campaign slogan and, remarkably, it worked yet again nearly four decades later. Little acknowledged, Reagan – along with the millions who voted for him – knew back then that the U.S. was no longer “great.” In the years separating the Reagan and Trump campaigns, the nine intervening administrations – Reagan (2 terms), Bush I (1 term), Clinton (2 terms), Bush II (2 terms) and Obama (2 terms) – failed to address the reasons for the nation’s loss of “greatness.” More troubling, each contributed to ending this alleged greatness.

      Trump won the election promising to break with the old – and failed – domestic and international policies of the inside-the-Beltway establishment symbolized by Hillary Clinton. His Cabinet picks suggest he plans to take the nation — and its people — in a new direction, one based on shortsightedness and self-serving opportunism. The nation faces enormous and radical challenges; Trump can be expected to significantly falter after an initial period of spectacular misdirection.

    • The War Against Alternative Information

      The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, setting aside $160 million to combat any “propaganda” that challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.

    • Days of Moderate Democratic Party ‘Are Over,’ Analyst Declares

      According to political commentator Van Jones, it’s a moment when the progressive wing of the party is going to rise.

      Speaking on Sunday to CNN, Jones told host Jake Tapper that the future stars of the party may be surprising, and pointed to Senator-elect for California Kamala Harris as an example.

      Harris, Jones, said, “is unreal.”

      “She’s going to be out there defending those DREAMer kids because they’re a big part of her constituency, but she’s got African-American roots. She’s got Asian roots. She’s female. She’s tough. She’s smart. She’s going to become a big deal,” he said.

      Indeed, The Hill described Harris, currently the state’s attorney general, as among the “10 incoming lawmakers to watch.”

    • As a Trump Administration Fast Approaches, Cities and Towns Gear Up for Political Resistance

      Back in March, when Donald Trump was facing off with two now-forgotten candidates for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, the small town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, was quietly protecting its citizens. At their annual town hall, residents voted unanimously for a city ordinance establishing the right to freedom from forced religious identification.

    • Fascism can’t be stopped by fact-checking

      Arendt, a German-born Jewish philosopher, wrote these words trying to make sense of Hitler’s Germany. The ways in which they resonate in today’s U.S. context is chilling. Arendt’s analysis here reminds me why fascism—including nascent neo-fascist forms—can’t be fact-checked.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Community Voices: On art and censorship, Junauda Petrus’ open letter to the city of Minneapolis

      I give thanks to the sacred, indigenous ancestors to this land and the ways they are influencing spirits in these times as we continue the journey to light and justice. I gives thanks to the ancestors of my blood, who guide my heart and have paved the way for my life as a healer through the realm of art. May I honor their memory by living into my truth.

    • 2016’s Assault On The Internet Was Brutal. Will 2017 Be Worse?

      Nothing may have had as bad of a year as the Internet.

      The Internet has been hit with an onslaught of criticism and suffered several setbacks in 2016: from relinquishment of American control over web address management, introduced surveillance measures in the United Kingdom, social media backlash for users’ hate speech and terrorist affiliations, to censorship and fake news.

      [...]

      The U.K. passed a surveillance bill in November that significantly expands the government’s spying powers, namely over the Internet. The Investigatory Powers Bill is considered so expansive, it’s informally called the “snoopers’ charter.” The European Union’s top court ruled the measure was illegal because it calls for the “general and indiscriminate” retention of people’s online web traffic, but it remains to be seen if the ruling will ultimately matter.

    • Press freedom organisation condemns tough censorship in Venezuela

      The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has expressed regret that the old year ended with the toughest censorship and restriction of the Venezuelan press following the announcement by the South American country’s oldest newspaper, El Impulso, that in 2017 it will no longer circulate in its print edition.

      The paper, founded in January 1904, announced in an editorial on its website that it would be circulating only until December 31 due to the lack of newsprint. It blamed the state-owned Alfredo Maneiro Editorial Corporation, which has a monopoly in the distribution of newsprint.

      The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Roberto Rock, condemned “the insolence with which the Venezuelan government is applying censorship in a manner that is as subtle as it is gross.”

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Pirates: You Can Click But You Can Hide

      In a big publicity campaign targeting all types of media and even paying cinema-goers, in 2004 the MPAA warned torrent users that being anonymous online wasn’t possible. You Can Click But You Can’t Hide, their famous slogan read. Now, coming up for an unlucky 13 years later, nothing could be further from the truth.

    • Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy
    • lecture: Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy

      Today virtually everything we do is monitored in some way. The collection, analysis and utilization of digital information about our clicks, swipes, likes, purchases, movements, behaviors and interests have become part of everyday life. While individuals become increasingly transparent, companies take control of the recorded data.

    • Privacy showdown: divorce lawyers could see your web history

      Australia’s new mandatory data retention scheme is headed for a big confrontation, as the Turnbull government moves to allow civil litigation lawyers access to the web, phone and email sessions of every private user.

      Since October 13, 2015, all telephony and internet service providers have been required by law to retain for two years all their clients’ metadata, including voice, text and email communications, time, date and device locations and internet sessions.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Not Working for Us

      The benefits extended to the personal as well. Jake invited me to sex parties, and I enthusiastically attended, and made friendships there that persist to this day. Some of those parties didn’t have any problems (that I noticed). But sometimes I saw interactions that made me uncomfortable. Sometimes I participated in questionable activities. Everybody in the room said “yes” in the moment — sometimes after discussion, sometimes with their body language screaming “no”. Jake and I never talked about those situations.

      Benefits accrued to organizations as well. It became routine for CCC to be mentioned above the fold in the NYT each Congress season. Noisebridge (co-founded by Jake) attained a certain fame, then a notoriety. It was exciting, but we saw the problems. We even called them out occasionally, but for years I said to myself, “he’s problematic but he does good work and his negative behavior is part and parcel of the special gift that makes him so effective.” Many others excused what they saw with a similar calculus.

      Being friends with Jake had worked for me. But “Works For Me” isn’t good enough. I’d privately warned women not to date him, but I wasn’t confronting the problems. I was covering them, hiding from them.

    • Rare Track Record: NYPD’s History Chronicling Hate Crimes

      As of Dec. 18, 2016, there had been 373 hate crimes reported to the New York Police Department. Crimes against Muslims were up 50 percent from the same time last year, rising to 33 from 22. Crimes involving sexual orientation were also up — to 101 from last year’s 74. Whites have been victims, too, the source of 16 reported crimes.

      The numbers reflect a distinctive effort by a law enforcement agency to track crimes driven by intolerance, for hate crimes are notoriously poorly reported across the country. Since 1980, however, the New York Police Department has operated a hate crime task force, and since 1994 it has diligently sent off its data on such crimes to the FBI.

    • Why ‘White Genocide’ is Key to the Earth’s Survival: White Genocide From Baldwin to Ciccariello-Maher

      White genocide would not only be good, it is necessary and even unavoidable; that is, if we are interested in the survival of the planet, humanity, and all life forms – though to be clear the phrase ‘white genocide’ is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps most accurate would be the concept of collective mass “white” ontological suicide or more simply put: the end of white supremacy. To clarify, a 140-character tweet cannot do justice to a necessary and timely analysis, so my intent is to do so here…. “White genocide” has little to do with violence or the physical death of actual living “white” people – or as renowned poet James Baldwin preferred to call them since 1979: “people who think they’re white” – but rather with the collective disinvestment amongst “people who think they’re white” from all forms of racial thinking and their own holding on to the benefits accrued directly and indirectly through a persistent global structure of white supremacy over the last 500 years.

      In the 1984 essay, “On Being White,” James Baldwin also stated (as others before and after him have as well) that “no one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.” That coercion was twofold: wreaked upon the bodies of indigenous inhabitants of these lands and the souls kidnapped, transported and enslaved through the Atlantic slave trade, on the one hand; but also through the legal and extralegal sanctioning and expectation that eastern and southern Europeans and Jews who were not initially

]]> http://techrights.org/2017/01/02/neptune-4-5-3-release/feed/ 0 Links 27/12/2016: Chakra GNU/Linux Updated, Preview of Fedora 26 http://techrights.org/2016/12/27/preview-of-fedora-26/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/27/preview-of-fedora-26/#comments Tue, 27 Dec 2016 19:05:19 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=98017

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Top 3 NFV & SDN Open Source Trends in 2016

    The first few years of open source work on software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) were defined by some nebulous goals. But this year, three clear trends emerged from the haze.

    First, the Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD) became really popular. It garnered so much attention in 2016 that its originator — On.Lab‘s Open Network Operating System (ONOS) — established CORD as a separate open source entity.

  • Reality Check: Open source and the coming disruption of the telecom value chain

    The convergence between the internet and telecommunications worlds is bringing to the forefront different approaches to deploying services. In the internet world, large cloud players built their data centers using white box hardware and open source software to ease and improve service delivery. In the process, they achieved unparalleled scale and cost efficiency. On the other hand, telecom service providers have relied on specialized vendors, whose solutions were based on proprietary, in-house implementations of standards-based technologies. This lengthens the service creation cycle and reduces the ability of service providers to compete effectively especially with over-the-top players.

  • Tor at the Heart: Tahoe-LAFS

    Tahoe-LAFS is a free and open source decentralized data storage system, with provider-independent security and fine-grained access control. This means that data stored using Tahoe-LAFS remains confidential and retrievable even if some storage servers fail or are taken over by an attacker.

    Using a Tahoe-LAFS client, you turn a large file into a redundant collection of shares referenced via a filecap. Shares are encrypted chunks of data distributed across many storage servers. A filecap is a short cryptographic string containing enough information to retrieve, re-assemble and decrypt the shares. Filecaps come in up to three variants: a read-cap, a verify-cap and (for mutable files) a write-cap.

    Starting with version 1.12.0, Tahoe-LAFS has added Tor support to give users the option of connecting anonymously and to give node operators the option of offering anonymous services.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome Remote Desktop Setup: Windows/MacOS/Linux

        Chrome Remote Desktop has been around since the early days of Chrome. Even before Chrome OS existed, Chrome Remote Desktop was a shining example of how powerful the Chrome apps could be.

      • How to use Chrome Remote Desktop to help friends and family with new devices

        If you’re anything like me, you spend basically all of your time on “holiday” not with family enjoying a nice cup of cocoa, but rather fixing and setting up all their devices. This can be annoying itself, but when you go back home, it can be even more of a pain helping out remotely without being able to see what they see. One app from Google that can help in this situation — it’s been available for Chrome and Chrome OS for a while now — is Chrome Remote Desktop.

    • Mozilla

      • Ex-Mozilla dev talks about Firefox

        World-renown programmer and ex-Mozilla developer Risitas, the CIO of the highly prestigious Spanish alt-browser company Las Paelleras S.A., talks about Firefox in an exclusive interview.

  • Education

    • Kids on Computers establishes computer labs in five countries

      Linux and open source software are not just fueling charities, they are gifting the freedom of education and knowledge to the people the charities are helping because of the low cost, yes, but also the exceptional technology. This sentiment is proven when you look at the work the Linux Foundation does supporting a variety of community initiatives and organizations that are using Linux and open source software.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • 3 keys to unlocking your 2017 open organization resolutions [Ed: openwashing of Red Hat and book promotion for Red Hat's CEO]
    • Thank you, …we’re not there yet.

      Expose those who abuse the open source label and community: Each year we discover more and more disingenuous organizations that promise open source software, yet do not release their work under an OSI approved open source license, risking our software freedom, or, promise the ideals of open source software but in fact only use the label to promote their proprietary interests. We want to raise $2,500 to develop a system to verify claims of open source licensing made through crowd-funding efforts.

  • BSD

    • NewGVN Merged Into LLVM

      The long in-development “NewGVN” code to provide a new global value numbering (GVN) algorithm within the LLVM code-base has been merged to master.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • A Grassroots Case Study: Cal Poly’s Free Culture Club

      Among the ways in which the Electronic Frontier Alliance supports the digital rights movement is amplifying creative grassroots tactics that concerned individuals around the country are using to promote digital civil liberties. By finding ways to demonstrate these principles within their community, even small groups can help shift cultural norms, as well as public policy.

      The Free Culture Club, a student organization at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, is supporting creativity and access to knowledge by providing a repository of openly licensed intellectual works in a common campus space.

    • Science Needs an Upgrade to ‘Open’

      For too long, much of our science has been kept behind doors that are both closed and locked. It’s past time to bring openness to science, in much the same way we’re bringing openness to software.

  • Programming/Development

    • DevLog: Meson and Beast threading (33c3)

      Meson also has/had a lot of quirks (examples #785, #786, #753) and wasn’t really easier to use than our GNU Make setup. At least for me – given that I know GNU Make very well. The number one advantage of Meson was overcome with migrating Rapicorn to use a non-recursive Makefile (I find dependencies can still be expressed much better in Make than Meson), since parallel GNU Make can be just as fast as Ninja for small to medium sized projects.

Leftovers

  • Muslim-owned restaurant offers elderly and homeless free meals on Christmas Day so ‘no one eats alone’

    A Muslim-owned restaurant in London is offering a three-course meal to homeless and elderly people on Christmas Day so that “no one eats alone”.

    Shish Restaurant, in Sidcup, is asking local residents to spread the word of its offer and has put up posters saying “We are here to sit with you” on 25 December.

    The restaurant urged people to share its plan through social media – where the initiative was widely praised.

  • George Michael was a ‘generous philanthropist’ who anonymously donated millions to charity

    George Michael was secretly trying to heal the pain around the world.

    The superstar singer — who died on Sunday at 53 — never boasted about his charitable side, but now countless people are coming forward to share stories of Michael’s giving ways.

    “A woman on ‘Deal Or No Deal’ told us she needed £15k for IVF treatment. George Michael secretly phoned the next day and gave her the £15k,” game show host Richard Osmond tweeted on Monday.

  • People want to tear down these architectural masterpieces because they’re too depressing

    The term Brutalism, or New Brutalism, was coined to describe an emerging international style of architecture in the early 1950s. The name referenced Le Corbusier’s use of “béton brut,” or unfinished concrete, and described large, usually government or institutional buildings characterized by the rejection of Beaux-Arts styles. A relatively cheap way to build, Brutalism grew popular in post-war Europe and emerging countries like India and the eastern bloc. But architects were looking for more than cost cutting: for many, Brutalism represented a rejection of bourgeois comforts and pretense. The movement emphasized the valuation of existing materials (no paint, no dressings), the importance of image (an imposing presence) and the “clear exhibition of structure” to lay bare a building’s function.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Russia shocked by video of bear being crushed to death

      Russian investigators are looking into a disturbing video of a bear being crushed to death by a group of men riding in off-road vehicles over Siberian tundra.

      In the video, apparently shot by one of the assailants, two trucks normally used by Russian oil and mining workers in off-road conditions repeatedly drive over a brown bear sitting in the snow.

      Investigators in Russia’s Yakutia region, which spans the Siberian Arctic, said they were examining the incident to determine whether it constitutes an animal cruelty criminal offence.

      In the clip, which went viral on Tuesday and was picked up by state media, one of the men in the truck shouts “Squash him! Squash him!” and squeals as the vehicle runs over the bear.

    • Mothers, Babies on Navajo Nation Exposed to High Levels of Uranium

      Researchers with the Navajo Birth Cohort Study aren’t looking for simple answers about how uranium exposure affects health. We already know—and have known for decades—that contact with uranium can cause kidney disease and lung cancer.

      This study is the first to look at what chronic, long-term exposure from all possible sources of uranium contamination—air, water, plants, wildlife, livestock and land—does down through the generations in a Native American community.

      Since the study began in 2012, over 750 families have enrolled and 600 babies have been born to those families, said Dr. Johnnye Lewis, director of the Community Environmental Health Program & Center for Native Environmental Health Equity Research at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center and NBCS principal investigator.

  • Security

    • SQL is Insecure

      SQL is insecure, tell everyone. If you use SQL, your website will get hacked. Tell everyone.

      I saw the news that the US Elections Agency was hacked by a SQL injection attack and I kind of lost it. It’s been well over two decades since prepared statements were introduced. We’ve educated and advised developers about how to avoid SQL injection, yet it still happens. If education failed, all we can do is shame developers into never using SQL.

      I actually really like SQL, I’ve even made a SQL dialect. SQL’s relational algebra is expressive, probably more so than any other NoSQL database I know of. But developers have proven far too often that it’s simply too difficult to know when to use prepared statements or just concatenate strings — it’s time we just abandon SQL altogether. It isn’t worth it. It’s time we called for all government’s to ban use of SQL databases in government contracts and in healthcare. There must be utter clarity.

    • Cyber-criminals target African countries with ransom-ware

      Once again Conficker retained its position as the world’s most prevalent malware, responsible for 15% of recognised attacks. Second-placed Locky, which only started its distribution in February of this year, was responsible for 6% of all attacks, and third-placed Sality was responsible for 5% of known attacks. Overall, the top ten malware families were responsible for 45% of all known attacks.

    • It’s Incredibly Easy to Tamper with Someone’s Flight Plan, Anywhere on the Globe

      It’s easier than many people realize to modify someone else’s flight booking, or cancel their flight altogether, because airlines rely on old, unsecured systems for processing customers’ travel plans, researchers will explain at the Chaos Communication Congress hacking festival on Tuesday. The issues predominantly center around the lack of any meaningful authentication for customers requesting their flight information.

      The issues highlight how a decades-old system is still in constant, heavy use, despite being susceptible to fairly simple attacks and with no clear means for a solution.

      “Whenever you take a trip, you are in one or more of these systems,” security researcher Karsten Nohl told Motherboard in a phone call ahead of his and co-researcher Nemanja Nikodijevic’s talk.

    • Open source risks and rewards – why team structure matters

      An impressive and user-friendly digital presence is an indispensable asset to any brand. It is often the first point of contact for customers who expect and demand great functionality and engaging content across multiple platforms. The finding that nearly half of us won’t wait even three seconds for a website to load bears witness to ever increasing customer expectations which must be met.

      Partnership with a digital agency can be a great way to keep up to speed with rapid change and innovation but to ensure the very best outcome, both client and agency need to find an optimum commercial, creative and secure cultural fit. This should be a priority for both sides from the very first pitch. The promise of exceptional creativity and customer experience is one thing, but considering the more practical aspects of how the relationship will work is entirely another.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Is Mirai Really as Black as It’s Being Painted?

      An important feature of the way the Mirai botnet scans devices is that the bot uses a login and password dictionary when trying to connect to a device. The author of the original Mirai included a relatively small list of logins and passwords for connecting to different devices. However, we have seen a significant expansion of the login and password list since then, achieved by including default logins and passwords for a variety of IoT devices, which means that multiple modifications of the bot now exist.

      [...]

      If you ignore trivial combinations like “root:root” or “admin:admin”, you can get a good idea of which equipment the botnet is looking for. For example, the pairs “root:xc3511” and “root:vizxv” are default accounts for IP cameras made by rather large Chinese manufacturers.

    • Traveling Computer Security

      7 things all travelers with smartphones and computers should do to be secure while traveling.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Suspect in Berlin market attack was radicalized in an Italian jail

      When Anis Amri washed up on European shores in a migrant boat in April 2011, he landed on the windswept Italian island of Lampedusa already a fugitive. Sought in his native Tunisia for hijacking a van with a gang of thieves, the frustrated Italians would jail him for arson and violent assault at his migrant reception center for minors on the isle of Sicily.

    • First female Afghan Air Force pilot has applied for asylum to the United States

      The first female pilot to serve in Afghanistan’s air force has applied for asylum in the United States because she is “scared” for her life.

      Captain Niloofar Rahmani, 25, made headlines when she completed her training in 2013, having defied her parents to join the programme in Texas.

      She persisted despite receiving death threats during and after she completed her training.

    • First Female Pilot in Afghanistan Requests Asylum in U.S.

      As the first female airplane pilot in Afghanistan, Niloofar Rahmani became a powerful symbol of what women could accomplish in the post-Taliban era. But in the ultraconservative country, the limelight also brought threats, sending her into hiding from insurgents and vengeful relatives.

    • Intent on Unsettling E.U., Russia Taps Foot Soldiers From the Fringe

      To his neighbors in a village in western Hungary, 76-year-old Istvan Gyorkos was just an old man who mostly kept to himself. Hardly anyone looked askance at his passion for guns and for training youths in paramilitary tactics.

      In late October, however, Mr. Gyorkos, a veteran neo-Nazi and the leader of a tiny fringe outfit called the Hungarian National Front, suddenly took on a more sinister visage when, according to Hungarian police officers who raided his home in search of illegal weapons, he shot and killed a member of the police team with an assault rifle. Members of his family say the dead policeman was shot by a fellow officer.

      The saga then took an even stranger turn: Hungarian intelligence officials told a parliamentary committee in Budapest that Mr. Gyorkos had for years been under scrutiny for his role in a network of extremists linked to and encouraged by Russia. So close was the relationship, the committee heard, that Russian military intelligence officers, masquerading as diplomats, staged regular mock combat exercises using plastic guns with neo-Nazi activists near Mr. Gyorkos’s home.

    • A Bigger Problem Than ISIS?

      The next day, Vice-President Joe Biden telephoned Masoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdish region, and urged him to retake the dam as quickly as possible. American officials feared that ISIS might try to blow it up, engulfing Mosul and a string of cities all the way to Baghdad in a colossal wave. Ten days later, after an intense struggle, Kurdish forces pushed out the ISIS fighters and took control of the dam.

      But, in the months that followed, American officials inspected the dam and became concerned that it was on the brink of collapse. The problem wasn’t structural: the dam had been built to survive an aerial bombardment. (In fact, during the Gulf War, American jets bombed its generator, but the dam remained intact.) The problem, according to Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-American civil engineer who has served as an adviser on the dam, is that “it’s just in the wrong place.” Completed in 1984, the dam sits on a foundation of soluble rock. To keep it stable, hundreds of employees have to work around the clock, pumping a cement mixture into the earth below. Without continuous maintenance, the rock beneath would wash away, causing the dam to sink and then break apart. But Iraq’s recent history has not been conducive to that kind of vigilance.

    • German Resistance to Russia Detente

      The German political hierarchy and major media remain hostile to any détente with Russia, but the ground may be shifting under the feet of Chancellor Merkel and her allies, reports Gilbert Doctorow.

    • Hong Kong, where history has become a battleground for Beijing

      Stepping off the subway in his army uniform, Victor Yu prepared to face the onslaught ahead. Instead of charging into a crowd armed with rifles, he was met with smartphones, overwhelmed on a street in Hong Kong by pictures and selfies rather than enemy fire.

      Yu is a member of Watershed, a local historical group working to raise awareness of what they feel is Hong Kong’s forgotten history. The performance comes at a time when instruction of the city’s history is becoming increasingly politicised, with recent government attempts to bury details that may be embarrassing for China.

    • Israel threatens to give Trump ‘evidence’ that Obama orchestrated UN resolution

      Israel has escalated its already furious war with the outgoing US administration, claiming that it has “rather hard” evidence that Barack Obama was behind a critical UN security council resolution criticising Israeli settlement building, and threatening to hand over the material to Donald Trump.

      The latest comments come a day after the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, was summoned by Netanyahu to explain why the US did not veto the vote and instead abstained.

    • Sanders Says Trump’s “Dangerous” Nuclear Arms Race Talk Must Be Challenged

      Sen. Bernie Sanders has made it known that Donald Trump should not go unchallenged by his congressional colleagues as troubling comments by the President-elect about nuclear weapons this week sparked alarm across the United States and the world.

      Following an initial out-of-the-blue tweet Thursday saying the U.S. should “expand” its nuclear arsenal followed by “clarifying” remarks Friday to MSNBC in which Trump said, “Let it be an arms race,” Sanders responded: “It’s a miracle a nuclear weapon hasn’t been used in war since 1945. Congress can’t allow the Tweeter in Chief to start a nuclear arms race.”

    • Israel says ‘reducing’ ties with nations over UN vote

      Israel’s foreign ministry said Tuesday the country was “reducing” ties with nations that voted for last week’s UN Security Council resolution demanding a halt to settlement building in Palestinian territory.

      Refuting reports that ties had been suspended, foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said in a message to journalists that Israel was “temporarily reducing” visits and work with embassies, without providing further details.

      Deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely said Tuesday she was concerned that Israel would miss opportunities to explain its position by cancelling visits, but that she supported making clear “you can’t take Israel for granted.”

    • World War Three, by Mistake

      The personnel who command, operate, and maintain the Minuteman III have also become grounds for concern. In 2013, the two-star general in charge of the entire Minuteman force was removed from duty after going on a drunken bender during a visit to Russia, behaving inappropriately with young Russian women, asking repeatedly if he could sing with a Beatles cover band at a Mexican restaurant in Moscow, and insulting his military hosts. The following year, almost a hundred Minuteman launch officers were disciplined for cheating on their proficiency exams. In 2015, three launch officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base, in Montana, were dismissed for using illegal drugs, including ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. That same year, a launch officer at Minot Air Force Base, in North Dakota, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for heading a violent street gang, distributing drugs, sexually assaulting a girl under the age of sixteen, and using psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen. As the job title implies, launch officers are entrusted with the keys for launching intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • ‘This is possible. We did it’: the week Portugal ran on renewables

      If you can keep your gaze off the hilltops, imagine away the pylons and forget the occasional tractor of an uncertain vintage coughing along the narrow roads, little appears to have changed in the valleys of north-eastern Portugal for decades, perhaps even centuries.

      The gnarled alvarinho vines have been relieved of their fruit to make vinho verde, an old woman in black herds her sheep through a hamlet and hungry eagles hover over the fields, scanning the land for lunch.

      But look up, past the villages, the clumps of stout ponies and the wolf-haunted forests of pine, oak and eucalyptus, and the harbingers of an environmental revolution are silhouetted against the December sky.

    • New Study ‘Sounds Alarm’ on Another Climate Feedback Loop

      The loss of Arctic sea ice has already been shown to be part of a positive feedback loop driving climate change, and a recent study published in the journal Nature puts the spotlight on what appears to be another of these feedback loops.

      It has to do with soil, currently one of Earth’s carbon sinks. But warming may lead to soils releasing, rather than sequestering, carbon.

      As study co-authorJohn Blair, university distinguished professor of biology at Kansas State University, explained, “Globally, soils hold more than twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, so even a relatively small increase in release of carbon from the Earth’s soils can have a large impact on atmospheric greenhouse gases and future warming.”

      For the study, the researchers took data from over four dozen sites across the globe representing a variety of ecosystems and heated them approximately one degree Celsius.

    • Arctic Waters Have Been Rescued From Drilling, But What About the Land?

      I’d like to reframe what happened in early November as the opposite of tragedy. Instead of looking at the election results through a lens of doom and gloom, let us view this moment in history as a leverage point, one that has the ability to unite people across the country and the world.

    • Trump could face the ‘biggest trial of the century’ — over climate change

      A few weeks ago, a federal judge in Oregon made headlines when she ruled that a groundbreaking climate lawsuit will proceed to trial. And some experts say its outcome could rewrite the future of climate policy in the United States.

      The case, brought by 21 youths aged 9 to 20, claims that the federal government isn’t doing enough to address the problem of climate change to protect their planet’s future — and that, they charge, is a violation of their constitutional rights on the most basic level. The case has already received widespread attention, even garnering the support of well-known climate scientist James Hansen, who has also joined as a plaintiff on behalf of his granddaughter and as a guardian for “future generations.”

    • Renewable Energy: An Exxon Investigation Given Second Life as Trump Taps Exec for Cabinet

      In 2015, Neela Banerjee, John H. Cushman Jr., David Hasemyer and Lisa Song of Inside Climate News spent close to a year producing “Exxon: The Road Not Taken” — a comprehensive portrait of four decades of the oil giant’s relationship with climate science. The reporting showed, among other things, how Exxon lobbied against action on greenhouse gases.

      The work won an array of awards and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service, and the hard-won reporting has renewed relevance now that Exxon’s chairman and chief executive officer, Rex Tillerson, has been picked by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the State Department.

      The project on Exxon was just the latest triumph for Inside Climate News. The news organization, founded in 2007, has become widely respected for its in-depth journalism. Its team of reporters pursue both news and investigative breakthroughs related to human-driven global warming and efforts to move beyond fossil fuels.

    • 2016 was the year solar panels finally became cheaper than fossil fuels. Just wait for 2017

      The renewable energy future will arrive when installing new solar panels is cheaper than a comparable investment in coal, natural gas or other options. If you ask the World Economic Forum (WEF), the day has arrived.

      Solar and wind is now the same price or cheaper than new fossil fuel capacity in more than 30 countries, the WEF reported in December (pdf). As prices for solar and wind power continue their precipitous fall, two-thirds of all nations will reach the point known as “grid parity” within a few years, even without subsidies. “Renewable energy has reached a tipping point,” Michael Drexler, who leads infrastructure and development investing at the WEF, said in a statement. “It is not only a commercially viable option, but an outright compelling investment opportunity with long-term, stable, inflation-protected returns.”

  • Finance

    • Online banking access soon guaranteed for EU citizens

      Finland has followed the European Union’s lead and reformed its laws to grant citizens the universal right to open a bank account and receive online banking access codes, regardless of their place of residence in the union. How the change, which will come into effect on 1 January 2017, will affect foreigners from outside the EU’s access to bank services in Finland remains to be seen.

    • Apple CEO Tim Cook Met With Trump to “Engage” on Gigantic Corporate Tax Cut

      Why did executives from 11 of America’s biggest technology companies obediently show up when they were summoned by the president-elect to meet at Trump Tower?

      Some might suspect it has something to do with the $560 billion in profits those companies have stashed overseas — and refuse to bring back until the U.S. government gives them an enormous tax break.

      Apple CEO Tim Cook has now confirmed that that was indeed part of his motivation to attend the tech summit with Donald Trump.

      On Tuesday, TechCrunch obtained Cook’s response on Apple’s internal network to a question from an employee about the Trump meeting.

    • Private firms earn £500m from government’s fit-to-work scheme

      Two private firms have earned more than £500m in taxpayers’ money for carrying out controversial work capability assessments.

      The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) paid Atos and Capita £507m for the “fit-to-work” tests between 2013 and 2016, despite fierce criticism of their services by MPs.

      Figures up until September this year reported by the Daily Mirror suggest that 61% of the 90,000 claimants who appealed against personal independent payment (PIP) decisions surrounding their benefits by the DWP, based on these companies’ assessments, won their case at tribunal. The DWP said it was unsure where this figure came from.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Donald Trump and the Triumph of Climate-Change Denial

      Denial of the broad scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of global warming could become a guiding principle of Donald Trump’s presidential administration. Though it’s difficult to pin down exactly what Trump thinks about climate change, he has a well-established track record of skepticism and denial. He has called global warming a “hoax,” insisted while campaigning for the Republican nomination that he’s “not a big believer in man-made climate change,” and recently suggested that “nobody really knows” if climate change exists. Trump also plans to nominate Republicans to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department who have expressed skepticism toward the scientific agreement on human-caused global warming.

    • ‘Queen backed Brexit’, BBC political editor told – but she decided NOT to report it

      The BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg has admitted that she was told that the Queen backed EU but decided not to report.

    • Rupert returns

      21st Century Fox – the Murdoch family’s entertainment conglomerate – is bidding for the 61% of satellite broadcaster Sky it does not own. Predictably, alarm bells are ringing? What is at stake?

    • A Quarter of Florida’s Black Citizens Can’t Vote. A New Referendum Could Change That.

      For more than a century, the state of Florida has presided over one of American history’s single most effective and enduring efforts to disenfranchise voters. By far the most populous of the three states that strip lifelong voting rights from people with felony convictions, Florida is home to some 1.5 million residents who can never again cast a ballot unless pardoned by the state’s governor, according to a calculation by The Sentencing Project.

      Florida’s legions of disenfranchised voters are disproportionately Democrat-leaning minorities — including nearly a quarter of Florida’s black population — numbers that advocates say amount to a long-standing and often ignored civil rights catastrophe. This racial skew means that the state’s mass disenfranchisement could have changed the outcome of some particularly important elections — such as Bush v. Gore — and thus the direction of modern American history itself. Most recently, after the state’s Republican governor clamped down on the ability of ex-felons to have their rights restored, Donald Trump won the crucial swing state by a margin less than a tenth the size of the state’s disenfranchised population, leading some to question the effect that felony disenfranchisement may have had on the size of Trump’s Electoral College win.

    • “The Apprentice” Employees Feared Professional Reprisal Over Leaks

      After the infamous “grab her by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape, many expected footage of Donald Trump’s hundreds of hours in “The Apprentice” boardroom to yield something just as incendiary. But outtakes from the show were never leaked. One of the plausible reasons why this footage hasn’t seen the light of day is that, simply put, many of the employees with access to the footage feared the end of their careers.

      It’s a concern that highlights the dangers of working in an industry without job security or union representation.

      On a Seattle radio show this week, comedian Tom Arnold claimed the existence of an old edited video of Trump “saying every dirty, offensive, racist thing ever.” Explaining why “The Apprentice” staffers who made the reel never tried to release it, Arnold said, “They were scared to death. They were scared of (Trump’s) people. They’re scared they’ll never work again.”

    • Trump’s Disappearing ‘Neutral Guy’

      President-elect Trump’s attack on the U.S. abstention to a U.N. vote condemning illegal Israeli settlements raises doubts about his vow to be a “neutral guy” on Palestinian issues, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Bernie Sanders: Corporate Media is a Threat to Democracy

      Three weeks after the election of Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders spoke at the Free Library of Philadelphia as part of his “Our Revolution” book tour. He spoke harshly about the corporate media. “What media does and what media loves is conflict and political gossip and polls and fundraising and all that stuff,” Sanders said. “What media loves is to focus on the candidates. What the American people, I believe, want is for us to focus on them, not the candidates, not anymore.”

    • Trump’s Election Has Led to Massive Wave of Donations to Progressive Groups

      If there is any upside to the U.S. presidential election, it could be that progressive causes around the country are reporting an “unprecedented” surge in donations, the Guardian wrote on Sunday.

      In the wake of the election that vindicated Donald Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic campaign, many Americans are turning their despair into action, supporting a range of organizations that fight for equality and civil rights.

      Planned Parenthood, which has quickly become a target of the newly emboldened Republican party, has received more than 300,000 donations since November 8, which is 40 times higher than its normal rate, the Guardian’s Joanna Walters reports.

    • President Duterte of the Philippines for Dummies

      When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ascended to power in 1999, almost no one in the West, in Asia and even in most of the Latin American countries knew much about his new militant revolutionary anti-imperialism. From the mass media outlets like CNN and the BBC, to local televisions and newspapers (influenced or directly sponsored by Western sources), the ‘information’ that was flowing was clearly biased, extremely critical, and even derogatory.

      A few months into his rule, I came to Caracas and was told repeatedly by several local journalists: “Almost all of us are supporting President Chavez, but we’d be fired if we’d dare to write one single article in his support.”

      In New York City and Paris, in Buenos Aires and Hong Kong, the then consensus was almost unanimous: “Chavez was a vulgar populist, a demagogue, a military strongman, and potentially a ‘dangerous dictator’”.

      In South Korea and the UK, in Qatar and Turkey, people who could hardly place Venezuela on the world map, were expressing their ‘strong opinions’, mocking and smearing the man who would later be revered as a Latin American hero. Even many of those who would usually ‘distrust’ mainstream media were then clearly convinced about the sinister nature of the Process and the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’.

      History repeats itself.

      Now President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is demonized and ‘mistrusted’, ridiculed and dismissed as a demagogue, condemned as a rough element, mocked as a buffoon.

      In his own country he is enjoying the highest popularity rating of any president in its history: at least well over 70 percent, but often even over 80 percent.

    • Tough-Talking Philippine President Duterte

      Now the process to discredit the rebellious President of the Philippines is already in full swing. Would Duterte’s liberal Vice-President Leni Robredo (recently expelled from the cabinet), be elevated by the Western establishment to stardom? She is pro-Washington, she is against all Duterte’s ‘wars,’ and, above all, she is against his increasingly close relationship with China. She could soon join the band of the ‘Color Revolutions’ leaders, as she leads the “yellow” Liberal Party.

    • [Old] It’s ON! Between Duterte and America

      The US seems to be embedded in a colonial mindset when it comes to the Philippines, something along the lines of “we’ve been selflessly looking after the Philippines for a century, and that thug Duterte won’t be allowed to screw that up during his brief (maybe curtailed) presidency.”

    • [Old] Duterte’s Death Squads, and Ours

      Duterte was right to be agitated. Typically, the United States calls attention to the deficiencies in a country’s human rights record as a prelude to invasion.

      Duterte cannot plead innocent in the matter of extrajudicial killings. Before he became President at the end of June, Duterte had been mayor of Davao, the Philippines’ third-largest city. During Duterte’s 22 years as mayor one thousand people were killed by the so-called Davao Death Squads. The victims are people suspected of selling or even just using drugs.

    • The Continuing Muddle at a Pro-Trump Political Committee

      A political action committee that backed Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency is continuing to flout campaign finance laws.

      Earlier this month, ProPublica reported that the America Comes First PAC had violated the rules by not disclosing the source of its funding before Election Day and by exceeding caps on contribution amounts.

      America Comes First gave $115,000 to Trump Victory, a group that raised money for the Trump campaign and for national and state-level Republican groups. It now ranks as the second-biggest PAC contributor to Trump Victory, according to a list compiled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics — behind GEO Group, a private prison company.

      After the ProPublica article was published, the treasurer of the PAC, David Schamens, said the group’s filings with the Federal Election Commission were inaccurate, and that they would be amended. Last week they were — but the amended filing includes new irregularities.

    • Under Cover of Christmas, Obama Establishes Controversial Anti-Propaganda Agency

      In the final hours before the Christmas holiday weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday quietly signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law—and buried within the $619 billion military budget (pdf) is a controversial provision that establishes a national anti-propaganda center that critics warn could be dangerous for press freedoms.

      The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, introduced by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, establishes the Global Engagement Center under the State Department which coordinates efforts to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United Sates national security interests.”

      Further, the law authorizes grants to non-governmental agencies to help “collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda” directed at the U.S. and its allies, as well as “counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability” of the U.S. and allied nations.

    • Chris Hedges Explores the New McCarthyism With Historian Ellen Schrecker

      On his RT show “On Contact,” Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges explores the rise of a new McCarthyism with Yeshiva University professor Ellen Schrecker, author of “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America.”

      Hedges and Schrecker examine the role of President-elect Donald Trump and the impact the suppression of dissent has had on higher education.

    • Voter ID proposal could disenfranchise millions, Labour warns

      Millions of people may be disenfranchised by the government’s plans to trial asking for ID in order to vote, Labour has said.

      Cat Smith, Labour’s shadow minister for voter engagement, raised concerns that 7.5% of the electorate may not have the right kind of identification in order to exercise their right to vote.

      “Labour supports measures to tackle electoral fraud and will be backing a number of the reasonable proposals planned by the government,” she said on Tuesday. “However, requiring voters to produce specific forms of photo ID risks denying millions of electors a vote.

      “A year ago the Electoral Commission reported that 3.5 million electors – 7.5% of the electorate – would have no acceptable piece of photo ID. Under the government’s proposals, these voters would either be denied a vote entirely, or in other trial areas, required to produce multiple pieces of ID, ‘one from group A, one from group B’.

    • Donald Trump, Republicans threaten to get back at UN for Israel resolution

      President-elect Donald Trump is joining the cavalcade of Republicans who are denouncing the United Nations over its Friday resolution to stop Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

    • Alt-right leaders are predicting a “revolt” if Donald Trump doesn’t do their bidding

      ist movement known as the alt right are rumbling early discontent at the prospect of President-elect Donald Trump not doing their bidding.

      “In January Trump will start governing and will have to make compromises,” said Holocaust denier and Taki magazine writer David Cole in an interview with The Guardian on Tuesday. “Even small ones will trigger squabbles between the ‘alt-right.’ ‘Trump betrayed us.’ ‘No, you’re betraying us for saying Trump betrayed us.’ And so on. The alt-right’s appearance of influence will diminish more and more as they start to fight amongst themselves.”

      Jared Taylor, the creator of so-called “race-realist” magazine American Renaissance, denounced Trump for rolling back one of his core campaign pledges on immigration.

      “At first he promised to send back every illegal immigrant,” Taylor said to The Guardian. “Now he is waffling on that.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Obama Pulls Cybercommand Control From NSA; Changes To Take Effect Whenever

      The NSA will have to satisfy itself with being the most powerful intelligence agency in the world. President Obama, rushing through some last-minute presidential business before handing over the title to an aspiring plutocrat, has split up the nation’s cyberware command. This siloing prevents Cybercom from being run by the same military officer who oversees the NSA.

      [...]

      The offensive end of the nation’s cyberwarfare will now have its own leader, which points towards an increase in offensive efforts, rather than tighter handling of the reins.

      Sticking the NSA with defense doesn’t make it happy, considering the wealth of offensive weapons it has at its disposal. But having a new singular focus may help it refine its pitch for a cut of some unfiltered domestic data. The NSA would rather be in on the ground floor of the information sharing forced on private companies by the recent passage of cybersecurity legislation. If it can defend the government’s most sensitive networks, surely it can be trusted handling the civilian side as well?

      Obama’s approval of the defense spending bill may be putting different hats on different individuals, but his letter also notes that the more things change, the more things aren’t really going to change for the foreseeable future.

    • Newly Declassified House Intel Report on Snowden Is “Rifled With Obvious Falsehoods”

      The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday unveiled its full 37-page report on its three-year investigation into Edward Snowden, drawing even more criticism for conclusions that have been called biased by supporters of the former NSA contractor.

      The report, released just days before a holiday weekend, is an extended version of a highly acerbic — and disputed — unclassified summary the committee published in September, describing the former NSA contractor as a “serial exaggerator and fabricator.”

      Snowden and other critics have vehemently denied the report’s conclusions.

      The House Committee authors allege Snowden’s concerns had more to do with petty workplace spats than moral uncertainty, citing interviews with his coworkers as well as his superiors — and suggest that he is not legally a whistleblower because he did not take advantage of internal channels available for formal complaints such as Congress and the inspector general.

      Snowden quickly derided the report, which delves into his personal and professional life, often citing seemingly petty workplace grievances. He tweeted to his more than 2.5 million followers that the document is “rifled with obvious falsehoods” — citing reporting by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Barton Gellman, who has also criticized the report.

      The extended report, according to U.S. News & World Report, actually addresses some factual concerns critics had about the summary published in September. The original report argued Snowden overstated his injuries and lied about his education, while the full investigation includes contrary evidence.

    • EU Court slams UK data retention surveillance regime

      Here’s our quick overview of what the CJEU has told the UK and Sweden they must do to fix requirements for data retention.

    • Virtual Reality Allows the Most Detailed, Intimate Digital Surveillance Yet

      Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on stage wearing a virtual reality headset, feigning surprise at an expressive cartoon simulacrum that seemed to perfectly follow his every gesture.

      The audience laughed. Zuckerberg was in the middle of what he described as the first live demo inside VR, manipulating his digital avatar to show off the new social features of the Rift headset from Facebook subsidiary Oculus. The venue was an Oculus developer conference convened earlier this fall in San Jose. Moments later, Zuckerberg and two Oculus employees were transported to his glass-enclosed office at Facebook, and then to his infamously sequestered home in Palo Alto. Using the Rift and its newly revealed Touch hand controllers, their avatars gestured and emoted in real time, waving to Zuckerberg’s Puli sheepdog, dynamically changing facial expressions to match their owner’s voice, and taking photos with a virtual selfie stick — to post on Facebook, of course.

    • Smart Vibrator Company Settles Lawsuit For Over-Collection Of, Uh, Personal Data

      The internet of really broken things is raising no limit of privacy questions. As in, companies are hoovering up personal data on smart-device usage, often transmitting it (unencrypted) to the cloud, then failing to really inform or empower consumers as to how that data is being used and shared. Though this problem applies to nearly all IoT devices, it tends to most frequently come up when talking about the rise of smart toys that hoover up your kids’ ramblings, then sell that collected data to all manner of third parties. A company named Genesis toys is facing a new lawsuit for just this reason.

      Since your toys, fridge, tea kettle and car are all collecting your data while laughing at your privacy and security concerns, it only makes sense that your sex toys are doing the same thing.

      Back in September, a company by the name of Standard Innovation was sued because its We-Vibe vibrator collected sensitive data about usage. More specifically, the device and its corresponding smartphone app collect data on how often and how long users enjoyed the toy, the “selected vibration settings,” the device’s battery life, and even the vibrator’s “temperature.” All of this data was collected and sent off to the company’s Canadian servers. Unlike many IoT products, Standard Innovation does encrypt this data in transit, but like most IoT companies it failed to fully and clearly disclose the scope of data collection.

    • Police’s secret cellphone-surveillance tool can also block calls by the innocent

      It’s no secret that state and local law enforcement agencies have grown more militarized in the past decade, with armored personnel carriers, drones and robots.

      But one item in their arsenal has been kept largely out of public view, to the dismay of civil liberties advocates who say its use is virtually unregulated – and largely untracked.

      The device is a suitcase-size surveillance tool commonly called a StingRay that mimics a cellphone tower, allowing authorities to track individual cellphones in real time. Users of the device, which include scores of law enforcement agencies across the country, sign a non-disclosure agreement when they purchase it, pledging not to divulge its use, even in court cases against defendants the device helped capture.

    • Politicians vs. human rights

      The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has – once again – ruled that data retention (storage of data on everybody’s phone calls, text messages, e-mails, Internet connections, mobile positions etc.) is in breach of fundamental human rights.

      Nevertheless, politicians in several EU member states are trying their hardest to ignore the court. For them, Big Brotherism carries more weight than human and civil rights.

    • Need a Yahoo Mail Replacement? Here’s How ProtonMail is Different

      The large number of new users coming from Yahoo Mail is not very surprising given that ProtonMail’s core focus is email security and privacy. We first noticed the trend on social media when a large number of Tweets began appearing mentioning ProtonMail as a Yahoo Mail replacement. Starting on December 15th, the day the Yahoo breach was announced, ProtonMail’s growth rate effectively doubled as can be seen in the above chart.

    • City Passes Ordinance Mandating CCTV Surveillance By Businesses, Including Doctors And Lawyers Offices

      While there have been similar statutes enacted in other cities, these have generally been targeted at businesses already subject to extra regulation, like pawn shops, gun stores, and pharmacies. There has been some mission creep in recent years, leading to other businesses being ordered to install surveillance systems, like cellphone resellers and scrap metal dealers.

      On top of that, many of these ordinances also allow for on-demand law enforcement access, allowing the government to extend its surveillance reach without having to pay for the equipment. The specifics of Madison’s new statute haven’t been made available yet, so it’s unclear whether the collection of footage from businesses will be voluntary and tied only to investigations requested by business owners, or whether law enforcement will just be able to show up and demand to see recordings.

    • The Surveillance Oversight Board Is Dead And It’s Unlikely President Trump Will Revive It

      The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) — at least partially responsible for recent surveillance reforms — is dead. The first hints of its demise were tucked away in the annual intelligence budget, which gave Congress direct control of the PCLOB’s investigative activities.

      The last vestiges of the board’s independence have been stripped away and it seems unlikely the incoming president is going to have much interest in restoring this essential part of intelligence oversight. Congress now has the power to steer the PCLOB’s investigations. A new stipulation requiring the PCLOB to report directly to legislators means intelligence officials will be less forthcoming when discussing surveillance efforts with board members.

      At best, the PCLOB would have limped on — understaffed and neutered. That was back when the news was still good (but only in comparison). The Associate Press reports that Donald Trump is being handed the keys to a well-oiled surveillance machine, but with hardly any of the pesky oversight that ruins the fun.

    • Cyber War: Obama Wants To Split Cybercom From The NSA

      With looming threats of an open cyber war with Russia, U.S. President Barack Obama has moved to split the leadership of the NSA and the United States’ cyber warfare command. Obama supported made the following statement.

    • Government data requests on Facebook up by 27 percent

      SELF PROMOTION, AND ADVERTISE TO ME PORTAL Facebook, has seen a 27 per cent increase in the number of government demands for its data in the first half of this year.

      If there are two things that the INQUIRER does not much like they are government data demands and Facebook. A combination of the two just before Christmas is ill-timed but we can’t help that.

    • Twitter Says It Inflated Video Ad Views, Refunded Clients

      Twitter Inc. discovered a software bug that overstated how often video ads were viewed on Android phones, the latest snafu to shake faith in the measurement of digital advertising.

      The company issued refunds to some clients who ran video ads on the Twitter Android app from Nov. 7 to Dec. 12. The bug caused views to be overstated by as much as 35 percent, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    • MegaFon to Buy Mail.ru Stake for $740 Million From Usmanov

      Alisher Usmanov and his partners are set to pocket $740 million from moving a stake in internet company Mail.ru Group Ltd. to MegaFon PJSC, as the Russian billionaire consolidates his technology holdings into the wireless carrier.

      MegaFon plans to buy 33.4 million shares, equal to an almost 64 percent voting stake in the web company, from Usmanov’s USM Holdings, according to a statement Friday. The price is $640 million on completion plus $100 million after one year, which MegaFon said implies a premium of about 24 percent on Thursday’s closing price.

    • Expanding state power in times of ‘surveillance realism’: how the UK got a ‘world-leading’ surveillance law

      With the fallout of the Brexit referendum and the Trump election dominating the news, one important story of 2016 did not receive the attention it deserved: in late November, the British parliament adopted a law with an obscure name but far-reaching implications for citizens in the UK and, potentially, beyond. The ‘Investigatory Powers Act’ is a comprehensive legislative framework that regulates the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies and other public authorities.

      While the government has maintained that the new law is “world-leading”, critics have pointed out that it allows for some of the most extensive and intrusive surveillance practices in the world, and have asked: “What part of the world are we leading exactly: North Korea, Cuba, China and Saudi Arabia?”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Forced marriage victims are made to pay to go home to UK

      The Foreign Office has come under fire for ordering victims of forced marriage to repay the government the costs of their repatriation.

      In a letter seen by the Guardian, a Muslim women’s charity has written to the Foreign Office on behalf of a British woman who arrived at the UK embassy in Islamabad in 2014, aged 17, seeking help to escape a forced marriage.

      She was required to sign a loan agreement and surrender her passport before she was flown back to the UK. She was then issued a bill for £814, the cost of her repatriation from Pakistan, and will not have her passport returned until she repays the money.

    • Is Women’s Basketball Un-Islamic? Muslim Group Religious Group Says So

      A women’s basketball tournament in Somalia was denounced and declared “un-Islamic” by the Somali Religious Council Thursday, a tremendously influential force in the East African nation that is more than 99 percent Muslim.

      The female competition, which was to begin Thursday, is the first-ever national women’s basketball tournament in Somalia, local reports said. The games will feature teams from each of the Somalia’s five administrative regions, along with some from the capital, Mogadishu.

      The first game was scheduled for the northeastern town of Garowe Thursday, roughly a 13-hour car ride from Mogadishu.

    • Who funds Swiss mosques?

      Getting hold of independent information on funding is extremely difficult, however. Federal or cantonal statistics are non-existent.

      “The Confederation has no data on the funding of Muslim associations and mosques – it is not its competence – except in exceptional circumstances when national security is threatened,” the Swiss government wrote in June in reply to a recent parliamentary question by Christian Democrat Ruth Humbel.

      “It is however of public knowledge that governmental organisations and private individuals send donations from abroad. But the Federal Intelligence Service has no intelligence to suggest that the external funding of mosques could have a consequence for state security,” the cabinet told Fiala in July in answer to another parliamentary question.

    • Foul-mouthed Duterte back on the offensive as more innocent lives are taken

      “Mamma, mamma,” 12-year-old Kristine Joy Sailog said, moments before a stray bullet struck her heart as she stood with her family at the gate of a Catholic church on the outskirts of the Philippine capital Manila.

      Kristine died in her mother’s arms, one of the latest innocent victims of President Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown on drugs.

    • ‘Only one person should be in control’: Rodrigo Duterte is again flirting with an ominous idea about the rule of law in the Philippines

      Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s rhetoric on a number of issues has zig-zagged during his six months in office.

      He has vacillated on his stance toward US-Philippine ties, alternately repudiating the Obama administration and embracing the incoming Trump administration.

      Domestically, he has gone back and forth on the issue of martial law, repeatedly suggesting imposing it before backing off.

      Duterte returned to the subject this week, bemoaning the constitutional limits on how the Philippine president could deal with security threats like war.

      “If you have martial law, only one person should be in control,” Duterte said during a visit to the northern Philippines on Thursday.

    • The Cops Have Become The Thieving Thugs Through “Civil Asset Forfeiture” And Now — Through “Booking Fees”

      It’s so often the poorest, least powerful people they fund their departments through, by seizing cash as supposed illicitly earned — without proof it actually was. (In the Orwellian-named “civil asset forfeiture,” citizens must prove their money innocent — which often would mean hiring a lawyer who will cost them more than the money that was seized.)

      [...]

      Some of you may know that I’ve been friends for a long time with a guy who’s been homeless. He is in Illinois now, with a roof over his head, and I receive mail for him and send it to him. Though he is a very hard worker when he gets work and a talented artist, we all have our issues, and he just hasn’t been able to maintain a bank account or do things that many of us find easy.

      Personally, with ADHD, I find certain tasks that others find simple really overwhelming — yet, I can spend a day researching science to get a single line correct and then throw the whole thing out the next day, because it makes some paragraph of the column too long — and yes, ventral tegmental area, I mean you!

    • Stun guns and male crew: Korean Air to get tough on unruly passengers

      Korean Air Lines said it will allow crew members to “readily use stun guns” to manage violent passengers, and hire more male flight attendants, after coming in for criticism from U.S. singer Richard Marx over its handling of a recent incident.

      The new crew guidelines, announced on Tuesday following the Dec. 20 incident, will also include more staff training, use of the latest device to tie up a violent passenger, and the banning of passengers with a history of unruly behavior.

      Men account for about one-tenth of Korean Air flight attendants, and the carrier said it will try to have at least one male on duty in the cabin for each flight.

      “While U.S. carriers have taken stern action on violent on-board behavior following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 (2001), Asian carriers including us have not imposed tough standards because of Asian culture,” Korean Air President Chi Chang-hoon told a news conference.

      “We will use the latest incident to put safety foremost and strengthen our safety standards,” he said.

      In South Korea, the number of unlawful acts committed aboard airplanes has more than tripled over the past five years, according to government data.

      [...]

      The incident came to light when Marx said on Facebook and Twitter that he helped subdue “a psycho passenger attacking crew members and other passengers,” accusing crew members of being “ill-trained” and “ill-equipped” to handle the “chaotic and dangerous event”.

    • The Year in Government Hacking: 2016 in Review

      There’s no question that this has been a big year for government hacking. Not a day has gone by without some mention of it in the news. 2016 may forever be remembered as the year when government hacking went so mainstream that Stephen Colbert cracked jokes about Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear on The Late Show. The Obama administration has publicly blamed the Russian government for a series of compromises of U.S. political institutions and individuals in this election year, including the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee, and John Podesta, former Chairman of the Hillary Clinton election campaign. Political espionage is nothing new, but what distinguishes this series of attacks is the element of publication. This election cycle was dominated by news stories stemming from DNC and Podesta emails leaked to and published by Wikileaks, which has repeatedly said that it will not comment on sources but denies that the source of the documents is Russian.

    • All I Want for Christmas Is to Get Out of Immigration Detention

      Families are not supposed to be in immigration detention at all — and certainly not for more than a few days — but these children have been locked up with their mothers for more than a year. They are fleeing violence in Central America and asked for asylum in the United States. They got caught in legal limbo while their lawyers press for the Supreme Court to hear their case.

    • A Seminole Christmas Gift of Freedom

      Traditional U.S. history downplays Native people who settled the land and Africans enslaved to cultivate it while glorifying European whites and ignoring when the “other side” won, as on Christmas Day 1837, writes William Loren Katz.

    • After 10-year Legal Battle, a Victory for Undocumented Workers Injured on the Job

      In 2004, Leopoldo Zumaya was working as an apple picker in Pennsylvania when he fell from a tree, breaking his leg and leaving him with permanent nerve damage and chronic pain. A treating physician said Zumaya’s injuries were among the worst he’d ever seen. Most workers in Zumaya’s position would have received workers’ compensation benefits. But instead of disbursing his rightful worker’s compensation, his employer reported his immigration status to the insurance company, which then refused to pay his benefits, leaving him unable to access medical care.

    • The NYCLU Will Continue to Watch the NYPD, so Its Lawyers Don’t Institutionalize a Protester Prosecution Program

      People who take to the streets to protest should not be subject to a different form of justice than everyone else. But lawyers for the NYPD are doing exactly that when they selectively step in and act as prosecutors in cases that involve demonstrators, reportedly to keep those protesters from suing the department for false arrest.

      The eyebrow-raising agreement between the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the NYPD, in which the district attorney allows NYPD lawyers to prosecute certain criminal summons cases, was revealed by the New York Daily News earlier this year. Police officials told the Daily News that the arrangement came about after the NYPD grew frustrated with paying out settlements to protesters who sue after their summonses are dismissed. It’s important to note that the NYPD gets sued a lot. Over the last five years, the city shelled out $837 million in lawsuits brought against the police.

    • Obama’s Clemency Problem – And Ours

      Earlier this week, President Obama broke his own remarkable clemency record, granting an unprecedented 231 commutations and pardons in a single day. Headlines and tweets broadcast the historic tally; on the White House website, a bar graph tracks Obama’s record to date, which has dramatically outpaced that of his predecessors. With a total of 1,176 recipients, the White House boasted, Obama has granted clemency “more than the last 11 presidents combined.”

      The president certainly deserves credit for making clemency a priority before leaving office. His efforts are especially laudable in contrast to the lazy rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump, who has cluelessly condemned clemency recipients as “bad dudes.” In reality, to use language Trump might understand, all successful applicants go through a process of extreme vetting: only a fraction of people in federal prison are eligible in the first place, and selections rely on a careful review of each candidate’s history and behavior behind bars. A record of violence, including as a juvenile, is disqualifying.

    • Belatedly, a Defense of a Whistleblower

      After vowing to run a transparent government, President Obama oversaw an unprecedented legal assault on whistleblowers, only now offering up a modest concession, as Linda Lewis explains.

    • Principal of Taiwan school resigns over Nazi-themed parade

      The principal of a high school in northern Taiwan has resigned following widespread criticism over an event staged by students that featured Nazi-themed costumes and swastika banners.

      Taiwan’s official Central News Agency reported this week that Cheng Hsiao-ming, principal of Kuang Fu High School in the city of Hsinchu, apologized for the incident as he announced his resignation.

    • Top 5 Threats to Transparency: 2016 in Review

      Journalists investigating national security agencies have faced unprecedented threats, alongside government employees and contractors who come forward to reveal fraud, waste, and abuse. Conscientious public servants—people who have risked (and often resigned) their careers in order to do the right thing—have been thanked for their public service with criminal prosecutions for espionage, as if they were subverting the U.S. rather than performing their constitutional function or fulfilling their oaths of office.

      Under the Obama administration, more federal employees faced accusation of espionage based on their public interest whistleblowing activities than during the entire preceding history of the U.S. put together.

      For instance, military whistleblower Chelsea Manning filed an appeal in May, noting that her 35-year sentence in military prison is “grossly unfair” since “no whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly.” Manning revealed documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks, including a video revealing a U.S. military coverup following the assassination of Reuters journalists and evidence that the Pentagon suppressed accurate data about civilian casualties that were in fact higher than those officially acknowledged.

      EFF submitted a brief to the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals, arguing that her conviction for violating the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act was inappropriate since the law was designed to punish people for breaking into computers systems, which Manning never did.

      Informed by Manning’s treatment and due process violations pervading her prosecution, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden continued to seek refuge internationally. Meanwhile, a domestic coalition petitioned the Obama administration to pardon Snowden, given the public interest in his revelations and failure of congressional oversight to expose policymakers to the unconstitutional surveillance programs—including PRISM and upstream collection, which Congress will examine in 2017—that Snowden uncovered.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Protecting Net Neutrality and the Open Internet: 2016 in Review

      In 2016 we won one battle in the fight for the Open Internet – but several others are well underway and we expect Team Internet will have to mobilize once again to protect our gains and prevent further efforts to undermine network neutrality.

      Almost two years ago, thanks in large part to a massive mobilization of Internet users, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally issued an Open Internet Order to protect net neutrality. While far from perfect, the new Order was on strong legal footing, with some limits in place to help prevent FCC overreach. Before the year was out, however, the battle for the Internet moved to the courts, as broadband providers tried to get a judge to derail the new rules. After months of wrangling, in June 2016 a federal appeals court instead approved the Order – a crucial win for Team Internet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Australian Productivity Commission Report Sparks More Unproductive Whining from Monopolists

        Back in May, we wrote about a draft report by Australia’s Productivity Commission on how Australia’s copyright and patent laws could be reformed to foster domestic production and innovation. That report is back in the news this week, after it was released in its final form, and a consultation seeking public feedback was opened.

        The most important proposed change would introduce a fair use right into Australia’s copyright law. Currently Australia’s copyright flexibilities are narrowly pre-defined; for example, it is lawful for Australians to backup their computer software and to digitize their video tapes (remember those?), though there is still no similar exception allowing them to back up their iTunes downloads or to rip copies of their DVDs. This approach has made Australia’s copyright law a complicated and anachronistic mess.

      • USTR Gets Piracy Website Listing Notoriously Wrong

        The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has just released another edition of its periodic Notorious Markets List, a spotlight on websites and physical markets that it claims facilitate copyright or trademark infringement, and a supplement to its regular Special 301 Report on countries that allegedly do the same.

        Here are just a few of the problems we’ve identified in this year’s list, illustrating the overreach of the USTR’s single-minded enforcement agenda.

      • Swedish Supreme Court has ruled that sport broadcasts are not protected by copyright

        Back in 2015 this blog reported and commented [here and here] on the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in C More, a reference for a preliminary ruling from the Swedish Supreme Court seeking guidance on whether – among other things – the unauthorised live streaming of broadcasts of ice hockey matches could be regarded as an act of making available to the public within the meaning of the Swedish implementation of Article 3(2) of the InfoSoc Directive and, if so, a potential copyright infringement.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/12/27/preview-of-fedora-26/feed/ 0 Links 22/12/2016: VirtualBox 5.1.12, Qt 5.8.0 RC, IPFire 2.19 http://techrights.org/2016/12/22/virtualbox-5-1-12/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/22/virtualbox-5-1-12/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:58:44 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97672

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • ALSA 1.1.3 Released For Linux Sound

      Version 1.1.3 of the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) was released today.

    • A Holiday Gift From Conexant: an ALSA Driver For Recent Cherry Trail SOC Based Devices

      Late on Monday Simon Ho of Conexant announced the release of a driver for the company’s driver for CX2072X codec to the ALSA-devel mailing list. I have to add a tip of the proverbial hat to Pierre Bossart who shared the information in kernel.bugzilla.org where I found it. According to Mr. Bossart we can expect “a follow-up machine driver soon from Intel.” The machines where sound has been a problem have Intel SST sound on the SOC which uses the Conexant codec. On those systems the “sound card” is simply not detected.

    • Suzuki Joins Automotive Grade Linux to Expand Technology Development through Open Source Collaboration

      Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a Linux-based, open platform for the connected car, today announced that Suzuki is joining The Linux Foundation and Automotive Grade Linux as a Platinum member.

      “Adopting an open source approach to software development is a key part of our technology strategy and will help us to keep pace with the rapid advances happening across the auto industry,” said Hisanori Takashiba, Executive General Manager of Research & Development at Suzuki Motor Corporation. “Joining Automotive Grade Linux expands our R&D capabilities and enables us to collaborate with hundreds of developers across the industry on new automotive technologies.”

    • Graphics Stack

      • RADV Radeon Vulkan Code Enables More Driver Features

        The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa has seen some activity last night to enable more fine-grained features.

        RADV now enables shaderImageGatherExtended. The image gather extended functionality for shaders is described via the Vulkan registry as “indicates whether the extended set of image gather instructions are available in shader code. If this feature is not enabled, the OpImage*Gather instructions do not support the Offset and ConstOffsets operands. This also indicates whether shader modules can declare the ImageGatherExtended capability.”

      • Haswell OpenGL 4.0 / FP64 Support In Mesa Might Finally Be Close To Merging

        It appears that ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for Intel Haswell graphics hardware might finally be merged soon into Mesa and thereby exposing OpenGL 4.0 support.

        While Broadwell and newer Intel hardware has OpenGL 4.5 support in Mesa, the Haswell support is left behind as while it can reach OpenGL ~4.1, it’s currently at OpenGL 3.3. The blocking extension from Haswell having OpenGL 4.0 is the big ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension, but the code has been sitting around for a while.

    • Benchmarks

      • Blender & Darktable OpenCL Benchmarks On 13 NVIDIA GPUs

        For those into Blender modeling or Darktable for your RAW photography workflow, hopefully you find these latest OpenCL benchmarks interesting. The NVIDIA 375.26 Linux driver was used for benchmarking. The cards tested based upon what I had available included the GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. The tests in this article are just on the NVIDIA side with having no new AMDGPU-PRO release available for testing since my last 16.50 comparison and the open-source stack still leaving a lot to be desired and not yet trying out the brand new ROCm release, but I plan to work on benchmarks of that over Christmas if the stack holds up.

      • Linux Workstation/Server Distribution Benchmarks For Winter 2016

        The latest for your enjoyment of our year-end comparison articles and benchmarks is a fresh comparison of various workstation/enterprise/server oriented Linux distributions when looking at relevant workloads. Testing for this distribution comparison being done from a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system while a desktop-focused Linux desktop comparison for winter 2016 will be posted still before year’s end.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Best GNOME Distro, Linux All-in-One, PIXEL for PCs

        Today was another busy day in Linux news with the top story being the release of Red Hat’s third quarter 2017 financial report. Third quarter revenue missed analysts’ expectations and cut full year forecast along with the resignation of CFO all added up to a rough night for Red Hat stock. Elsewhere, Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the release of PIXEL for PC and Mac and The Document Foundation introduced MUFFIN, a “tasty new user interface” for LibreOffice. Blogger Dedoimedo chose the best GNOME distro of the year and Andy Weir covered Acer’s new all-in-one PC that’s available with Linux.

      • GTK 3.89.2 Released With Vulkan Renderer, Continued GDK/GSK Changes

        Matthias Clasen shifted focus today from working on the new recipes program to putting out a new development release in the road to GTK4.

        GTK+ 3.89.4 is the new GTK4 development snapshot released today. This the experimental Vulkan renderer implementation that co-exists alongside the OpenGL back-end. Related, the GDK and GSK (Scene Kit) rendering code continues to be refactored. Some changes to handling include now only drawing the top-level windows and always re-drawing the whole window. GTK has also been working towards EGL X11 support — as an alternative to the GLX X11 code — while the EGL Wayland support is obviously already there.

      • Best Gnome distro of 2016

        Ever since Gnome 3 came to life, I struggled with how it was realized and what it did, a far cry (but not Far Cry, hi hi) from its predecessor. It was functionally inferior to its rival, and it is the chief reason why MATE and Cinnamon came to life. Then, over the years, it slowly evolved, and now, at last, the combination of its core elements and a thick layer of necessary extensions allows for a decent compromise. Throughout 2016, I tested more Gnome releases than ever before, I was quite pleased with the results, and now we will select the best candidate for this year.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Asus, T-Mobile have CES surprises in store for Android users

          As the end of December approaches, visions of sugar plums are dancing in Android fans’ heads as they await the big event. Not Christmas—we’re talking about CES 2017. While there are more rumors than you can shake a stocking at, several companies have already begun to promote their upcoming announcements.

        • 2016 and Android: 5 Things That Still Stand Out

          2016 was, to be honest, not exactly the best year in recent memory. From the nastiest presidential election we may ever see (until the next one in four years) to the early deaths of some of the great entertainers and people of this world, there was a lot to be sad about. But even in tech or Android specifically, we saw Samsung go through the Note 7 recall, carriers go extra shady on this “unlimited” idea, and even Google kill the Nexus line. What a year.

          And now with that depressing glob of snot on your mind, let’s talk about five (or six) things that are still standing out from 2016 as we head into 2017. Because even if 2016 sucked, a lot of stuff did happen!

        • Our Favorite Android Smartphone of 2016

          While we are still bringing in votes for the DL Reader’s Choice for Phone of the Year (POTY), we are ready to present you with our choice(s). In 2016, we saw a plethora of great smartphones from a number of makers, which made for a very exciting and busy year.

          Because there was such a high number of fantastic phones, it was actually quite the struggle to choose a single one as our favorite. As you will see, we have a couple runner ups this year, only because we didn’t want to have a three-way tie for favorite.

        • LG announces five new phones you probably won’t care about

          Ahead of CES, LG has announced four new phones in the K series — the K10, K8, K4, and K3 — that will make their debut at the trade show. LG will also showcase the Stylus 3, which offers an “improved writing experience” that mimics the “feel and feedback of an actual pen.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 open source gift ideas for non-techies

    It’s getting down to the wire here for the holidays. You know, that time when we all realize that we’ve completely neglected to get gifts for people. While reading through our very excellent gift guide, a thought occurred to me: Those unfortunate souls with lives devoid of technological wonder… they need presents, too. So what do we get them? What do we present to these people whose interests diverge so greatly from our own? I’m glad you asked. I made a list.

  • What is Odoo Open Source ERP?

    Odoo’s open source application offerings range beyond ERP to include such features as CRM, website building, eCommerce and BI.

    Belgium-based Odoo made a name for itself under its previous name of OpenERP, an open source ERP application that quickly gained traction, especially in Europe. Over the past few years, however, the company has expanded into many more areas of the enterprise application landscape.

  • Swift Is Old, Why Should I Use it?

    A central concept to Swift is the Binary Large OBject (BLOB). Instead of block storage, data is divided into some number of binary streams. Any file, of any format, can be reduced to a series of ones and zeros, sometimes referred to as serialization. Start at the first bit of a file and count ones and zeros until you have a block, a megabyte or even five gigabytes. This becomes an object. The next number of bits becomes an object until there is no more file to divide into objects. These objects can be stored locally or sent to a Swift proxy server. The proxy server will send the object to a series of storage servicers where memcached will accept the object, at memory speeds. Definitely an advantage in the days before inexpensive solid state drives.

  • Ticketmaster Chooses Kubernetes to Stay Ahead of Competition

    If you’ve ever gone to an event that required a ticket, chances are you’ve done business with Ticketmaster. The ubiquitous ticket company has been around for 40 years and is the undisputed market leader in its field.

    To stay on top, the company is trying to ensure its best product creators can focus on products, not infrastructure. The company has begun to roll out a massive public cloud strategy that uses Kubernetes, an open source platform for the deployment and management of application containers, to keep everything running smoothly, and sent two of its top technologists to deliver a keynote at the 2016 CloudNativeCon in Seattle explaining their methodology.

  • Events

    • LibrePlanet 2017 will return to MIT thanks to SIPB, March 25-26, 2017

      This is the fourth year the FSF will partner with MIT’s Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) to bring this two-day celebration of free software and software freedom to Cambridge, MA. Registration for LibrePlanet is now open, and admission is gratis for FSF members and students.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox takes the next step towards rolling out multi-process to everyone

        With Firefox 50, Mozilla has rolled out the first major piece of its new multi-process architecture. Firefox 50 is also Firefox’s current stable release.

        Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari all have a multiple process design that separates their rendering engine—the part of the browser that reads and interprets HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—from the browser frame. They do this for stability reasons (if the rendering process crashes, it doesn’t kill the entire browser) and security reasons (the rendering process can be run in a low-privilege sandbox, so exploitable flaws in the rendering engine are harder to take advantage of).

  • SaaS/Back End

    • 3 highly effective strategies for managing test data

      Over the last year, I’ve researched, written, and spoken coast-to-coast on strategies for managing test data, and the common patterns you can use to resolve these issues. The set of solutions surrounding test data are what I call “data strategies for testing.” Here are three patterns for managing your own test data more effectively. If after reading you want to dig in more deeply, drop in on my presentations on these patterns during my upcoming presentation at the upcoming Automation Guild conference.

    • Tuning OpenStack Hardware for the Enterprise

      As a cloud management framework OpenStack thus far been limited to the province of telecommunications carriers and providers of Web-scale services that have plenty of engineering talent to throw at managing one of the most ambitious open source projects there is. In contrast, adoption of OpenStack in enterprise IT environments has been much more limited.

      But that may change as more advanced networking technologies that are optimized for processor-intensive virtualization come to market. Some of the technologies we have covered here include single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV) and Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). Another technology includes using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) in Network Interface Cards, to make them smarter about how to offload virtualized loads.

    • Q&A: Hortonworks CTO unfolds the big data road map

      Hortonworks has built its business on big data and Hadoop, but the Hortonworks Data Platform provides analytics and features support for a range of technologies beyond Hadoop, including MapReduce, Pig, Hive, and Spark. Hortonworks DataFlow, meanwhile, offers streaming analytics and uses technologies like Apache Nifi and Kafka.

      InfoWorld Executive Editor Doug Dineley and Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Hortonworks CTO Scott Gnau about how the company sees the data business shaking out, the Spark vs. Hadoop face-off, and Hortonworks’ release strategy and efforts to build out the DataFlow platform for data in motion.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Public Services/Government

    • EC reports examine value of open government, help inspire for implementation

      This month, the European Commission published two reports, the first providing inspiration for the implementation of open government services, the second providing insight on the social value of these services, with advice on how to foster their use and increase their impact. The reports are part of the ‘eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020′, which aims to modernise public administration, achieve the Digital Single Market, and engage more with citizens and businesses to deliver high quality services. The reports are targeted at European policy makers.

Leftovers

  • Norwegians are about to lose their FM radio and they’re not happy about it

    In just a matter of weeks, Norway will tune out FM radio for good and become the world’s first country to switch over to digital-only transmissions.
    Norway’s government has decided that the nation’s FM airwaves will fall silent from January 11, 2017, starting in Nordland and gradually moving south.

    After nearly a century of the analogue system, which revolutionised music listening with high-fidelity stereo sound compared to mono AM transmissions, the changeover to Digital Audio Broadcasting’s advanced version (DAB+) will render the country’s almost eight million radio sets obsolete.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Lead Contaminated Drinking Water Is Much More Prevalent Than You Think

      In 2001, Washington, DC changed the chemical used to treat the city’s water from chlorine to chloramine. The switch was supposed to limit byproducts in the water that arise during the disinfection process. It turned out, however, that chloramine also has the particularly powerful trait of corroding lead pipes, which allows the toxic metal to show up in faucets and drinking water.

      Authorities from the water utility knew of the astronomical lead levels in 2001 but, for fear of repercussion, kept mum. It carried on for 3 more years, and as many as 42,000 children in the womb, or less than 2 years old, were exposed to extreme levels of lead, which can cause serious cognitive, and behavioral problems in children, as well as hearing, and weight loss, and fatigue. The DC water crisis from 2001 to 2004 is still considered by experts to be the worst such calamity in modern American history.

  • Security

    • Most ATMs in India Are Easy Targets for Hackers & Malware Attacks

      Hacking is a hotly debated subject across the country right now, and it’s fair to say that the ATM next door is also in danger. It has been reported that over 70 percent of the 2 lakh money-dispensing ATM machines in our country are running on Microsoft’s outdated Windows XP operating system, leaving it vulnerable to cyber attacks.

      Support for Windows XP was discontinued by Microsoft in 2014 which means that since then the company hasn’t rolled out any security updates for this Windows version.

      While it doesn’t make sense for banks to continue using outdated software, security experts feel that the practice stems from legacy behaviour, when physical attacks were a bigger threat than software hacks.

    • 20 Questions Security Pros Should Ask Themselves Before Moving To The Cloud

      A template for working collaboratively with the business in today’s rapidly changing technology environment.

      Everywhere I go lately, the cloud seems to be on the agenda as a topic of conversation. Not surprisingly, along with all the focus, attention, and money the cloud is receiving, comes the hype and noise we’ve come to expect in just about every security market these days. Given this, along with how new the cloud is to most of us in the security world, how can security professionals make sense of the situation? I would argue that that depends largely on what type of situation we’re referring to, exactly. And therein lies the twist.

      Rather than approach this piece as “20 questions security professionals should ask cloud providers,” I’d like to take a slightly different angle. It’s a perspective I think will be more useful to security professionals grappling with issues and challenges introduced by the cloud on a daily basis. For a variety of reasons, organizations are moving both infrastructure and applications to the cloud at a rapid rate – far more rapidly than anyone would have forecast even two or three years ago.

    • Report: $3-5M in Ad Fraud Daily from ‘Methbot’

      New research suggests that an elaborate cybercrime ring is responsible for stealing between $3 million and $5 million worth of revenue from online publishers and video advertising networks each day. Experts say the scam relies on a vast network of cloaked Internet addresses, rented data centers, phony Web sites and fake users made to look like real people watching short ad segments online.

      Online advertising fraud is a $7 billion a year problem, according to AdWeek. Much of this fraud comes from hacked computers and servers that are infected with malicious software which forces the computers to participate in ad fraud. Malware-based ad fraud networks are cheap to acquire and to run, but they’re also notoriously unstable and unreliable because they are constantly being discovered and cleaned up by anti-malware companies.

    • Linux Backdoor Gives Hackers Full Control Over Vulnerable Devices [Ed: Microsoft booster Bogdan Popa says “Linux Backdoor”; that’s a lie. It’s Microsoft that has them.]

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Keeping Cheerful in a Difficult World

      It has been a difficult couple of days at the end of a difficult year. Individual lone wolf terrorism is impossible to stop completely. Fortunately, although it commands the headlines when it occurs, it is quite incredibly rare. Terrorism remains almost the least likely of freak deaths you could suffer, and everywhere in Europe is thousands of times less likely than the comparatively mundane event of dying in an ordinary traffic accident. Yet the perception of the terrorism risk is entirely wrong – for precisely the same reason that recent surveys show that people massively overestimate the number of Muslims in the population. Relentless media propaganda takes its toll.

    • US Military Returns Land to Japan, but Okinawa Isn’t Celebrating

      When US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and top American military brass join Japanese officials for a much-anticipated land return ceremony on December 22 (Japan time), they will mark the largest handover of property by the United States in a generation. Okinawa, once the independent Ryukyu kingdom, has been part of Japan since the 1870s and after World War II was administered by the US military until 1972 when the islands reverted to Japanese control. But the US never really left and still has roughly half of its 50,000 troops and its greatest concentration of military bases on just 0.6 percent of Japanese territory.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • 39 Chernobyl children to spend Christmas in Ireland

      A group of 39 children with special needs will fly into Dublin from Chernobyl this afternoon before heading to homes all around the country for the best Christmas holiday of their lives.

      The very special visit follows an historic move by the UN this month, to designate an ‘International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day’ for the future.

      Adi Roche from Chernobyl Children International (pictured) says it’s heart-warming that thirty years on – the survivors of the world’s worst nuclear disaster are not being forgotten: “I tried it one more time, last April at the General Assembly, not sure whether it would fall on deaf ears or not,

    • Judge rules school children can pursue climate change lawsuit against Washington State

      Eight Seattle children should have “their day in court” to argue that Washington State and others aren’t protecting them from climate change, a judge ruled.

      King County Superior Court Judge Hollis Hill allowed the young petitioners to move ahead in their case against the state, writing that “it is time for these youth to have the opportunity to address their concerns in a court of law, concerns raised under statute and under the state and federal constitutions.”

      The petitioners, between 12 and 16 years old, had asked the judge last month to find the state Department of Ecology in contempt for failing to adequately protect them and future generations from global warming.

    • Storm Barbara set to batter UK and cause Christmas chaos

      Storm Barbara is set to bring strong winds and Christmas chaos to Britain, according to forecasters.

      Gusts of up to 90mph are predicted to hit the UK, with the worst of destruction expected between Friday evening and Christmas Eve morning.

      Scotland appears likely to suffer the most, while pockets of Northern Ireland, north Wales and north England could also feel the full force.

      Forecasters warned the potential for structural damage and disruption to some transport services means the storm’s impact could be felt long after the winds have subsided.

    • Fog in the south east threatens Christmas travel

      Fog across the south east has disrupted flights at Heathrow, Gatwick and City airports, British Airways says.

      The delays in London come as people travelling for Christmas were warned to expect disruption across the UK as Storm Barbara approaches.

      The Met Office said the worst of the weather was expected on Friday and Saturday, with gusts of up to 90mph forecast in parts of Scotland.

    • Storm Barbara AND Storm Conor to wreak havoc on Christmas Day in double mega storm

      Strong gales of up to 100mph are expected to smash into Britain with the arrival of the freak storm – with many predicting travel cancellations.

      And during Christmas it”s beginning to look likely that another storm will strike in the aftermath of Storm Barbara.

  • Finance

    • U.K. Companies Plan 2017 Price Hikes as Pound Drop Lifts Costs

      If you’ve ever gone to an event that required a ticket, chances are you’ve done business with Ticketmaster. The ubiquitous ticket company has been around for 40 years and is the undisputed market leader in its field.

      To stay on top, the company is trying to ensure its best product creators can focus on products, not infrastructure. The company has begun to roll out a massive public cloud strategy that uses Kubernetes, an open source platform for the deployment and management of application containers, to keep everything running smoothly, and sent two of its top technologists to deliver a keynote at the 2016 CloudNativeCon in Seattle explaining their methodology.

    • Google avoided US$3.6b in taxes in 2015: report

      Last year, Google, along with Microsoft and Apple, came under attack during an Australian Senate hearing into tax avoidance.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • A Spy Coup in America?

      As Official Washington’s latest “group think” solidifies into certainty – that Russia used hacked Democratic emails to help elect Donald Trump – something entirely different may be afoot: a months-long effort by elements of the U.S. intelligence community to determine who becomes the next president.

      I was told by a well-placed intelligence source some months ago that senior leaders of the Obama administration’s intelligence agencies – from the CIA to the FBI – were deeply concerned about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump ascending to the presidency. And, it’s true that intelligence officials often come to see themselves as the stewards of America’s fundamental interests, sometimes needing to protect the country from dangerous passions of the public or from inept or corrupt political leaders.

    • Emanuel releases private emails, ending court fight

      After fighting in court to keep his private email accounts completely concealed from public view, Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday released a trove of messages from throughout his nearly six years in office and announced a new city ban on using private email to conduct official business.

      The records released by his administration showed Emanuel has frequently used a private Gmail account and another personal, unofficial email address — mayor_re@rahmemail.com — to communicate with top aides, business leaders, political supporters, national media figures and others who wanted to discuss city government with him.

    • Unsealed Clinton Email Warrant Asks Court To Maintain Secrecy Of Investigation James Comey Publicly Announced To Congress

      The FBI’s search warrant for Anthony Weiner’s laptop was unsealed and released yesterday. This isn’t the warrant the FBI originally used to seize and search the laptop. That one was looking for evidence related to allegations Weiner sexted an underage girl.

      This warrant is the second search warrant for the same laptop, related to the discovery of emails to and from Hillary Clinton on it. This discovery during an unrelated search prompted Comey to write a letter to Congress informing it that he was going to be diving back into the Clinton email investigation.

      The second dive into emails stored on the laptop by former Clinton aide (and estranged spouse of Anthony Weiner) Huma Abedin resulted in the discovery of nothing the FBI hadn’t already seen. Comey apologized for getting everyone hot and bothered by his shouting of “CLASSIFIED!” in a crowded electoral season, but believed his actions were justified because he feared this information would likely leak anyway.

    • Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun – it’s the smiling face of the corporate machine

      Now that a reality TV star is preparing to become president of the United States, can we agree that celebrity culture is more than just harmless fun – that it might, in fact, be an essential component of the systems that govern our lives?

      The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself. It has long been cultivated by advertisers, marketers and the media. And it has a function. The more distant and impersonal corporations become, the more they rely on other people’s faces to connect them to their customers.

      Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.

      [...]

      The celebrities you see most often are the most lucrative products, extruded through a willing media by a marketing industry whose power no one seeks to check. This is why actors and models now receive such disproportionate attention, capturing much of the space once occupied by people with their own ideas: their expertise lies in channelling other people’s visions.

    • U.S. government loses to Russia’s disinformation campaign: advisers

      The U.S. government spent more than a decade preparing responses to malicious hacking by a foreign power but had no clear strategy when Russia launched a disinformation campaign over the internet during the U.S. election campaign, current and former White House cyber security advisers said.

      Far more effort has gone into plotting offensive hacking and preparing defenses against the less probable but more dramatic damage from electronic assaults on the power grid, financial system or direct manipulation of voting machines.

      Over the last several years, U.S. intelligence agencies tracked Russia’s use of coordinated hacking and disinformation in Ukraine and elsewhere, the advisers and intelligence experts said, but there was little sustained, high-level government conversation about the risk of the propaganda coming to the United States.

    • 2016: The Year the Media Broke

      Rupert Murdoch’s bid for a full takeover of Sky TV demonstrates graphically that the extreme concentration of media ownership has not yet run its course. It also yet again underlines the extent to which the Leveson Inquiry was barking entirely up the wrong tree. There is no question to which the correct answer is increased government control over free speech. Any inquiry into the media should look first and foremost at its highly concentrated ownership and how to instil more pluralism. It is probably now too late to expect that a vibrant, diverse traditional media is achievable. We can however be cheered by the continuing decline of the political influence of the mainstream media, as illustrated by its “Fake News” panic.

      Even five years ago, if the mainstream media carried a meme that was fundamentally untrue, the chances of persuading public opinion of its untruth were almost minimal. Similarly if they wished to ignore an inconvenient truth, it would be very hard indeed to get it out to a significant number.

      Four years ago, when the official version of the Adam Werritty affair was front page news for days, causing the resignation of the Defence Secretary, I discovered that in fact the real scandal ran much deeper. Werritty – who had an official pass but no official position – had held at least eight meetings with Matthew Gould, now Cabinet Office anti-WikiLeaks supremo. Gould had at the time of some of the meetings been ambassador to Israel, at the time of others Private Secretary to two different Foreign Secretaries, David Miliband and William Hague. On at least one occasion it was acknowledged by the FCO that Mossad were also present. For the three meetings which occurred while Gould was Private Secretary, I requested the diary entries under the Freedom of Information Act. The meetings were held on 8 Sept 2009, 27 Sept 2010 and 6 Feb 2011. The FCO sent me, in reply to my Freedom of Information request, the diary entries for those three days with only the dates – the rest was 100% redacted, in the interests of national security.

    • Vox’s Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest, Explained

      One of Vox’s major investors—second only to Comcast—is General Atlantic. The New York–based private equity firm invested $46.5 million in Vox Media in December 2014, roughly six months after the flagship website Vox.com launched. As part of the deal, General Atlantic VP Zachary Kaplan got a seat on Vox Media’s corporate board (as is common in large investment rounds). General Atlantic also invests in several technology and media companies Vox Media covers, without Vox disclosing this fact.

      [...]

      General Atlantic was also one of three lead investors in a $1.5 billion fundraising round for AirBnb in December 2015. While Vox has been critical of AirBnb’s high-profile problems with racist users, the New Money vertical was quick to defend the San Fransisco room-sharing giant after New York state passed restrictive legislation—again, without any disclosure of General Atlantic’s investment: “New York’s Crackdown on ‘Commercial’ Airbnb Listings Is Misguided” (11/18/16).

      When asked for comment on their disclosure policy, Vox managing editor Lauren Williams wrote back, “That’s something we’ve been thinking about, and we plan to post one in the new year.” A follow-up email asking whether Vox covering companies owned by its major investors was a potential problem has had no response so far.

      [...]

      While Vox coverage of its corporate parents, siblings and cousins isn’t uniformly positive, all too often it is. Even in stories that aren’t more or less verbatim PR copy, disclosures ought to be mandatory—especially when it’s as direct as covering Comcast and NBC corporate. For startups, major investors are tantamount to ownership in every sense of the word, and since traditional media companies disclose ownership, there’s no reason why this same standard wouldn’t apply to venture capital and private equity-backed New Media outfits.

      Complexity is no excuse for not disclosing obvious conflicts, nor does it justify running a major media site for two-and-a-half years without a public, clearly worded code of ethics. Vox Media has raised over $300 million and has a staff reportedly of over 400 people. With all those resources, perhaps they can take a week off and hash out a coherent ethics guide that reflects the economic realities of PE- and corporate-backed “disruptive” media.

    • Sources Tell Me… Fake News, Kuwait and the Trump DC Hotel

      It is fully normalized now in American mainstream journalism to build an entire story, often an explosive story, around a single, anonymous source, typically described no further than “a senior U.S. official,” or just “a source.”

      For a writer, this makes life pretty easy. They can simply make up the entire story sitting in their bedroom, inflate a taxi driver’s gossip into a “source,” or just believe an intern they tried to pick up at happy hour who says she saw an email written by her supervisor saying their manager heard something something. The story goes viral, often with an alarming headline, and is irrefutable in an Internety way, demanding critics prove a negative: how can you say it didn’t happen?!?!?

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Thailand’s military-appointed Assembly unanimously passes an internet law combining the world’s worst laws

      On Dec 15, an amendment to Thailand’s 2007 Computer Crime Act passed its National Legislative Assembly — a body appointed by the country’s military after the 2014 coup — unanimously, and in 180 days, the country will have a new internet law that represents a grab bag of the worst provisions of the worst internet laws in the world, bits of the UK’s Snooper’s Charter, America’s Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the dregs of many other failed laws.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Twitter is ‘toast’ and the stock is not even worth $10: Analyst

      Twitter is “toast” as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service.

      The microblogging platform’s chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and “take some time off”, while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday.

      Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year.

    • European Officials Accuse Facebook of Misleading Them on WhatsApp Deal

      European competition officials filed charges on Tuesday against Facebook, accusing the social media giant of making misleading statements to receive regulatory approval for its $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, the internet messaging service.

      The accusation, which could lead to a fine of up to 1 percent of Facebook’s yearly revenue, meaning a penalty of about $200 million, comes amid growing tension with Europe’s policy makers over how the company is able to dominate much of the region’s digital world.

    • In Major Privacy Victory, Top EU Court Rules Against Mass Surveillance

      The European court’s panel of 15 judges acknowledged in their ruling that “modern investigative techniques” were necessary to combat organized crime and terrorism, but said that this cannot justify “the general and indiscriminate retention of all traffic and location data.” Instead, the judges stated, it is acceptable for governments to engage in the “targeted retention” of data in cases involving serious crime, permitting that persons affected by any surveillance are notified after investigations are completed, and that access to the data is overseen by a judicial authority or an independent administrative authority.

      The case was originally brought in December 2014 by two British members of parliament, who challenged the legality of the U.K. government’s Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act, which forced telecommunications companies to store records on their customers’ communication for 12 months. That law has since been replaced by the Investigatory Powers Act, which was recently approved by the British parliament and is expected soon to come into force.

      Though the U.K. voted to leave the European Union earlier this year, Wednesday’s decision remains — at least in the short term — highly significant, and will prove to be a severe headache for British government officials. The ruling will now be forwarded to the U.K.’s Court of Appeal, where judges there will consider how to apply it in the context of national law. It may result in the government being forced to make changes to controversial sections of the Investigatory Powers Act, which enable police and spy agencies to access vast amounts of data on people’s internet browsing, instant messages, emails, phone calls, and social media conversations.

    • Complete Victory: EU Supreme Court Rules Blanket Logging Requirements Blanketly Unconstitutional

      The EU Supreme Court (European Court of Justice) has ruled that no European country may have laws that require any communications provider to perform blanket indiscriminate logging of user activity, stating in harsh terms that such measures violate the very fundamentals of a democratic society. This finally brings the hated Data Retention to an end, even if much too late. It also kills significant parts of the UK Snooper’s Charter.

      This morning, Luxembourg time, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) presented its damning verdict. In a challenge brought by plaintiffs in Ireland and Sweden, it was argued that forcing telecommunications providers – ISPs and telecom companies alike – to log all activity of their users, in case law enforcement may need it later, was simply incompatible with the most fundamental privacy rights laid out in the European Charter of Human Rights. The court agreed wholesale.

    • Parliament must change the Investigatory Powers Act in response to CJEU ruling

      The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued a judgment that could force the Government to change the Investigatory Powers Act – just weeks after the surveillance law received royal assent.

    • Yahoo email scan shows U.S. spy push to recast constitutional privacy

      Yahoo Inc’s secret scanning of customer emails at the behest of a U.S. spy agency is part of a growing push by officials to loosen constitutional protections Americans have against arbitrary governmental searches, according to legal documents and people briefed on closed court hearings.

      The order on Yahoo from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) last year resulted from the government’s drive to change decades of interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment right of people to be secure against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” intelligence officials and others familiar with the strategy told Reuters.

    • Europe’s highest court declares UK ‘snooper charter’ illegal

      Britain’s controversial ‘snooper’s charter’ has been delivered a blow from the EU with its highest court ruling that the government’s “indiscriminate retention” of emails is illegal.

      The ruling could trigger challenges against the UK’s new Investigatory Powers Act, passed into law in November, which allows for the sweeping collection and storage of people’s emails, text messages and internet data.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Anonymous’ Barrett Brown Is Free—and Ready to Pick New Fights

      When Barrett Brown was arrested in his home by FBI agents in 2012—a moment captured by chance in a public videochat streamed to his fans and haters alike—the hacker group Anonymous was an online force to be reckoned with. Just nine months earlier the group had hacked the private intelligence firm Stratfor and dumped five million of its emails, the crime to which Brown would later be tied and sentenced to five years in prison.

      Today, just a few weeks after Brown walked out of Texas’s Three Rivers Federal Correctional Institute, Anonymous has shrunk to a thin imitation of the hacker army it once was. But with or without the hacktivist group that he championed, Brown can’t imagine a better time to resume his work as a journalist and radical information agitator. “When things deteriorate, when the system destroys itself as it’s doing right now and does so in such an obvious and disgusting way, my ideas seem less crazy,” he says.

    • VIDEO: “Relatively Free” Barrett Brown out of prison and already hard at work

      Alex Winter and production company Field of Vision have released a short documentary on Barrett Brown’s release from FCI Three Rivers and the six-hour drive to his new residence, a halfway house near Dallas. The twenty-minute film called ‘Relatively Free’ features a skinnier, longer-haired Barrett discussing his time in federal prison, the fight for press freedoms to come under a Trump administration, and why his case is a “jackpot case” for reformers, should they choose to make use of it.

    • Dear TSA: The country is not safer because you grab vaginas

      Eventually your heart gets hardened when you hear about nightmarish scenarios with the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA. With my elite status as a TSA Precheck and a CLEAR traveler, I’d grown accustomed to breezing through the security screening process in five minutes or less.

      Randomly selected for additional screening? Child, please — not “Diamond on Delta” me. So when I was selected in a nearly completely empty Detroit Metropolitan Airport last night, I thought it was ridiculous.

      [...]

      The supervisor told me he would call his manager. He did. I repeated my protests: I have a Homeland Security background. This is a severe violation of my privacy and civil liberties. Please just let me get the scan again. I do not want my vagina patted.

      The agent began to insist that it was a backhanded pat around the upper thigh. At the same time, the manager says I can go through it or be escorted out. I really weighed my options. Did I really need to get on this plane to New York? I did.

    • Google sued by employee for confidentiality policies that ‘muzzle’ staff

      A product manager at Google has sued the company over its allegedly illegal confidentiality rules, which, among other things, prohibit employees from speaking even internally about illegal conduct and dangerous product defects for fear that such statements may be used in lawsuits or sought by the government.

      The alleged policies, which are said to violate California laws, restrict employees’ right to speak, work or whistle-blow, and include restrictions on speaking to the government, attorneys or the press about wrongdoing at Google or even “speaking to spouse or friends about whether they think their boss could do a better job,” according to a complaint filed Tuesday in the Superior Court of California for the city and county of San Francisco.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Global Average Internet Connection Speeds Reaches 6.3 Mbps in 3Q16

      The average connection speed is just that, the average of the all the connections that are made to Akamai’s global content delivery network platform. In contrast, the global average peak connection speed, which measures the highest speeds, was reported at 37.2 Mbps, for a 16 percent gain over the third quarter of 2015.

      Once again, South Korea was reported to be the top nation on the planet for average connection speed, with 26.3 Mbps. In contrast, the average connection speed for the U.S was reported at 16.3 Mbps. Singapore had the top peak speed at 162 Mbps, while the average peak connection in the U.S was 70.8 Mbps.

    • Canada Calls Broadband a ‘Basic’ Service, Funds Rural Expansion

      Canada’s communications regulator announced a C$750 million ($560 million) fund that companies like Rogers Communications Inc., BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. can tap to subsidize high-speed internet projects in rural parts of the country.

      The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission said broadband internet should be seen as a “basic” service across the country. The C$750 million will be distributed over five years and doled out based on applications from telecommunications carriers.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Australian Govt Advisory Body Digs in Over Fair Use & Geo-Unblocking

        A final inquiry report published by the Australian government’s Productivity Commission is steadfastly maintaining the position that citizens should have the right to use VPNs to access geo-restricted content. The advisory body is also unmoved when it comes to delivering fair use exceptions, stating that rightsholder objections are based on flawed and “self-interested” assumptions.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/12/22/virtualbox-5-1-12/feed/ 0 Links 21/12/2016: New BlackArch Linux and BusyBox 1.26 Released http://techrights.org/2016/12/21/busybox-1-26-released/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/21/busybox-1-26-released/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2016 10:54:20 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97644

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Merry Linux to you!

    Get ready to start caroling around the office with these Linux-centric lyrics to popular Christmas carols.

  • 5% Market Share, Linus Upset, Wonderful Bluestar

    Monday was a busy day in the Linux world, there were way too many good headlines to cover. One of the more interesting was a prediction from Jack Wallen who said that Linux should reach 5% market share in 2017. Bad news is, vulnerability discoveries are liable to increase as well. Elsewhere, Mr. Wallen reviewed Bluestar Linux, an Arch derivative featuring a customized Plasma desktop, making it sound so good it will be my next experiment. The Register spotted another scolding from Linus Torvalds and blogger Dedoimedo said Fedora 25 GNOME is “an interesting distro.” Bryan Lunduke revived old 1992 BBS gaming and Adobe released an update for Flash.

  • Desktop

    • How can Linux get 5 percent desktop market share?

      Many people have been predicting the “year of the Linux desktop” for quite a while now, but it’s never happened. A redditor recently asked what it will take for Linux to actually achieve 5% desktop market share, and he got some interesting answers in the Linux subreddit.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • ‘Upset’ Linus Torvalds gets sweary and gets results

      Linus Torvalds has unleashed a little ripe language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, and quickly got results for having done so.

      “This piece-of-shit branch has obviously never been even compile-tested”, Torvalds wrote after receiving a pull request for some fixes to the KVM hypervisor that it was hoped might make it into Linux 4.10.

      Torvalds’ ire looks justifiable, as the code he was asked to review included errors that the contributors added to their own branch.

      “Am I upset?” Torvalds asked on the list, answering “You bet I am. Get your act together. You can’t just randomly revert things without checking the end result.”

    • Towards Enterprise Storage Interoperability

      With Dell EMC’s contribution of the CoprHD SouthBound SDK (SB SDK) we’re staking a claim for better interoperability. The SB SDK will help customers, developers and every day users be able to take some control over their storage interoperability, with an assist from the OpenSDS community. Right now, you can create block storage drivers pretty easily, with the ability to create filesystem and object storage drivers coming up later next year. The reference implementation you see in the GitHub code repository is designed to work with CoprHD and ViPR Controller, but over time we hope to see other implementations in widespread use across the industry.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • NVIDIA 375 vs. RADV+RadeonSI Mesa 13.1-dev Vulkan Benchmarks For Ending 2016

        The latest installment of our year-end benchmarks is focusing upon the performance of the NVIDIA Linux driver against the open-source Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver found within Mesa 13.1-dev. This comparison is particularly interesting given the continuous flow of improvements into Mesa Git, the NVIDIA 375.26 driver release from last week, the big Dota 2 7.00 update debuted earlier this month, and Croteam’s Vulkan improvements have rolled into TTP stable.

        Tested on the AMD side were the followign graphics cards that are supported (non-experimental) by AMDGPU DRM for RADV compatibility include the R9 285, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. Experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 benchmarks with RADV to come in its own article. For those curious about AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 fresh benchmarks on that front, I’ll post some more soon albeit there obviously is no changes over my earlier 16.50 benchmarks given the infrequent hybrid driver releases.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Icon Widget Properties

        A feature that went missing in the transition from Plasma 4 to Plasma 5 was the ability to configure the icon widget. The upcoming Plasma 5.9 release is where this dialog will finally make its entry into the 5.x series.

      • How input works – pointer input

        In the last blog post I discussed keyboard input. This blog post will be all about pointer devices – mostly known as “mouse”. Like my other posts in this series, this post only discusses the situation on KWin/Wayland.

      • QtCon Talks here

        Many KDABians attended QtCon and contributed to the unique new Qt event we co-created in Berlin, the summer of 2016, along with Qt Contributors, KDE Akademi, VideoLan and FSFE.

      • Embedded Devices with Qt and the INTEGRITY RTOS

        Qt 4.8 support has been available for a long time on the INTEGRITY RTOS. We are now pleased to announce that a proof-of-concept port of Qt 5.7 to INTEGRITY has been completed by Green Hills engineers. During the work, we tested the port on all major embedded HW platforms, including ones that have OpenGL ES support available. Work continues together with The Qt Company and the Qt ecosystem and thanks to this initial prototype, the upcoming Qt 5.9 is expected to contain INTEGRITY support.

      • What I’ve been upto

        Yup, this project has been in the pipeline for months. While it (mostly) works on a clean install of KDE, it has some bugs with copying with mtp:/ device slaves and isn’t very well integrated with Dolphin yet. It is in my best interest to have this shipped with KDE Frameworks as soon as possible, so I’m looking into patching Dolphin with better, more specific action support for my project.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 review

        For users with older computers, some of the modern Linux distributions can be too resource intensive. Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 is a lightweight distribution designed for those users. The minimum system requirements are a 500MHz processor, 128MB of RAM, and 4GB of disk space. The recommended requirements are a 1.0GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 10GB of disk space. Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, as well as a “Legacy” release for really old 32-bit systems, Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 can easily bring new life to older computers.

        Bodhi Linux offers a couple of download options beyond the 32-bit/64-bit choice. There is a Standard release and an AppPack version. The Standard release is very bare-bones with only a minimal set of pre-installed options, while the AppPack version comes with a larger number of bundled applications. The ISO for the 64-bit Standard version is 647MB and the 64-bit AppPack version is 1.21GB (about twice the size). For the purposes of this review, I opted for the Standard version, so I could customize my system as I wished. However, I will be mentioning some of the AppPack version’s additional software throughout this review.

      • Everything you wanted to know about Zorin OS 12

        Windows XP along with Windows 7 is one of the most favored operating system for millions of users around the world as of today, even though Microsoft has washed their hands off these operating system. No support for these platforms means, you will not get any security updates anymore and your data may be at risk. But there’s always a solution for all you Windows users, Linux is there for your rescue. And Zorin OS is one of the best desktop distribution for Linux desktops and with the new release Zorin OS 12, it only got better.

    • New Releases

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 for Raspberry Pi: An intriguing option for data centers

        SUSE announced recently that it managed to take its enterprise-grade platform, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and marry it with the Raspberry Pi. Fancy that—a platform created to support massive workloads and mission-critical services running on a $35 computer.

        You can download a 60-day evaluation of SUSE Enterprise Server 12 SP2 for Pi (login required). Be sure to check out the quick start guide. If you have trouble with subscription codes for SUSE Enterprise Server 12 SP2 for Pi, check out this forum thread.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Linux Kernel 4.9 Now Available in the Unstable Repos of Debian-Based SparkyLinux

          On December 20, 2016, the developers of the Debian-based SparkyLinux operating system announced the availability of the latest stable Linux 4.9 kernel series in the unstable repos of the GNU/Linux distribution.

          If you’re reading the news lately, you should be aware of the fact that Linux kernel 4.9 was officially released more than a weeks ago, on December 11, 2016, as announced by Linus Torvalds himself. This means that most Linux OS vendors should soon start preparing to migrate to the latest Linux 4.9 kernel branch.

          It might take some time for the new Linux kernel 4.9 packages to land in the stable repositories of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions available today, including Arch Linux, Solus, Ubuntu, etc., but it looks like it landed earlier on the unstable repository of SparkyLinux.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • This Intel board computer can be a powerful Ubuntu 16.04 Linux PC

            If you want a PC with Ubuntu Linux, you can turn to Intel’s Joule single-board computer instead of buying an expensive machine.

            Support for Ubuntu 16.04 desktop OS has been added to the Joule board, according to developer notes for Intel IoT Developer Kit 5.0 released late last week.

          • Where Does Ubuntu Fit Into the Internet of Things?

            Ubuntu Linux started off as a desktop focused Linux distribution, but has expanded to multiple areas of the years. Ubuntu Linux is today a leading Linux server and cloud vendor and has aspirations to move into the embedded world, known today as the Internet of Things (IoT).

            In a video interview, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical Inc., details some of the progress his firm has made in 2016 in the IoT world.

            Ubuntu has made past announcements about phone and TV efforts. While multiple Ubuntu phones exist, the standalone Ubuntu TV effort has evolved somewhat. Shuttleworth explained that Ubuntu Core, which is an optimized distribution of Ubuntu for embedded systems, is making some headway with TVs.

          • Ubuntu Budgie 17.04 Daily Builds Coming Soon, Budgie Desktop 10.2.9 Has Landed

            The development team behind the newest Ubuntu Linux flavor build around the lightweight Budgie desktop environment produced by the Solus Project, Ubuntu Budgie, published an informative newsletter about the latest news of the project.

          • Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) Linux OS to Use Swapfiles Instead of Swap Partitions

            Canonical’s Dimitri John Ledkov announced recently plans to drop Swap partitions for new installations of upcoming Ubuntu Linux operating system releases, and replace them with so-called Swapfiles.

            Not that this is big news for most of us who own computers with SSD or NVMe flash drives and a lot of RAM (system memory), but we thought it might be of interested to those who will attempt to install future versions of Ubuntu on PCs from ten years ago. If you’re not aware, Swap partitions or space is used when the amount of RAM) is full.

          • Canonical Patches 15 Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

            On December 20, 2016, Canonical published several new USN (Ubuntu Security Notice) advisories to inform users of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution about the general availability of kernel updates for their operating systems.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Happy Holidays: Linux Mint get a major upgrade

              With this long-term support Linux desktop, which is based on Ubuntu 16.04, Linux Mint is better than ever. Since I’ve already found Linux Mint 18 to be the best desktop out there of any sort, that’s saying something.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source challenger takes on Google Translate

    Researchers have released an open source neural network system for performing language translations that could be an alternative to proprietary, black-box translation services.

    Open Source Neural Machine Translation (OpenNMT) merges work from researchers at Harvard with contributions from long-time machine-translation software creator Systran. It runs on the Torch scientific computing framework, which is also used by Facebook for its machine learning projects.

  • Op-ed: Why I’m not giving up on PGP

    Every once in a while, a prominent member of the security community publishes an article about how horrible OpenPGP is. Matthew Green wrote one in 2014 and Moxie Marlinspike wrote one in 2015. The most recent was written by Filippo Valsorda, here on the pages of Ars Technica, which Matthew Green says “sums up the main reason I think PGP is so bad and dangerous.”

    In this article I want to respond to the points that Filippo raises. In short, Filippo is right about some of the details, but wrong about the big picture. For the record, I work on GnuPG, the most popular OpenPGP implementation.

  • Coopetition: All’s fair in love and open source

    PostgreSQL vs. MySQL. MongoDB vs. Cassandra. Solr vs. Elasticsearch. ReactJS vs. AngularJS. If you have an open source project that you are passionate about, chances are a competing project exists and is doing similar things, with users as passionate as yours. Despite the “we’re all happily sharing our code” vibe that many individuals in open source love to project, open source business, like any other, is filled with competition. Unlike other business models, however, open source presents unique challenges and opportunities when it comes to competition.

  • Illinois Turns Its Eye Toward Blockchain for Statewide Innovation

    Blockchain technology is the poster child for innovation in the financial tech space, but Illinois is taking an ambitious step forward by attempting to boldly adopt distributed ledger technology into several of its state agencies.

    The state announced last month at the Blockchain Conference Chicago that it was forming the Illinois Blockchain Initiative, a private-public partnership dedicated to exploring and utilizing blockchain in real-world and compelling ways, reports StateScoop.

    Blockchain technology “is a shared digital ledger, or a continually updated list of all transactions. This decentralized ledger keeps a record of each transaction that occurs across a fully distributed or peer-to-peer network, either public or private,” according to an article from international auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

  • Blockchain and the public sector – What happened in 2016

    Blockchain, also known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), was the technology buzzword of 2016. The technology has been around since 2008. It underpins the digital cryptocurrency, Bitcoin and was conceptualised as a solution to the problem of making a database both secure and not requiring a trusted administrator.

  • Kickstarter Apps Go Open Source on iOS and Android Apps to Help Startups

    Kickstarter is known for giving startups the boost they need to get going. And independent developers will now get similar help by getting access to the functional programming used to create the app.

    Kickstarter announced recently the company had released open source iOS and Android. The announcement was made on the company’s official company blog.

    Kickstarter launched in 2009, but an official mobile app didn’t come around for some time. The site now has an Android and iOS version, and the company is doing one better by open sourcing the code for these native apps.

  • Open Source, Free Riders and Crowdfunding

    Until about ten years ago, “free as in speech, not as in beer,” was an often repeated expression heard in open source circles. These days, the same sentiment is usually phrased as “free as in freedom.” Even though it’s fallen out of favor, I prefer the former. I think it more clearly explains the philosophy behind the open source development model. At the same time, it explains a problem that many essential open source projects face finding funding.

    Open source software is free to use, but as another old expression points out, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Open source or not, software doesn’t get written for free — nor can it be maintained without cash flow. Another old saying that fits here: If you’re going to dance, you have to pay the piper.

  • Coreboot

    • Google “Poppy” Kabylake Board Added To Coreboot

      While Chromebook / ChromeOS fans have been looking forward to the Kabylake-based “Eve” device, it looks like another device is possibly forthcoming making use of these latest-generation Intel CPUs.

      A new board for “Poppy” was added yesterday to Coreboot Git. This Google Poppy board is indeed making use of an Intel Kabylake processor.

    • 100% Of The 289 Coreboot Images Are Now Built Reproducible

      Reproducible builds have been a big theme in particularly the last year or two with being able to verify the binaries offered by open-source projects are bit-for-bit the same against the same set of sources. With the latest Coreboot work, all of their generated images are now reproducible from source.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • 5 Essential LibreOffice Writer Tips to Improve Your Productivity

      LibreOffice is the frugal (or Linux) person’s choice of office suite, offering all the robustness of Microsoft’s dominant software while being fully open-source and not costing you a penny.

      While even the latest version of the word-processing part of LibreOffice, Writer, looks a little old-hat without the fancy ribboned interface of Microsoft office or WPS, don’t be fooled. It has all the tools you need to create quality documents quickly. Here are a bunch of tips to hone your LibreOffice craft.

  • Funding

    • Databricks $60 Million in New Funding to Advance its Spark Efforts

      People in the Big Data and Hadoop communities have been becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley. IBM has made a huge financial commitment to advancing Spark, and companies like Databricks are focused on it as well.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open source core to Greek govt procedure documentation

      The use of open source technology is a core part of a project to document Greek government procedures. The project, involving 200 public administration staff and university researchers, is creating or completing the documentation for Greece’s public sector procedures. Started in 2015, the Diadikasies project has so far completed documentation for 1652 procedures.

    • France, Germany promote open source in industry

      Industry in France and Germany should embrace open source, the governments of both countries say in the closing statement of the German-French digital conference in Berlin on 13 December. Open source is a key driver for digital innovation, the countries say.

    • France And Germany Get Free/Libre Open Source Software

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Seeking Open Access Deal, 60 German Academic Institutions Ditch All Subscriptions With Elsevier

        In the struggle to provide open access to academic research, one company name keeps cropping up as a problem: Elsevier. Techdirt has written numerous stories about efforts to rein in the considerable — and vastly profitable — power that Elsevier wields in the world of academic publishing. These include boycotts of various kinds, mass resignations of journal editors, as well as access to millions of publicly-funded papers in ways that bypass Elsevier altogether.

Leftovers

  • 2017 predictions from IT leaders on the future of technology

    As we approach 2017, we asked IT leaders what they see on the horizon for the future of technology. We intentionally left the question open-ended, and as a result, the answers represent a broad range of what IT professionals may expect to face in the new year.

  • Science

    • Brexit will damage world-class science in the UK; throwing money at it won’t help

      The UK gets more money for research from the EU—£8.8 billion between 2007 and 2013—than it contributes (£5.4 billion for the same period). Fortunately, that shortfall is a relatively easy problem to solve by throwing money around, and the UK government has done that, as a new report from the House of Lords titled A time for boldness: EU membership and UK science after the referendum notes. Importantly, this boldness comes in the form of new money: “It is an additional commitment from the Treasury to underwrite EU research funding.”

      However, the report also points out that “Reassurances on funding are welcome but if they were to expire, and are not replaced, this would undermine some of the benefit of the major increase announced in the 2016 Autumn Statement.” In other words, the UK government’s commitment to make up the shortfall needs to be long-term if it is to be effective.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • After Two Unconstitutional Anti-Abortion Bills Pass, We Have to Ask: What’s the Matter With Ohio’s Lame Duck Legislature?

      It’s lame duck season in the state of Ohio and this year seems like the “super special” version. During the lame duck session, the legislature has just a few short weeks to pass laws before all bills have to start over from scratch in the new year.

      In a matter of 72 hours, Ohio’s super-majority party has managed to attach, pass, and push through a nearly unbelievable amount of legislation.

    • Former Flint emergency managers, others charged in water crisis

      Michigan prosecutors on Tuesday charged four former government officials in Flint, including two city emergency managers, with conspiring to violate safety rules in connection with the city’s water crisis that exposed residents to dangerous levels of lead.

      Former state-appointed emergency managers Darnell Earley and Gerald Ambrose and former city employees Howard Croft, a public works superintendent, and Daugherty Johnson, a utilities manager, were the latest to be charged in the case, Attorney General Bill Schuette said.

      The defendants conspired to operate the city’s water treatment plant when it was not safe to do so, he told a news conference in Flint.

      “Flint was a casualty of arrogance, disdain and failure of management, an absence of accountability,” Schuette said.

    • ‘The Trump Administration Looks Like Bad News for Almost Every Element of Drug Policy Reform’ – CounterSpin interview with Ethan Nadelmann on John Kelly

      They were hard-won and a long time coming, but there were clear signs of hope that the punitive, racist, violent and ineffective war on drugs was not just fading away, but maybe being consciously reconsidered. And however cynical you want to be about motives, nascent bipartisan moves around over-incarceration and sentencing disparities looked set to change the lives of real people.

    • Media Legitimizing GOP’s ‘Universal’ Health Plan That Doesn’t Exist

      Members of the GOP leadership were likely jubilant when they read the New York Times (12/15/16) and saw the following headline: “GOP Plans to Repeal Health Law with ‘Universal Access.’”

      The Times’ decision to include the words “universal,” “health” and “plan” in the headline was extremely misleading and irresponsible. It gave readers the distinct—and deceptive—impression that Republicans have something resembling a “universal” health plan, and will use it to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

      It appears that the same corporate media who misled us into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (Extra!, 4/10) are now misleading us out of it—and the Times’ reporting on the GOP’s health care agenda is a particularly egregious example of this.

    • Exxon Mobil Is Fighting to Keep Its Dangerous Chemicals in Children’s Toys

      Most of us know Exxon Mobil Corp. as an energy giant, which makes sense given that it is the world’s largest publicly held oil and gas company. Rex Tillerson, the company’s CEO, has spent his entire professional life prioritizing Exxon Mobil’s corporate interests over human rights, the environment, and the diplomatic interests of the U.S., all of which has prompted many journalists and commentators to point out that his appointment as secretary of state is not just a terrible idea but a joke seemingly ripped from the pages of a Marxist comic book.

      What’s less well known is that Exxon Mobil is also one of the world’s biggest chemical companies, and that its chemical interests also sometimes run counter to those of people in the U.S. and beyond. Petrochemicals accounted for more than a quarter of Exxon Mobil’s $16 billion in net profits last year and wound up in wide range of consumer products such as plastics, tires, batteries, detergents, adhesives, synthetic fibers, and household detergents.

      Among Exxon Mobil’s chemical products are phthalates, a family of chemicals widely used to make plastic pliable. Phthalates are in everything from food containers and plastic wrap to rattles, pacifiers, bottle nipples, and teething toys for babies. More than 75 percent of Americans have at least five of the chemicals in their body, according to a 2000 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    • ‘We’ve Seen Exxon Leading the Charge to Go After Groups That Criticized Them’

      A widely circulated news article on the appointment of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be secretary of State opens with the note that “the brash Texas oilman…helped forge or supervise exploration, production, and refinery projects in 50 countries on six continents.” But corporate media really only appear interested in one country, and that’s Russia.

  • Security

    • ADUPS Android Malware Infects Barnes & Noble

      ADUPS is an Android “firmware provisioning” company based out of Shanghai, China. The software specializes both in Big Data collection of Android usage, and hostile app installation and/or firmware control. Google has blacklisted the ADUPS agent in its Android Compatibility Test Suite (CTS).

      ADUPS recently compromised many BLU-phone models and was found to be directly transmitting call logs, SMS, contacts, location info, nd more from handsets within the US to Chinese servers using DES (weak) encryption.

    • New Linux/Rakos threat: devices and servers under SSH scan (again) [Ed: No, it’s not a “Linux” problem that some people or developers use a crappy and predictable password]

      Apparently, frustrated users complain more often recently on various forums about their embedded devices being overloaded with computing and network tasks. What these particular posts have in common is the name of the process causing the problem. It is executed from a temporary directory and disguised as a part of the Java framework, namely “.javaxxx”. Additional names like “.swap” or “kworker” are also used. A few weeks ago, we discussed the recent Mirai incidents and Mirai-connected IoT security problems in The Hive Mind: When IoT devices go rogue and all that was written then still holds true.

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • OpenSSL After Heartbleed by Rich Salz & Tim Hudson, OpenSSL

      In this video from LinuxCon Europe, Rich Salz and Tim Hudson from the OpenSSL team take a deep dive into what happened with Heartbleed and the steps the OpenSSL team are taking to improve the project.

    • OpenSSL after Heartbleed
    • Container Security: Your Questions Answered

      To help you better understand containers, container security, and the role they can play in your enterprise, The Linux Foundation recently produced a free webinar hosted by John Kinsella, Founder and CTO of Layered Insight. Kinsella covered several topics, including container orchestration, the security advantages and disadvantages of containers and microservices, and some common security concerns, such as image and host security, vulnerability management, and container isolation.

    • Google scales tiny mountain to hunt down crypto bugs

      Google’s Project Wycheproof is a new effort by Google to improve the security of widely used cryptography code.

      Many of the algorithms used in cryptography for encryption, decryption, and authentication are complicated, especially when asymmetric, public key cryptography is being used. Over the years, these complexities have resulted in a wide range of bugs in real crypto libraries and the software that uses them.

    • Mysterious Rakos Botnet Rises in the Shadows by Targeting Linux Servers, IoT Devices

      Somebody is building a botnet by infecting Linux servers and Linux-based IoT devices with a new malware strain named Rakos.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Marine Le Pen denies cash-for-support deal with Russia

      French far-right leader Marine Le Pen may have received funding from Russian-backed banks as thanks for supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea, French investigative news site Mediapart reported Tuesday, citing text messages exchanged between two Russian officials.

      In the messages, which Mediapart said it had obtained thanks to a hacking group called “Anonymous International,” Kremlin official Timur Prokopenko mentioned Le Pen dozens of times in exchanges with a person identified as Kostia. Anonymous International identified Kostia as Konstantin Rykov, a former pro-Putin MP who has a house in France and is known to have met with Le Pen.

      A few days before Crimea was due to hold a referendum on Russia’s annexation, in March 2014, Prokopenko wrote to Kostia asking to bring Le Pen to Crimea as an “observer” during the referendum. “We really need it. I told my boss you were in contact with her???”

    • Berlin terror suspect released

      The man arrested by Berlin police in connection with Monday’s deadly attack on a Christmas market in Berlin has been released, the federal prosecutor said in a statement Tuesday.

      “The investigations thus far have not produced urgent suspicion against the suspect,” the statement said.

      The man who was released is believed to be a Pakistani asylum seeker who had evaded immigration authorities’ attempts to question him after he arrived in the country a year ago, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said at a press conference earlier on Tuesday. The man had not been identified as a suspected terrorist prior to Monday’s events.

    • ISIS claims responsibility for Berlin attack, says driver was ‘soldier of the Islamic State’

      The German capital was on high alert Tuesday with one or more suspects still at large in the deadly truck assault on a Christmas market, even as the Islamic State claimed responsibility for an act that struck at the heart of Europe’s Christian traditions.

      Chancellor Angela Merkel decried the assault — which left 12 dead and 52 injured after a truck carrying a payload of steel careened into festive stalls and fairgoers in Berlin — as a presumed “terror attack,” even as German police scrambled to find the culprit. The only suspect to date — a Pakistani asylum seeker taken into custody shortly after Monday’s bloodshed — was released by police late Tuesday because of insufficient evidence.

    • Families Of Orlando Shooting Victims Sue Twitter, Facebook, And Google For ‘Supporting Terrorism’

      Remember that time when Google, Twitter, and Facebook helped shoot up a nightclub in Orlando, Florida? Me neither. But attorney Keith Altman does. He’s representing the families of three of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in a lawsuit alleging [sigh] that these tech companies are somehow responsible for this act of terrorism.

    • Eva Bartlett and Joey Johnson

      For the first half of the program, Peter and Mickey discuss the conflict in Syria; their guest is independent journalist Eva Bartlett, who recently returned from Aleppo and is now on a US speaking tour. She explains why most corporate media coverage of Syria, and even some progressive coverage, doesn’t depict the actual situation there. In the second half of the program, the guest is Joey Johnson, whose burning of an American flag in 1984 became a US Supreme Court free-speech case, where they ruled in his favor in 1989. Johnson is facing charges again over the burning of a flag outside the 2016 Republican National Convention.

    • The Terrifying Executive We Need for the Wrong Reasons

      I understand why all of the often false, usually bombastic, reporting on Trump is angering me.

      You know the stuff — take a “fact,” real or fully made up, and conflate it with some apocalyptic prediction. Watch: Trump alternates between wearing boxers and briefs. Will his indecisiveness cause him to pull back when America is attacked by the Russians?

      The other story everyone writes now is based on the journalist’s apparent post-November 9 discovery of an element of fascism, racism and/or parts of the Constitution and presidential practice. And so someone is shocked that Trump will be able to choose drone kill targets, or have access to everything the NSA sweeps up about his enemies.

    • Trump’s Pick for Interior Secretary Was Caught in “Pattern of Fraud” at SEAL Team 6

      A Montana lawmaker tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to be secretary of the interior committed travel fraud when he was a member of the elite Navy SEAL Team 6, according to three former unit leaders and a military consultant.

      In announcing the nomination of Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke, a retired Navy SEAL commander, Trump praised his military background. “As a former Navy SEAL, he has incredible leadership skills and an attitude of doing whatever it takes to win,” Trump said last week.

      But when Zinke was a mid-career officer at SEAL Team 6, he was caught traveling multiple times to Montana in 1998 and 1999 to renovate his home. Zinke claimed that the travel was for official duties, according to the sources.

      He submitted travel vouchers and was compensated for the travel costs.

    • How Many Children Were Shot Dead Today? An Interview with Gary Younge

      Every day, on average, seven children and teenagers are shot dead in the United States. November 23, 2013 — the day Gary Younge chose randomly as the setting for his book Another Day in the Death of America — was “just another day in America.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Former church member launches ‘Mormon Wikileaks’ for anonymous tips and whistleblowers

      A former member of the Mormon church has launched a “Wikileaks”-inspired website in an effort to make the famously private Latter Day Saints more transparent.

      MormonWikiLeaks went live on Tuesday after two-and-a-half months of planning and, like the original WikiLeaks, will seek to expose validated documents or videos anonymous tipsters choose to send in. The group also plans to have social media pages.

      Founder Ryan McKnight, a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, conceived of the idea for the site after he helped an anonymous source leak videos of senior church members at a twice-yearly conference in October. He has been “bombarded” with people looking to share information since.

    • Every month a whistleblower wants to report misconduct

      Since going public in June 2013, Commonwealth Bank whistleblower Jeff Morris is contacted at least once a month by company insiders asking for advice about reporting corporate misconduct.

      “When I explain the potential cost to them: the loss of not just their job but also their career, due to vindictive back channel smear campaigns; the lack of any effective protection or compensation, let alone rewards; most walk away,” he says.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Climate scientists are launching an anonymous hotline for government workers to report Trump meddling

      Climate scientists are predicting rough weather for their profession in 2017. US president-elect Donald Trump’s statements on climate change, his appointments to head environmental agencies, and the threatening actions of his transition team all have the nation’s weather professionals on alert and preparing for the worst.

      The Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has established a hotline for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees to report political meddling. There’s currently concern among NOAA scientists about who Trump’s pick to head the agency will be. “I am hearing a lot of worry,” union director Andrew Rosenberg told Bloomberg. “The worry is that they will be putting another ideologue in place.”

    • 70,000 Demand Obama Protect Climate from Trump Denialism

      ust one month from inauguration and with confirmation hearings looming for President-elect Trump’s climate-denier cabinet, an international coalition of human rights and environmental groups is appealing to President Obama to take one final action to advance justice and action on climate change in spite of Trump.

    • Collapse of West Antarctic Ice Sheet Reveals Inadequacy of Current Climate Strategies

      With president-elect Donald Trump and his army of climate deniers preparing to take office, it could be a hard battle to get the US to adhere to any sort of climate policy anytime soon. This is hard news because today’s suggested but nowhere-implemented climate policy was already much less restrictive than the climate policy from the mid-1990s. In a world where we have emitted as much carbon dioxide since 1987 as was emitted in the previous 230 years, why has policy not become more stringent? This outdated emissions reductions policy has earned the title “legacy,” not because it is worthy of recognition, or something we want to pass on to future generations, but because it is like “legacy software,” in that “it is difficult to replace because of its wide usage.”

      The climate policy strategy that we are attempting to implement in the face of Trump’s intransigence is conceptually similar to what we were supposed to adopt with the Kyoto Protocol back in the 1990s. That is, it involves a reduction of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The two relevant actions that we are now struggling to implement are the Clean Power Plan (CPP) and Obama’s Paris Climate Conference commitment. The CPP is still not implemented and has been sent back to District Court for further litigation. On paper, its emissions reductions are a fraction more restrictive than the initial Kyoto targets but overall, the CPP is significantly less restrictive than Kyoto because Kyoto targets were supposed to have been achieved in 2012. The CPP pushed the deadline back 18 years to 2030.

  • Finance

    • I make $2.35 an hour in coal country. I don’t want handouts. I want a living wage.

      I grew up in Dickenson County, Va. Like many who were raised in the heart of Appalachia, I come from a long line of coal miners. My great-grandfathers, grandfathers, uncles and cousins all went underground to dig the coal that kept the lights on for communities across our country.

      My family members, like thousands throughout coal country, took pride in their work. We stuck together and fought to make our jobs good jobs. In April 1989, the Pittston Coal Co. cut health care for mineworkers, and 2,000 miners walked out on strike. My pawpaw was one of them. When Pittston brought scabs in to work at lower wages and called on state troopers to break up the strike, the mineworkers, with their community behind them, didn’t back down — they fought harder. Through months of civil disobedience, blocking roads and mine entrances and holding public demonstrations, the United Mine Workers of America won the wages and benefits our families deserved in February 1990.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Teaching Civics in the Time of Trump

      Do we need a new Schoolhouse Rock! to remind us how to run a democracy?

    • Can We Fire the Electoral College? Probably Not, but We Can Put It Under New Management

      The electors of the Electoral College met this afternoon in their respective states and anointed as president the candidate who won the popular vote in a larger number of states — Donald Trump — regardless of the fact that another candidate — Hillary Clinton — won the larger number of votes by several million.

      The ACLU has opposed the Electoral College since 1969 for non-partisan reasons. By now — everyone, Republicans, Democrats, and none-of-the-aboves — should be fed up with its undemocratic and unpredictable nature.

      Unfortunately, amending the Constitution to eliminate this atavistic system is a practical impossibility for the same reason the Electoral College is a problem: The less populous states have a disproportionate share of voting power. Constitutional amendments require approval by three-quarters of the states, not a national majority or even super-majority of voters. Most states are currently Republican-dominated, and Republicans may believe at the moment that the peculiarities of the Electoral College will help to serve their partisan goals in future elections.

    • Republicans Will Review Recount Process

      But some Republicans say the recount surfaced issues that must be researched, and maybe fixed.

      “While the recount was more of a publicity stunt than anything else, at the very least it proved that our state has a fair and trustworthy system because of our efforts to reduce fraud with the implementation of voter ID,” said Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

      “Moving forward, we will investigate additional ways to reform our election laws to reduce any chance of fraud,” Vos added. “The Assembly Republican caucus will also discuss changes to the recount statute to insure Wisconsin taxpayers don’t bear any of the costs of future recounts.”

    • Why US liberals are now buying guns too

      Gun ownership has traditionally been associated with the right wing in America but the election of Donald Trump has prompted some left-wingers to join gun clubs – and even start preparing for the collapse of society.

      “I really didn’t expect to be thinking about purchasing a gun. It was something that my father did and I rolled my eyes at him.”

    • Green Party Activist: No, Jill Stein’s Recount Was Not A ‘Front’ For The Clinton Campaign

      By now, it is clear that the two main corporate-backed political parties will never allow ballots to be re-counted in any U.S. Presidential election.

      I am writing on the morning that the electoral college will be voting on who will become the next president of the United States. Even at this late date the evidence mounts that hundreds of thousands of voters cast legitimate ballots in the 2016 elections that were never counted. Yet the Democratic Party and its candidate, Hillary Clinton, have refused to file any court challenges to the elections machinery, oversight, or illegitimate processes.

      And the Republican Party continues to go all-out to block Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s attempt to force three states to count every ballot by hand.

      One would think: “Who could be opposed to counting every ballot?”

      Both the Democrat and Republican parties and their candidates each twist rationalizations like pretzels to prevent a re-count.

    • The Electoral College Desecrates Democracy—Especially This Time

      The Electoral College was created 229 years ago as a check and balance against popular sovereignty. And, with its formal endorsement of Donald Trump for the presidency, this absurd anachronism has once again completed its mission of desecrating democracy.

      As of Monday afternoon, the actual vote count in the race for the presidency was: Democrat Hillary Clinton 65,844,594, Republican Donald Trump 62,979,616. That’s a 2,864,978 popular-vote victory. Yet, when the last of the electors from the 50 states and the District of Columbia had completed their quadrennial mission early Monday evening, the Electoral College vote was: Trump 304, Clinton 227.

      So-called “faithless” electors split from Trump and Clinton, casting votes for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Ohio Governor John Kasich, former Congressman Ron Paul and Native American elder (and Dakota Access Pipeline critic) Faith Spotted Eagle.

    • What Trump’s Cabinet of ‘best people’ lacks

      You’re hired. That’s what President-elect Donald Trump has been telling the select group of individuals whom he has chosen for his Cabinet. On Thursday he named Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Montana, to lead the Department of the Interior. “America is the most beautiful country in the world and he is going to help keep it that way with smart management of our federal lands,” Trump said in a statement. Now, with only the slots for secretary of agriculture and veteran’s affairs still open, it seems highly unlikely that any Latinos will have a spot in Trump’s Cabinet.

    • Detroit’s election woes: 782 more votes than voters

      Whether the result of machine malfunction, human error or even fraud, the unexplained voting discrepancies in Detroit last month were not sizable enough to affect the outcome in Michigan of the presidential election, according to a new Free Press analysis of voting precinct records.

      In 248 precincts, there were a total of 782 more votes tabulated by voting machines than the number of voters listed as picking up ballots in the precincts’ poll books. That makes up just three-tenths of 1% of the total 248,211 votes that were logged in Detroit for the presidential election. That number was far too small to swing the statewide election results, even in this year’s especially tight race that saw a Republican win Michigan for the first time since George Bush in 1988.

    • My President Was Black

      Obama’s ties to the South Side tradition that Washington represented were complicated. Like Washington, Obama attempted to forge a coalition between black South Siders and the broader community. But Obama, despite his adherence to black cultural mores, was, with his roots in Kansas and Hawaii, his Ivy League pedigree, and his ties to the University of Chicago, still an exotic out-of-towner. “They were a bit skeptical of him,” says Salim Muwakkil, a journalist who has covered Obama since before his days in the Illinois state Senate. “Chicago is a very insular community, and he came from nowhere, seemingly.”

    • Only one-third of Americans say Russia influenced 2016 election

      Just one-third of Americans say they believe Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

      Forty-four percent of the 2,000 voters polled Dec. 15 through Dec. 17 said they do not think Russia influenced November’s election, while a quarter are still unsure.

    • Trump on Free Speech and Freedom of the Press

      No one can know for sure what the incoming Trump administration will do, but President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized and threatened the media in the United States. In lieu of attempting the impossible and predicting the future, we’ve gathered all of Trump’s stated positions on free speech and freedom of the press. If you are aware of any additional statements that we have not included, please email kate@eff.org with a link to your source material, and we will consider it for inclusion.

      While running for president, Trump made his general feelings about the press very clear. He has called the media “dishonest” and described reporters as “scum,” “sleaze,” and “horrible people.” At a rally last February, he famously said, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

    • Why Hillary Lost, According to Hillary

      It wasn’t her fault.

      The Clinton campaign, and Hillary herself, summed up her loss by blaming FBI Director Comey as an individual, the FBI as an organization, and of course the Russians and the Russians and the Russians and Putin himself for the loss. “Angry white men” got tagged as well. Nobody likes Huma Abedin anymore, either. That’s pretty much it.

    • Clinton’s Defeat and the Fake News Conspiracy

      There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result.

      A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts.

      But now he has won, the same media outlets are cheerleading the establishment’s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of a Trump presidency. That campaign is being headed by the failed candidate, Hillary Clinton, after a lengthy softening-up operation by US intelligence agencies, led by the CIA.

      According to the prevailing claim, Russian president Vladimir Putin stole the election on behalf of Trump (apparently by resorting to the US playbook on psy-ops). Trump is not truly a US president, it seems. He’s Russia’s placeman in the White House – a Moscovian candidate.

    • The Left’s Risk in Blaming Russia

      This week began with a mass email from the head of the Democratic National Committee, who declared: “By now, Americans know beyond any reasonable doubt that the Russian government orchestrated a series of cyberattacks on political campaigns and organizations over the past two years and used stolen information to influence the presidential campaign and congressional races.” DNC chair Donna Brazile went on: “The integrity of our elections is too important for Congress to refuse to take these attacks seriously.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • How Tech Companies Can Fight for Their Users in the Courts

      There are a lot of political uncertainties around the incoming Trump administration, but the threats to civil liberties are potentially greater than ever. President Obama failed to rein in the surveillance state, and Mr. Trump has nominated cabinet members like Mike Pompeo who are big fans of bulk surveillance. Now, given Mr. Trump’s campaign posture of being a “law and order” candidate who has openly criticized Apple for standing up for strong encryption, tech companies need to be even more vigilant in fighting for their users in the courts.

      EFF stands ready to support those who will be pioneers in these efforts. Below, we highlight a few ways companies can stand up for their users, along with some prominent examples of from the past. In addition, for the last six years EFF has produced an annual “Who Has Your Back?” report evaluating the practices of technology companies in categories such as insisting on a warrant for user content and issuing transparency reports. Companies can look at these reports to get a sense of best practices in the industry.

    • Trump and His Advisors on Surveillance, Encryption, Cybersecurity

      On encryption, Trump said in early 2016 that Apple should have to make available data stored on an iPhone linked to the shooter in last year’s attack in San Bernardino, California. Apple repeatedly challenged the FBI’s demands that the company build a tool to access the secure data on the encrypted device.

      “But to think that Apple won’t allow us to get into her cell phone,” Trump said in an interview. “Who do they think they are? No, we have to open it up.”

      Trump also famously called for a boycott of Apple until the company helped to unlock the device, criticizing Apple CEO Tim Cook for “looking to do a big number, probably to show how liberal he is.”

    • ORG’s first take on the leaked e-Privacy Regulations

      The leaked e-Privacy Regulation (ePR) brings many improved protections to our communications data, which are now extended to communications devices and internet services, not just traditional telecom providers. At the same time this modernisation has brought other fundamental changes that could have less welcome consequences.

      Here we focus on the basic changes to electronic communications. Most other analyses of the leaked ePR will probably focus on cookies and the impact on online advertising, and rightly so as this is really important. We don’t have the space here for a proper take on both here, but in the coming months we will also engage with those other areas: cookies, marketing, nuisance calls, as well as the enforcement aspects.

    • Court Says Abandoned Phone Locked With A Passcode Still Has Expectation Of Privacy

      A Florida Court of Appeals has handed down a somewhat surprising ruling [PDF] in a case centering on evidence obtained from a teen’s cellphone. (via FourthAmendment.com)

      Two juveniles fled their vehicle during a traffic stop, with one of them (referred to as “K.C.” in the ruling) leaving behind his cellphone on the car’s seat. This phone — whose lockscreen featured a photo of someone who “looked similar” to “K.C.” — was taken by the officer.

      Several months later, the PD’s forensic lab was asked to determine ownership of the phone. The phone was locked with a passcode, but the lab was able to unlock and retrieve this information. No warrant was obtained and the search apparently wasn’t limited to determining ownership. The use of evidence obtained from the phone was challenged, but the state felt it had plenty of warrant exceptions to save its search.

    • EFF urges companies to prepare for more surveillance and censorship

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation – a group of tech pioneers trying to keep the Internet open and free – have published an open letter to tech companies pleading them to prepare for an era of increased Internet surveillance and censorship. The EFF is citing statements by Trump and his advisors regarding Internet control, net neutrality, and freedom of speech and the press.

    • Donald Trump’s future NSA director met with Austrian party founded by Nazis

      The leader of Austria’s Nazi-founded Freedom Party has signed a cooperation agreement with Russia’s ruling party — only weeks after meeting with Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who will soon be national security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. This muddies the waters as to the United States’ place in a geopolitical world that could be dominated by Russia in the near term.

      Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Freedom Party, announced that he had signed the agreement with Putin’s own United Russia party on his Facebook page, The New York Times reported on Monday. The announcement also mentioned that Strache had visited Flynn a few weeks earlier in Trump Tower. The cooperation agreement itself includes plans for collaboration between United Russia and the Freedom Party on economic, business, and political projects over the next five years.

      Founded in the 1950s by former Nazis, the Freedom Party nearly captured the Austrian presidency (which is largely ceremonial) in May but lost a runoff election on Dec. 4. It nevertheless remains a potent force in Austrian politics, where it leads all opinions polls ahead of the two mainstream parties, and is best known for its hardline stance against immigration and its defensiveness toward Russia. Indeed, Russia’s signatory Sergei Zheleznyak identified Europe’s “migration crisis” as one of the key areas where the two parties could work together.

    • Report: Shadow Brokers Leaks Trace to NSA Insider
    • Report: ShadowBrokers Obtained Stolen NSA Info Via Rogue Insider
    • ShadowBrokers got NSA spy tools from rogue insider

      The ShadowBrokers didn’t break into the United States National Security Agency after all. The latest research into the group of cybercriminals selling alleged NSA spy tools reinforced the idea that they’d received the classified materials from an insider within the intelligence agency, security company Flashpoint said.

      Analysis of the latest ShadowBrokers dump, which was announced earlier in the month on the blogging platform Medium by “Boceffus Cleetus,” suggests the spy tools were initially taken directly from an NSA code repository by a rogue insider, Flashpoint said. The company’s researchers analyzed the sample file containing implants and exploits and various screenshots provided in the post and have “medium confidence” that an NSA employee or contractor initially leaked the tools, said Ronnie Tokazowski, senior malware analyst with Flashpoint. However, they were still “uncertain of how these documents were exfiltrated,” he said.

    • Shadow Brokers are back with ‘stolen NSA cyberweapons’, now 99.9% off

      That’s the self-styled, pseudo-semi-literate but surely satirical hacker group that claimed in August 2016 to have penetrated the NSA, or some other organisation of that sort, and made off with “cyberweapons” worth more than $500 million.

      They dumped a few files as tasters, with the claim that the files they were keeping back to sell were “better than Stuxnet.”

      That’s a bold claim, given that Stuxnet was the airgap-jumping USB virus that was allegedly written to sneak right into the heart of Iran’s uranium enrichment programme.

    • Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22 billion WhatsApp merger

      Brussels’ competition officials issued a charge sheet against Facebook on Tuesday, in which it is alleged that the free content ad network failed to disclose that “the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook users’ IDs with WhatsApp users’ IDs already existed” at the time of the merger.

      Antitrust chief Margerthe Vestager said that companies must provide “accurate information” during routine competition probes into planned acquisitions.

      “They must take this obligation seriously,” she said. “In this specific case, the commission’s preliminary view is that Facebook gave us incorrect or misleading information during the investigation into its acquisition of WhatsApp. Facebook now has the opportunity to respond.”

    • James Clapper’s Office To Finally Reveal NSA’s ‘Incidental Collection’ Numbers

      Prior to the Snowden leaks making it unignorable, the NSA denied the incidental collection of Americans’ communications was much of a problem. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall were two of the few members of the NSA’s oversight willing to ask tough questions. One of the questions they asked — all the way back in 2011 — was how many Americans were spied on by the NSA’s programs. The answer may shock you/cause uncontrollable eyerolling.

    • EFF’s full-page Wired ad: Dear tech, delete your logs before it’s too late

      EFF has run a full-page ad in this month’s Wired, addressed to the technology industry, under the banner “Your threat model just changed,” warning them that the incoming administration has vowed to spy on and deport millions of their fellow Americans on the basis of religion and race, and that they are in grave risk of having their services conscripted to help with this effort. (Trump is also an avowed opponent of net neutrality)

    • GCHQ should do more to guard against financial cyber crime, Tory MP urges
    • NCSC boss asked to detail efforts to protect financial services sector against cyberattacks
    • GCHQ must do more to protect banks against cyber attacks, Tory MP urges
    • Notable Analyst Coverage Update: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), Sempra Energy (NYSE:SRE)

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Unequal Sentences for Blacks and Whites

      In Flagler County, Fla., blacks convicted of robbery were given prison sentences nearly triple those of whites, even though the circumstances of the crimes were the same.

    • Malcolm Gladwell Likes Leaks When They Bolster Government Power

      But maybe more surprising than the class bias of the New Yorker’s resident deep-thinker is his take on the role of anonymous leaks. In a properly functioning media system, Gladwell argues, the purpose of leaks is to fool people into accepting government indoctrination—and it would be a shame if that system were to break down.

      Gladwell borrows (of course) this argument from Columbia law professor David Pozen (Harvard Law Review, 12/20/13), writing, “Pozen argues that governments look the other way when it comes to leaks because it is in their interest to do so.” Pozen makes a distinction between unauthorized “leaks” and “plants”—the latter being “a leak made with the full authorization of the White House.”

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T, Verizon Laugh At The FCC’s Last-Minute Attempt To Crack Down On Zero Rating

      So we’ve noted several times how the FCC’s decision to avoid banning zero rating when crafting net neutrality rules was a bad idea, as it opened the door wide to all manner of net neutrality violations — provided incumbent ISPs were just creative about it. And like clockwork, companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast quickly got to work exempting their own content from usage caps, while penalizing competitors (and non-profits or educational services). Meanwhile companies like Sprint and T-Mobile began charging users a steep premium unless they wanted games, video and music throttled by default.

      Unlike many other countries (Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, India), the FCC decided to avoid banning these kinds of practices as part of neutrality rules, instead saying they’d step in and act on a “cases by case” basis should ISP behaviors prove anti-competitive. But as ISPs increasingly made it very clear they were using arbitrary usage caps as anti-competitive weapons against competing streaming video services, the FCC did nothing. That is, until the agency reached out to AT&T and Verizon last month, formally accusing both companies of violating net neutrality.

      It’s a strange, belated decision by an FCC that, by most analyst accounts, is about to be defunded and defanged. Both the GOP and incoming Trump administration have clear they see no role for the agency as a consumer or competition watchdog. With FCC boss Tom Wheeler having just stepped down, both AT&T and Verizon are well aware the current FCC is a lame duck. As such both companies responded to the FCC’s inquiries this week with the legal equivalent of laughter.

    • Trump and His Advisors on Net Neutrality

      Through the combined efforts of EFF and a coalition of public interest groups — and four million of you who wrote in to the FCC — we won carefully tailored and essential net neutrality protections in 2015 and defended them in court in 2016. But how will the incoming Trump administration impact net neutrality in 2017? We’ve collected a range of statements on the positions of Trump, his transition team, and those who are likely to guide the new administration on this issue.

      Trump took a swipe at net neutrality in a November 2014 tweet, stating, “Obama’s Attack on the Internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target Conservative Media.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • How The DMCA And The CFAA Are Preventing People From Saving Their Soon-To-Be-Broken Pebble Watches

        I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think smartwatches are really wonderful, even as lots of people scoff at the concept (and sales have been disappointing across the board). The first device that clued me in to the possible power of the smartwatch was the original Pebble smartwatch, which I (and many, many others) backed on Kickstarter. I ended up backing their second Kickstarter campaign as well — but was disappointed in the end product and ended up moving on to another smartwatch instead (the Moto 360, though now it looks like Motorola is dumping that business as well). I didn’t end up backing Pebble’s latest Kickstarter campaign, which turned out to be a good thing, because as you may have heard, the company announced last week that it had sold its assets to Fitbit, and no more work would be done on Pebble watches (and people who backed the latest project would eventually get refunds, but no watches).

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/12/21/busybox-1-26-released/feed/ 0 Links 20/12/2016: OpenSDS Project Grows, OpenSSH 7.4 is Out http://techrights.org/2016/12/20/openssh-7-4-is-out/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/20/openssh-7-4-is-out/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2016 14:18:07 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97620

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • An Open Source Driving Agent from comma.ai

    Last week, we open sourced an advanced driver assistance system in order to help accelerate the future of self driving cars and provide a platform anyone can build on top of. We released both openpilot, driving agent research software, and NEO, a robotics platform capable of running openpilot, under the MIT license.

  • How Praekelt.org and Open Source Provide Critical Services to Enable Social Change

    Praekelt.org runs exclusively on open source software, and the majority of their services are deployed on Ubuntu Linux servers. Recently, they launched a few services on the latest stable Debian release.

    The organization uses Apache Mesos to manage large clusters for their maternal health applications. “All applications on these clusters are distributed in Docker containers and are managed by Mesophere’s Marathon. To provision the machines we use Puppet. Our language of choice for all of our services is Python,” according to Simon de Haan, chief engineer atPraekelt.org and Ambika Samarthya-Howard, head of communications.

  • Five open source skills you’ll need in 2017 | Top skills IT pros will need to conquer the open source platform

    With more organisations opting to either use open source software or open up their platforms, most IT pros will be versed in basic open source practices. However, like most things in tech, the required skills can be subject to change.

    According to The Linux Foundation, a huge 87 percent of managers say it’s difficult to find open source talent, with 79 percent of mangers increasing incentives to retain their current open source employees.

    Computerworld UK spoke with CBT Nuggets trainer and open source expert Shawn Powers to discuss skills IT pros will need to conquer the open source platform in 2017.

  • Give back this holiday: Language input needed for literacy project

    Educational software programs like gCompis, Tux Math, Childsplay and KDE Edu may be familiar to free desktop users. This software is used by organizations such as Reglue, Partimus and KidsOnComputers who are bring educational opportunities to underprivileged children the world over. Even what you might consider to be business-focused software can make the world a better place, as we see with CouchDB who played a crucial role in the fight against the Ebola outbreak two years ago.

  • Kickstarter’s Engineering Team Begins to Open Source Crowdfunding Platform’s Android & iOS Apps

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Upstreams Chrome on iOS Source Code In Chromium

        Google developers today pushed a bunch of their Chrome on iOS code into the upstream Chromium Git repository.

        Over the course of 11 commits, Google appears to have upstreamed much of their Chrome iOS source-code into Chromium.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Survey Reveals Big Data Reaching Maturity, But Governance Fears Loom

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

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD-Based OPNsense 17.1 Operating System for Firewalls & Routers Enters Beta

      The OPNsense project had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the first Beta images of the upcoming OPNsense 17.1 operating system developed for firewalls and routers.

    • OpenSSH 7.4 released

      OpenSSH 7.4 has just been released. It will be available from the
      mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly.

      OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and
      includes sftp client and server support. OpenSSH also includes
      transitional support for the legacy SSH 1.3 and 1.5 protocols
      that may be enabled at compile-time.

      Once again, we would like to thank the OpenSSH community for their
      continued support of the project, especially those who contributed
      code or patches, reported bugs, tested snapshots or donated to the
      project. More information on donations may be found at:

      http://www.openssh.com/donations.html

    • OpenSSH 7.4 released!
    • OpenSSH 7.4 Removes Server Support for the SSH-1 Protocol, Adds New Features

      OpenSSH 7.4 has been released today, December 19, 2016, as the latest and most advanced stable release of the open-source and portable 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation used on Linux, BSD, and other Unix-like platforms.

      OpenSSH 7.4 is here four and a half months after the release of OpenSSH 7.3, and it promises to be primarily a bugfix release that addresses many of the security issues discovered since OpenSSH 7.3. But first, it looks like this version includes various under-the-hood changes that may affect existing configurations.

      For example, it removes support for the the SSH version 1 protocol as SSH2 is a more secure, efficient, and portable version of SSH (Secure Shell), which delivers SSH-encrypted SFTP functionality. It also removes 3des-cbc from the client’s default proposal, as well as support for pre-authentication compression.

  • Public Services/Government

    • DISA looks to open source to squash cyber bugs, reorganizes its data centers

      As part of the response to two massive data breaches involving systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government decided to put the Defense Department in charge of building a new information technology backbone to house and process all of the data involved in security clearance investigations, one that would be safer from foreign attacks.

      As one way to achieve that goal, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the lead agency in charge of the IT development, is considering opening up the National Background Investigation System’s underlying source code to the general public as soon as it’s fully baked. The theory is that it’s far better for white-hat hackers to find and help squash security bugs before the new system comes online than for bad-guy hackers to discover and make use of them to steal yet another batch of data.

      Maj. Gen. Sarah Zabel, DISA’s vice director, said the idea was first proposed to her agency by the Defense Digital Service.

    • Smart Citizens roll out sensor network in Barcelona

      The roll out of the sensor network is part of a “beta pilot” marking the start of the Making Sense project. This project is partly funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 programme and runs from 2015 till 2017. It aims to “explore how open source software, open source hardware, digital maker practices and open design can be effectively used by local communities to fabricate their own sensing tools, make sense of their environments, and address pressing environmental problems in air, water, soil and sound pollution.”

    • GDS says its open source code guidance needs to be more joined up

      Writing in a blogpost, Anna Shipman, a technical architect and open source lead at GDS, said that making code open – all new code written in government must be open by default – was “vital” to government’s plans to change the way it works.

      “By making our code open and reusable we increase collaboration across teams, helping make departments more joined up, and can work together to reduce duplication of effort and make commonly used code more robust,” she said.

      However, she acknowledged that the service’s guidance on open source code “is not as joined up as it could be” and that more work needed to be done to encourage good practice and make it easy for teams to collaborate.

      Shipman said she would be working to clarify the guidance and fill in any gaps, as well as addressing other barriers identified in user research.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • 3 Common Open Source IP Compliance Failures and How to Avoid Them

      Companies or organizations that don’t have a strong open source compliance program often suffer from errors and limitations in processes throughout the software development cycle that can lead to open source compliance failures.

      In part 3 of this series, we covered some of the risks that a company can face from license failures, including an injunction that prevents a company from shipping a product; support or customer service headaches; significant re-engineering; and more.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • OECD STI Outlook 2016: open science is next frontier

      Beyond open data, open science is now the next frontier. This is one of the main conclusions of the ‘Science, Technology and Innovation Outlook 2016′, published earlier this month by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

      “Open data access practices are increasingly widespread,” the authors of the report claim. “Encouraging the sharing and re-use of research data could generate more value for public money. Science is also becoming a less institutionalised endeavour, with citizens conducting their own research alongside the scientific community. However, deep changes in academic culture will be necessary to realise the full potential of a more open science.”

    • Open education is about improving lives, not taking tests

      Early in the book Couros says, “Sometimes it scares me to think that we have taken the most human profession, teaching, and have reduced it to simply letters and numbers,” Couros says early in the book. “We place such an emphasis on these scores, because of political mandates and the way teachers and schools are evaluated today, that it seems we’ve forgotten why our profession exists: to change—improve—lives.”

      In other words education has lost it’s “Why?”—and that is central to its mission.

      Immediately I saw the parallels to The Open Organization. Central to the open organization is a completely different model of organization. Conventional organizations are top-down, while open organizations are bottom-up. In conventional “What we do” and “How we do it” are most important. But in the bottom-up open organization “Why we do it” is most important, and this emotional connection between and among the members of the open organization motivates the community and drives innovation.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • SiFive Is Setting Silicon Free with Open-Source Chips

        Moore’s Law is dead…just not in the way everyone thinks. Technological advances keep allowing chips to scale, but the economics are another story – particularly for smaller companies that can’t afford chips in the volumes that the big chipmakers would like from their customers.

        The solution, according to San Francisco-based startup, SiFive, is open-source hardware, specifically an architecture developed by the company’s founders called RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”). Done right SiFive, which was awarded Startup of the Year at the 2016 Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards, believes that RISC-V will do for the hardware industry what Linux has done for software.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Apple’s not very good, really quite poor 2016

    As they drift off for their one- or two-day vacations shortly, will Apple’s senior executives be patting themselves on the back? Or will they be slapping themselves on the forehead?

    Apple’s 2016 was garlanded with the usual hype, but not somehow with the usual excitement.

    Perhaps you’re excited by profits. Most real people, however, simply want to witness, feel and enjoy something that, to them, feels both new and exciting.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Superbacteria seep through Finland’s borders

      The last few years have seen more cases of antibiotic-resistant superbacteria infections in Finland. Even special strains of antibiotics that are saved for difficult cases may not necessarily have an effect on the so-called superbugs.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • [Older] Why Is Sweden Giving the “Alternative Nobel Prize” to Syria’s ‘White Helmets’?

      Sweden did not succeed in getting Bob Dylan to come to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nevertheless as a consolation the “White Helmets” did arrive to get the Right Livelihood Award.

      This article examines a likely geopolitical rationale that the Swedish elites had for selecting that organization. Facts suggest a congruence between the stances of those elites on Syria and the declared political aims of the organization White Helmets. The reviewing of the institutions involved in the award-decision and process can also result relevant in pondering the reason for the event. Finally, to inquire into the role of Carl Bildt, as member of the board of directors in the institution ultimately deciding, is interesting against the backdrop of his opposition regarding the participation of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in previous international events organized by the same institutions –all of them under the umbrella of the Swedish Foreign Office.

    • Truck hits Berlin Christmas market, one dead: reports

      German media reported on Monday that a truck had ploughed into a Christmas market in central Berlin, killing at least one person and injuring several others, according to local media.

      Reports said the truck drove into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in central Berlin’s main shopping district. There was no immediate word on who was responsible, but the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost — whose offices are located on the square — said police suspected it was a terrorist attack.

    • Berlin Crash Is Suspected to Be a Terror Attack, Police Say

      The Berlin police said early Tuesday that the killing of at least 12 people and the wounding of dozens more when a truck plowed through a Christmas market on Monday night was “a suspected terrorist attack.”

      In a statement, the police added that they were working swiftly and with “necessary care” in the investigation.

      The truck jumped the sidewalk about 8 p.m. near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, whose jagged spire, a reminder of the bombings during World War II, is one of the most symbolic sites in Berlin.

    • Russian official found dead from gunshot wounds in Moscow

      THE head of a Russian foreign ministry department has been shot dead in Moscow, according to local media.

      The government has not yet confirmed the reports.

      A man’s body was found in an apartment with a gunshot wound to the head, REN TV reported.

      Two shells were found along with a gun under the sink in the kitchen, a source told the news outlet. They claimed the wife of the man was also in the apartment.

      Paramedics were filmed carrying a man wearing a white shirt into an ambulance.

      The news comes on a dramatic day after nine were killed by a truck driving into a Berlin Christmas market and a Turkish off-duty police officer pulled out a gun at an art exhibition in Ankara and killed Russia’s ambassador to the country, shouting: “Don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!”

    • ISIS claims responsibility for Berlin Christmas market attack

      ISIS has claimed responsibility for the deadly Christmas market truck crash in Berlin, a report says.

      The Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force tweeted that the terror group was taking credit for the incident, which left at least 12 people dead and more than 50 injured at major public market Monday.

      Using encrypted technology, the group said they found several jihadist Twitter accounts that had been claiming responsibility for the alleged attack, according to the Washington Times.

    • Three more charged over Nice truck attack

      Six people have already been charged so far over alleged links to the 31-year-old killer

      A French anti-terrorist judge has charged three more men suspected of helping to arm the Islamist radical who crushed 86 people to death with a truck in Nice, a judicial source said Saturday.

      The three, who were among 11 arrested on Monday in Nice and the western city of Nantes, were remanded into custody on Friday, said the source. The other eight have been released.

      The three, aged 24, 31 and 36, were charged in relation to a terrorist plot.

      The arrests come five months after Tunisian extremist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne truck into a crowd on the Nice seafront, further traumatising a country reeling from a series of jihadist attacks.

    • Police escort FPI members during raid on Santa hats in Surabaya malls

      The Surabaya Police escorted Islam Defenders Front (FPI) members on Sunday as they raided shopping malls in the East Java capital to check whether outlets had ordered employees to wear Christmas attire such as Santa hats.

      For promotional purposes, many companies ask their employees to wear holiday season paraphernalia, including Santa hats, when serving customers ahead of Christmas and New Year celebrations. Recently, the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) issued an edict banning companies from forcing staff to wear such items, deeming it haram.

    • Russian ambassador dead: Video shows assassin shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ after shooting Andrey Karlov

      Video has emerged of the moments after a gunman shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey in Ankara.

      Andrey Karlov was several minutes into a speech at the embassy-sponsored exhibition in the capital when a man wearing a suit and tie shouted “Allahu akbar” and fired at least eight shots, according to an AP photographer in the audience.

      It was reported that the gunman shouted in Turkish: “Don’t forget Aleppo. Don’t forget Syria.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • The dirty deplorables: Who’s who on Donald Trump’s team and how they’ll destroy the environment

      What do Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees and advisers think about climate change and other sustainability issues? As you would expect, it’s not looking good for those of us concerned about a habitable climate and livable cities. Trump is putting together a climate-denying cabal of extreme right-wingers and corporate sympathizers likely to roll back environmental protections, halt smart-growth efforts and undo progress toward environmental justice.

      We’ll keep tabs on the most relevant nominees and appointees here, continuing as they make their way through the confirmation process, so check back for updates.

    • The United States of Climate Change Denial

      Donald Trump has promised to unleash an energy revolution by extracting billions of dollars in untapped fossil fuels and gutting incentives to invest in renewable energy. With the nominations of Rex Tillerson, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Rick Perry to his Cabinet, the President-elect is poised to do more damage to America’s environmental legacy—and future—than any other leader in recent memory.

      Despite Trump’s untraditional approach to choosing Cabinet officials, nothing about their nomination is accidental. Each of them offers a range of qualifications and connections that, together, form a unified front against climate progress, human health, and energy security.

    • Finland’s future – Even darker winters with temperatures like Hungary?

      Hot summers, warm winters and plenty of rain, this is the future Finland may face if unbridled climate change continues, says a study by the Finnish Meteorological Institute FMI. If the emissions of greenhouse gases continue unchecked, by the end of the century the climate of central Finland could be as warm as it is today in Hungary.

    • Indonesia’s forestry ministry takes Greenpeace to court over freedom of information request

      The Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry is going to court over a successful freedom of information request by Greenpeace, setting the stage for a protracted legal battle over a form of data NGOs say they need if they are to play a monitoring role in the world’s third-largest democracy.

      Greenpeace Indonesia on Oct. 24 won its yearlong suit submitted to the Central Information Commission (KIP) against the ministry demanding access to seven different geospatial maps of Indonesia, including those showing oil palm, timber, and mining concessions as well as the archipelago country’s land cover.

      The group argued its case under the 2008 Freedom of Public Information Law, which established the KIP. “This is exciting news for us,” Greenpeace’s Kiki Taufik said immediately after the ruling came down. “The commission has made the right decision.”

  • Finance

    • IMF chief Lagarde found guilty of negligence by French court over payout to businessman

      The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, has been found guilty of negligence by a Paris court over a huge payout she approved to a business tycoon while serving as French finance minister in 2008.

      Despite the guilty finding, the Court of Justice of the Republic did not issue any sentence for the IMF chief.

      The official denies the negligence charges, and her lawyers will now look into appealing the court ruling, Reuters reported.

      The decision not to hand down a punishment was made considering Lagarde’s good reputation and international standing, Reuters reported, citing the main judge, Martine Ract Madoux. She added that “the context of the global financial crisis in which Madame Lagarde found herself” was “taken into account.”

    • When you thought trade deals could not get any worse — enter Wall Street

      What connects two proposed gold mines, one in the high-altitude wetlands of Colombia and one in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania?

      Both mines would require huge quantities of cyanide and threaten watersheds used by millions of people for drinking water. One would damage a unique, legally protected ecosystem and the other would destroy an ancient, UNESCO-nominated settlement. Both have been opposed by scientific bodies, protested by tens of thousands of people, and restricted by domestic courts.

      And in both cases, the Canadian mining corporations behind the projects (Eco Oro in Colombia and Gabriel Resources in Romania) have responded to the mining denials by using trade and investment deals to sue the governments in private tribunals. In fact, Eco Oro just launched its case last week. Using this backdoor process called “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS), the corporations can demand up to billions of dollars from the taxpayers in both countries. These ISDS claims are possible due to far-reaching rights that trade and investment deals grant to corporations.

      But there is another common element driving both cases: big money from Wall Street.

    • Brazil passes the mother of all austerity plans

      Imagine setting your budget today for every year through 2036. This week, the world’s ninth-largest economy made just such a decision.

      The Brazilian Senate on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment to freeze social spending by the Brazilian government for 20 years — allowing it to rise only in tandem with inflation. The government says such a dramatic measure is necessary to get the country’s recession-bound economy back on track and gain control over public debt, which has grown sharply in recent years.

      With tough fiscal measures such as the amendment, “everyone will be able to project the numbers,” Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles said in an interview in June with the Financial Times. “A lot of the uncertainty is coming down.”

    • We’re about to sign a deal with Canada that’s just as bad as TTIP and could increase inequality across the whole of Europe

      CETA is an EU-Canada trade deal just like the controversial EU-US deal TTIP. It was secretly negotiated over five years, locks in the privatisation of public services and will permit corporations across the North America to sue European governments in a private justice system. Brexit may not happen for at least two years, but CETA will be voted on in February – if it passes, it will immediately apply to the UK.

      Inequality is grist to the mill for far-right populists, yet the European Commission and members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are failing to learn the lessons of Brexit and the rise of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. Instead, it’s big business as usual, and continued support for policies that generate inequality and, in turn, fuel the xenophobic right.

    • Apple given favorable treatment on tax? No way, insists Ireland

      On Monday, the Irish government said in its challenge against the European Commission—which ruled that Apple should pay Ireland €13 billion (£11.1 billion) in back taxes—that it “does not do deals with taxpayers,” adding that the country “did not give favourable tax treatment to Apple.”

      The commission’s antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, said in August: “Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies—this is illegal under EU state aid rules.” But Ireland’s finance ministry countered that “the full amount of tax was paid in this case and no state aid was provided.”

    • If the U.S. Won’t Pay Its Teachers, China Will

      Cindy Mi leans forward on a couch in her sun-filled Beijing office to explain how she first got interested in education. She loved English so much as a child that she spent her lunch money on books and magazines to practice. By 15, she was good enough that she began to tutor other students. At 17, she dropped out of high school to start a language-instruction company with her uncle.

      Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.

    • Trump’s anti-education Education Secretary owes millions in election fraud fines

      Betsy DeVos is the self-described neo-Calvinist and wife of the heir to the Amway fortune who’s devoted her life to fighting against public education through a system of vouchers that allow for public funding of religious schools; in accord with the trumpian maxim of “a fox for every henhouse,” she has been selected to serve as Trump’s Education Secretary.

      In 2006, All Children Matter, DeVos’s anti-education PAC asked the Ohio Elections Commission whether it could transfer unlimited funds to its Ohio subsidiary, and were firmly told that the most they could transfer was $10,000 — a ruling DeVos ignored, transfering $870,000 to the Ohio affiliate. This resulted in the bipartisan commission fining DeVos $5.2m, a ruling upheld by an Ohio court.

      DeVos ducked out of the fines by shutting down the Ohio subsidiary and claiming that neither she nor her PAC were liable for its debts, including the whopping $5.2M fine.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Five reasons why we don’t have a free and independent press in the UK and what we can do about it

      While most of us don’t trust journalists, many of us are still under the illusion that we have a free and independent press. The truth is we don’t. Here’s five reasons why we should be very sceptical of the information we read in the corporate media and why there is hope for the future.
      1) The billionaires that own the press set the agenda

      Who owns the media shapes what stories are covered and how they are written about. The UK media has a very concentrated ownership structure, with six billionaires owning and/or having a majority of voting shares in most of the national newspapers.

    • BREAKING: FBI Ordered to Unseal Warrant Used to Get Clinton Emails During Weiner Probe

      A federal judge has ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to unseal at least a portion of search warrant it obtained after finding emails pertinent to the Hillary Clinton investigation during the Bureau’s Anthony Weiner probe.

      The FBI’s planned disclosure is directly related to an effort by well-known attorney Los Angeles attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Justice that sought the “immediate disclosure of the FBI search warrant for the e-mails of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.”

    • Fact-checking the integrity of the vote in 2016

      Faith in elections goes to the core of the American idea of democracy. That faith has been challenged before, but this year, the attacks came from many directions.

      There were repeated allegations of voter fraud, which for the most part turned out to be false. The government warned that Russia tried to influence the election through hacking and strategic document dumps. And fake news reports about the presidential candidates circulated on the Internet and via Facebook.

    • Kent County to profit $10K from halted Michigan recount

      Kent County could profit as much as $10,000 from a halted recount of ballots cast in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

      The recount was halted by a federal judge after Kent County had completed two full days of reviewing thousands of paper ballots by hand.

    • Pennsylvania’s voting system is one of the worst

      In May 2006, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, launched an e-voting system, producing a nationally notorious election disaster in which every technical and management system failed. One of the largest election jurisdictions in the nation, the county used DRE touchscreens similar to Allegheny County’s.

      When the election tabulation database grew beyond what it was designed to handle — a flaw concealed by the manufacturer — it silently began dropping votes and other data, without notifying officials. An accurate recount was possible, however, because Ohio had required paper printouts of voters’ e-ballots. Recounts showed that some previously announced winners actually had lost. The hidden software problem did not extinguish anyone’s voting rights only because there was a paper trail.

      Experts in election technology have pointed out that most Pennsylvania counties — including Allegheny — use e-voting systems that have been outlawed by most states. The chief reason? The omission of voter-approved paper printouts that can be recounted and that allow for audits to check on the accuracy of the electronic machines. Even when voting systems are aged and vulnerable to hacking or tampering, durable paper ballots combined with quality-assurance audits can ensure trustworthy results.

    • Trump private security force ‘playing with fire’

      President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at least some members of the team after he becomes president, according to people familiar with the plans.

      The arrangement represents a major break from tradition. All modern presidents and presidents-elect have entrusted their personal security entirely to the Secret Service, and their event security mostly to local law enforcement, according to presidential security experts and Secret Service sources.

      But Trump — who puts a premium on loyalty and has demonstrated great interest in having forceful security at his events — has opted to maintain an aggressive and unprecedented private security force, led by Keith Schiller, a retired New York City cop and Navy veteran who started working for Trump in 1999 as a part-time bodyguard, eventually rising to become his head of security.

    • IBM workers protest against co-operation with Trump

      Employees of IBM have launched a petition against the statement made by the company’s chief executive Ginni Rometty to US president-elect Donald Trump in which she detailed various services the company could sell to the government.

      According to the Intercept, IBM had also initially refused to rule out creating a registry of Muslims in the US, something that it has ruled out now.

      The IBM protest is being led by cybersecurity engineer Daniel Hanley. He said he was shocked after reading Rometty’s letter which was published on an internal IBM blog along with a personal note from the chief executive to the company’s global staff.

    • Trump wins electoral college amid nationwide protests

      The US electoral college has certified Donald Trump as the 45th president, despite a last-ditch effort to deny him the White House.

      Six weeks after winning the polls, the Republican cruised past the 270 votes needed to formalise his victory.

      After the result, Mr Trump promised to “work hard to unite our country and be the president of all Americans”.

      Electors had been flooded with emails and phone calls urging them not to support the billionaire.

      But despite longshot liberal hopes of a revolt by Republican electors, only two – from Texas – ended up voting against him.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Turkey blocks Tor’s anonymity network

      Turkey’s President Erdogan and the ruling AKP party are increasingly bent on silencing online dissent, and that now affects you even if you’re smart enough to evade typical censorship methods. Watchdog group Turkey Blocks has confirmed that Turkey is blocking the Tor anonymity network’s direct access mode for most users. You can still use a bridge mode for now, but there are hints that internet providers might be hurting performance even then. The restrictions come alongside a recent government ban on virtual private network services.

    • Tor blocked in Turkey as government cracks down on VPN use

      The Turkey Blocks internet censorship watchdog has identified and verified that restrictions on the Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser are now in effect throughout Turkey. Our study indicates that service providers have successfully complied with a government order to ban VPN services.

    • Facebook patent hints at an automated solution for fake news

      Facebook may have said that it’s stepping up its fight against fake news in the past few weeks, but there are signs that it might have had a way to tackle this problem sooner. A recently published USPTO filing from 2015 reveals that Facebook has applied for a patent on technology that would automate the process of removing “objectionable content.” It’s ostensibly for eliminating hate speech, porn and other material that Facebook has objected to for years, but the system could easily be applied to bogus stories as well.

      The approach would supplement user-based content flagging with machine learning. The automatic system would generate a score for content based on the likelihood that it’s objectionable, helping human moderators decide which material to cut. It’d look at the number of users objecting to content, for example, as well as the age of the account making a complaint (to discourage harassment and trolling). The AI-like code would study valid flags and learn to make more informed decisions about objectionable content.

    • Google is threatening to throw me off Google+, but won’t tell me why

      Naturally, I assumed this was just the Russians trying to gain access to my hugely valuable store of e-mails, and ignored the message. However, the next time I logged on to my Google+ account, there was a further warning that Google was seriously thinking about throwing me off the service, and so I had better watch my step.

      Since I am not in the habit of posting “unwanted promotional or commercial content, or engaging in unwanted or mass solicitation” on Google+, this left me somewhat perplexed. I searched everywhere for some way of contacting the Google+ violation department, or whatever it’s called, but could find nothing other than a couple of pages offering “Tips for creating Google+ content” and one about “Limited access and profile suspensions.” The absence of any way to contact Google seemed strange: after all, before I could stop doing what I shouldn’t be doing, I needed to know what exactly that was.

      Although I was unable to find any official way of obtaining information on alleged violations, I did find a Google+ Help community. After I joined, I asked how I could find out what I had done to incur the wrath of the great god Google, and this led to a useful thread.

    • Facebook fake news: Germany threatens new law with €500,000 fine attached

      Germany’s coalition government is threatening to bring in legislation early next year that would see Facebook and other social media firms fined up to €500,000 (£420,000) for “publishing” fake news.

      “Market dominating platforms like Facebook will be legally required to build a legal protection office in Germany that is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” parliamentary chair of the Social Democratic Party Thomas Oppermann told Der Spiegel, which was translated on Deutsche Welle.

      “If, after appropriate examination, Facebook does not delete the offending message within 24 hours, it should expect individual fines of up to 500,000 euros,” Oppermann said. The subject of a fake news story would be able to demand a correction published with similar prominence, he added.

    • MPs suggest introducing web blocking to tackle suicide rates in UK

      MPs have suggested restricting access to sites which encourage self-harm or give detailed advice on methods for committing suicide as a means of tackling the “unacceptable” level of suicide in the nation.

      MPs have warned government that it has failed to do enough to tackle the UK’s suicide rates. Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under 49, and also the leading cause of death for people aged between 16 and 24.

      Over 6,100 deaths in the UK in 2015 were registered as suicides, though the actual number may be higher. While MPs placed much blame at the feet of government, they claimed there was also much to be done by internet providers and social media companies too.

    • France plans internet ombudsman to safeguard free speech

      France is considering appointing an official internet ombudsman to regulate complaints about online material in order to prevent excessive censorship and preserve free speech.

      A bill establishing a “content qualification assessment procedure” has been tabled in the French senate and the initiative was debated last week at a high level meeting attended by senators and judges as well as policy officers from Google and Twitter.

      The aim is to provide a simple procedure that will support firms operating online who are uncertain of their legal liabilities and to prevent over-zealous removal or censorship of material merely because it is the subject of a complaint. It could be copied by other European jurisdictions.

      Dan Shefets, a Danish lawyer who works in Paris has developed the proposal with the French senator Nathalie Goulet, said: “The problem which an internet ombudsman addresses applies to all countries in Europe [because] member states have to work with the e-commerce directive.

    • Proposed bill would block porn from computers sold in South Carolina, somehow

      South Carolina representative Bill Chumley has proposed a bill that would make it slightly more difficult for people in his state to watch porn. The bill would require manufacturers to install “digital blocking capabilities” on their computers that would ban access to internet porn, The Charlotte Observer reports.

    • South Carolina will debate bill to block porn on new computers

      A South Carolina politician is hoping to stop computer owners in his state from viewing pornography.

      State Rep. Bill Chumley, a Republican from Spartanburg, told his hometown newspaper that his Human Trafficking Prevention Act would require manufacturers or sellers of computers or other devices that access the Internet to install digital blocks to prevent the viewing of obscene content. Blocking websites that facilitate prostitution would also be required, he said.

      If a purchaser wants the filter lifted, he or she has to pay $20 to have it taken out—provided the person is over the age of 18.

    • The Call To Censor Bad News Isn’t New, Doesn’t Make Sense, And Should Frighten You A Great Deal

      The American citizen currently enjoys greater access to information than any average person in human history. But you wouldn’t know that from reading The New York Times, Buzzfeed or any other of the many outlets busying themselves calling for the administration, in concert with corporations, to censor fake news stories.

    • Arts Academy Under Attack: Police Questionings, Censorship and a Blow to Academic Freedom

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Cuts to open source monitoring tool could impact MoD intelligence, warn MPs

      BBC Monitoring is one of the few open source information gathering agencies, which has a global reach through its partnership with its US counterpart, Open Source Enterprise (OSE). BBC Monitoring covers 25% of the world and OSE the remaining 75%.

    • How to check if your VPN is leaking private data

      A virtual private network is a great way to keep your internet usage secure and private whether at home or on public Wi-Fi. But just how private is your activity over a VPN? How do you know if the VPN is doing its job or if you’re unwittingly leaking information to those trying to pry into your activities?

      One simple way to see if the VPN is working is to search for what is my IP on Google. At the top of the search results, Google will report back your current public Internet Protocol (IP) address. If you’re on a VPN, it should show the VPN’s IP. If it doesn’t, you know you have a problem.

    • U.S. Investigators Blame Autopilot in Facebook’s Big Drone Crash

      The wing on Facebook Inc.’s experimental high-altitude drone broke last summer in Arizona after the massive aircraft hit an updraft and its autopilot overcompensated seconds before touchdown on its maiden flight, a U.S. investigation has concluded.

      The end section of the right wing snapped off as the plane’s computerized flight controls made abrupt maneuvers to keep it on course, breaking the carbon-fiber structure, the National Transportation Safety Board said in conclusions posted online Friday.

      There were no injuries or damage other than to the drone.

    • Twitter Cuts Off Firehose Access To DHS Fusion Centers

      Earlier this year, Twitter pulled the plug on some of Dataminr’s customers, specifically the intelligence agencies it was selling its firehose access to. Twitter made it clear Dataminr’s access to every public tweet wasn’t to be repurposed into a government surveillance tool.

      That being said, everything swept up by Dataminr was public. There was no access to direct messages or tweets sent from private accounts. And Twitter seemingly is doing nothing to prevent Dataminr from selling this same access to the FBI, an agency that’s far more an intelligence agency than a law enforcement agency these days — one that thinks it should be allowed to do everything the CIA does, if not more.

    • Britain urged to increase cyber security in financial services

      Britain’s intelligence agencies need to do more to help regulators to protect the financial services industry from cyber crime, the head of an influential parliamentary committee said on Monday.

      Andrew Tyrie, a lawmaker in the ruling Conservative Party, said parliament’s Treasury Committee was concerned about the “opaque lines of accountability”, particularly between regulators and intelligence agencies.

    • GCHQ urged to ramp up security to protect Britain’s financial industry from escalating cybercrime
    • GCHQ must do more to protect UK banks from hack attacks, say MPs
    • Tyrie demands clarity on cybercrime
    • GCHQ asked to step up action against cyber-attack threat to financial services

      More action may be needed to protect the financial services industry from a devastating cyber-attack, the head of the Treasure select committee has suggested.

    • Edward Snowden, The NSA And Civil Liberties: Is Our Privacy Still Being Violated By The Federal Government And Its Intelligence agencies?

      Thanks to Edward Snowden, the ongoing debate between those who want to ensure the United States can gather any intelligence it needs to protect itself from terrorism and those who are concerned about civil liberties exploded into the public arena three years ago. As reported by NBC News, Snowden released a vast treasure trove of highly classified documents regarding the surveillance activities then being carried out by the NSA. But have these revelations really changed anything regarding privacy issues?

      In the immediate aftermath of Snowden’s release of these documents, many politicians and legal experts came forward to demand that the NSA be reformed. Following the leaks, President Obama assembled experts to evaluate the situation. In December of that year, the group published a report in which they recommended a number of significant reforms – such as halting the U.S. government’s gathering of bulk telephone data and limiting the extent of surveillance carried out on foreign leaders.

    • In Trump, beleaguered intelligence community faces a new challenge: A disparaging boss

      It’s been a bruising few years for America’s spies.

      Revelations about torture by the CIA and sweeping electronic spying on the part of the NSA have hurt their public image, casting them as aggressive or nosy rather than — as they tend to see themselves — quiet patriots forced to work in obscurity to protect the nation.

      Officials say falling morale has affected the agencies’ ability to hold on to employees — often highly skilled analysts and technicians who could earn many times as much money in the private sector.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Why General Motors is asking the Supreme Court to say it’s only 7 years old — not 108

      When a company reorganizes itself through a bankruptcy, is it the same company? And if so, is it liable for alleged wrongdoing committed by the previous version of itself?

      These are questions raised by General Motors’ efforts to dodge hundreds of lawsuits related to a potentially fatal ignition-switch flaw in millions of its older sedans. After receiving a stinging defeat in a federal appellate court this past summer, the automaker is now making a Hail Mary pass to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to convince judges that it has reincarnated into a seven-year-old car company free of liabilities from its previous life.

      With potentially billions of dollars’ worth of personal and financial injury claims at stake, the Detroit automaker’s lawyers argue that allowing these lawsuits to go through would undermine an important aspect of corporate bankruptcy: giving assurance to the buyers of troubled companies that they aren’t also buying a whole bunch of unexpected legal headaches.

    • Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable

      Lawmakers in South Carolina are mulling over banning the sale of computers, tablets and phones unless they have a device that automatically blocks pornography from popping up on-screen.

      The Human Trafficking Prevention Act amendment, introduced by State Representative Bill Chumley (R‑Spartanburg), calls for manufacturers and resellers to be fined if they sell an internet-connected product in the US state without a filter capable of stopping smut from appearing by default. The proposed stiff rules, drawn up late last week, follow a crackdown in the state on human trafficking in 2015.

    • Disgusted by White Land Theft, Millionaire Gives Home to Tribe

      The $4 million property will turn into a prayer house for Indigenous youth to have a ‘safe space’ where they can get in touch with their roots, history and language.

      Expressing “disgust” for the historic land-theft perpetrated on Indigenous peoples in the United States, an eccentric Manhattan millionaire has decided to transfer his $4 million home back to the Lenape Tribe, the original inhabitants of Mannahatta – or land of many hills.

      Jean-Louis Goldwater Bourgeois, 76, the son of late sculptor Louise Bourgeois, is currently in the process of transferring the deed of his West Village home to Anthony Jay Van Dunk, the chief of the 5,000-member Ramapough Indians, who are part of the Lenape Nation. They met in 2011, introduced by a common acquaintance after Bourgeois had expressed his desire to return the land.

    • ‘This isn’t Paris. It’s only men here’ – Inside the French Muslim no-go zones where women aren’t welcome

      A quiet Paris bar where men play cards and bet on horses has become the unlikely focus of a national row over alleged no-go zones for women in predominantly Muslim areas.

      The bar in the impoverished north-eastern suburb of Sevran is accused of being one of many in France where women are effectively banned.

      The neighbourhood, near Charles de Gaulle airport, is notorious as one of France’s leading exporters of jihadists.

      “Au Jockey Club” is clearly a male preserve — there were no women when The Telegraph visited — but it serves alcohol and feels more akin to a high street bookmaker than a den of Islamists. Licensed as a betting shop, its mainly French Arab patrons gazed intently at giant screens showing the races at Deauville.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • European authorities crack down on zero-rating ISPs, defending net neutrality

      Telecom authority PTS is cracking down on the European ISP Telia for having unmetered traffic to Facebook and Spotify while metering other traffic, in violation of net neutrality. Earlier this year, the ISP launched a marketing scheme where accessing Facebook and Spotify didn’t count against your Internet traffic cap, causing net neutrality concerns. While the authority hasn’t made a final decision, sources say it will tell Telia to end the practice in no uncertain terms.

      In May this year, Swedish ISP Telia attracted global attention by blatantly violating Net Neutrality in zero-rating Facebook, later adding a selection of music streaming services (Spotify among them) to its zero-rating offer.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Groundless threats – Nvidia v Hardware Labs

      This judgment concerned the Defendant’s application for strike out/summary judgment of the Claimant’s claim to groundless threats, the Claimant’s application to stay their groundless threats claim pending an EU IPO decision, and the Defendant’s application for transfer to IPEC or the Shorter Trials Scheme.

      The groundless threats question turned on the location of a threat to sue. More specifically, can a letter sent in English from a Germany company to a US parent company regarding infringement of an EU trade mark constitute a threat to bring trade mark infringement proceedings in England and Wales?

    • Trademarks

      • Dunks And Drunks: Jagermeister Blocks Milwaukee Bucks Logo Trademark Application

        Just when you think you’ve seen it all in silly trademark filings, along comes a liquor company to block the trademark application for the logo of an NBA basketball team. Jagermeister, a liquor I haven’t thought about since my college days because I’m a grownup that drinks grownup drinks, has decided that the logo for the Milwaukee Bucks is too similar to its own logo and must be stopped.

      • Lee v. Tam and A Basket of Deplorable People

        In the case, the Department of Justice and USPTO are appealing the Federal Circuit’s determination that the disparagement provision of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. 1052(a) is facially invalid as in conflict with the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The provision at issue provides for the PTO’s refusal to register marks that consist of “matter which may disparage . . . persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” Mr. Tam’s band name – THE SLANTS – was refused under this provision.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/12/20/openssh-7-4-is-out/feed/ 0 Links 19/12/2016: NetworkManager 1.4.4, GNU Hurd 0.9 http://techrights.org/2016/12/19/networkmanager-1-4-4/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/19/networkmanager-1-4-4/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:11:01 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97591

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • ​The best Linux laptop: The 2016 Dell XPS 13

      This is a really, sweet design. The display bezel is only a quarter of an inch thick. This is as close to a real “edge-to-edge” display than I’ve ever seen. The 13.3 inch display itself is also sweet. It’s a 3,200×1,800 touchscreen. For those playing along at home that’s 280 pixels per inch. That’s 40 more than my prized 2015 Chromebook Pixel and 60 more than a MacBook Pro with Retina.

      The display is powered by Intel’s Iris 540 GPU. It looks, in a word, great. At 13.3 inches, the screen is a bit small for my taste, but I’m not complaining.

    • Why I *Still* Use Linux

      We talk a lot about why people should switch to linux. It got me thinking about why, after 10 years, am I still using linux and how the reasons are so different from why we tell people to switch.

    • Lenovo Yoga Book 2-in-1 PC With Chrome OS Coming In 2017

      Now this Chrome OS is a straightaway competition for Microsoft Windows PC. The primary user interface is Linux and the Chrome browser. It is dependent on the internet web based applications. So you won’t have to store anything locally on the hard drive of the device. Google recently updated the Chrome OS for supporting the Google Play station in September. It enables users to download and install the Android apps along with native Chrome apps.

    • Chrome OS Yoga Book Is Bad News For Android Tablets

      Just the other day, Lenovo made it official: a Chrome OS version of the Lenovo Yoga Book is coming in 2017.

      What Jeff Meredith said in addition to that confirmations is just as interesting, though.

  • Kernel Space

    • PCI Updates For The Linux 4.10 Kernel

      The PCI subsystem updates for the Linux 4.10 merge window were sent in a few days ago.

    • Hearing The Sound Updates For Linux 4.10

      Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates on Wednesday for the Linux 4.10 kernel. Intel Skylake audio continues to be refined but there is also a lot of other hardware driver work.

    • Linux Kernel 3.12.69 LTS Has Many Networking Improvements, Updated Drivers

      Today, December 18, 2016, Linux kernel maintainer Jiri Slaby announced the release of the sixth-ninth maintenance update of the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series, which will be maintained until 2017.

      The Linux 3.12 kernel branch was supposed to reach end-of-life in spring this year, but it’s used in the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 1 (SP1) operating system, which is supported with security and software updates until 2017. As such, Jiri Slaby decided to move the EOL status of Linux kernel 3.12 to 2017 too, and the latest release, Linux kernel 3.12.69 LTS, changes a total of 48 files, with 414 insertions and 162 deletions.

    • Linux Kernel, tested by the Linux-version of PVS-Studio

      Since the release of the publicly available Linux-version of PVS-Studio, it was just a matter of time until we would recheck the Linux kernel. It is quite a challenge for any static code analyzer to check a project written by professionals from all around the world, used by people in various fields, which is regularly checked and tested by different tools. So, what errors did we manage to find in such conditions?

    • Linux 4.10 To Better Support Microsoft’s Surface 3 Device

      A few days ago I wrote about HID improvements for Microsoft’s Surface 3/4 tablets coming with Linux 4.10 while now there is additional driver work landing to benefit the Microsoft Surface 3 2-in-1 computer.

    • Graphics Stack

      • 3D-Accelerated Remote Wayland Displays Are Being Discussed Again

        The subject of remote Wayland displays with hardware-acceleration is again back to being talked about, this time initiated by the developer of VirtualGL.

        VirtualGL is one of the open-source projects working on remote Linux display support with the ability to run OpenGL applications with full 3D hardware acceleration via a GLX interposer and a high-speed X proxy. The lead developer of VirtualGL is wanting to go beyond just supporting X11 but also to handling Wayland/Weston.

      • The Strange Behavior Of My Radeon R9 290 Is Still There

        In recent days there have been a few Phoronix readers inquiring why I am not testing with my Radeon R9 290 graphics card in all our frequent comparisons and driver benchmarks. The short story is that the regression since Linux 4.7 remains and for my Radeon R9 290 and others with select Hawaii graphics cards, there still is a performance regression. Though over Christmas I hope to finally find the time to bisect it.

        So for those wondering but haven’t asked why the R9 290 hasn’t been used, it’s since there is still that pesky regression… While there was a fix for some, my HIS Radeon R9 290 and that of other select users still are having issues, likely due to differing video BIOS. AMD, meanwhile, reportedly hasn’t been able to reproduce this issue with their hardware.

      • RADV Vulkan Driver Patches To Support Compute Queues
      • AMD MxGPU Virtualization For The AMDGPU Driver

        The patches by AMD’s Xiangliang Yu work to implement CSA and KIQ along with mailbox communication with the GPU hypervisor. CSA is the Context Save Area. KIQ in this context is the Kernel Interface Queue, as described in one of the patches, “KIQ is queue-memory based initialization method: setup KIQ queue firstly, then send command to KIQ to setup other queues, without accessing registers. For virtualization, need KIQ to access virtual function registers when running on guest mode.”

      • VK9, the open source project to implement d3d9 over Vulkan reaches another milestone

    • Benchmarks

      • 2016 End-of-Year Open-Source Radeon Benchmarks With Linux 4.9, Mesa 13.1-dev On Many Different GPUs

        With 2016 soon drawing to an end, it’s time for all of my year-end recaps now of Linux drivers that I have been doing for the past 12 years. Today are benchmarks of a wide assortment of AMD graphics cards on both R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers when using Mesa 13.1-dev + LLVM 4.0 SVN and the Linux 4.9 kernel for providing a bleeding-edge look at the open-source AMD Linux graphics performance across hardware going from the Radeon HD 4890 series all the way up through the RX 480 and R9 Fury hardware. Here’s a fun look at the OpenGL driver performance across this range of GPUs.

  • Applications

    • Best Clock And Weather Widgets For Linux

      So there are a couple of handy desktop widgets that are available for your Linux desktop. Today we’ll take a look at a few Clock and Weather widgets that easily set up on your Linux desktop.

    • NetworkManager 1.4.4
    • NetworkManager 1.4.4 Supports Restart Without Connection Disruption, Fixes Bugs

      Lubomir Rintel, one of the developers working on the widely-used open-source network management solution for GNU/Linux distributions NetworkManager, announced the release of NetworkManager 1.4.4.

      NetworkManager 1.4.4 is the latest stable and most advanced build of the software, which should be used by all Linux-based operating systems that prefer this graphical solution for helping users to easily connect to Wi-Fi and wired networks, as well as Point To Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) or VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections.

    • Top 16 best network monitoring tools for 2016

      Towards the end of 2016 we made a short introduction to network monitoring and we told you about the main characteristics to keep in mind when selecting a network monitoring tool. This was meant for users whose installation couldn’t conform with standard syslog monitoring or standard bandwidths.

    • 4 Essential Tools to Search the Filesystem

      Desktop search is a software application which searches the contents of computer files, rather than searching the internet. The purpose of this software is to enable the user to locate information on their computer that they just cannot seem to find. Typically, this data includes emails, chat logs, documents, contact lists, graphics files, as well as multimedia files including video and audio.

      Searching a hard disk can be slow, especially bearing in mind the large storage capacities of modern hard disks. To ensure considerably better performance, desktop search engines build and maintain an index database. Populating this database is a system intensive activity. Consequently, desktop search engines can carry out indexing when the computer is not being used.

      One of the key benefits of this type of software is that it allows the user to locate data stored on their hard disk almost instantaneously. They are designed to be fast. They are not integrated with a different application, such as a file manager.

    • Don Libes’ Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix Automation Tool

      In this article, I will attempt to convince you that Expect is an extremely underappreciated tool for automating terminal applications in Unix.

      Why do I feel so strongly about this? Well, if you’re like me you know that the best way to make a great impression at a party is to boast about your excellent understanding of the Unix command-line. However, if you really want to be the life of the party, you not only need to show that you know the commands, you must also demonstrate that you can automate everything.

    • Proprietary

      • After ignoring Linux for years, Adobe releases Flash 24 for Linux

        Adobe has just released the first final Adobe Flash Player stable release, Flash Player 24, for GNU/Linux in years.

        The company announced back in September 2016 that it would bring back Flash for Linux from the dead. This came as a surprise as it had ignored Linux for the most part when it comes to Flash.

      • Adobe Brings Flash For Linux Back From The Dead (How Cute)

        After years of neglecting to do so, Adobe has now released Flash Player 24 for GNU/Linux. Now Windows, Mac and Linux are being offered the same version of Flash Player for the first time in ages. But considering Flash is already dying a slow and painful death, this might be too little too late.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine or Emulation

      • The Out-of-Tree Wine Code To Run DOOM On Linux

        It’s sad that DOOM hasn’t seen a native Linux port with id Software having a falling out with Linux in recent years, particularly after they were acquired by ZeniMax. But fortunately there is now a patch for being able to run DOOM with Wine.

      • Second Wine 2.0 Release Candidate Fixes Hitman: Blood Money Crashes, 20 Bugs

        The second Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming major Wine 2.0 open-source implementation of Microsoft Windows on Unix-like operating systems arrived for testing.

        Wine 2.0 RC2 comes only one week after the release of the first RC build, and it looks like it’s here to patch even more of the remaining blockers before the final version hits the streets, which might happen just in time for the Christmas holidays if we’re lucky. If not, it will hit the streets in early 2017, as the project is now in code freeze.

      • PlayOnLinux Updated to 4.2.10, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint via PPA

        PlayOnLinux is a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use numerous apps and games designed to run with Microsoft Windows. Few apps and games are compatible with GNU/Linux at the moment and it certainly is a factor preventing the migration to this system. PlayOnLinux brings a cost-free, accessible and efficient solution to this problem.

      • World Wine News

        This is the 404th issue of the World Wine News publication. Its main goal is to inform you of what’s going on around Wine. Wine is an open source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix. Think of it as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available.

    • Games

      • Orwell, the surveillance simulation game is now on Linux

        Not long after requesting Linux testers for Orwell [Steam, Official Site], the surveillance simulation game, it’s now officially available on Linux.

      • The open source itch games client has been updated yet again
      • Dota 2 7.00 Benchmarks – Intel Vulkan vs. OpenGL On Linux – Mesa 13.1 + Linux 4.9

        In addition to big end-of-year AMD Radeon Linux benchmarks and the forthcoming NVIDIA data points among other interesting EOY comparisons, there is also ongoing fresh Intel Linux benchmarks as we end out 2016. For your viewing pleasure today are the latest Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark results using last week’s Dota 2 7.00 game release.

        Last week were some fresh AMD Dota 2 benchmarks while here are the numbers from Dota 2 with Intel Skylake HD Graphics 530 as of this weekend. Testing was done with the Linux 4.9 kernel and Mesa 13.1-devel as of this past week from the Padoka PPA on Ubuntu 16.10.

      • It Looks Like CryENGINE’s Sandbox Editor Could Eventually Work On Linux

        While the CryENGINE 5.x game engine is supported on Linux, to date their sandbox editor isn’t compatible with Linux but it looks like eventually there could be said support.

        CryENGINE developer David Kaye has been commenting in our forums pertaining to the discussion around CryENGINE 5.3, which sadly didn’t ship with the Vulkan API support as planned. About the lack of Vulkan support in CryENGINE 5.3, the Crytek developer commented, “we looked at the state of Vulkan prior to branching for the stabilisation of 5.3 and decided that we weren’t happy with its level of stability, so we delayed it. This is also the reason the release as a whole was delayed. This prioritisation of stability over new features is something our community have requested.”

      • Political Animals Launches Linux version!

        We’re happy to finally be able to release the game on Linux! Thanks so much to the folks on r/linux_gaming/ for their help in testing the game on multiple distros. We hope you enjoy the game.

        There are a few known issues with Linux which we have shared in our community page. Please let us know if you find any issues and we’ll do our best to sort them out.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • ​XFCE Desktop Environment – A Linux Desktop Environment For Everyone

      One of the strong advantages of Linux over Windows or Mac is freedom. You find freedom in every corner of the Linux operating systems. You have freedom of choosing one out of hundreds of distros. Most new users of Linux are introduced to either Ubuntu or Mint. This helps in reducing the choices users have in terms of the number of distros. But here, we have one more choice to make within the distro itself. As you are already guessing, It is the DE (Desktop Environment).

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Gets A Systemd Genie; KDE Partition Manager 3.0 Released

        There are two noteworthy pieces of KDE news as the weekend comes to an end.

        First up, KDE developer Ragnar Thomsen has shifted his focus from systemd-kcm as the KDE configuration module for managing systemd into its own application: SystemdGenie. SystemdGenie is systemd-kcm turned into its own full-fledged Qt application. With morphing it into its own application, SystemdGenie offers more functionality and more UI options than being a KDE KCM module.

      • Killing the redundancy with automation

        In the past three weeks, the openSUSE community KDE team has been pretty busy to package the latest release of Applications from KDE, 16.12. It was a pretty large task, due to the number of programs involved, and the fact that several monolithic projects were split (in particular KDE PIM). This post goes through what we did, and how we improved our packaging workflow.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • GoboLinux 016 Arrives After 2 Years with Its Own Filesystem Virtualization Tool

        GoboLinux developer Lucas Correia Villa Real has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the final GoboLinux 016 operating system, an independently-developed GNU/Linux distribution that uses a custom file system hierarchy.

      • 4MRecover 21.0 Beta Ships with PhotoRec and TestDisk 7.0, Based on 4MLinux 21.0

        Polish developer Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator of the independently-developed 4MLinux computer operating system, informed Softpedia today about the release of 4MRecover 21.0 Beta.

        Based on the upcoming 4MLinux 21.0 distribution, which should be out in spring 2017, this Beta release of the 4MRecover 21.0 Live CD ships with the latest TestDisk 7.0 and QPhotoRec 7.0 software, which can be used for recovering lost partitions or photos from damaged disk drives or SD cards of all types and sizes.

        “4MRecover is a small Live CD designed for data recovery. It’s a part of 4MRescueKit, which in turn is one of the three main 4MLinux releases available for download,” said Zbigniew Konojacki in the release announcement. “This version includes TestDisk 7.0 and it uses 4MLinux 21.0 as the base system.”

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • GeckoLinux Static Editions Get Calamares Installer, Based on openSUSE Leap 42.2

        The developers of the openSUSE-based GeckoLinux computer operating system have announced the release of a new set of respined live ISO images of their GNU/Linux distribution, which is now rebased on openSUSE Leap 42.2.

      • openSUSE on ownCloud

        It is Chrismas time and I have got cookie cutters by openSUSE and ownCloud. What can you create as a happy Working Student at ownCloud and an openSUSE Contributor?

        Normally you deploy ownCloud on openSUSE. But do you know the idiom „to be in seventh heaven“ (auf Wolke 7 schweben)?

        I want to show you openSUSE Leap 42.2 on ownCloud 9.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Debian-Based SparkyLinux 4.5.2 Ships Budgie Desktop 10.2.9, Linux Kernel 4.8.15

          The development team behind the Debian-based SparkyLinux GNU/Linux distribution announced today, December 18, 2016, the release and general availability of a new ISO respin, versioned 4.5.2.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Releases Snapcraft 2.24 Snap Creator Tool for Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10

            Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov had the great pleasure of announcing the release of Snapcraft 2.24, the latest stable version of the tool application developers can use for packaging their apps as Snaps, a universal binary format for Linux OSes.

          • Serious Ubuntu Linux desktop bugs found and fixed

            The good news is that the problems have been patched. So, now that you’re almost done reading this, patch your system already.

            The bad news is there still aren’t enough eyes looking at older open-source code for overlooked security vulnerabilities.

          • Snapd 2.20 Snappy Daemon Brings Support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Many Other Goodies

            Canonical’s Michael Vogt happily announced the release of the Snapd 2.20 stable build of the Snappy daemon used on Ubuntu Linux operating systems for providing out-of-the-box support for installing and running Snap universal packages.

            Snapd 2.20 was released on the same day with Snapcraft 2.24, the tool app developers can use to package their applications as Snaps for cross-distro distribution. Snapd 2.20 is an important milestone that, for the first time, introduced support for the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system. It’s also available in the repositories of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).

          • Never Miss a Desktop Notification Again With This Indicator

            Hate missing desktop notifications on Ubuntu? Well, with the Recent Notifications indicator you don’t need to. This handy tool collects and collates all desktop notifications you receive, regardless of whether you see them or not. Then, with one click, you can see and action them.

          • These Unity 8 Desktop Designs Show a Striking New Feature

            New Unity 8 desktop mock-ups shared by the Canonical design team show an interesting new approach to presenting Scopes to desktop users.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • How to upgrade to Linux Mint 18.1

              It is now possible to upgrade the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 18 to version 18.1.

              If you’ve been waiting for this I’d like to thank you for your patience.

            • You Can Now Upgrade From Linux Mint 18 to Linux Mint 18.1, Here’s How to Do It

              After announcing the final release of the highly anticipated Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” operating system, which shipped with Cinnamon and MATE editions, project leader Clement Lefebvre published an in-depth tutorial on how to upgrade from Linux Mint 18.

              As expected, the release of Linux Mint 18.1 also opened the upgrade path for those who are currently using the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” operating system on their personal computer, allowing them to upgrade to the latest release without to much hassle. But first, the developer urges users to think twice before attempting an upgrade.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Smart Projector With Built-in Raspberry Pi Zero

      You’ve heard of smartphones but have you heard of smart projectors? They’ve actually been around for a few years and are sort of like a TV set top box and projector combined, leaving no need for a TV. Features can include things like streaming Netflix, browsing in Chrome, and Skyping. However, they can cost from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars.

      [Novaspirit] instead made his own cheap smart projector. He first got a $70 portable projector (800×480 native resolution, decent for that price) and opened it up. He soldered an old USB hub that he already had to a Raspberry Pi Zero so that he could plug in a WiFi dongle and a dongle for a Bluetooth keyboard. That all went into the projector.

    • Pi Palette- Hacker’s Cosmetics Case

      A Raspberry Pi 3 running Kali Linux in a 3D printed enclosure to disguise it as as a (somewhat chunky) makeup palette.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Workload reference architectures address requirements for deploying OpenStack clouds
    • OpenStack, HPC and public clouds: What’s on the horizon

      Many outsiders probably think that in the world of science and HPC (high performance computing) there’s only room for supercomputers and the magicians who operate them.

      However, while that’s partially true, this area is much closer to the technology as we all know it than one would expect. And nothing proves this better than the fact that the earliest and most prevalent use cases for OpenStack are research and science. (To learn more about them, check out our OpenStack in Science web page.)

      Bringing together a group of technical specialists and researchers to solve the conundrums of how to efficiently use cloud computing technology for workloads, the RCUK Cloud Working Group recently held its second annual workshop in London. The event is an amazing opportunity to bridge the gap between the magicians of science and the magicians of technology to produce better and more efficient solutions by sharing expertise.

    • Pushing the boundaries of OpenStack – Wait, what are they again?

      As a Production Support engineer for many years, I love providing operational support for front- and back-end systems. That love of operations drives me to share knowledge on how you can push the boundaries of OpenStack. To do that, you must first know the boundaries.

    • 11 benefits to running your containers on OpenStack

      Enterprises today must keep up with increasing internal and external customer demand, or die trying.

    • Running containers, reducing complexity, and more OpenStack news

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • Difference Between Linux And BSD | Open Source Operating Systems

      When you start to get out of the Windows ecosystem, the very first thing you see is macOS. But, chances are less that you may go for it, mostly because of the price tag. Moving further, you come across Linux flaunting its open source badge. Most people confuse Linux as an operating system and it has been a topic of controversy for a long time. Thus, some people refer a Linux operating system as GNU/Linux.

      Soon, you start realizing how diverse is the Linux ecosystem with numerous Linux distributions and their derivatives. You almost believe that Linux and its family is the representative of the open source community. But there is a lesser-known family of operating systems known as the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution), which also counts as one of the major names in the open source community.

    • The Current State Of OpenMP Offloading In LLVM’s Clang, Try It Today With Clang-YKT

      During last month’s SuperComputing 2016 conference in Salt Lake City was the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC workshop being hosted for its third year. The slides from that event were recently made available and one of the talks interesting me the most was about the state of Clang OpenMP offloading, including for GPUs.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Hurd 0.9 & Mach 1.8 Released: Adds Ethernet Multiplexer, Mach Drops ACPI

      There is an early GNU Christmas with the release of GNU Hurd 0.9 joined by GNU Mach 1.8. Yep, another rare released update to Hurd.

      GNU Hurd 0.9 supports its boot program running as an unprivileged user, an Ethernet multiplexer has been merged to support better virtual interfaces, the addition of the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) library, and many bug fixes.

      GNU Mach meanwhile as the microkernel upon which GNU Hurd systems are based, has seen many changes with version 1.8. Mach 1.8 has significantly reworked its memory management system, the virtual memory system now uses a red-black tree for allocations, and improved debugging / error reporting. There are also many bug fixes in Mach and GNU Mach has dropped its partial ACPI support.

  • Public Services/Government

    • 5 initiatives that pushed the free software envelope in Europe in 2016

      The public sector tends to lag—some would say drag—behind the private sector when it comes to adopting new technologies. This is also true when it comes to adopting free software: Although companies widely see free technologies as a boon, government organizations often are still locked into proprietary software and work with closed standards.

      That said, some countries are making progress moving toward open source technologies.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Ushering in a bold new era for open science

        Earlier this year, the Montreal Neurological Institute announced an ambitious – and, in many ways, unprecedented – commitment to the principles of open science.

        The Neuro will be eschewing patents for its discoveries and doing all it can to make its research findings – and all the data associated with that research – widely available. While there have been other large-scale open science initiatives – usually involving several partners collaborating in a specific area – the Neuro is the first major research institute of its kind to make such a wide-ranging commitment to open science.

        That commitment just received a huge boost, thanks to a $20-million gift from the Larry and Judy Tanenbaum family. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (BA’94) was on hand at a press conference on Dec. 16 to announce the launch of the Neuro’s new Tanenbaum Open Science Institute. “This is a catalyst,” says Neuro director Guy Rouleau of the Tanenbaum gift. “This is really going to allow us to get things done.”

      • McGill Neurology will no longer patent researchers’ findings, instead everything will be open access

        The Neurological Institute at Montreal’s McGill University is host to the “Tanenbaum Open Science Institute,” endowed by a $20M contribution; since last spring, the unit has pursued an ambitious open science agenda that includes open access publication of all research data and findings, and an end to the practice of patenting the university’s findings. Instead, they will all be patent-free and usable by anyone.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Using Blender and Python to 3D print a dress

        The opening ceremony at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio featured snowboarder Amy Purdy wearing a 3D printed dress, wearing prosthetics printed from the same material as the dress, and dancing with a Kuka robotic arm.

        The dance was a statement about the merging of the human spirit and technology. “The backstory, which mainstream media passed over, was the critical role open source software played in the making of the dress: it was created using Blender and Python.

  • Programming/Development

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Printer fun

      The current cartridges were running low for a while, but I didn’t need to change them yet. As I printed a user manual at the beginning of the week (~300+ pages in total), I ran out of the black half-way through. Bought a new cartridge, installed it, and the first strange thing was that it still showed “Black empty – please replace”.

      I powered the printer off and turned it on again (the miracle cure for all IT-related things), and things seemed OK, so I restarted printing. However, this time, the printer was going through 20-30 pages, and then was getting stuck in “Printing document” with green led blinking. Waited for 20 minutes, nothing. So cancel the job (from the printer), restart printing, all fine.

      The next day I wanted to print a single page, and didn’t manage to. Checked that the PDF is normal, checked an older PDF which I printed successfully before, nothing worked. Changed drivers, unseated & re-seated the extra memory, changed operating systems, nothing. Not even the built-in printer diagnostic pages were printing.

      The internet was all over with “HP formatter issues”; apparently some HP printers had “green” (i.e. low-quality) soldering, and were failing after a while. But people were complaining about 1-2-4 years, not 9 that my printer worked, and it was very suspicious that all troubles started after my cartridge replacement. Or, more likely, due to the recent sudden increase in printing.

    • That Didn’t Last Long: Samsung 960 EVO NVMe Already Fails

      I now have my first dead NVM Express SSD and it only lasted one week… It’s already time to RMA the Samsung 960 EVO and unfortunately lost a number of benchmarks that I was working on this weekend.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Lidl issues health warning after paint thinner chemical discovered in gravy granules

      Unsafe levels of a paint thinner chemical have been discovered in batches of gravy from Lidl.

      The discount supermarket has recalled two batches of Kania Gravy Granules after they were found to be contaminated with xylene, which occurs naturally in petroleum and crude oil, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said.

      Exposure to the “harmful” chemical poses a health risk, causing irritation of the mouth, throat, nose and lungs and in severe cases leading to heart problems, liver and kidney damage and coma, according to Public Health England.

      An alert posted on the FSA website said: “Exposure to xylene in food products represents a health risk as it can cause adverse effects such as headache, dizziness, nausea and vomiting.

    • Paint thinner chemical found in Lidl gravy by Food Standards Agency

      Unsafe levels of a paint thinner chemical have been found in gravy granules sold at Lidl, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) has revealed.

      The contamination affected two batches of Kania Gravy Granules, which were found to contain xylene.

    • Oklahoma Just Passed a Law Requiring Private Businesses to Turn Their Bathrooms Into Billboards for Anti-Abortion Propaganda

      The Oklahoma Legislature has outdone itself this time. In the latest of their absurd and callous efforts to shame and stigmatize women, Oklahoma legislators from both parties have passed into law a requirement that commands thousands of private businesses to turn their bathroom walls into billboards for anti-abortion propaganda.

      As part of a misguided effort to reduce the number of abortions in Oklahoma, Rep. Ann Coody and Sen. AJ Griffin introduced HB 2797 — the “Humanity of the Unborn Child Act.” Among other troubling provisions, the new law requires public schools, hospitals, restaurants, and nursing homes to post signs in their restrooms directing women to services aimed at discouraging abortion.

    • Can sub-Saharan Africa produce enough food to meet growing demand?

      Each year, the planet has to feed more hungry, hungry humans. Right now, projections suggest that we might just be able to meet the challenge of feeding our growing population in 2050, but only if we make better use of the land that we use for agriculture.

      For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), though, the question gets a little more complicated. Even if there’s enough food globally to go around by 2050, will SSA be able to produce enough to be self-sufficient? A paper in this week’s PNAS suggests that the region might be stuck relying on imports unless it massively expands its croplands. This would be bad news for the environment, and it wouldn’t be easy.

      Every region on Earth relies on food imports to some extent, but importing large amounts of food is only really feasible in countries that are economically developed. For developing countries, affording large quantities of food imports can stifle economic development. Right now, SSA produces around 80 percent of the staple grains that it needs. By contrast, North and South America, Europe, and Australia all produce well above 100 percent of their own needs. And the population of SSA is projected to increase more than that of other regions.

  • Security

    • SELinux, Seccomp, Falco, and You: A Technical Discussion

      One of the questions we often get when we talk about Sysdig Falco is “How does it compare to other tools like SELinux, AppArmor, Auditd, etc. that also have security policies?” To help answer some of those questions, we thought we’d present a summary of other related security products and how they compare to Sysdig Falco.

    • PGP Never Gonna Give You Up

      Seeing that I was planning on carrying my long-term private keys around on my telephone (BlackBerry PRIV, FDE encryption active FWIW), I had to double-check the security of the secret key encryption.

      It turns out that PGP encrypts each of your secret keys with a hash of the passphrase you supply. My passphrase is significantly longer than the average, and consists of random characters (uppercase, lowercase, numbers, symbols). Passphrase length and complexity is by far the most important factor determining the safety of your encrypted secret key.

    • McAfee Virus Scan for Linux

      A system running Intel’s McAfee VirusScan Enterprise for Linux can be compromised by remote attackers due to a number of security vulnerabilities. Some of these vulnerabilities can be chained together to allow remote code execution as root.

    • The Coolest Hacks Of 2016

      No 400-pound hacker here: Lightbulb and ‘do-gooder’ worms, machines replacing humans to hack other machines, and high-speed car hacking were among the most innovative white-hat hacks this year.

      In a year when ransomware became the new malware and cyber espionage became a powerful political propaganda tool for Russia, it’s easy to forget that not all hacking in 2016 was so ugly and destructive.

      Sure, cybercrime and cyber espionage this past year turned the corner into more manipulative and painful territory for victims. But 2016 also had its share of game-changing “good” hacks by security researchers, with some creative yet unsettling ways to break the already thin-to-no defenses of Internet of Things things, as well as crack locked-down computers and hijack computer mice. Hackers even took a back seat to machines in the first-ever machine-on-machine hacking contest this summer at DEF CON.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Right and Wrong in the South China Sea

      John Pilger’s tremendous new documentary The Coming War With China explains Chinese motivations. China is ringed by 200 US military bases and installations, far from any State of the USA, in an unabashed display of American Imperial power. China by contrast has very few military outposts outside China at all and shows remarkably little interest in territorial ambition, given China’s current economic power. The stories of US exploitation and duplicity recounted in the Pilger documentary are overwhelming, and of course the entire venture is a massive transfer of money from struggling US taxpayers to the arms industry. One is left with a feeling of surprise that the Chinese reaction to naked US threat is so calm and not paranoid.

    • China Flexes Military Might After Trump Pokes Taiwan Policy with Stick

      Fears that President-elect Donald Trump’s questioning of the “one China” policy and recent phone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-Wen would amplify military tensions with China were seemingly confirmed on Thursday after an editorial in the government mouthpiece, The Global Times, called for “use of force” to deter Taiwanese independence.

      “Time will tell after Trump’s team takes over the U.S., whether it will willfully utilize the one-China policy as leverage to blackmail Beijing or restrain itself in actual practice,” the editorial stated, referring to the diplomatic agreement that allows “the U.S. to do business with both China and Taiwan while only recognizing Beijing,” the Guardian explains.

      “In any case,” the editorial continued, “the current farce has made China vigilant.”

      Underscoring the threat, the Chinese navy announced late Thursday that it had, on an “undisclosed date,” carried out large-scale war exercises, using live ammunition, with the nation’s first aircraft carrier.

    • The Cold War, Continued: Post-Election Russophobia

      Mainstream TV news anchors including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes are reporting as fact—with fuming indignation—that Russia (and specifically Vladimir Putin) not only sought to influence the U.S. election (and—gosh!—promote “doubt” about the whole legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system) but to throw the vote to Donald Trump.

      The main accusation is that the DNC and Podesta emails leaked through Wikileaks were provided by state-backed Russian hackers (while they did not leak material hacked from the Republicans). I have my doubts on this. Former U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan and torture whistle-blower Craig Murray, a friend of Julian Assange, has stated that the DNC emails were leaked by a DNC insider whose identity he knows. The person, Murray contends, handed the material over to him, in a D.C. park. I have met Murray, admire and am inclined to believe him. (I just heard now that John Bolton, of all people, has also opined this was an inside job.)

    • ‘Castro Was a Living Reminder of the Limits of American Power’

      Fidel Castro, who died November 25 at age 90, will be remembered as someone whose work changed, not just Cuba, but the wider world. With US media ringing with denunciation—with some left over to denunciate those who aren’t denunciating enough—there’s little oxygen left for discussion of that work, and what it meant and still means.

      We’re joined now for some context on Castro and Cuba by Louis Pérez. He’s professor of history at the University of North Carolina and editor of Cuban Journal, and author of, among other titles, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. He joins us now by phone from North Carolina.

    • CIA apologises to Turkey over ‘false claims’ of links to Daesh

      Diplomatic sources said that the United States main intelligence service, the CIA, had apologised to Turkey in a written statement for making “false claims” about alleged oil trading between Turkey and Daesh, Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah reported yesterday.

      The Turkish newspaper said that high-level Turkish diplomatic sources said that the CIA and the US Secretary of State John Kerry had apologised to Turkey following a report provided by the Turkish intelligence service which proved that the US claims were wrong in early 2015.

      According to Daily Sabaha, Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) officials revealed that the geographic locations in the document that allegedly showed where Daesh’s oil trade was conducted in Turkey in fact showed an asphalt plant in Kilis in southeast Turkey.

      Following the MIT investigation of the CIA’s documents, the CIA apologised for the mistaken allegations at the end of 2015. “We have seen no evidence to support such an accusation. Turkey plays a vital role in the counter-ISIL coalition,” a statement by the CIA said, using another acronym for Daesh.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • How the Trump Administration Could Change the American Landscape, Literally

      With the election of Donald Trump, the management of America’s public lands could shift, altering the landscape in southern Utah and across the Western United States. Extractive projects like the Coal Hollow expansion that have stalled or been rejected under the Obama administration could be given new life. They include drilling in the Arctic, in the North Atlantic, in the forests of Colorado, and around Glacier National Park; uranium mining at the edges of the Grand Canyon; and ramped-up logging in the national forests of the Pacific Northwest.

      The federal government—we, the taxpayers—owns some 640 million acres, and about half of the land in Western states. Those lands are the source of roughly 20 percent of the oil and gas produced in the United States, and 40 percent of coal. Once burned, fossil fuels extracted from public lands account for more than a fifth of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Given the amount of carbon still locked in public ground—between 319 and 450 gigatons of potential carbon dioxide, according to a 2015 analysis by Ecoshift Consulting, more than half of the entire world’s carbon budget—increased development there has implications not only for local ecosystems and communities but also for the entire planet.

    • If GOP Gets Climate ‘Science’ From Breitbart, God Help the Planet

      The US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology recently tweeted an article by Breitbart, stating “@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence From Climate Alarmists.”

      [...]

      Breitbart makes much of the fact that El Niño, a cyclic Pacific Ocean weather phenomenon, has contributed to record temperatures this year and last year—as though the observation that El Niño years are warmer than usual were not a reality understood and acknowledged by every climate scientist.

      [...]

      These people don’t have any independent expertise in climate science; Smith is a lawyer, Walker has a master’s in political science and Shank’s degree is in aerospace engineering. If they’re getting their information about climate disruption from sites like Breitbart, a fraudulent degree from Trump University would probably be a better education.

    • ‘We Don’t Need to Get to Standing Rock to Be Part of the Front Line’

      The struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux against the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline rivets the attention of people around the world, not only as an environmental story, an emblem of what the fight to address climate change actually looks like, but also as a historic story, a chapter in the resistance of indigenous people to the violent power of state and corporate actors. The announcement that the Army Corps of Engineers would withhold an easement permit for the last part of the Dakota Access Pipeline, pending an environmental impact study, is a significant moment that should nonetheless not be mistaken for the end of either that environmental or that historical story.

    • Investigating Law Enforcement’s Possible Use of Surveillance Technology at Standing Rock

      One of the biggest protests of 2016 is still underway at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where Water Protectors and their allies are fighting Energy Transfer Partners’ plans to drill beneath contested Treaty land to finish the Dakota Access Pipeline. While the world has been watching law enforcement’s growing use of force to disrupt the protests, EFF has been tracking the effects of its surveillance technologies on water protectors’ communications and movement.

      Following several reports of potentially unlawful surveillance, EFF sent technologists and lawyers to North Dakota to investigate. We collected anecdotal evidence from water protectors about suspicious cell phone behavior, including uncharacteristically fast battery drainage, applications freezing, and phones crashing completely. Some water protectors also saw suspicious login attempts to their Google accounts from IP addresses originating from North Dakota’s Information & Technology Department. On social media, many reported Facebook posts and messenger threads disappearing, as well as Facebook Live uploads failing to upload or, once uploaded, disappearing completely.

    • This Just Became the World’s Cheapest Form of Electricity Out of Nowhere

      Solar power is becoming the world’s cheapest form of new electricity generation, data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) suggests.

      According to Bloomberg’s analysis, the cost of solar power in China, India, Brazil and 55 other emerging market economies has dropped to about one third of its price in 2010. This means solar now pips wind as the cheapest form of renewable energy—but is also outperforming coal and gas.

      In a note to clients this week, BNEF chairman Michael Liebreich said that solar power had entered “the era of undercutting” fossil fuels.

  • Finance

    • Wells Fargo Is on a Losing Streak, But Still Has Some Trump Cards

      The embattled Wells Fargo Bank, famously accused of signing up its customers to multiple accounts without their knowledge, was discovered last week to be doing the same thing with a life insurance product sold in their branches by Prudential. This could prove even more damaging than the original fake account scandal, as bankers are not allowed to sell insurance, much less secretly sign people up for it.

      Then on Tuesday, the bank was suspended from doing any work for the city of San Francisco, its home town. Plus, Wells was the only U.S. bank to have their “living will” — a government-mandated roadmap for how to dismantle the firm in the event of a failure — rejected by federal regulators. This is the third time since 2014 Wells Fargo had its living will denied as not credible, and for the first time, that will lead to sanctions: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve announced they will prohibit Wells Fargo from establishing any international subsidiaries or purchasing any nonbank companies.

    • Whistleblower Vindicated: Massive Trading Firm Knight Capital Charged With Abusing “Naked Shorts”

      Back in September, I wrote a seven-part series at The Intercept chronicling how former Wall Street trader Chris DiIorio, determined to figure out how he lost a small fortune on a penny stock, came to the conclusion that gigantic market-making firm Knight Capital, now known as KCG, repeatedly violated federal regulations meant to prevent abuse in what are known as “naked short sales.”

      It was an explosive allegation. Naked short sales are when you sell a stock you don’t have. That’s illegal most of the time, for obvious reasons. DiIorio found evidence that KCG had illegally conducted nearly two billion dollars’ worth of them.

      It was a bit of a mystery story, with two unanswered questions at the end: Was DiIorio right? And if so, why hadn’t any regulatory authority done anything about it?

      One regulatory authority finally has, and its action would seem to confirm DiIorio’s suspicions.

    • Trump Transition Team Picks Up Yet Another Promoter of Cheap Foreign Labor

      Donald Trump the candidate campaigned on protecting the wages of American workers. In announcing his agenda for the first 100 days, he said he would task his Department of Labor to “investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker.”

      But his transition team doesn’t reflect that perspective. Veronica Birkenstock, who runs a recruitment firm that secures visas for cheap temporary foreign workers, was named to Trump’s Department of Labor landing team — before being mysteriously disappeared after The Intercept reported on it.

      Next, the Trump team chose fast food executive Andy Puzder — an outspoken proponent of legalizing undocumented workers so they can provide cheap, low-skilled labor — to be the administration’s Labor Secretary.

    • 100 CEOs Have as Much Retirement Savings as 116 Million Americans

      While many Americans are facing a “frightening retirement reality,” 100 CEOs are looking at “colossal nest eggs” and can look forward to monthly retirement checks of over $250,000 for the rest of their lives.

      The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) puts a spotlight on this massive savings gap in its new report (pdf), “A Tale of Two Retirements.”

      “While slashing jobs and benefits for ordinary workers, CEOs of large companies have been feathering their own nests,” stated Sarah Anderson, report co-author and director of the IPS Global Economy Project. “It’s no wonder so many American workers are concerned about whether their golden years will be tarnished by financial stress.”

      In fact, these 100 CEOs have retirement funds that total $4.7 billion. That’s as much as the retirement savings of the 41 percent of U.S. families with the smallest nest eggs—that’s 116 million people. The report also notes that 37 percent of U.S. families have no retirement wealth at all.

    • Are we stuck with inequality?

      The latesT study of deepening inequality by three of the most careful scholars of the subject, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saens, and Gabriel Zucman, has prompted another round of shrugs from economists that inequality is just in the nature of the advanced economy.

      Supposedly, these inexorable trends reflect technology, globalization, and increasing rewards to more advanced skills. The poor are paid in correct proportion to their contribution to the national product, which, alas, isn’t much.

      A close look at political history suggests that this widespread inference is convenient nonsense — convenient to economic elites. In fact, the distribution of income and wealth has bounced around a lot in the past century and a half. It was extreme in the first Gilded Age of the late 19th century, a little less so in the Progressive Era, extreme again in the 1920s, and remarkably egalitarian in the period between the New Deal and the early 1970s — and now extreme again.

    • EU Commission ‘exceeded its powers’ in Apple tax case

      The Government has moved to pre-empt the expected publication of the full EU Commission ruling on the controversial €13 billion Apple tax case .

      In a statement early today, it said the commission had misinterpreted Ireland’s tax laws and wrongly ruled that profits not attributable to activity in Ireland should have been taxed here.

      The commission has found that Ireland deliberately decided to forego tax due from the US multinational over many years by giving it favourable tax treatment. But the Government says the commission has misinterpreted Ireland’s tax laws.

    • Apple appeals EU tax ruling, says it was a ‘convenient target’

      Apple (AAPL.O) has launched a legal challenge to a record $14 billion EU tax demand, arguing that EU regulators ignored tax experts and corporate law and deliberately picked a method to maximize the penalty, senior executives said.

      Apple’s combative stand underlines its anger with the European Commission, which said on Aug. 30 the company’s Irish tax deal was illegal state aid and ordered it to repay up to 13 billion euros ($13.8 billion) to Ireland, where Apple has its European headquarters.

    • Apple CFO: “What the [EU] Commission is doing here is a disgrace for European citizens, it should be ashamed”
    • An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline

      This report from Gallup and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, “An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline” was released last week as a 120 page pdf. Here is the table of contents:

      01. THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
      02. WHY IS GROWTH DOWN?
      03. UNDERSTANDING GDP GROWTH
      04. THE KEY SECTORS DRAGGING DOWN GROWTH
      05. HEALTHCARE
      06. HOUSING
      07. EDUCATION
      08. POSSIBLE INDIRECT CONSEQUENCES OF ECONOMIC DETERIORATION
      09. WHAT IS CAUSING ECONOMIC DETERIORATION?
      10. REVIVING GROWTH WILL REQUIRE A NEW STRATEGY
      ENDNOTES

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Zorka Milin on Rex Tillerson, Ethan Nadelmann on Trump’s Drug War

      This week on CounterSpin: More Trump appointments mean more work cut out for public interest advocates. There’s no need to pick which is most worrisome, but a strong contender would be making Rex Tillerson, longtime CEO of Exxon Mobil, secretary of State. We’ll hear about Tillerson from Zorka Milin, senior legal adviser at Global Witness.

    • Trump, Choices, and Qualifications

      Now that some of Donald Trump’s choices for important positions in his administration have been made, it is time to examine the reasons for some of those appointments. An early appointment was that of General Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor. He was selected for two reasons: his tenuous relationship with the truth, as shown by his promulgation of fake news over the years, a trait admired by Mr. Trump; and his former status as a general.

    • The Republican Sabotage of the Vote Recounts in Michigan and Wisconsin

      Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state’s count by 10,704 votes. But hold on — a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.

      The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

      According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?

    • Blaming Trump’s Win on the Age Group Least Responsible for It

      “Yes, You Can Blame Millennials for Hillary Clinton’s Loss” was the headline over a piece by the Post‘s Aaron Blake (12/2/16). “Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Thursday that one particular group is especially to blame: Millennials.” Blake quoted another Post story citing Mook’s claim that “younger voters, perhaps assuming that Clinton was going to win, migrated to third-party candidates in the final days of the race.” “That’s why we lost,” Mook said.

      [...]

      Whoa, wait—”Clinton’s 55–36 margin among those ages 18 to 29″? Yep, Clinton won among voters under 30—the Millennials, basically—by 19 percentage points. Blake doesn’t spell it out, but this is the age group that delivered by far the biggest margin for Clinton. The next-best cohort for Clinton was those aged 39–44, who picked her by a 10-point margin. This is in sharp contrast to the 45–64 and 65+ age groups, who voted for Trump by margins of 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively.

      So who do we blame for Trump—the age group that voted for Clinton by the widest margin, or the ones that voted for Trump? If you’re the Washington Post, the biggest Clinton backers are responsible for Trump, naturally.

      You can play the same statistical games with race, by the way. For example, exit polls suggest that Trump did only 1 percentage point better than Romney among white voters, who went for Trump 58–37 percent. Among African-Americans, he only got 8 percent, but his losing margin was “only” 80 percentage points, as opposed to 87 points for Romney; Trump “overperformed” with black voters by 7 points.

    • No to the Sky deal. The Murdochs can’t be trusted

      Five years ago, after the phone-hacking revelations, the House of Commons unanimously rejected Rupert Murdoch’s bid for 100% of Sky. A year later, Sky was only passed by Ofcom as being fit and proper to hold a communications licence on the basis that there was not full Murdoch ownership and control. Today, the Murdochs want to turn the view of parliament and the regulator on its head. But what’s really changed?

    • North Carolinians Revolt Over Republicans’ Brazen Post-Election Coup

      Refusing to accept Republican lawmakers’ brazen power grab, hundreds of North Carolinians flooded the halls of the General Assembly building in Raleigh Thursday evening to shame the officials as they passed a series of measures aimed at stripping power from Governor-elect Roy Cooper.
      Tweets about #RespectOurVote OR #ncga OR #ncpol

      Twenty people, including one journalist, were reportedly arrested for disrupting the special session, during which the GOP-led legislature passed a number of bills that would limit the ability of the incoming Democratic administration to make appointments and control elections.

    • CNN Praises ‘Diverse Viewpoints’ of Trump’s ‘Bipartisan CEOs’

      On CNN (12/2/16), anchor Carol Costello introduced a story about how Donald Trump is convening a panel of prominent CEOs to consult with on a monthly basis on issues including job growth and taxes.

      CNN reporter Christina Alesci reported excitedly that the panel, assembled by the Blackstone Group’s CEO Stephen Schwartzman, will be made up of a “who’s who” of “bipartisan CEOs,” including GM’s Mary Barra, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Disney‘s Bob Iger, Doug McMillon of Walmart and Jack Welch, former GE CEO.

    • Rick Luttmann, Greg Palast, Nadya Tannous, and Damanjit Singh

      In the first half of the program, mathematician Rick Luttmann discusses ranked-choice voting and why it is superior to the prevalent “plurality voting” system. Also, investigative journalist Greg Palast returns to Project Censored to explain how GOP voter supression tactics may have helped manipulate the outcome of the 2016 presidential election (he calls it a “Jim Crow election”). In the second half of the program, two activists recently returned from Standing Rock describe the violence police there are inflicting on the water protectors and their allies. Nadya Tannous and Damanjit Singh also explain why the Standing Rock confrontation is an anti-colonial struggle.

    • Voting with Risk-Limiting Audits: Better, Faster, Cheaper

      After extensive ups and downs, the election recount efforts in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have concluded. The main lesson: ballot audits should be less exciting and less expensive. Specifically, we need to make audits an ordinary, non-partisan part of every election, done efficiently and quickly, so they are not subject to emergency fundraising and last-minute debates over their legitimacy. The way to do that is clear: make risk-limiting audits part of standard election procedure.

      After this year’s election, EFF joined many election security researchers in calling for a recount of votes in three key states. This was partly because of evidence that hackers affected other parts of the election (not directly related to voting machines). But more than that, it was based long-standing research showing that electronic voting machines and optical scanners are subject to errors and manipulation that could sway an election. In response to that call, Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s campaign raised more than $7 million to fund the recounts.

    • From Reagan to Trump: Reflecting on Three Disastrous Elections

      Like millions of Americans, I am alarmed that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. While Barack Obama’s record as president is mixed, Trump has peddled hatred and suspicion, threatening to reverse everything positive that Obama has accomplished. But along with worrying about what is to come, I’ve been reflecting on some past elections that were also shocking or wrong, elections that brought great harm — but not quite the end of civilization as we know it. The chances are that’s what will happen this time too.

    • The First Amendment requires the Pennsylvania recount

      Jill Stein and a handful of voters might succeed in forcing a recount that would make Hillary Clinton the next President of the United States.

      I say that on the basis of my experience testifying before the Florida Legislature’s Select Joint Committee on the Manner of Appointment of Presidential Electors in the 2000 Florida recount. I had been asked by Committee to provide advice on whether the many lawsuits filed by Democrats around the state could come to a conclusion in time for the Electoral College’s meeting and vote on December 18, 2000.

      If the lawsuits could not be timely concluded, a serious risk existed that Florida’s 25 electoral votes would not be counted. That would leave George w. Bush with just 246 electoral votes to Al Gore’s 266. The Committee asked for my view because I had handled hundreds of lawsuits, including many that involved expedited matters.

    • GOP electors cite rural voice in Electoral College

      When the Constitution was written, some signers wanted direct election of the president. Others wanted state legislatures or Congress to choose the executive. The Electoral College was the end result: Each state got a slate of electors numbering the same as its delegation in Congress. Electors vote, with rare exception, for whichever candidate won the most votes in their state — effectively meaning the presidential election is 51 separate popular votes.

    • Yes, Trump can lose the Electoral College — but then what?

      The Electoral College has remained a topic of hot conversation since Nov. 8.

      There has been much discussion about faithless electors abandoning their traditional role, Hamilton Electors and what happened in the past when electors have been thrown out during ballot counting by the House and Senate, such as in 1872, when Louisiana and Arkansas’ electors were thrown out.

      How could this happen again?

    • Rex Tillerson revealed as former director of US-Russian oil company in Bahamas

      Leaked documents show Donald Trump’s appointed secretary of state was a director of a Bahamas-based US-Russian oil company.

      Rex Tillerson, whose suitability for the top government position was already under question due to his potential conflicts of interest with the energy industry and his ties to Russia, is now revealed to have been the former director of ExxonMobil’s Russian subsidiary.

      Mr Tillerson was named director of Exxon Neftegas in 1998. His name on company filings – RW Tillerson – appears next to other directors based in Texas, Moscow and in far eastern Russia. The company is incorporated in the Bahamas, thousands of miles away from their most important Russian Arctic exploration projects and where the corporation tax rate is zero.

    • Trump anger smashes Vanity Fair’s subscription record

      Vanity Fair has had the last laugh after President-elect Donald Trump blasted the magazine over a snooty review of one of his restaurants: its subscription numbers have broken a company record.

      “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine?” the incoming Republican commander-in-chief asked his 17.4 million followers on Twitter bright and early Thursday.

      “Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!” he added for good measure in reference to the magazine’s editor, with whom he has a feud dating back decades.

      Only it seems that offending the 70-year-old billionaire real estate tycoon is good for business — at least in the news industry.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Trump Promised To Help Tech Companies. What Does He Want in Return?

      Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, and 10 other technology company leaders trooped to Trump Tower in New York this week, where the President-elect told them they were “amazing” and said, “I’m here to make you folks do well.” He pledged to do “anything we can do to help.” We’re glad to hear it, and we have a few ideas for steps the new administration can take to fulfill that commitment.

      If Mr. Trump wants to help technology thrive, he should start by protecting users and innovation from policies and practices that threaten privacy, civil liberties, and a free Internet. Users are beset by overreaching digital collection and the tracking of personal information on all fronts. We exist in an era of unprecedented government invasions into our private lives, made easier by the digital devices we carry and the servers and cloud storage that hold information about every aspect of our lives—where we go, what we say, what we buy, and with whom who we associate.

    • Trump to Inherit Vast Surveillance Powers

      Many Democrats trusted President Obama with the vast surveillance powers inherited from President George W. Bush, but now the failure to curtail those powers means they pass on to Donald Trump, notes Nat Parry.

    • Facebook Finally Says It Will Not Help Build Muslim Registry [Ed: Nonsense. Facebook ALREADY has a “Muslim Registry”]

      At the beginning of December, The Intercept reported on eight major American technology firms unwilling to state on the record that they would not help the Trump administration create a national Muslim registry. Since then, 22 different advocacy groups petitioned those companies to respond —today, Facebook breaks its silence.

      The following statement was issued to The Intercept by a Facebook spokesperson:

      “No one has asked us to build a Muslim registry, and of course we would not do so.”

    • The New and Improved Privacy Badger 2.0 Is Here

      EFF is excited to announce that today we are releasing Privacy Badger 2.0 for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Privacy Badger is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden third-party trackers that would otherwise follow you around the web and spy on your browsing habits. Privacy Badger now has approximately 900,000 daily users and counting.

      Third-party tracking—that is, when advertisers and websites track your browsing activity across the web without your knowledge, control, or consent—is an alarmingly widespread practice in online advertising. Privacy Badger spots and then blocks third-party domains that seem to be tracking your browsing habits (e.g. by setting cookies that could be used for tracking, or by fingerprinting your browser). If the same third-party domain appears to be tracking you on three or more different websites, Privacy Badger will conclude that the third party domain is a tracker and block future connections to it.

      Privacy Badger always tells how many third-party domains it has detected and whether or not they seem to be trackers. Further, users have control over how Privacy Badger treats these domains, with options to block a domain entirely, block just cookies, or allow a domain.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • The Lies at the Heart of Our Dying Order

      One should understand why people have lost trust in experts, the media, and politicians.

      It is not difficult, it is the same reason people lost faith in Soviet Communism: Promises were made that turned out to be lies, those promises were not kept.

      Soviet Communism was supposed to lead to a cornucopia and a withering away of the state. Instead it lead to a police state and a huge drought of consumer goods, and often enough, even food. Communism failed to meet its core promises.

      [...]

      Lying is bad policy. It may get you what you want in the short run, or even the medium run, but it destroys the very basis of your power and legitimacy. Lying is what neoliberal politicians, journalists (yes, yes they are neoliberal), and their experts have done to themselves and they destroyed both their own power and legitimacy and that of the order they supported. No one with sense trusts them: If you trust these people, you have no sense, it is definitional. I always laugh when some idiot says, “But 90 percent of economists think X is bad.”

    • Seth Rogen and Six More White Men Discuss Race, Gender in Animation

      If you’re planning to be asking questions like, “How do you approach different ethnicities and cultures in animation? Are you conscious of running the risk that some group could take offense?” or “Several of your movies have female protagonists. But they’re not looking for a prince,” you’d think that you’d try to get to get some kind of diversity in your panel of animation directors. Failing that, you might point out the monoculture in the room, and what it says about the animation business.

    • Widespread ethnic profiling by police: a call for EU action

      If you have never been stopped and search by the police, you might not see how it can affect those who are systematically stopped and searched, sometimes several times a week, for no apparent reason. Even if you have nothing to be blamed for, it is humiliating and frustrating to be targeted, singled out very often, just because of your perceived race, ethnicity or religion, rather than on the basis of individual behaviour or objective evidence.

      With the tightened border controls over migration concerns and the threat of terrorism, the increased perception of use of ethnic profiling has been reported by anti-racism organisations across Europe.

    • The Rise of White Racial Nationalism

      There is little doubt that white racism played a role in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. As Zach Beauchamp demonstrates in a Nov. 10 article at Vox.com, enthusiastic support for Donald Trump – 10 on a scale of 10 – among white voters in mostly white geographic areas was about 25 percent. However, in areas of growing ethnic and racial diversity, the percentage of all-in Trump support goes way up.

      Beauchamp quotes the research of the University of London scholar Eric Kaufmann, who surveyed Trump’s white supporters. Kaufmann’s original findings are reported in the policy blog of the London School of Economics. One result was that in areas that had experienced a 30 percent rise in Latino population, the number of whites who enthusiastically supported Trump rose to 70 percent.

    • Obama Can Stop the Trump Administration From Targeting and Discriminating Against Muslim and Arab Immigrants

      This Monday, December 12, the ACLU will be joining Color of Change, 18 Million Rising, MomsRising.org, MoveOn, DRUM — Desis Rising Up and Moving, and others to deliver over 280,000 petition signatures calling on President Obama to repeal the special registration system targeting Muslim and Arab immigrants before Donald Trump takes office.

    • The State of Alabama Last Night Tortured a Man While Slowly Snuffing Out His Life

      Alabama cruelly and excessively violated the bounds of human decency last night when it knowingly inflicted torturous pain during Ronald Smith’s botched execution.

      And it should never have come to this.

      Ronald Smith’s jury had voted to spare his life, but the trial judge in the case overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced him to death under Alabama’s outlier practice. A divided Supreme Court then denied Smith’s request to postpone his execution to review the issue of judicial override, and Alabama moved forward with his execution.

      The execution of Ronald Smith last night took far longer than it should have, 34 minutes, during which time his body heaved as he struggled. He was almost certainly awake when the prison administered the agonizing drugs, whose administration without sedation is an open and shut violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

    • The California Transportation Department Is Cruelly and Unconstitutionally Destroying Homeless People’s Belongings

      Sometimes the trucks arrive early. Sometimes they come with no notice at all. Sometimes, while workers from the California Department of Transportation make their way down the row of tents—seizing property and cherished belongings—people have mere seconds to grab everything they can. Then they stand and watch as their bedding, clothes, tools, bikes, medicine, food, and other things are tossed into a trash compactor and destroyed.

      I’ve heard this story countless times from homeless people in the Bay Area and beyond. My colleagues who work on issues of poverty and inequality have too. For decades, save a few years where good practices and policies were followed because of lawsuit settlements, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and other government agencies in California have been conducting illegal sweeps of homeless encampments, cruelly and unconstitutionally seizing and destroying property.

    • The Dark Side of Christmas: The Impact on Sweatshops

      Television screens are filled with Christmas advertising, propagating the apparent need to buy something, and above all electronics, apparel, toys — the most popular Christmas gifts. The festive countdown is well underway.

      Three points specifically define the ‘festive’ season: advertisements and commercialisation, shopping and spending, and increased revenue for the Western economy. Data from Capgemini and new in the UK’s industry association for e-retail, the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG), reveal that in 2015, British retailers took in over £24 billion (roughly $30 billion) during the Christmas period alone, more than the entire GDP of countries like Nepal or Honduras. This spending craze is linked with advertisement and the increasing consumerism promoted by mass-, and now social media.

    • Why Obama should pardon Chelsea Manning

      Today, Saturday 17th December, is Chelsea Manning’s 29th birthday. How will she mark the day? At Fort Leavenworth, the austere military prison in Kansas where she is serving out her 35-year sentence, time passes according to a strict and tedious regime: unlock, work detail, prisoner counts, security checks. There’s little scope for celebrations, and rules against “trafficking” mean other inmates are unlikely to be allowed to shower her with gifts.

      Post is probably as good as it gets, and one hopes the small desk in her cell is overflowing with cards and letters from friends and supporters. Letters might not seem like much but there’s one message, from one man, that could truly make her day. What, after all, would be a better birthday gift for an imprisoned whistle-blower than for Obama, presidential pen in hand, to sign off on her release?

    • Muslim chaplain of Canada’s army explains Quranic verse on wife beating

      Dr. Iqbal Al-Nadvi (Mohammad Iqbal Masood Al-Nadvi) is the Muslim Chaplain of the Canadian army, the Chairperson of Canadian Council of Imams (Canada’s top imam) and the Amir (President) of Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Canada, a nation-wide Islamic organization that is striving “to build an Exemplary Canadian Muslim Community” by “total submission to Him [Allah] and through the propagation of true and universal message of Islam.”

      His previous positions include the following: Director of Al-Falah Islamic School in Oakville, Ontario from 2004 to 2011, Imam of Muslim Association of Calgary Islamic Center from 1998-2004 and as a member of the University of Calgary chaplaincy team.

    • Muslim cleric banned in Pakistan is preaching in UK mosques

      A Pakistani Muslim cleric who celebrated the murder of a popular politician is in Britain on a speaking tour of mosques. The news has alarmed social cohesion experts who fear such tours are promoting divisions in the Muslim community.

      Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri has been banned from preaching in Pakistan because his sermons are considered too incendiary. However, he is due to visit a number of English mosques, in heavily promoted events where he is given star billing.

    • ‘They speak against it by day and cut girls at night’: fighting FGM in southern Kenya

      When Rampei Wuantai and his wife, Angela, decided not to make their daughters undergo female genital mutilation, they were not prepared for the backlash.

      The family live on a small homestead surrounding by acacia trees in the village of Illmotiok, in Kenya’s Kajiado county. Though outlawed in 2011, FGM is still widely practised in the area. The Wuantais were the first to reject the tradition.

      “Our first motivation to go against this culture was religion. We are Christians and the Bible does not tell us to cut our girls,” says Rampei, 53, a pastor and driver. He and his wife have 10 children: four girls and six boys.

      “Here, even chiefs and pastors still cut their daughters,” says Angela. “They speak against it during the day and cut their girls at night.”

      In Kenya, chiefs work under the provincial administration and are in charge of locations and sub-locations, the smallest administrative areas. Their role is to maintain law and order; constitutionally, they have power to arrest anyone breaking the law in their jurisdiction. As Angela points out, however, some turn a blind eye to the continued practise of FGM.

    • In Pakistan, five girls were killed for having fun. Then the story took an even darker twist.

      It was just a few seconds, a video clip of several young women laughing and clapping to music, dressed for a party or a wedding in orange headscarves and robes with floral patterns. Then a few more seconds of a young man dancing alone, apparently in the same room.

      The cellphone video was made six years ago, in a village deep in Kohistan, a rugged area of northwest Pakistan. It was the last time the young women, known only as Bazeegha, Sareen Jan, Begum Jan, Amina and Shaheen, have ever been definitively seen alive.

      What happened to them remains a mystery. Their fates have been shrouded by cultural taboos, official inertia, implacable resistance from elders and religious leaders suspected of ordering their deaths, and elaborate subterfuges by the families who reportedly carried out those orders.

    • Dutch government prepares to ratify EU-Ukraine deal

      The Netherlands’ government moved swiftly Friday to prepare legislation clearing the way for Parliament to vote on ratifying an EU-Ukraine free trade pact, despite Dutch voters rejecting the deal in a non-binding referendum.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • EFF to Supreme Court: Trademarks are Not Government Speech

        Today, together with the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression, EFF submitted an amicus brief in Lee v. Tam. Our brief discusses an unusual but important question: are registered trademarks government expression? It is important to get the dividing line between government and private speech correct. This is because, while the government doesn’t get to control what you say, it does get to control what it says. As we argue in our brief, categorizing registered trademarks as government expression would threaten speech in many other areas.

        The case involves a rock band from California called The Slants. The band, like Dykes on Bikes®, intentionally chose a name containing a slur to reappropriate the term. The band attempted to register its name as a trademark but United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) refused the registration. The PTO concluded that the mark was not eligible under a statute prohibiting registration of any marks that “disparage” people. The PTO did not care how The Slants, an Asian-American band, intended for its mark to be understood. Rather, the fact that the term, standing alone, could be a slur was sufficient for it to deny registration.

]]> http://techrights.org/2016/12/19/networkmanager-1-4-4/feed/ 0 Links 10/12/2016: KDE neon User LTS Edition, AsteroidOS in Headlines Again http://techrights.org/2016/12/10/asteroidos-in-headlines-again/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/10/asteroidos-in-headlines-again/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2016 23:15:44 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97368

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 5 Things To Expect From The World Of Linux In 2017

    Linux has come out of oblivion to become a mainstream technology today – making its presence felt in the world of marketing, finance, operations and in every other domain. The New Year 2017, should hold promise for Linux, as Bryan Lunduke said recently. There will be some crucial outcomes of the Linux Foundation-Microsoft partnership as well, which made waves in the tech circles the world over. From the predictions available, there will be increased focus on some areas, while the others will witness a lot of trial and error, and even predictive failure, for that matter.

  • Desktop

    • The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

      Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.

      The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

  • Server

    • Docker 1.13.0 Just Around the Corner as Docker 1.12.4 Enters Development

      Victor Vieux from the open source Docker app container engine released new development versions of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 major milestone and Docker 1.12.4 maintenance update for the current stable series.

      The third Release Candidate (RC) version of Docker 1.13.0 arrived a couple of days ago with numerous minor tweaks and fixes to polish the software before it’s tagged as ready for production and hits the streets, which should happen in the coming weeks. Docker 1.13.0 RC3 comes two after the release of the second RC build.

    • Pet Containers: You’re Not Doing it Wrong

      The conventional wisdom of Linux containers is that each service should run in its own container. Containers should be stateless and have short lifecycles. You should build a container once, and replace it when you need to update its contents rather than updating it interactively. Most importantly, your containers should be disposable and pets are decidedly not disposable. Thus the conventional wisdom is if your containers are pets, you’re doing it wrong. I’m here to gently disagree with that, and say that you should feel free to put your pets in containers if it works for you.

    • Best Open Source Hosting Control Panels

      Most website owners use web hosting control panels to manage their hosting environment. The fact is, the control panel facilitates the server administration and allows users to manage multiple websites without hiring an expert. Today, with so many options available, you don’t have to be a command line guru in order to host a simple website. All you need is a server and a web hosting control panel. There are paid control panels like WHM/cPanel or DirectAdmin which are very powerful, but if you don’t like to pay for a control panel you can simply choose one of the open source alternatives. In this guide, we will present to you some of the most popular open source hosting control panels.

    • ZEPL Announces $4.1M Funding to Accelerate Innovation and Adoption of Apache Zeppelin For End-to-End Analytics Workflow
    • Apache Zeppelin Gets Commercial Backing from ZEPL

      NFlabs rebrands as ZEPL and announces $4.1M in funding in support of open-source Apache Zeppelin data analytics project.

      The open-source Apache Zeppelin project is an increasingly popular, web-based notebook for interactive data analytics that directly integrates with the Apache Spark project for Big Data analytics. Among the commercial backers of Zeppelin is ZEPL, formerly known as NFLabs. On December 8, the newly branded ZEPL announced that it has raised $4.1 million in an initial funding round.

      The funding round was led by Vertex Ventures and it included the participation of Translink Capital, Specialized Types and Big Basin Capital. The funding is set to be used to help ZEPL build a successful business model. Sejun Ra, co-founder and CEO at ZEPL said that the plan for the new money to help his company build and develop a single platform for end-to-end data analytics workflow.

    • New Amazon Web Services Region Opens in Canada

      Amazon launches AWS Canada (Central) Region in Montreal, extending Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to 15 regions and 40 availability zones around the world.

      At long last, the cloud is coming to Canada. Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on December 8, the official launch of the new AWS Canada (Central) Region, providing cloud infrastructure from data centers in Montreal, Quebec. The new AWS region is set to help serve customers in Canada with Amazon already highlighting a number of well-known organizations including National Bank of Canada, Porter Airlines and clothing retailer Lululemon.

    • MEF, TM Forum Unite With Open Source Groups on Network Vision

      MEF Thursday announced the release of a new white paper – “An Industry Initiative For Third Generation Network and Services“ – spearheaded by MEF and co-authored by ON.Lab, ONOS, OPEN-O, OpenDaylight (ODL), the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV), and TM Forum. The white paper describes an industry vision for the evolution and transformation of network connectivity services and the networks used to deliver them. MEF refers to this vision as the “Third Network,” which combines the agility and ubiquity of the Internet with the performance and security of CE 2.0 (Carrier Ethernet 2.0) networks.

    • The New Role of Assurance for Virtualized Networks

      For as long as any of us can remember, fulfillment and assurance were two independent processes, mostly because they were conceived, operated and purchased by separate departments. As Alfred D. Chandler demonstrated in his classic book “Strategy and Structure,” operations and even business structure follow organizational charts and vice-versa. Fulfillment and assurance are no exceptions, with those organizations driving processes and supporting software purchases. While many know that its not ideal, the situation has mostly worked.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.8.13

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.13 kernel.

      All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at:
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y
      and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

      http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

    • Linux 4.4.37
    • Linux Kernel 4.4.37 LTS Is a Minor Patch with AArch64 Changes, Updated Drivers
    • Linux Kernel 4.8.13 Launches with ARM64 and AMDGPU Improvements, KVM Fixes

      A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.

      While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it’s not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week’s Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

    • Linux Foundation adds an open source networking specialist to the team

      In recognition of the increasingly central role open source technology has played for the networking sector, the Linux Foundation today named Arpit Joshipura as its general manager for networking and orchestration.

      Joshipura, a veteran tech executive who has worked at Dell, Ericsson, and Nortel, among others, is considered by the organization to be a foundational contributor to open source software in general and networking in particular. Currently, he’s the chief marketing officer for Prevoty, an application security startup in Los Angeles.

    • The Linux Foundation Appoints Veteran Networking Professional as General Manager, Networking & Orchestration
    • Three serious Linux kernel security holes patched

      The good news is developers are looking very closely at Linux’s core code for possible security holes. The bad news is they’re finding them.

      At least the best news is that they’re fixing them as soon as they’re uncovered.

      The latest three kernel vulnerabilities are designated CVE-2016-8655, CVE-2016-6480, and CVE-2016-6828. Of these, CVE-2016-8655 is the worst of the bunch. It enables local users, which can include remote users with virtual and cloud-based Linux instances, to crash the system or run arbitrary code as root.

    • At Long Last, Linux Gets Dynamic Tracing

      When the Linux kernel version 4.9 will be released next week, it will come with the last pieces needed to offer to some long-awaited dynamic thread-tracing capabilities.

      As the keepers of monitoring and debugging software start using these new kernel calls, some of which have been added to the Linux kernel over the last two years, they will be able to offer much more nuanced, and easier to deploy, system performance tools, noted Brendan Gregg, a Netflix performance systems engineer and author of DTrace Tools, in a presentation at the USENIX LISA 2016 conference, taking place this week in Boston.

    • It’s Been A Quiet Year-End For BUS1, The Proposed In-Kernel IPC For Linux

      With the Linux 4.10 kernel merge window expected to open this weekend, I was digging around to see whether there was anything new on the BUS1 front and whether we might see it for the next kernel cycle.

      While I have yet to see any official communication from the BUS1 developers, it doesn’t look like it’s happening for BUS1. In fact, it’s been a rather quiet past few weeks for these developers working on this in-kernel IPC mechanism to succeed the never-merged KDBUS.

    • Intel Working On 5-Level Paging To Increase Linux Virtual/Physical Address Space
    • IBM building blockchain ecosystem

      IBM believes blockchain technology, with its capability to create an essentially immutable ledger of digital events, will alter the way whole industries conduct transactions. To make that happen, Big Blue asserts, requires a complete ecosystem of industry players working together.

      To that end, IBM today said it is building a blockchain ecosystem, complete with a revenue sharing program, to accelerate the growth of networks on the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Fabric. IBM envisions the ecosystem as an open environment that allows organizations to collaborate using the Hyperledger Fabric.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE neon User LTS Edition Out Now

        KDE Plasma 5.8 is designated an LTS edition with bugfixes and new releases being made for 18 months (rather than the normal four months). This will please a category of user who don’t want new features on their desktop but do want it to keep working and bugs to be removed. Because Neon aims to service Plasma and its users in every way we have now created the KDE neon User LTS Edition.

      • neon User LTS, openSUSE Upgrades, Best Distro Poll

        Jonathon Riddell today announced a new release of KDE Plasma flagship neon, KDE neon Long Term Supported. neon LTS features Plasma 5.8 and will not change to 5.9. Elsewhere, two users shared their methods for upgrading from openSUSE Leap 42.1 to 42.2 and Tumbleweed received several interesting updates this week. Dedoimedo posted a best distro poll and Sourceforge said watch out for your project founder’s “mentality.”

      • KDE Neon User LTS Edition Released, Powered By Plasma 5.8

        Jonathan Riddell has announced the KDE Neon User LTS Edition availability. Rather than tracking the bleeding-edge KDE developments as KDE Neon traditionally does, the User LTS Edition tracks Plasma 5.8 LTS.

      • KDE e.V. Community Report – 2nd Half of 2015

        The KDE e.V. community report for the second half of 2015 is now available. It presents a survey of all the activities and events carried out, supported, and funded by KDE e.V. in that period, as well as the reporting of major conferences that KDE has been involved in.

  • Distributions

    • Antivirus Live CD 21.0-0.99.2 Helps You Protect Your Computer Against Viruses

      4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki proudly informs Softpedia today about the general availability of the Antivirus Live CD 21.0-0.99.2 bootable ISO image for scanning computers for viruses and other malware.

    • Best distro of 2016 poll

      Time for you to express yourselves. It’s been another year full of ups and downs, good distros and bad distros. Or if I may borrow a quote from a movie, Aladeen distros and Aladeen distros. Indeed.

      The rules are very similar to what we did in years gone past. I will conduct my own annual contest best thingie wossname, with a sprinkling of KDE, Xfce and other desktops, having their separate forays. But then, I will incorporate your ideas and thoughts into the final verdict, much like the 2015 best distro nomination. Let us.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5: is it near-perfect?

        ROSA is a Linux distribution forked some time ago from Mandriva Linux by a team of Russian developers, Rosa Lab, or officially LLC NTC-IT ROSA.

        I reviewed their distributions several times: ROSA KDE R7, ROSA Desktop 2012 and even interviewed the ROSA team.

        The most recent release of ROSA is now ROSA Desktop Fresh R8, which is available in several flavours: MATE, GNOME 3, KDE 4 and Plasma 5. I decided to try the Plasma 5 edition of this distribution, especially as my interest to Plasma increased after the good impression Kubuntu 16.10 left on me.

        There are links to the ISO images available on the ROSA download page, and I used it to get my own version of this Linux distribution. The size of ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5 64-bit image is 1.9 Gb. The dd command helped me to “burn” the image to the USB stick.

        So, the USB drive is attached to my Toshiba Satellite L500-19X laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let’s go!

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Deepin 16.10.3 released

        Manjaro Deepin is an edition of Manjaro Linux that uses the Deepin Desktop Environment, which is a desktop environment that originated from the Deepin Linux, a desktop distribution that’s based on Ubuntu.

        The main edition of Manjaro uses the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Manjaro Deepin is just one of many community-supported desktop environments available to users of the Arch Linux-based desktop distribution. The others are: Budgie, Cinnamon, GNOME 3, i3, LXQt and MATE.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • openSUSE Says Goodbye to AMD/ATI Catalyst (fglrx) Proprietary Graphics Drivers

        openSUSE developer Bruno Friedmann, informed the community of the openSUSE Linux operating system about the fact that he’s planning to remove the old ATI/AMD Catalyst (also known as fglrx) proprietary graphics drivers.

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed Users Get Git 2.11, Xfce 4.12.3, FFmpeg 3.2.1 & Mesa 13.0.2

        openSUSE’s Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

      • Git, Kernels, LightDM, More update in Tumbleweed

        Topping the list of updates for snapshot 20161129 was the update to Light Display Manager 1.21.1, which added an Application Programming Interface (API) version to the greeter-daemon protocol for future enhancements. Other updates in the snapshot include openVPN, which added a recommended utility for network and traffic protocols, and subpackages for systemd relevant for 32-bit users. Desktop manager xfdesktop updated to version 4.12.3 and introduced rotating wallpaper images if the images contain rotation information.

        The programming language vala, which aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements, updated in the 20161129 and 20161201 snapshots.

      • openSUSE Leap 42.1 upgrade to Leap 42.2
      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2016/49

        I’m sure nobody doubted it, but Tumbleweed is back on the roll! And in fact, we did the impossible and released 8 snapshots in a week. This review will cover {1201..1208}.

    • Slackware Family

      • Based on Slackware 14.2, Absolute 14.2.2 Linux Is Out with Updated Kernel, X.Org

        Paul Sherman, the developer of the Absolute Linux distribution based on Slackware, has announced the availability of the second point release to the stable Absolute 14.2 series.

        Absolute 14.2 launched in mid-September 2016, and it’s based on the latest and most advanced Slackware 14.2 operating system, but from time to time there’s need for updated installation medium in case you want to deploy the OS on new computers without the need to download any updates. That’s why Absolute 14.2.2 is here, bundled with all the latest kernel and graphics stack updates released for Slackware 14.2 since its July launch.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

    • Devices/Embedded

      • ST launches sensor module and open source dev kit

        ST unveiled a Cortex-M4F based “SensorTile” sensor and BLE module plus an open source dev kit that adds audio, micro-USB, and an Arduino-like interface.

        STMicroelectronics (ST) announced its SensorTile sensor module at its developer conference in October where it was one of the highlights of the show. Now the company has officially launched the 14 x 14mm SensorTile module along with an open source “STEVAL-STLKT01V1” development kit. The kit can be used for developing wearables, gaming accessories, smart-home, and other Internet of Things devices.

      • Open Source Smartwatch Operating System AteroidOS Alpha 1.0 Released (video)
      • With Android Wear critical, open source AsteroidOS offers smartwatches a life line
      • AsteroidOS is an Open Source OS for Smartwatches

        Florent Revest is a French computer science student who has been working on an open source operating system for smartwatches for the last two years. Yesterday, he officially launched version 1 of the alpha for AsteroidOS.

        The goal for the platform was to create something that gave smartwatch owners more control over their privacy, as well as the hardware they purchased.

        Florent feels that the current proprietary platforms do not guarantee this, and this was the basis for AsteroidOS. He wanted his open source smartwatch operating system to provide freedom with free software, more privacy than other wearable platforms offer, interoperability so it could communicate with other devices, modularity that enabled the user to tweak and change the OS as they see fit, the ability to port the software to as many devices as possible, and gathering a community who is passionate about the platform.

      • AsteroidOS Brings Open Source Functionality To Smartwatches

        Smartwatches may not have taken off like companies were hoping, but they have come quite far in terms of what they can offer and what sorts of features are available for the many different models of smartwatches that are out there. Even with the updated functionality of options like Samsung’s Gear S lineup and Android Wear platforms, though, smartwatches can still feel a little bit limiting, and part of this undoubtedly includes the reason that the operating systems aren’t as open as platforms like Android. That is now changing thanks to a platform called AsteroidOS which is an open source operating system for smartwatches.

      • AsteroidOS alpha release gives Android Wear smartwatches a new hope
      • AsteroidOS is an alternative open source OS for your Android Wear device
      • Mini Apollo Lake module takes the heat — and the cold

        Congatec’s “Conga-MA5” is a Linux-ready COM Express Compact Type 10 Mini module with Apollo Lake SoCs, up to 128GB eMMC 5.1, and -40 to 85°C support.

        Congatec was one of the first embedded vendors to announce computer-on-modules based on Intel’s Atom E3900 and other Apollo Lake Pentium and Celeron SoCs. The offerings included a Qseven module, a SMARC 2.0 module, and a COM Express Compact Type 6 Conga-TCA5. The company has now followed up with a COM Express Compact Type 10 Mini Conga-MA5 module.

      • Conexant voice board lets you summon Alexa from a Raspberry Pi

        Conexant and Amazon have launched an Alexa Voice Service development kit for the Raspberry Pi 3. The kit includes a Conexant AudioSmart CX20921 voice board.

        Since Amazon opened up access to its Alexa Voice Service (AVS) agent inside the Amazon Echo smart speaker/IoT hub, including an open source port to the Raspberry Pi, several projects have emerged for creating Echo-like devices built around the RPi. For example, earlier this year, a Novaspirit Tech hack along these lines was promoted by the Raspberry Pi blog. Now Conexant Systems and Amazon have teamed up on a higher end “AudioSmart 2-mic Development Kit” for the RPi that’s designed specifically for voice-controlled smart home IoT functionality.

      • New Smartwatch OS Debuts on GitHub

        Can a new smartwatch operating system based on Linux breathe some new life into the smart wearables market? Florent Revest hopes so.

        Revest, a French computer science student, on Wednesday announced the alpha release of AsteroidOS, an open source operating system that will run on several Android smartwatch models.

        “Many users believe that the current proprietary platforms can not guarantee a satisfactory level of control over their privacy and hardware,” noted Revest, who has been working on his OS for two years. “Hence, I noticed a need for an open wearable platform and AsteroidOS is my attempt to address this issue.”

      • Rugged EBX single board computer sets off on the Bay Trail

        VersaLogic’s Linux-friendly, EBX style “Viper” SBC offers a Bay Trail Atom E3800, up to 16GB DDR3L, -40 to 85°C support, and MIL-STD-202G ruggedization.

      • Upcoming Retro Console Promises To Play Almost All Classic Games Across All Consoles, Supports 4K
      • RetroEngine Sigma release date, specs, latest news: Crowd-funded retro gaming device can emulate 28 different consoles
      • Doyodo RetroEngine Sigma Release Date, News & Update: Linux-Powered Emulation Console For Classic Games Soon To Launch!

        Doyodo has launched a mini-console RetroEngine Sigma that can run classic video games and soon to release in the market. The mini-console is said to directly compete with Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition console.

        Doyodo, a design company has introduced its crowd funding campaign console called RetroEngine Sigma. The mini-console is also a plug-and-play media player that is capable of running thousands of classic video games using an emulator.

      • Make Raspberry Pi Portable With 5-inch Touch Screen

        You can be your own Geordi La Forge and build yourself a fully capable GNU/Linux pocket computer with this uber inexpensive five-inch touch screen and a Raspberry Pi.

      • Phones

        Free Software/Open Source

        • Apache Zeppelin open-source analytics startup reveals new name, fresh funding

          The team behind the Apache Zeppelin open-source notebook for big data analytics visualization has renamed itself ZEPL and announced $4.1M in Series A funding.

          ZEPL, which swears a certain professional football organization had nothing to do with it ditching its former name (NFLabs), is one of numerous companies smelling blood in the water around Tableau, the $3.5 billion business intelligence and analytics software vendor that has stumbled financially in recent quarters and seen its stock price plummet accordingly. The pitch from ZEPL entering my email inbox read: “Is Open Source project eating Tableau’s lunch?”

        • OpenMake Software turns its ARA solution into open-source offering

          OpenMake Software wants to improve how developers use the Continuous Delivery pipeline with its recently open-sourced Application Release Automation (ARA) solution, Release Engineer, which is based on version 7.7 of the ARA solution and offered under the FreeBSD license.

        • Open source needs social freedoms for business to thrive

          When open source was first introduced in 1991 with Linux, it was considered a novelty in the industry, a new toy for developers to play with. Today, it’s a fundamental driver of technology innovation across all software companies, according to Dirk Hohndel, VP and chief open source officer at VMware Inc.

          “Open source is more than software development methodology; open source is how a group of people interact and how you create fantastic technology,” said Hohndel.

        • 6 organizational growing pains you can avoid

          Everything has a season, and as organizations age—communities, charities, companies, churches and more—they face similar diseases of time. These are emergent patterns of failure that arise not from mistakes but from the consequences of earlier success. In open source, we are seeing the same patterns emerge; this should not be a surprise.

          Some of them are unavoidable. Understanding them helps leaders reduce the risk that will arise and helps identify them when they do. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but we have encountered all of these modes of systemic failure, some of them often.

        • Maximizing the benefits of open source in IoT

          With the dawn of the Internet of Things, software is making its way into every product, into every industry. And along with software come developers, who bring their beliefs, attitudes, expertise, and habits along with them. One of those is open source technology — a staple in the software industry since the 1980s, but a new and often scary concept for many traditional industries, whose businesses are built on protecting their assets and intellectual property.

          In this article, we will illustrate how open source technologies permeate every part of the IoT development stack, and outline how open source can be used as a means of market control as well as a booster of innovation and a way to tap into the IoT developer talent pool. The data have been collected from 3,700 IoT developers in 150 countries across the globe, surveyed in Q4 2015 and shines a light on how big a deal open source really is in IoT, why developers love it, and how companies can create a successful commercial strategy around the use of open source by aligning themselves with the values of that core stakeholder group that are developers.

        • A tour of Google’s 2016 open source releases

          Open source software enables Google to build things quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, allowing us to focus on solving new problems. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we know it. This is why we support open source and make it easy for Googlers to release the projects they’re working on internally as open source.

          We’ve released more than 20-million lines of open source code to date, including projects such as Android, Angular, Chromium, Kubernetes, and TensorFlow. Our releases also include many projects you may not be familiar with, such as Cartographer, Omnitone, and Yeoman.

        • Why this CTO believes open source should be the new norm for all software companies

          Open source is personally very important to me, and my team has a long track record of contributing to open source projects, so it was a simple decision to open source our platform. Doing that encourages transparency and community engagement, which is key for any product that has security at its core. We had a vision to be a secure and completely transparent messaging app and we stuck to it.

        • Google’s Open Embedded Projector is a Cool Data Visualization Tool

          With 2016 closing out, there is no doubt that cloud computing and Big Data analytics would probably come to mind if you had to consider the hot technology categories of the year. However, there is an absolute renaissance going on right now in the field of artifical intelligence and the closely related field of machine learning. In fact, in its top 10 strategic technology trends for the year 2017, Gartner put AI and machine learning at the top of the list.

          Google is among several companies making big contributions in this space. It recently gathered some compelling AI and machine learning demonstrations and placed them in its Google AI Experiments showcase. Now, Google has announced that it is open sourcing its data visualization tool, Embedding Projector. The tool will aid machine learning practioners as they visualize data without having to install and run Google’s TensorFlow tool (also open source, which we covered here).

        • Nextcloud’s Promising Advances Continue

          The extremely popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds has been much in the news lately. CTO and founder of ownCloud Frank Karlitschek resigned from the company a few months ago. His open letter announcing the move pointed to possible friction created as ownCloud moved forward as a commercial entity as opposed to a solely community focused, open source project. Karlitschek had a plan, though. He came out with a fork of ownCloud called Nextcloud, and we’ve reported on strong signs that this cloud platform has a bright future. In recent months, the company has continued to advance Nextcloud.

          Now, if you’re running the Nextcloud platform, a convenient new addition is coming your way. The Nextcloud 9.0.54 and 10.0.1 releases come with a new updater. This new updater allows reliable upgrading to new Nextcloud versions via the web and in the upcoming 11 release even via the command line interface.

        • Don’t Let Your Project Suffer Because of Founder’s Mentality

          There’s a certain mentality that can creep up and slowly destroy open source project development. It’s dangerous in a way that nobody really notices it’s there or that it is destructive, except at the very last moments. It’s the founder’s mentality.

        • How Gratipay helps solve the ‘free rider’ problem
        • Rhizome is working on an open-source tool to help archive digital content

          “The stability of this kind of easy archiving for document storage, review and revision is a great possibility, but the workflow for journalists is very specific, so the grant will allow us to figure out how it could function.”

          Another feature of Webrecorder that journalists might find appealing, and one of the software’s core purposes, is to preserve material that might be deleted or become unavailable in time.

          However, the tool is currently operated under a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Takedown policy. This means any individual can ask for a record of their web presence or materials to be removed, so Rhizome will be working to “answer the more complicated questions and figure out policies” around privacy and copyright with the latest round of funding.

        • An ode to releasing software

          There is one particular moment in every Free and Open Source Software project: it’s the time when the software is about to get released. The software has been totally frozen of course, QA tests have been made, all the lights are green; the website still needs to be updated with the release notes, perhaps some new content and of course the stable builds have to be uploaded. The release time is always a special one.

          The very day of the release, there is some excitement and often a bit of stress. The release manager(s), as well as everyone working on the project’s infrastructure are busy making sure everything is ready when the upload of the stable version of the software, binaries and source, has been completed. In many cases, some attention is paid to the main project’s mirror servers so that the downloads are fluid and work (mostly) flawlessly as soon as the release has been pushed and published.

        • Events

          • Diversity Scholarship Series: My Time at CloudNativeCon 2016

            CloudNativeCon 2016 was a wonderful first conference for me and although the whirlwind of a conference is tiring, I left feeling motivated and inspired. The conference made me feel like I was a part of the community and technology I have been working with daily.

        • Web Browsers

        • SaaS/Back End

          • Spark and Hadoop Training Can Lead to Top Job Prospects

            In the tech job market race these days, hardly any trend is drawing more attention than Big Data. And, when talking Big Data, the subject of Hadoop inevitably comes up, but Spark is becoming an increasingly popular topic. IBM and other companies have made huge commitments to Spark, and workers who have both Hadoop and Spark skills are much in demand.With all this in mind, several providers are offering free Hadoop and Spark training.

        • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

          • Michael Meeks: 2016-12-08 Thursday.

            Mail chew; really encouraged to see Kolab’s lovely integration with Collabora Online announced and available for purchase. Wonderful to have them getting involved with LibreOffice, doing testing, filing and triaging bugs up-stream and so on, not to mention the polished marketing.

          • LibreOffice Goes Online

            Well, Meeks and company have done it. What was at first a rather limited demonstration of LibreOffice running in a browser window is now available as a Docker image for everyone to try out. I haven’t yet, because I’m under the weather with yet another winter cold, but that shouldn’t delay you.

        • CMS

          • WordPress 4.7 Content Management System Provides New Design Options

            WordPress is among the most widely used open-source technologies in the world, powering more than 70 million websites. WordPress 4.7 was released Dec. 6, providing a new milestone update including new features for both users and developers. As is typically the case with new WordPress releases, there is also a new default theme in the 4.7 update. The 2017 theme provides users with a number of interesting attributes including the large feature image as well as the ability to have a video as part of the header image. The Theme Customizer feature enables users to more intuitively adjust various elements of a theme, to fit the needs of websites that use will upgrade to WordPress 4.7. In addition, the new custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) feature within a theme preview lets users quickly see how style changes will change the look of a site. As an open-source project, WordPress benefits from participation of independent contributors and for the 4.7 release there were 482 contributors. In this slideshow eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the WordPress 4.7 release.

        • Education

          • Psychology Professor Releases Free, Open-Source, Preprint Software

            The Center for Open Science, directed by University of Virginia psychology professor Brian Nosek, has launched three new services to more quickly share research data as the center continues its mission to press for openness, integrity and reproducibility of scientific research.

            Typically, researchers send preprint manuscripts detailing their research findings to peer-reviewed academic journals, such as Nature and Science. The review process can take months or even years before publication – if the research is published at all.

            By contrast, “preprinting,” or sharing non-peer-reviewed research results online, enables crucial data to get out to the community the moment it is completed. That, said Nosek, is critical.

        • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

        • BSD

          • GCC 6.2/7.0 vs. LLVM Clang 3.9/4.0 SVN Compiler Performance

            Earlier this week I published some GCC 5.4 vs. GCC 6.2 vs. GCC 7.0 SVN development benchmarks with a Core i7 6800K Broadwell-E system. For those curious how the LLVM Clang compiler stack is comparing, here are some tests on the same system when running fresh benchmarks of LLVM Clang 3.9 as well as LLVM Clang 4.0 SVN.

            These tests were done with LLVM Clang 3.9 and 4.0 SVN added in to the GCC results from this Core i7 6800K system running Ubuntu 16.10 with the Linux 4.8 kernel. The CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were maintained the same throughout all testing with the “-O3 -march=native” flags.

          • LLVM 3.9.1 Expected For Release Next Week

            While LLVM 4.0 isn’t coming until its planned release in Feburary, the LLVM 3.9.1 point release is expected this coming week.

            Tom Stellard of AMD released LLVM 3.9.1-rc3 on Friday and anticipates this being the last release candidate. This 3.9.1-rc3 build just has some ARM/AArch64 fixes compared to his earlier RC2 milestone.

        • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

          • GCC Patch To Support Google’s Fuchsia OS

            It’s been a while since last hearing anything of Google’s experimental Fuchsia OS but it looks like things are moving along as they are now looking to merge support for it into the GCC compiler.

        • Public Services/Government

          • Slovenia voting analysis tool shared as open source

            The President of the Parliament of Slovenia, Milan Brglez, last Monday unveiled Parlameter, a web-based software solution that displays in the National Assembly voting results and helps analyse them. The software, made available as open source, is developed by ‘Danes je nov dan’ (Today is a new day) an NGO focusing on eParticipation, openness and government oversight.

          • Bulgaria to make EUPL preferred open source licence

            Next week, the government of Bulgaria will make the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) the preferred licence to be used for governmental software development projects. An ordinance, to be adopted on Wednesday, will allow projects to use around ten popular free and open source software licence approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) – an open source advocacy organisation.

          • Bulgaria, France, UK, US support OGP free software policy

            The United States of America and three EU Member states – Bulgaria, France and the United Kingdom – have pledged support for the open source policy, making it an official part of the ‘Paris Declaration’, the outcome of the 4th Global Summit of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), taking place in Paris this week. The open source policy is also supported by the city of Austin (USA).

        • Licensing/Legal

          • Open Source Software A Core Competency For Effective Tech M&A

            Imagine your company just acquired its competitor for $100 million. Now imagine the company’s most important asset – its proprietary software – is subject to third-party license conditions that require the proprietary software to be distributed free of charge or in source code form. Or, imagine these license conditions are discovered late in the diligence process, and the cost to replace the offending third-party software will costs tens of thousands of dollars and take months to remediate. Both scenarios exemplify the acute, distinct and often overlooked risks inherent to the commercial use of open source software. An effective tech M&A attorney must appreciate these risks and be prepared to take the steps necessary to mitigate or eliminate them.

            Over the past decade, open source software has become a mainstay in the technology community. Since its beginnings, open source software has always been viewed as a way to save money and jumpstart development projects, but it is increasingly being looked to for its quality solutions and operational advantages. Today, only a fraction of technology companies do not use open source software in any way. For most of the rest, it is mission critical.

          • Facing down copyright claims, Doom roguelike fan game goes open-source (correction)
          • Doom-inspired roguelike goes open-source in a bid to outrun Zenimax lawyers

            Last week news broke that Zenimax is threatening legal action against the developer of DoomRL, a free Doom-inspired roguelike. Now, DoomRL’s creator is open-sourcing it in an attempt to put it beyond the reach of Zenimax’s legal team.

            Many devs will probably appreciate the symbolic resonance of this move, given that id Software open-sourced the original Doom code almost twenty years ago.

          • DoomRL creator makes free roguelike open-source to try and counter Zenimax legal threat
          • DoomRL Goes Open-Source in Face of Copyright Claims

            Earlier this week, ZeniMax Medi hit DoomRL, a popular roguelike version of the original first-person shooter, with a cease-and-desist order. This order instructed producer ChaosForge to remove the free downloadable game to prevent further legal action. Instead of taking it down, co-creator Kornel Kisielewicz turned the game open-source.

        • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

        • Programming/Development

          • This Indian software company just partnered with the world’s biggest open source community

            In what can be called a major motivation for Indian tech firms, Amrut Software, an end-to-end Software, BPO services and solutions provider has become a GitHub distributor for India region.

            GitHub hosts world’s biggest open source community along with the most popular version control systems, configuration management and collaboration tools for software developers. It has some of the largest installations of repositories in the world.

          • Python 3.6 released with many new improvements and features

            Python,the high-level interpreted programming language is now one of the most preferred programming language by beginners and professional-level developers.So,here Python 3.6 is now available with many changes,improvements and of course the ease of Python was not left in the work list.

        Leftovers

        • Health/Nutrition

          • Els Torreele Named Executive Director Of Global MSF Access Campaign

            Veteran public health advocate Els Torreele of Belgium has been named the new executive director of the high-profile Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) Access Campaign, based in Geneva.

          • Spain: Brexit Britain must pay for expats’ healthcare

            Britain will have to reach a deal to pay for the healthcare of its citizens in Spain once the country leaves the EU, Spain’s foreign minister has said.
            Speaking at a conference in Alicante, Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said Spain would try to reach a deal for the UK to pay for the healthcare of the estimated 800,000 Brits living in the country.

            “We must reach an agreement for residents to access health services in Spain, but covered by the United Kingdom” he told the conference held by accountancy firm PWC, according to Spanish news site Estrella Digital.

        • Security

        • Defence/Aggression

          • What if the terrorists won?

            Like 9/11 for New Yorkers, the Paris attacks of November 2015 have become that rare thing for city slickers — a topic of conversation in which everyone can participate. There are two million Parisians, each of whom has a story about the night suicide bombers and gunmen killed 130 people at cafés, restaurants, the Stade de France and the Bataclan music hall.

            Some offer a poignant mix of tumult and tragedy, like the one my high school friend tells of diving under a table at a café when a terrorist opened fire on drinkers with an assault rifle. (She performed CPR on a shooting victim who ended up dying from loss of blood). Others, like mine, are less riveting. After making sure my friends and family were safe, I got to work covering the story. The tales all have one thing in common: a moment in which the person recounting it is struck by the enormity of what occurred.

        • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

          • Julian Assange issues statement, destroys Sweden’s rape case

            In the statement Assange also complains at considerable length about what he says is the oppressive behaviour of the Swedish authorities towards him: reviving a rape investigation after it was closed down, issuing an arrest warrant against him without proper cause and in breach of due process, and insisting on his extradition from Britain to Sweden instead of questioning him in Britain, as he had repeatedly offered.

            In this part of the statement Assange says that the Swedish prosecutor’s decision to interview him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London – something which the Swedish prosecutor had previously consistently refused to do – was the result of a decision in March 2015 of the Swedish Supreme Court that she was in potential breach of her duties, and of the February 2016 decision of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the UN Human Rights Council that he has been illegally denied his freedom as a result of her actions and of the actions of the British authorities.

            Assange’s statement is obviously partly intended to give his side of the story after years of legally enforced silence.

            As Assange rightly complains, numerous stories about him and about his case have appeared in the Western media, some undoubtedly leaked to the media by the Swedish authorities. These leaks and stories were clearly designed to ruin his reputation, and have in fact been very effective in doing so.

          • Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA’s Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence

            The Washington Post late Friday night published an explosive story that, in many ways, is classic American journalism of the worst sort: the key claims are based exclusively on the unverified assertions of anonymous officials, who in turn are disseminating their own claims about what the CIA purportedly believes, all based on evidence that remains completely secret.

            These unnamed sources told the Post that “the CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.” The anonymous officials also claim that “intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails” from both the DNC and John Podesta’s email account. Critically, none of the actual evidence for these claims is disclosed; indeed, the CIA’s “secret assessment” itself remains concealed.

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • In U.S., there are twice as many solar workers as coal miners

            SolarCity, the largest installer of residential solar systems in the U.S., nearly doubled its workforce last year, hiring 4,000 people to do everything from system design and site surveys to installation and engineering.

            The hiring spree at SolarCity isn’t slowing; it’s picking up speed as the company attempts to install twice as many rooftop solar systems than last year and readies its 1.2 million-square foot factory in New York, which is scheduled to reach full production in 2017.

          • Trump team’s demands fuel fear of Energy Department ‘witch hunt’

            Donald Trump’s transition team wants the Energy Department to provide the names of any employees who have worked on President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives — a request that has current and former staffers fearing an oncoming “witch hunt.”

            The president-elect’s team sought the information as part of a 74-point questionnaire that also asked for details about how DOE’s statistical arm, the Energy Information Administration, does the math on issues such as the cost-effectiveness of wind and solar power versus fossil fuels. POLITICO obtained the document Friday, after Trump’s advisers sent it to the department earlier in the week.

        • Finance

          • TPP, TTIP And CETA Are Disasters For The Public: Are There Better Ways To Do Trade Deals?

            As well as calling for truly independent and impartial judges, the Declaration also wants any dispute resolution mechanism to be available to small companies and even members of the public.

            The Namur Declaration is mostly of interest because it grew out of Magnette’s personal experience with CETA (article in French). The fact that a few dozen leading academics have lent their names to it adds weight, but is unlikely to bring about major changes to the way that trade negotiations are conducted. However, seismic political developments on both sides of the Atlantic are already doing that; let’s hope these provide an opportunity to debate and maybe even adopt some of the Declaration’s bold ideas.

          • Trump’s Labor Pick, Andrew Puzder, Is Critic of Minimum Wage Increases

            President-elect Donald J. Trump on Thursday chose Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that franchises the fast-food outlets Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor.

            “Andy Puzder has created and boosted the careers of thousands of Americans, and his extensive record fighting for workers makes him the ideal candidate to lead the Department of Labor,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.

            Mr. Puzder, 66, fits the profile of some of Mr. Trump’s other domestic cabinet appointments. He is a wealthy businessman and political donor and has a long record of promoting a conservative agenda that takes aim at President Obama’s legacy. And more than the other appointments, he resembles Mr. Trump in style.

          • Italy’s banking nightmare just came true

            The road back to health for Italian banks just became rockier. A lot rockier.

          • Why It’s Pointless For Trump To Renegotiate TPP, Even If He Wanted To, And Even If He Could

            Last month, we pointed out that that pretty much everyone agrees that TPP is dead… except that some still cling to the hope that Trump might be persuaded to carry out another swift U-turn and revivify the zombie deal. As Mike noted, Trump doesn’t seem to be against these kinds of mega-trade deals in principle, it’s just that he says the US generally concedes too much in them. That means he’d need some kind of high-profile win to make TPP 2.0 compatible with his earlier condemnation of TPP 1.0′s terms.

            The hope amongst true TPP believers seems to be that Trump could reopen the negotiations, talk tough, and strike a deal that is far more favorable to the US, which he could then ratify, holding it up as another Trump triumph. But in an article on the Cobram Courier site, the Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, says it would be “fanciful” to think the other TPP nations would happily reopen negotiations so that Trump could rewrite it in his favor.

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

          • A ‘Political Horror Show’ of Recounts, 16 Years After Hanging Chads

            The recount of the presidential election ended on Wednesday night as abruptly as it had begun. By Thursday, workers were packing away canvas bags of ballots, board records and tables and chairs. A legal battle halted proceedings before all of Michigan’s votes were counted again, but not before a flood of perplexing peculiarities emerged.

            An effort to recount the votes here and in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin led by Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, was never viewed as very likely to change Donald J. Trump’s election to the presidency, but it revealed something else in stark terms: 16 years after a different presidential recount in Florida dragged on for five agonizing weeks, bringing the nation close to a constitutional crisis, recounts remain a tangle of dueling lawyers, hyperpartisanship and claims of flawed technology.

            States still have vastly different systems for calling recounts and for carrying them out. Counting standards are inconsistent from state to state, and obscure provisions, like one in Michigan that deems some precincts not “recountable,” threaten to raise more public doubt about elections than confidence. Some of the most basic questions — is it better to count by hand, or with a machine? — have not been settled.

          • Green Party’s Jill Stein on Obstacles to Vote Recount: “This is Not What Democracy Looks Like”

            A Wisconsin judge is set to decide if a recount of the state’s presidential vote can proceed. We speak with Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein, who has requested recounts in three states where Donald Trump narrowly beat Hillary Clinton: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Stein has faced obstacles in all three states. Today’s hearing in Wisconsin comes after two pro-Trump groups, the Great America PAC and the Stop Hillary PAC, filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop the recount process. Meanwhile, in Michigan, a judge has already halted the recount. Another hearing will be held in Pennsylvania today to decide if a recount there can begin.

          • Redo Election For POTUS
          • Jill Stein: US election recount is vital to reform our broken voting system

            The election didn’t end on 8 November, it just morphed into a crisis whose resolution is not in sight. Hillary Clinton’s campaign was impacted by an October surprise delivered by a partisan FBI, but November was not short on surprises, and there may yet be one in December. A little more than a week ago, while people were wondering what it would take to get the Clinton campaign to pursue a recount, Jill Stein’s campaign amazed everyone by taking on the job. Exuberance for the idea immediately inspired small donors to contribute $6.5m in about 48 hours.

          • The Michigan Vote Recount Halt Isn’t Distracting Jill Stein From Her Main Post-Election Goal

            A Michigan judge ordered that the state start its vote recount on Dec. 5, but by Dec. 7, he had changed his tune and halted that very same recount. You might think this effectively knocks out Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount effort, but according to her team, the Michigan vote recount isn’t stopping Stein.

            U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith had originally ordered the ballot recount to start at noon on Dec. 5 so as to complete the recount by the Dec. 13 soft deadline before the Dec. 19 Electoral College vote. But the case came back to him when a Michigan Court of Appeals panel rejected the recount after determining that Stein was not considered an “aggrieved party” in the election. (Due to her fourth place finish in the state with around 1.1 percent of the votes, it wasn’t considered realistic that Stein could have actually won the election.) Goldsmith upheld this decision and lifted his previous order, citing the lack of evidence of “significant fraud or mistake” in his decision.

            Interestingly enough, Stein chose to spearhead vote recounts in battleground states rather than her opponent Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote over President-elect Donald Trump. And for Clinton, whose campaign agreed to cooperate with Stein’s effort, not winning Michigan’s electoral votes in the recount effectively puts her out of the running to overturn Trump’s Electoral College victory. (She needed to win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to put her vote count ahead of Trump’s.)

          • Constitutional Lawyer: It’s an “Outrage” That Judge Halted Michigan Presidential Election Recount

            On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Michigan’s Board of Elections to stop the state’s electoral recount. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith said he would abide by a court ruling that found that former Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein could not seek a recount. Goldsmith concluded, “A recount as an audit of the election has never been endorsed by any court.” Stein has pledged to continue to push for a recount. Michigan is one of three battleground states where Stein had demanded a recount. The other two states are Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. President-elect Donald Trump narrowly defeated Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton in all three states. For more, we’re joined by John Bonifaz, attorney and political activist specializing in constitutional law and voting rights. He was one of a group of leading election lawyers and computer scientists calling for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

          • Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s final campaign spending revealed

            Donald Trump’s campaign spent about $94m in its final push for the White House, according to new fundraising reports.

            The Republican continued his campaign-long trend of spending far less than Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Her campaign spent almost $132m in its closing weeks, according to reports filed on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission. The latest reports cover 20 October to 28 November.

            Over the course of the primary and general elections the Trump campaign raised about $340m including $66m out of his own pocket. The Clinton campaign, which maintained a longer and more concerted fundraising focus, brought in about $581m.

          • Obama orders full review of Russian hacking during the 2016 election

            President Obama has ordered a full review of foreign-based digital attacks that U.S. intelligence agencies say were aimed at influencing this year’s presidential election, a top White House official said Friday.

            The disclosure came after President-elect Donald Trump again dismissed a blunt U.S. intelligence assessment that concluded senior Russian authorities had authorized the digital theft of emails from Democratic Party officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager during the campaign.

          • Obama orders review of Russian election-related hacking

            President Barack Obama has ordered a full review into hacking aimed at influencing US elections going back to 2008, the White House said Friday.
            “The President has directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders,” White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters Friday. “This is consistent with the work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were seeing.”

            White House spokesman Eric Schultz added later that the review would encompass malicious cyber activity related to US elections going back to 2008.

          • Russia Hacked Republican Committee but Kept Data, U.S. Concludes

            American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

            They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

            In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

            Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.

          • A Clinton Fan Manufactured Fake News That MSNBC Personalities Spread to Discredit WikiLeaks Docs

            The phrase “Fake News” has exploded in usage since the election, but the term is similar to other malleable political labels such as “terrorism” and “hate speech”; because the phrase lacks any clear definition, it is essentially useless except as an instrument of propaganda and censorship. The most important fact to realize about this new term: those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

            One of the most egregious examples was the recent Washington Post article hyping a new anonymous group and its disgusting blacklist of supposedly pro-Russia news outlets – a shameful article mindlessly spread by countless journalists who love to decry Fake News, despite the Post article itself being centrally based on Fake News. (The Post this week finally added a lame editor’s note acknowledging these critiques; the Post editors absurdly claimed that they did not mean to “vouch for the validity” of the blacklist even though the article’s key claims were based on doing exactly that).

            Now we have an even more compelling example. Back in October, when WikiLeaks was releasing emails from the John Podesta archive, Clinton campaign officials and their media spokespeople adopted a strategy of outright lying to the public, claiming – with no basis whatsoever – that the emails were doctored or fabricated and thus should be ignored. That lie – and that is what it was: a claim made with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard for its truth – was most aggressively amplified by MSNBC personalities such as Joy Ann Reid and Malcolm Nance, The Atlantic’s David Frum, and Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald.

          • Rather Than Exposing Propaganda, WaPo Shows How It’s Done

            As the Hillary Clinton campaign slogged toward victory in the long primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders, word came from WikiLeaks that it had scored a trove of hacked emails to and from the Democratic National Committee. Among other things, they proved that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, along with their organizations, had been working hand-in-glove to skew the primaries in Clinton’s favor.

            The day before the party’s convention opened in Philadelphia on July 24, Wasserman-Schultz had to resign her post or face a floor revolt. Sanders delegates were so angry at what they were learning from WikiLeaks about the sabotage of their candidate that hundreds walked out on the second day of the convention, tossing away their delegate credentials over the security fence and vowing never to support Clinton.

          • Washington Post Issues Correction To “Fake News” Story

            The Washington Post has been under fire for its publication of an article entitling “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.” The article by Craig Timberg relied on a controversial website called PropOrNot, which published what is little more than a black list of website that the authors deemed purveyors of fake news including some of the largest sites on the Internet like Drudge Report. However, the previously unknown group was itself criticized for listing “allies” that proved false. Yesterday, Hillary Clinton ramped up the call for action against “fake news” which she described as an epidemic. Now the Washington Post has published a rather cryptic correction to the fake news story. The controversy is the subject of my latest column in USA Today.

            The organization listed a variety of news sites as illegitimate. It included some of the most popular political sites from the left and right Truthout, Zero Hedge, Antiwar.com, and the Ron Paul Institute. It even includes one of the most read sites on the Internet, the Drudge Report. Notably, it also included WikiLeaks, which has been credited with exposing political corruption and unlawful surveillance programs.

          • Trump says U.S.-China relationship must improve

            President-elect Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States needed to improve its relationship with China, which he criticized for its economic policies and failure to rein in North Korea.

            “One of the most important relationships we must improve, and we have to improve, is our relationship with China,” Trump told a rally in Iowa. The United States and China are the world’s two biggest economies.

            “China is not a market economy,” he said. “They haven’t played by the rules, and I know it’s time that they’re going to start.”

          • Trump has declined many intelligence briefings offered to him according to Senate aide

            Intelligence community officials have confirmed that president-elect Donald Trump has declined many of the daily intelligence briefings that have been offered to him, a Senate aide confirmed to CBS News’ Margaret Brennan. The Washington Post first reported that Mr. Trump was turning away intelligence briefings in the weeks after the election.

            Two key Senate Democrats — Ben Cardin of Maryland and Dianne Feinstein of California — expressed dismay about this in an op-ed published Thursday by USA TODAY.

          • Russia Hacked Republican Committee but Kept Data, U.S. Concludes

            American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high confidence” that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.

            They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

            In the months before the election, it was largely documents from Democratic Party systems that were leaked to the public. Intelligence agencies have concluded that the Russians gave the Democrats’ documents to WikiLeaks.

            Republicans have a different explanation for why no documents from their networks were ever released. Over the past several months, officials from the Republican committee have consistently said that their networks were not compromised, asserting that only the accounts of individual Republicans were attacked. On Friday, a senior committee official said he had no comment.

          • Attorney Calls For Florida Voters To Demand A Hand Recount Of All Ballots

            On December 11th, 2016, voters around the state will demand that their votes be counted and will respectfully request that the courts approve a full hand count of the paper ballots of the 2016 Florida Presidential Election.

          • Michigan owes Jill Stein a refund since recount stopped

            Green Party candidate Jill Stein is in line for a big check from the state of Michigan after the recount she requested was stopped by a federal judge and the state Board of Canvassers after only three days of counting ballots.

            Under state law, Stein had to pay $125 per precinct — or $973,250 — to count Michigan’s 7,786 in-person and absentee voting precincts. That check was delivered to state officials when she requested the recount last week.

            Now, with only a fraction of the recount completed, Michigan’s Secretary of State is prepared to refund a portion of that amount, said Fred Woodhams, spokesman for Secretary of State Ruth Johnson. Stein will have to pay for the precincts in Michigan that were counted, but she will not be charged for the precincts that couldn’t be counted because of problems with the ballot containers.

        • Censorship/Free Speech

          • Breitbart News pushes deeper into Europe

            A NOTABLE American commentator, Charles Krauthammer, once explained Rupert Murdoch’s success in founding Fox News, a cable channel, by pointing out that he had found a niche market—half the country. The same may be true of Breitbart News, a conservative website whose fortunes have risen with those of Donald Trump, and whose chairman, Stephen Bannon (pictured), is Mr Trump’s chief strategist.

            Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at Breitbart, explained after Mr Trump’s victory that half of voters are “repulsed by the Lena Dunham, Black Lives Matter, third-wave feminist, communist, ‘kill-all-white-men’ politics of the progressive left.” Breitbart saw it coming a while ago, he added. The company’s expansion plans suggest it sees something coming in Europe, too. It already has a website in Britain and in January it will launch French and German sites.

          • Fake News About Fake News Leads To (Fake?) Defamation Threat

            So, it seems like “fake news” is all the rage these days. As we’ve discussed, the sudden focus on fake news is a silly distraction. It’s not likely to be changing many minds — and the talk about fake news seems mostly to be leading to calls for censorship. And a big part of the problem is that “fake news” is such a broad and vague label. It’s been applied to outright propaganda, to satire, to serious reporting, to serious reporting people don’t like… and to serious, but mistaken, reporting. The problem is that when you lump all those things together, things get pretty damn messy.

            Take, for example, this “fake news” story that got a lot of attention when it came out right around Thanksgiving: the Washington Post claimed that some “experts” had shown that Russian propagandists were behind the fake news explosion during the election. Which experts? The story doesn’t say. What evidence? The story doesn’t say. The article is focused on a brand new organization called “PropOrNot” that claimed to be run by experts, but won’t identify who’s involved, and the Washington Post didn’t seem to care. But still it made incredibly broad claims about “fake news” and Russian propaganda.

          • The Thin Line Between Political Censorship and Fighting Fake News in Iran

            The Iranian government is reportedly taking steps to expand regulations on large public news channels on the instant messenger Telegram. The move would apparently affect groups with more than 5,000 subscribers.

            It remains unclear, however, if state officials seek dramatic changes to controls on these online communities (ostensibly in the battle against “fake news”), or if the government merely plans to extend and continue existing Internet controls.

            As reported by Tasnim News, a hardline news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, Iranian ICT Minister Mahmoud Vaezi made the announcement at a press conference during the National Conference on Public Service. Vaezi cited the dangers “unofficial news channels” pose in Iran’s rural and less developed regions, where fake news and misinformation have gained sizeable audiences.

          • Tunisian-American Comic Pokes Fun at the Censorship of Corrupt State-Sponsored News During the Arab Spring

            In February 2011, Arab Spring protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Zitounia, a fictional island-nation in the Mediterranean. At least that’s the plot line for “Good Morning, Zitounia!” a new off-Broadway play from comic and activist Leila Ben-Abdallah.

            Ben-Abdallah takes the audience back to a time when protests raged and reporters maintained their propaganda directed by the corrupt government. Despite extreme restrictions, state-owned media did their best to cover the news; a phenomenon some American journalists seem to be emulating in an all-Trump era.

            “This show is for anyone who doesn’t want to read the news because it is too sad, or wants to learn more about the Middle East and North Africa, but is afraid it is too dense or boring,” Ben-Abdallah explained.

          • The Attack on “Fake News” Is An Outright Campaign for Censorship of the Truth

            The buzzword “fake news” has popped into the popular lexicon in recent weeks.

            We’ve been using that term for years, though, when referring to the mainstream media.

            While poll numbers show that about 9 out of 10 people don’t trust the information they get from the mainstream media, they likely still have no idea just how fake it all is.

            As someone who travels the world, I often walk by a television program and it’s called program for a reason, with the local media and can’t even believe what I am seeing or hearing.

          • Application of problematic CJEU ruling on copyright infringement by hyperlinks is getting out of hand

            That’s just unbelievable. I have read this sentence over and over again, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that in a U.S. ruling, let alone by higher courts. It happens in all jurisdictions that concepts get conflated or confused, but the words “conflation” and “confusion” are by far not strong enough to describe this.

            It’s highly illogical that unrelated factors such as a profit motive and knowledge of an infringement cold have any bearing on the term “communication to the public.” You either communicate (including that you make available) something to the public or you don’t, but that is unrelated to whether you do it for profit, for fun, or pro bono, just like it has nothing to do with whether you do it on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Also, a “communication to the public” (including a “making available”) is a communication to the public regardless of whether it’s legal or illegal. That is a subsequent question then.

          • Information Warfare: Chinese Software Supports Subtle Censorship
          • Jihad crackdown slippery slope of censorship
          • Another View: Introducing censorship on social media can be a slippery slope
          • Slippery slope of censorship

        • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Civil Rights/Policing

          • Geert Wilders guilty of incitement

            Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders was on Friday found guilty of incitement and encouraging discrimination, but was not given a penalty.

            A judge said that freedom of expression is fundamental to a democracy, but said there were limits to how far people could go.

            The case against Wilders dates back to 2014 when, during a rally of his Freedom Party (PVV), he asked supporters if they wanted more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. The crowd responded by chanting “Fewer! Fewer! Fewer!”

            Wilders answered them by saying, “We’ll take care of that.”

            Prosecutors asked for a €5,000 fine to be the penalty for Wilders and argued that he deliberately tried to distinguish Dutch citizens of Moroccan origin from others, calling his comments “unnecessarily offensive.”

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • In Search of Evidence: The IP Statistics For Decision Makers Conference (IPSDM) 2016

            The already existing problem of cross-licensing agreements and also the problem of “cluttering” of patent or trade mark registers, particularly in the information technology and life sciences industries.

          • Trademarks

            • Will Iceland’s EU trade mark end up on ice?

              As the Northern European weather turns to a cold chill, a trade mark dispute is just starting to heat up…

              Iceland is known for its chilly temperatures and occasional financial difficulties. It is also the name of a Nordic country.

              You might think that a supermarket which primarily sells frozen foods would not be readily confused with a country which is known (in no particular order) for Bjork, hot springs, Northern Lights* and the pirate party. But a recent war of words (the main word being “Iceland”) has erupted like a geyser and once again brought trade mark law to the mainstream media’s attention.

            • Indian Trade Marks Registry to widen its doors for recording “well known” marks

              The role of recordation of well-known marks varies across jurisdictions. Against that backdrop, the step about to be taken by the Trade Marks Registry in India in connection with recording well-known marks is especially noteworthy. Kat friend Ranjan Narula, of RNA Intellectual Property Attorneys, describes what can be expected to shortly take place.

          • Copyrights

            • It Begins: Congress Proposes First Stages Of Copyright Reform, And It’s Not Good

              The House Judiciary Committee has been “exploring” various copyright reform proposals for a few years now, asking for feedback, holding a “listening tour” and more. Through it all, it seemed pretty clear that the Judiciary Committee is (reasonably) fearful of getting SOPA’d again, and thus was trying to figure out some less controversial proposals it could push forward first to see how they worked. Two, in particular, have been brought up multiple times: moving the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress… and creating a “small claims court” for copyright infringement. And it appears that’s what the Judiciary Committee is now moving forward on, even though both are pretty bad ideas.

            • Coming in 2017: Reforms to Copyright Law and the Copyright Office
            • CBS Sues Public Domain For Existing

              This is of course not the first time we’ve seen such an attempt to nibble (or chomp) away at the edges of the public domain. Other examples include the high-profile fight over Sherlock Holmes, and the recent loss over Wizard Of Oz promotional materials. But each is subtly different, and together they form a trifecta that snuffs out giant swathes of the public domain.

              In the case of Sherlock Holmes, we’ve got the rule that early works falling into the public domain can be freely used, but if you’re building on them or adapting them, you can’t incorporate character traits or story points from later works that are still under copyright. While this still raises a huge host of “perpetual copyright” concerns, at its core it seems… somewhat reasonable. The Wizard Of Oz situation is similar, stemming from the idea that just because some materials from the film have fallen into the public domain doesn’t mean everything else is fair game. But, it pushed the borders: the court didn’t simply say that building on the public domain material with other still-copyrighted material from the film becomes infringing, but that building on it with anything or changing it in any way makes it infringing.

        ]]> http://techrights.org/2016/12/10/asteroidos-in-headlines-again/feed/ 0 Links 7/12/2016: ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5, Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 http://techrights.org/2016/12/07/ubuntu-touch-ota-14/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/07/ubuntu-touch-ota-14/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2016 12:22:48 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97317

        GNOME bluefish

        Contents

        GNU/Linux

        Free Software/Open Source

        • NIPS conference: Google releases open-source, AI, 3D game-development project

          Today, on the opening day of the marquee AI conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona, Google announced in a blog post the release of its DeepMind Lab project available to the AI community under open source licensing terms.

          Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are the next two computing platforms. DeepMind Lab is a 3D AI platform for building virtual games that bring these two platforms together in multiple dimensions. DeepMind Lab uses a special kind of AI, called machine learning (ML). And within the field of ML, it uses an advanced form of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL).

        • 7 cool little open source projects that stood out in 2016

          In the early days of the open source movement, a lot of the attention was on operating systems, and later on large content management systems. These days, containers are mentioned regularly even in mainstream news outlets. The big tech stories are great, but they miss the other great activity in the niches of the open source space. I’ve rounded up seven interesting lesser-known projects from the past year. You can see more articles about projects like this in my Nooks and Crannies column.

        • The most in demand skills you need for an open source job

          With coding and software development in serious need of talent, it’s essentially a graduate’s market, but you still need the right combination of skills and attributes to beat the competition. When it comes to open source and DevOps, a deeper understanding is essential.

        • Why the Open Source Cloud Is Important

          To this end, foundations such as the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Open Container Initiative (OCI) at The Linux Foundation are actively bringing in new open source projects and engaging member companies to create industry standards for new cloud-native technologies. The goal is to help improve interoperability and create a stable base for container operations on which companies can safely build commercial dependencies.

        • AI Platforms Welcome Devs With Open Arms

          Two leaders in the field of artificial intelligence have announced that they’re open-sourcing their AI platforms.

          After investing in building rich simulated environments to serve as laboratories for AI research, Google’s DeepMind Lab on Saturday said it would open the platform for the broader research community’s use.

          DeepMind has been using its AI lab for some time, and it has “only barely scratched the surface of what is possible” in it, noted team members Charlie Beattie, Joel Leibo, Stig Petersen and Shane Legg in an online post.

        • Open source is so much more than free code

          In 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs officially moved its most critical software, the VistA electronic health record system, into open source by establishing the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA). Along the way, VA officials solicited and followed advice from numerous open source experts, including Red Hat, Carnegie Mellon University and the Industry Advisory Council.

        • Events

        • Databases

          • SQL Server on Linux signals Microsoft’s changing development landscape [Ed: This headline is wrong. There is no SQL Server on Linux; it runs on a Windows compatibility layer and it's entirely proprietary.]
          • Exploring the Trend Towards Open Source Database Management Systems

            The popularity of open source DBMSs, as measured by the DB-Engines Ranking, has reached a new record. So, we’re going to analyze the underlying details.

            We have 154 open source systems in our ranking, slightly less than the 156 commercial systems. If we add up the popularity scores of all the open source systems, we get 46% of the overall scores, whereas 54% goes to commercial systems.

          • Cloud convenience is killing the open source database

            Open source has never been more important or, ironically, irrelevant. As developers increasingly embrace the cloud to shorten time to market, they’re speeding past open source, making it even harder to build an open source business.

            After all, if open source were largely a way for developers to skirt legal and purchasing departments to get the software they needed when they needed it, the cloud ups that convenience to the nth degree. In Accel’s annual business review, the vaunted venture capital firm writes: “‘Product’ is no longer just the bits of software, it’s also how the software is sold, supported, and made successful.” The cloud is changing the way all software is consumed, including open source.

        • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

        • CMS

          • WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, More: Keeping Up With Open Source CMS

            Due to its organic nature, the world of open source software is in constant flux, which makes it difficult to keep tabs on.

            To keep you in the loop, I’m kicking off a monthly roundup of open source CMS news, starting today.

            Here are your latest open source CMS highlights.

          • 4 open source peer-to-peer marketplaces

            What happens if your startup can’t afford one of these proprietary solutions or you need customized features? You go look for an open source alternative that could open the space for new solutions and modules. Here are four peer-to-peer marketplaces that are working to become the WordPress or Prestashop of their kind.

          • WordPress 4.7 “Vaughan”

            Version 4.7 of WordPress, named “Vaughan” in honor of legendary jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.7 help you get your site set up the way you want it.

        • Education

          • Pencils down: Why open source is the future of standardized testing

            Administering standardized tests online is trickier than it sounds. Underneath the facade of simple multiple choice forms, any workable platform needs a complex web of features to ensure that databases don’t buckle under the pressure of tens of thousands of test takers at once. On top of that, it also needs to ensure that responses are scored correctly and that it’s impossible for students to cheat.

        • BSD

        • Public Services/Government

        • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

          • Why your teams may be failing at the collaboration game

            When we think about skills needed to build open structures and establish open mindsets, collaboration jumps to mind immediately. In order to collaborate effectively, communication—or rather, clear communication—is imperative to making it all work.

            Communication can be defined as a transfer of information from one space or person to another—but it can look like dialogue, conflict resolution, listening skills, or even a knowledge commons. In open organizations, we look for timely transfers of information to all members so that they may do their jobs effectively and efficiently.

          • Open Data

            • Portugal’s AMA publishes two open data guides

              The Portuguese Agency for Administrative Modernisation (Agência para a Modernização Administrativa, AMA) has published two national open data guides.

              As its title implies, the ‘Open Data Introduction Guide’ is aimed at the general public or those interested in learning about the subject.

              The ‘Open Data Guide’ is the official government publication on the subject of public sector data openness. It addresses theoretical issues and practices relevant to the development of open data in Portugal. The topics include open movements, the potential of data openness, processes of opening information, ways of reuse, and an introduction to technical issues. This document is aimed at the various stakeholders in the Portuguese open data ecosystem, such as public agencies, researchers, journalists, citizens and companies interested in reusing or analysing public sector information.

            • Poland looking for new Digital Services and Open Data director

              The Polish Ministry of Digital Affairs is looking for a new director for its Department of Development of Digital Services and Open Data. The director is expected to be a “creative and proactive person who will set out the directions and lead the way for the most important and boldest changes in the state administration”.

          • Open Hardware/Modding

            • Accelerating Innovation: Michigan Tech patent database/app promotes open-source hardware

              Open-source innovation is making the traditional patent system obsolete. Michigan Technological University associate professor Joshua Pearce and his team work with what is called open-source hardware development.

              “What that means is sort of developing technologies that don’t rely on patents,” Pearce said. “We work collaboratively with engineers and scientists all over the world, and (it’s) fairly successful. And the reason it’s successful is because if you have thousands of people working on something, it tends to get pretty good pretty fast.”

              Pearce said the concept began some time ago with open-source software.

            • Non-profit creates open-source drinking water filter for 1/10th of the cost

              The high-tech vision of open-source software meets low-tech design at non-profit organization OHorizons, an international coalition of innovators working to solve persistent global challenges. The team’s most recent invention is the open-source Wood Mold, designed to allow even the least experienced person to create a BioSand Filter that can deliver clean water at 1/10th of the cost of the traditional method. The Wood Mold is designed to be accessible by anyone who has the DIY, open-source construction manual that OHorizons offers for free online.

        • Programming/Development

        Leftovers

        • The Operating System Fountain of Youth: iOS

          When I returned to the store this week, the display was gone. Still, the idea is in the air, the two individuals mentioned didn’t know about the Microsoft product.

          The Microsoft implementation might be too kludgy, or immature, or the concept itself could just be a doomed Rube Goldberg fantasy. Back to reality, we’re likely to pick up fresher clues on iOS direction when new iPads show up, probably next quarter.

        • 15+ Stunning Satellite Photos That Will Change How You See Our World

          Every single day, Grant shares one satellite photo from Digital Globes to change the way we see our planet. “With a focal length 16 times longer than a standard DSLR camera, the cameras are so powerful that you can take a picture of a beach ball on the Golden Gate Bridge in full resolution…from Los Angeles,” Grant told Bored Panda. “I try to present the images with no bias and let people decide what these altered landscapes mean, based on the facts and the visual evidence in the frame. I believe that this perspective is a means to start a conversation about the condition of our planet and how we can better protect it.”

        • Science

          • Teachers’ union ‘concerned’ over Pisa results

            Finland has slipped down the Pisa rankings in recent years, and that trend continued in the latest set of the OECD educational charts released on Tuesday. Although Finland was the only country where girls outperformed boys in science, the number of poor performing students was up and there were fewer high-achievers.

            Finland’s teaching union, the OAJ, says it is concerned about the development in Finnish Pisa results.

            “Finnish results have declined clearly when compared to previous years,” said OAJ expert Jaakko Salo. “The biggest concern in this is that our cornerstone—equality in education—looks to be crumbling.”

        • Health/Nutrition

          • Why is a banned pesticide that harms bees actually being used more?

            Goulson called it “sinister” last week when made aware of the silence, but now concludes it was probably an innocent error. Bob Maurer, chairman of the show, told me the event has never received any sponsorship from the big chemical companies that manufacture neonicotinoids. He believes an accidental “technical hitch” by the video producer was responsible.

            Concern over this coincidence can be dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but what cannot be dismissed is the solid scientific evidence that Goulson is helping to produce, showing how neonicotinoids harm bees and other insects.

          • Civil rights commission to discuss Flint water crisis report

            The Michigan Civil Rights Commission will discuss an early version of its report about the lead-contaminated water crisis in Flint at its next meeting.

            The commission, which meets Monday morning at the University of Michigan Detroit center, is expected to check on progress and provide feedback. The report is scheduled to be released next month.

          • California bill would require reporting of ‘superbug’ infections, deaths

            A California state senator introduced a bill on Monday that would mandate reporting of antibiotic-resistant infections and deaths and require doctors to record the infections on death certificates when they are a cause of death.

            The legislation also aims to establish the nation’s most comprehensive statewide surveillance system to track infections and deaths from drug-resistant pathogens. Data from death certificates would be used to help compile an annual state report on superbug infections and related deaths.

            In September, a Reuters investigation revealed that tens of thousands of superbug deaths nationwide go uncounted every year. The infections are often omitted from death certificates, and even when they are recorded, they aren’t counted because of the lack of a unified national surveillance system.

            “The (Reuters) story highlighted some of the problems that have come from the lack of information, the lack of reporting, especially deaths,” said state Senator Jerry Hill, who introduced the bill. “I wasn’t aware that on death certificates, antibiotic-resistant infections have never been called out.”

            Because there is no federal surveillance system, monitoring of superbug infections and deaths falls to the states. A Reuters survey of all 50 state health departments and the District of Columbia found that reporting requirements vary widely.

        • Security

          • HP shutting down default FTP, Telnet access to network printers

            Security experts consider the aging FTP and Telnet protocols unsafe, and HP has decided to clamp down on access to networked printers through the remote-access tools.

            Some of HP’s new business printers will, by default, be closed to remote access via protocols like FTP and Telnet. However, customers can activate remote printing access through those protocols if needed.

          • Google Chrome 55 Fixes Flaws, Blocks Flash
          • Cyberattacks are going to get a lot worse, former NSA official says

            The face of cybercrime is changing. Healthcare has gone from a declared mission of stealing personal data to much more disruptive issues. In fact, healthcare has seen the largest jump in ransomware attacks than in any other industry.

            When Joel Brenner opened the HIMSS Privacy & Security Forum in Boston Monday morning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology research fellow – who focuses on cybersecurity, privacy and intelligence policy – and former senior counsel at the National Security Agency, didn’t sugarcoat the state of healthcare security.

            The government isn’t going to sort out that problem until we suffer some great losses, Brenner said.

          • Chrome 55 Now Blocks Flash, Uses HTML5 by Default

            Chrome 55, released earlier this week, now blocks all Adobe Flash content by default, according to a plan set in motion by Google engineers earlier this year.

            Back in May, Google’s staff announced that starting with Q4 2016, Chrome would use HTML5 by default, while Flash would be turned off.

            While some of the initial implementation details of the “HTML5 By Default” plan changed since May, Flash has been phased out in favor of HTML5 as the primary technology for playing multimedia content in Chrome.

          • Google Debuts Continuous Fuzzer for Open Source Software

            A new Google program aimed at continuously fuzzing open source software has already detected over 150 bugs.

            The program, OSS-Fuzz, currently in beta mode, is designed to help unearth programming errors in open source software via fuzz testing. Fuzz testing, or fuzzing is when bits of randomly generated code is inputted into programs as a means to discover code and security flaws.

          • Google Opens Up a Powerful FOSS Security Tool

            Back in 2014, public exposure of the OpenSSL Heartbleed security bug created a stage for security experts and commentators to field opinions on the open source error that left an estimated two thirds of the internet unsecured. We followed up back then with a guest post for OStatic from Eren Niazi, founder of Open Source Storage, where he discussed the security implications for the open source community.

          • Google Finally Patches ‘Dirty COW’ Linux Vulnerability With December Android Security Update [Ed: Google patches don’t matter to news sites until there’s some stupid brand with logo and Web site]
          • Google patches Dirty Cow vulnerability in latest Android security update
          • Docker CEO: Docker Already Is a Security Platform (with Swarm, That Is)

            In a reinforcement of his company’s marketing message that containerization as an architecture is more secure by design, Docker Inc. CEO Ben Golub [pictured right above, with HPE Executive VP Antonio Neri] told attendees at HPE’s Discover London 2016 event last Tuesday morning that the Docker platform addresses and ameliorates its users’ security concerns just by its very architecture.

          • Tuesday’s security updates
          • On CVE-2016-4484, a (security)? bug in the cryptsetup initramfs integration

        • Defence/Aggression

          • Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste

            The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

            Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

            The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

        • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

          • Julian Assange defies Swedish prosecutors by releasing rape statement

            Julian Assange has thumbed his nose at Swedish investigators, who he says have robbed him of his freedom for six years, by releasing the answers he gave to them under questioning in Ecuador’s London embassy last month.

            The decision to issue the statement, which contains for the first time a detailed account by the WikiLeaks founder of his encounter with a woman in August 2010 who made rape allegations against him, marks a fresh twist in a case in which Assange claims an early leak of information from the Swedish police has shaped opinion.

            The transcript of a police interview with the woman was leaked to media in December 2010, which the Australian, who has not been charged with any crime, says helped to establish an aura of guilt around him.

            Since then, Assange has repeatedly asked to be allowed to tell his side of the story to prosecutors, but until recently they insisted he come to Sweden for questioning. Assange has been confined to Ecuador’s cramped London embassy since June 2012, after claiming asylum to avoid extradition over the allegations.

          • Julian Assange says texts show he is ‘entirely innocent’ of rape; WikiLeaks founder criticises Swedish prosecutor

            The ABC has obtained a copy of the statement the WikiLeaks founder gave prosecutors from his refuge inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on November 14.

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • A threat to rainforests in Indonesia: Big banks

            In early 2015, scientists monitoring satellite images at Global Forest Watch raised the alarm about the destruction of rain forests in Indonesia.

            Environmental groups raced to the scene in West Kalimantan province, on the island of Borneo, to find a charred wasteland: Smouldering fires, orangutans driven from their nests, and signs of an extensive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

            “There was pretty much no forest left,” said Dr Karmele Llano Sanchez, director of the non-profit International Animal Rescue’s orangutan rescue group, which set out to save the endangered primates. “All the forest had burned.”

          • Republicans Vow to Finish the Dakota Access Pipeline Under Trump

            This weekend the Army Corps of Engineers said Dakota Access Pipeline won’t go through as planned since it could have destructive environmental consequences. But, as activists know, that doesn’t mean Republicans are done fighting for the oil pipeline.

            President-Elect Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan were among pipeline supporters who emphasized their commitment to the project, and promised to approve the project in the next term. Trump has suggested in prior speech he would push an oil pipeline through during his first 100 days in office, according to the Wall Street Journal.

          • Five things to watch in Dakota Access pipeline fight

            The Obama administration halted construction on the Dakota Access oil pipeline Sunday, saying it would hold off on granting the final easement for the project while it conducts a thorough environmental review.

            Both the developer and President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have vowed to finish construction, while protesters say they could bring the conflict to court.

            Here are five things to watch in the unfolding fight.

            Trump’s strategy

            When Trump and his administration take office, approving Dakota Access probably won’t be as simple as signing a piece of paper.

            The Army Corps of Engineers ordered an environmental impact statement for the project Sunday. Experts say that because of that, Trump’s administration will have to either complete the yearslong process or find a way to remove the requirement for testing the environmental impact. Doing the latter, however, would be a rare move that could subject the pipeline to a lawsuit.

          • Melting Permafrost Could Affect Weather Worldwide

            Melting permafrost is causing significant changes to the freshwater chemistry and hydrology of Alaska’s Yukon River and could be triggering global climate impacts, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report released yesterday.

            Researchers say the study, which analyzed more than 30 years of data, sheds light on how climate change is already affecting the Arctic.

            According to the report, the Yukon River and one of its major tributaries have accumulated increasing levels of calcium, magnesium and sulfates over the last three decades due to thawing permafrost.

          • Standing Rock protesters asked to ‘go home’ by Sioux leader

            The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has asked the thousands of “water protectors” gathered in encampments along the Missouri river to “go home” after the US Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the river.

            In a video statement Dave Archambault thanked the thousands of Native American and environmental activists who travelled to North Dakota to help the tribe fight back against the pipeline, which they feared would contaminate their water source and destroy sacred sites.

            But after the “huge victory” of the Army Corps decision, Archambault said: “There’s no need for the water protectors or for anyone to be putting ourselves in unsafe environments.

          • Indonesia takes new step to combat loss of forests, fires

            Indonesia has strengthened its moratorium on converting peat swamps to plantations in a move a conservation research group says will help prevent annual fires and substantially cut the country’s carbon emissions if properly implemented.

            President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s amendment to the moratorium regulation, which was issued on Monday, expands it to cover peatlands of any depth and orders companies to restore areas they’ve degraded.

            Indonesia’s move was welcomed by Norway, which in 2010 pledged $1 billion to help the country stop cutting down its prized tropical forests but has released little of it. As a result of the expanded regulation, Norway said it would give $25 million to Indonesia to fund restoration of drained peatlands and another $25 million once an enforcement and monitoring plan is ready.

            Draining of peat swamps by palm oil and pulp wood companies is a big contributor to destruction of tropical forests in Indonesia and the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The land conversion worsens annual dry season fires that release huge amounts of carbon stored in the peat. Many of the fires are deliberately set to clear land of its natural vegetation.

          • Britain could slash environmental and safety standards ‘a very long way’ after Brexit, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg says

            Britain could slash environmental and safety regulations on imported products after it leaves the EU, a Tory MP has suggested.

            Jacob Rees-Mogg said regulations that were “good enough for India” could be good enough for the UK – arguing that the UK could go “a very long way” to rolling back high EU standards.

            The idea, floated at a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee, was immediately rejected by an economist, who said such a move would likely cause “quite considerable” difficulties.

        • Finance

          • The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don’t assume western democracy will last forever

            Below the medieval citadel in Kazan, two vast frozen rivers turn the landscape white. On a Saturday afternoon there are a few hardy locals shuffling through the icy sludge to take selfies against the mosque, the Christmas lights and the Soviet-era statues.

            It’s 25 years since I was last in Russia, trying and failing to revive the left during the chaotic first days of Boris Yeltsin’s economic reforms. Half a lifetime later I am here to address a room full of people who want to talk about replacing capitalism with something better – and suddenly we have something in common: now we both know what it’s like to see a system that once looked permanent collapsing.

            Since I’ve been here, almost everyone who has chosen to come and hear me is involved in either contemporary arts or philosophy. The journalists who want to interview me – a public critic of Putin’s policy in Syria and Ukraine – mainly write for cultural magazines. These, if not exactly the new rock’n’roll, are the safest intellectual spaces in which critical thought can take place.

          • Tar Heel heist: How the charter school industry is hijacking public education

            If the American Dream is still alive – the one that includes a good job and a house with a yard, kids, and a two-car garage – you can see it taking shape in Wake County in the heart of the state of North Carolina. Signs of surging prosperity are everywhere this morning as I make my way to West Lake Middle School in Apex, NC, on the outskirts of Raleigh.

            What were once sleepy two-lane country roads are now teaming with impatient commuters, school busses, and mini-vans. New housing developments, shopping centers, and office buildings are transforming the rolling Piedmont landscape.

          • TPP May Be Dead – But Its Impact Lingers

            Despite the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) being – to all-intents-and-purposes – dead in the water, pursuit of some of the most egregious objectives of the corporate interests driving the TPP agenda rolls on. Pharma is persisting in its push for countries to adopt not just TRIPS-Plus, but in some cases even TPP-Plus intellectual property rules – presumably groundwork for the later emergence of a ‘son-of-TPP’ agreement.

          • India ready to resume BTIA talks with EU without preconditions

            Government is committed to an early and balanced outcome of India-EU Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) negotiations and is willing to resume talks without any preconditions, Parliament was informed today.

            “The European Union (EU) has expressed willingness to re-engage with India in India-EU Broad based Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) negotiations subject to certain conditions.

          • The Mafia State

            The list of financial titans, including Trump, who have profited from a rigged financial system and fraud is endless. Many in the 1 percent make money by using lobbyists and bought politicians to write self-serving laws and rules and by forming unassailable monopolies. They push up prices on products or services these monopolies provide. Or they lend money to the 99 percent and charge exorbitant interest. Or they use their control of government and the courts to ship jobs to Mexico or China, where wages can be as low as 22 cents an hour, and leave American workers destitute. Neoliberalism is state-sponsored extortion. It is a vast, nationally orchestrated Ponzi scheme.

            This fevered speculation and mounting inequality, made possible by the two ruling political parties, corroded and destroyed the mechanisms and institutions that permitted democratic participation and provided some protection for workers. Politicians, from Reagan on, were handsomely rewarded by their funders for delivering their credulous supporters to the corporate guillotine. The corporate coup created a mafia capitalism. This mafia capitalism, as economists such as Karl Polanyi and Joseph Stiglitz warned, gave birth to a mafia political system. Financial and political power in the hands of institutions such as Goldman Sachs and the Clinton Foundation becomes solely about personal gain. The Obamas in a few weeks will begin to give us a transparent lesson into how service to the corporate state translates into personal enrichment.

          • We don’t need a charter-school lobbyist as education secretary: Stephen Henderson

            In Detroit, parents of school-age children have plenty of choices, thanks to the nation’s largest urban network of charter schools.

            What remains in short supply is quality.

            In Brightmoor, the only high school left is Detroit Community Schools, a charter boasting more than a decade of abysmal test scores and, until recently, a superintendent who earned $130,000 a year despite a dearth of educational experience or credentials.

            On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance.

          • Jill Stein Takes Long-Shot Recount Campaign to Trump Tower

            Jill Stein went to Trump Tower on Monday to press her case for long-shot recounts in three closely contested states in last month’s presidential election.

            Ms. Stein, the Green Party presidential nominee and now the leader of the recount campaign, appeared emboldened by an early morning federal court ruling that ordered Michigan elections officials — over the protests of President-elect Donald J. Trump and his allies — to begin a recount by noon Monday.

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

          • Republican ‘faithless elector’ says he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump as he is ‘unfit for presidency’

            A REPUBLICAN presidential elector has issued the shock claim that he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump in an attempt to block his path to the White House.

            Christopher Suprun said in an article for the New York Times that he could not approve Mr Trump in good conscience as he felt the president-elect was unfit for public office.

            “Mr Trump urged violence against protesters at his rallies during the campaign,” he wrote. “He speaks of retribution against his critics.”

            “I owe no debt to a party. I owe a debt to my children to leave them a nation they can trust.”

          • Trump’s lawyer suggests the president-elect’s fraud claim isn’t true

            As you’ve probably heard, there are progressive efforts underway to force recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – three traditionally “blue” states where Donald Trump narrowly prevailed. Had these three states, where literally every independent poll showed Hillary Clinton ahead in the months leading up to Election Day, voted Democratic, Trump would’ve lost.

          • Jill Stein charges ahead with recount efforts

            Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is vowing to move ahead with recount efforts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, despite legal setbacks and growing opposition from Republicans and other Donald Trump allies in each state.

            “We will not give in to intimidation, to legal maneuvering and to bureaucratic obstruction,” Stein said at a news conference outside of Trump Tower on Monday.

            Her vow came as Stein’s campaign on Monday morning filed a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania — an attempt to revive the push there after Stein and other Pennsylvania voters dropped a state-based lawsuit to try to force a recount. They gave up on the state-based lawsuit when a judge raised the bond to $1 million, a price Stein panned as exorbitant .

            But even as she railed against the roadblocks in Pennsylvania, Stein lauded developments in Michigan, which was to begin its recount by noon Monday.

          • Trump’s Threat to the Constitution

            On July 7, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, met privately with House Republicans near the Capitol. I was present as chief policy director of the House Republican Conference. Mr. Trump’s purpose was to persuade the representatives to unite around him, a pitch he delivered in a subdued version of his stream-of-consciousness style. A congresswoman asked him about his plans to protect Article I of the Constitution, which assigns all federal lawmaking power to Congress.

            Mr. Trump interrupted her to declare his commitment to the Constitution — even to parts of it that do not exist, such as “Article XII.” Shock swept through the room as Mr. Trump confirmed one of our chief concerns about him: He lacked a basic knowledge of the Constitution.

          • Michigan recount begins, as Jill Stein’s legal battle moves to Pennsylvania

            Presidential candidate Jill Stein’s fight to force presidential recounts in three states focuses Monday on Pennsylvania, where her Green Party is seeking an emergency federal court order for a statewide recount, and Michigan, where a federal judge has ordered a hand recount to begin by noon.

            The recount is underway in Wisconsin.

            President-elect Donald Trump narrowly defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in all three states. The recounts were not expected to change enough votes to overturn the result of the election.

            Stein says her intent is to verify the accuracy of the vote. She has suggested, with no evidence, that votes cast were susceptible to computer hacking.

          • The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming

            Shortly after the Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over the wire: the Thomas Mann villa in Los Angeles has been saved. The house, which was built to Mann’s specifications in the nineteen-forties, went on the market earlier this year, and it seemed likely to be demolished, because the structure was deemed less valuable than the land beneath it. After prolonged negotiations, the German government bought the property, with the idea of establishing it as a cultural center.

            The house deserves to stand not only because a great writer lived there but because it brings to mind a tragic moment in American cultural history. The author of “Death in Venice” and “The Magic Mountain” settled in this country in 1938, a grateful refugee from Nazism. He became a citizen and extolled American ideals. By 1952, though, he had become convinced that McCarthyism was a prelude to fascism, and felt compelled to emigrate again. At the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings on Communism in Hollywood, Mann said, “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in Germany.” The tearing down of Mann’s “magic villa” would have been a cold epilogue to a melancholy tale.

          • 9 Things Obama Can Do Before Leaving Office to Prepare for the Trump Takeover

            In less than seven weeks, President Barack Obama will hand over the government to Donald Trump, including access to the White House, Air Force One, and Camp David. Trump will also, of course, inherit the infamous nuclear codes, as well as the latest in warfare technology, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s fleet of killer drones, the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance and data-collection apparatus, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s enormous system of undercover informants.

          • Why is Donald Trump delegitimizing an election that he won?

            On the other hand, what he DOES is important. When he settled the Trump University for 25 Million, despite prolonging it for multiple years and putting all of the plaintiffs through years of frustration and debt, the news stories lasted less than 12 hours before being drowned by the Hamilton Tweets. My own reaction to the tweet was reflexively the same as others: Our President-elect is so sensitive that anything even slightly negative is considered an insult. But, you have to work HARD to find a story today talking about the settlement (or the fact that some are contesting it), but the fallout from the tweets lasted days. Looking back, more than once a fundamental issue concerning Trump was obscured by Tweet reactions. Nude underage beauty contestants, Manafort Russian connections, a debate that clearly showed Trump unprepared, unpresidential, and unhinged turned immaterial as the world reacted to his tweets about Alicia Machado.

          • Jill Stein On What’s Next With the Recount Effort in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania

            Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein has initiated recount efforts in three states — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a combined margin of 103,519 votes. (A fourth, partial recount is underway in Nevada, by independent presidential candidate Roque De La Fuente).

            Though considered an “extreme long shot” by the New York Times, Stein’s campaign raised her initial goal of $7 million — twice as much as she raised in her failed campaign bid — in just a matter of days. Clinton’s campaign has cooperated with the effort.

          • Bob Dole’s Law Firm Was Paid $20,000 A Month To Lobby For Taiwan

            The Taiwanese representative office in Washington paid the law firm of former Sen. Bob Dole $20,000 a month to advance its interests in Washington, public filings show. Dole said on Monday his firm helped broker a controversial phone call between President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.

            Dole told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that his law firm “may have had some influence” on the phone call, which broke decades of diplomatic precedent, but has been widely praised by China hawks for the tough signal it sends to Beijing. An unnamed Trump transition team official told the paper that Dole had arranged the call.

          • US Power Will Decline Under Trump, Says Futurist Who Predicted Soviet Collapse

            Johan Galtung, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated sociologist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, warned that US global power will collapse under the Donald Trump administration.

            The Norwegian professor at the University of Hawaii and Transcend Peace University is recognized as the ‘founding father’ of peace and conflict studies as a scientific discipline. He has made numerous accurate predictions of major world events, most notably the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

          • Half of Detroit votes may be ineligible for recount

            One-third of precincts in Wayne County could be disqualified from an unprecedented statewide recount of presidential election results because of problems with ballots.

            Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month.

            Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662.

          • Mismatched numbers means Mich. precincts can’t be recounted

            A single missing ballot was enough to scuttle the recount of a Michigan precinct Monday.

            The computerized poll book in Rochester Hills precinct 11 listed the names of 848 voters who cast ballots there, but the ballot box contained just 847 ballots. So where is the other ballot? The poll workers’ notes offered no explanation.

            “It didn’t match on the canvass and it doesn’t match now,” said Joe Rozell, Oakland County’s director of elections. “This precinct is not recountable.”

            Two Michigan counties began the recount process Monday, hours after a federal judge ordered the immediate start of the presidential recount. Six counties are expected to start the recount process Tuesday, with the last batch of counties to start Dec. 12.

          • How the Electoral College Really Started
          • Florida voters sue for recount

            Three central Florida voters are mounting an unlikely bid to overturn the presidential election result in the Sunshine State.

            In a lawsuit filed Monday in Leon Circuit Court, they assert that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, actually won Florida. The plaintiffs, who live in Osceola and Volusia counties, say the state’s official election results were off because of hacking, malfunctioning voting machines and other problems.

            They’re asking for a hand recount of every paper ballot in Florida, at the expense of defendants including Trump, Gov. Rick Scott and the 29 Republican presidential electors from Florida.

        • Censorship/Free Speech

          • 3 Tips for Teachers to Help Teens Distinguish Fact From Fiction

            The rise in websites dispensing false information has become a problem for Facebook. But for one high school teacher, having students take misinformation at face value is nothing new – though it’s gotten worse.

            “I’m constantly got kids coming to me, ‘Did you know?’ insert whatever conspiracy theory,” says Dave Stuart Jr., who teaches world history at Cedar Springs High School in Michigan. “Ranging from the Apollo missions to the moon never happened, to current events-related stuff.”

            The Common Core standards focus strongly on skills that should prepare students to detect fake news – the standards emphasize the need for students to write and read arguments using and looking for strong reasoning and evidence, says Dana Maloney, an English teacher at Tenafly High School in New Jersey.

          • Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube team up to stop terrorist propaganda

            Four of the largest tech companies—Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and YouTube—are coming together to stop the spread of terroristic content on social media.

            The plan is to create a shared database and track the digital fingerprints of accounts who share propaganda for terror networks helping them identify the content and easily remove photo or videos from their sites.

            “Our companies will begin sharing hashes of the most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos we have removed from our services — content most likely to violate all of our respective companies’ content policies,” the companies announced in a joint statement Monday night.

          • Pakistani Cinema’s Censorship Problem

            Actor Hameed Sheikh, known for his phenomenol performance in Jami’s Moor, spoke about the difficulty he faced while trying to release the movie

          • Hacker News calls for “political detox,” critics cry censorship

            Can social media even exist without political debate? What about trolls? Hacker News, the social news site run by Y Combinator, is trying to find out.

            The head of the Hacker News community since 2014, Daniel Gackle (whose HN handle is “dang”) on Monday initiated a site-wide “Political Detox Week.”

          • With a new Star Trek TV series incoming, we revisit the show’s long history of censorship at the BBC…

            Star Trek is not a franchise you’d normally associate with controversy. Nevertheless, between 1969 and 1994, four episodes of the original series – Empath, Whom Gods Destroy, Plato’s Stepchildren and Miri – were not aired on the BBC, and other episodes were heavily redacted.

          • Internet giants will join forces to stop online sharing of terrorist material

            Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube have announced that they will be working together to curb the dissemination of terrorist material online. The Web giants will create a shared industry database of hashes—digital fingerprints that can identify a specific file—for violent terrorist imagery and terrorist recruitment materials that have previously been removed from their platforms.

            According to a statement the four companies have jointly released, the hope is that “this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online.”

          • I’m a Journalist and I Was Stopped From Covering Standing Rock

            It was an assignment that I barely prepared for. I didn’t think I had to.

            For most reporting trips I have made in the last decade, I would think long and hard about where I was going and what the variables were. If I was heading to a conflict zone, I would need body armor and a trauma kit. If it was a natural disaster, I would bring a satellite phone and spare food. If I was heading to an authoritarian country where journalism was not allowed, I would need a mix of burner phones, encrypted hard drives and a disposable laptop. I felt I was prepared for every eventuality. But I never thought that I would have to think about these things so close to home.

            For my recent assignment heading from Canada to the U.S. to cover the anti-oil pipeline protests in Standing Rock for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I didn’t prepare for anything extraordinary. But at the border, after handing over my Canadian passport I was taken aside. I wasn’t worried. Why should I be? I had nothing to hide, and I felt like it was the one border in my travels where I could proudly proclaim that I was a journalist to safe ears.

          • Ahead of 2022 World Cup, Qatar doubles down on internet censorship and blocks independent news website

            Last week, an independent news website in Qatar, Doha News, discovered that they had been blocked in Qatar. While there has been no official news on why this block has happened, Doha News stated that they suspect that the block happened at the behest of the government. The news site has a reputation for toeing the line in Qatar, and had previously done such “unprecedented” things in the emirates such as publishing an anonymous article by a homosexual Qatari man. Ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it is more than possible that this is just the first of many censorship actions by Qatar. Another famous international media site that is based in Qatar is none other than Al Jazeera.

            Doha News confirmed that Qatar’s two ISPs, Ooredo and Vodaphone, have blocked Doha News. The independent news source tried to create a new domain name to get past the block but that new website was quickly blocked as well. Doha News’s editor, Shabina Khatri was forced to use a different Medium to communicate after the block.

          • Facebook reportedly testing new tool to combat fake news

            Facebook appears to be testing a tool designed to help it identify and hide so called “fake news” on the social network, in an attempt to quell increasingly vocal criticism of its role in spreading untruths and propaganda.

            The tool, reported by at least three separate Facebook users on Twitter, asks readers to rank on a scale of one to five the extent to which they think a link’s title “uses misleading language”. The articles in question were from reliable sources: Rolling Stone magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chortle, a news site which reports on comedy.

          • Facebook and Google make lies as pretty as truth

            If you asked Google who won the popular vote just after the election, there’s a chance you would have been sent to a conspiracy blog with bogus results. And the site is likely to have looked as legitimate as any other.

        • Privacy/Surveillance

          • NSA’s best are ‘leaving in big numbers,’ insiders say

            Low morale at the National Security Agency is causing some of the agency’s most talented people to leave in favor of private sector jobs, former NSA Director Keith Alexander told a room full of journalism students, professors and cybersecurity…

          • Who Are The NSA’s Elite Hackers?

            Last week, a mysterious group calling itself The Shadow Brokers dumped online a series of hacking tools associated with the NSA. The leak provided an unprecedented look into the actual tools that the NSA uses to hack its targets, and in the process, put the spotlight on a little-known team that works inside the spy agency—its elite-hacking unit.

            Known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, its existence was barely—if at all—discussed in public until 2009, when intelligence historian and author Matthew Aid described it in his book about the history of the NSA as a “super-secret” unit that taps into “thousands of foreign computer systems” and accesses “password-protected hard drives and email accounts of targets around the world.”

          • Appeals Court to Hear Argument in ACLU Challenge to NSA Internet Surveillance

            A federal appeals court will hear oral argument Friday in Richmond, Virginia, in the case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a broad group of organizations challenging the National Security Agency’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international internet communications.

          • German Investigation Committee ‘Protracting’ Inquiry Into NSA Spying Scandal

            WikiLeaks published 2,400 documents on the NSA spying affair, according to which Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was involved in the creation of the spy software that was later used by the NSA to tap top-ranking officials. It was also said that BND used the software in its work.

          • Court upholds warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens under Section 702

            The U.S. federal appeals court has ruled in United States v. Mohamud, a case that began with a 2010 holiday bomb plot and will end with unique implications for the private digital communications of American citizens.

            Digital privacy advocates had hoped that the appeals case might prompt reform for a contentious portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as Section 702. The provision accommodates U.S. surveillance of foreign targets located abroad, although its many detractors argue that Section 702 allows the U.S. government to collect the bulk communications of Americans in the process.

          • United States v. Mohamud
          • No Appeal For US Man Believed Convicted With Warrantless NSA Evidence

            A U.S. man convicted after his emails were revealed by the NSA’s PRISM program, the first public case of its kind, will not have his case overturned, an appeals court has found.

          • German spy agency penetrated by ISIS

            My recent interview about the German domestic spy agency, the BfV – the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, ironically – being allegedly infiltrated by ISIS.

          • Canada Wants Software Backdoors, Mandatory Decryption Capability And Records Storage

            The new Canadian government is looking to further expand its surveillance powers by requiring decryption capabilities for all services, mandatory storage of both internet and phone records for service providers, backdoors that allow interception, and warrantless access to basic subscriber information.

        • Civil Rights/Policing

          • Saudi journalist banned from media after criticising Trump

            Saudi authorities banned journalist Jamal Khashoggi from writing in newspapers, appearing on TV and attending conferences, the Alkhalij Aljadid reported in Arabic.

            This came after Khashoggi’s remarks during a presentation he made at a Washington think-tank on 10 November in which he was critical of Donald Trump’s ascension to the US presidency.

            Two weeks ago, an official Saudi source was cited by the Saudi News Agency as saying that Khashoggi did not represent the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in his interviews or statements.

          • Michael Coe, associate of hate preacher Anjem Choudary, jailed for 28 months

            An associate of hate preacher Anjem Choudary has been jailed for 28 months for knocking a schoolboy unconscious because he cuddled his girlfriend in the street.

            Michael Coe, a Muslim convert, has a long record of violent offences starting when he was 16, including assaults, burglary, robbery and violent disorder.

            The married father of two was convicted in August of attacking the boy after he took exception to the 16-year-old cuddling his teenage girlfriend in Newham, east London, in April.

          • Coincidence? German Stats Show Surge in Sex Crime Rate Around Refugee Centers

            A group of German activists have carried out a study which found that rates of sexual offenses increase significantly in the vicinity of asylum reception centers, Germany’s Journalistenwatch news portal reported.

          • Afghan migrant woman ‘hunted down to Europe by abusive husband’

            Forced into marrying a man 25 years her senior after he had allegedly raped her, this 23-year-old Tajik woman from Kabul is now in a Greek camp for migrants.

            But Lina told the BBC that the abusive husband she ran away from is now following her, threatening to kill her for disobeying him.

            Her story was corroborated by volunteers for a Spanish refugee charity.

            Lina’s husband is one step behind her and her two small children, having reached the Greek island of Lesbos shortly after she was transported to mainland Greece.

          • Muslims are failing to integrate because men keep marrying abroad, major report warns

            Muslim communities remain isolated even after decades in the UK because men keep marrying foreign wives, a Government adviser has warned.

            Dame Louise Casey said that there is a “first generation in every generation” phenomenon in Muslim communities which is acting as a “bar” to integration.

            The review also accuses Labour and local authorities of having “ignored or even condoned” harmful cultural traditions for fear of being branded “racist or Islamaphobic”.

            It reports concerns that Sharia Courts in the UK have been “supporting the values of extremists, condoning wife-beating [and] ignoring marital rape”.

          • British ‘subjects’ did not deserve legal equality with their colonial masters: Interview with Marieme Helie Lucas on Sharia Courts in Britain

            Today, the British law of the land applies to all citizens, be they Catholics, Protestants, atheists, etc. Not one single citizen is beyond the law. Except for the former ‘natives’, be they actually British citizens or migrants: those – and those only – are, once more, entitled to laws of their own, because, beyond their official citizenship, they are still seen as ‘different’ from – and inferior to – the (former?) colonial master. ‘Let them have their own customs, it is their way’.

            ‘Proper’ British citizens are ruled by laws they have voted on, that they can change if they come together and press their MPs. How can ‘Sharia laws’ be changed by the will and vote of citizens? A significant proportion of British citizens are now under supposedly religious laws that they have neither voted for, nor can change through a democratic process. Democracy for ‘proper’ British citizens but unchangeable ‘tribal native customs’ for others?

          • European Union Directive on counterterrorism is seriously flawed

            European Union Member States must ensure that a new effort to standardise counterterrorism laws does not undermine fundamental freedoms and the rule of law, a group of international human rights organisations said today.

            Amnesty International, the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), European Digital Rights (EDRi), the Fundamental Rights European Experts (FREE) Group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) are warning that the overly broad language of the new EU Directive on Combating Terrorism could lead to criminalising public protests and other peaceful acts, to the suppression of the exercise of freedom of expression protected under international law, including expression of dissenting political views and to other unjustified limitations on human rights. The Directive’s punitive measures also pose the risk of being disproportionately applied and implemented in a manner that discriminates against specific ethnic and religious communities.

          • Amber Rudd says EU nationals in post-Brexit UK will need ‘form of ID’

            More than 3 million European Union citizens living in Britain after Brexit will have to be issued with “some form of documentation”, the home secretary has said.

            Amber Rudd told MPs she would not yet set out the details for any new EU ID card, but said: “There will be a need to have some sort of documentation. We are not going to set it out yet. We are going to do it in a phased approach to ensure that we use all the technology advantages that we are increasingly able to harness to ensure that all immigration is carefully handled.”

            The home secretary’s statement came in response to Labour’s Hilary Benn, who told MPs that EU citizens already in the UK would need to be documented so that employers and landlords could distinguish them from EU citizens arriving after Brexit.

            During Home Office questions in the Commons, Rudd also said she was aware of the need to continue the seasonal agricultural workers’ scheme after Brexit, but again ruled out demands to remove international students from the annual net migration target.

          • Diverse yet divided: UK is growing apart, Casey report finds

            The UK is becoming more divided as it becomes more diverse, a Government-commissioned review has claimed.

            In the report by Dame Louise Casey, it is revealed that the ‘pace of immigration in some areas has been too much’.

          • Theresa May’s government condemned for driving ‘more austerity and more racism’ after integration review

            Campaigners have condemned a review of integration for “adding to the politics of racism and scapegoating” after it called for immigrants to swear an oath to the UK and children to be taught “British values” in schools.

            Dame Louise Casey’s review, which was commissioned by the Government, found the country is becoming more divided amid growing “ethnic segregation” and that Muslim women in particular were being marginalised by limited English language skills.

          • Sorry, Louise Casey, but Muslim women are held back by discrimination

            Despite the fact that more British Muslim women than men are getting degrees, we are the most disenfranchised group in the country. Not only are we subject to high levels of unemployment and poverty, but discrimination on the basis of our faith, gender and ethnic background hinders our entry into the labour market.

          • Governor Vetoes Bill That Would Have Allowed Agencies To Withhold Names Of Officers Who Deploy Deadly Force

            Last month, Pennsylvania legislators wrapped up a little gift for the state’s law enforcement agencies: a bill that would have allowed agencies to withhold the names of officers involved in deployments of deadly force for at least 30 days. This was just the mandatory withholding window. The bill never stipulated a release date past that point, meaning “never” was also an acceptable time frame.

            The normal concerns for “officer safety” were given as the reason for the new opacity. Rather than see disclosure as an essential part of maintaining healthy relationships with the communities they served, law enforcement agencies saw disclosure as just another way to hurt already very well-protected officers.

            The DOJ itself — often a defender of entrenched police culture — recommended a 72-hour window for release of this information. State legislators, pushed by local police unions, felt constituents would be better served by being kept in the dark. Given the back-and-forth nature of public sentiment, it was unclear how Governor Tom Wolf would react to the passed proposal.

          • Theresa May urged to raise human rights concerns on Gulf visit

            Theresa May has been urged to confirm she will put human rights reform on her agenda when she meets Saudi and Bahraini leaders on Tuesday, after announcements on her two-day trip to the Gulf were squarely focused on trade and security.

            Rights campaigners in Bahrain argue that although the UK has been assisting Bahrain with judicial and police reform since 2012, current levels ofengagement on rights issues have not prevented crackdowns on journalists and pro-democracy activists in the country.

            May said: “I think the UK has always had the position, and we continue to have the position, that where there are issues raised about human rights, where there are concerns, we will rightly raise those.

          • The terrible human rights records of the countries Theresa May is having dinner with tonight

            Theresa May is visiting Bahrain to meet with leaders of Gulf states, who are in the country for a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

            She will attend a dinner with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman on Tuesday, before addressing the plenary session of the summit on Wednesday.

            The Prime Minister will use the visit to announce a new working group with regional nations to combat the financing of terrorists. The UK will provide three specialist cyber experts to the Gulf states to help deal with extremism.

          • Please, Theresa May, save my husband from death in Bahrain

            In 2014 Mohammed was arrested at Bahrain’s airport where he worked as a police officer. My husband believes in human rights, democracy and transparency. He attended peaceful marches in Bahrain calling for our government to respect these values. As a state employee, he knew that it was risky for him to go to these protests. But he believes in reform and so he went anyway.

            After Mohammed was taken into custody, our family heard nothing for four days – we had no idea where he was, or even if he was alive. Eventually, two weeks later, we were allowed to see him, but only with three guards watching us on a surveillance camera. As soon as we saw him, it was clear that Mohammed had been tortured by the security services.

            Mohammed seemed weak and exhausted, and his body was trembling; this suggested to us that he had been subjected to extreme torture. But no one would tell us the reasons for his arrest or the charges against him.

          • Angela Merkel Calls for Ban on Full-Face Veils in Germany

            To loud applause, Chancellor Angela Merkel told her party members on Tuesday that Germany should ban full-face veils “wherever legally possible” and that it would not tolerate any application of Shariah law over German justice.

            Accepting her party’s nomination as its candidate for another four-year term, the chancellor used the moment to broaden her stance on banning the veil, trying to deflect challenges from far-right forces that have made some of their deepest gains since World War II.

            In welcoming nearly one million asylum seekers to Germany a year ago, Ms. Merkel emerged as a powerful voice for tolerance across a Europe gripped by anxiety over waves of arriving migrants and fears of terrorism.

        • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

          • Will Donald Trump Dismantle the Internet as We Know It?

            Talking about net neutrality is so boring, the comedian John Oliver once quipped, that he would “rather listen to a pair of Dockers tell me about the weird dream it had” than delve into the topic.

            So it’s unsurprising that Donald Trump—an entertainer with a flair for the dramatic and little interest in wonky details—has stayed away from the issue almost entirely.

            If you want to captivate a nation, discussing thorny telecommunications policy is generally a terrible way to do it. (For those who have managed to avoid reading up on net neutrality thus far, the term refers to open-web principles aimed at curbing practices that give certain companies competitive advantages in how people access the internet. The FCC formally established rules last year that allow the agency to regulate broadband the way it oversees other public utilities. Those rules ban internet service providers from throttling—or slowing—connections to certain content online, and prohibit providers from offering faster connections to corporations that can afford to pay for premium web services. The rules also discourage zero-rating—in which an internet service provider subsidizes a consumer’s cost of going online but often does so in exchange for a competitive advantage.)

          • Millions in US still living life in Internet slow lane

            Millions of Americans still have extremely slow Internet speeds, a new Federal Communications Commission report shows. While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds of 25Mbps, about 47.5 million home or business Internet connections provided speeds below that threshold.

            Dealing with speeds a bit lower than the broadband standard isn’t too horrible, but there are still millions with speeds that just aren’t anywhere close to modern. Out of 102.2 million residential and business Internet connections, 22.4 million offered download speeds less than 10Mbps, with 5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps. About 25.1 million connections offered at least 10Mbps but less than 25Mbps.

            54.7 million households had speeds of at least 25Mbps, with 15.4 million of those at 100Mbps or higher. These are the advertised speeds, not the actual speeds consumers receive. Some customers will end up with slower speeds than what they pay for.

        • DRM

          • W3C at a crossroads: technology standards setter or legal arms-dealer?

            The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an amazing, long-running open standards body that has been largely responsible for the web’s growth and vibrancy, creating open standards that lets anyone make web technology and become part of the internet ecosystem.

            Since 2013, the W3C has been working on a very different kind of standard: Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), designed to enable DRM for streaming video, is more than a technology standard. Thanks to US-propagated laws that give DRM makers the right to sue people who break DRM, even for legal purposes, EME will — for the first time in W3C history — give its members the power to sue security researchers, accessibility toolmakers, and competitors who improve EME implementations, regardless of whether these improvements enable copyright infringement or other illegal outcomes.

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • Copyrights

            • Pirate Bay Blocking Case Heads Back to Court in Sweden

              In 2015, a coalition of copyright holders lost a court case which demanded an ISP blockade of The Pirate Bay in Sweden. A year later and Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music and Nordisk Film are back, hoping for a victory in a brand new court that could open the floodgates for widespread website blocking.

            • Court: ‘Falsely’ Accused ‘Movie Pirate’ Deserves $17K Compensation

              An Oregon District Court has sided with a wrongfully accused man, who was sued for allegedly downloading a pirated copy of the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler. According to the court’s recommendations, the man is entitled to more than $17,000 in compensation as the result of the filmmakers “overaggressive” and “unreasonable” tactics.

            • Wild Boys Sometimes Lose It: Duran Duran fail to reclaim their US copyright

              A few weeks after his eighteenth birthday, Duran Duran co-founder Nick Rhodes signed a music publishing agreement assigning his existing and future copyrights to a publisher, as did the other band members. None of them was aged more than 21 at the time.

            • Aussie Celebrities Join Campaign to Oppose Fair Use

              A campaign has been launched in Australia to prevent proposed changes to copyright law and the introduction of a “fair use” doctrine. Australia currently has a “fair dealing” provision but the royalties and anti-piracy group APRA AMCOS and its celebrity supporters are opposing rules that would provide more freedom.

            • Ten Years in Jail For UK Internet Pirates: How the New Bill Reads

              The Digital Economy Bill is currently at the report stage. It hasn’t yet become law and could still be amended. However, as things stand those who upload any amount of infringing content to the Internet could face up to 10 years in jail. With the latest bill now published, we take a look at how file-sharers could be affected.

        ]]>         http://techrights.org/2016/12/07/ubuntu-touch-ota-14/feed/ 0         More French Politicians Are Complaining That Benoît Battistelli is a Disgrace to France and Urge for Action http://techrights.org/2016/12/03/french-national-assembly-on-battistelli/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/03/french-national-assembly-on-battistelli/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2016 16:46:32 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97189 Battistelli

        Summary: The backlash against Battistelli spills well outside the EPO and is now apparent even at the French National Assembly

        THE EPO may not be the only casualty of the rather psychopathic (with God complex) Benoît Battistelli, the man who was somehow put in charge of the EPO only to destroy the institution Europe once took pride in.

        Battistelli is certainly one for the history books; he does enormous damage not just to the EPO technically (bad patents, brain drain etc.) but also to its reputation. Moreover, he spoils the reputation of France and creates/reinforces an antipathy stigma that’s hard(er) to shake off, even though some of Battistelli’s victims are French.

        Repeating what was said before by a female French politician (arguing Battistelli is “extremely damaging to the image of France”), Philip Cordery now tells the French National Assembly that Battistelli is a “disgrace to France”, according to this new article from The Register (published on a Saturday, their third article about the EPO this past week). To quote:

        President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Benoit Battistelli is a disgrace to his country, the French National Assembly heard Wednesday.

        “La présence du Français Benoît Battistelli à la tête de l’Office nuit aujourd’hui gravement à l’image de notre pays,” stated MP Philip Cordery in an address to the secretary of state for industry, Christophe Sirugue.

        The extraordinary personal attack comes as a number of politicians, media organizations and staff unions across Europe have joined a growing chorus of criticism against the civil servant for continued attacks on his own workers.

        For over a year, Battistelli has held several key members of the EPO staff union in disciplinary hearings and on restricted pay, claiming that they had been intimidating other employees. Last month, he took the momentous decision to fire the union’s former secretary, Laurent Prunier, despite an explicit resolution of the EPO’s governing Administrative Council telling him not to do so.

        Comments in IP Kat (right now/this past week) aren’t much more flattering and some some of them blame more than just Battistelli; blame is put also on the Council for refusing or failing to fire Battistelli and his ilk.

        To quote one comment:

        You may well be right. Perhaps this is why Monsieur le President feels so secure, despite conducting himself in a manner that would land him in civil court (and perhaps also in criminal court) in any EU country.

        This does beg the question: if EU leaders wanted to achieve certain goals that would currently be illegal due to some irksome EU law or other, could they set up an international organisation in order to effectively bypass those laws?

        For example, in order to deal with troublesome political enemies, could one or more EU Member States set up an international organisation (with the usual privileges and immunities granted to its staff) with a name such as “Totalitarian Organisation for the Re-education of Those Undeserving of Rights in Europe” – or “TORTURE” for short? I would like to think not, but what would stop it?

        If there are mechanisms that would stop the creation of a hypothetical organisation such as TORTURE, what are they? Would any of them be applicable to the EPO? If they would, is it too late to trigger them now? If not, how can they be triggered?

        It is clear that the President and his cronies have taken actions that are not “strictly necessary for its [the EPO's] administrative and technical operation”. I mean, at what point could it ever be argued that it is “strictly necessary” to fire a staff representative when your governing body has explicitly told you not to? Thus, due to the limitations of immunity under Article 3 PPI, the Organisation, if not any of its individual staff, ought to be liable for suit in a national court. Such suit might raise interesting questions of the duty of the President under Article 19(2) PPI.

        I do hope that there is a way out of this mess for the EPO. However, I fear that only legal action at a national court will be the answer: as what is to stop another clique of self-serving, money-grabbing, sociopathic “politicians” taking over the management of the EPO once the current President finally leaves?

        In reference to the Dutch Supreme Court:

        I suspect the Dutch Supreme Court Appeal might answer your question. It seems the court will find in favour of the EPO but, of course, the decision may well say a lot more about whether the EPO is morally wrong but technically safe. In doing so it should define the boundaries since that is the crux of the matter – where does immunity start. Don’t be surprised if the court is very direct and critical.

        The discussion about the Dutch Supreme Court continues as follows:

        Despite the AG’s opinion, I can’t see any reason to believe that it is likely that the Dutch Supreme Court will find in the EPO’s favour. This is because the AG’s opinion is so demonstrably full of holes that it is embarrassing. ILO-AT’s remit simply does not cover complaints relating to the rights at issue, and so to point to the possibility of complaining to ILO-AT is no answer to the plaintiff’s arguments.

        But perhaps you know something about the Supreme Court’s decision-making process that I do not.

        I would rather have expected that the government of the Netherlands (as well as all other national governments and/or heads of international organisations) would be at pains to avoid any suggestion of “political” interference in the Dutch judiciary. The independence of the judiciary is, after all, one of the cornerstones of democracy in Europe.

        Eponia does not need to obey anyone though, as it even openly brags about ignoring the Dutch Supreme Court if found guilty. As one person put it:

        The independence of the judiciary is, after all, one of the cornerstones of democracy in Europe.

        What century are you living in ?
        Certainly not the 21st century in Eponia !

        What a load of quaint antiquated Montesquieuesque nonsense !

        ILO’s ruling too can probably be ignored by Battistelli’s EPO and here is one comment about ILOAT, citing a PDF that we uploaded about a week ago.

        One of the two decisions which had been announced for exceptional public delivery by the ILOAT is now available here:

        http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ilo-3785.pdf

        It doesn´t seem extraordinary, but it is, and it might have serious implications for other appellants as well: the ILOAT refused to examine the case before it on its merits, but sent it back right away to the EPO for reconsideration by an Appeals Committe “composed in accordance with the applicable rules” (!!!)
        By analogy it must be expected that the numerous cases pending before the ILOAT concerning e.g. the disciplinary measures taken against staff mambers, or the contested guidelines relating to investigations, data protection, right to strike, etc … will be remitted to the EPO in the same way. It is a pity, and clear evidence that the EPO administration does not even abide to the most elementary statutory rules.

        “Facts are opinions,” one person wrote. “This is what EPO communication is about now. Facts are opinions…”

        EPO announcements/interviews/messages to media are also filled with lies these days. Lies have become the norm; it’s a post-truth era for the EPO.

        Battistelli, a Republican, does not seem to care what’s true, much like Donald Trump with his utterly bizarre opinions on climate. Only says ago Trump’s spokesperson Scottie Nell Hughes said “there’s no such thing as facts” and she earned many headlines for that outlandish remark.

        Here is the full comment about the EPO:

        Facts are opinions. This is what EPO communication is about now. Facts are opinions, firing staff representatives is not what it looks like, it is based on individual circumstances, it so happens that 100% of dismissals target senior union members. And opinions are facts: really, yes, the unnamed board member hid nazi memorabilia and weapons in his office, after all who are you to disagree, I am the one controlling communication here. All of this is a matter of degrees in a scale with no beginning and no end.

        So of course no definitive action need be taken by the administrative council. We are all still talking and arguing, you see. Let us put things in perspective.

        From my perspective, the time for talking is long gone; communication has become corrupted and dangerous. The rule of law has become an esoteric detail standing in the way of “modernisation” and “reforms”.

        Do not ever take BB and his cronies for anything other than what they are.

        The authoritarian style of management championed by the likes of Putin and Battistelli does no favrour to France ahead of increasingly worrisome elections. Battistelli’s political party seems to be having issues and a reader told us that “Sarkozy got sodded at the first round! Bastardelli’s caring daddy won’t get upped!! Yuk yuk!!!”

        Well, maybe he’ll stay around at the EPO even longer than his current term, or work at some capacity to fulfill his horrible UPC fantasies (he has done this for more than half a decade).

        Here is one more comment:

        It is a pity, and clear evidence that the EPO administration does not even abide to the most elementary statutory rules.

        That is only the tip of the iceberg.

        The real problem is that the AC will not demand any consequences or call those responsible for the mess to account, in particular DG5 legal services dilettantes who have created the problem with their anticipatory obedience to the forces of tyranny.

        You really have to wonder whether the AC will even realise the significance of this judgement.

        We won’t be quoting any more comments because many of them merely give a platform to trolls. The economics of Internet trolling are spectacular. One provocative comment is enough to cause a storm and take everything off topic. Readers of ours who also read IP Kat comments (especially over the past fortnight) will know what we mean. █

        ]]>         http://techrights.org/2016/12/03/french-national-assembly-on-battistelli/feed/ 0         Links 1/12/2016: Devuan Beta, R3 Liberates Code http://techrights.org/2016/12/01/r3-liberates-code/ http://techrights.org/2016/12/01/r3-liberates-code/#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2016 17:24:42 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=97149

        GNOME bluefish

        Contents

        GNU/Linux

        Free Software/Open Source

        Leftovers

        • Science

          • The conservative group behind efforts to intimidate professors

            Last week, a conservative group called Turning Point USA published a “Professor Watchlist” that targets academics accused of pushing a “radical agenda.” But the project is part of the group’s much larger effort to organize young conservatives on college campuses.

            Since its start in 2012, the group has started local chapters at hundreds of universities and high schools across the United States. Founder Charlie Kirk has used the megaphone of social media — he has over 84,000 followers on Twitter — and his regular television appearances as the conservative Millennial to bring attention to his organization and the Professor Watchlist.

            Although much of the The Turning Point USA website is benign, some of its resources claim affirmative action is unfair and suggest being confrontational with groups seeking safe spaces.

        • Hardware

          • Apple’s Bootcamp audio driver can permanently damage the speakers on the new MacBook Pro

            For the past 11 years, Apple has offered formal support for installing Windows on a Macintosh running OS X via its Boot Camp Assistant software. If you need Windows on a Macintosh and don’t want to use virtualization software to run it, Boot Camp will resize your hard drive partition to create a new Windows volume and ships with its own set of drivers for your underlying hardware. Apple tends to aggressively prune support for older operating systems — Boot Camp 6.1, which shipped with macOS 10.12 (Sierra), only supports Windows 10 — but Cupertino’s QA team clearly screwed up its compatibility testing, even with just one operating system to evaluate. Multiple customers who purchased one of Apple’s new MacBook Pros are reporting that the default Boot Camp audio driver can permanently damage the system’s speakers.

        • Health/Nutrition

          • WHO Board May Discuss UN High-Level Panel Report On Medicines Access

            The UN World Health Organization this week clarified that the possibility exists for the WHO Executive Board to discuss a recently released report from a UN Secretary General-appointed panel that makes recommendations for improving global access to medicines.

          • Tobacco giant predicts the end of smoking. Panic ensues

            A few years ago, I interviewed Dr Craig Ventner, the man who decoded the human genome, about his plan to save the planet. Ventner’s goal was to create a drop-in substitute for hydrocarbon fuels, using genetically modified algae.

            His algae facilities would be located beside high CO2 sources, and churn out synthetic oil. This could then be turned into aviation fuel, or petrol.

            It was the first low carbon project Exxon had ever invested in. The beauty of Ventner’s scheme was that much of the world’s transport infrastructure could carry on unmodified, with enormous savings on carbon dioxide emissions.*

          • Man in the Netherlands euthanised due to his alcohol addiction

            A man in the Netherlands has been allowed to die because he could no longer carry on living as an alcoholic.

            Mark Langedijk chose the day of his death and was telling jokes, drinking beer and eating ham sandwiches with his family hours before he passed away.

            He was killed by lethal injection at his parents’ home on 14 July, according to an account of the ordeal written by his brother and published in the magazine Linda.

            The Netherlands introduced a euthanasia law 16 years ago, which is available to people in “unbearable suffering” with no prospect of improvement.

          • Weaver: ‘It makes no sense’ Flint aid stalled

            Flint officials, including Mayor Karen Weaver, renewed their call Monday for Congress to approve aid for the lead-contaminated water crisis before its members break for the holidays.

            In a conference call, Weaver said lawmakers should push ahead for Flint aid in the Water Resources Development Act legislation funding for the city and its long-running water issues in a new budget bill.

            “Flint needs to stay a priority — we cannot let this go away,” she said. “This is November. We’re six months into our third year … that the residents of Flint have not been able to bathe or cool with their water. It makes no sense.”

          • There’s no water in Flint

            The most banal example philosophers use in discussing conceptual analysis is water; from Putnam’s twin earth papers to Kaplan’s two-dimensionalism, this is the classic example that is supposed to illustrate something valuable about the way that concepts work. I won’t delve too much into the traditional analyses, here, though a familiar observer may note this as a fairly strong rebuke of those analyses; I also won’t delve into whether or not water is a better or worse concept for such illustrations than its more problematic sibling, pain.

            Per Kaplan, we take it that any semantic analysis of water has to include two dimensions. The first dimension has to do with our ordinary exposure to water; water is the sort of thing that “plays the water role.” (To borrow Dave Chalmers’ locution.) That is, water is the stuff that functionally behaves like water, in that we drink it, and wash with it, etc. and that occupies the places that we expect water to occupy, e.g. lakes, rivers, bathtubs, etc. This is the ordinary dimension of water.

          • This Is Why the Flint Water Crisis Is Still Ongoing

            Of course you do. It’s the city in Michigan where drinking water was contaminated by lead seeping through pipes in 2014. City officials denied the leakage problem for months, causing a serious problem, NPR reported. High blood lead levels ensued as Flint residents drank the water, which was particularly harmful to children and pregnant women, causing learning disabilities in developing brains.

          • Flint family says Navy is retaliating for speaking out about water crisis

            Lee Anne Walters and her family were the first in Flint, Michigan, to discover that there were astronomically high levels of lead in the water and alert the Environmental Protection Agency. But the family now says her criticism and advocacy during the water crisis has been met with workplace retaliation and harassment against her husband, a sailor with the US Navy.

            “We’re still recovering from Flint. We never thought we’d be in this position again,” Walters said, explaining that she is afraid her husband is in danger of losing his job. “We are afraid now for our livelihoods.”

            Dennis Walters, a 17-year Navy veteran, has filed a complaint claiming mistreatment at work due to his wife’s role in the Flint water crisis.

            In a complaint filed last week, Dennis Walters claims that he has been repeatedly mistreated at the Sewells Point Police Precinct, which is part of Naval Station Norfolk, because his wife has been so outspoken. He claims that the pattern of harassment began in March after she testified in Congress.

            “Since I testified at the state Senate hearing, things got progressively worse,” Lee Anne Walters said. “They threatened to force him into a hardship discharge if he didn’t get me under control.”

        • Security

          • Security advisories for Wednesday
          • What Malware Is on Your Router?

            Mirai is exposing a serious security issue with the Internet of Things that absolutely must be quickly handled.

            Until a few days ago, I had been seriously considering replacing the 1999 model Apple Airport wireless router I’ve been using since it was gifted to me in 2007. It still works fine, but I have a philosophy that any hardware that’s more than old enough to drive probably needs replacing. I’ve been planning on taking the 35 mile drive to the nearest Best Buy outlet on Saturday to see what I could get that’s within my price range.

            After the news of this week, that trip is now on hold. For the time being I’ve decided to wait until I can be reasonably sure that any router I purchase won’t be hanging out a red light to attract the IoT exploit-of-the-week.

            It’s not just routers. I’m also seriously considering installing the low-tech sliding door devices that were handed out as swag at this year’s All Things Open to block the all-seeing-eye of the web cams on my laptops. And I’m becoming worried about the $10 Vonage VoIP modem that keeps my office phone up and running. Thank goodness I don’t have a need for a baby monitor and I don’t own a digital camera, other than what’s on my burner phone.

          • National Lottery ‘hack’ is the poster-girl of consumer security fails

            IN THE NEW age of hacking, you don’t even need to be a hacker. National Lottery management company Camelot has confirmed that up to 26,500 online accounts for their systems may have been compromised in an attempted hack, that required no hacking.

            It appears the players affected have been targetted from hacks to other sites, and the resulting availability of their credentials on the dark web. With so many people using the same password across multiple sites, it takes very little brute force to attack another site, which is what appears to have happened here.

          • Mozilla and Tor release urgent update for Firefox 0-day under active attack

            “The security flaw responsible for this urgent release is already actively exploited on Windows systems,” a Tor official wrote in an advisory published Wednesday afternoon. “Even though there is currently, to the best of our knowledge, no similar exploit for OS X or Linux users available, the underlying bug affects those platforms as well. Thus we strongly recommend that all users apply the update to their Tor Browser immediately.”

            The Tor browser is based on the open-source Firefox browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Shortly after this post went live, Mozilla security official Daniel Veditz published a blog post that said the vulnerability has also been fixed in a just-released version of Firefox for mainstream users. On early Wednesday, Veditz said, his team received a copy of the attack code that exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Firefox.

          • Tor Browser 6.0.7 is released

            Tor Browser 6.0.7 is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory.

            This release features an important security update to Firefox and contains, in addition to that, an update to NoScript (2.9.5.2).

            The security flaw responsible for this urgent release is already actively exploited on Windows systems. Even though there is currently, to the best of our knowledge, no similar exploit for OS X or Linux users available the underlying bug affects those platforms as well. Thus we strongly recommend that all users apply the update to their Tor Browser immediately. A restart is required for it to take effect.

            Tor Browser users who had set their security slider to “High” are believed to have been safe from this vulnerability.

          • Firefox 0-day in the wild is being used to attack Tor users

            Firefox developer Mozilla and Tor have patched the underlying vulnerability, which is found not only in the Windows version of the browser, but also the versions of Mac OS X and Linux.

            There’s a zero-day exploit in the wild that’s being used to execute malicious code on the computers of people using Tor and possibly other users of the Firefox browser, officials of the anonymity service confirmed Tuesday.

            Word of the previously unknown Firefox vulnerability first surfaced in this post on the official Tor website. It included several hundred lines of JavaScript and an introduction that warned: “This is an [sic] JavaScript exploit actively used against TorBrowser NOW.” Tor cofounder Roger Dingledine quickly confirmed the previously unknown vulnerability and said engineers from Mozilla were in the process of developing a patch.

          • Mozilla Patches SVG Animation Remote Code Execution in Firefox and Thunderbird

            If you’ve been reading the news lately, you might have stumbled upon an article that talked about a 0-day vulnerability in the Mozilla Firefox web browser, which could be used to attack Tor users running Tor Browser on Windows systems.

        • Defence/Aggression

          • France wants urgent U.N. Security Council meeting on Aleppo

            France called on Tuesday for an immediate United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the situation in Aleppo and said it would press for a U.N. resolution to punish the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

            Speaking ahead of a meeting in the Belarusian capital Minsk on the Ukrainian crisis, Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Syrian government forces and their allies would not resolve the Syrian conflict by carrying out one of the “biggest massacres on a civilian population since World War Two.”

          • Women who are captured by Isis and kept as slaves endure more than just sexual violence

            On August 3 2014, Isis attacked the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq, as part of their campaign to eradicate the Yazidi people and “purify” the region of non-Islamic influences.

            That same day, Prince Tahseen Said, leader of the Yazidi people, issued an “urgent distress call” to the international community to “to assume their humanitarian and nationalistic responsibilities” and help the 40,000 Yazidis who had fled their homes in the district.

            But it was already too late for Nadia Murad. Aged 19, she lived in the quiet farming village of Kocho, within the area around Sinjar ISIS had selected for “purification”. Before the Isis militants arrived, she lived with her large family of brothers and sisters and was studying at high school, harbouring dreams of becoming a history teacher and perhaps a make-up artist.

            But Nadia’s dreams were shattered as war ravaged Sinjar. Now she was simply an Isis sex slave.

          • Arrested German spy was a onetime gay porn actor — and a secret Islamist

            Two weeks ago, German intelligence agents noticed an unusual user in a chat room known as a digital hideout for Islamic militants. The man claimed to be one of them — and said he was a German spy. He was offering to help Islamists infiltrate his agency’s defenses to stage a strike.

            Agents lured him into a private chat, and he gave away so many details about the spy agency — and his own directives within it to thwart Islamists — that they quickly identified him, arresting the 51-year-old the next day. Only then would the extent of his double life become clear.

          • Reports: Islamic extremist mole found in German intel agency

            A 51-year-old German man working for the country’s domestic intelligence service is reportedly under investigation for allegedly disclosing internal information on Islamic extremist chat sites.

            Der Spiegel magazine reported Tuesday the man’s activities were detected by the intelligence agency, known as the BfV, about four weeks ago. He’s alleged to have been trying to pass on sensitive information while using a false name and also making Islamic extremist comments.

          • Law Enforcement In Ohio Apparently Unable To Sound Out Words To Motive In OSU Attack

            Islam demands the death or conversion of “the infidel,” which, no, isn’t to say that an individual Muslim necessarily practices this way.

            But the Quran is said to have been handed down from Allah to the Angel Gabriel, unlike the Bible, which was written by men. This means that the Quran is said to be unchangeable and unquestionable — including the violence-commanding verses, which “abrogate” (erase) the peaceful verses earlier in the book, from before Mohammed got power. This he did by not just starting a religion but a religion that gave his followers — basically early gang members — the go-ahead to attack and loot passing caravans and then even attack, murder, and rape people living in cities. (The men were slaughtered; the women were turned into sex slaves — as we see with the modern Yazidi women.)

            Here in America, we gave this man a home — this Somali refugee — and he repays us by trying to slaughter Americans.

          • Report: 240,000 Nigerians who fled Boko Haram still outside the country

            Nearly a quarter million Nigerians remain refugees in neighboring countries after fleeing Boko Haram, a government agency reported.

            Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency said in a report that it identified 239,834 refugees — including 20,804 in Chad, 80,709 in Cameroon and 138,321 in Niger. It added that 28,951 former refugees have returned to Nigeria.

            The report also cited the humanitarian work of NEMA and the United Nations in bringing relief aid to the displaced Nigerians, the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard reported Tuesday.

          • Was Brussels terror suspect radicalized in Sweden?

            A former Stockholm resident suspected of involvement in the recent terror attacks in Paris and Brussels also had links with an extreme Islamist network in the Scandinavian country, SVT’s Uppdrag granskning program reports.

            Mohamed Belkaid was killed during a police raid in Brussels on March 15th. Belgian investigators believe he played a role in the November 13th, 2015 massacres in Paris, as well as organizing the subsequent attack in Brussels, though he was killed before the bombings in the Belgian capital took place.

            The Algerian lived in Sweden between 2009 and 2013. In 2014, he travelled to Syria and signed up for Isis suicide missions, according to leaked records of people who signed up to the terrorist organization between 2013 and 2014 which Uppdrag granskning examined.

          • Suspect Identified in Ohio State Attack as Abdul Razak Ali Artan

            An Ohio State University student posted a rant shortly before he plowed a car into a campus crowd and stabbed people with a butcher knife in an ambush that ended when a police officer shot him dead, a law enforcement official said.

            Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 18, wrote on what appears to be his Facebook page that he had reached a “boiling point,” made a reference to “lone wolf attacks” and cited radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

            “America! Stop interfering with other countries, especially Muslim Ummah [community]. We are not weak. We are not weak, remember that,” the post said.

          • Trump Could Pump Tens of Billions Into the Army, Only to Make It Worse

            President-elect Donald Trump wants a much bigger and more powerful US military. More Navy ships. More Air Force fighter planes. And a much bigger Army with tens of thousands of additional soldiers.

            But Trump and his administration should be careful. Lavishing the Army with money might result in a bigger Army, but it won’t necessarily result in a better Army. America’s ground-combat branch has a reputation for dramatically squandering huge cash windfalls.

            Trump hasn’t detailed exactly how he’ll grow the military—or how much it might cost. But outside experts estimate Trump’s Pentagon could cost US taxpayers an additional $900 billion over 10 years compared to President Barack Obama’s current spending plan.

          • Trump is considering a secretary of state with a much worse scandal than Clinton’s emails

            Yesterday, former CIA Director David Petraeus journeyed to Trump Tower, reportedly making an audition for the post. The visit brought to mind the scandal Petraeus has become known for, and invited parallels to Clinton’s misuse of classified information. But Petraeus’ incident, as far as it can be compared, was deemed far more severe by investigators.

            In 2012, Petraeus resigned as CIA Director, and it was later revealed he had provided classified information to his biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell. Petraeus eventually admitted to providing information from “black books,” which included covert officers’ identities, intelligence capabilities, and notes on meetings with President Obama.

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • Shrinking glaciers cause state-of-emergency drought in Bolivia

            The government of Bolivia, a landlocked country in the heart of South America, has been forced to declare a state of emergency as it faces its worst drought for at least 25 years.

            Much of the water supply to La Paz, the highest capital city in the world, and the neighbouring El Alto, Bolivia’s second largest city, comes from the glaciers in the surrounding Andean mountains.

            But the glaciers are now shrinking rapidly, illustrating how climate change is already affecting one of the poorest countries in Latin America.

            The three main dams that supply La Paz and El Alto are no longer fed by runoff from glaciers and have almost run dry. Water rationing has been introduced in La Paz, and the poor of El Alto – where many are not yet even connected to the mains water supply – have staged protests.

          • Neil Young, Daryl Hannah Pen Message to Standing Rock Protestors

            Young and Hannah’s Facebook statement comes after police fired rubber bullets and water cannons at protestors at the site of proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, an altercation that sent nearly 20 protestors to the hospital.

            “We are calling upon you, President Barack Obama, to step in and end the violence against the peaceful water protectors at Standing Rock immediately,” the duo wrote.

            “Your growing activism in support of freedom over repression, addressing climate change, swiftly replacing a destructive old industries with safe, regenerative energy, encouraging wholistic thinking in balance with the future of our planet; that activism will strengthen and shed continued light on us all. These worthy goals must be met for the all the world’s children and theirs after them. This is our moment for truth.”

          • NYTimes: Veterans to Serve as ‘Human Shields’ for Dakota Pipeline Protesters

            As many as 2,000 veterans planned to gather next week at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to serve as “human shields” for protesters who have for months clashed with the police over the construction of an oil pipeline, organizers said.

        • Finance

          • GoPro Slashes 15% of Workforce, Shuts Down Entertainment Division [Ed: Microsoft engaged in blackmail and extortion with patents against them this year]

            GoPro announced that it will lay off more than 200 employees and freeze hiring, amounting to a reduction of about 15% of its workforce, and as part of the restructuring is shutting down its entertainment division. In addition, the company said president Tony Bates will be leaving the company.

          • Ericsson confirms close of production in Boras, Kumla [Ed: Well, the company is a patent troll now. Avoid it.]

            Says as previously announced, Ericsson will make significant reductions in its operations in Boras and Kumla

          • Ericsson denies systematic bribery allegations

            Following the broadcast of a radio documentary on Swedish Radio on November 23, telecommunications and networking equipment supplier Ericsson has issued a statement saying that is disagrees with claims made in the media that Ericsson has used bribes deliberately and systematically.

          • Trump is apparently still terrified about financial conflicts so now he’s tweeting about flag-burning and CNN

            Last weekend, the New York Times published an outstanding, meticulously reported investigative story about Trump’s financial conflicts of interest — the sorts of things that could lead to forced divestiture, impeachment, or worse, triggering a tweetstorm from the president-elect about an imaginary, millions-strong cohort of fraudulent voters.

            However, the story about Trump’s conflicts is still in the news — it refuses to die the way that Trump’s $25,000,000 fraud settlement did — so Trump is scraping the barrel for new things to distract the press with.

            One of those subjects is flag-burning, a form of political speech twice deemed constitutionally protected by the Supreme Court (Trump says it isn’t, that people should be imprisoned and stripped of citizenship for participating in). Trump will get to appoint between one and three Supreme Court justices, and he says he’ll opt for a “strict constitutionalist” meaning that his court will uphold the First Amendment protections for flag-burners, so this isn’t a story.

          • A disappointing TTIP human rights assessment

            ECORYS published a final draft human rights assessment of the trade agreement with the US (TTIP). The official name is a Trade Sustainability Impact Assessment (TSIA). I provided feedback on an earlier draft, see here. In my opinion, the final draft is disappointing. I will give two examples.

          • EU Executive to step up efforts to set up international investment dispute settlement system

            EU Executive to step up efforts to set up international investment dispute settlement system

            The European Commission wants to give a strong push within the EU and around the globe for the establishment of a multilateral investment dispute settlement system to replace the controversial ad-hoc arbitration known as the investor to state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism. The aim is to set it up as soon as possible even with a small number of countries but with a “dock-in” system for others to join at the later stage.

          • Hundreds Of Civil Society Groups Urge RCEP Negotiators To Reject Imported TPP Clauses

            As 16 Asia and Pacific nations prepare to meet in Indonesia next week for the next round of negotiations for a large regional trade agreement called RCEP, more than 300 civil society groups signed a letter urging negotiators to reject efforts to bring in texts from the separate Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

            The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiation includes the 10 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members plus China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.

          • Goldman shares hit highest level since financial crisis in post-election rally [Ed: Billionaires love having an oligarch who loves them too in the White House]

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

          • 5 Signs Donald Trump Is Going To Hate The Next Four Years

            Holy shit you guys, Trump is going to be president. That’s bonkers. Like, I know you’re probably sick of hearing this every week on Cracked, but … Donald Trump is going to be the next president. Our president-elect is a spray-tanned reality TV star celebrated by actual white supremacists and terrorists. That is hilarious on paper, but deeply unsettling in reality … like Muppet rabies, or a wizard masturbating.

            But at least there’s a small silver lining, and it’s that, while the American people certainly don’t want Donald Trump to be president … Donald Trump doesn’t want to be president either. At least, not when the full weight of the job finally hits him, and it becomes chillingly clear that he is in way over his head in every conceivable way. Imagine how he’s going to feel when he realizes …

            [...]

            I hate to break this to you, future-President Trump (we both know you read all my work), but even popular presidents get booed a whole lot. Obama was a brainy personified bear hug of a man, and even he got 30 death threats a day. Because no matter your charm, there is always going to be a large group of people getting triple-screwed by the system. And policies and party completely aside, Donald Trump has no charm. In fact, Donald J. Trump has all the social and sexual appeal of a maternity ward fire. He’ll be the first president with less charisma than the foam puppet version Gwar slaughters on stage.

          • Trump: The Choice We Face

            With the election of Donald Trump—a candidate who has lied his way into power, openly embraced racist discourse and violence, toyed with the idea of jailing his opponents, boasted of his assaults on women and his avoidance of taxes, and denigrated the traditional checks and balances of government—this question has confronted us as urgently as ever. After I wrote a piece about surviving autocracy, a great many people have asked me about one of my proposed rules: “Do not compromise.” What constitutes compromise? How is it possible to avoid it? Why should one not compromise?

            When I wrote about my great-grandfather in a book many years ago, I included the requisite discussion of Hannah Arendt’s opinion on the Jewish councils in Nazi-occupied Europe, which she called “undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story” of the Holocaust. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem she asserted that without Jewish cooperation Germany would have been unable to round up and kill as many Jews as it did. I quoted equally from the most comprehensive response to Arendt’s characterization of the Judenrat, Isaiah Trunk’s book Judenrat, in which he described the councils as complicated and contradictory organizations, ones that had functioned differently in different ghettos, and ultimately concluded that they had no effect on the final scope of the catastrophe.

          • The No-BS Inside Guide to the Presidential Vote Recount

            There’s been so much complete nonsense since I first broke the news that the Green Party would file for a recount of the presidential vote, I am compelled to write a short guide to flush out the BS and get to just the facts, ma’am.

          • Jill Stein: Recounts are Necessary Because Electronic Voting Invites Tampering, Hacking, Human Error

            Former presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is continuing her efforts to force recounts in three states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But on Tuesday the effort faced a setback as a Wisconsin judge refused to order a statewide hand recount. Instead, the judge ruled that each of the state’s 72 county clerks can decide on their own how to carry out the recount. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin by less than 30,000 votes out of 2.8 million cast. The result was even closer in Michigan, where Trump won by just 12,000 votes. Stein is expected to file paperwork in Michigan by today’s deadline to request a recount there. More than 130,000 people have donated more than $6.5 million Stein’s efforts—that’s nearly double how much Stein raised during her presidential effort. We speak to Jill Stein.

          • Trump taps ex-Goldman banker Mnuchin for Treasury post

            President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker who profited from the housing meltdown, as his Treasury secretary, according to an official briefed on the decision.

            Mnuchin’s career has been full of contradictions. He started as a Wall Street insider working for old-line firms before running a series of eclectic businesses — including his own hedge fund and a West Coast consumer bank. In recent years, he has been a Hollywood movie producer.

          • Electoral College voters form group to block Trump presidency

            Electoral College voters based in Colorado have formed a political non-profit to block Donald Trump from the presidency.

            According to The Denver Post, Michael Baca, a Democratic elector, filed paperwork Tuesday with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office to create the “Hamilton Electors,” a group able to fundraise unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and labor unions for political reasons.

            The goal of the group is to convince Republican and Democratic Electoral College voters to unify behind a Republican alternative for President or force an Electoral College deadlock.

            “I was opposed, actually, to raising money because I would prefer to just have this done organically,” Baca told The Denver Post. “But we’ve had people throwing money at us through our website.”

          • Forget Jill Stein’s recount! It’s yet another distraction from the deep structural problems that led to President Donald Trump

            One thing I’ve learned from my infrequent forays into legal gambling is that no matter how rational a person might imagine herself to be, it’s damn near impossible not to fall into superstitious behaviors when you belly up to a craps table.

            You have no control over the dice. You know you have no control over the dice. But in your desperation to win, you start crossing your fingers, kissing the dice or doing other little rituals meant to exert some kind of imaginary control over those tumbling bones, to deceive yourself into thinking that you can escape the heartless mathematical probabilities that say there’s a 1 in 6 chance your roll will be a 7.

          • Why I Support An Election Audit, Even Though It’s Unlikely To Change The Outcome

            Here at FiveThirtyEight, we’ve been skeptical of claims of irregularities in the presidential election. As we pointed out last week, there are no obvious statistical anomalies in the results in swing states based on the type of voting technology that each county employed. Instead, demographic differences, particularly the education levels of voters, explain the shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016 fairly well.

            But that doesn’t mean I take some sort of philosophical stance against a recount or an audit of elections returns, or that other people at FiveThirtyEight do. Such efforts might make sense, with a couple of provisos.

            The first proviso: Let’s not call it a “recount,” because that’s not really what it is. It’s not as though merely counting the ballots a second or third time is likely to change the results enough to overturn the outcome in three states. An apparent win by a few dozen or a few hundred votes might be reversed by an ordinary recount. But Donald Trump’s margins, as of this writing, are roughly 11,000 votes in Michigan, 23,000 votes in Wisconsin and 68,000 votes in Pennsylvania. There’s no precedent for a recount overturning margins like those or anything close to them. Instead, the question is whether there was a massive, systematic effort to manipulate the results of the election.

          • Security experts join Jill Stein’s ‘election changing’ recount campaign

            More election security experts have joined Jill Stein’s campaign to review the presidential vote in battleground states won by Donald Trump, as she sues Wisconsin to secure a full recount by hand of all its 3m ballots.

            Half a dozen academics and other specialists on Monday submitted new testimony supporting a lawsuit from Stein against Wisconsin authorities, in which she asked a court to prevent county officials from carrying out their recounts by machine.

          • Why is Jill Stein pushing for recounts, again?

            Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein of Lexington has agreed to pay millions for Wisconsin officials to begin recounting ballots, filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania, and indicated she will file for a recount in Michigan (the deadline is Wednesday).

            But why? There’s understandably a lot of confusion over Stein’s intentions for these costly legal proceedings, and both Democrats and Republicans are rolling their eyes at her efforts, which they view as a waste of time.

          • Trump’s team of gazillionaires

            Beyond Trump himself, who claims a net worth of more than $10 billion, the president-elect has tapped businesswoman Betsy DeVos, whose family is worth $5.1 billion, and is said to be considering oil mogul Harold Hamm ($15.3 billion), investor Wilbur Ross ($2.9 billion), private equity investor Mitt Romney ($250 million at last count), hedge fund magnate Steven Mnuchin (at least $46 million) and super-lawyer Rudy Giuliani (estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars) to round out his administration. And Trump’s likely choice for deputy commerce secretary, Todd Ricketts, comes from the billionaire family that owns the Chicago Cubs.

        • Censorship/Free Speech

          • Jeremy Hunt is being accused of censorship over his plan to ban teen sexting

            British health secretary Jeremy Hunt has called for social media companies and messaging apps to ban teen sexting — prompting fury and ridicule from activists and internet users.

            “I just ask myself the simple question as to why it is that you can’t prevent the texting of sexually explicit images by people under the age of 18,” Hunt told a Commons health committee. “Because there is technology that can identify sexually explicit pictures and prevent it being transmitted.”

          • No Jeremy Hunt, you can’t use tech to ban sexting for the under-18s

            Cyberbullying, sexting and all other aspects of online life that cause teenagers misery may seem pretty complex and intractable problems. But not for Jeremy Hunt. Somehow, when not dealing with despairing junior doctors, he’s found the time to devise a simple solution to end them all.

            In case you’ve missed it, the health secretary’s big idea to tackle the – very real – problems of sexting and cyberbullying is to call on social media and tech companies to ban them.

          • Mossberg: Facebook can and should wipe out fake news [Ed: Well, who defines “fake”? Another censorship pretext. Like “hate”. Satire banned too?

            Totally false news isn’t a new thing in the United States. In our fourth presidential election, in 1800, two of our most brilliant founders — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — faced off in a vicious campaign that involved newspaper editors on the take, and numerous false, often personal attacks. Some historians even claim that partisans for Adams spread the rumor that Jefferson was dead. (He won anyway.)

            But they didn’t have Facebook to present, amplify, and repeat those falsehoods instantly to millions of people. And that’s why the fake news problem is so serious, even outside the context of a presidential election.

          • WeChat Censoring User Messages Even Outside China, Study Says

            Users of the WeChat instant-messaging platform can have their content censored even if they leave China or switch to an overseas phone number, according to a research group.

            WeChat accounts registered with a mainland China-based phone number have keywords filtered out or messages blocked anywhere in the world as long they keep the same user name, according to a study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. Accounts created abroad, such as through carriers in Hong Kong or the U.S., don’t face the same restrictions, it said.

            “The idea that you can’t escape a censorship system imposed on you at the time of registration is a troubling one,” said Jason Q. Ng, a research fellow at the Citizen Lab.

          • Universities Strive for Diversity in Everything but Opinion

            My seminar students at McGill University told me that you can’t say anything at this university without being accused of being sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, fascist, or racist, and then being threatened with punitive measures. They felt silenced by the oppressive atmosphere of political correctness. Nothing significant – sex, religion, relationships, public policy, race, immigration, or multiculturalism – could be discussed. Only the acceptable opinions could be expressed without nasty repercussions.

            It is generally held today in the West, if not elsewhere, that diversity is a good thing. Diversity in origin, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexual preference is now regarded as not only desirable, but mandatory. Universities strive to increase their physical diversity. The currently accepted theory in Western academia is that physical diversity reflects diversity of experience and thus an enriching diversity of viewpoint.

            McGill’s committee on diversity proposed that we no longer define excellence as intellectual achievement, but as diversity. Their view is that a university populated by folks of different colours or having different sexual preferences is by virtue of this diversity “excellent.”

          • Russia Turns to China for Help Building Its Own “Great Firewall” of Censorship

            Russia wants to step up its ability to censor the Internet, and it’s turning to China for help.

            China’s “Great Firewall” is the envy of the Putin regime, which has long feared that the rise of online political activism could loosen its grip on power. The government has spent years building a system for filtering the country’s Internet—but it is incomplete, and many U.S.-based Internet companies have thumbed their nose at the Kremlin’s rules.

            That’s now changing. In June, the Russian government passed a series of measures known as Yarovaya’s laws that require local telecom companies to store all users’ data for six months, and hang on to metadata for three years. And if the authorities ask, companies must provide keys to unlock encrypted communications. Human rights watchdog groups were aghast at the measure. Edward Snowden, who is holed up in Russia, called the package the “Big Brother law.”

          • Archive.org Moving To Canada Over Trump Censorship Fears

            The data isn’t in yet on whether Americans are packing for Canada in droves following Donald Trump’s electoral win, but a digital copy of the history of the Internet is going to make the move north.

            Archive.org, a digital library that caches and indexes older versions of websites for the historical record, says it’s creating a backup copy of its collection that it will keep on servers in Canada.

            “We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because, to quote our friends at LOCKSS, ‘lots of copies keep stuff safe’,” Archive.org said in a blog post published Tuesday.

          • Entire internet to be backed up in Canada over fears of Trump censorship
          • The Internet Archive is building a Canadian copy to protect itself from Trump
          • The Entire Internet Will Be Archived In Canada to Protect It From Trump

        • Privacy/Surveillance

          • NSA and FBI Believe They Will Gain More Surveillance Power Under Trump

            Expanded surveillance power will likely be given to the FBI, NSA and CIA under President-elect Donald Trump. The Republican-controlled Congress will help this happen and privacy advocates have already started creating an opposition.

          • FBI, NSA, CIA Poised to Gain increased Surveillance Powers Under Trump

            The FBI, National Security Agency and CIA are likely to gain expanded surveillance powers under President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress, a prospect that has privacy advocates and some lawmakers trying to mobilize opposition.

            Trump’s first two choices to head law enforcement and intelligence agencies — Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo for director of the Central Intelligence Agency — are leading advocates for domestic government spying at levels not seen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

          • The ‘snooper’s charter’ is a threat to academic freedom

            The UK Investigatory Powers Bill has passed into law. This bill legalises a variety of tools for intercepting and hacking by security services and was waved through without complaint by both houses. Academics should be concerned – and engage in some serious discussion about the (mis-)use of technological advances.

          • IRS Casts Unusually Wide Net for Bitcoin User Data

            A request by the IRS for user data from a bitcoin exchange highlights simmering tensions between compliance and customer privacy for financial institutions and will test how those demands are balanced in the young field of cryptocurrency.

            Under a procedure called a John Doe summons, the IRS this month asked a federal court in California to approve its request for Coinbase to turn over records on any user who had made digital currency transactions between 2013 and 2015.

            At issue is the indiscriminate nature of the request. Coinbase has accumulated nearly 5 million users, according to its website – which could mean the company might be forced to turn over financial records on millions of U.S. taxpayers.

          • ‘Snooper’s charter’ bill becomes law, extending UK state surveillance

            The “snooper’s charter” bill extending the reach of state surveillance in Britain was given royal assent and became law on Tuesday as signatures on a petition calling for it to be repealed passed the 130,000 mark.

            The home secretary, Amber Rudd, hailed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 as “world-leading legislation” that provided “unprecedented transparency and substantial privacy protection”.

            But privacy campaigners claimed that it would provide an international standard to authoritarian regimes around the world to justify their own intrusive surveillance powers.

          • FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails

            A last-ditch effort in the Senate to block or delay rule changes that would expand the U.S. government’s hacking powers failed Wednesday, despite concerns the changes would jeopardize the privacy rights of innocent Americans and risk possible abuse by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

            Democratic Senator Ron Wyden attempted three times to delay the changes, which will take effect on Thursday and allow U.S. judges will be able to issue search warrants that give the FBI the authority to remotely access computers in any jurisdiction, potentially even overseas. His efforts were blocked by Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican.

            The changes will allow judges to issue warrants in cases when a suspect uses anonymizing technology to conceal the location of his or her computer or for an investigation into a network of hacked or infected computers, such as a botnet.

          • U.S. border agents stopped journalist from entry and took his phones

            Award-winning Canadian photojournalist Ed Ou has had plenty of scary border experiences while reporting from the Middle East for the past decade. But his most disturbing encounter was with U.S. Customs and Border Protection last month, he said.

            On Oct. 1, customs agents detained Ou for more than six hours and briefly confiscated his mobile phones and other reporting materials before denying him entry to the United States, according to Ou. He was on his way to cover the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline on behalf of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation.

            If Ou had already been inside the U.S. border, law enforcement officers would have needed a warrant to search his smartphones to comply with a 2014 Supreme Court ruling. But the journalist learned the hard way that the same rules don’t apply at the border, where the government claims the right to search electronic devices without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing.

          • Facebook has cut off Prisma’s Live Video access

            Style transfer startup Prisma added support to its iOS app for livestreaming its art filter effects in real-time via Facebook Live earlier this month — but almost immediately the startup’s access to the Live API was cut off by the social media platform giant.

          • Facebook Cuts Off Competitor Prisma’s API Access

            Photo-filter app Prisma, the popular program which makes pictures and video look like painterly art, had its access to Facebook’s Live Video API revoked this month, TechCrunch reports.

            According to Prisma, Facebook justified choking off Prisma’s access by stating, “Your app streams video from a mobile device camera, which can already be done through the Facebook app. The Live Video API is meant to let people publish live video content from other sources such as professional cameras, multi-camera setups, games or screencasts.”

          • China Turns Big Data into Big Brother

            That’s a reimagining of the introduction to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. But it’s also set to become a reality for citizens of China if the government’s dream of an authoritarian big-data scheme comes to fruition.

            The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese government is now testing systems that will be used to create digital records of citizens’ social and financial behavior. In turn, these will be used to create a so-called social credit score, which will determine whether individuals have access to services, from travel and education to loans and insurance cover. Some citizens—such as lawyers and journalists—will be more closely monitored.

            Planning documents apparently describe the system as being created to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” The Journal claims that the system will at first log “infractions such as fare cheating, jaywalking and violating family-planning rules” but will be expanded in the future—potentially even to Internet activity.

          • Intelligence experts urge Obama to end Edward Snowden’s ‘untenable exile’

            Fifteen former staff members of the Church committee, the 1970s congressional investigation into illegal activity by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, have written jointly to Obama calling on him to end Snowden’s “untenable exile in Russia, which benefits nobody”. Over eight pages of tightly worded argument, they remind the president of the positive debate that Snowden’s disclosures sparked – prompting one of the few examples of truly bipartisan legislative change in recent years.

            They also remind Obama of the long record of leniency that has been shown by his own and previous administrations towards those who have broken secrecy laws. They even recall how their own Church committee revealed that six US presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, were guilty of abusing secret powers.

          • Uber wants more user data

            The most recent update to Uber’s ride-hailing app allows the platform to track user location data even while the app isn’t in use, according to TechCrunch.

            Earlier versions of the app only tracked user data while the app was running, however, the update requests users’ permission to keep location sharing always on. Uber plans to use the data gained to improve the user experience, like by offering more accurate pick-up times and locations.

        • Civil Rights/Policing

          • How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’

            Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.

            His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline.

            Mr. Mounk’s interest in the topic began rather unusually. In 2014, he published a book, “Stranger in My Own Country.” It started as a memoir of his experiences growing up as a Jew in Germany, but became a broader investigation of how contemporary European nations were struggling to construct new, multicultural national identities.

            He concluded that the effort was not going very well. A populist backlash was rising. But was that just a new kind of politics, or a symptom of something deeper?

          • Opinion: National Anthem in cinema halls may go against the very idea of why Supreme Court made it compulsory

            The Supreme Court on Wednesday made playing the national anthem in cinema theatres before the commencement of a film mandatory. The judgement, delivered by a bench led by Justice Dipak Misra underlined that the measure would ‘instil a sense of committed patriotism and nationalism’ in citizens. The root of the new compulsion is instilling a sense of national identity, integrity and constitutional patriotism.

            The top court has, however, made it very clear that the national anthem could not be commercially exploited and that no entity could either dramatise it or use it in abridged form. The national anthem is to be played along with the image of the tricolour and people must stand up in respect. A clarification was inserted here providing an exception for the disabled.

          • Play national anthem in all cinemas before film screening: Supreme Court

            “People now-a-days don’t know how to sing national anthem and people must be taught. We must respect national anthem,” the top court said.

          • UN Panel: WikiLeaks’ Assange a Victim of Arbitrary Detention

            A U.N. panel is sticking by its opinion that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a victim of arbitrary detention, rejecting a request by Britain to review the case.

            The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that Britain had not presented enough new information to merit a new examination. The panel made the decision at a meeting last week, the U.N. human rights office said Wednesday.

            In February, the panel found that Britain and Sweden had “arbitrarily detained” Assange, saying he should be freed and entitled to compensation.

          • Julian Assange pleads to be ‘set free’ after UN panel ruling

            A statement on behalf of WikiLeaks said the original decision now stands and the UK and Sweden are once again required to “immediately put an end to Mr Assange’s arbitrary detention and afford him monetary compensation”.

            It continued: “Earlier this year the United Nations concluded the 16 month long case to which the UK was a party.

            “The UK lost, appealed, and today – lost again. The UN instructed the UK and Sweden to take immediate steps to ensure Mr Assange’s liberty, protection, and enjoyment of fundamental human rights.

            “No steps have been taken, jeopardising Mr Assange’s life, health and physical integrity, and undermining the UN system of human rights protection.

          • UN panel rebuffs Britain over Assange ruling

            Swedish prosecutors dropped a sexual assault probe into Assange last year after the five-year statute of limitations expired. But they still want to question him about the 2010 rape allegation, which carries a 10-year statute of limitations.

            Assange insists the sexual encounters in question were consensual.

          • Julian Assange: Ecuador says no ‘quick way out’ of embassy impasse

            The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has no “quick way out” of the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he took refuge more than four years ago, Ecuador’s prosecutor has said.

            An Ecuadorean state attorney accompanied by a Swedish prosecutor questioned Assange at the embassy on 14 November over allegations that he committed rape in Sweden in 2010.

            Ecuador’s prosecutor, Galo Chiriboga, said Ecuadorean officials would send the official transcript of Assange’s evidence to Swedish authorities “in mid-December”.

            Assange, who is Australian, has said he fears deportation to Sweden and the United States, where he could be charged for the publication of hundreds of thousands of secret US diplomatic cables.

          • Watergate-Era Church Committee Staffers Urge Leniency for Snowden

            Fifteen staff members who worked on a well-known bipartisan intelligence watchdog committee wrote to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Monday requesting the administration negotiate a plea agreement with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

            “There is no question that Edward Snowden’s disclosures led to public awareness which stimulated reform,” wrote the staffers who served on the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities — called the Church Committee, after its chairman, Idaho Sen. Frank Church.

          • Michigan considered a ‘border zone,’ citizens subject to search, detention, ACLU says

            The ACLU says immigration officials conduct warrantless vehicle searches and detentions in Michigan because the state, surrounded by the Great Lakes, is considered a border zone.

            Federal law gives U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, “extraordinary powers” to search vehicles and detain people who are within a “reasonable distance” of the border, the American Civil Liberties Union said.

            CBP has set the “reasonable distance” at 100 miles, which makes the state the “functional equivalent” of an international border, the ACLU said.

            Customs and Border Protection and Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

          • Burka ban backed by Dutch MPs for public places

            Dutch MPs have backed a ban on the Islamic full veil in some public places such as schools and hospitals, and on public transport.

            The niqab face veil and the burka, which covers the eyes, are included in the ban along with other face coverings such as ski-masks and helmets.

            The Dutch Senate must approve the bill, which has government backing, for it to become law.

            Supporters of the ban say people should be identifiable in public places.

            Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s ruling Liberal-Labour coalition described the bill as “religious-neutral”.

          • Labor abuses rife on Indonesia’s palm oil plantations – Amnesty

            Children as young as eight are working at plantations that supply palm oil to some of the world’s biggest brands, according to a new report by Amnesty International.

            Amnesty’s investigation into plantations in Indonesia also found workers performing dangerous tasks without adequate protection. Others were paid less than the legal minimum wage or exposed to dangerous chemicals.

            The rights advocacy group said it interviewed 120 workers, including supervisors, on Indonesian plantations that supply or are owned by Singapore-based Wilmar (WLMIF), the world’s largest palm oil producer.

          • Malaysia PM Najib Razak expresses support for strict Islamic laws to empower Sharia courts

            Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is facing a backlash over his alleged involvement in a multi-billion dollar scandal, has expressed his support for strict Islamic laws in the country in a bid to woo Malay Muslims.

            Malaysians are reported to be frustrated over corruption and the country’s economy ahead of next year’s election. Najib has fended off calls to quit over the last 18 months over the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) scandal that drew widespread anger of Malaysians, including members of the ruling United Malay National Organisation (UMNO).

            Razak called on ethnic Malay Muslims to extend their support to a plan by the rival pan-Malaysian Islamic Party and push for the adoption of an Islamic penal code, called hudud. It is believed to be an Islamic concept that sets out punishment under Sharia law and includes amputations and public stoning.

            “We want to develop Islam,” Najib was quoted as saying by Reuters on Tuesday (29 November). “Non-Muslims must understand that this is not about hudud but about empowering the Sharia courts.”

          • ‘Bogus charges’: Standing Rock activists say they face campaign of legal bullying

            In what appears to be a concerted effort to deter people from joining the Standing Rock protests, North Dakota officials are pursuing serious criminal charges and threatening to levy hefty fines against Native American activists.

            Despite state and federal evacuation orders, a government roadblock, escalating police violence and aggressive prosecutions that attorneys say lack basic evidence, thousands of veterans are preparing to travel to Cannon Ball this weekend to support the growing movement to stop the Dakota Access pipeline.

            Since the demonstrations against the $3.7bn oil project began in April, law enforcement have made more than 500 arrests, with state prosecutors filing serious charges, including rioting and conspiracy, against many of them.

          • German police betrayed by justice system – union chief on ‘Sharia patrol’ ruling

            The head of a major German police union has lashed out at the country’s “failed” justice system, following a number of controversial court rulings. The most recent case involved a ‘Sharia police’ group operating in a suburban town, which was deemed legal.

            “The full force of the law these days often means we determine the identities of offenders, but the judges just let them go free,” Rainer Wendt, head of the German Police Union (DPolG), told the Passauer Neue Presse (PNP) newspaper on Wednesday.

            The official spoke about the recent incident involving the German court system, when a group of Islamists was cleared of charges for forming a ‘Sharia police force,’ a volunteer initiative to patrol the streets and uphold peace in the western German town of Wuppertal in 2014.

            The town is one of Germany’s most popular destinations for Salafists, who follow a very conservative interpretation of Islam and reject any form of democracy.

          • How Cops Use Civil Forfeiture to Keep The Public In The Dark About Surveillance

            Police across Canada are using civil forfeiture laws to seize everything from houses and cars to small amounts of cash from people who sometimes haven’t been convicted of a crime. Some of this money is paying for cutting-edge surveillance equipment, a practice that critics say keeps the public in the dark about police capabilities.

            “We are very suspect about what is being purchased [with forfeiture funds],” said Micheal Vonn, policy director for the BC Civil Liberties Association, in an interview. “We have very little public insight into the kinds of equipment that police are using.”

          • Students get 100 lashes for sex outside marriage in Indonesia

            Nineteen-year-old Indonesian students who received 100 lashes were among a group of people flogged in the conservative province of Aceh, which adheres to Sharia law.

            A total of five people, including two women and three men, were caned outside a mosque in the provincial capital Banda Aceh on Monday, according to AFP.

            The 34-year-old woman was flogged with a rattan cane at least seven times for being in close proximity to a man. The 32-year-old male who was with her was also flogged seven times.

            “It hurts so bad,” the woman said, as cited by AFP, raising her arms into the air.

            Among the others who were flogged on Monday were two university students, both 19, who confessed to having sex outside marriage. They received 100 lashes.

            A man found guilty of sex outside marriage was also flogged at least 22 times by the person delivering the punishment, who was dressed in long robes and a hood. His partner, who is two-months pregnant, is still waiting for her fate to be decided.

            In such situations, officials in the province usually order the flogging of women after they give birth.

          • The Government Is Using a No Fly Zone to Suppress Journalism At Standing Rock

            In recent weeks, videos shot by Native American drone pilots have shown percussion grenades launched from an armored vehicle deep into a crowd of people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. They have shown people being knocked backward with a constant barrage of water being shot from fire hoses. They’ve shown a line of body armor-clad cops aiming guns at unarmed water protectors holding their hands high above their heads. Another video, shot at night, shows that construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline continues under the cover of darkness.

            In recent weeks, Dakota Access Pipeline protesters have been tear gassed, sprayed with water cannons in freezing temperatures, and shot with rubber bullets by a police force using military-style vehicles and violent riot suppression tactics. Every suppression apparatus the government has at its disposal has been used—even the National Guard has been called in.

        • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

          • Dropbox CEO urges Donald Trump to protect net neutrality

            DROPBOX CEO Drew Houston has said that he hopes president-elect Donald Trump will respect the rights of all workers in the country and won’t ditch net neutrality legislation, but admitted nothing is clear for now.

            When quizzed on Trump by INQ at a roundtable event in London, Houston said that it is too soon to tell if Trump will adopt the positions he used to gain election.

            “It’s pretty wild times […] I think a lot of us are sort of waiting to see what actually happens. I mean there’s a lot of speculation about what from a policy standpoint is going to change, or not change,” he said.

          • Trump Appoints Third Net Neutrality Critic to FCC Advisory Team

            President-elect Trump today added yet another fierce critic of net neutrality to his FCC transition team. The incoming President chose Roslyn Layton, a visiting fellow at the broadband-industry-funded American Enterprise Institute, to help select the new FCC boss and guide the Trump administration on telecom policy. Layton joins Jeffrey Eisenach, a former Verizon consultant and vocal net neutrality critic, and Mark Jamison, a former Sprint lobbyist that has also fought tooth and nail against net neutrality; recently going so far as to argue he doesn’t think telecom monopolies exist.

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • Report: IP, Access To Science A Troubled Relationship

            A new academic report looks into the relationship between intellectual property and access to science and culture, in the wake of work on the issue by former United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed. Contributors to the report aimed at reflecting on how the intellectual property system can foster economic growth while encouraging non-economic values and objectives of human development.

          • New Draft Articles For The Protection Of Traditional Knowledge On Table At WIPO

            New draft articles published this morning at the World Intellectual Property Organization committee on traditional knowledge show signs of progress in terms of reducing options. Meanwhile, the United States introduced a proposal for a discussion of what should be protectable and what is not intended to be protected. Delegates have to deliver their take on both documents this afternoon.

          • Copyrights

            • Antigua & Barbuda Threatens to Punish U.S. With Piracy Free-For-All

              A long-running dispute between Antigua and Barbuda and the United States over gambling services has reached a critical point. In a letter to the WTO, the Caribbean nation warns that unless the US either stops blocking or compensates its gambling services, it will lift protection of US intellectual property rights in 2017.

            • UK ISPs to Start Sending ‘Piracy Alerts’ Soon

              Early 2017 will see the long-awaited start of a broad UK anti-piracy effort. With help from copyright holders, ISPs will send email notifications to subscribers whose connections are allegedly used to pirate content. These “alerts” will educate copyright infringers about legal alternatives in the hope of decreasing piracy rates over time.

            • Court Awards Damages Following Bogus DMCA Takedowns

              Topdawg Entertainment Inc., Interscope Records and Universal Music Group must pay damages after issuing false DMCA notices which damaged an artist’s reputation. Montreal hip hop artist Jonathan Emile teamed up with Kendrick Lamar on a track, but the labels wrongfully took it down from YouTube, iTunes and Soundcloud.

        ]]>         http://techrights.org/2016/12/01/r3-liberates-code/feed/ 0         Links 24/11/2016: OpenBSD Foundation Helped by Smartisan, US Vote Recounts http://techrights.org/2016/11/24/openbsd-foundation-smartisan/ http://techrights.org/2016/11/24/openbsd-foundation-smartisan/#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2016 16:23:33 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96977

        GNOME bluefish

        Contents

        GNU/Linux

        • Linux Security Made Simple

          From the revelations of Edward Snowden to the potential problems with the Internet of Things and the latest malware, security and privacy are constantly in the news. The trouble is, while everyone is concerned about security and privacy, few know what to what to do about them. Fortunately, Linux has endless tools to address these problems without requiring that everyone become an expert.

        • Desktop

          • The miracle of Lubuntu for older computers

            When it comes to Linux distributions you generally don’t hear a lot about Lubuntu. However, this Ubuntu spin can be a great help to users with older computers who need a light-weight distribution that requires minimal hardware resources.

        • Server

          • Cumulus ‘Evolves’ CLI to Help Network Engineers Access Linux

            Cumulus Networks recently announced the availability of its Cumulus Linux Network Command Line Utility (NCLU) to help network engineers access the benefits of Linux, using software similar to Command Line Interface (CLI) that they’re accustomed to.

            This all may seem counterintuitive to Cumulus’ stated goal of making switches behave more like servers. By creating its NCLU, it seems to be adjusting its own operating system to behave more like a Cisco switch.

          • Helm: The Kubernetes Package Manager

            Back on October 15th 2016, Helm celebrated its one year birthday. It was first demonstrated ahead of the inaugural KubeCon conference in San Francisco in 2015. What is Helm? Helm aims to be the default package manager for Kubernetes.

          • Kompose: a tool to go from Docker-compose to Kubernetes

            At Skippbox, we developed kompose a tool to automatically transform your Docker Compose application into Kubernetes manifests. Allowing you to start a Compose application on a Kubernetes cluster with a single kompose up command. We’re extremely happy to have donated kompose to the Kubernetes Incubator. So here’s a quick introduction about it and some motivating factors that got us to develop it.

          • Docker Joins Eclipse, Updates Commercial Platform

            Docker Inc, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Docker application container technology, is working hard trying to help all of its DevOps constituents, including both developers and enterprises, that use Docker in production.

        • Kernel Space

          • Introducing the Linux Hardware Guide

            The Linux-Hardware-Guide tests and rates all types of hardware for their Linux compatibility for the knowledge base. A test report is created for each investigated hardware component and, if necessary, additional Linux configuration help is provided. Furthermore, Linux users can add their own hardware to the database and transmit hardware details and test results with a dedicated scan software. This allows creating a broad data basis and semi-automatic filling of the knowledge base. The Linux-Hardware-Guide is not limited to a single Linux distribution but instead tries to support all distributions and as many Linux users as possible. Currently, it supports 27 different Linux distributions. Additionally, the Linux-Hardware-Guide facilitates the knowledge transfer between Linux users who have exactly the same hardware under operation, because problem finding and solving often is much easier if someone else with exactly the same hardware is available.

          • My Lightning Talk from All Things Open 2016: 25 years of Linux in 5 minutes

          • Graphics Stack

            • AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA On Linux With OpenGL & Vulkan

              With Croteam recently having released an updated Talos Principle with better Vulkan performance and the NVIDIA 375.20 and AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 both having come out recently, here is a fresh OpenGL and Vulkan graphics API performance comparison when using Valve’s Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, both of which games on Linux offer both graphics API renderers.

              This article is a look at the latest NVIDIA vs. AMDGPU-PRO performance with the newest drivers for both OpenGL and Vulkan. A follow-up article will include results when testing the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan driver code too. A fresh Windows vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance comparison is also being worked on as thanks to our readers this holiday season. This is all thanks to those that support Phoronix via viewing the site without ads, making a holiday tip, or joining our premium program, such as through this week’s Thanksgiving event. Plus a number of other exciting unrelated Linux graphics articles coming out in the days ahead.

              • ‘

            • Intel Graphics Installer for Linux 2.0.3 Supports Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 24

              One of our readers informs us about the general availability of the Intel Graphics Update Tool 2.0.3 for Linux-based operating systems, which finally brings support for the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases.

              Previously known as Intel Graphics Installer for Linux, the Intel Graphics Update Tool is designed to let users install the latest graphics drivers for their Intel HD GPUs. It’s specifically made for Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, and the latest version finally adds support for Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) and Fedora 24, though Fedora 25 is out.

            • AMDGPU Gets RPM Fan Info, Clock/Power-Gating Improvements & More For Linux 4.10

              Last month AMD sent out their big feature pull to DRM-Next for staging ahead of Linux 4.10 while now a secondary feature pull request has been sent in of more material for this next kernel development series.

              Last month’s Radeon/AMDGPU DRM-Next 4.10 code had support for multiple virtual displays, a new VM manager, support for UVD power-gating on more hardware, power management improvements, more fixes, and other fun.

            • Intel Skylake OpenGL vs. Vulkan Numbers With The Latest ANV Mesa Changes

        • Applications

        • Desktop Environments/WMs

          • GNOME Desktop/GTK

            • Evolution 3.24 Email and Groupware Client to Support XZ Compression for Backups

              Yesterday, we reported on the availability of the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, and we promised we’d cover the most important application updates pushed as part of this unstable branch.

            • GNOME Shell, Mutter to Handle Three-Finger Touchpad Pinch Gestures in GNOME 3.24

              Today we’re continuing our reports on the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment with what landed for the GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window and composite manager as part of the GNOME 3.23.2 development release.

            • GNOME Shell & Mutter Land New 3.24 Development Releases, NVIDIA Wayland Support

              They missed Tuesday’s GNOME 3.23.2 release, but available as of Wednesday evening is Mutter 3.23.2 and GNOME Shell 3.23.2.

              Mutter 3.23.2 now stacks docks below other windows on full-screen windows, supports touchpad pinch gestures with more than two fingers, implements drawing tablet support on X11, fixes some Wine games starting minimized, fixed switching between scrolling modes on Wayland, support for EGLStream/EGLDevice, and other bug fixes and improvements. The EGLStream/EGLDevice support is what allows the mainline NVIDIA Wayland on GNOME support.

            • I’m going to the Core Apps Hackfest

              In this exact moment, I’m packing up my stuff to attend the Core Apps Hackfest organized by Carlos Soriano and kindly hosted by Kinvolk. It’ll happen in Berlin, German.

            • A tale of cylinders and shadows

              Like I wrote before, we at Collabora have been working on improving WebKitGTK+ performance for customer projects, such as Apertis. We took the opportunity brought by recent improvements to WebKitGTK+ and GTK+ itself to make the final leg of drawing contents to screen as efficient as possible. And then we went on investigating why so much CPU was still being used in some of our test cases.

              The first weird thing we noticed is performance was actually degraded on Wayland compared to running under X11. After some investigation we found a lot of time was being spent inside GTK+, painting the window’s background.

        • Distributions

          • OpenSUSE/SUSE

            • openSUSE Tumbleweed Gets Linux Kernel 4.8.9, CMake 3.7, Firefox 50 & Mesa 13.0.1

              Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling distribution should be happy to hear that the repositories were flooded this week with hundreds of updated packages.

            • SUSE Releases The First Official 64-bit Linux OS For Raspberry Pi 3

              SUSE has released the first official 64-bit Linux-based operating system for Raspberry Pi 3. This release is basically a version of Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 that supports Raspberry Pi 3. The users need to visit SUSE’s website, make an account, and download the OS image.

            • YaST Team visits Euruko 2016

              As promised in previous posts, we want to share with you our experience and views from this year annual Ruby conference Euruko. Maybe “our” is too much to say, since we only sent one developer there. So to be precise, these are Josef Reidinger’s experience and views on the conference.

              This year Euruko took place in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria. It turned out to be a great conference place. Public transport works very well, everyone speak English and even when it uses Cyrilic alphabet, almost everything is written also in Latin one.

          • Red Hat Family

          • Debian Family

            • Debian stretch on the Raspberry Pi 3

              The last couple of days, I worked on getting Debian to run on the Raspberry Pi 3.

              Thanks to the work of many talented people, the Linux kernel in version 4.8 is _almost_ ready to run on the Raspberry Pi 3. The only missing thing is the bcm2835 MMC driver, which is required to read the root file system from the SD card. I’ve asked our maintainers to include the patch for the time being.

            • Debian miniconf in Cambridge

              I spent a few days in Cambridge for a minidebconf. This is a tiny version of the full annual Debconf. We had a couple of days for hacking, and another two days for talks.

            • Derivatives

              • Canonical/Ubuntu

                • Ubuntu to Reject SHA-1-Signed Repos by Default in APT Starting January 1, 2017

                  Today, November 24, 2016, Debian developer and Ubuntu member Julian Andres Klode announced that he plans on turning off SHA1 support for APT repositories starting January 1, 2017.

                  As you might know, or not, the long-awaited deprecation of the SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) encryption, which is used to verify digital content, CRLs (certificate revocation lists), and digital certificates, is set for the first day of January 2017 worldwide, which might affect your Internet browser.

                • Flavours and Variants

                  • Cinnamon 3.2.2 Desktop Out Now with Workspace Switcher and Sound Applet Fixes

                    We reported the other day on the official availability of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, which you can now install on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 16.10 machines, and it looks like the second point release is already out.

                    That’s right, we’re talking about Cinnamon 3.2.2, which arrived a few hours ago with lots of improvements and bug fixes, such as the ability to show a separator on applets’ context menus and a new mechanism for highlighting applets that have open menus, as well as better keyboard navigation for the Menu applet with some specific keys.

        • Devices/Embedded

          • Phones

            • microG on Jolla

              I am a incorrigibly in picking non-mainstream, open smartphones, and then struggling hard. Back then in 2008, I tried to use the OpenMoko FreeRunner, but eventually gave up because of hardware glitches and reverted to my good old Siemens S35. It was not that I would not be willing to put up with inconveniences, but as soon as it makes live more difficult for the people I communicate with, it becomes hard to sustain.

              Two years ago I tried again, and got myself a Jolla phone, running Sailfish OS. Things are much nicer now: The hardware is mature, battery live is good, and the Android compatibility layer enables me to run many important apps that are hard to replace, especially the Deutsche Bahn Navigator and various messengers, namely Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Threema and GroupMe.

            • Handset Installed Base Passed Tipping Point. Now More than Half of All Mobile Phone Handsets in Use are Smartphones

              We have passed a significant milestone for the planet’s digital connectivity. As of last quarter, we passed the tipping point where now there are more smartphones in use, than dumbphones (aka ‘featurephones’). The new sales of smartphones has been more than dumphones for three years but with the installed base, worldwide, it takes this long for the trends to catch up. And as smartphones now sell more than 4 out of every 5 new phones, this trend will go to its logical conclusion. In five years we’re at the point where all new phones sold are smartphones; and by middle of the next decade, the last dumbphones will quietly disconnect from their networks for the last time.

            • Tizen

              • New Photo Editor Apps Instatags and Monograph added to the Tizen Store

                A couple of the most wanted apps by Tizen users is a photo editor app has been added to the Tizen store last month. The apps named Instatags and Monograph are created by Arrie Affanto. Both apps are easy to use, have some good features, and don’t take much storage space.

              • Black Friday Deals, get money off the Gear S3 / S2 and other Tizen Tech

                As part of it’s Black Friday offerings Samsung has some great discounts on quite a bit of its latest Tizen tech. So if you’re looking for a fridge that has Family hub Integrated in it, the latest smartwatch, or a Tizen smart TV then they might have something that will sway you to part company with your hard earned cash.

              • Register Now – First ever Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV comes to Russia, 2016

                For the first time we have a Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV Russia 2016, taking place from November 30 – December 1, 2016. The event will be held in Moscow at the “Marriott Hotel Novy Arbat”.

                As the name suggests this will be a Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV that will Introduce app developers to the exciting world of TV apps and educate them to the Tizen TV platform and architecture. You will be able to learn all the features and possibilities of SmartTV including multitasking, instantOn, preview, checkout on TV, etc.

            • Android

              • Android 7.1 Nougat Features: What To Expect With Its New Upgrade?

                If you have one of the devices that’s eligible for this developer preview and you have been signed up for the Android Beta Program, then Google will automatically send an over-the-air (OTA) update to your device. The update will be over the coming week, according to Dave Burke, Google vice president of engineering. You can still sign up for the Android Beta Program if you want to test this latest OS release before it becomes available to everyone. And if you’d like, you can download images and flash them onto supported devices.

              • Nokia Android Phone Tipped to Have Zeiss Lens, 2K Display

                New details of the upcoming Nokia Android phone, expected to be unveiled at the MWC 2017 in Barcelona, have surfaced online. According to a tipster based in China, the upcoming Nokia Android phone will feature a 5.2-inch or 5.5-inch screen size. The rumours claim that the smartphone will sport 2K (QHD) display, which means that the handset may belong to the high-end category.

                Additionally, the Nokia Android phone is said to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC which may seem slightly dated considering all new smartphones are now featuring Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 under the hood. One of the highlight feature of the upcoming Nokia Android phone is said to be the Zeiss lens for the primary camera, something that has been seen on earlier Nokia devices.

              • Android TV home screen bloat and how to fix it
              • How to see Wi-Fi passwords on an Android phone
              • Samsung Galaxy S7 May Update To Android 7.0 Nougat Starting In December
              • OnePlus 3T review: Picking up where the Google Nexus left off

                Startup phone maker OnePlus has a new flagship Android smartphone. Well, tweaked phone might be more accurate.

                Less than six months after it released the $400 OnePlus 3 to critical acclaim (Mashable’s included), OnePlus is back with the OnePlus 3T — a faster and longer-lasting OnePlus 3.

              • The OnePlus 3T makes one of Android’s best bets even better

                OnePlus has always been a people pleaser. It’s an impulse grown, in part, from the hardware startups close connection to a tight-knit fanbase. As other new entrants like Le Eco on the smartphone scene push to be the biggest and flashiest, the company has been producing excellent handsets from the very beginning, devices capable of taking on the top flagships at a fraction of the price.

                But the 3T is a bit of conundrum. It’s certainly in keeping with OnePlus’s focus on quality, but for those who went all in with the company’s last flagship a few months back, the phone may feel like a small-scale betrayal, upping the specs and entirely replacing the phone half-a-year after its introduction.

              • 10 Ways to Trick Out Your Android Home Screen

                One of the advantages of choosing a shiny new Android phone over those Apple handsets is the extra scope for home screen customization. If you’re stuck for inspiration or wondering how to get started, here are 10 ways of tricking out your home screen and other parts of the Android OS.

              • Huawei Leapfrogs Samsung to Become World’s Most Profitable Android Device Maker

                The explosive woes of Samsung’s defective Galaxy Note 7 franchise have helped catapult China’s Huawei past the South Korean conglomerate as the most profitable Android smartphone manufacturer in the world. Apple aapl continues to remain the most profitable of all smartphone makers with a staggering 91% operating profit market share.

              • This is the ‘Glossy Black’ Galaxy S7 Edge, coming soon

                A couple of days ago we told you about the possibility of a “Glossy Black” Galaxy S7 Edge in the works. Just 48 hours later and the first images of that upcoming device have now appeared on Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. The photos show a very shiny, very sexy S7 Edge that’s quite similar to the Olympics Games edition, but without the accents.

                The baby blue version of the Galaxy S7 Edge is now available across all U.S. carriers, but the new shiny black version is expected to arrive in December sometime. We would expect it to arrive as early as possible though, to give it the best chance of being snapped up in time for the holiday buying frenzy.

        Free Software/Open Source

        • Are you powering your business with open source tech? Here’s why you should

          If open source is not already an integral part of your IT strategy, then it’s time for a re-think. Today’s open source solutions are just as secure and feature rich as the proprietary offerings in the market and come with many added benefits.

          Of course some might espouse the cost efficiencies of open source but for many organisations, the decision to adopt open source technologies has more to do with capability and community. For starters, open source is inherently flexible, removing vendor lock-in and providing code which can be customised or extended to meet a particular need. This flexibility is essential for rapid innovation and also adding new capabilities within already complex IT environments.

        • Nextcloud: an Open-source Dropbox, Google Drive Alternative

          Nextcloud is a cloud software alternative that gives you full control over your data. It’s designed for both individuals and organizations with many users. It’s a relatively young project, being a fork of the similar ownCloud project, which is also worth checking out and comparing.

        • Securing open source

          Open source software is on the up and up. More companies, software development houses and individual developers are making use of it. But, isn’t the very concept of open source inimical to security? It could be argued both ways, but the reality is that if it is being used – and it is – then companies had better have a good understanding of the implications for their system, and how to secure it.

          First of all, some basics of the open source world. It is important to understand the difference between free and open source software. Free software is software that can be used without paying a licence fee – think of Adobe Acrobat Reader or Winzip – whereas open source software allows users to access the source code itself.

        • Keynote: Fujitsu’s Open Source Journey – From Consumer to Apprentice Contributor
        • Fujitsu’s Open Source Journey — From Consumer to Contributor

          About a year ago, Fujitsu created the Open Service Catalog Manager (OSCM), their first full software project contribution to the open source space. Ries describes this a “winding road” where they moved through several different steps to ultimately release the OSCM as an open source project. They started with “Consensus Ridge” to decide whether Fujitsu should even do this as an open source project, which was easily answered because so many of their customers and the industry are demanding open source solutions.

        • Get emotional: Tips for open source communities

          Humans are driven quite a bit by emotions. You may be a rational human being, but your emotions will still drive many of your choices. You can be excited, angry, interested, or sad about things—it doesn’t matter—you’ll react to those emotions and you’ll very often leak that into your communications.

          You’ll likely leak your emotions, and so will other members of the community. If you think humans should suck it up and act like nothing is happening, I’m afraid you are living in a bubble. That is not how humans operate. That’s not how humans interact.

          Some humans know this and these humans should make sure other humans know this as well: Emotions matter and they affect our daily tasks. Emotions take control over us many times during our day and they determine how our day will go. Being thick skinned doesn’t really matter. It just means you can control your emotions a bit more than others, but you still react to them. You react in a different, perhaps more controlled, way but you still react to your emotions.

        • Making open source fashionable

          In March 2015, the leadership of Berlin-based Zalando gathered the company’s entire tech team in a hip underground techno club (it’s Berlin, after all) and announced a new way of working—something called “Radical Agility.” Inspired by Daniel Pink’s Drive, Brian Robertson’s Holacracy system and the agile movement, Radical Agility emphasizes Drive’s call for autonomy, mastery and purpose as the pillars of the company’s tech strategy and culture.

        • Will Open Source Drive Blockchain Interoperability?

          Blockchain technology matured a lot this year. Sure, it’s still unclear why banks should use it — needs vary by company. But it is clear blockchains provide more value if they can interact with each other.

          Competing blockchain vendors have worked hard to differentiate their products and sell them to banks. In the process some players have begun open-sourcing their software — following the same path as operating-system programmers and architects of the internet.

        • Pay the Price for Open Source

          Fast forward a few dozen years and here we are, Open Source is now an ecosystem, not a user group that you and five friends attend, or a magazine to which you subscribe. The problem is that most of us have stopped talking about the different types of open source, we just assume it is both. Most of the projects in our corner of the world – PHP – actually is both. The PHP license – a derivative of the BSD license – is very open about giving you freedom with very few responsibilities. Other projects use GPL, MIT, Apache, and other licenses. Each developer or group has the right to select whatever license they feel most comfortable with for their code. If you use their code, it is your responsibility to abide by the restrictions and responsibilities of their license.

        • Events

          • 2017 Community Leadership Events: An Update

            This week I was delighted to see that we could take the wraps off a new event that I am running in conjunction with my friends at the Linux Foundation called the Community Leadership Conference. The event will be part of the Open Source Summit which was previously known as LinuxCon and I will be running it in Los Angeles from 11th – 13th Sep 2017 and Prague from 23rd – 25th Oct 2017.

            Now, some of you may be wondering if this replaces or is different to the Community Leadership Summit in Portland/Austin. Let me add some clarity.

        • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

        • Funding

          • Kicking off the 2016 End-of-Year Fundraiser

            Thanks to a single staff member, ten volunteer board members, and dozens of interns, volunteers, and members, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) protects and promotes open source software, development and communities, championing software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition, and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement. Although primarily known for our role in certifying open source licenses, today OSI’s mandate includes, fiscal sponsorships for emerging projects, hosting of open source working groups, and cross-discipline community building, all in an effort to extend the reach of open source in education, government, nonprofits, and business. In order to move forward with our work, we are asking members and open source contributors and enthusiasts to take the next step and donate to the OSI. Join us in our work for the next year by donating to the OSI today!

        • BSD

          • openbsd changes of note 2

            Things happened, stuff changed.

            X550 support among other ix changes and cleanup.

            Ongoing switch work. Better OpenFlow compat. You know it’s serious when tcpdump gets an update.

            Loongson 3A support.

            [...]

          • FreeNAS 10, World’s Most Popular Software-Defined Storage OS, Gets New Beta

            The day of November 23, 2016, brought us the second Beta development release of the upcoming FreeNAS 10 open-source storage NAS (Network Attached Storage) operating system based on FreeBSD, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday.

            FreeNAS 10 Beta 2 comes almost three months after the first Beta milestone, and the devs are proud to say that the upcoming operating system, which will be a total rewrite, is now feature complete, and there are many GUI enhancements for the Dashboard, Volume UI, Accounts, System, Services, Networking, Calendar, Console, and Peering. Also, it looks like feature-parity with the FreeNAS 9.10 is in place now.

          • OpenBSD Foundation Welcomes First Iridium Donor: Smartisan

            Today’s big news comes from the OpenBSD Foundation, via director Ken Westerback.

        • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

          • Open Government in France “a mini-revolution”

            “In five years, France has progressed from an “empty chair” policy to that of an observer and to then become a member of OGP and its vice-president”, declared Axelle Lemaire, France’s Secretary of State in charge of Digital Affairs, at the Paris Open Source Summit, speaking about the country’s Open Government policy.

          • Open Data

            • EU-US Transatlantic Open Data Partnership publishes data access library

              This month, the eu.us.opendata library was published on GitHub. The software provides developers in the statistical programming language R with a universal way to access economic data from the EU and the USA.

              The library was developed as part of the EU-US Transatlantic Open Data Partnership, a collaboration between the US Department of Commerce and its Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on the one hand, and the EC’s DG Connect and Eurostat on the other.

          • Open Hardware/Modding

            • Open Source Pancakes

              [drtorq] promises more hacking on the printer in the future, so this is just step one. We expect the mods will be a lot like a typical 3D printer, except the heated bed is absolutely necessary on this model. The printer is more like a CNC engraver than a 3D printer since it is basically an XY carriage with a nozzle that flows batter instead of polymer.

        • Programming/Development

          • Quick Read: The JS Foundation

            In recent years, JavaScript has seen a staggering number of libraries and frameworks come and go. In can be difficult to make important decisions about which software to use in your projects, as there is always the risk of depending on a library that the maintainer will not be able to support and, at worst, may end up abandoning.

            To try and tackle some of the issues surrounding the support and development of the JavaScript ecosystem, the well-known jQuery Foundation and the Dojo Foundation have decided to join forces and fuse into the JS Foundation, a project backed by the Linux Foundation (if only I had a cent for every time someone says “Foundation”!).

          • Math in V8 Is Broken; How Do We Fix It?

            JavaScript has become increasingly more popular, especially with the introduction of Node.js, which has allowed full-stack JavaScript development. As this 20-year development language continues to rise, a group of individuals began to notice something: Math in V8 (a JavaScript engine) is broken.

            In advance of Node.js Interactive, to be held Nov. 29 through Dec. 2 in Austin, we talked with Athan Reines, software engineer at Fourier, about the importance that JavaScript Math library has to the overall community; how they discovered underlying implementations were not accurate; and why a group of individuals are working to fix this.

          • Resolving Conflict

            If you want to be successful (whether as a leader or a senior engineer), you need to be someone who can look at the big picture, assess how to move forward, and then get everyone working on the same page again. That is true leadership and what most managers value in great employees.

          • Git Behind the Curtain: What Happens When You Commit, Branch, and Merge

            This is the script for a talk that I gave at BarCamp Philly. The talk is a “live committing” exercise, and this post contains all the information needed to follow along, as well as some links to relevant source material and minus my pauses, typos, and attempts at humor.

          • How to build your code club on GitHub

            While not essential, a repository for real-life tasks or issues in a club can be a helpful planning tool. It also makes it easy for people to see what the club or group is working on. This promotes the idea of transparent and open leadership. You can use labels to tag issues for specific types of work or committees. Milestones are useful for deadlines or goals the group is working towards. The new Projects feature may also be useful in a repository for real-life task management.

          • Zapcc Still Aiming For “Super Fast” Compiler Performance

            It’s been a while since last covering Zapcc as a new, super-fast C/C++ compiler yet it has evolved and now the latest beta is reporting to show even more impressive performance gains.

            Zapcc is a compiler based on LLVM/Clang that has routinely strived for maximum performance not just for compile-time performance but also the resulting performance of the compiled binaries.

        Leftovers

        • Secessionists Formally Launch Quest for California’s Independence

          Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general’s office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.

          Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.

        • Science

          • Presidential Medal of Freedom awards go to top computer scientists

            On Tuesday, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to several luminaries in the arts, sports, and sciences.

            Of those, the class of 2016 included two women who played crucial roles in American computer science in the 20th century: Margaret H. Hamilton and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was given the award posthumously.

        • Security

          • Security advisories for Wednesday
          • Malware Found on New Windows Computers (Not What You Think)

            It appears that the office supply giant, Office Depot, isn’t adverse to tarnishing its reputation if there’s a buck or two to be made in the process.

            KIRO TV in Seattle reported on November 15 that it had taken brand new out-of-the-box computers that had never been connected to the Internet to Office Depot stores, both in Washington state and Portland, Oregon, and told the repair desk staff that “it’s running a little slow.” In four out of six cases they were told the computer was infected with viruses and would require an up to $180 fix.

            After declining the “fix,” they took the “virus laden” machines to a Seattle security outfit, IOActive, which reexamined the machines. “We found no symptoms of malware when we operated them,” an employee with the firm, Will Longman, said. “Nor did we find any actual malware.”

            In the two cases where undercover reporters weren’t told that their computers showed evidence of an infection, they were advised to install antivirus software. In one of the two stores, a technician evidently noticed that the machine was new and told the reporter to “ignore the test results.”

          • How Unikernels Can Better Defend against DDoS Attacks

            On the episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Dell EMC CTO Idit Levine, an EMC chief technology officer at the cloud management division and office of the CTO, discussed how unikernels are poised to offer all of the developer flexibility afforded to containers, while striving for better security and integrations with many of today’s top container platforms. She spoke with SolarWinds Cloud Technology Lead Lee Calcote at KubeCon 2016:

          • Exploit Code Bypasses Linux Security Features Leaving Systems Vulnerable
          • Researcher writes codeless exploit that bypasses Linux security measures

            If you’re a Linux administrator, then you’re likely aware that even being fully up to date on all of the patches for your Linux distribution of choice is no guarantee that you’re free from vulnerabilities. Linux is made up of numerous components, any of which can open up an installation to one exploit or another.

          • FBI Hacked into 8,000 Computers in 120 Countries Using A Single Warrant

            The FBI hacked into more than 8,000 computers in 120 different countries with just a single warrant during an investigation into a dark web child pornography website, according to a newly published court filings.

            This FBI’s mass hacking campaign is related to the high-profile child pornography Playpen case and represents the largest law enforcement hacking campaign known to date.

            The warrant was initially issued in February 2015 when the FBI seized the Playpen site and set up a sting operation on the dark web site, in which the agency deployed malware to obtain IP addresses from alleged site’s visitors.

          • The FBI Hacked Over 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries Based on One Warrant

            In January, Motherboard reported on the FBI’s “unprecedented” hacking operation, in which the agency, using a single warrant, deployed malware to over one thousand alleged visitors of a dark web child pornography site. Now, it has emerged that the campaign was actually an order of magnitude larger.

            In all, the FBI obtained over 8,000 IP addresses, and hacked computers in 120 different countries, according to a transcript from a recent evidentiary hearing in a related case.

          • curl security audit

            I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing the bill for it. The auditing company is called Cure53.

          • Personal data for more than 130,000 sailors was breached, Navy says

            The Navy was notified in October by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services that a computer supporting a Navy contract was “compromised,” and that the names and social security numbers of 134,386 current and former sailors were accessed by unknown persons, the service said in a news release.

          • Your headphones could be spying on you

            JUST WHEN you thought you couldn’t possibly be carrying any more tracking devices, it looks like you can add another one to the mix.

            A team of researchers in Israel have discovered that with a little hardware hackery, your headphones can be used to listen in on you when plugged into your computer.

            It’s been known for a long time that if you plug a microphone into a speaker jack, it can sometimes make a tinny speaker (if you blast the volume). But what about the other way around?

            Ben Gurion University researchers have discovered that with a simple malware program which they’ve christened SPEAKE(a)R, Realtek codecs, which provide the built in sound on most motherboards, can be reassigned to turn the headphone jack into a microphone.

          • How to create heat maps to show who’s trying to connect your router

        • Defence/Aggression

          • Arabs Celebrate Israeli Fires as Haifa Blaze Spreads

            However, the impression that the fires were deliberately set as acts of terrorism was reinforced by a report by the NRG news site, which presented dozens of social media posts in Arabic that expressed happiness over the fires. On one forum discussing the proposed law to prevent mosques from broadcasting their call to prayer in the early morning hours, one post said that the Israelis “tried to prevent the mosques from conducting prayers, now they are burning up.” Another post said that “this is our land, and Israel will continue to burn until we return free to it.” A social media tag in Arabic, “Israel is burning,” was trending on Thursday.

          • Watch: Haifa up in flames

            Security forces are dealing with a wave of fires breaking out all over the country. According to official estimates, terror squads are igniting the fires in various areas, and efforts are being made to locate these squads.

            Firefighters are working to subdue four fires around the city of Haifa.

            Police have ordered the residents of 11 neighborhoods in Haifa, constituting thousands of people, to evacuate their homes and reach the Bat Galim Community Center or the old Qiryat Eliezer soccer stadium.

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • Bolivia Declares Water Emergency, El Niño Blamed

            Bolivia is deep in the middle of a punishing drought, likely caused by the El Niño system in the Pacific last winter. It’s gotten so bad that taps have dried up, and the president has declared a national emergency.

            The El Niño, a system of unusually warm water in the Pacific, significantly alters weather patterns over the fall and winter when it hits land, causing drier conditions in Central America and wetter conditions in North America and parts of South America.

            “We have to be prepared for the worst,” Morales said at a press conference, the Guardian reported. He also told press the country will use this drought as an opportunity to invest in strategies to adapt to climate change impacts.

          • Saudi Arabia’s Sway in OPEC Limited by Resurgent Iraq and Iran

            Iraq and Iran, shaking off shackles of sanctions and war, have raised oil output to record highs and are asserting themselves within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Together they produce more than 8 million barrels of oil a day, almost a quarter of the oil pumped by the group, and both want to boost their output further.

          • Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’

            Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

            Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

        • Finance

          • Sweden’s flag company Ericsson paid millions SEK to a Costa Rica’s President while competing for telecom deal

            I have recently reported in ‘The Indicter’ and ‘Global Research’ of a payment made by Swedish giant corporation Ericsson, to the Clinton foundation. I have also reported separately the intervention of this company in Haiti – which had disastrous consequences for that country’s economy, as reported in a US Embassy cable from Port-au-Prince to the State Department [see document-excerpt below].

            The revelations regarding unethical transactions in a variety of corruption investigations around Ericsson indicate, in my judgement, that this Swedish flag company might have pursued systematic bribery, internationally.

            The new exposures are in relation to previous Costa Rica President Miguel Angel Rodriguez over the tendering process for a major telecommunications contract in that nation. The revelations are partly based on the testimony of a former employee at the company, Liss Olof Nenzell, who was in charge of “sensitive payments”. The report adds that government ministers as well as executives of Telecom companies received Ericsson’s payments.

            Reports of the exact sum allegedly sent by Ericsson to Miguel Angel Rodriguez vary in the Swedish media. While ‘Swedish Radio’ puts it at $750,000 [See graphic above], ‘The Local’ (Carl Bildt’s megaphone) mentions the significantly lower amount of $271,245. Rodriguez denies the existence of bribes; he admits, nevertheless, “having links” to the mentioned bank account in Panama. Former Costa Rica’s president Rodriguez was a staunch supporter of the UN invasion in Haiti. Following that invasion, Ericsson obtained extended credits in Haiti; that, according to a document declassified by the US State Department, contributed significantly to the decline of the economy of that country.

          • TPP Dead, TTIP Dying, But The EU And Canada Seem Determined To Ram Through CETA Deal Without Proper Scrutiny

            The death of TPP has now been confirmed by Donald Trump himself in a short video posted to YouTube. As Mike wrote recently, the other huge trade deal, TTIP, is now in limbo, probably dying, and there are rumors that even the low-profile Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) has been put on ice pending instructions from the new President. Doubtless attempts will be made to revivify them, and if those fail, there will certainly be further so-called “trade” deals — which actually go way beyond trade — that seek to bring in all the bad things that Techdirt has been warning about for years.

            But alongside TPP, TTIP and TISA, there is one deal that is teetering on the brink of success. CETA is a smaller-scale agreement between the EU and Canada, but it’s more important than it looks. It allows US companies with subsidiaries in Canada to use the agreement’s corporate sovereignty provisions to sue the EU — and there are 42,000 such companies according to one analysis (pdf). As a result, CETA has been called “TTIP by the backdoor,” since it would provide a handy way for US companies to put pressure on EU nations even if TTIP suffers the same fate as TPP.

          • India’s Cash Ban Is the Best Thing to Happen to Digital Payments [Ed: absolutely devastating to privacy]

            Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Twitter feed has come alive these past two weeks. From a roadside egg-seller in Bhopal to a soda hawker in Bangalore, the founder of Paytm has posted snapshots of the unusual array of merchants who ply the teeming streets of India — and are now turning to his digital payments startup for help.

            Those fishmongers, vegetable vendors and rickshaw drivers count among the thousands who’ve signed onto India’s largest digital payments service since Prime Minister Narendra Modi triggered a nationwide cash crunch when he scrapped the country’s two largest note denominations. While the aim was to vanquish “black money,” it could end up being the best thing to happen to its nascent online finance industry and haul its antiquated economy into the 21st century by making digital payments mainstream.

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

          • Trump’s grandfather ‘kicked out of Germany for avoiding military service’

            Donald Trump’s grandfather was kicked out of his native Germany for failing to do his mandatory military service there, a historian has claimed.

            A local council letter from 1905 informed Friedrich Trump — who had become a United States citizen — that he would not be granted his German citizenship back and that he had eight weeks to leave the country or be deported, German historian Roland Paul told CNN Tuesday.

            He also claimed that Trump had illegally left Germany, failing to notify authorities of his plan to immigrate.

          • US election recounts campaign—citing hack attacks—raises $3M in one day

            Citing the dangers of hacked voting machines, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said on Wednesday that she intends to raise more than $2 million by Friday to initiate vote recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

            “After a divisive and painful presidential race, reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual e-mail accounts are causing many Americans to wonder if our election results are reliable,” Stein said. “These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust.”

            In her statement, Stein claims that some election machines used in Wisconsin were banned in California because they were “highly vulnerable to hacking and malicious reprogramming.”

          • Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots

            You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons manually checking ballots is an essential security safeguard (and includes some incorrect numbers, to boot). Let me set the record straight about what I and other leading election security experts have actually been saying to the campaign and everyone else who’s willing to listen.

          • Alex Halderman Clarifies: Not Sure If Election Was Hacked, But, Uh, Shouldn’t Someone Be Checking To Make Sure?

            So lots of people have been discussing the story claiming that some e-voting experts believe the Clinton campaign should be asking for a recount in certain battleground states, where it’s possible there were some e-voting irregularities. As we noted in our post, the story would barely be worth mentioning if one of the people involved wasn’t Alex Halderman, a computer science professor we’ve been talking about for nearly a decade and a half, going back to when he was a student. Halderman is basically the expert on e-voting security — so when he says something, it’s worth paying attention.

            Halderman has now posted something of a follow-up to the NY Magazine article clarifying his views and what he’s suggesting. He’s not saying there’s evidence of a hack, but basically saying that no one knows if there was a hack or not, and because of that, there should be a recount as a way to audit the results to see if there were any irregularities.

          • Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones)

            After an election marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states.

          • Hillary Clinton Supporters Call for Vote Recount in Battleground States

            Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is growing. She is roughly 30,000 votes behind Donald J. Trump in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin — a combined gap that is narrowing. Her impassioned supporters are now urging her to challenge the results in those two states and Pennsylvania, grasping at the last straws to reverse Mr. Trump’s decisive majority in the Electoral College.

            In recent days, they have seized on a report by a respected computer scientist and other experts suggesting that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the keys to Mr. Trump’s Electoral College victory, need to manually review paper ballots to assure the election was not hacked.

            “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack?” J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who has studied the vulnerabilities of election systems at length, wrote on Medium on Wednesday as the calls based on his conclusions mounted. “Probably not.”

          • Jill Stein hopes to request election recounts in battleground states

            Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is prepared to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states, her campaign said on Wednesday.

            Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a $2.5m fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

          • Jill Stein pushes for recount in 3 swing states over hacking concerns

            Failed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday announced plans to force a recount of votes in three crucial swing states — a longshot move that could help vanquished Democrat Hillary Clinton, who remained mum on the subject.

            Stein, who garnered a dismal 1 percent of the national vote, said challenging the tallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was needed to answer questions about a possible cyber-attack on electronic-voting machines.

            She appealed for $2 million-plus in donations to pay for the effort, which would have to be started by Friday, the deadline for filing papers in Wisconsin.

            An online counter showed just over $285,000 in donations by late Wednesday afternoon, and a Stein campaign lawyer notified the Wisconsin Elections Commission it intended to seek a statewide recount, a commission spokesman said.

          • Experts Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States

            Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

            Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

          • Donald Trump Skips TV for YouTube to Offer Brief Transition Update

            Hours after scolding TV-news executives in a meeting, president-elect Donald Trump decided to make a brief address Monday on YouTube updating the nation on where his transition efforts stand.

            In one of the few appearances he has made in the two weeks since he defeated Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency, Trump devoted the two-and-a-half-minute clip to an overview of his priorities, from interviewing cabinet members to his policy plans in the first 100 days.

          • Acts of Quiet Desperation: Wisconsin Recount Edition

            It is quite sad to see so many well-meaning and otherwise intelligent Americans embarrassing and deluding themselves that Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the election held over two weeks ago.

            I hear many using words like mourning, markers of the kind of feelings that follow an actual death. If that is the case, then it is time to move on into some form of acceptance.

            In addition to the clueless bleating about the electoral vote not matching the popular vote (you win at baseball with more runs, not more hits), Hillary Clinton is now being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump. The story, somehow, despite the scientists not speaking on record and only to the Clinton team in private, has gone viral across the same media (HuffPo, Vox, you know them) that never saw the flaws in Candidate Clinton and still doesn’t.

          • Republicans were wildly successful at suppressing voters in 2016

            Last week, the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act propelled Donald Trump to the White House.

            Trump will assume the presidency because of the Electoral College’s influence — nearly a million more people cast ballots for Hillary Clinton as of November 15. The election was also marked by low turnout, with tens of millions of eligible voters choosing not to participate at all. Yet there has been relatively little discussion about the millions of people who were eligible to vote but could not do so because they faced an array of newly-enacted barriers to the ballot box.

          • Study: most students can’t spot fake news

            If you thought fake online news was a problem for impressionable adults, it’s even worse for the younger crowd. A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn’t identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two thirds of middle school kids didn’t see why they shouldn’t trust a bank executive’s post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn’t question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it.

          • This is the single most dangerous thing Donald Trump said in his New York Times interview

            Donald Trump said lots (and lots) of eyebrow-raising things during his sitdown with the New York Times on Tuesday. On climate change. On prosecuting (or not) Hillary Clinton. But one statement – in response to a question about the various conflicts of interest between his eponymous company and his status as the soon-to-be president of the United States – was truly eye-popping.

            Trump’s statement carried considerable echoes of Richard Nixon’s famous/infamous line to interview David Frost three decades ago: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

        • Censorship/Free Speech

          • Facebook wants to get into China so badly it created a censorship tool

            The Times adds that the tool may never be used and that it’s just one of the ideas Facebook is throwing around to get into China. The report also notes that if the tool is eventually used in the country, Facebook itself probably wouldn’t be suppressing posts; rather the tool would be given to a third party in charge of censorship.

          • ISIS publishes a ‘how to’ outfox Twitter guide

            Islamic State’s presence on social media is here to stay even as it loses ground in Iraq and Syria and after a serious crackdown by Twitter. The terrorist entity has published a guide on how to outfox Twitter’s efforts, according to an advance copy of a report by the Jihadi Websites Monitoring Group of IDC’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism obtained by The Jerusalem Post.

          • Sweden to outlaw… what, exactly?

            For years, online hate speech and cyber-bullying have been on the political agenda in Sweden. Now there will be some new laws, covering a wide range of actions and statements.

          • Opera Browser Asked to Blacklist Pirate Sites in “Turbo Mode”

            The Opera web browser feature ‘Turbo Mode’ is designed to speed up browsing. As a side effect, it also bypasses website blocks, something popular with pirates. However, it appears that the company has been in talks to integrate a blacklist which could stop access to blocked domains.

          • Facebook ‘made China censorship tool’

            Facebook worked on special software so it could potentially accommodate censorship demands in China, according to a report in the New York Times.

            The social network refused to confirm or deny the software’s existence, but said in a statement it was “spending time understanding and learning more” about China.

          • The War on the First Amendment Didn’t Start Last Week

            For those who woke a week ago to discover the First Amendment is under attack, I lost my job at the Obama/Clinton State Department in 2012 for writing We Meant Well, a book the government did not like, and needed the help of lawyer Jesselyn Radack and the ACLU to push back the threat of jail.

            My book was critical of actions in Iraq under both the Obama and Bush administrations. One helped protect the other.

            Braver people than me, like Thomas Drake, Morris Davis, and Robert MacLean, risked imprisonment and lost their government jobs for talking to the press about government crimes and malfeasance. John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, and Jeff Sterling went to jail for speaking to/informing the press. The Obama administration tried to prosecute reporters from Fox and the New York Times for stories on government wrongdoing.

            Ray Maxwell at the State Department went public with information about Clinton’s email malfeasance before you had even heard of her private server. The media called him a liar, an opportunist, and a political hack and he was pressed into retirement.

          • Facebook, China, Fake News And The Slippery Slope Of Censorship

            Well, I guess it’s time to complete the circle. Last week, we were warning that the rush to demonize Facebook for allowing “fake news” to be distributed and shared via its platform would lead to calls to suppress and censor certain view points. And then, this week came the news that China is strategically and opportunistically using the hubbub over “fake news” to push for greater censorship of the internet — claiming it’s necessary to stop fake news and keep people “better” informed (rather than the opposite).

            And to top all of that off, comes a story from the NY Times about how Facebook has been working on a tool to allow the Chinese government to censor stories on Facebook as a condition of entering the market. It’s no secret that Facebook has been trying for a really long time to figure out a way to get into China. There are over a billion potential users there that Facebook really wants on its platform. And that’s not a bad thing. But, of course, China has a heavily censored internet. And while Facebook has been mostly blocked in China, there have already been reports from last year of stories being suppressed to appease the Chinese government.

          • Facebook’s Chinese takeaway could see certain posts silenced

            FACEBOOK HAS REPORTEDLY developed software that will stop certain posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, namely China.

            The social network has been banned in China since 2009, not because the country was sick of baby pictures and mundane gossip, but because of the government’s strict censorship rules.

            Like many other US technology firms, Facebook would like to reenter the market, which is home to more than 1.4 billion potential pocket-liners for Facebook.

          • Facebook developed secret software to censor user posts in China, report says

            Facebook has developed censorship software in an effort to get China to lift its seven-year ban on the world’s largest social network, according to reports.

            The social network developed the software to suppress posts from appearing in users’ news feeds in specific geographies with the support of the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, according to the New York Times. The posts themselves will not be suppressed, only their visibility.

            A Facebook spokesperson said: “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country.

          • We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned

            A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

            We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.

        • Privacy/Surveillance

          • Google warns journalists and professors: Your account is under attack

            Google is warning prominent journalists and professors that nation-sponsored hackers have recently targeted their accounts, according to reports delivered in the past 24 hours over social media.

            The people reportedly receiving the warnings include Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Stanford University professor and former US diplomat Michael McFaul, GQ correspondent Keith Olbermann, and according to this tweet, Politico, Highline, and Foreign Policy contributor/columnist Julia Ioffe; New York Magazine reporter Jonathan Chait; and Atlantic magazine writer Jon Lovett. Reports of others receiving the warnings are here and here. Many of the reports included banners that Google displayed when account holders logged in. Ars spoke to someone who works for a well-known security company who also produced an image of a warning he received. The person said he was aware of a fellow security-industry professional receiving the same warning.

          • Wednesday’s papers: Supo wants more powers, Finland’s electric car ambitions, Alko opens online shop

            While the agency said that it had no reason to update Finland’s current terror threat assessment, it did say that the relatively high number of Finnish nationals joining Isis is concerning.

            According to the agency more than 300 people currently under Supo surveillance because of suspected ties to jihadist extremism, the papers write.

          • Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

            Plans to keep a record of UK citizens’ online activities face a challenge from tech firms seeking to offer ways to hide people’s browser histories.

            Internet providers will soon be required to record which services their customers’ devices connect to – including websites and messaging apps.

            The Home Office says it will help combat terrorism, but critics have described it as a “snoopers’ charter”.

            Critics of the law have said hackers could get access to the records.

            “It only takes one bad actor to go in there and get the entire database,” said James Blessing, chairman of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa), which represents BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and others.

            “You can try every conceivable thing in the entire world to [protect it] but somebody will still outsmart you.

          • Monument to Privacy: Is This Manhattan Skyscraper a NSA Listening Post?

            Many have walked by and wondered what purpose this vast, windowless skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan serves. 33 Thomas Street, also known as the “Long Lines Building” (LLB), is an impenetrable monolithic fortress amid canyons of glass and steel. Ostensibly an AT&T telecoms building, the New York Times have recently reported (based on investigative work by The Intercept) that this “blank face[d] monument to privacy” may in fact be a NSA (National Security Agency) listening post, hidden in plain sight.

            Designed by San Franciscan John Carl Warnecke—an architect who worked closely with the Kennedy administration, and designer of the late President’s mausoleum—the Brutalist tower was completed in 1974. Built to withstand a nuclear attack on New York or, at the very least, a devastating loss of power to the city, the 550 foot-tall (169 meters) structure is supported by systems that allow it to provide enough food, water and fuel to sustain 1,500 people for two weeks completely removed from public infrastructure.

          • How can I protect myself from government snoopers?

            The UK has just passed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, at the third attempt, and it will become law by the end of the year. The bill was instigated by the then home secretary, Theresa May, in 2012. It is better known as the snooper’s charter.

            Jim Killock, the director of Open Rights Group, described it as the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”. It more or less removes your right to online privacy.

          • Moment of truth: Web browsers and the SHA-1 switch

            The long-awaited SHA-1 deprecation deadline of Jan. 1, 2017, is almost here. At that point, we’ll all be expected to use SHA-2 instead. So the question is: What is your browser going to do when it encounters a SHA-1 signed digital certificate?

            We’ll delve into the answers in a minute. But first, let’s review what the move from SHA-1 to SHA-2 is all about.

          • Who can view my internet history?

            Last week, whilst most of us were busy watching the comings and goings at Trump Tower and Ed Balls on Strictly, Parliament quietly passed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (a.k.a. the Snoopers’ Charter). It’s been described as the most intrusive system of any democracy in history and a privacy disaster waiting to happen.

            The Act makes broad provisions to track what you do online. Amongst a raft of new surveillance and hacking powers, it introduces the concept of an internet connection record: a log of which internet services – such as websites and instant messaging apps – you have accessed. Your internet provider must keep these logs in bulk and hand them over to the government on request, whether you want them to or not.

          • Your data is for sale

            Seminar: The consequences of the commercial use of consumer data

          • What Would Trump’s Plan to Fire Federal Workers Mean for Intelligence Employees?

            President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers want him to take on government bureaucracy the same way he approached his reality show: cut the fat and fire more federal employees.

            Civil service laws were written to prevent freewheeling firing sprees and to protect federal employees’ rights, though many complain it prevents speedy removal of ineffective workers, creating the “forever” government bureaucrat. However, large segments of the intelligence community, including DIA, CIA, NSA, and most of the FBI are not entitled to these same protections, and some attorneys who represent those employees are particularly concerned.

            “[Intelligence community] employees have little protection,” wrote Mark Zaid, an attorney who often represents members of the national security and intelligence spheres, in a tweet. He noted that some clients, blowing off steam and making dark jokes, threatened to leave the U.S. to hand over secrets to agents of foreign powers “because of mistreatment.”

          • A message to tech entrepreneurs from Edward Snowden: “We can build something better”

            In a climate of global instability, one of the world’s most renowned whistleblowers has put the onus on tech companies to step in when people’s basic human rights are not upheld by governments or the law.

            Shortly after Donald Trump added the United States presidency to his portfolio, Startpage.com hosted a live interview with Edward Snowden, who believes Trump’s election is a “dark moment” in US history.

          • Protect the whistleblowers: The case for pardoning Snowden

            Critics of Edward Snowden have long maintained that the young whistleblower could have legally and safely worked within the system to reform the NSA, but instead recklessly went rogue.

            This simply is not true.

            Snowden’s actions can only fairly be judged when considered against a backdrop of Washington power plays, diminishing rights for intelligence community contractors like Snowden, and retaliation against those who did speak up through institutional channels.

          • Obama: No Pardon For Edward Snowden

            President Barack Obama has never taken kindly to whistleblowers, and it seems he hasn’t changed his stance even in the twilight of his administration.

            Asked about the possibility of pardoning Edward Snowden, the American who leaked thousands of documents from the National Security Agency, Obama said it’s not going to happen.

            “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point,” Obama told Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper.

          • President’s stance on Snowden pardon

            On Nov. 18, Der Spiegel, a German weekly magazine which is one of Europe’s largest publications of its kind, interviewed President Obama. On the question of whether he would pardon Edward Snowden, Obama replied “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves …”

          • Obama won’t pardon Snowden

            Despite Edward Snowden and his lawyers presenting a case for Barack Obama to free Edward Snowden of his charges for espionage, the House Select Committee has issued a letter to the President saying he should not be pardoned.

            13 Republicans and nine Democrats argued that the crimes Snowden had committed were inexcusable and he should not be let off.

          • Trump’s CIA pick would reinstate US collection of phone data

            The federal government’s long-hidden authority to sweep up records of all phone calls made in the U.S. was repealed last year in a bipartisan vote of Congress. But President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the CIA has called for reinstatement of the data haul and said its elimination was part of “Edward Snowden’s vision of America.”

            Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, revealed in 2013 that the NSA had been collecting bulk data on U.S. phone calls without a warrant for more than a decade. President George W. Bush’s administration had ordered the collection unilaterally after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, then obtained approval from a secret intelligence court in 2006.

          • Snowden Fires Back at Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

            Despite President Obama‘s (incorrect) claim that he is unable to pardon Edward Snowden because the whistleblower hasn’t gone before a court, that hasn’t stopped Snowden from continuing to troll the NSA and Obama Administration.

          • Obama claims he can’t pardon Snowden

            The campaign to have President Barack Obama pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden has run aground.

            Not only has the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and nine Democrats, sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. “He is a criminal.” Obama himself has said it is impossible.

          • Edward Snowden doesn’t care about Trump administration stepping up efforts to arrest him

            Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Monday downplayed the importance of President-elect Donald Trump and again defended his decision to leak documents showing massive surveillance of US citizens’ communications.

            “Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden told an internet conference in Stockholm, speaking via a video link from Russia, where he has been living as a fugitive.

          • Edward Snowden Latest: Trump ‘Is Just The President,’ NSA Whistleblower Says

            Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden made light of Republican Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on Monday during an internet conference in Stockholm.

            “Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden reportedly said at the conference speaking via a video link from Moscow where the 33-year-old fugitive has been living since 2013.

          • Trump is ‘just the president’, says defiant fugitive Snowden

            Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Monday downplayed the importance of President-elect Donald Trump and again defended his decision to leak documents showing massive surveillance of US citizens’ communications.

            “Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden told an internet conference in Stockholm, speaking via a video link from Russia, where he has been living as a fugitive.

          • German Court Rules that Snowden Invitation is Permitted
          • Court ruling means Edward Snowden may give evidence in Germany

            The possibility of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden being brought to Berlin to give evidence before a parliamentary committee has risen after a top appeals court ruled the German government cannot block him.

            The committee investigating US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance in Germany has wanted to call Snowden as a witness to detail what he knows but the government has said it cannot guarantee his safety.

          • Court ruling means Snowden may testify in Germany

            The possibility of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden being brought to Berlin to testify before a Parliamentary committee has risen after a top appeals court ruled the government cannot block him.

            The committee investigating NSA surveillance in Germany has wanted to call Snowden as a witness to detail what he knows but the government has said it can’t guarantee his safety. Snowden is wanted by the U.S. on espionage charges.

            But in a ruling announced Monday, the Federal Court of Justice said the government needs to “establish the preconditions” including “effective protection of the witness.”

          • Court Ruling: Snowden Must be Brought to Germany to Answer US Spying Questions

            The German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has ruled that the German government must make plans to bring former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to Berlin to answer questions from a parliamentary committee looking into US intelligence agency spying.

          • Snowden can testify in Berlin, govt must provide ‘effective protection’ – court

            A top German appeals court has ruled that the government must “establish preconditions” for US whistleblower Edward Snowden to come to Berlin, in order for him to testify before a parliamentary committee investigating NSA surveillance in Germany.

            The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruling, made on November 11 but only announced on Monday, came after the Greens and the Left Party requested that the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor be questioned by German MPs. Snowden is wanted by the US on espionage charges.

          • Opinion: Wonderful Snowden Verdict

            The decision by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice in favor of parliamentary minority rights – specifically in the Edward Snowden whistleblower case – is a good, solid verdict, writes Marcel Fürstenau.

          • Snowden can be asked to testify in person in German NSA probe
          • Snowden can be invited to meatspace in German NSA probe, court rules

            Germany’s government has been told that it should make suitable arrangements for that to happen. It has been refusing to invite Snowden to give evidence personally since it would need to guarantee that he would not be handed over to the US—a promise the German authorities say would risk damaging the political relations between the two countries.

            Instead, it has called for him to give evidence via a video link, or for German officials to interview him in Moscow, both of which Snowden turned down.

          • High court: Snowden must come to Berlin

            The Federal court of Justice (BGH) has ruled that the government must bring US whistleblower Edward Snowden to Berlin to answer parliamentary questions on the NSA, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

        • Civil Rights/Policing

          • Governments see social media as “a new front in warfare”

            Propaganda, psychological warfare, and real-time surveillance were all on the agenda at the Sixth Annual Conference on Social Media Within the Defence and Military Sector.

          • Journalist who criticised burka flees country after rape and death threats

            The journalist spoke about how a Bosnian soldier offered a bounty on his social media account for anyone who would sexually assault her.

            She said: “He publicly called for my rape offering money to anyone who is willing to rape me.”

            A Ministry of Defence investigation has stalled despite nearly two months of investigating the incident.

          • Arabia Moves to Bosnia: The implications of the Middle-Eastern influx into Central Bosnia

            And Iran was not alone. In the 1990s Saudi economic aid to Bosnia had a religious agenda. Their money was almost exclusively devoted to building (and rebuilding) mosques and madrassas. According to their own claims the Saudis spent $1 billion (US) on “Islamic activities” in Bosnia between 1992-1998. When Alija Izetbegovic was once asked why Saudi monies were not used to bolster the economy, he replied that the Saudis “would not give money for building factories . . . They would only support building mosques.”[ii] Saudi officials now claim that they gave more than $6 billion (US) to Bosnia over the past twenty years.[iii]

          • Trump registered eight companies in Saudi Arabia during campaign: report

            President-elect Donald Trump registered eight companies during his presidential campaign that appear to be tied to hotel interests in Saudi Arabia, according to a report in The Washington Post.

            Trump registered the companies in August 2015, shortly after launching his presidential bid, according to The Post.

            The companies were registered under names such as THC Jeddah Hotel and DT Jeddah Technical Services, according to financial disclosure filings.

          • Water Protector in Critical Condition After DAPL Police Grenade Blew Apart Her Arm

            Sunday night’s no-holds-barred offensive by police from multiple agencies against unarmed water protectors opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline on Highway 1806’s Backwater Bridge — in which at least 167 suffered injuries — sent two elders into cardiac arrest, left a 13-year-old girl injured by a rubber bullet to the head, and now, one woman will almost certainly lose her arm.

            Sophia Wilansky stood among the crowd of around 400 water protectors as the police launched an all-out assault, firing ‘nonlethal’ projectiles, tear gas, mace, LRAD sound cannons, and concussion grenades — one of which reportedly exploded on her left arm, tearing through flesh and exposing bone, and leaving her facing possible amputation.

          • ‘Sharia police’ street patrols did not violate law, German court rules

            A German court has ruled that a group of Islamists did not break the law in forming “sharia police” street patrols and telling people to stop drinking, gambling and listening to music.

            The ultra-conservative Muslim group around the German Salafist convert Sven Lau sparked public outrage with their vigilante patrols in the western city of Wuppertal in 2014, but prosecutors have struggled to build a case against them.

            The city’s district court ruled that the seven accused members of the group did not breach a ban on political uniforms when they approached people while wearing orange vests bearing the words “Sharia Police”.

            Judges said there could only be a violation of the law – originally aimed against street movements such as the early Nazi party – if the uniforms were “suggestively militant or intimidating”, a court spokesman said.

          • Happy Thanksgiving and Moving Forward in a Pluralistic America

            As leading lawyers we obviously play an important role in ensuring that racism and some kind of white-nationalism does not again become acceptable and normal. One of my friends who is openly gay here in Missouri was leaving his house last week and a passenger in a passing vehicle yelled-out “faggot” and targeted him with an open soda bottle. As with Bill Lee, Tracy noted that he had not experienced this type of open vitriol for decades. These incidents are These incidents are not supposed to happen here, but they are happening. As Dan Rather writes “now is a time when none of us can afford to remain seated or silent. We must all stand up to be counted. . . . I believe there is a vast majority who wants to see this nation continue in tolerance and freedom. But it will require speaking.”

          • Kazakh politicians want to rename capital after president

            If Kazakh politicians get their wish, the capital city will be renamed to honour the country’s first and only president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

            The suggestion to rename Astana was buried in a declaration unanimously passed by both chambers of parliament on Wednesday.

            On the surface, the declaration was to mark the forthcoming 25th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence. But reading past the tributes to Nazarbayev’s “outstanding service”, the declaration’s final paragraph calls for renaming the capital and other important facilities across the country after theleader of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

          • Posters appeal to save controversial Swiss mosque

            The posters in support of the An‘Nour mosque were seen around town on Tuesday but promptly removed by Winterthur authorities, who said they had not been pre-informed of the posters, reported news agencies on Wednesday.

            Associations and communities are allowed to use free publicity sites around the town but must inform the authorities and have their posters checked beforehand, they said.

            According to the newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the posters called for donations aiming at saving a mosque and referenced a bank account belonging to An‘Nour.

            The mosque in question is an increasingly controversial presence in Winterthur.

            It is currently suspended by the Zurich Federation of Islamic Organizations (Vioz) after its imam and three others were arrested in a police raid at the beginning of November.

            The raid followed a tip off about a sermon given by the imam in late October in which he “called for the murder of Muslims who refuse to participate in communal prayer”.

          • Britain has “turned a blind eye” to abuse of women by sharia ‘courts’

            Powerful testimony from Muslim women has been published by MPs on the Home Affairs Committee as part of their investigation into sharia, while activists have warned that its approach so far has favoured those who support sharia councils.

            Submissions received from Muslim women on their experiences of sharia ‘law’ have now been published by the Committee. The evidence was gathered by One Law For All, who sent the personal testimonies to the committee for their investigation into sharia ‘law’ in the UK.

            One woman whose evidence was included for the Select Committee’s consideration is Habiba Jan who was trapped in an abusive Islamic ‘marriage’ and was unable to escape without a sharia ‘divorce’. Jan ended up being referred to Anjem Choudary for a ‘divorce’, without knowing who he was.

          • Areas of concern regarding Home Affairs Select Committee on Sharia

            We refer to recent emails from the Home Affairs Select Committee to Southall Black Sisters and the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation requesting us to help find Muslim women who have ‘used’ Sharia Councils, to attend an event in Whitechapel, East London, on 24 November 2016 in connection with your inquiry.

            We are a coalition of organisations who have an immense track record in providing front line services and in campaigning for the human rights of black and minority women. Our coalition includes Southall Black Sisters, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, Centre for Secular Space, One Law for All, British Muslims for Secular Democracy and the Culture Project: we represent some of the most marginalised groups in our society. Between us, we have over 100 years of combined experience of working with women from all faith backgrounds, the majority of whom come from a Muslim background.

          • Mainstream Media MIA as DAPL Action Is Met With Water Cannons and Mace

            Outside a triage tent at the foot of the Oceti Sakowin Camp, frantic chatter and whirring generators fused with the familiar drone of police surveilling in the night sky.

            “We have seen four gunshot wounds, three of them to the face and head,” said Leland Brenholt, a volunteer medic.

            By gunshots, he insinuated that rubber bullets had been used on hundreds of people clashing with police. Conflict erupted again over the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, Sunday night.

            “This is still not on mainstream media,” Brenholt sighed. “I’d like to know why,” he sang in a facetious sing-song voice.

            The video account of Brentholt was one of dozens posted on Facebook. They helped to piece together the night’s events, an evolving scene repeatedly described as a war zone by many testifying via livestream.

            Tensions flared when police say around 400 protesters, or ‘water protectors,’ attempted to dismantle a police-enforced barricade on State Highway 1806. Around 6 p.m., demonstrators say they used a semi-truck to remove burnt military vehicles that had been chained to concrete barriers. Since October 27th, traffic has been blocked at the center of the Backwater Bridge, a crossing not far from the encampments where thousands of pipeline resisters have occupied since April.

          • Mob of 30 schoolchildren ambush and beat up two Met Police officers

            Police said a 15-year-old male was arrested at the scene on suspicion of actual bodily harm and has since been bailed to a date in mid-December.

        • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

          • Trump hires two net neutrality opponents to oversee FCC transition

            President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two outspoken opponents of net neutrality rules to oversee the Federal Communications Commission’s transition from Democratic to Republican control.

            The appointees announced yesterday are Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison. Eisenach is director of the Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), while Jamison is a visiting fellow at the same institution. Eisenach previously worked on behalf of Verizon and other telecoms as a consultant, and Jamison used to manage regulatory policy at Sprint.

          • Make companies pay full cost of breaches to restore trust in the internet, says ISOC

            Fake news, online banking thefts and data breaches: It’s no wonder that trust in the internet is at an all-time low. But don’t worry: The Internet Society has a five-step plan for restoring faith in the network of networks.

            The first step is to put users first, according to ISOC, which published its 2016 Global Internet Report on Thursday. That involves being more transparent (step two) about risk and the incidence of data breaches and prioritizing data security (step three) to ensure breaches don’t happen.

          • Experts to Congress: IoT regulation may be inevitable

            In Nov. 16 testimony before a joint subcommittee meeting of the House of Representatives, cybersecurity experts debated whether the internet of things should be regulated by government.

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • Trademarks

            • Apple’s ebook store bans books that use Apple trademarks in unapproved (but legal and accurate) ways

              Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz’s must-read new book The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (read an excerpt) is not for sale in the Apple ebook store, and won’t be until they agree to change their text to refer to Apple’s ebooks as “iBooks” rather than “iBook.”

              The petty editorial dictate is a little-known aspect of the agreement that publishers must sign onto in order to put their products in Apple’s bookstore, which demands that Apple trademarks be used as “adjectives, not nouns.” But even this injunction doesn’t actually cover the sin that Perzanowski and Schultz committed in their book.

              Rather, Apple is objecting to the authors’ use of iBook (the name of a discontinued line of Apple laptops) to refer to the ebooks sold in Apple’s store, which they do three times in the text — Apple wants these items referred to as “ebooks from the iBooks store.”

          • Copyrights

            • Viacom 18 Obtains Court Order to Block 1,250 ‘Pirate’ Sites

              In India, a court has gone to extreme lengths to protect a new movie distributed by Viacom 18. A so-called John Doe order filed against at least 40 ISPs instructs them to block a minimum of 1,250 websites that might make the newly released Force 2 available to the public.

            • 4shared: Copyright Holders Abuse Google’s DMCA Takedown System

              Popular file-hosting service 4shared is a true piracy haven, according to some copyright holders. Following numerous complaints the site has had more than 50 million of its URLs removed from Google’s search index. However, according to 4shared many of these are the result of abusive takedown requests.

        ]]>         http://techrights.org/2016/11/24/openbsd-foundation-smartisan/feed/ 0         Links 23/11/2016: Fedora 25 Officially Released http://techrights.org/2016/11/23/fedora-25-officially-released/ http://techrights.org/2016/11/23/fedora-25-officially-released/#comments Wed, 23 Nov 2016 17:19:18 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96958

        GNOME bluefish

        Contents

        GNU/Linux

        Free Software/Open Source

        • Mastodon is an open source, decentralized version of Twitter

          So, you want to share your thoughts on social media, but you’re tired of the way apps like Facebook and Twitter monopolize your posts and feed. It might be time to try an entirely new alternative: Mastodon.

          Mastodon bills itself as a free, open-source social media server. Like Twitter, it’s a microblogging platform. Unlike Twitter, it’s non-commercial and not centrally owned, so you don’t have to worry about what will happen to your account or your posts if it gets acquired by another company.

        • The Power of Open Source in the Foundation Framework

          CSS frameworks are among the most actively used tools in web design and development. If you’ve been involved in the industry, at some point you would have heard, seen or used a CSS framework or library before. What many developers do not realise is that these frameworks flourish thanks to the open source movement.

          Frameworks like Bootstrap and ZURB’s Foundation offer a platform for rapid prototyping, getting your site up and running by providing all of the common building blocks. Bootstrap and Foundation are just two popular examples, there are hundreds if not thousands of great frameworks out there that aim to make your job easier and speed up your development work.

        • How Your Company Can Benefit from Contributing to Open Source

          Open source is the antithesis of proprietary software. It’s the free lovin’ hippie amid a sea of corporate profiteers. Defined as software for which the source code is freely available to view, modify, and redistribute, open source software has benefited hardened coders and layman consumers alike. But just because it’s free doesn’t mean profit-driven companies can’t use open source to their advantage.

        • Free as in Puppy — Open Sourcing Your JavaScript Code

          Open Source is much more than making something available to the public. It is not only about your code, it is also about licenses, understanding participation and herding cats a.k.a. dealing with community issues. In this article we will briefly look at the benefits of open sourcing your code and the pitfalls to avoid.

        • Disney’s best releases may be its open source tools

          While most people associate Disney with Mickey Mouse, animation, and amusement parks, the company is forging a path in the open source software realm, encouraging contributions from its developers and releasing software of its own.

          Not surprising, several projects involve images, such as the OpenEXR high-dynamic-range image file format developed by Disney subsidiary Industrial Light and Magic. Others are less image-focused, including Munki, a set of tools to help MacOS X admins manage software installs and removals.

        • Tools for collecting and analyzing community metrics

          Thus far, we’ve discussed the importance of setting goals to guide the metrics process, avoiding vanity metrics, and outlined the general types of metrics that are useful for studying your community. With a solid set of goals in place, we are now ready to discuss some of the technical details of gathering and analyzing your community metrics that align with those goals.

          The tools you use and the way in which you collect metrics depend heavily on the processes you have in place for your community. Think about all of the ways in which your community members interact with each other and where collaboration happens. Where is code being committed? Where are discussions happening? More importantly than the where, what is the how? Do you have documented processes for community members to contribute? If you have a solid understanding of what your community is doing and how it is doing it, you’ll be much more successful at extracting meaningful data to support your goals.

        • Entertainment Giants Offer a Slew of Useful Open Source Tools

          Nowadays, open source efforts are going on not only at big technology companies, but at big companies that leverage technology. Two prime examples exist in the entertaintment industry: Both Netflix and Disney have robust open source programs and have contributed mighty tools to the community. Here is a peek at what they have contributed.

        • Web Browsers

          • Mozilla

            • Mozilla’s Firefox Focus Browser Protects Your Tracks Online

              If you’ve used incognito browsing features, or even the Tor anonymity tool, you’re already familiar with the concept of avoiding online trackers. Now, Mozilla has launched a browser for iOS users that offers security features that block unwanted trackers.

        • SaaS/Back End

        • CMS

          • A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding and Open Content Management Solution

            In case you missed it, open source content management systems (CMS) have come of age. With free CMS tools, you can manage a blog, manage content in the cloud and much more You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.

            The good news is that free, sophisticated guides for evaluating CMS systems have flourished, as well. We’ve covered many of the best guides for getting going with a good CMS system. Here, in this newly updated post, you’ll find several additional, good resources.

        • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

          • Microsoft’s Embrace of Linux Draws Ire

            “I am really disappointed that The Linux Foundation accepted Microsoft as a member in the Linux ecosystem, especially considering its own mission to promote, protect and advance Linux,” added another. Rather than expanding its membership to include established commercial vendors, the contributor said the group should be focused on “standardization, stable programming API’s, more use of inherent safe programming languages and less fragmentation of developer effort.”

          • Microsoft’s Warning — “Don’t Change Linux Files In Windows”

        • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • Project Releases

        • Public Services/Government

          • Russia kicks out IBM, Microsoft and Oracle

            The State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, is working on a law to reduce government dependence on IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. According to Bloomberg, Russian government agencies will be restricted in buying proprietary software, and will have to prefer open source software instead.

            This step further pushes proprietary vendors out of Russia. Russian companies are increasingly buying software from domestic providers like Diasoft and New Cloud technologies, or deploying open source packages like PostgreSQL and Linux, instead of purchasing licensed packages from companies like Oracle, Autodesk and Siemens.

          • Russia Makes The Right Moves For The Wrong Reasons

            Whatever the motivations, the end result will be the same, a ramping up of utilization of FLOSS in Russia, a good thing. It’s too bad Russia did not make these moves a decade or longer ago which would have caused the move to be completed by now. Too bad Putin isn’t as reasonable in his other dealings with the West.

        • Licensing/Legal

        • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

          • Open Access/Content

            • 4 tips for creating a Wikipedia article

              It is human nature to want to share the enthusiasm you have for a subject or project with others. Wikipedia is a great place for that, where you can record your expertise and create a fact-based touchpoint for your interest. The site’s mission is altruistic, and it has been my experience that Wikipedia administrators zealously guard against content that has an obvious agenda, is not relevant to today’s Zeitgeist, or does not provide the references and citations needed to prove accuracy.

          • Open Hardware/Modding

            • Open-V, The First Open Source RISC-V Microcontroller

              Open Source software has been around for decades. Over these decades, Open Source software has been the driving force behind most of the Internet, and all of the top-500 supercomputers. The product of the Open Source software movement is perhaps more important than Gutenberg’s press. But hardware has not yet fully embraced this super-charging effect of openness. Being able to simply buy an open source CPU, free of all proprietary bits and NDAs is impossible.

            • Open-source hardware makers unite to start certifying products

              Four years ago, Alicia Gibb was trying to unite a fragmented open-source hardware community to join together to create innovative products.

              So was born the Open Source Hardware Association, which Gibb hoped would foster a community of hardware “hackers” sharing, tweaking, and updating hardware designs. It shared the ethics and ethos of open-source software and encouraged the release of hardware designs — be it for it processors, machines, or devices — for public reuse.

              Since then, OSHWA has gained strength, with Intel, Raspberry Pi, and Sparkfun endorsing the organization. Its growth has coincided with the skyrocketing popularity of Arduino and Raspberry Pi-like developer boards — many of them open source — to create gadgets and IoT devices.

            • 3D printed QuadBot Kickstarter combines open source robotics and STEM education
            • Crowdfunding Watch: QuadBot, making robotics fun
            • Manchester Graduates Hoping to Inspire With Their DIY Walking Robot

        • Programming/Development

          • Pyston 0.6 released

            We are excited to announce the v0.6 release of Pyston, our high performance Python JIT.

            In this release our main goal was to reduce the overall memory footprint. It also contains a lot of additional smaller changes for improving compatibility and fixing bugs.

          • Pyston 0.6 Drops Memory Usage, Better NumPy Performance

            For those interested in greater Python performance, the Dropbox team responsible for the Pyston project that’s interpreting Python using JIT techniques with LLVM, has announced a new release.

        Leftovers

        • Health/Nutrition

          • UN Secretary-General Urges Action On High-Level Panel Report On Medicines Access

            United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today issued a message praising the “milestone” report of a High-Level Panel on access to medicines he set up a year ago to address the continuing problem of medicines prices being too high for many in the world to afford, and the lack of access to quality medicines for many. In his message, he called on governments to review the report and its recommendations, and to chart a way forward to address the problem of lack of access to medicines and health technologies.

          • WHO Director Candidates Nabarro, Szócska Speak On Medicines Prices And IP

            Candidates from around the world vying to be the next director general of the World Health Organization in recent weeks have presented their views to member states on a range of public health issues. Two of the six candidates answered a question put to them by Intellectual Property Watch relating to medicines prices, innovation and intellectual property. Here are their answers.

            The question by IP-Watch to candidates was: For a long time, WHO has worked without success on addressing alternative models of financing for R&D and more affordability/accessibility of medicines for poor populations. Recently, the issue has become a mainstream concern with high prices in developed countries too, while questions of incentivizing innovation come into play. What would be your vision of how to address this problem?

          • Eduardo Pisani To Step Down From IFPMA’s Helm In January

            The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations today announced that its Director General is stepping down, but will stay at the helm of the organisation until the end of January.

        • Security

          • Elegant 0-day unicorn underscores “serious concerns” about Linux security [Ed: Molehill becomes mountain in the hands of Dan Goodin]

            Recently released exploit code makes people running fully patched versions of Fedora and other Linux distributions vulnerable to drive-by attacks that can install keyloggers, backdoors, and other types of malware, a security researcher says.

          • Researcher writes codeless exploit that bypasses Linux security measures

            If you’re a Linux administrator, then you’re likely aware that even being fully up to date on all of the patches for your Linux distribution of choice is no guarantee that you’re free from vulnerabilities. Linux is made up of numerous components, any of which can open up an installation to one exploit or another.

        • Defence/Aggression

          • One of Trump’s Top Military Advisers Played a Key Role in the Disastrous Iraq Occupation

            Over the past two days, President-elect Donald Trump has put together a national security team that will move US foreign policy far to the right. The most shocking appointment, announced Thursday, was retired Army General Michael Flynn, a fanatical opponent of radical Islam, as his national security adviser. On Friday, Trump named Kansas GOP Representative Mike Pompeo to run the CIA. Pompeo is a member of the House Intelligence Committee who strongly opposed the Iran nuclear deal as well as the post-Snowden “reforms” of US intelligence.

            But so far, little attention has been paid to a retired Army lieutenant general, Joseph “Keith” Kellogg, one of Trump’s closest military and foreign-policy advisers. Kellogg is a former contracting executive who is considered a front-runner for a senior position at the Pentagon. He has been among the small group of advisers seen entering and leaving Trump Tower this week.

        • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

          • WikiLeaks does good work. It’s not Assange who’s gone off the deep end, it’s us

            So, you think Assange is a prick? Well tough shit. History-making rebels aren’t meant to be sweethearts.

            What, the world’s most ardent defenders of freedom want to know, has happened to Julian Assange? Just a few years ago, he was such an earnest fellow, who spoke all truth to power. Well-known liberals gave him airtime, centrist trade organisations gave him membership and middle-brow humourists gave him plaudits and harbour. Now, all that the honourable can offer him is their disgust. He’s a Russian collaborator, a spiteful traitor, a pussy-grabbing narcissist whose leaks on Clinton place him in precisely the same deplorable basket that emits the stink of Trump.

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • An astounding 102 million trees are now dead in California

            Forest managers have never seen anything like it. Across California, an astounding 102 million trees have died over the past six years from drought and disease — including 62 million trees in 2016 alone, the US Forest Service estimates. Once-mighty oaks and pines have faded into ghastly hues of brown and gray.

            The biggest worry is that these dead, dry forests will become highly combustible when California’s annual fire season rolls around next summer. The south and central Sierra Nevada regions, where most of the dead trees are located, are at particular risk of severe wildfires…

        • Finance

          • Support for the EU on the rise since Brexit vote … even in the UK

            Support for the EU has risen across Europe, including in the UK, since the British people voted to leave.

            Pro-EU sentiment has grown in five of the six largest member states, according to a survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation. These were the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. The only large state to see a fall in support for the EU was Spain.

            “The looming Brexit seems to have been the best advertisement for the EU,” said Aart De Geus, of the Bertelsmann Foundation, Germany’s largest NGO.

            In the UK referendum on 23 June, the country narrowly voted to leave the EU, with 52% voting leave while 48% supported remain.

            But the Bertelsmann survey, completed in August against a backdrop of confusion about the British government’s Brexit strategy, showed that 56% of British citizens wanted to stay in the EU, compared with 49% when a similar survey was conducted in March.

          • Loud calls in Parliament for ending EU membership talks with Turkey

            With relations between the EU and Turkey already deeply strained, a broad coalition of members of the European Parliament Tuesday called for ending EU membership talks with Ankara as punishment for a trampling of democratic freedoms and human rights by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following a failed coup attempt last July.

            The fraying of ties comes at a particularly sensitive time for Brussels, with the EU relying on Turkey to keep up its end of an agreement on the return of migrants who have sought refuge in Europe.

            While an unraveling of that deal could create acute political problems in capitals across the Continent, many members of Parliament called for ending the arrangement, saying Erdoğan was using it as a tool of “blackmail.” Leaders of the biggest factions in the Parliament also called for ending the discussions with Turkey about EU membership.

          • Swedish company Ericsson denounced of payed bribes to a Costa Rica’s President

            I have recently reported in The Indicter and Global Research on the payment done by the Swedish giant corporation Ericsson to the Clinton foundation, and also on the intervention of the company in Haiti – which resulted in disastrous consequences for the Haiti economy, as reported in a cable from the US Embassy in Port Au Prince to the State Department.

            New exposures referring unethical transactions of the Swedish company, indicates that Ericsson would have even bribed the then Costa Rica’s President Miguel Angel Rodriguez while competing for a major telecom contract.

            The exposures are partly based on a testimony by a former employee at the company, Liss Olof Nenzell, which was in charge of “sensitive payments”. The report adds that also ministers in the government as well as executives of the Telecom companies have received the Ericsson’s payments. Reports regarding the exact sum allegedly sent by Ericsson to Miguel Angel Rodriguez vaies in the Swedish media. While the graphic in Swedish Radio names $750,000, The Local (Carl Bildt’s megaphone) reduced it to $271,245.

            Former Costa Rica’s president Rodriguez was staunch supporter of the UN invasion in Haiti. Later, Ericsson obtained extended credits in Haiti, which according to a document declassified by the US State Department would have caused a deterioration in the economy of Haiti.

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

          • Trump won’t pursue charges against Clinton

            President-elect Donald Trump won’t subject Hillary Clinton to a criminal inquiry — instead, he’ll help her heal, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.

            “I think when the president-elect who’s also the head of your party … tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who first reported that the president-elect would not pursue his campaign pledge to “lock up” Clinton, his Democratic opponent.

            “Look, I think, he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” Conway, who is now on the Trump transition team, said in her interview.

          • Donald Trump Seems to Retreat on Some Promises

            President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tempered some of his most extreme campaign promises, dropping his vow to jail Hillary Clinton, expressing doubt about the value of torturing terrorism suspects and pledging to have an open mind about climate change.

            But in a wide-ranging, hourlong interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times — which was scheduled, canceled and then reinstated after a dispute over the ground rules — Mr. Trump was fiercely unapologetic about repeatedly flouting the traditional ethical and political conventions that have long shaped the American presidency.

          • Jill Stein’s Post-Election Interview – Green Party Candidate Shares Why She Thinks Hillary Clinton Lost the Election

            This is a powerful moment in U.S. history. Disappointment in Donald Trump’s victory has brought thousands of people onto the streets, chanting “Not my president!” Trump and Clinton were not the only people who ran for president; the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein and 27 other people were also on the ballot. Johnson won 3.3% of the vote, while Stein took 1% (1.3 million votes). Neither Johnson nor Stein made as great an impact as the polls suggested or as they had hoped. If they had attained the 5% threshold, their parties would qualify for public campaign funding.

            As the results of the election began to sink in, I spoke to Jill Stein about the election and about what might come from a Trump presidency.

          • Emails: CIA Official Reviewed Parts of Times Reporter’s Book Before Publication

            New York Times reporter David Sanger worked extensively with former deputy CIA director Michael Morell during the reporting of his book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power—even arranging to provide Morell with access to an entire unpublished chapter for his review—according to documents obtained by Gizmodo.

          • Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming

            Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)

          • Study: 80 percent of students can’t tell the difference between an ad and a news story

            Young doesn’t necessarily equal web savvy, at least according to a recent Stanford study. More than 80 percent of students were unable to tell an advertisement — labeled as sponsored content — from a news story.

            The study attempted to judge news literacy among students and examine how they might respond and evaluate to stories gathered from Facebook and Twitter feeds, photographs, reader comments on news sites, and blog posts. All told, researchers collected some 7,804 responses from students in 12 US states.

          • Why Did Donald Trump Take Money From This Sketchy Ukrainian Oligarch?

            Almost $600,000 per hour.

            That’s the fee Donald Trump’s charity got for recording a video on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch.

            It’s a payment that could be in violation of tax laws, legal experts told The Daily Beast. When Hillary Clinton’s foundation received money from the very same billionaire, Donald Trump blasted her as “crooked.”

            Ukrainian steel magnate Victor Pinchuk’s foundation was the single largest outside donor to Donald Trump’s private charity in 2015, according to new IRS filings filed by the organization. The $150,000 gift amounted to 20 percent of the foundation’s total donations during that time, the documents showed. The filings also affirmed Trump violated tax laws by using his private foundation to self-deal, or enrich himself and his businesses instead of fulfilling a charitable mission.

            Pinchuk’s gift was given in conjunction with a short video Trump made for the Yalta European Strategy annual meeting, held in Kiev in September of 2015, according to The Washington Post.

          • Trump Foundation Took Donations from Controversial Ukrainian Clinton Donor

            A Ukrainian steel magnate who was one of the largest donors to the Clinton Foundation has surfaced on newly filed tax records for Donald Trump’s charitable foundation, raising alarms from some of the Clinton’s most vocal critics.

            “I think is troubling,” said Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which documented the blending of the Clinton’s charitable and political interests. “He’s somebody that donated to the Clinton Foundation, and this is a problem…I think there’s no other way to read it other than they are hoping to get some favor in return.”

            Pinchuk’s $150,000 donation, first reported by The Washington Post, was to the Trumps’ family-run charity, far smaller and more intimate than the vast Clinton Foundation. In total, the Trump non profit took in $780,000 in contributions last year.

        • Censorship/Free Speech

          • Donald Trump Personally Blasts the Press

            The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump—the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory—should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.

            First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?

            For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. When he was asked about the sort of “fake news” that now clogs social media, Trump replied that it was the networks that were guilty of spreading fake news. The “worst,” he said, were CNN (“liars!”) and NBC.

            This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.

            The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”

          • ‘Christians feel they are being censored’: Index on Censorship CEO

            Christians in Ireland feel unable to express their opinions on same-sex marriage, the CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship has said.

            Jodie Ginsberg, speaking in a debate on religious freedom, emphasised the need for tolerance of those with non-mainstream views, and their freedom to express those views.

          • UK to censor online videos of ‘non-conventional’ sex acts

            Web users in the UK will be banned from accessing websites portraying a range of non-conventional sexual acts, under a little discussed clause to a government bill currently going through parliament.

            The proposal, part of the digital economy bill, would force internet service providers to block sites hosting content that would not be certified for commercial DVD sale by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).

            It is contained within provisions of the bill designed to enforce strict age verification checks to stop children accessing adult websites. After pressure from MPs, the culture secretary, Caroline Bradley, announced on Saturday that the government would amend the bill to include powers to block non-compliant websites.

            In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch.

          • Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China

            Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has cultivated relationships with China’s leaders, including President Xi Jinping. He has paid multiple visits to the country to meet its top internet executives. He has made an effort to learn Mandarin.

            Inside Facebook, the work to enter China runs far deeper.

            The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential. The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked, these people said. Mr. Zuckerberg has supported and defended the effort, the people added.

        • Privacy/Surveillance

          • President Obama Will Soon Turn Over the Keys to the Surveillance State to President-Elect Trump

            On January 20, President Obama will hand Donald Trump the keys to the surveillance state. Not only will Trump have the NSA’s incredibly powerful technological tools at his disposal, but he’ll also have the benefit of the overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance authorities embraced by the Obama administration — authorities that give tremendous discretion to executive branch officials.

            These spying powers have long been cause for concern because they violate our core rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. But when wielded by a man who invited Russia to hack his political opponent, who reportedly eavesdropped on his own hotel guests, and who has called for expanded surveillance of Americans and especially American Muslims, they are all the more frightening. Fortunately, there are several ways to fight back against the surveillance state, including concrete steps you can take to protect yourself and your communications.

          • The UK is about to wield unprecedented surveillance powers — here’s what it means

            The legislation in question is called the Investigatory Powers Bill. It’s been cleared by politicians and awaits only the formality of royal assent before it becomes law. The bill will legalize the UK’s global surveillance program, which scoops up communications data from around the world, but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. UK spies will be empowered to hack individuals, internet infrastructure, and even whole towns — if the government deems it necessary.

          • Senior defence officials called for NSA director’s removal

            The Washington Post reported on 19 November that Defence Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper Jr made the recommendations to President Obama, now serving out the final days of his term.

            Clapper and Carter, Rogers’ two bosses, reportedly have problems with Rogers’ performance in the role. There have have apparently been “persistent complaints from NSA personnel that Rogers is aloof, frequently absent and does not listen to staff input”. His tenure as NSA director has been marked by several significant security breaches. The most recent example was the arrest of NSA contractor Harold T. Martin III, whose garage was found filled with terabytes of classified data on removable storage devices.

          • Britain’s Snoopers charter threatens your privacy

            There is a global siege on privacy. Governments all over the world have introduced legislation (sometimes secret) which forces email, internet or data storage providers to track what you do and make that data available to their governments. This, of course, also means third parties who gain access to the storage systems can see and abuse it. And because so many of us have put so much of our data at just a few providers, we’re at great risk as events like last week’s shutdown of hundreds of Google accounts did show.

            While Google, Dropbox and others lure customers in with ‘free’ data storage and great online services, governments benefit from centralized data storages as it makes it easy for them to hack in or demand data from these companies.

        • Civil Rights/Policing

          • Albuquerque police illegally deleted, altered videos of police shootings: report

            The Albuquerque Police Department is coming under fire after former records supervisor, Reynaldo Chavez, gave a sworn affidavit claiming officers altered and deleted body camera videos.

            According to New Mexico In Depth, after at least two police shootings, videos were deleted or edited so they didn’t show the incident.

            In the case of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014, the videos were partially deleted in spots or altered. In a separate incident, surveillance camera video from a nearby salon showed APD officers shooting law enforcement informant, Jeremy Robertson. That video too was altered. Chavez explained the June 2014 video had “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”

          • 31 authors urge Obama to pardon Edward Snowden

            Thirty-one authors have signed an open letter to President Obama, urging him to pardon Edward Snowden, the former U.S. government contractor charged with violating the Espionage Act for leaking National Security Agency documents to journalists.

            Writers who signed the letter include Michael Chabon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Cheryl Strayed, Neil Gaiman, Teju Cole and Joyce Carol Oates.

            “Throughout American history, the pardonable offense and the pardon privilege itself have functioned together as a uniquely direct system of check-and-balance between the individual citizen and the executive branch,” the letter reads. “Both can be understood as extreme actions undertaken to mitigate the harm caused by judicial and legislative insufficiency; by courts that would rule unfairly, and by laws — like the Espionage Act — whose vagaries and datedness would make their application too severe or too broad.”

          • When Doctors First Do Harm

            President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday expressed reservations about the use of torture. But he did not disavow the practice, or his promise to bring it back. And if he does, C.I.A. doctors may be America’s last defense against a return to savagery. But they’ll need to break sharply with what they did the last time around.

            Buried in a trove of documents released last summer is the revelation that C.I.A. physicians played a central role in designing the agency’s post-Sept. 11 torture program. The documents, declassified in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, show in chilling detail how C.I.A. medicine lost its moral moorings. It’s long been known that doctors attended torture as monitors. What’s new is their role as its engineers.

            The documents include previously redacted language from a directive by the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services telling physicians at clandestine interrogation sites to flout medical ethics by lying to detainees and collaborating in abuse. This language also reveals that doctors helped to design a waterboarding method more brutal than what even lawyers for the George W. Bush administration allowed.

          • Oakland Activist Cat Brooks on President Trump: ‘My Revolutionary Prayer’

        • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

          • Trump Formally Picks Two Net Neutrality Opponents To Head FCC Transition

            Trump this week formally selected two staunch opponents of net neutrality to oversee the incoming President’s FCC transition team. Economist Jeff Eisenach and former Sprint Corp lobbyist Mark Jamison both have deep-rooted ties to the broadband sector, and both played major roles in helping the industry fight passage of the U.S.’s net neutrality rules last year. We had already noted that incumbent ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been getting excited by the possibility of a hamstrung FCC and the roll back of numerous consumer-friendly policies made under the tenure of outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler.

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • Trademarks

            • Convicted Felon Ask Google To Delist Multiple Government Websites Because His Name Is Protected By ‘Common Law Trademark’

              You don’t often see the FBI’s website targeted by a DMCA takedown notice, but when you do, you can be sure there’s someone with a criminal record behind it. The last time we saw this happening, it was convicted fraudster Sean Gjerde, who thought he could perform his own reputation management by copy-pasting the FBI’s press release onto his own website as part of a “book” he was “writing,” and then begin issuing bogus takedown notices targeting content he didn’t create. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for all the reasons he was NEVER GOING TO GET AWAY WITH IT.

              Enter Anthony Lewis Jerdine, someone with a bit of reputation to clean up. Over the past decade, Jerdine has been imprisoned for bank fraud, made the US Marshals fugitive list, been sanctioned for unauthorized practice of law, been called a vexatious litigant by the Ohio court system, and, lest we forget, formed a trust in his own name.

          • Copyrights

            • Resale Royalty Right: A Way To Redress Imbalance In Copyright Revenue, WIPO Told

              When visual artists sell their work, they usually perceive a price for that work. If it is resold at a much higher price, some countries provide for a resale right, providing artists with resale royalties. In other countries, such a right does not exist, putting visual artists in a disadvantageous situation, particularly indigenous artists, whose work can become very valuable on the international art markets.

        ]]>         http://techrights.org/2016/11/23/fedora-25-officially-released/feed/ 0         Links 21/11/2016: New Linux RC, Zorin OS 12 Receives a Lot of Press Coverage http://techrights.org/2016/11/21/zorin-os-12-coverage/ http://techrights.org/2016/11/21/zorin-os-12-coverage/#comments Mon, 21 Nov 2016 17:29:16 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96918

        GNOME bluefish

        Contents

        GNU/Linux

        Free Software/Open Source

        • In memoriam: Pieter Hintjens

          Former FFII President, erstwhile OFE collaborator, and personal friend, Pieter Hintjens, passed away last month at the age of 53. Pieter was a programmer, an influential thinker, and a prolific writer who inspired many. While we did not always agree, I always appreciated the intelligence and passion he brought to everything he did. He will be much missed.

        • Best open source management tools

          Open source software provides an attractive alternative to more costly commercial products, but can open source products deliver enterprise-grade results? To answer this question we tested four open source products: OpenNMS, Pandora FMS, NetXMS and Zabbix. All four products were surprisingly good. We liked Pandora FMS for its ease of installation and modern user interface. In general, we found configuration to be easier and more intuitive with Pandora than the other contenders. NetXMS came in a close second with a nice user interface, easy to configure rules and a solid user manual. Overall, we found all four products suitable for enterprise use, particularly in small-to-midsize environments

        • Pandora FMS wins open-source management shootout

          Doing more with less remains an ongoing challenge for IT execs. Making sure everything keeps humming along to meet service-level agreements can be challenging for resource-stretched IT departments. For all but the smallest shops, effective monitoring requires tools that provide a meta view of the entire infrastructure with drill-down capabilities.

        • 4 ways to open up your project’s infrastructure

          Open source isn’t just about opening up your code—it’s also about building a supporting infrastructure that invites people to contribute. In order to create a vibrant, growing, and exciting project, the community needs to be able to participate in the governance, the documentation, the code, and the actual structures that keep the project alive. If the overall “hive” is doing well, it attracts more individuals with diverse skills to the project.

        • Minoca, it’s ‘another’ lightweight OS for IoT

          New on the scene is recent times is Minoca OS, a general purpose open source operating system written specifically to conserve power, storage and memory.

        • Events/Outreachy

          • Speak at The Linux Foundation’s Invite-Only Open Source Leadership Summit

            The Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit (formerly known as Collaboration Summit) is where the world’s thought leaders in open source software and collaborative development convene to share best practices and learn how to create and advance the open source infrastructure that runs our lives.

            The Linux Foundation is now seeking executives, business and technical leaders, open source program office leaders, and open source foundation and project leaders to share your knowledge, best practices and strategies with fellow leaders at OSLS, to be held Feb. 14-16, 2017, in Lake Tahoe, CA.

          • LLVM Developer Meeting 2016 Videos Posted

            The videos from the LLVM Developer Meeting 2016 conference that took place at the beginning of November are now online.

          • Outreachy Winter 2016 Projects/Participants Announced

            The accepted participants and their projects for the Outreachy Winter 2016 session were announced earlier this month for helping females and other under-represented groups engage in free software development.

        • SaaS/Back End

        • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

        • Funding

          • Early Stage Startup Heptio Aims to Make Kubernetes Friendly

            Two Former Google staffers the built the original Google Compute Engine and helped to create Kubernetes are launching their own company to fill a perceived gap in the container orchestration market.

            Heptio was officially announced on Nov. 17, as yet another company in the ever-growing landscape of vendors aiming to support the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system. Heptio is noteworthy in that it was recently founded and led by the same two Google staffers, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, that originally created Kubernetes in the first place.

        • Standards/Consortia

          • GLobjects 1.0.0 Released For OpenGL Aide

            GLobjects 1.0.0 has been released as an open-source library designed to make OpenGL usage “modern, less cluttered, and less error-prone.”

            GLobjects 1.0 is derived from glbinding and OpenGL Mathematics and provides a object-oriented C++-based interface.

        Leftovers

        • Security

          • Linux versus Unix hot patching

            There has always been a debate about how close Linux can get to the real operating system (OS), the core proprietary Unix variants that for two decades defined the limits of non-mainframe scalability and reliability.

            But times are changing, and the new narrative may be when will Unix catch up to Linux on critical reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features such as hot patching?

            Hot patching, the ability to apply updates to the OS kernel while it is running, is a long sought-after but elusive feature of a production OS.

            It is sought after because both developers and operations teams recognise that bringing down an OS instance that is doing critical high-volume work is at best disruptive and at worst a logistical nightmare. Its level of difficulty also makes it somewhat elusive.

            There have been several failed attempts and implementations that almost worked, but they were so fraught with exceptions that they were not really useful in production.

          • Can I interest you in talking about Security?

        • Defence/Aggression

          • US Implicated in Targeting Yemeni Civilians

            Since March 2015, Yemen has been ravaged by armed conflict between the incumbent administration headed by President Abdrahbuh Mansour and the religious-political Houthi insurgency, sometimes linked to terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. The US had prioritized its anti-terrorism efforts in the Middle East following the rise of Musab al-Zarqawi (the founder of ISIS). But, in becoming preoccupied with hunts for other high-profile terrorist targets, the US let the internal socio-political state of Yemen fall to the wayside. To make up for past neglect, the Obama administration began backing Yemen’s Mansour administration and implementing “strategic” bombings. Today, Yemen is neck deep in a war they did not ask for, facing an enemy that is not identifiable.

            On August 15, 2016, “Abs Hospital, located in the country’s Hajjah governorate and supported by the international medical charity, was hit at 3:45 p.m. local time.” According to a statement released by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières [MSF]), nine individuals were killed on impact, including an MSF volunteer. Teresa Sancristóval, the MSF emergency program manager, claims that all military authorities were well informed regarding the GPS coordinates of the humanitarian hospital site, but failed to acknowledge it when planning the strike. There is still no information released on behalf of who was targeted by the strike.

          • 9/11, Permanent War, and the Transnational Capitalist Class

            Globalization of trade and central banking has empowered private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control some $100 trillion dollars of wealth.

          • Could David Petraeus, Rumored Candidate for Secretary of State, Get a Security Clearance?

            After months of criticizing Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information while serving as secretary of state, Donald Trump is reportedly considering David Petraeus for the same job, even though the four-star general and former CIA director pled guilty to passing classified information to his former lover and biographer.

            The Guardian reported on Thursday that Petraeus is in the running for secretary of state in the Trump administration. The anonymously sourced report could not be confirmed, but Petraeus reportedly met with Trump just before the election, and has since been complimentary about the president elect.

            On German cable news, Petraeus called Trump a “dealmaker,” and said, “He’s right to criticize Washington over its partisanship and its inability to forge compromises.”

            Petraeus resigned as CIA director in 2012 after the FBI discovered he was having an affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. The resulting investigation revealed that he had given her highly classified information, and Justice Department prosecutors wanted to indict Petraeus on felony charges.

            According to his 2015 plea deal, Petraeus intentionally gave Broadwell access to eight “Black Books” filled with highly classified information, including “the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions,” and even Petraeus’s conversations with the president. He also admitted that he had misled the FBI during the investigation.

          • THE COMING WAR ON CHINA – A NEW PILGER FILM FOR TV AND CINEMA

            John Pilger’s new film – The Coming War on China – will be in UK cinemas from Monday 5 December 2016 and on ITV at 10.35pm on Tuesday 6 December.

          • British Navy fires warning shots at Spanish vessel off Gibraltar

            The British Navy on Sunday fired flares at a Spanish research vessel after it ignored requests to leave the waters at Gibraltar’s coast and attempts to contact the crew failed, the Guardian reports.

            The boat, operated by Spain’s state Oceanographic Institute, entered the British waters several times within 48 hours, but ignored requests to leave.

            “The Royal Navy challenges all unlawful maritime incursions into British Gibraltar territorial waters. We back this up by making formal diplomatic protests to the Spanish government,” a spokesperson for the ministry of defense told the Guardian.

            Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s chief minister, said he was “satisfied” with the tactical decisions taken, AFP reports. Gibraltar says similar “provocative” incidents with Spanish vessels take place in its territorial waters, but it is rare for the Navy to fire flares.

          • Former NSA Director Doesn’t Think Michael Flynn Is Up To The Job

            Former National Security Agency director and CIA director Michael Hayden expressed concern about President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, saying Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, would be “stretched a bit” by his new role.

            “But by and large he’s been successful at the tactical operational level,” Hayden said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “This is a strategic global job. And so I think he’ll be stretched a bit by this.”

          • A New Documentary Explores the Devastating Effects of Drone Warfare on Victims and Whistleblowers

            On the night of February 21, 2010, a group of families driving a convoy of vehicles through the valleys of Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan came into the sights of a Predator drone crew operating out of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

            “That truck would make a beautiful target,” one of the operators says. The crew analyzes the convoy, debating whether children are present. “I really doubt that child call, man. I really fucking hate that shit.”

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • Exploring Tidal Marsh Resilience to Sea Level Rise

            The NOAA-sponsored National Estuarine Research Reserve System released a national assessment of tidal marsh resilience in the face of rising sea levels. This assessment establishes a national monitoring baseline for estuarine climate change impacts.

            Using data from the reserve’s system-wide monitoring program, the study was conducted at 16 sites in 13 coastal states. The results indicate that Pacific coast tidal marshes are more resistant to rising seas levels from climate change than marshes in the Atlantic. Of the areas evaluated, one marsh in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, and another in Massachusetts’ Waquoit Bay were found to be the most vulnerable.

          • How Important is the Ocean to U.S. Island Territories?

            A new report allows readers to better understand the importance of the ocean to the economies of two U.S. territories in the Caribbean. For people who manage, protect, and make use of the resources in these special places, more accurate economic data about ocean use are key to good decision making. And good decisions will help keep our ocean healthy and resilient—supporting livelihoods for future generations. Shown here: St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.

          • San Francisco Bay And Outer Coast Sentinel Site Cooperative

            Rush Ranch, part of San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. The tidal marshes at Rush Ranch and nearby China Camp serve as research sites for scientists; classrooms for teachers, land managers and naturalists; and inspiring places for Bay Area residents to visit. Credit: Tom Muehleisen.

            The region is a major urban and economic center and a unique ecological treasure. It is home to over seven million people, and retains some of the largest and most important natural areas along the west coast, including three National Marine Sanctuaries (Greater Farallones, Cordell Bank, and Monterey Bay), the Point Reyes National Seashore, the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, and the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex. The estuary serves as a major hub of commerce and supports the most intact Mediterranean-climate wetlands in North America.

            The San Francisco Sentinel Site Cooperative Management Team is currently comprised of representatives from NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management (OCM), the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR), NOAA’s Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary (GFNMS), and California Sea Grant. The management team guides the development of the Cooperative and assists with engaging partners and linking existing efforts related to our focus areas, and expanding collaborations in the region.

          • Why “Climate Change” Must Become a Promise to Decolonize

            Like the racist policing we witnessed at the Dakota Access pipeline (and have been witnessing throughout the nation), climate change was, as feminist philosopher Chris J. Cuomo reminds us, “manufactured in a crucible of inequality.” Specifically, it is “a product of the industrial and the fossil-fuel eras, historical forces powered by exploitation, colonialism and nearly limitless instrumental use of ‘nature.’”

          • What we choose to resist

            I was standing in a crowded room filled with plaid and free cider. The student-run events space of Oxford Hub buzzed with a collective though rather timid optimism. Standing on a table with a foaming beer in his hand was Achim Steiner, Director of the Oxford Martin School and former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He was delivering the first of the celebratory speeches.

            “In terms of global cooperation, the Paris Agreement was perhaps the most vital moment of sanity,” said Steiner. “Paris alone will not save us, but imagine if it had not happened.”

            In his words, the Agreement has forged an opportunity to deal with two key climate issues: legacy and equity. It has created the space to begin tackling the challenges of per-capita and historical CO2 emissions, and disparities such as the impacts of climate change on small island states and developing regions.

            As Steiner continued with his speech, however, he didn’t mince his words. Every syllable carried weight. “I have heard it all before,” he said, when referring to resistance to climate action and energy transitions. “We can’t do it. We don’t have the grid. It will affect our bottom line. It’s not possible. But the shareholders…”

          • English village strives for carbon neutrality

            South of Manchester, Ashton Hayes is a collection of tweed cottages and pretty houses, nestled between green fields and trees. But for the past 10 years, this small village has been showing world leaders how to save the planet.

            “I switched things off, wore more jumpers, changed how I used electricity – for example, I never used it after that for heating water,” says local Kate Harrison, as a way of explaining how she managed to cut her energy consumption by a whopping 60 percent over a short period of time.

            “Eventually I replaced my boiler for a much more efficient one – and just threw myself into the project, really.”

          • ‘Unprecedented’: More than 100 million trees dead in California

            California’s lingering drought has pushed the number of dead trees across the state past 100 million, an ecological event experts are calling dangerous and unprecedented in underlining the heightened risk of wildfires fueled by bone-dry forests.

            In its latest aerial survey released Friday, the U.S. Forest Service said 62 million trees have died this year in California, bringing the six-year total to more than 102 million.

          • Fiji’s Prime Minister Pleads With Trump: ‘Save Us’ From Climate Change

            Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has pleaded with Donald Trump and the American people to help save his slowly sinking nation. At this year’s global climate talks in Marrakech, he said that climate change was no hoax, and invited the President-elect to come visit Fiji and see the damage first hand.

            Mr. Bainimarama made his remarks on Friday, the last day of this year’s Conference of the Parties, a yearly meeting where UN signatories of the Paris Climate Agreement meet to discuss and plan its implementation.

            The spectre of a Trump administration and what that could mean for the climate agreement hung like a pall over the talks in Marrakech, and Mr. Bainimarama—slated to be president of next year’s meeting—addressed the worry directly on the closing day of the conference. His tiny island nation of Fiji is already under serious pressure from rising seas—a product of climate change.

        • Finance

          • German citizenship is ranked the most valuable in the world

            Not only do Germans have the most powerful passports in the world, they also have the highest quality of citizenship, according to a new report. The consultancy Henley & Partners’ first Quality of Nationality Index (QNI) ranks the value of 161 nations’ citizenship on a scale of 0 to 100%.

          • Sanders, Warren Not ‘Genuine Progressives’–Says Washington Post

            In standard theory, the people in the developing world buy their own stuff, with rich countries like the US providing the financing. It actually did work this way in the 1990s, up until the East Asian financial crisis in 1997. In that period, countries like Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia were growing very rapidly while running large trade deficits. This pattern of growth was ended by the terms of the bailout imposed on these countries by the US Treasury Department through the International Monetary Fund.

            The harsh terms of the bailout forced these and other developing countries to reverse the standard textbook path and start running large trade surpluses. This post-bailout period was associated with slower growth for these countries. In other words, the poor of the developing world suffered from the pattern of trade the Post advocates. If they had continued on the pre-bailout path, they would be much richer today. In fact, South Korea and Malaysia would be richer than the United States if they had maintained their pre-bailout growth rate over the last two decades. (This is the topic of the introduction to my new book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer; it’s free.)

            It is also important to note that the Post is only bothered by forms of protection that might help working-class people. The United States prohibits foreign doctors from practicing in the United States unless they complete a US residency program. (The total number of slots is tightly restricted, with only a small fraction open to foreign-trained doctors.) This is a classic protectionist measure. No serious person can believe that the only way for a person to be a competent doctor is to complete a US residency program. It costs the United States around $100 billion a year ($700 per family) in higher medical expenses. Yet we never hear a word about this or other barriers that protect the most highly paid professionals from the same sort of international competition faced by steelworkers and textile workers.

          • TPP: A Post-Mortem

            The death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that EFF called last week has since been confirmed by White House officials. This marks the end of a long-running campaign against the secretive agreement that EFF began back in 2012.

            Make no mistake; although the proximate cause of the TPP’s demise was the U.S. Presidential election result, the TPP faced long odds in Congress even if the election had gone the other way. This in turn was due to broad opposition to the agreement from many sectors of society across the political divide, including from members of the digital rights community. So as we survey the fallout from the TPP’s demise, EFF and its supporters are entitled to feel proud of the part we played.

          • NYC Lawmakers Push For Audits of Landlords Who Pocket $1.4 Billion Tax Break

            New York City’s biggest housing subsidy may finally get more scrutiny just as state lawmakers are about to consider a massive expansion of the controversial program.

            The $1.4 billion-a-year program, known as 421-a, is designed to wipe away most of the property taxes owed by real estate developers who agree in return to limit annual rent increases in new apartments they have constructed. For buildings in Manhattan as well as expensive neighborhoods in other boroughs, a certain percentage of units must also be set aside for low-income renters.

          • Federal Court Holds That the Government Can’t Lock Up Immigrants for Being Poor

            Cesar Matias, a gay man, fled to the United States from Honduras more than a decade ago to escape the persecution he suffered because of his sexuality. He worked as a hair stylist and in a clothing factory in Los Angeles and rented a small, one-bedroom apartment.

            In March 2012, immigration agents arrested him; locked him up in the city jail in Santa Ana, California; and put him in deportation proceedings. He applied for asylum, and an immigration judge found him eligible for release while his case was being decided. He then spent the next four years of his life in prison — not because of any crime, but because he couldn’t afford to pay the $3,000 bond set by the judge.

          • For the poor, Texas’ justice system is a maze with no exit

            Dee Arellano had just parked her car in downtown Houston when she was approached by a police officer on horseback. The officer cited her because her vehicle registration had lapsed, a common infraction.

          • A ‘trade war’ is already going on in cyberspace

            After the initial shock-and-awe reaction to the surprise Trump victory, the markets rejoiced last week… a lot.

            “The Dow closed at an all-time high on Thursday, while the S&P and the Nasdaq were flirting with their record highs entering Friday,” reported CNBC.

            Others were less thrilled with the election result. Some experts claimed Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on China, withdraw from NAFTA, and otherwise stop globalization in its tracks would surely set off a trade war and hurt the markets.

            I disagree.

            I think Trump can’t start a trade war because we are already in one. It’s been going on for years, right under our noses… and it’s happening in cyberspace.

          • Economist’s research reveals poverty should be measured by more than income

            Since social scientists and economists began measuring poverty, the definition has never strayed far from a discussion of income.

            New research from Georgia Tech economist Shatakshee Dhongde shows there are multiple components of poverty that more accurately describes a household’s economic condition. Dhongde looks at “deprivation” more than simply low income, and her work finds that almost 15 percent of Americans are deprived in multiple dimensions.

            “This study approaches poverty in a new way,” said Dhongde, who recently published “Multi-Dimensional Deprivation in the U.S.” in the journal Social Indicators Research.

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

          • ‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election America

            It was different in 2008. Knowing that Michigan was securely in Obama’s column and Ohio was on the bubble, Rob and Jenny went to Toledo to knock on doors in trailer parks and housing projects. Foreclosure signs were common. When they introduced themselves as canvassers for Obama, the residents, all of them white, were welcoming and chatty. “The interactions were long,” Mickey said. “The people were worried and they wanted to talk.” Ohio’s 18 electoral votes went to Obama in 2008 and 2012.

            “This campaign wore a lot of people down,” Mickey said. “The state was bombarded by pro-Clinton ads, but she failed to offer any sustained and coherent economic message. She said, ‘I’m not crazy’ and ‘I’m not a sexist racist pig’, but for working class whites that’s not enough. I would say that of the people who slammed their doors on me, most of them didn’t vote for either candidate.”

          • Lashing Out at ‘Identity Politics,’ Pundits Blame Trump on Those Most Vulnerable to Trump

            Over the past two weeks, pundits from all ends of the spectrum have been scrambling to explain Clinton’s unexpected loss, with reasons spanning from the plausible to the highly dubious; WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, fake news, Jill Stein, Russia, bad algorithms and the FBI have all been accused of having sole or part responsibility. Lately, however, a new, entirely bogus culprit has emerged from center and center-left circles: “identity politics” and its close cousin, “political correctness.”

          • Those Damn Emails

            Clinton supporters were surprised the emails mattered at all, because they had been fed a regular and often fully-factually wrong diet by the majority of the media. There was some good reporting on what the emails meant, and how classification works, but it was almost all on right-of-center websites Clinton people did not read, and blithely dismissed as biased when the sites were brought to their attention. And yeah, sometimes things got a bit too partisan in tone, but the facts were also there.

          • Hamilton vs Trump

            “Apologize!” was President elect Donald Trump conclusion of two messages he wrote to the cast of Hamilton, one of the most successful Broadway musicals in recent times. He was thus responding to the incident in which actor Brandon Victor Dixon, that played Vice President Aaron Burr, addressed the audience of the show.

            At the end of last Friday’s performance, noting that Vice President-elect Mike Pence was in the audience, he used the opportunity to thank Mr. Pence for attending the show and told him, “We hope you will hear us out.”

            And then Dixon added, “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us. Again, we truly thank you for seeing this show, this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds and orientations.”

          • For Many Americans, A Day to Forget
          • A Victory for ‘White’ America

            My reaction four days out from the moral tragedy of Donald Trump’s election as President is this: we are two nations, not one nation. On Nov. 8, 2016, one nation, a very white, very gerrymandered nation, braced by feeble voter turnout, conquered the other.

            The conquest will continue for at least a generation since it includes control of the U.S. Supreme Court. Mid-term elections may bring minor relief (or possibly not because Senate Democrats have far more seats to defend than Republicans) but the conquering nation knows that the Supreme Court and other judges pipe the tune to which all must dance.

          • Trump Can’t Hear What the Cast of “Hamilton” Tried to Tell Him

            The message, written by the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, with input from the cast and crew, certainly reached Trump Tower, less than a mile away from the Richard Rodgers Theater, since it inspired a fit from the man whose divisive campaign stirred the alarm and anxiety the cast described, Donald Trump.

            Despite the intensely civil tone of this act of dissent, Trump inaccurately claimed that Pence “was harassed” by the cast of the play, and then described their plea for tolerance as “very rude,” before demanding an apology.

          • We Cannot “Give Trump a Chance”

            In the ten days since the election, several thousand people have phoned and emailed my Seattle City Council office in their fury over my call to shut down Donald Trump’s agenda with massive peaceful protests on Inauguration Day.

            Many messages were from middle- and working-class people who had voted for Trump because they hated corporate Democrats and Hillary Clinton, and mistakenly believed that Trump was going to stand up for the ordinary Americans. Many were also racist and misogynist, saying things like, “You don’t belong here with the bull***t you spew from your c***su**er,” or “Drop dead and go back to turbanville.”

            Call after call, while having zero tolerance for bigotry and threats, my staff patiently explained to the more reasonable Trump supporters that we agree working people have been sold out by corporate politicians. That we completely oppose the bipartisan, big business policies of “free trade” deals like the TPP and NAFTA, corporate tax handouts, and the close ties of both parties to Wall Street. Callers were surprised to learn that while I fiercely oppose Trump, I did not back Hillary Clinton (I campaigned for Bernie Sanders, and later Jill Stein). Many were simply not reachable, as they spewed hate on all those protesting their president-elect. They will have to experience Donald Trump’s policies in office to see him for what he is: a con man and representative of the billionaire class who sold the lie that he will bring back the American Dream.

            My first grim thoughts as I saw some of the horrifying emails was that I will be far from the only person targeted after the dangerous rise of Donald Trump. Bigots are feeling emboldened. Already a surge in bullying and hate crimes has taken place, and the KKK felt confident to hold a rally in North Carolina to celebrate Trump’s victory.

          • Trump Assembling Team of ‘Swamp Creatures,’ Says Ellison

            Forget “draining the swamp,” President-elect Donald Trump is building a cabinet full of “more swamp creatures than ever before,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

            Appearing on the morning show, the progressive lawmaker, who is running to chair the Democratic National Committee (DNC), said, “Donald Trump has already proven where he’s going with this thing,” based on the nominees thus far.

            “He has lobbyists and big-time investment bankers,” Ellison continued, pointing to the recent Politico article, “Why Wall Street is Suddenly in Love with Trump.”

            “He’s not doing what he’s said he’s gonna do for average working Americans,” he added.

          • Meet the Candidate For Attorney General Who’s Hunted Quail with Corporate Donors

            While Donald Trump was running for the White House, he bashed politicians who courted the billionaire Koch brothers as “puppets” and vowed to “drain the swamp” in Washington by squelching cozy relationships between lobbyists and elected officials.

            Take, for example, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who is reportedly on the short list to become Trump’s attorney general.

            Last month, Kobach was among a group of Republican secretaries of state who spent the weekend hunting pheasant and quail and shooting clay pigeons with corporate donors at a Kansas lodge, a getaway funded by industry groups.

            The attendees included Allen Richardson, a lobbyist for Koch Industries, who joked about keeping the guest list secret. “The Koch brothers out with the Republican secretaries of state — that’s a news story I don’t need,” he said, unaware that a ProPublica reporter was in attendance.

          • Switzerland not so neutral with Clinton Foundation donation

            An agency overseen by the Swiss foreign ministry made a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation — at the same time the US and Switzerland were in the midst of a diplomatic struggle over tax evasion.

            The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation shelled out about $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2011, money earmarked for a program that sought to lower mortality for mothers and infants in Liberia, the Schweiz am Sonntag newspaper discovered on Sunday, according to The Local.

            The payment was made when the US government was pressuring Swiss banks to hand over customer info, after allegations arose that Swiss banks were being used to help avoid US taxes.

          • The Dark Money Cabinet

            uring the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.

            Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”

          • What Student Protests Tell Us About America Under Trump

            There is little doubt that Trumps’ campaign and subsequent election have brought trauma into public education at all levels.

            “The country has elected a man who threaded racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic messages and mockery of disabled people through his campaign,” writes Emily Bazelon for the New York Times.. “Donald J. Trump’s victory gives others license to do the same,”

            Bazelon, a Times staff writer and author of a highly regarded book on bullying explains that characteristics Trump targeted for insults and inflammatory rhetoric – being non-white, gay, or disabled – describe students who are most apt to be bullied and abused in schools. She cites numerous examples of harassment and racist displays in schools since the election.

            An article for Mother Jones reports, “Bullying in schools is out of control since the election,” and cites examples of racist incidents and actions in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Oregon.

          • Who’s to Blame for President Trump?

            First, as Wikileaks has proven without a shadow of a doubt, it is clear that the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign as well as with highly placed sources at CNN to fatally undermine and sabotage the progressive insurgency campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

          • Swedish company Tetrapak linked to Clinton Foundation Haiti Operations. More on Ericsson

            This article reports the link found between the Swedish company Tetrapak (also know as Tetra Pak) with the Clinton Foundation, as it is indicated in a document newly released by the US Department of State to the organization Judicial Watch, after a federal order (details down below). I am also reporting, based in document I found at the Freedom of Information Act, on the economic consequences for Haiti due to expanded credits given to the giant Swedish company Ericsson.

          • President-elect: I had to settle Trump University case ‘to focus on our country’

            President-elect Donald Trump sounded off on his $25m payout to students who accused him of fraud on Saturday, as he prepared for a meeting with former foe Mitt Romney, tipped as a possible nominee for secretary of state.

            On Friday the US president-elect settled class-action fraud lawsuits relating to his Trump University for $25m, avoiding the public embarrassment of having to testify in court, despite having previously vowed to fight the cases to the end.

            On Saturday he sought to explain in a tweet: “I settled the Trump University lawsuit for a small fraction of the potential award because as President I have to focus on our country.”

          • Ivanka isn’t the only reason these photos of Trump meeting Abe are problematic

            Trump also hasn’t done much to reassure the public about potential conflicts of interest: As many pointed out, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner feature prominently in photos of the diplomatic meeting.

            Presidential family members often interact with foreign leaders at state dinners, but Ivanka is more than family—she represents Trump’s private business interests. While part of Trump’s transition team, she is one of three Trump kids slated to run his private business after Jan. 20. Her own business recently was forced to apologize for turning media appearances about her father’s presidency into a sales opportunity.

          • Lucy Kellaway to leave the Financial Times to become a teacher

            Lucy Kellaway, the columnist and associate editor of the Financial Times, is leaving the newspaper after 31 years.

            From next summer, she will begin a new career as a maths teacher in a “challenging” London secondary school. In so doing, she will be acting as a pioneer for the charity Now Teach, which she co-founded earlier this year.

            It was set up to encourage high-flying professionals in the business world to retrain as teachers and help to address the shortage of maths and science teachers.

            Kellaway said: “I’ve had one of the nicest jobs in journalism by writing a column for 22 years. I love it, but I don’t want to spend my entire life doing it.

            “I think teaching is hugely important and I’m in the luxurious position of being able to take on the task. My mother was a teacher. One of my daughters is a teacher. It’s in the family, and I’m very excited about making this move.”

            Kellaway’s columns, poking fun at modern corporate culture, have long been regarded as a jewel in the FT’s crown. Editor Lionel Barber describes her as “a unique voice for the business community.”

          • Extreme Center Goes After Anti-Trump Protesters

            After Donald Trump’s surprise victory last week, protests against his pending presidency—and against the racism, misogyny and xenophobia he embodies—popped up from New York City to Portland to Kansas City to Austin to Nashville. Thousands of protesters gathered under the banner of #NotMyPresident, expressly rejecting the Trump administration’s agenda of, among other things, forced deportations, Muslim bans and attacks on women’s reproductive rights.

            On cue, several center and center-left pundits jumped in to call into question and concern-troll this exercise of dissent and its sometimes “violent” excesses of property damage.

          • TV Pundits Eager to Make Trump the New ‘Normal’

            After wrongly predicting the election, political pundits are returning to TV talkshows to explain what will happen under a Trump presidency. But these predictions aren’t like TV anchors predicting the weather; these forecasts have a profound impact on the public reception to the Trump administration and the future course of US politics.

            The danger is that by normalizing Trump—a candidate distinguished by an embrace of political violence and open appeals to ethnic nationalism who boasted of getting away with sexual assaults—these commentators will make racist and sexist bullying an acceptable way to run for public office.

          • 2016 the year everyone got interested.

            Some people wondered why the “losing” side to Brexit or the US Elections complained, moaned and did not accept the result. This is quite simple when you boil it down to the fact both were only a binary choice question, this is clearly going to be divisive by nature!

          • Sanders Draws Massive Crowds as Progressives Prepare to Fight Trump

            The election of a right-wing, repressive government led by President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-dominated Congress has the American left searching for ways to mount a resistance and regain ground in future elections.

            Many have found an answer in progressive figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), it seems, as crowds of young people are once again gathering to hear the senator speak.

            The senator has spoken out multiple times in the days since Trump’s election, arguing that the Democratic party needs to make greater efforts to reach working-class people and overhaul its leadership; vowing that progressives will “not go silently into the night”; and promising to resist Trump’s repressive, right-wing policy plans.

            The Democratic Party, which spurned Sanders’ campaign during the primary, has elevated the senator to a leadership position within the party.

          • Resisting Despair: Speaking Truth in the Face of Trump

            The attacks keep coming. A few blocks from my apartment in Michigan, a white man threatened to light a Muslim woman on fire if she did not remove her hijab. In California, my friend comforted a mother whose high-school-age daughter and her friend got yelled at in the grocery store parking lot by a man screaming, “Get out of here, lesbian bitches, you know Trump is president and that isn’t going to be allowed anymore.” My heart sinks with each new report of anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ attacks involving direct references to Trump and his campaign slogans. As we countenance a president who has embraced a curator of white supremacist propaganda as his chief White House strategist, and who plans to enact xenophobic attacks on a mass scale, I see Truthout’s role as twofold. First, we must resist the normalization of state-sanctioned violence and white supremacy. We can do so by publishing investigative reports and analyses that center the words of people directly affected by this violence. Second, we must resist despair by reporting on concrete acts of mass resistance that can be joined and copied by others. As a commissioning editor, I will be seeking out these stories in the days and months to come.

        • Censorship/Free Speech

          • Acclaimed Brazilian film makes splash despite political battles and cries of censorship

            An internationally acclaimed Brazilian film received the equivalent of an X rating, perhaps because of a political stand taken by the cast. But despite the controversy and alleged censorship surrounding Kleber Mendonca Filho’s “Aquarius,” it has made a big splash at the box office in a large and growing market that usually has more conservative tastes.

          • Germany Wants To Hold Facebook Criminally Liable If It Doesn’t Find & Delete ‘Hate’ Speech

            We’ve been pointing out that in the rush to claim that Facebook is a media company that must take responsibility for the content that is posted and shared on the site, there’s really an implicit call for blocking content that is somehow deemed “bad.” People keep acting like Facebook, rather than its users, has the responsibility to edit what is on the site. That’s dangerous — and for yet another example of how, we’ve now got a German official saying that Facebook has to be classified as a media property and be held criminally liable if it doesn’t magically delete “hate speech.”

            This is really, really dangerous. Yes, we know that Germany has much stricter hate speech laws, but if you have to have them, at least hold the proper party responsible: those doing the speaking (and, yes, as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, hate speech laws are almost always abused by governments to silence and punish people they don’t like). Facebook, to some extent, has brought this on itself. In the past, it’s made promises, to Germany in particular about how it will help curb “hate speech” on the site. And, eventually, the government is going to get upset and say “you’re not doing enough.” Earlier this year, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, and Twitter) tried to appease European bureaucrats by signing an agreement to respond to complaints of hate speech within 24 hours. But now officials want more. Because once you give governments the power to censor speech, they’re always going to want more.

          • Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s fake news: We’re working on it

            Buzzfeed found that the most-shared Facebook stories have been bogus pro-Trump articles, some of them produced by a fake-news mill run by Macedonian teenagers. A man who makes $10,000 a month writing bogus news opened up to a Washington Post reporter about his conflicted feelings. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) suggested the media take note of “paid rioting”—referring to the persistent, yet evidence-free idea that anti-Trump activists were bused-in, paid protesters.

          • Citizen Lab uncovers censorship across Chinese live-streaming apps

            The Citizen Lab, a research centre based at U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs, has published a report following a year-long investigation into censorship practices concerning Chinese live-streaming applications Sina Show, YY, and, 9158.

            Citizen Lab’s research was done by reverse-engineering the applications in order to examine the scripts that facilitate censorship, such as keyword bans which were on the client-side and therefore completely accessible to researchers after the reverse-engineering process.

            The popularity of live-streaming using these applications has risen exponentially, with people using them to perform and share glimpses into their everyday lives.

          • NYT Advocates Internet Censorship

            The New York Times wants a system of censorship for the Internet to block what it calls “fake news,” but the Times ignores its own record of publishing “fake news,” reports Robert Parry.

          • A moment of truth amid the fake news for Mark Zuckerberg

            r

            Well, the election is over; now we’re knee-deep in postmortems. Every mainstream publication and every corner of the blogosphere is full of autopsies. Many of these investigations have an anguished “How could this have happened?” tone. American students in a university department adjacent to mine have decorated the trees outside with hundreds of distraught but determinedly forward-looking messages. “Love WILL Conquer!” says one. “Knowledge not Ignorance,” says another.

            I don’t propose to add to this genre. If you want an informed, dispassionate analysis of the campaign that has given Trump the keys to the kingdom, look no further than an essay by Professor Charlie Beckett of the LSE on that institution’s Polis blog. It’s worth reading in full, but for those who are pressed for time, the gist is: “Trump had the better politics. Tactically, strategically, personally, policy-wise. He won partly because the Democrats and Hillary Clinton got most of that wrong, but mainly because he did best what you are supposed to do in an election: convince people to vote for you. They (and he) knew what they were doing.”

          • According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem

            The day after the election, news began swirling around social media that New York Times columnist David Brooks had called for President-elect Donald Trump’s assassination. Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski had a feeling it was fake. Because, come on now, would a prominent columnist for a reputable news outlet really make that kind of comment?

            Snopes has made its business out of correcting the misunderstood satire, malicious falsehoods, and poorly informed gossip that echoes across the internet — and that business is booming. Traffic jumped 85 percent over the past year to 13.6 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. The site supports itself through advertising, and in the last three years it has made enough money to quadruple the size of its staff.

            Sure enough, a bit of Snopes reporting revealed that Brooks had written a column saying Trump would likely resign or be impeached within a year. A news item published on The Rightists claimed Brooks had then said in an interview for KYRQ Radio New York that Trump should be killed. Snopes found The Rightists doesn’t even pretend to traffic in truth. In the site’s “about” section, it describes itself this way: “This is HYBRID site of news and satire. part [sic] of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!” What’s more, the story’s facts didn’t add up. For example, the site claimed Brooks had made the comments on a radio station — KYRQ — that didn’t exist.

          • What Peter Thiel’s Appointment Could Mean For Freedom Of Speech

            As Donald Trump commences his ghastly slouch toward Washington, a coterie of sycophants snatches at his coattails: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie—we knew this particular trio would scurry after heightened relevance and authority. Unsurprisingly, all three have slavered their way to the president-elect’s transition team, and possibly into the Cabinet. Less expected, perhaps, was billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s recent appointment to the same advisory committee. And yet, an alliance between Trump and Thiel, however appalling, seems so fitting that hindsight renders it almost preordained.

            We can surmise that Thiel’s explicit relevance to the team resides in his connection to Silicon Valley. Fervently supportive of President Obama, the technology hub does not regard Trump with the same beam of approval; on the contrary, it’s deeply dismayed by his ascendance to the presidency. Apart from his evident love affair with Twitter, Trump oscillates in his position on technology’s consequence to modern life. He has also threatened to renegotiate international trade agreements beneficial to the tech industry. Apple, in particular, fears that it will be barred from overseas production (this might not be a bad thing, considering the working conditions of so many foreign factories).

            Theoretically, Thiel will forge a more congenial relationship between his Silicon Valley colleagues and the incoming executive administration. He has previously claimed that his outlier status as a Trump-supporting libertarian has not blighted his business relationships. That said, it’s difficult to conceive of Thiel as possessing much social capital or political influence amid such a staunchly liberal community. And, in any case, would Silicon Valley be cajoled into cooperation with Trump? That remains to be seen.

          • UK Piracy Blocklist Silently Expands With Hundreds of Domains

            UK Internet providers have added close to 500 URLs to the national pirate site blocklist. The expansion follows a request from copyright holders who frequently add new proxies for sites that have previously been barred. Despite this mass-update, the ongoing blocking whack-a-mole is far from over.

        • Privacy/Surveillance

          • The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

            Do you panic easily? Do you often feel blue? Do you have a sharp tongue? Do you get chores done right away? Do you believe in the importance of art?

            If ever you’ve answered questions like these on one of the free personality quizzes floating around Facebook, you’ll have learned what’s known as your Ocean score: How you rate according to the big five psychological traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You may also be responsible the next time America is shocked by an election upset.

            For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.

            Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients: Senator Ted Cruz in the primaries, Mr. Trump in the general election. Cambridge is reportedly backed by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and a major Republican donor; a key board member is Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who became Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman and is set to be his chief strategist in the White House.

          • Obama declines comment on reports of possible removal of NSA chief

            U.S. President Barack Obama declined on Sunday to comment on media reports that senior defense and intelligence officials in his administration had requested the removal of National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers.

            Obama called Rogers a “terrific patriot” during a news conference at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima, adding he did not generally comment on personnel matters.

          • Former GCHQ spy suspended because of work ‘incident’ found dead in bath

            A FORMER GCHQ spybase worker who had once been suspended because of an “incident” at work was found drowned in his bath – and the front door of his flat was unlocked, an inquest heard yesterday.

          • Theresa May’s Terrible Instincts

            Everything you do on the web is now stored for twelve months by the security services. They can hack into your laptop or phone to see what is on there without any conditions at all. Not only do they not need to convince a judge you are suspected of a crime, they do not need to even pretend to actually suspect you of anything at all. They can just decide to target you and go fishing. The UK has now zero right to online privacy and the most vicious security service powers of any democracy. Indeed when you combine powers with capability (and the security service are recruiting tens of thousands more staff to our stasi state) the UK is now the most authoritarian country in the world. The legislation. passed this week, was framed by Theresa May as Home Secretary and received no significant opposition from the UK’s complicit political class.

          • Self-censorship dangerous for journalism and democracy: Joseph [Ed: surveillance is made to induce exactly that]

            Veteran investigative journalist Josy Joseph today said self-censorship, which had become the norm across newsrooms, was dangerous for both journalism and democracy.

            “Once journalist gets a job, he has a bank loan and has to pay EMI. So his concern is to protect his salary. So, he starts self-censorship within himself,” he said.

            “Then when once he goes into newsroom, the editors bring in their vested interest. So there is large and very powerful self-censorship that rules newsroom and I think it is dangerous for both democracy and journalism,” said Joseph, whose book on corruption in India released recently.

            He was speaking during a discussion on “Investigative journalistic stories that never saw light of the day” at Tata Lit-fest here.

            Joseph’s book “A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India” examines and documents the corruption within the Indian democracy.

          • Battle erupts as Trump considers NSA chief for top intelligence post
          • Intelligence battle erupts as Trump considers NSA chief for top intel post

        • Civil Rights/Policing

          • Congress Needs More Information Before the Government’s New Hacking Powers Kick in [Ed: Older but relevant]

            The federal government is set to get massively expanded hacking powers later this year. Thankfully, members of Congress are starting to ask questions.

            In a letter this week to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, 23 members of Congress—including Sens. Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy and Rep. John Conyers—pressed for more information and said they “are concerned about the full scope of the new authority” under pending changes to federal investigation rules.

            The Department of Justice kickstarted this process by proposing changes to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which governs how the government obtains search warrants from federal magistrate judges. Specifically, the changes to Rule 41 would let judges grant warrants allowing the government to remotely hack into and search computers and other devices when those devices are part of a “bot-net” or when the government isn’t sure where the devices are located.

          • President Obama Claims He Cannot Pardon Snowden; He’s Wrong

            There may be reasons why the President doesn’t wish to grant a pardon to Snowden, but his stated reasons are completely bogus.

          • Trump’s Picks For AG & CIA Happy To Undermine Civil Liberties, Increase Surveillance

            This is (unfortunately) not a huge surprise, but it appears that a Trump administration is going to be much worse for civil liberties and surveillance. Earlier today, Donald Trump named his choices to head the CIA — Rep. Mike Pompeo — and to be the next Attorney General — Senator Jeff Sessions — and both have terrible records on surveillance, civil liberties and whistleblowing. They also are problematic in other areas, but in the areas where we cover, it’s not looking good.

          • Chagossians Have No Right of Self-Determination

            The debate starts at 10.34 – if you put the cursor to the bottom of the picture a slider appears. It is excruciating to watch. In an unusually full House of Commons (not a high bar) there is indignation and real anger on all sides, with even Tories describing the decision to continue the eviction of the Chagos islanders as “dishonourable”.

            The government argues that the Chagossians are not “a people” distinct from the Mauritians, therefore they do not have a right of self-determination. This piece of sophistry is designed to answer the obvious question of why the Chagossians have less rights than the Falkland Islanders or Gibraltarians. The actual answer – that the Chagossians are not white – is not one the government wishes to give. It also begs the question, if the Chagossians are Mauritians, why are the islands not a part of Mauritius?

            The government produced a paper on prospective resettlement, imposing arbitrary conditions on where and how the Chagossians could live designed to make life as difficult as possible. Those conditions included that there could be no civilian use of the airstrip – which I am glad to see Alex Salmond challenged in the Commons. Chagossians could work at the US airbase, but only on condition their partners and children would not be permitted to be with them. Fishing – their traditional activity – will be banned by the UK government’s marine reserve.

          • Spinning Bannon as ‘Provocateur’ Who ‘Relishes Combativeness’

            There’s a difference between bad news and bad reporting. We’re seeing a lot of both these days, as each Trump Cabinet choice hurls us deeper into dystopia.

            For example: How do you describe a man who propagates white supremacy, misogyny and antisemitism? If you’re the New York Times, you call him a “provocateur.” If you’re the AP, you say his hire is evidence of Trump’s “brash, outsider instincts.”

            Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign chief executive and recently named “Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor” for the Trump White House, has declared of Breitbart, the website he still heads, “We’re the platform for the alt-right”—that being, by Breitbart’s own description, a coalition of advocates of “scientific race differences” with those who “believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” and online traffickers in racist and antisemitic stereotypes and harassment, along with a significant admixture of pro-Hitler neo-Nazis.

          • CBS Evening News Provides Platform For White Nationalist To Spin, Without Pressing Him On Racist Views

            CBS News provided alt-right white nationalist Richard Spencer with a platform to normalize his racist political movement and praise President-elect Trump without pressing him on his racists comments and stances.

          • Kica Matos on Immigration, Sue Udry on Civil Liberties–Under Trump

            This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump spent his entire campaign demonizing immigrants as dangerous, job-stealing criminals. While denouncing that, media sometimes dismissed it as mainly campaign rhetoric. Will they take the story seriously enough as a Trump administration tries to turn those ideas into policy? We’ll hear from Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change.

          • Jewish historians speak out on the election of Donald Trump

            As scholars of Jewish history, we are acutely attuned to the fragility of democracies and the consequences for minorities when democracies fail to live up to their highest principles. The United States has a fraught history with respect to Native Americans, African Americans and other ethnic and religious minorities. But this country was founded on ideals of liberty and justice and has made slow, often painful progress to achieve them by righting historic wrongs and creating equal rights and opportunities for all. No group has been more fortunate in benefiting from this progress than American Jews. Excluded by anti-Semitism from many professions and social organizations before the Second World War, Jews in the postwar period became part of the American majority, flourishing economically and politically and accepted socially. There are now virtually no corners of American life to which Jews cannot gain entry. But mindful of the long history of their oppression, Jews have often been at the forefront of the fight for the rights of others in this country.

            In the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, it is time to re-evaluate where the country stands. The election campaign was marked by unprecedented expressions of racial, ethnic, gender-based, and religious hatred, some coming from the candidate and some from his supporters, against Muslims, Latinos, women, and others. In the days since the election, there have been numerous attacks on immigrant groups, some of which likely drew inspiration from the elevation of Mr. Trump to the presidency of the United States.

          • Career Racist Jeff Sessions Is Donald Trump’s Pick For Attorney General
          • Grassroots Digital Rights Alliance Expands Across U.S.

            Observers around the world are scrutinizing the President-elect’s transition team and prospects for digital rights under the incoming administration. Trump’s campaign statements offered few reasons to be optimistic about the next administration’s commitments, making the unrestrained domestic secret surveillance regime that President Trump will inherit an even greater threat not only to privacy, but also dissent, individual autonomy and freedom of conscience, and—ultimately—our democracy.

            At EFF, we have committed ourselves to redoubling our efforts to defend digital rights. We know, however, that it will take the concerted actions of our supporters to help our goals find their reflection in law, policy, technology, and culture.

            That’s why we launched the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA), a network of grassroots groups taking action in their local communities to promote digital rights.

          • Troubling Study Says Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Who Will Be Criminals Based on Facial Features

            The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction. This might explain a new study out of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which says computers can tell whether you will be a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features.

            The bankrupt attempt to infer moral qualities from physiology was a popular pursuit for millennia, particularly among those who wanted to justify the supremacy of one racial group over another. But phrenology, which involved studying the cranium to determine someone’s character and intelligence, was debunked around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and few outside of the pseudo-scientific fringe would still claim that the shape of your mouth or size of your eyelids might predict whether you’ll become a rapist or thief.

            Not so in the modern age of Artificial Intelligence, apparently: In a paper titled “Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images,” two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed “facial images of 1,856 real persons” into computers and found “some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle.” They conclude that “all four classifiers perform consistently well and produce evidence for the validity of automated face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding the topic.”

          • Officer Put on Leave After Video Shows Him Punching Woman in Face During Eviction

            An officer with the Flagstaff police department in Arizona has been put on leave following the release of video footage taken by an eye witness that showed him punching a woman in the face during an arrest earlier this week.

          • Hey, Trump Told, ‘Get Your Daughter the F$%k Out of State Meetings!’

            U.S. News & World Report writes that “Ivanka Trump’s presence at the meeting was only made public when the Japanese government released photos, as the Trump team has continued to bar journalists from witnessing all but the most superficial aspects of the transition.”

            CBS News describes her presence, along with that of her husband, Jared Kushner, as “a reminder of potential conflicts of interest between Donald Trump’s businesses and the White House” as well as his adult children’s future roles in the White House.

            Ivanka and Kushner are on the Trump transition team’s executive committee.

            “Their involvement raises a host of ethical questions,” Emily Jane Fox writes at Vanity Fair, as “it appears to violate the 1967 nepotism law put in place after John Kennedy installed his kid brother Bobby as attorney general.” There’s also the fact that Ivanka, along with her two brothers, will reportedly run the real estate mogul’s business empire in a “blind trust.”

            “Which, as you hardly need to be sharp-eyed to point out, makes it a bit odd that she’s sitting in on presidential state business,” Marine Hyde writes at the Guardian.

            Hyde added, “Before you could say ‘conflict of interests’, America’s most dysfunctional family have already begun blurring the lines between politics and business”

          • Killing Dylann Roof Wouldn’t Help Racial Injustice

            The impact of race on criminal justice is one of the hottest topics of our time. Today’s police-shooting videos have not revealed something new, they have revealed, in a new way, a legacy of racial hatred and violence that is embedded in our nation’s DNA, and more and more Americans are waking up to that fact. So, if we are ready to address the impact of racism in the criminal justice system, what do the remedies look like?

            Let me tell you one thing that will not work—sentencing Dylann Roof to death. Jury selection for his federal death penalty case in the Charleston shooting last summer starts on Nov. 7.

          • Donald Trump’s Mass Deportations Would Cost Billions and Take Years to Process

            And while the president-elect’s comments, rhetoric, and choice of advisers, have fueled panic among immigrant communities across the country, many are quick to point out that he is only going to exacerbate a broken system that’s already been defined by rogue enforcement agencies and rampant abuse for years.

            “Obama built a horrible machine already,” said Danny Cendejas, an organizer with Detention Watch Network, a group that fights immigration detention and deportations nationwide. “Trump will just take it, and take it to a much more horrifying level.”

            In fact, what Trump is proposing is not very different from what has already been happening under the Obama administration, which has prioritized the deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. But there simply aren’t two to three million of them. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of undocumented people with criminal records is closer to 820,000, and even then many of those people are not the “rapists” and “criminals” Trump would have us believe but are guilty instead of “status crimes,” like driving without a license in states that won’t allow undocumented people to get one, or entering the country illegally.

          • As Schools See Hate-Fueled Attacks Rise, Millions Demand Trump Speak Out

            And while Trump “spoke against bullying, intimidation, and hate crimes” during his “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, his appointment of alt-right “hero” Stephen Bannon to chief strategist “sends the exact opposite message,” the letter charges.

            “The presidency is about many things,” it concludes. “Chiefly, it is about setting an example through your leadership. You have said that you will be the president for all Americans, Mr. Trump. We ask that you keep your promise by loudly, forcefully, unequivocally, and consistently denouncing these acts and the ideology that drives them. We ask you to use your position, your considerable platform, and even your tweets to send a clear message that hate has no place in our public discourse, in our public policy, or in our society.”

          • None of This Is Normal. All of It Is Un-American.

            Journalists who investigated Trump, his businesses, family and associates have been mailed anti-Semitic screeds or threatened with violence and even death. Women who have reported on Trump have been sent the vilest sexist epithets. Kshama Sawant, the socialist city council member from Seattle who recently urged protests at Trump’s inauguration in January has been targeted for email and phone attacks, some of which have suggested that she kill herself.

            Just about everyone I know has a story or two or three from the last week and a half. My friend Deana tells of a part-Asian co-worker swung at by a white male who mistook him as being from the Middle East, of a friend’s boyfriend who was told to “Go back to Africa” on his Facebook page, of another friend’s middle-school-aged daughter and other girls who were pushed around by boys in her class, some wearing Trump T-shirts and shouting hateful things about women.

          • Digital Security Tips for Protesters

            After the election, individuals took to the streets across the country to express their outrage and disappointment at the result of the U.S. presidential election. Many protesters may not be aware of the unfortunate fact that exercising their First Amendment rights may open themselves up to certain risks. Those engaging in peaceful protest may be subject to search or arrest, have their movements and associations mapped, or otherwise become targets of surveillance and repression. It is important that in a democracy citizens exercise their right to peaceably assemble, and demonstrators should be aware of a few precautions they can take to keep themselves and their data safe. Here we present 10 security tips for protesting in the digital age.

            [...]

            If you’re really concerned with the data stored on your device, don’t bring it at all and pick up a prepaid mobile phone. These lower-end devices can be purchased along with a SIM card at most large retail stores, and current federal regulation does not require you to show your ID (but your state may). Let your friends know your temporary number, and use this to coordinate activities. Remember that the location of mobile devices can be determined by the cell towers they connect to, so if you don’t want your identity known, turn off your prepaid device before going home or anywhere that might lead to your identity. Using GPS should be safe, since GPS is a receiver and does not transmit any information, but your device may store your coordinates. For this reason, we suggest you turn off location services. When you’re done with the phone, it can be safely recycled or discarded from a location that is not linked to you. Keep in mind that if you carry both your regular device and a prepaid one with you, the location of these devices can be correlated as a way to compromise your anonymity.

          • Clemency Applicants Urge Obama to Act Before Trump Presidency Crushes Hope

            When Brigitte Barren Williams realized Donald Trump had won the presidential election, “it felt like somebody let the air out of a balloon,” she said. Her brother, David Barren, is locked up at a federal prison in West Virginia, serving life plus 20 years on federal drug conspiracy charges. Now in his 50s, Barren has served almost 10 years of his sentence — the minimum portion required before he is eligible to seek a commutation under President Obama’s clemency initiative.

            Tens of thousands of people convicted of nonviolent federal drug crimes have sought mercy under the program, which was announced in April 2014. Obama ramped up his commutations in advance of the election, and Williams prayed with each clemency announcement that her brother’s name might be on the list. After the last round came out, on November 4, Williams was forced to hope that if Obama didn’t grant her brother clemency, perhaps his successor might.

            But the chances of that almost certainly dissolved on election night. Trump has called the clemency recipients “bad dudes,” warning one audience this summer that “they’re walking the streets. Sleep tight, folks.” After winning the White House on such fearmongering rhetoric — and promptly naming a white supremacist to his cabinet — Trump chose Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as his attorney general, an opponent of criminal justice reform and defender of mandatory minimums. There is little reason to believe President Trump will show mercy to people like Barren.

            Yet Williams remains steadfast in her belief that her brother will come home. “We are a family of very strong faith,” she said. Besides, her fight does not end with his freedom. There are too many others in his position. “We have to continue making sure people care.”

            Williams spoke over the phone from Washington, D.C., where she had traveled from Pittsburgh for a series of public events under the theme “Hope for the Holidays.” The advocacy group #cut50, which aims to slash the incarcerated population in half, had organized the series, where participants urged Obama to commute as many sentences as possible in the remaining weeks of his presidency.

          • Installing a Torture Fan at CIA

            President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo, an open aficionado of torture practices used in the “war on terror,” to be CIA director shows that Trump was serious when he said he would support “waterboarding and much worse.”

            Earlier, there had been a sliver of hope that that, while on the campaign trail, Trump was simply playing to the basest instincts of many Americans who have been brainwashed – by media, politicians, and the CIA itself – into believing that torture “works.” The hope was that the person whom Trump would appoint to head the agency would disabuse him regarding both the efficacy and the legality of torture.

          • Obama says he can’t pardon Snowden

            A campaign to pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden, launched in combination with a fawning Oliver Stone film about him, hasn’t made any headway. The request spurred the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and 9 Democrats, to send a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. “He is a criminal,” they stated flatly.

          • A country with perfect law enforcement based on perfect surveillance will stop dead in its tracks

            Britain passed the Snooper’s Charter, as expected. Legislators worldwide are making the crucial mistake of seeing privacy as an individual luxury, instead of as a collective necessity: a country that increases its surveillance reduces its pace of progression and competitiveness, and does so at its peril, even disregarding the human rights angle.

            The United Kingdom, on its third attempt, just passed the worst mass-surveillance legislation seen in a democracy – the so-called “Snooper’s Charter”. There is a belief that such intrusion is necessary for the development of society, and that privacy is an individual luxury. Nothing could be further from the truth: privacy is a collective necessity, for society does not develop without it.

          • Rail bosses wanted to spy on sex lives of people who opposed controversial route

            The information gathered would include details of their sex lives, mental health and political views.

            An extraordinary document was published by HS2 detailing how they would access and “process personal data” including details of individuals’ sexual orientation, trade union affiliation, criminal record as well as information about their physical and mental health.

            As part of the company’s Privacy Notice, HS2 said it could collect this information on a number of people, including staff and suppliers but also complainants and litigants, which would include those claiming compensation or objecting to the scheme.

          • Student jailed after blackmailing schoolgirl, 14, with ‘abuse’ video

            A student has been jailed for blackmailing a 14-year-old schoolgirl into handing over family jewellery after threatening to release a video of her being ‘abused’ on Facebook.

            The young victim claimed she was targeted for sexual exploitation by Mohammed Luqman, 18, over a period of months.

            The Birmingham college student allegedly recorded her being sexually abused and later threatened to release the videos on social media, unless she stole from her family for him.

          • Monkey incident sparks clashes in southern Libyan city of Sabha, 16 dead

            At least 16 people died and 50 were wounded in Libya in four days of clashes between rival factions in the southern city of Sabha, a health official said on Sunday.

            According to residents and local reports, the latest bout of violence erupted between two tribes after an incident in which a monkey that belonged to a shopkeeper from the Gaddadfa tribe attacked a group of schoolgirls who were passing by.

            The monkey pulled off one of the girls’ head scarf, leading men from the Awlad Suleiman tribe to retaliate by killing three people from the Gaddadfa tribe as well as the monkey, according to a resident who spoke to Reuters.

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • Copyrights

            • Turning Promises Of Marrakesh Treaty For Visually Impaired Into Reality

              With the recent entry into force of the Marrakesh Treaty providing copyright exceptions for persons with visual impairments, a panel convened alongside last week’s World Intellectual Property Organization copyright committee meeting explored ways to transform the treaty’s promises into reality.

              The WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) met from 14-18 November. The 15 November side event was organised by the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC), which is hosted by WIPO.

            • [Old] EFF to Copyright Office: It’s Time for Real Reform of DMCA 1201

              Over 11,000 People Join EFF’s Call to Protect Security Research and Repair

              San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the U.S. Copyright Office today to protect the public’s right to research and repair everything from phones to refrigerators to tractors, to support the right of people with print disabilities to convert media into an accessible format, and to restore users’ rights to make fair and lawful uses of the software and media they buy.

              EFF’s comments are part of the Copyright Office’s ongoing study into whether the “anti-circumvention” provisions of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) are working for the public. Section 1201 bans anyone from accessing a copyrighted work when a technology like digital rights management software (DRM) is in place to block access. The law is meant to stop illegal copying, but instead, companies use digital locks in all sorts of products to obstruct those who want to look inside for any reason—blocking competition, innovation, security research, and other legal activities. To vindicate these activities, the public must resort to a burdensome exemption process that allows the digital locks to be broken in certain cases. EFF and a host of other public interest organizations must repeatedly plead for temporary exemptions that expire every three years. Moreover, the law expects users to figure out for themselves how to circumvent digital locks to take advantage of exemptions: no one is allowed to give them the technology to do so.

        ]]>         http://techrights.org/2016/11/21/zorin-os-12-coverage/feed/ 0         Links 17/11/2016: OpenSUSE Leap 42.2, Microsoft E.E.E. on Linux http://techrights.org/2016/11/17/microsoft-e-e-e-on-linux/ http://techrights.org/2016/11/17/microsoft-e-e-e-on-linux/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2016 13:26:23 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96824

        GNOME bluefish

        Contents

        GNU/Linux

        Free Software/Open Source

        • What’s important in open source today

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

        • How to Avoid Burnout Managing an Open Source Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

        • How to make your own ‘unexpected’ number generator

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

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

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

        • An introduction to open source GIS – Part I

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

        • ReactOS 0.4.3 Released

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

        • ReactOS 0.4.3 Released, Fixes Over 300 Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

        • Events

          • Blender enthusiasts gather for the 15th annual conference

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

        • Web Browsers

        • SaaS/Back End

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

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

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

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

        • Education

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

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

        • Funding

          • Sauce Labs Raises $70M for Application Testing

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

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

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

        • BSD

        • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

          • NVIDIA GCC Backend Gets Ready For OpenMP Offloading

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

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

        • Public Services/Government

        • Licensing/Legal

        • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

          • Open Data

            • EFSA models transparency with open source ‘Knowledge Junction’

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

          • Open Access/Content

            • Editorial: Groups make Strides with open source textbooks

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

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

          • Open Hardware/Modding

            • Cypress Has Begun Publishing Broadcom Datasheets

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

        • Programming/Development

          • Farewell to Rob Collins

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

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

          • Examining ValueObjects

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

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

        Leftovers

        • Hardware

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

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

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

        • Health/Nutrition

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

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

        • Security

          • Evolution of the SSL and TLS protocols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • Wickedly Clever USB Stick Installs a Backdoor on Locked PCs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        • Defence/Aggression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • Trump could face a nuclear decision soon

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

        • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

          • Guy FOIAs NSA for Area 51 Docs, Finds Diner

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

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

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

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

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

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

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • Opponents of Dakota oil pipeline protest across USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • Saudi Arabia And Russia To Meet Ahead Of OPEC Meeting

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

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

          • Saudi Arabia Warns Trump Not To Block Oil Imports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        • Finance

          • Snapchat Parent Files for $25 Billion IPO

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

          • The great CETA swindle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • ‘Monster’ at the Berlaymont

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

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

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

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

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

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

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

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

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

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

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

          • Americans Throw Their Support Behind The Free Press

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

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

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

          • Republicans Stole the Supreme Court

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

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

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

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

          • Federal prosecutors launch probe of law firm over donations

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

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

          • Apocalypse Then, and Now, Cracker Revolution Edition

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

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

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

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

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

          • Carl Icahn Confirms 2 Trump Cabinet Contenders on Twitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • Jesse Jackson: Obama should pardon Hillary Clinton

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

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

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

          • It’s Worse Than You Think

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

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

        • Censorship/Free Speech

          • Megyn Kelly’s Cautionary Tale of Crossing Donald Trump

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

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

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

          • Twitter suspends American far-right activists’ accounts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • China holds ‘World Internet Conference’ as censorship intensifies

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

          • Satan, sex and censorship: 17 banned album sleeves

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

          • AZERBAIJAN: Raids, fines enforce state religious censorship

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

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

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

          • TUSC vindicated in censorship protest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • Pressure grows on Facebook over censorship

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

        • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Civil Rights/Policing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            [...]

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

          • Chelsea Manning Petitions Obama for Clemency Before Leaving Office

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

        • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

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

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

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

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

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

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

        • DRM

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

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

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

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • Copyrights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        ]]>         http://techrights.org/2016/11/17/microsoft-e-e-e-on-linux/feed/ 0         Links 15/11/2016: “498 out of 500 of the Speediest Computers on the Planet Are Running Linux” http://techrights.org/2016/11/15/hpc-498-out-of-500/ http://techrights.org/2016/11/15/hpc-498-out-of-500/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2016 22:43:27 +0000 http://techrights.org/?p=96801

        GNOME bluefish

        Contents

        GNU/Linux

        Free Software/Open Source

        • ARK Crew Releases Open Source Code on GitHub

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

        • Editorial: What Does Open Source Mean to You?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          [...]

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

        • Web Browsers

        • SaaS/Back End

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

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

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

        • Databases

        • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

        • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

          • GCC 7 Feature Development Ends

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

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

        • Public Services/Government

          • Parliament: Navarre should move to use open source

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

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

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

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

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

          • Russian Bill Makes Free Software a Public Priority

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

          • Russian Bill makes Free Software a Public Priority

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

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

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

        • Licensing/Legal

          • Open source licenses are shared resources

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

            But a license? A shared resource?

            Yes, open source licenses are shared resources. And, they, too, may be underappreciated until a vulnerability is exploited. Legal documents (contracts, licenses, whatever they may be called) are typically unique to each commercial enterprise. Certainly, there is some commonality. Lawyers adapt from what others have done. Patterns are followed. Text is reused.

          • Building Out an Open Source Project? Your License Matters

            It was only a few years ago when Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the prediction that open source software would soon become nearly pervasive in organizations of all sizes. That has essentially become true, and many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so.

            As businesses adopt open source platforms such as OpenStack and Hadoop, they are complementing them with their own open source projects.For these reasons and other ones, it is more important than ever to know your way around the world of laws and licenses that pertain to open source software. Leaders of new projects need to know how to navigate the complex world of licensing and the law, as do IT administrators. Here is our newly updated ollection of resources to help you navigate the world of open source laws and licenses.

            We’ve rounded up some resources on open source, licenes and the law, as seen in this post, but the topic remains a moving target. Did you know that there is an official, free journal dedicated to open source law? It’s the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, and it’s worth looking into.

        • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

          • Boundless Launches GIS Products Based on Open-Source, Data-Rich Future

            In a proprietary, license-based model, users might need to pay more to scale up their operations. For some, the extra costs might mean going through a procurement cycle, which takes time and resources.

          • Free and open sewing patterns gain popularity

            About two months ago, I started rewriting the entire Makemypattern.com codebase. I am using this opportunity to implement some improvements and features that were difficult to implement in the existing backend. But my main reason is that I am going to make all of my code available as open source. And for that, I need to make it easy for others to extend and adapt the code.

            With a mission that is not merely about making patterns anymore, I also feel like a name change was needed. So when I finish my rewrite, I will relocate to Freesewing.org, which is free as in beer and free as in speech.

        • Programming/Development

        Leftovers

        • How Google changed itself for India in a ‘mission to connect the world’

          Alphabet Inc’s Google is ready to spend billions to get millions of Indians online– through a slew of India-specific products and initiatives – to stay relevant in the world’s fastest-growing internet economy.

          With 350-million internet users, India has already surpassed the US, and the number is expected to double by 2020. Around 15,000 new Indians log onto the internet every day, fitting perfectly in Google’s scheme of the “next billion internet users” gambit to acquire new customers.

          But this wasn’t the case three years ago, not until smartphones burgeoned and a large number of people started accessing the Net through their phones.

          All that makes India more important for Google, especially after China, which has the maximum number of internet users globally, closed its doors the American internet firm.

        • Science

          • The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think

            One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs. Since designers are so different from the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal preferences.

            For sure, anybody who works on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an outsider. If you target a broad consumer audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many of your users.

        • Health/Nutrition

          • Flint mayor asks for state of emergency renewal over water crisis

            Mayor Karen Weaver has asked for a renewal of the state emergency it was declared nearly one year ago over Flint’s water crisis.

            A resolution is on the agenda for Flint City Council members to approve or deny the request at Monday evening’s meeting as the declaration is due to expire Nov. 14.

            “Mayor Karen W. Weaver has stated that it imperative that Flint’s state of emergency remain in place until the city of Flint’s drinking water is deemed safe to drink without a filter,” states the resolution.

          • Congress begins lame duck session, with Flint water crisis funding on the agenda

            Michigan’s senior U.S. Senator says there are some things that Congress has to address when it returns to work this week.

            Sen. Debbie Stabenow says her top priority during Congress’ lame duck session will be lining up federal money for Flint.

            “We have a promise that was made to me by the Speaker of the House and the Republican Majority Leader that before the end of this year we would pass the money that’s critical to fixing the pipes in Flint,” says Stabenow.

          • VW admits Audi automatic transmission software can change test behavior

            Last week, a German newspaper reported that Audi was hiding emissions-cheating software in its automatic transmissions. I don’t know why it took a whole week, but Volkswagen finally came around to admitting as much.

            “Adaptive shift programs can lead to incorrect and non-reproducible results” in emissions tests, Volkswagen told Reuters on Sunday. Software in the AL 551 automatic transmission may detect testing conditions and shift in a way that minimizes emissions, only to act “normally” out on the road. Much like Dieselgate’s defeat device, that leads to higher-than-imagined pollution, which could be in excess of legal limits.

            Audi’s AL 551 can be found in both gas and diesel vehicles, including the A6, A8 and Q5.

          • WTO ‘Paragraph 6’ System For Affordable Medicine: Time For Change?

            A range of practitioners and representatives in the manufacture of medicines, intergovernmental officials, academics and civil society representatives last week gave diverse views on the effectiveness of a waiver to international trade rules intended to ease shipments of affordable medicines to low-income countries.

            Alongside the first day of the 8-9 November World Trade Organization Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the intergovernmental South Centre held a side event to discuss experiences in the implementation and the effective functioning of the system.

          • New MSF survey: Thousands of kids dying in northeast Nigeria

            Thousands of children have died of starvation and disease in Boko Haram-ravaged northeastern Nigeria, Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday quoting a new survey that is forcing Nigerian officials to stop denying the crisis.

            The Paris-based organization hopes that official recognition of the calamity in which “thousands are dying” will help bring urgent aid before older children also start dying, Natalie Roberts, emergency program manager for northeast Nigeria, told The Associated Press.

            A survey of two refugee camps in the northeastern city of Maiduguri shows a quarter of the expected population of under-5 children is missing, assumed dead, according to the organization. Under-5 mortality rates in the camps are more than double the threshold for declaring an emergency, Roberts said in a phone interview from Paris.

        • Security

          • Security advisories for Monday
          • How to Secure Your Ubuntu Network

            In 2016, keeping your Ubuntu network secure is more important than ever. Despite what some people might think, there’s much more to this than merely putting up a router to protect a network. You must also configure each of your PCs properly to ensure you’re operating within a secure Ubuntu network. This article will show you how.

          • Linux Foundation Back Reproducible Builds Effort for Secure Software

            Building software securely requires a verifiable method of reproduction and that is why the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative is supporting the Reproducible Builds Project.

            In an effort to help open-source software developers build more secure software, the Linux Foundation is doubling down on its efforts to help the reproducible builds project. Among the most basic and often most difficult aspects of software development is making sure that the software end-users get is the same software that developers actually built.

          • Boy, 17, admits TalkTalk hacking offences

            A 17-year-old boy has admitted hacking offences linked to a data breach at the communications firm TalkTalk.

            Norwich Youth Court was told he had used hacking tool software to identify vulnerabilities on target websites.

          • Upgrade for KDE neon Security Issue

            Last month we moved the neon archive to a new server so packages got built on our existing server then uploaded to the new server. Checking the config it seemed I’d made the nasty error of leaving it open to the world rather than requiring an ssh gateway to access the apt repository, so anyone scanning around could have uploaded packages. There’s no reason to think that happened but the default in security is to be paranoid for any possibility.

          • Security B-Sides conferences attract growing information security crowd

            The Security B-Sides DC conference is part of the B-Sides movement, which was created to provide a community framework to build events for and by information security practitioners. Alex Norman, the co-director of Security B-Sides DC, tells us how he wants to expand information security beyond security professionals, and to involve a larger, more diverse community.

          • Major Linux security hole gapes open

            An old Linux security ‘feature’ script, which activates LUKS disk encryption, has been hiding a major security hole in plain sight.

          • A Linux Exploit That Uses 6502 Code

            With ubiquitous desktop computing now several decades old, anyone creating an operating system distribution now faces a backwards compatibility problem. Each upgrade brings its own set of new features, but it must maintain compatibility with the features of the previous versions or risk alienating users. If you are a critic of Microsoft products for their bloat, this is one of the factors behind that particular issue.

          • Cryptsetup Vulnerability Allows Easily Getting To A Root Shell

            CVE-2016-4484 was disclosed on Monday as a Cryptsetup issue that allows users to easily gain access to a root initramfs shell on affected systems in a little over one minute of simply hitting the keyboard’s enter key.

            This Cryptsetup vulnerability is widespread and easy to exploit, simply requiring a lot of invalid passwords before being dropped down a root shell. The data on the LUKS-encrypted volume is still protected, but you have root shell access. The CVE reads, “This vulnerability allows to obtain a root initramfs shell on affected systems. The vulnerability is very reliable because it doesn’t depend on specific systems or configurations. Attackers can copy, modify or destroy the hard disc as well as set up the network to exflitrate data. This vulnerability is specially serious in environments like libraries, ATMs, airport machines, labs, etc, where the whole boot process is protect (password in BIOS and GRUB) and we only have a keyboard or/and a mouse.”

          • CVE-2016-4484: Cryptsetup Initrd root Shell
          • Security updates for Tuesday
          • Super Mari-owned: Startling Nintendo-based vulnerability discovered in Ubuntu

        • Defence/Aggression

        • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

          • Assange Is Questioned in London Over Rape Accusation in Sweden

            Six years after the Swedish authorities opened an investigation into a rape accusation made against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, he was questioned about the matter on Monday.

            The questions were prepared by prosecutors in Sweden, where an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange was issued in 2010, but were posed by a prosecutor from Ecuador under an agreement the two countries made in August. Ecuador granted Mr. Assange political asylum in 2012, and the interview occurred at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Mr. Assange has lived in the embassy since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over the rape accusation.

        • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

          • Thanks to Donald Trump, China just won the global green technology sector

            There’s no denying who the king of technology in the 20th century was: America. But the 21st century poses new challenges that must be met by the rise of the green technology and green energy sectors across the globe. And whatever country is producing the best green tech solutions is in the pole position to spring to the top of the 21st century technological heap.

            America’s election of Donald Trump virtually guarantees that country will be China.

            To be fair, China was already ahead of the US on this front. It began investing big in green tech more than a decade ago, and it is now the world’s leading investor in green energy. Last year alone, China invested more than US$100 billion in green energy – that’s more than double what the US invested – and that number is expected to grow. Trump or no, there’s a good chance China would have won this race. But the US, the second-biggest global investor, was in a better position than any other single nation to challenge China on this front.

          • Floridians Wonder How President-Elect Trump Will Deal With Their Rising Seas

            Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump’s signature piece of property in the South, is just 70-miles north of Miami in Palm Beach, a mostly upscale barrier island. But the residence and private club is likely to be affected by the rising tides and increasingly powerful hurricanes that now regularly batter the coast of Florida.

            Miami and nearby coastal towns in Florida are, and will be, impacted by changes in our climate—the sea levels in just the past decade rose at double the rate of the entire century before, according to the World Resource Institute. But in the end, Floridians chose noted climate change-skeptic Donald Trump as their future leader.

        • Finance

          • EU ministers to discuss plan to charge Britons to visit Europe after Brexit

            A European plan under which Britons will face a £10 charge to travel to the EU after Brexit is to be discussed by interior ministers this week.

            The plan for a European version of the US visa waiver programme has already won the backing of the British diplomat now in charge of European security.

            Sir Julian King, the European commissioner for the security union is to give evidence to peers on Tuesday. He has described the plan as “a valuable additional piece of the jigsaw” in the war against international terrorism.

          • Why India wiped out 86% of its cash overnight

            On 8 November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave only four hours’ notice that virtually all the cash in the world’s seventh-largest economy would be effectively worthless.

            The Indian government likes to use the technical term “demonetisation” to describe the move, which makes it sound rather dull. It isn’t. This is the economic equivalent of “shock and awe”.

            [...]

            These may be the largest denomination Indian notes but they are not high value by international standards – 1,000 rupees is only £12. But together the two notes represent 86% of the currency in circulation.

            Think of that, at a stroke 86% of the cash in India now cannot be used.

            What is more, India is overwhelmingly a cash economy, with 90% of all transactions taking place that way.

            And that is the target of Mr Modi’s dramatic move. Because so much business is done in cash, very few people pay tax on the money they earn.

          • Donald Trump victory wipes $1 trillion off value of global bond markets

            Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the US presidential election wiped more than $1 trillion (£800bn) off the value of global bond markets in two days.

            President-elect Trump has pledged to massively increase infrastructure spending, which has caused a big shift away from the safety of government debt and into the shares of companies who may cash in on any spending bonanza. The wider stock market has also risen on the back of investors’ predictions of increased growth.

            Turning on the government spending taps would push up inflation, meaning that the already meagre returns on US bonds would head into negative territory, adding more reasons to sell and move into riskier assets.

          • 7 WTF Ways Famous Companies Rip You Off Every Day

            There’s a righteous, almost smug satisfaction to buying something cheap. It feels like we’re sticking it to the big companies by denying them those extra ten cents per unit on a box of Kit Kats. However, no one loves a bargain more than the businesses themselves. That usually takes the form of tax evasion and poor wages, but sometimes they like to get … creative.

          • Baby dies after Indian hospital refuses to accept parents’ money because of country’s new cash note ban

            A baby died when a hospital in India refused to accept a deposit paid in banknotes which were withdrawn from circulation the day before.

            Police said they are investigating a doctor in a Mumbai suburb who allegedly turned away a couple with a premature baby because they did not have the correct currency.

            Kiran Sharma gave birth to a boy around one month early on 9 November and was rushed to Jeevan Jyot Hospital in Govandi to the east of the city, reported The New Indian Express.

        • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

          • VP Elect Mike Pence Goes To Court To Keep His Emails Secret

            The circumstances are different, but the general principle is the same — and there’s a really important issue at stake when it comes to FOIA and public records issues. The background is fairly convoluted, but here’s a quick summary. After President Obama announced a plan to defer enforcement of certain immigration laws for certain individuals, a few states were upset about it, and Texas and Indiana (where Pence is governor) sued the President. Pence hired an outside law firm to handle the case, and a local lawyer thought this was a waste of taxpayer funds. The lawyer filed public records requests to get access to emails about the decision to hire the law firm and to find out the costs to taxpayers.

            Pence’s office released some emails, but they were apparently redacted in places — and in one case an email referred to an attached white paper that was not included. The lawyer who filed the request, William Groth, went to court to demand that the Pence administration reveal the full email with the attached white paper. The Pence administration has argued that it’s not subject to public records requests as “attorney-client” work material — but also that the courts are not allowed to question what the government chooses to release or redact under public records laws. A lower court agreed — following an Indiana Supreme Court ruling saying that the courts cannot “meddle” in public records decisions by the legislative or executive branch due to “separation of powers.” That’s a bizarre reading of the law that seems to actually turn the concept of separation of powers on its head, as it kind of destroys a key part of that separation: the checks and balances of the three branches of government.

          • Your Government Wants to Militarize Social Media to Influence Your Beliefs

            A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces.

            The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion.

            A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month revealed how a CIA-funded tool, Geofeedia, was already being used by police to conduct surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters.

            Although Facebook and Twitter both quickly revoked Geofeedia’s access to their social feeds, the conference proves that social media surveillance remains a rapidly growing industry with no regulatory oversight. And its biggest customers are our own governments.

          • Remember when they told us Hillary, not Bernie, would beat Trump?

            If the Democrats continue to front establishment candidates while the establishment’s cherished beliefs continue to crumble, they will continue to lose.

            American politics now: the anti-establishment, white-nationalism troll party and the pro-establishment party that thinks you’ll vote for them because you fear white supremacists more than you hate the trolls.

            American politics tomorrow, if we address ourselves to the work at hand: the terrified troll white-nationalist party versus the party of hope, change and rebuilding: “dismissing a major indicator of popularity like polling—a key tool of campaign journalism in virtually all other contexts—due to vague, handwaving claims of unvettedness comes across as far more a convenient talking point than an earnestly arrived-at conclusion.”

          • Interview: Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein On Clinton’s Loss To Trump

            When the liberal class heard news media report Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote, numerous people experienced meltdowns that involved blaming anyone and everyone but Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. In particular, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was one of the targets, even though the math did not point to Stein as a culprit for the outcome.

            MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow wailed, “If you vote for somebody who can’t win for president, it means that you don’t care who wins for president.” It not only displayed the prejudice many liberals have against allowing more choices and more voices in presidential elections, but it also exemplified a denial among liberal pundits. They reflexively lashed out at Stein or Bernie Sanders in order to ignore their failure to recognize how Trump had a strong chance all along to win because voters were fed up with the neoliberal economic policies of Democrats.

            For this week’s “Unauthorized Disclosure,” the show returns with an interview with Jill Stein. She highlights what her campaign managed to accomplish. She looks back on smears she faced, such as the idea that she was anti-vaccine and says she views it as a “sign of the media’s weakness and also their fear and our strength.” Then, she shares how she was never confident Clinton would win the election and addresses the denial among Democrats, who do not want to confront the reality of what happened. She also lists off a number of initiatives and efforts she plans to help support in the aftermath of the election.

          • Julian Assange, Whose Wikileaks Played a Pivotal Role in US Election, Faces Possible Criminal Trial

            I sit in the tiny conference room adjoined to Julian Assange’s tiny living space in Ecuador embassy. I always feel a bit restless and nervous waiting for him. I worry how he’s coping. I realize how difficult it must be, to be here for years every day looking at these same walls, not feeling the sunshine.

            Just then the cat pops in, making me feel more at ease. He has full reign. He is on the table sniffing the muffins and rubbing up against me purring and maybe a little disappointed that everything I’ve brought is vegan.

            Next, the big man walks in, wearing a Sea Shepherd tshirt and jeans, a bit disheveled. It’s early but he manages a smile. He’s got a long day ahead.

          • Julian Assange calls for leaks on Trump after claims Wikileaks attacked Hillary Clinton

            The online group was grilled by users of Reddit in a questions and answer session on the online debating forum.

            WikiLeaks became a focal point during the election campaign.

            It published thousands of internal Democrat National Council emails, and more recently thousands more from the hacked email account of the Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.

            Some Reddit users appeared suspicious Wikileaks had an agenda to get Donald Trump elected.

          • WikiLeaks informant Chelsea Manning asks Obama to cut her 35-year prison sentence to time served

            The Lawyer of Chelsea Manning, a former US soldier who is currently serving a prison sentence for disclosing secret diplomatic and military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, has put forth a petition requesting President Barack Obama to grant clemency and reduce the rest of her 35-year sentence to the more than six years she has already served.

            Manning’s punishment is the longest period of incarceration awarded to any leaker in American history.

          • Anti-Semitic incidents stoke fear among Jews after Trump win

            A synagogue in Montana wants police protection after Nazi fliers were delivered nearby following Donald Trump’s election win. Anxiety is now growing among American Jews after Trump appointed an alleged anti-Semite as one of his closest advisors on Sunday as the number of hate incidents continues to rise across the US.

          • Did the WikiLeaks Email Dumps Cost Hillary the White House? [Ed: falsely blames it all on Russia, without evidence]
          • Pain Management

            The only thing that will save us from a populist racist oligarch demagogue is a populist anti-racist anti-neoliberal progressive with a mobilized movement behind them and serious contenders up and down the ticket.

          • Sanders backs Trump protests, questions Electoral College
          • Amid DNC Reckoning, Ellison Emerges as Progressive Antidote to Trump

            Amid the growing post-election call for a “reckoning” within the Democratic Party, Rep. Keith Ellison on Minnesota has swiftly emerged as the favored progressive choice to lead that transition.

            “Liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups have started plotting a major overhaul of the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” the Washington Post reported late Thursday, with the first step being a replacement for the embattled interim chair Donna Brazile.

            The progressive flank of the party has largely placed the blame for the stunning election loss on the DNC and its elitist leadership, which they say is out of touch with the Left’s grassroots base, which wants to see a renunciation of corporate influence.

          • Maine became the first state in the country Tuesday to pass ranked choice voting

            Amid a national vote that rocked the political world Tuesday, voters in Maine narrowly approved a measure that supporters say will be respectively disruptive to the state’s political status quo.

            With 98 percent of the vote reporting in the state, 52 percent of voters approved a ballot question making Maine the first state to implement ranked choice voting, a fundamental reform of how voters literally fill out their ballot.

            In a ranked choice vote system, rather than simply voting for one candidate, voters rank their candidates by preference—first, second, third, and so on.

          • Maine Passes Ranked-Choice Voting

            Maine residents have approved a ballot question that will allow voters to rank their choice of candidates.

            Under the election overhaul, ballots are counted at the state level in multiple rounds. Last-place candidates are eliminated until a candidate wins by a majority.

          • Stephen Bannon and Reince Priebus to lead Trump’s White House

            Donald Trump has named Reince Priebus as his White House chief of staff, rewarding a loyalist to his party and its long-serving chairman by making him his top aide in the Oval Office. But he also named Steve Bannon, the head of his campaign and of the far-right website Breitbart, as his “chief strategist and senior counselor”.

            The statement announcing Trump’s decision named Bannon first, despite the vague title of his role. It said he and Priebus would work as “equal partners”.

            “Steve and Reince are highly qualified leaders who worked well together on our campaign and led us to a historic victory,” Trump said. “Now I will have them both with me in the White House as we work to make America great again.”

          • Trump appoints Chief of Staff, chief strategist

            “I am thrilled to have my very successful team continue with me in leading our country,” Trump said in a statement.

          • Denying climate change is only part of it: 5 ways Donald Trump spells doom for the environment

            If the world’s governments don’t prevent the planet’s surface temperature from increasing more than 2°C, then life on Earth will become a difficult proposition for many humans, animals and plants. Glaciers will melt, sea levels will rise, crops will fail, water availability will decrease, and diseases will proliferate. Some areas will experience more wildfires and extreme heat; in others, more hurricanes and extreme storms. Coastal cities and possibly entire nations will be swallowed by the sea. There will be widespread social and economic instability, leading to regional conflicts.

          • Trump seeks top-secret security clearances for his kids

            President-elect Donald Trump is seeking top-secret security clearances for his adult children, CBS News reported Monday.

            CBS News said the real estate mogul has asked the White House if he can obtain such clearances for Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr., as well as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

            But a transition team official told the presidential pool reporter Monday night that the president-elect did not request such a step and said the Trump children have not started filling out paperwork for such clearances.

          • I actually have something I would use the Department of Education to do. It would be to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.
          • Donald Trump ‘will consult Nigel Farage before Theresa May’ on UK policy proposals, says Aaron Banks

            Donald Trump will run policy proposals affecting the UK past Nigel Farage before consulting Theresa May, a Ukip donor has claimed.

            Mr Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon will “run ideas” past interim Ukip leader Mr Farage, prominent Ukip donor Aaron Banks told the Daily Telegraph.

            “There is no doubt about it that Steve Bannon will talk to Nigel Farage before any other British politician and run stuff by them,” Mr Banks said.

          • Playtime is over

            Well, I was optimistic. The tea party radicals have gone nuclear, but I wasn’t counting on a neo-Nazi running the White House, or on the Kremlin stepping in …

            Let me explain.

            A few years ago, wandering around the net, I stumbled on a page titled “Why Japan lost the Second World War”. (Sorry, I can’t find the URL.) It held two photographs. The first was a map of the Pacific Theater used by the Japanese General Staff. It extended from Sakhalin in the north to Australia in the south, from what we now call Bangladesh in the west, to Hawaii in the east. The second photograph was the map of the war in the White House. A Mercator projection showing the entire planet. And the juxtaposition explained in one striking visual exactly why the Japanese military adventure against the United States was doomed from the outset: they weren’t even aware of the true size of the battleground.

            I’d like you to imagine what it must have been like to be a Japanese staff officer. Because that’s where we’re standing today. We think we’re fighting local battles against Brexit or Trumpism. But in actuality, they’re local fronts in a global war. And we’re losing because we can barely understand how big the conflict is.

            (NB: By “we”, I mean folks who think that the Age of Enlightenment, the end of monarchism, and the evolution of Liberalism are good things. If you disagree with this, then kindly hold your breath until your head explodes. (And don’t bother commenting below: I’ll delete and ban you on sight.))

            The logjam created by the Beige Dictatorship was global, throughout the western democracies; and now it has broken. But it didn’t break by accident, and the consequences could be very bad indeed.

            What happened last week is not just about America. It was one move—a very significant one, bishop-takes-queen maybe—in a long-drawn-out geopolitical chess game. It’s being fought around the world: Brexit was one move, the election and massacres of Dutarte in the Philippines were another, the post-coup crackdown in Turkey is a third. The possible election of Marine Le Pen (a no-shit out-of-the-closet fascist) as President of France next year is more of this stuff. The eldritch knot of connections between Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Da’esh in the wreckage of Syria is icing on top. It’s happening all over and I no longer think this is a coincidence.

          • Looking for someone to blame? It’s not third parties

            As news of Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss sinks in, many Clinton supporters looking for someone to blame are pointing fingers at a familiar scapegoat: people who voted outside the two-party system.

            Pundits are already trying to blame Libertarian Gary Johnson and me, the Green party candidate, for Trump’s win. For example, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow concocted a scenario in which by taking every Stein vote and half of Johnson’s votes, Clinton could have grabbed enough states from Trump to eke out an electoral college win, a story repeated by CNN. Unwilling to accept that Clinton didn’t motivate enough voters to win the presidency, and explore the reasons why, many pundits are instead looking to put responsibility for the loss onto others.

            First the facts: if every single Stein voter had voted for Clinton, Clinton still lost.

          • Why Are Liberals Blaming The Green Party For Trump?

            The Green Party’s showing in this year’s election was strong but not significant enough to reach the desired 5%. It was more like 1%. Still, the Stein Baraka ticket garnered more than 1.2 million votes nationwide. That’s a big bump from the last Green Party presidential ticket in 2012 which won less than half a million votes.

            Already some liberal pundits, shocked by the election of Donald Trump have begun blaming the Green Party for Clinton’s loss. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman tweeted on election night, “Jill Stein managed to play Ralph Nader. Without her Florida might have been saved.”

          • A road map Hillary Clinton did not follow to the White House

            We know this because Wikileaks founder Julian Assange came into possession of it along with tens of thousands of other emails to and from Clinton’s strategist Podesta, and spread them across the internet.

            Huma Abedin’s email revealed no high drama or internal backbiting, and so it did not grab headlines during the campaign. It simply noted that she had met with Smith, a San Francisco political consultant, and she attached a memo, titled thoughts.doc. Written by Smith, it maps out a strategy, though not one followed by Hillary Clinton.

            Smith and his firm, SCN Strategies, are among the most successful Democratic campaign firms in the state and country. In 2008, he ran Clinton’s 2008 winning primary campaigns in California and Texas. And in 2014, he was making a pitch for a position in Clinton’s 2016 campaign; he didn’t get it.

            “Today, you are a fully known quantity and a second-time candidate for President of the United States,” Smith wrote, setting forth how Clinton might announce her candidacy and frame her campaign. “As such you will be expected to have a clear and deep rationale for your candidacy from the first day of the campaign.”

          • Donna Brazile says CNN should have let her ‘defend myself’ following Wikileaks email

            Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and former CNN contributor, went after her former employer at an event at a women’s college in Virginia Monday, blaming them for “ripping me a new one” instead of allowing her to defend herself after it appeared she tipped off Hillary Clinton’s campaign to town hall questions.

            Brazile, who had been a contributor and commentator at CNN for 14, resigned from the network earlier this year after WikiLeaks published hacked emails that showed Brazile tipping off Clinton’s campaign in advance to at least two questions the Democratic presidential nominee could be asked at upcoming town hall events.

            “CNN never gave me a question,” Brazile said at a talk held at Hollins University, according to The Roanoke Times. “I wish CNN had given me some other things, like the ability to defend myself rather than ripping me a new one.”

            Brazile did not deny the allegations that she had emailed two questions in advance, but she said she “never got on Clinton’s campaign airplane or prepped the candidate for any of the debates,” according to the Roanoke Times. When the network cut ties with Brazile permanently, it said the company was “completely uncomfortable” with the revelations and asserted that it had not provided questions to Brazile in advance.

          • Rep. Keith Ellison Enters Race for DNC Chair With Strong Support

            Rep. Keith Ellison formally announced his candidacy Monday to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a race that has taken on unusual importance as the party looks for someone to lead its efforts to rebuild after last week’s devastating loss to Donald Trump.

            Ellison, a progressive who backed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary, enters the potentially crowded race as the clear favorite thanks to early backing from a number of leading Democrats.

            “It is not enough for Democrats to ask for voters’ support every two years. We must be with them through every lost paycheck, every tuition hike, and every time they are the victim of a hate crime,” Ellison said in a statement announcing his bid. “When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation. To do that, we must begin the rebuilding process now.”

          • More than half of arrested anti-Trump protesters didn’t vote

            More than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland didn’t vote, according to state election records.

            At least seventy demonstrators either didn’t turn in a ballot or weren’t registered to vote.

            KGW compiled a list of the 112 people arrested by the Portland Police Bureau during recent protests. Those names and ages, provided by police, were then compared to state voter logs by Multnomah County Elections officials.

            Records show 35 of the protesters arrested didn’t return a ballot for the November 8 election. Thirty-five of the demonstrators taken into custody weren’t registered to vote.

          • D.C. Area High School Students Walk Out Of Class To Protest Trump

            A day after hundreds of students staged a peaceful protest at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, another large protest is taking place in the District.

            Hundreds of students walked out of school at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, in the Tenleytown neighborhood, Tuesday morning in protest of President Elect Donald Trump.

          • President Trump’s Cabinet Will Be Filled With Deplorables

            There are 67 days until Donald Trump’s inauguration, a fact that seems to have surprised the president-elect – who reportedly never thought he’d remain in the race past October 2015 – as much as anyone. According to the Wall Street Journal, not only was Trump “surprised by the scope” of the president’s duties when President Obama explained them to him in private last week, but his aides were unaware they would need to hire an entirely new White House staff.

          • The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…

            On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.

            Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor. Here’s a sample of the list

          • ‘Trump lookalike’ chef slams media coverage of beating

            TV chef Anders Vendel said in a Facebook post that he was beaten up by three men, two of whom bound his arms behind his back, while the third beat him in the face. He estimated that he was punched twenty times in the face, which took place at 4am in central Malmö on Saturday.

            The attack left him with a broken nose and extensive bruising around his right eye, mouth and jaw.

            In the Facebook post, which has since been deleted but has been widely cited by populist media including Russian state propaganda channel RT, Vendel had said the men thought he resembled the US President-elect. He also said they were Muslim.

            But in a comment to The Local on Monday, the chef said the way his case was being used abroad was “scary.”

            Headlines in RT, the Daily Mail and various other global media emphasised the attackers’ supposed religion. None of them had spoken to the chef.

            “I was angry, hurt and humiliated when I wrote what I was thinking at the time,” Vendel said.

          • Trump’s victory comes with a silver lining for the world’s progressives

            The election of Donald Trump symbolises the demise of a remarkable era. It was a time when we saw the curious spectacle of a superpower, the US, growing stronger because of – rather than despite – its burgeoning deficits. It was also remarkable because of the sudden influx of two billion workers – from China and Eastern Europe – into capitalism’s international supply chain. This combination gave global capitalism a historic boost, while at the same time suppressing Western labour’s share of income and prospects.

            Trump’s success comes as that dynamic fails. His presidency represents a defeat for liberal democrats everywhere, but it holds important lessons – as well as hope – for progressives.

            From the mid-1970s to 2008, the US economy had kept global capitalism in an unstable, though finely balanced, equilibrium. It sucked into its territory the net exports of economies such as those of Germany, Japan and later China, providing the world’s most efficient factories with the requisite demand. How was this growing trade deficit paid for? By the return of around 70 per cent of the profits made by foreign corporates to Wall Street, to be invested in America’s financial markets.

        • Censorship/Free Speech

        • Privacy/Surveillance

          • Spies Use Tinder, and It’s as Creepy as You’d Think

            On September 4, a group of young activists planned to attend a demonstration against Interim President Michel Temer in the city center of São Paulo. They never made it. Their group had been infiltrated by an Army Captain Willian Pina Botelho—via Tinder.

            Surveillance and infiltration are not new tactics, but the ACLU revelation last month that Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook had been sharing data with surveillance service Geofeedia reminds us that the internet is bringing it to whole new levels. The story of the “Tinder infiltrator” serves as a reminder for a generation of young activists who are organizing online: don’t stop organizing, but be vigilant.

          • Comey Can’t Say How Often Encryption Thwarts Investigations, But Probably A Lot

            FBI Director James Comey believes encryption is perhaps the biggest threat to public safety yet. So big, in fact, that he can only engage in hyperbole about it. There’s been very little done to quantify the problem, even by the agency that seems to fear it most.

            In 2015, Comey told senators that a “vast majority” of devices seized by US law enforcement “may no longer be accessible” due to encryption. Comey has a very strange definition of “vast majority,” as Marcy Wheeler points out.

          • US Secrecy Prevails In German Constitutional Court

            The German constitutional court has rebuffed a second complaint seeking to allow oversight bodies to see the US National Security Administration (NSA) selector list.

            The list was pushed by the NSA to its German sister organisation BND to crawl through data traffic intercepted at the DeCIX, an internet exchange point in Frankfurt and traffic-wise the largest peering platform worldwide.

          • 1ST LEAD Court: Germany does not have to hand over NSA list of spying targets By Friederike Heine, dpa

            The list of so-called “selectors” – telephone numbers, email and IP addresses – was handed to Germany‘s foreign intelligence agency BND by the National Security Agency (NSA) with the aim of spying on German and European targets.

          • The German government won’t have to disclose who it spied on with the NSA
          • German court’s ruling on mass spying is a victory for the BND and NSA
          • German court rejects opposition’s bid for disclosure of NSA spy targets
          • German Constitutional Court rules out access to NSA’s ‘selectors’ list
          • Court rejects case to reveal more on US spies in Germany
          • CIA, NSA ordered to reveal to judge whether they were involved in Occupy Philly surveillance

            A federal judge has ordered the CIA and the National Security Agency to disclose to him whether they were involved in spying on Occupy Philadelphia protesters during their monthlong demonstration at what is now Dilworth Park five years ago.

            Responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by a lawyer for the demonstrators, U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller gave the agencies until early next year to submit a list of any records detailing the agencies’ potential surveillance activities, along with a justification of why those documents should be withheld from public disclosure.

            Schiller said he would rely upon that list to determine whether to release such documents or whether he would need to examine such records in person before making his decision.

          • Federal Contractor Collected Pay From NSA, OPM for Hours He Didn’t Work: Prosecutors
          • Apps for Communicating and Organizing in the Age of Trump

            On January 20, Donald Trump will gain control over the most powerful surveillance system in history. Worried? Here are some steps you can take to protect yourself.

            The U.S. government has a long history of targeting activists. Agents spied on Martin Luther King Jr., bugging his hotel rooms in an attempt to find out personal information which could be used to discredit him. More recently, the FBI spied on Black Lives Matter activists.

            U.S. intelligence agencies have unprecedented power to gather information on millions of American citizens. This information includes our communications, banking info, and web browsing data. We know that the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on who you talk to, when, and where you call from.

          • Donald Trump is about to control the most powerful surveillance machine in history

            The US intelligence agencies are among the most powerful forces to ever exist, capable of ingesting and retaining entire nations’ worth of data, or raining down missiles on targets thousands of miles away. As of January 20th, all that power will be directly answerable to Donald Trump.

            It’s still early, but a picture is starting to emerge of how the president-elect could use those powers — and it’s not a pretty sight. Since the September 11th attacks, the US government gives the president almost unlimited discretion in matters of national security, with few limitations or mechanisms for oversight. That includes NSA surveillance, as well as the expanding powers of the drone program. And from what Trump has said on the campaign trail, his targets for using those powers may cut against some of America’s most important civil rights.

          • Shazam Keeps Your Mac’s Microphone Always On, Even When You Turn It Off

            What’s that song? On your cellphone, the popular app Shazam is able to answer that question by listening for just a few seconds, as if it were magic. On Apple’s computers, Shazam never turns the microphone off, even if you tell it to.

            When a user of Shazam’s Mac app turns the app “OFF,” the app actually keeps the microphone on in the background. For the security researcher who discovered that the mic is always on, it’s a bug that users should know about. For Shazam, it’s just a feature that makes the app work better.

          • A 10-Digit Key Code to Your Private Life: Your Cellphone Number

            The next time someone asks you for your cellphone number, you may want to think twice about giving it.

            The cellphone number is more than just a bunch of digits. It is increasingly used as a link to private information maintained by all sorts of companies, including money lenders and social networks. It can be used to monitor and predict what you buy, look for online or even watch on television.

            It has become “kind of a key into the room of your life and information about you,” said Edward M. Stroz, a former high-tech crime agent for the F.B.I. who is co-president of Stroz Friedberg, a private investigator.

            Yet the cellphone number is not a legally regulated piece of information like a Social Security number, which companies are required to keep private. And we are told to hide and protect our Social Security numbers while most of us don’t hesitate when asked to write a cellphone number on a form or share it with someone we barely know.

        • Civil Rights/Policing

          • Saudi bans schools from marking non-Islamic holidays

            Saudi education ministry has warned international schools from marking non-Islamic occasions, such as Christmas and New Year, the media reported on Monday.

            The ban includes forbidding those schools from providing holidays on such occasions or changing the dates of exams to suit them, Xinhua news agency reported.

          • Spokesperson Maryam Namazie wins 2016 International Secularism (Laicite) Prize

            This is a time where “solidarity” is no longer an act of defending revolutionaries but fascists; where there is always support for Islamist projects like Sharia courts, the burqa, gender segregation, apostasy and blasphemy laws – whether de jure or de facto – but never for those who refuse to be silenced, erased and “disappeared”.

            It’s a time when “progressive” all too often means protecting regressive identity politics, which homogenises entire communities and societies, and deems theocrats as the sole legitimate arbiters and gatekeepers of “community” values.

            It’s a politics of betrayal – devoid of class struggle and political ideals – which sees any dissent through Islamist eyes and immediately labels it “Islamophobic” and blasphemous.

            We are called “aggressive apostates”, “fundamentalist secularists”, “native informants”, “inflammatory”. We are accused of violating the “safe spaces” of Islamists on universities and even “inciting hatred”.

          • Blasphemy: How Kano mob murdered my wife in my presence – Husband

            Pastor Mike Agbahime, husband of Bridget Agbahime who was killed by an irate mob in Kano for alleged blasphemy has finally spoken up on the events that lead to his wife’s death.

            Agbahime in an interview with The Punch blamed Kano Governor Umar Ganduje for paving the way for the release of the arrested suspects.

          • Mauritanian clerics urge for blogger’s death penalty to be applied

            Muslim clerics in Mauritania on Sunday urged the authorities to execute a blogger who was sentenced to death in 2014 for apostasy after writing a blog post on Islam and racial discrimination.

            Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ould Mkhaitir’s article touched a nerve in Mauritania, a West African country with deep social and racial divisions. He was tried for apostasy and received the death penalty despite having repented and saying his article was misunderstood.

            According to the U.S.-based Freedom Now rights group who provide Mkhaitir with legal counsel, the blog post appears to have been the first he published. Prior to his arrest he worked as an engineer for a mining company and was not an activist, Freedom Now said on its website.

          • Delta: Police Raid Baby Factory in Oshimili Council, Arrest Six Pregnant Wome

            Police have raided a baby factory and arrested at least six pregnant women who are allegedly planning to sell their newborn babies after delivery in Delta State.
            The police said the arrest was made in Okwe community, Oshimili South Local Government Area of the state in Nigeria’s South-South region.
            They revealed that a victim, Blessing Aondoseer, had reported that her husband allegedly connived with some people to take away her two weeks old baby.

          • Freedom House warns that internet privacy is eroding fast

            INDEPENDENT WATCHDOG Freedom House has issued its 2016 report along with a chilling warning that internet privacy is becoming something of an oxymoron.

            Freedom House is based in Washington and deals with how countries handle and provide the internet and technology to citizens. We imagine that it is currently hiring. The Freedom On The Net report said that freedom has declined for the sixth year in a row.

          • The Way to Stop Trump

            The stunning upset election of Donald Trump has left many Americans wondering what has become of their country, their party, their government, even their sense of the world. Purple prose has been unleashed on the problem; comparisons to fascism and totalitarianism abound. Commentators claim that Trump’s election reflects a racist, sexist, xenophobic America. But we should resist the temptation to draw broad-brush generalizations about American character from last Tuesday’s outcome. The result was far more equivocal than that; a majority of the voters rejected Trump, after all. There is no question that President Trump will be a disaster—if we let him. But the more important point is that—as the fate of American democracy in the years after 9/11 has taught us—we can and must stop him.

            The risks are almost certainly greater than those posed by any prior American president. Trump, who has no government experience, a notoriously unreliable temperament, and a record of demagoguery and lies, will come to office with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and, once he fills the late Antonin Scalia’s seat, on the Supreme Court as well. His shortlist of Cabinet appointees offers little hope that voices of moderation will be heard. Who, then, is going to stop him? Will he be able to put in place all the worst ideas he tossed out so cavalierly on the campaign trail? Building a wall; banning and deporting Muslims; ending Obamacare; reneging on climate change treaty responsibilities; expanding libel law; criminalizing abortion; jailing his political opponents; supporting aggressive stop-and-frisk policing; reviving mass surveillance and torture?

            Whether Trump will actually try to implement these promises, and more importantly, whether he will succeed if he does try, lies as much in our hands as in his. If Americans let him, Trump may well do all that he promised—and more. Imagine, for example, what a Trump administration might do if there is another serious terrorist attack on US soil. What little he has said about national security suggests that he will make us nostalgic for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

          • Chuck Schumer: The Worst Possible Democratic Leader at the Worst Possible Time

            When Barack Obama leaves the White House, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer will almost certainly be elected Senate minority leader — and therefore become the highest ranking Democratic official in America.

          • Prosecutor Shuts Down New Orleans Cop’s Attempt To Charge Arrestee With Hate Crime For Insulting Responding Officers

            The Louisiana legislature decided to help out its most underprivileged constituents — law enforcement officers — by making it a felony to “attack” them using nothing more than words.

            When New Orleans police officers arrived at the scene of a disturbance to arrest an intoxicated man for banging on a hotel’s windows and harassing the employees, the situation devolved into the totally expected.

          • Hate Crimes Are Up — But the Government Isn’t Keeping Good Track of Them

            In 2015, the authorities in California documented 837 hate-crime incidents, charting a surge in offenses motivated by religious intolerance toward Muslims and Jews, while crimes against Latinos grew by 35 percent.

            Last week, shortly after Donald J. Trump was elected the country’s next president, the Southern Poverty Law Center put up a form on its website encouraging people to share details about potential hate crimes. By the next day, they’d received about 250 reports – more than they’re used to seeing in six months.

            Then on Monday, the FBI released its latest national tabulation of hate crimes, data that showed an overall uptick of 6.8 percent from 2014 to 2015. The accounting, drawn from information passed on to the bureau by state and local law enforcement agencies, charted a 67-percent increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes.

          • Self-styled ‘Sharia patrol’ allegedly launch brutal attack on girl for ‘not wearing HIJAB’

            In the horrific footage from Vienna, Austria, the youngster is seen being violently attacked by a group of girls and a boy in what is believed to be a “Sharia patrol”.

            In this clip, she keeps her hands in her pocket and takes the savage beating, despite breaking her jaw in two places and blood dripping from her face.

            The group is reported to have said in the video: “She has pulled the headscarf down, demolish her!”

          • Lauri Love faces hacking trial in US after UK signs extradition order

            Love’s family plan to appeal against the decision. The 31-year-old—who has Asperger’s syndrome—faces up to 99 years in prison and fears for his own life, his lawyers have said.

            A home office spokesperson told Ars: “On Monday 14 November, the secretary of state, having carefully considered all relevant matters, signed an order for Lauri Love’s extradition to the United States. Mr Love has been charged with various computer hacking offences which included targeting US military and federal government agencies.”

            Rudd considered four so-called legal tests of the Extradition Act 2003: whether Love is at risk of the death penalty; whether specialty arrangements are in place; whether Love has previously been extradited from another country to the UK, thereby requiring consent from that country; and whether Love was previously transferred to the UK by the International Criminal Court.

            However, the home secretary concluded that none of these issues applied to Love.

          • Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s ex-president, says successor Temer took bribes

            Brazil has been plunged into a fresh bout of political uncertainty after lawyers for former president Dilma Rousseff presented evidence suggesting her successor, Michel Temer, accepted bribes from a construction company.

            If accepted the documents filed with the supreme electoral court raise the possibility of the 2014 presidential election being declared invalid due to campaign funding violations, which could force Temer from office.

            The two politicians were running mates in 2014 but have since become bitter enemies. Rousseff, of the Workers party, was impeached and removed from the presidency in September on charges of window-dressing government accounts. She has levelled accusations of treachery at her replacement, Temer, of the centre-right Brazilian Democratic Movement party.

          • Hate crimes against Muslim Americans increased by 67 percent in 2015, says FBI

            Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, ‘We saw a spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide beginning toward the end of 2015. That spike has continued until today and even accelerated after the election of President-elect Trump’

          • Jews Aren’t An SJW-Approved Minority
          • U.S. Muslims make up only one percent of the population, but file 40% of workplace discrimination complaints

            Even outside of fear of drawing an Islamist attack, avoiding conflict with Muslim employees affects both the company’s ‘inclusive’ image, and its liability to lawsuits by activist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). When special interest activist groups put pressure on businesses to give into their demands businesses often (depending on the issue/s) concede rather than face bad publicity. Businesses placating to Muslim demands is one of the objectives of the Hamas-affiliated CAIR. Masquerading as a civil liberties organization for Muslims, CAIR, as mentioned in the video, pressures businesses into accommodating the most trivial of Muslim practices advocated for in sharia law.

        • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

          • Decentralization – a deep cause of causes you care about deeply

            Decentralized and distributed networks are, quite simply, fundamental; everyone is affected in many ways by the degree of distribution — not least one’s personal agency, the development of our societal structures, and our impact on this planet’s living systems.

            As we instrument the planet, as we build out a pervasive computing environment, as increasingly little ‘undigital’ remains, ensuring the decentralized and distributed nature of that digital infrastructure is nothing short of mission critical. We must resist the easy short-term temptations of centralization to avoid its longer-term miseries.

        • Intellectual Monopolies

          • South Centre, FAO Sign Agreement Promoting Tech Transfer, Innovation

            The intergovernmental South Centre and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation have signed a five-year agreement to help the global south fight malnutrition, reduce poverty, and address climate change consequences. The memorandum of understanding was signed on the margins of the recent climate change discussion held in Marrakesh.

          • Countries Asked To Revise IP Laws Preventing Implementation Of Farmers’ Rights [Ed: Treating people like farming slaves and perpetuating poverty by imposing ‘IP’, then calling them “pirates”.]

            Global Consultation on Farmers’ Rights took place in Bali, Indonesia from 27-30 September and was co-organised by the governments of Indonesia and Norway. The secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) engaged in the preparatory process, according to the treaty’s website.

            The consultation was attended by 95 participants from 37 countries, from all the seven regions of the FAO, according to a source. Participants came from governments, academia, international organisations (such as the ITPGRFA, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants [UPOV], and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), non-governmental organisations (such as Oxfam, the Development Fund, and SEARICE), and farmers and farmers’ organisation (such as la Via Campesina), the source said.

          • Copyrights

            • Toto, I Don’t Think We’re In The Public Domain Anymore

              Long-time readers may remember our coverage of a slow-moving copyright case over public domain images from The Wizard of Oz and other movies. In brief: back in 2006, Warner Bros. sued vintage/nostalgia merchandise company AVELA, which had obtained restored images from old promotional posters for the films and was selling them for T-shirts and other products. Nobody disputed that these specific images were in the public domain, because the promo materials had not been registered for copyright even though the films were — but Warner claimed that the images nevertheless infringed on the copyright in the characters established by the film. The court originally sided with Warner in full, but on appeal found that the exact two-dimensional reproductions of the images on T-shirts and the like were not infringing, but instances where they were combined with text and other images or used to create three-dimensional models were, and awarded some pretty huge damages. To complicate matters, there’s also a trademark claim wrapped up in all this. There was another appeal, and now a court has upheld the ruling and the damages, giving movie studios another weapon in their war on the public domain (here’s a PDF of the full ruling).

              Now, there are a lot of layers here, and I’m going to focus on The Wizard Of Oz, since it provides the most interesting example. The 1900 book is in the public domain. The 1939 movie is still under copyright held by Warner. The associated 1939 promo materials were not registered (a requirement at the time) and are in the public domain. And many characters and other elements of the movie are also covered by trademark, also owned by Warner. Absolutely none of these facts are in dispute — but put them all together and you have a giant mess that illustrates the flimsiness of the idea/expression dichotomy, and how something can supposedly remain in the public domain while being gutted of all its usefulness to the public.

            • Donald Trump Parody Results in Clockwork Orange Copyright Suit

              A YouTube parody which hoped to provide a satirical take on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has ended in a lawsuit. Hugh Atkin portrayed elements of Trump’s efforts in the style of and alongside images from A Clockwork Orange. Now the Australian is getting sued in the United States for copyright infringement.

            • U.S. Copyright Office Undecided About Future of DMCA Takedowns

              The U.S. Government’s Copyright Office has launched a new consultation seeking guidance on the future of the DMCA’s takedown process and safe harbor. Through a set of concrete questions, they hope to find a balance between the interests of copyright holders, Internet services and the public at large.

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