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09.17.16

Links 17/9/2016: Debian 8.6 Released, More Microsoft Layoffs and Dead Products

Posted in News Roundup at 2:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Good things come from projects that fail

    Without realizing it, I joined the open source movement in 1999 during the midst of the Kosovo refugee crisis. I was part of a team helping route aid supplies to local humanitarian organizations running transit camps across Albania. These are the camps that refugees often arrived at first before being moved to larger, more formal camps.

  • Monitoring open source software key for DevOps shops

    Open source software is all the rage, as the DevOps movement advances, but it’s important to keep track of it carefully for licensing and security purposes.

  • Elizabeth Joseph Talking Open Source Careers in Oman

    Sometimes we wonder how Ms. Joseph finds the time to balance her career at HP with writing, evangelizing Ubuntu and public speaking, along with an active life in the city by the bay. That she is an inspiration to open sourcers everywhere can be seen in this video.

  • HPE sells Vertica analytics, thanks to the growth of open source software

    HPE is paring down its software holdings, including analytical software in the Vertica line. A sale to Micro Focus is due to close next year.

  • Nextcloud and Canonical Introduce Nextcloud Box to Create Your Own Private Cloud

    Today, September 16, 2016, Nextcloud informs Softpedia about the launch of a new hardware product, the first in the company’s history, in collaboration with Canonical and WDLabs.

  • Canonical & Nextcloud Roll Out An Ubuntu-Powered Nextcloud 10 Box

    The embargo expired this morning on the Nextcloud Box, a device from the cooperation of Canonical, Nextcloud, and WDLabs for making it easy to deploy your own Ubuntu-powered personal cloud.

  • Canonical and Western Digital launch Ubuntu Linux ‘Nextcloud Box’ powered by Raspberry Pi

    Cloud storage is amazingly convenient. Unfortunately, the best part of the cloud can also be the worst. You see, having your files stored on someone else’s severs and accessing them over the internet opens you to focused hacking, and potentially, incompetence by the cloud storage company too. As a way to have the best of both worlds, some folks will set up net-connected local storage so they can manage their own ‘cloud’.

  • Run Your Own Private Ubuntu Cloud with the Nextcloud Box

    Most of us love using the cloud. It gives us on-the-go-access to our personal files, photos and documents, and helps keep our busy lives in sync.

    But loving the cloud doesn’t mean you have to love using a proprietary closed-off services like Dropbox, Google Drive or One Drive.

  • Cache in hand, Varnish cloud workload tuning goes one louder

    Content delivery firm Varnish Software has announced its Varnish Plus Cloud product — essentially, a full version of the Varnish Plus software suite that can be accessed via the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Marketplace.

  • Nexenta wins NetNordic open source storage contract

    NetNordic said it has recently chosen Nexenta to create a centralised storage repository for its customer base as well as for the company, as the operator and its customer base continue to grow. Nexenta provides open source-driven, software-defined storage, which offers extra data with compression turned on, a significant factor for NetNordic, said its operations engineer Sander Petersson.

  • Toyota, Open Source Robotics Foundation to partner on automated vehicle research
  • The scourge of LEDs everywhere: Readers speak out

    Open Source to the Rescue

    One solution to LED overload is going with open source technology.

    One Slashdot commenter going by the handle of guruevi uses OpenWrt: “You can reprogram any LED on your router for whatever purpose. Want them all on or off at the certain time of day or blink if it detected anomalous traffic.”

    I also got email from Dave Taht, who happened to recently write a blog post titled “Blinkenlights: A debugging aid AND a curse” (with the subhed of “Too many LEDs! Give me back the stars!”). Taht is a busy guy as director of the Make Wi-Fi Fast project and co-founder of the Bufferbloat and CeroWrt projects, though took time out to share some LED disabling tips in his blog post.

    Taht, like many of those cited above, has made his share of manual fixes over the years, using electrical tape and just plan moving devices behind things. Only recently did he start monkeying with software to solve his problem.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Healthcare

    • On the importance of patient empowerment and open source: A Medicine X panel weighs in

      Speaker Karen Sadler, JD, heartedly agreed that developing open-source software for medical devices is critical. She is the executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that develops, promotes and defends open-source software. Her life was changed when she was diagnosed with a life-threatening heart problem and implanted with a defibrillator. “I went from someone who thought open source was cool and useful to someone who thought great open-source software is essential for our society,” Sadler said.

  • Microsoft Openwashing and EEE

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: September 16th
    • denemo Version 2.0.12 is out.
    • Libreboot Leaves GNU Claiming Gender Identity Discrimination by FSF

      A disturbing story broke this morning concerning the sudden action by the Libreboot project to leave the GNU project. I started to write “potentially disturbing,” until it occurred to me that no matter how this plays out, the news is disturbing.

    • FSF Says Firing Wasn’t Discrimatory [Ed: There are a lot of examples of sexism, homophobia and other abuse inside Microsoft and Apple but unlike FOSS communities they hide it. Here are examples of Microsoft sexism [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] and Microsoft homophobia [1, 2, 3]

      Friday afternoon after we published our report, Richard Stallman, founder and president of FSF, posted a brief, unofficial statement in an email to the thread around Rowe’s email. “The dismissal of the staff person was not because of her gender,” he said. “Her gender now is the same as it was when we hired her. It was not an issue then, and it is not an issue now.”

    • FSF, RMS Issue Statements Over Libreboot’s Accusations
    • Leaked Apple emails reveal employees’ complaints about sexist, toxic work environment [Ed: apropos the above and new report, too]

      Danielle* didn’t expect her workday to begin with her male coworkers publicly joking about rape.

      Danielle is an engineer at Apple — and like many of the women in the company, she works on a male-dominated team. On a Tuesday morning in July, when men on her team began to joke that an office intruder was coming to rape everybody, Danielle decided to speak out about what she described as the “very toxic atmosphere” created by jokes about violent sexual assault.

      The coworker who first made the joke apologized, repeatedly assuring her that something like this wouldn’t happen again. But his assurances did little to instill confidence. This wasn’t the first time Danielle had allegedly seen something like this happen on her team, nor was it the first time she complained that the office culture at Apple was, in her words, toxic. Despite repeated formal complaints to her manager, Danielle said, nothing ever changed.

      But this rape joke was the final straw. The next day, Danielle escalated her complaint about the offense to the very top: Apple CEO Tim Cook.

    • Happy Software Freedom Day!

      And today is the 13th edition of Software Freedom Day! We wish you all a great day talking to people and discovering (or making them discovery) the benefits and joys of running Free Software. As usual we have a map where you can find all the events in your area. Should you just discover about SFD today and want to organize an event it is never too late. While the date is global, each team has the freedom to run the event at a date that is convenient in their area. We (in Cambodia) are running our event on November 26 due to university schedule, other conferences and religious holidays conflicting.

  • Public Services/Government

    • EU FOSSA publishes core sections of its deliverables

      To promote the exchange of comments made by the Free and Open Source Software communities, the EU FOSSA project points out some specific sections of the deliverables he produced so far. By consulting these chapters, you have a more direct insight to what the project team consider as the most relevant information.

      Read more

    • LEOS – drafting legislative texts made easy

      While LEOS has been developed to support the drafting of legislation by the European Commission services (i.e. proposals for directives, regulations and autonomous acts), public administrations can download and adapt the code to meet their own specific requirements. The code is available under the free European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • PHP version 5.6.26 and 7.0.11
    • anytime 0.0.2: Added functionality

      anytime arrived on CRAN via release 0.0.1 a good two days ago. anytime aims to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to POSIXct (or Date) objects.

    • GitHub’s new features aim for business and open-source users

      GitHub, the popular code repository service, has to serve two masters. It’s well-known for hosting popular open-source projects, but it’s also working to acquire more large and small business users to privately store and manage their proprietary code.

      Those different constituencies sometimes need different things. But Chris Wansrath, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told the company’s annual user conference this week that building new features into GitHub isn’t a matter of helping only one or the other.

    • GitHub gets all grown-up with better code review, project management, etc

      The GitHub Universe event has kicked off in San Francisco, with a number of new GitHub features announced by CEO Chris Wanstrath.

      GitHub’s main product is a collaborative source code repository, which you can use on the public cloud or in your own private deployment. There are now over 19 million open source projects hosted on GitHub, with 5.8 million active users.

      The focus of today’s announcements is on project management and workflow. A new Project dashboard lets you create cards from pull requests, issues or notes, and organize them into groups such as Backlog, In Progress, and Ready.

    • JDK 9 release delayed another four months

      Oracle’s asking for more time to complete JDK 9.

      The chief architect of Oracle’s Java Platform Group, Mark Reinhold, took to the Java developer’s mailing list to say that while work on JDK 9 is coming along nicely “We are not, unfortunately, where we need to be relative to the current schedule.”

      The hard part of JDK 9 is “Project Jigsaw”, an effort to “design and implement a standard module system for the Java SE Platform, and to apply that system to the Platform itself and to the JDK.” Reinhold says “it’s clear that Jigsaw needs more time.”

    • Pass the ‘Milk’ to make code run four times faster, say MIT boffins

      MIT boffins have created a new programming language called “Milk” that they say runs code four times faster than rivals.

      Professor Saman Amarasinghe says the language’s secret is that changes the way cores collect and cache data.

      Today, he says, cores will fetch whole blocks of data from memory. That’s not efficient when working on tasks like big data, when only some of a block’s content is needed by an application that may want to work on only a few items across very large data set.

    • Node.js: Building Better Technology and a More Diverse Community
    • Open Source Mobile Dev Tool Onsen UI Breaks Free from AngularJS Dependency

      Monaca today announced Onsen UI 2.0, a UI framework and tools for building HTML5-based native mobile apps, is now JavaScript framework-agnostic, having broken from its AngularJS dependency roots.

      The open source Onsen UI is itself based on the popular open source Apache Cordova/PhoneGap projects, which facilitate creating native iOS and Android apps with one codebase based on technologies usually used for Web development: HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.

    • The Python Packaging Ecosystem

      There have been a few recent articles reflecting on the current status of the Python packaging ecosystem from an end user perspective, so it seems worthwhile for me to write-up my perspective as one of the lead architects for that ecosystem on how I characterise the overall problem space of software publication and distribution, where I think we are at the moment, and where I’d like to see us go in the future.

Leftovers

  • After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

    You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There’s also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk.

  • Microsoft Azure borkage in central US leads to global woes

    At its height, the fault affected API management, web apps, Service Bus and SQL database services in the central US region, and Azure DNS globally.

    Microsoft’s Azure status page has just now reported that SQL database is still affected in the central US region.

    As is often the case, however, customers noticed confusion with Microsoft’s messages, as Azure Twitter feeds and status pages seemed to disagree on the speed of recovery.

  • OECD report shows sharp rise in numbers of marginalised young men

    Finland is sixth in an OECD ranking of countries by the number of young men who are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). Some 21.1 percent of Finnish men aged 20-24 fall into that category. The number has leapt up in recent years, from just 12.2 percent in 2005.

    The figures are not replicated among young women. In 2005 13.9 percent of young women fell into the NEET category, and ten years later that stood at 15.4 percent.

  • Science

    • Innovation and its Discontents – Where are we heading?

      Nearly two years ago, Kat Neil wrote about declining public trust in innovation. It is becoming increasingly apparent that economic growth and innovation is not benefitting everyone, and that it needs to be addressed by policy and society. At the SPRU conference, a session on IP looked at clashes between intellectual property rights and human rights’ protection.

      An ongoing concern is the potential that the participation of low-skilled workers in production will be rendered obsolete. A dystopian take on this suggests that innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will give rise to the Useless Class, a disenfranchised section of society with skills for which there is no demand. The potential social fall-out from this disenfranchisement is extremely unpleasant with a large portion of society no longer having a “reason to get up in the morning.”

    • Audi works with Chinese technology companies to develop intelligent cars

      German carmaker Audi has signed agreements with Chinese technology companies Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent to work on data analysis, internet connected vehicles and intelligent public transport.

      Audi China and FAW-Volkswagen – a joint venture between state-owned car manufacturer FAW Group and Volkswagen that makes Audi and Volkswagen cars in China – will work with the three technology companies on features for “the connected car of the future”, Audi said.

  • Hardware

    • Intel’s Chips Finally Find Their Way Into the iPhone

      The smartphone years have not been kind to Intel. The company ignored the transition to mobile early on, allowing ARM-based processors to take an early, decisive lead. Intel’s presence in pocket computers hasn’t just been minimal, it’s been practically nonexistent. That is, until the iPhone 7.

      Bloomberg first reported that Intel had worked out a deal with Apple in June, but now that the iPhone 7 has shipped, we have actual confirmation, thanks to a teardown from Chipworks. Apple may make its own processors now, but Intel’s providing an entire mobile cellular platform to the Cupertino company, the transceivers and modem that help put the “phone” in smartphone. For the first time, a flagship mobile device has Intel inside. Better late than never.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • South Sudan: Hunger, Shortages, and Hyperinflation

      South Sudan’s leaders stand accused of industrial-scale embezzlement, ripping off public money to fund property and business investments across the region. That opulence is in sharp contrast to what the vast majority of their fellow citizens are enduring, as they wrestle with chronic shortages and hyperinflation.

      Nationwide, food inflation hit a record 850 percent in August, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Some food price rises are 1,000 percent above the five-year average in Northern and Western Bahr el Ghazal, the World Food Programme has warned.

      Renewed fighting in July in the capital, Juba, between the forces of President Salva Kiir and those of his rival-turned vice president Riek Machar contributed to the latest jump in the inflation rate.

      The fear the country would return to civil war sent the South Sudanese pound tumbling to the current rate of 80 to the dollar, compared to 15 to one a year ago. That is driving up prices in a country dependent on imports from its neighbours, including much of its food and all of its fuel.

    • Upholding Michigan’s Emergency Manager Law

      A task force in March found that emergency managers appointed in Flint, along with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, were the primary culprits for Flint’s water crisis. The task force found the state’s actions “inappropriate and unacceptable.”

    • Court rejects challenge to Michigan’s emergency manager law
    • Bayer clinches Monsanto with improved $66 billion bid

      German drug and crop chemical maker Bayer clinched a $66 billion takeover of U.S. seeds company Monsanto on Wednesday, ending months of wrangling with a third sweetened offer that marks the largest all-cash deal on record.

      The $128-a-share deal, up from Bayer’s previous offer of $127.50 a share, has emerged as the signature deal in a consolidation race that has roiled the agribusiness sector in recent years, due to shifting weather patterns, intense competition in grain exports and a souring global farm economy.

      “Bayer’s competitors are merging, so not doing this deal would mean having a competitive disadvantage,” said fund manager Markus Manns of Union Investment, one of Bayer’s top 12 investors.

    • Bayer Just Bought Monsanto, Here’s Why You Should Care

      A giant company just bought another giant company, but if you’re not an investor or a farmer, you may not have noticed. Bayer—the aspirin company that also makes farm products like pesticides—announced on Wednesday it was merging with Monsanto, the massive genetically-modified seed producer that owns about a third of the seed market in the US.

      The $66 billion merger is the largest this year, and means Bayer now controls more than a quarter of all seeds and pesticides on the planet, according to the BBC. But what’s even crazier is that this is just the latest in a long list of big mergers of agricultural companies this year, meaning the options for where farmers buy their seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers are shrinking at lightning speed.

    • This Polish Law Would Imprison Women Who Have Abortions

      A girl raped by her own father will have no choice but to give birth. A woman at high risk of dying in childbirth or of carrying a dead baby will not be able to seek a termination. This will be the impact of new legislation to be debated in the Polish Parliament later this week which, if passed, would usher in an almost complete ban on abortion.

      On Sunday in Warsaw, London and other cities, protesters will gather opposing the amendment to Poland’s existing abortion legislation. The amendment aims to criminalize women and girls who have sought or had an abortion, making them liable to a prison term of between three months and five years. It also will increase the maximum jail term for anyone who assists or encourages women have an abortion.

    • Stronger Rx Than Obamacare Needed to Cover Everyone and Control Costs: Physician Leader

      “The Census Bureau’s official estimate that 29 million Americans, including 3.7 million children, still lacked health insurance in 2015, five years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, starkly illustrates how our inefficient, private-insurance-based system of financing care is fundamentally incapable of providing universal coverage,” said Dr. Robert Zarr, a Washington-based pediatrician who is president of Physicians for a National Health Program.

    • UN panel recommends stricter patentability rules and compulsory licensing to improve access to medicine [Ed: IAM protesting the UN's request that life should be put before patents]
    • Vegans, You’re Contributing to Antibiotic Resistance, Too

      There are a lot of different reasons why some people choose not to consume any animal products. The fact that we regularly pump our livestock full of antibiotics, significantly contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance, is one of them.

      But what some vegans may not realize is that just eschewing animal products doesn’t absolve them of any responsibility for the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, at least as it relates to the food supply. We douse our fruits and vegetables in antibiotics, too (though at a much, much lower rate than meat). Unless you strictly eat organic, your food is contributing to a problem that threatens to send us back to the dark ages of medicine, where every cut or scrape could be life-threatening.

      I point this out not to shame vegans, but to serve as a reminder. We are all contributing to the problem, and we’re all at risk because of it. Even if you keep a strict, organic, vegan diet, and never take antibiotics unless you absolutely need them, you’re not granted a magic halo of protection against superbug infection. You can do everything ostensibly right, and it still won’t stop antibiotic resistance. Paying attention to what we eat is part of the solution, but there’s more work to be done.

    • Antimicrobial Resistance A ‘Global Societal Challenge And Threat’, WHO Official Says

      Antimicrobial resistance had in the last decades emerged as a health issue, but only in the last couple of years has there been an understanding that we are facing a “global societal challenge and threat.” On a day-to-day basis, people worldwide are said to be driving resistance across human health and agriculture.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security advisories
    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Spies and criminals biggest cybersecurity threat

      The report shows that well-organised criminals focus on the use of ransomware. “Professional criminals have evolved into advanced actors and implement long-term and high-quality operations.” The larger the hacked organisation, the bigger the ransom demands, the cybersecurity experts conclude. Regular backups and computer network segmentation help to reduce the impact of such attacks.

    • 20 Questions Security Leaders Need To Ask About Analytics

      It would be an understatement to say that the security world tends to be full of hype and noise. At times, it seems like vendors virtually xerox each other’s marketing materials. Everyone uses the same words, phrases, jargon, and buzzwords. This is a complicated phenomenon and there are many reasons why this is the case.

      The more important issue is why security leaders find ourselves in this state. How can we make sense of all the noise, cut through all the hype, and make the informed decisions that will improve the security of our respective organizations? One answer is by making precise, targeted, and incisive inquiries at the outset. Let’s start with a game of 20 questions. Our first technology focus: analytics.

    • Trend Micro shows that Linux systems not so bulletproof against trojans [Ed: very low risk (must fool the user or gain physical access)]
    • Sixth Linux DDoS Trojan Discovered in the Last 30 Days [Ed: drama over something that must fool users]

      Linux users have yet another trojan to worry about, and as always, crooks are deploying it mostly to hijack devices running Linux-based operating systems and use them to launch DDoS attacks at their behest.

    • Yet Another Linux Trojan Uncovered
    • Secure Docker on Linux or Windows platforms

      With Docker appearing in businesses of all shapes and sizes, security is a concern for many IT admins. Here’s how to secure Docker on the container or the host machine.

    • New release: usbguard-0.6.1
    • Ransomware Getting More Targeted, Expensive

      I shared a meal not long ago with a source who works at a financial services company. The subject of ransomware came up and he told me that a server in his company had recently been infected with a particularly nasty strain that spread to several systems before the outbreak was quarantined. He said the folks in finance didn’t bat an eyelash when asked to authorize several payments of $600 to satisfy the Bitcoin ransom demanded by the intruders: After all, my source confessed, the data on one of the infected systems was worth millions — possibly tens of millions — of dollars, but for whatever reason the company didn’t have backups of it.

    • Web security CEO warns about control of internet falling into few hands

      The internet was designed to be a massive, decentralized system that nobody controlled, but it is increasingly controlled by a select few tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, and they are continuing to consolidate power, said the CEO of a cybersecurity company.

      “More and more of the internet is sitting behind fewer and fewer players, and there are benefits of that, but there are also real risks,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of web security company CloudFlare, in an interview with CNBC. His comments came at CloudFlare’s Internet Summit — a conference featuring tech executives and government security experts — on Tuesday in San Francisco.

      Facebook has faced a lot of criticism for perceived abuse of its editorial sway among the 1.7 billion monthly active users who visit the site to consume news alongside family photos and ads. For example, a Norwegian newspaper editor recently slammed Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s removal of a post featuring an iconic image known as the Napalm Girl that included a naked girl running from napalm bombs.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama, Pressing Senators, Delays Veto of Bill Exposing Saudis to 9/11 Suits

      President Obama is delaying a planned veto of a bill that would allow the families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the plot, hoping to tap into an unusual well of buyer’s remorse among senators who passed the measure unanimously in the spring.

      The measure sailed through the House last week after a surprise last-minute vote, raising the prospect of the first veto showdown between Mr. Obama and a bipartisan coalition in Congress. But an intense lobbying campaign by the White House and Saudi Arabia, among others, has cast doubt on what had appeared to be an inevitable override of the president’s long-expected veto.

      Officials have refused to say when Mr. Obama would veto the bill, and he has until next Friday to do so. His advisers are considering whether he should wait until then, after Congress is expected to recess on Thursday for the November elections, which could give him weeks to persuade lawmakers to drop their support for the measure before they return and consider the veto override.

      Already, cracks are showing, even among Republicans who generally would love to exercise the first veto override against Mr. Obama.

    • Every 72 minutes, a veteran commits suicide: Our view

      Many Americans have heard by now that 20 veterans commit suicide each day. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump cited the figure at last week’s Commander-in-Chief Forum viewed by 14.7 million people, further raising the issue’s visibility.

      But a 46-page suicide analysis released by the Department of Veterans Affairs last month reveals just how swift this current of self-destruction is flowing, particularly for young veterans fresh from war. It’s a pace of killing unknown to most Americans and a source of national shame.

      A veteran is choosing death every 72 minutes, and the VA could be doing more to keep that person alive. When veterans manage to ask for help, too many of their calls are not getting through to VA’s suicide hotline (800-273-8255). The agency isn’t offering enough veterans the kind of cutting-edge treatment therapies that researchers are finally uncovering.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Government Again Shows Its Inconsistency On Punishing The Mishandling Of Classified Documents

      Mishandling classified material can result in a variety of punishments, depending on who you are. If you’re a presidential candidate, the routing of hundreds of sensitive documents through an unsecured, private email server might result in a few conversations with the FBI, but not in any criminal charges. If you’re a retired general, routing classified material to your biographer/mistress might result in criminal charges, but not any time served. If you’re a whistleblower taking your complaints to the press, you’ll likely see some jail time to go along with your destroyed career.

      And if you’re a Marine Corps officer trying to warn others of trouble headed their way, you’re more likely to be treated like Jason Brezler than Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus, or even former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

      Brezler is facing dismissal from the Marine Corps for mishandling a classified document — one containing information about an allegedly corrupt Afghan police chief who had already been kicked off a US base by Brezler himself.

      [...]

      At this point, the Marine Corps is offering him an honorable discharge — a “thanks, but no thanks” for his attempt to warn his fellow soldiers about the long list of allegations against police chief Sarwar Jan. Brezler sued for full reinstatement as a Marine and the discharge has been put on hold pending a possible jury trial later this year.

      There are a handful of disturbing aspects of the Marine Corps’ dismissal of Brezler, not the least of which is its decision to ramp up its efforts to rid itself of him after it had been publicly embarrassed by a US congress member. It also highlights the absurdity — and danger — inherent to the military’s weirdly-selective non-interventionist policy: one deployed by an outside force playing World Police within its borders (decidedly interventionist) that draws the line at preventing the sexual abuse of minors on its bases by local officials.

      The decision to go after the messenger — one that self-reported his mishandling of sensitive information — shows the government, by and large, cares more about protecting itself from embarrassment than solving its problems.

    • Secret government electronic surveillance documents must be released, judge says

      In a major victory for journalists and privacy and transparency advocates, a federal court has started the process of unsealing secret records related to the government’s use of electronic surveillance.

      US District Court Judge Beryl Howell said at a hearing Friday morning that absent an objection by government attorneys, the court would post to its website next week a list of all case numbers from 2012 in which federal prosecutors in Washington, DC applied for an order to install a pen register or a trap and trace device.

      A pen register is an electronic apparatus that tracks phone numbers called from a specific telephone line (though the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act expanded the definition of pen register to allow for collection of email headers as well). A trap and trace device is similar, but tracks the phone numbers of incoming calls.

      For decades, court records relating to these documents have typically been sealed in their entirety, including even the docket numbers. Next week’s release, which is in response to a three-year-old petition filed by VICE News, will be a crucial first step in learning details about the electronic surveillance orders, and the beginning of a multilayered process that will ultimately lead to the disclosure of thousands of pen register applications dating back at least five years.

      Pen registers and other similar devices do not intercept the content of communications, and the government is not required to obtain a warrant or to have probable cause that the target committed a crime. Instead, a government attorney can simply obtain authorization by filing an application with a federal court stating that the information that would be obtained is “relevant” to a criminal investigation. The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal law enforcement agencies have used pen registers.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Arctic sea ice coverage is at its 2nd lowest on record

      Mark it down, Arctic sea ice watchers: the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has (preliminarily) called the annual minimum ice extent. On September 10, Arctic sea ice coverage dipped to 4.14 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles) before ticking back upward for a few days. While it’s possible that a couple more days of shrinkage could come along, that was probably the low point for the year.

      That puts 2016 in second place for the lowest minimum on record—statistically tied with 2007, which was within the error bars of this year’s data. The record low is retained by 2012, which fell to an incredible 3.39 million square kilometers. This continues the trend of marked decline observed by satellites since 1979.

    • Did lightning strike this 19th Century church in Newcastle?

      Stark white against the glowering blue skyline, a bolt of lightning flashes over Newcastle , narrowly missing the spire of a 19th century church.

      Thursday night’s thunderstorm had photographers throughout the city taking some impressive shots, and this dramatic view over the west end is one of our favourites.

      The church in the picture is St Stephen’s, in Low Elswick, a Grade II-listed Anglican church built in 1868.

    • Alabama pipeline ruptures, leaking 250,000 gallons & causing ‘fuel emergency’

      At least 250,000 gallons of gasoline have spilled following a pipeline rupture in central Alabama. Emergency responders are working to repair the spill, while Alabama and Georgia have declared a state of emergency due to possible fuel shortages.

      The spill, equivalent to 6,000 barrels, took place in a rural area southwest of Helena, Alabama, and was first noticed Friday. A spokesman for Colonial Pipeline said the spill has affected an area about two acres in size, Birmingham’s WBRC-TV reported.

      According to local media, the spill is located near Lindsey’s Crossing in Shelby County, about 28 miles southwest of Birmingham.

    • Indonesia dispatches nearly 5,000 firefighters to Kalimantan, after surge in hotspots

      Indonesia has dispatched almost 5,000 fire-fighters to Kalimantan as the dry spell continues across the western and central parts of the island, where hundreds of hot-spots have been detected in recent days.

      The National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) said on Wednesday (Sept 14) that it has deployed 2,492 and 2,363 personnel in west and central Kalimantan respectively.

      The group includes soldiers, policemen as well as officers from the BNPB, the Environment and Forestry Ministry, as well as local volunteers, said agency spokesman Dr Sutopo Purwo Nugroho.

      The reinforcements were sent in after satellite data from Indonesia’s meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency (BMKG) showed 536 total hot-spots across Kalimantan as of Wednesday.

    • Spain could be first EU country with national park listed as ‘in danger’

      A Spanish wetland home to 2,000 species of wildlife – including around 6 million migratory birds – is on track to join a Unesco world heritage danger list, according to a new report.

      Doñana is an Andalusian reserve of sand dunes, shallow streams and lagoons, stretching for 540 square kilometres (209 square miles) where flamingoes feed and wild horses and Iberian lynx still roam.

      But the Doñana region is said to have lost 80% of its natural water supplies due to marsh drainage, intensive agriculture, and water pollution from the mining industry.

      Spain now has until 1 December to declare Doñana permanently off limits for dredging and industrial activity in a report to Unesco, or face becoming the first EU country to have a national park classified as being “in danger”.

    • What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first

      We mostly can’t see it around us, and too few of us seem to care — but nonetheless, scientists are increasingly convinced that the world is barreling towards what has been called a “sixth mass extinction” event. Simply put, species are going extinct at a rate that far exceeds what you would expect to see naturally, as a result of a major perturbation to the system.

      In this case, the perturbation is us — rather than, say, an asteroid. As such, you might expect to see some patterns to extinctions that reflect our particular way of causing ecological destruction. And indeed, a new study published Wednesday in Science magazine confirms this. For the world’s oceans, it finds, threats of extinction aren’t apportioned equally among all species — rather, the larger ones, in terms of body size and mass, are uniquely imperiled right now.

  • Finance

    • Obama’s Last Gasp At Trade Deals: Lame Duck Push On TPP; And ‘Lite’ Version Of TTIP

      So, uh, that sounds good. Why do we need the rest of the crap that they’re debating, around corporate sovereignty ISDS provisions — especially since the entire basis for those kinds of agreements was supposed to be to encourage investment in developing countries. The EU and the US have perfectly decent court systems, so any dispute shouldn’t need a special tribunal.

      But, of course, those who have relied on shoving all sorts of pork and special interest protectionism through trade deals do not like the idea of a “lite” agreement that covers the officially discussed reasons for a trade deal. Why, that would be horrible! How could they continue to hide all the sneaky stuff they want to get in?

    • CETA Without Blinders: How Cutting ‘Trade Costs and More’ Will Cause Unemployment, Inequality and Welfare Losses

      The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is now in the process of being ratified by Canada and the European Union (EU). Like other ‘new generation’ trade agreements, CETA aims at further liberalizing trade, investment and other sectors of society so far protected from market competition. CETA is thus more than just a ‘trade deal’ and needs to be approached in its complexity, without blinders.

      CETA’s proponents emphasize the prospect of higher GDP growth due to rising trade volumes and investment. However, official projections suggest GDP gains of up to 0.08% for the European Union 0.76% for Canada. More importantly, all these projections stem from a single trade model, which assumes full employment and no negative impact on income distribution in all countries excluding the major risks of deeper liberalization. This lack of intellectual diversity and of realism shrouding the debate around CETA’s alleged economic benefits calls for an alternative assessment grounded in sounder modeling premises.

    • NAFTA burn: The Real Ford Escape? Moving its small-car production to Mexico

      In speech after speech, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has decried companies sending jobs abroad to low-wage countries, calling it a profound betrayal of the American worker. And despite having profited from his Trump branded Chinese-made cufflinks and dress shirts woven in Bangladesh, the real estate mogul has pledged to crack down on labor outsourcing if elected.

      But Trump’s threats have not discouraged American auto companies from setting up factories south of the U.S. and then sending finished vehicles north.

      On Wednesday, Ford Motor Co. CEO Mark Fields announced further efforts to take advantage of Mexico’s low-cost labor force, telling investors at an event near Detroit that Ford would soon shift all the company’s U.S. small-car production to Mexico by 2018.

    • $100 Million Awarded in Contest to Rethink U.S. High Schools

      An organization announced on Wednesday that it had chosen the winners of $10 million grants in a competition to rethink the American high school.

      The organization — the XQ Institute, which is backed by Laurene Powell Jobs — is funding 10 schools, for a total of $100 million.

      One of the winners, the Somerville Steam Academy in Somerville, Mass., will operate without standard class periods and without separating students by age.

      Rise High in Los Angeles will be designed for students who are homeless or in foster care. It will share locations around the city with service providers, like medical or mental health centers, and will have a mobile classroom to teach or tutor students wherever they are.

      And in New York City, at the Brooklyn Laboratory Charter High School, the school day will last from 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.

      “Each of these represent schools that don’t exist today,” said Russlynn H. Ali, chief executive of the XQ Institute and a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the federal Education Department.

      Ms. Powell Jobs, chairwoman of the XQ Institute’s board of directors, was the wife of Steven P. Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died five years ago next month.

      The Super School Project was announced a year ago by the Emerson Collective, the organization Ms. Powell Jobs uses to make philanthropic investments. The goal was to offer $50 million to schools that offered new approaches to education. Ms. Ali said American high schools had “stayed the same for 100 years” and were badly in need of new ideas and paradigms.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary Clinton Takes Aim at Voters Drifting Toward Third Party

      Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies, unnerved by the tightening presidential race, are making a major push to dissuade disaffected voters from backing third-party candidates, and pouring more energy into Rust Belt states, where Donald J. Trump is gaining ground.

      With Mrs. Clinton enduring one of the rockiest stretches of her second bid for the presidency, her campaign and affiliated Democratic groups are shifting their focus to those voters, many of them millennials, who recoil at Mr. Trump, her Republican opponent, but now favor the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

      While still optimistic that the race will turn decisively back in Mrs. Clinton’s favor after the debates, leading Democrats have been alarmed by the drift of young voters toward the third-party candidates.

    • September 14, 2016 – Trump Cuts Clinton Lead In Half, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds, Most Americans Are Voting Against, Not For, A Candidate

      In a largely negative presidential campaign, where most Americans are voting against, rather than for, a candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump 48 – 43 percent among likely voters nationwide, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

      This compares to a 51 – 41 percent Clinton lead in an August 25 survey of likely voters nationwide, by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.

    • 5 reasons Trump might fall in autumn

      The GOP nominee prefers his KFC by the bucket, devours the fries before the Big Mac, and only eats greens out of taco bowls perched atop white linen napkins — but make no mistake, these are Donald Trump’s salad days.

      Counted down in the dark days after his gloomy Cleveland convention, with polls showing him behind by double digits, Trump has mounted what, to the unschooled political observer, appears to be a remarkable comeback. He’s pulled even with Clinton among likely voters in the latest New York Times/CBS national poll — a 42 to 42 percent deadlock that has been reflected in a raft of tightening battleground state polls. And he’s surged to an 8-point lead in Iowa, reflecting his improvement in critical battleground states.

    • Republicans are careful when talking about their nominee — and so are Greater Minnesota’s Democrats

      The big story of this year’s House and Senate elections is how the presence of Donald J. Trump at the top of the GOP ticket affects Republicans running for Congress.

      What’s getting less ink this cycle, however, is how Democrats are reckoning with the down-ballot effect of their nominee, Hillary Clinton — but that doesn’t mean some Democratic candidates aren’t having problems.

      There’s good reason for that: broadly, Trump polls worse than Clinton, nationally and in the North Star State. And there are few elected Democrats out there who, like Rep. Erik Paulsen did with Trump, say that Clinton hasn’t earned their support.

    • Nigel Farage bows out as Ukip leader with nude skinny dip off Bournemouth Pier

      Nigel Farage celebrated his last night as Ukip leader with a late night skinny dipping session off Bournemouth pier, it has been revealed.

      Key financial backer Arron Banks told BBC Radio 4′s Any Questions? show on Friday night that he and Mr Farage had stripped off their clothes and jumped in the sea after a late night drinking session on Thursday.

      Multi-millionaire businessman Mr Banks had been challenging claims during the political talk show that Mr Farage might stage another comeback as leader.

    • Trump’s successful tax dodge: Months of lying and stonewalling somehow aren’t a major scandal

      It’s a rare thing to see honesty emerge from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but we were all treated to a bracing dose of forthrightness this week by the Republican candidate’s son, Donald Trump Jr., on the subject of his father’s tax returns. Speaking with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Trump Jr. explained that his dad’s tax information would remain hidden because if people saw it, then they’d talk about something other than what the campaign wants them to talk about.

      “He’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create . . . financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from (his father’s) main message,” the paper reported Trump Jr. as saying. That’s about as clear-cut an explanation as you could hope for: The campaign will keep on stonewalling because it doesn’t want people scrutinizing and talking about Donald Trump’s tax history and financial arrangements.

    • Green Party nominee says she’s going to presidential debate

      US Green Party nominee Jill Stein says she is planning to appear at the first presidential debate despite being ignored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

      The commission announced on Friday that Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson and Stein will not participate in the September 26 debate because they failed to garner the 15 percent support in five polls required to qualify for the debate.

      But the Green Party presidential nominee rejected the standards set by the commission and told CNN she plans to show up at the event with her supporters.

      “We will be at the debate to insist that Americans not only have a right to vote, but we have a right to know who we can vote for,” she said.

      Meanwhile, Johnson said in a statement he wasn’t surprised by the decision to “exclude” him from the first debate.

      He said he plans to have the 15 percent polling threshold to make it to the second debate in early October.

      “There are more polls and more debates, and we plan to be on the debate stage in October,” he stated.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Xiaomi phones are pre-backdoored; your apps can be silently overwritten

      Thijs Broenink audited the AnalyticsCore.apk app that ships pre-installed on all Xiaomi phones (Xiaomi has their own Android fork with a different set of preinstalled apps) and discovered that the app, which seemingly serves no useful purpose, allows the manufacturer to silently install other code on your phone, with unlimited privileges and access.

      The app phones home to Xiaomi once a day and transmits the user’s “IMEI, MAC address, Model, Nonce, Package name and signature,” all in the clear, then gets instructions back about which apps to install — it can seemingly overwrite your signed, pre-installed apps with modified versions.

    • Playpen: The Story of the FBI’s Unprecedented and Illegal Hacking Operation

      In December 2014, the FBI received a tip from a foreign law enforcement agency that a Tor Hidden Service site called “Playpen” was hosting child pornography. That tip would ultimately lead to the largest known hacking operation in U.S. law enforcement history.

      The Playpen investigation—driven by the FBI’s hacking campaign—resulted in hundreds of criminal prosecutions that are currently working their way through the federal courts. The issues in these cases are technical and the alleged crimes are distasteful. As a result, relatively little attention has been paid to the significant legal questions these cases raise.

      But make no mistake: these cases are laying the foundation for the future expansion of law enforcement hacking in domestic criminal investigations, and the precedent these cases create is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of Internet users for years to come. In a series of blog posts in the coming days and weeks, we’ll explain what the legal issues are and why these cases matter to Internet users the world over.

    • At war against the “totalitarian temptation”

      Bill Binney is not mincing his words. In a rallying battle cry against mass surveillance, the former NSA analyst tells an audience at the UK premiere of A Good American that we are basically at war. In every democracy across the world; in our very “hearts and minds”, a war “against the totalitarian temptation” is being waged.

      Perhaps because Binney is such a quiet, considered man, his words seem to carry extra weight. But it’s not just his solemnity that captures attention. Binney is not just a campaigner for civil liberties, speaking of principles and rights. He was on the inside – one of them. A high-level NSA analyst, technical director, and one of the best mathematicians the agency ever had, Bill Binney was their man for 32 years. And then, suddenly, he was their enemy.

    • A Good American: a personal take on mass surveillance

      Director Friedrich Moser draws some conclusions on mass surveillance from his groundbreaking documentary on the work of NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney

    • USA TODAY, others sue FBI for info on phone hack of San Bernardino shooter

      Three news organizations, including USA TODAY’s parent company, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking information about how the FBI was able to break into the locked iPhone of one of the gunmen in the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

      The Justice Department spent more than a month this year in a legal battle with Apple over it could force the tech giant to help agents bypass a security feature on Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone. The dispute roiled the tech industry and prompted a fierce debate about the extent of the government’s power to pry into digital communications. It ended when the FBI said an “outside party” had cracked the phone without Apple’s help.

      The news organizations’ lawsuit seeks information about the source of the security exploit agents used to unlock the phone, and how much the government paid for it. It was filed in federal court in Washington by USA TODAY’s parent company, Gannett, the Associated Press and Vice Media. The FBI refused to provide that information to the organizations under the Freedom of Information Act.

    • Senator John McCain Uses Cybersecurity Hearing To Try To Shame Twitter For Not Selling Data To The CIA

      John McCain — fighting for the government’s right to get all up in your everything — has decided to embrace the “grumpy” part of his “grumpy old legislator” personality.

      Back in July, McCain expressed his displeasure with Apple declining his invitation to show up and get yelled at/field false accusations at his hearing on encryption. He dourly noted that he was “seeking the widest variety of input,” but his invited guests included Manhattan DA Cy Vance, a former Bush-era Homeland Security advisor and former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis. Not having Apple to kick around peeved McCain, who finished off the “discussion” with subpoena threats.

      Another encryption hearing hosted by McCain devolved into the senator ranting about something no one cares about but him: a tech company not immediately prostrating itself in front of an intelligence agency. Here’s Marcy Wheeler’s summation of McCain’s “contribution” to the discussion.

    • AP, USA Today, Vice Sue FBI Over Refusal To Release Information About Contractor Who Cracked iPhone For It

      USA Today, the Associated Press, and Vice News have joined forces to sue the FBI over its refusal to release even the most minimal amount of information on the hack it purchased to crack open the iPhone seized during its San Bernardino shooting investigation.

      The DOJ certainly seemed adamant that Apple disclose all sorts of inside info to the government during the heated litigation. It turned down offers of assistance from hackers and security researchers before finally shelling out an unknown amount of money to an Israeli firm to gain access to the phone’s contents. It also ensured it would never have to discuss the technical details of the hacking by not demanding this information be included in the purchase price.

      Now, it refuses to even discuss the purchase price. Educated guesses that put it north of $1 million are based on a James Comey comment in which he said it was several times his annual salary. Somehow, the actual amount paid — if revealed — would somehow prevent the FBI’s investigation from reaching its conclusion.

      This FOIA lawsuit [PDF] targets other innocuous information the FBI refuses to release: contractor info on the party used to open up the seized iPhone (and discover nothing of investigative use on it).

    • Shock US government report says Edward Snowden did A Bad Thing

      The report ended by saying that the NSA needs to improve its work on creating an environment in which another Snowden-style leak cannot take place, claiming that not enough has been done to reduce the risk.

    • House Intel Committee Says Snowden’s Not A Whistleblower, ‘Cause He Once Emailed His Boss’s Boss

      As you probably heard, the ACLU and other have launched a massive campaign asking President Obama to pardon Ed Snowden. You can check it out here and sign the petition. There have also been a bunch of high profile op-eds and endorsements from a wide variety of people — from former intelligence officials to human rights groups and more. The campaign was obviously timed to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone’s new movie, Snowden.

      Apparently also timed with the release of the movie, the House Intelligence Committee has released a “report” that they claim they spent two years writing, detailing why they believe Snowden is no whistleblower. They’ve released an unclassified three page “executive summary” that is, at best, laughable. Honestly, if this is the best that the House Intel Committee can put together to smear Snowden, they must have found nothing bad. I mean, it’s the stupidest stuff: like that he once got into a dispute with his boss over some software updates at work and (*gasp*) emailed someone higher up the chain, for which he got reprimanded…

    • The NSA Has Files on a Country That Doesn’t Exist

      A couple years ago, Robert Delaware requested from the NSA any entries from its Intellipedia – the agency’s internal answer to Wikipedia – regarding the micronation “The Conch Republic.” The agency later released four pages, which is a fairly impressive feat considering that, strictly speaking, the Conch Republic doesn’t exist.

    • NSA leaker Edward Snowden says will vote in US presidential election
    • Snowden Says He’ll Vote in US Presidential Election

      Edward Snowden, in exile in Moscow after leaking U.S. National Security Agency documents, said Friday he intends to vote in the U.S. presidential election, but did not say which candidate he favors.

      “I will be voting,” Snowden said, speaking at a conference in Athens by video link from Moscow.

      “But as a privacy advocate I think it’s important for me … that there should never be an obligation for an individual to discuss their vote. And I won’t be doing so with mine.”

    • Snowden says he will vote in US elections

      Edward Snowden, in exile in Moscow after leaking documents of clandestine spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on everyday Americans, said Friday he intends to vote in the U.S. presidential election, but did not say which candidate he favours.

    • ‘Corrupt’ US Intel Unable to Prevent Terrorism, NSA Whistleblower Tells Sputnik

      Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency and intelligence whistleblower, has delivered a scathing indictment of US mass surveillance techniques. Binney told Sputnik that the current strategy of collecting bulk data is doomed to result in “people ending up getting killed.”

      When you think of intelligence whistleblowers, Edward Snowden may be the first name that springs to mind. But before Snowden, another NSA operative, Bill Binney, felt compelled to lift the lid on the secretive surveillance actions of his government.

    • Edward Snowden stole defence secrets and is no whistleblower, US report says

      Mr Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution and now wants a presidential pardon as a whistleblower.

    • U.S. House panel slams former NSA contractor Snowden
    • GCHQ’s plan for a Great British Firewall creates a dangerous norm

      Intelligence agencies are in the business of deception and misinformation. Truth has little objective meaning or value, but rather exists as it is necessary or useful. How else to make sense of the announcement earlier this week that agencies who just a few years ago railed against strong encryption and were exposed as trying to undermine it, and thus the security of the internet as a whole, are now claiming to be the internet’s protector?

      On Tuesday the director of the UK’s new National Cyber Security Centre laid out vague plans to build a Great British Firewall to protect us from the dangers of cyberattacks in the digital age: “We’re exploring a flagship project on scaling up DNS filtering,” said Ciaran Martin.

      Filtering, or domain name system (DNS) blocking, is controversial – especially when done by a government, as it can interfere with the essential architecture and security of the internet. In the US, bills to mandate DNS blocking such as the Stop Online Piracy Act failed after vigorous debate. Many spam and phishing attacks spoof legitimate sites or email servers, so blocking them has huge collateral damage.

    • The Feds Will Soon Be Able to Legally Hack Almost Anyone

      Digital devices and software programs are complicated. Behind the pointing and clicking on screen are thousands of processes and routines that make everything work. So when malicious software—malware—invades a system, even seemingly small changes to the system can have unpredictable impacts.

      That’s why it’s so concerning that the Justice Department is planning a vast expansion of government hacking. Under a new set of rules, the FBI would have the authority to secretly use malware to hack into thousands or hundreds of thousands of computers that belong to innocent third parties and even crime victims. The unintended consequences could be staggering.

    • 5 Cool Tech Tidbits From the ‘Snowden’ Movie

      Critics are giving mixed reviews to Snowden, the Oliver Stone film that opens in theaters on Friday. But as I wrote this week, the movie is essential viewing for anyone who cares about the national security debate and NSA’s co-opting of familiar technology like Google and Facebook to spy on us.

      One reason the movie is worth watching is the realistic depiction of technology and hacker culture. Even as Snowden engages in Stone-style propaganda to support its hero, it avoids the stupid clichés that often appear when Hollywood takes on tech topics. I spoke with screenwriter Kieran Fitzgerald and technical supervisor Ralph Echemendia, who explained that Edward Snowden himself read drafts of the film and corrected details he felt were inaccurate.

      Here are five aspects of the film that make Snowden a convincing tale about tech.

    • 5 Corporations Now Dominate Our Privatized Intelligence Industry

      The recent integration of two military contractors into a $10 billion behemoth is the latest in a wave of mergers and acquisitions that have transformed America’s privatized, high-tech intelligence system into what looks like an old-fashioned monopoly.

      In August, Leidos Holdings, a major contractor for the Pentagon and the National Security Agency, completed a long-planned merger with the Information Systems & Global Solutions division of Lockheed Martin, the global military giant. The 8,000 operatives employed by the new company do everything from analyzing signals for the NSA to tracking down suspected enemy fighters for US Special Forces in the Middle East and Africa.

      The sheer size of the new entity makes Leidos one of the most powerful companies in the intelligence-contracting industry, which is worth about $50 billion today. According to a comprehensive study I’ve just completed on public and private employment in intelligence, Leidos is now the largest of five corporations that together employ nearly 80 percent of the private-sector employees contracted to work for US spy and surveillance agencies.

    • Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Joins Call for Edward Snowden Pardon

      Earlier this week, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union launched a joint campaign and public petition to urge President Obama to pardon Snowden and allow him to return to the United States without the fear of persecution.

      The campaign is being supported by a number of politicians and celebrities, including Senator Bernie Sanders, Susan Sarandon, Daniel Radcliffe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Terry Gilliam, Noam Chomsky, Senator Ron Wyden as well as former NSA director Michael Hayden.

      It coincides with the release of Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” movie. The movie is largely based on Snowden’s own story, who worked as a NSA contractor until defecting in 2013. Snowden initially took refuge in Hong Kong, then fled to Russia, and worked with journalists at newspapers like Washington Post, the New York Times and the Guardian to reveal details about the NSA’s surveillance programs against U.S. citizens.

    • The House Intelligence Committee’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Snowden Report

      Late yesterday afternoon the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a three-page executive summary (four, if we count the splendid cover photo) of its two-year inquiry into Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures. On first reading, I described it as an “aggressively dishonest” piece of work.

    • Film Review: Human Element Makes Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ Quite Captivating

      Every whistleblower undergoes some kind of transformation that pushes them to the point where they make the pivotal decision to challenge power. Oliver Stone’s film about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden portrays how he went from a person reluctant to question the government to a person who believed it was virtuous to challenge abuses of government power.

      “Snowden” unfolds in the Mira Hong Kong Hotel, where Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) met with journalists Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto). The script intermittently flashes back to periods of Snowden’s life, from his time in a military boot camp to his time working for the CIA in Geneva to when he worked at an NSA facility in Oahu, Hawaii.

      Gordon-Levitt nails the intonation of Snowden’s voice. Shailene Woodley is fabulous as his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and the choice to make much of the film revolve around Snowden’s relationship with Mills positively elevates the film to a fairly compelling love story. In fact, the way the story is told suggests Snowden’s views on questioning the government changed from post-9/11 flag-waving nationalism the more his romance with Mills blossomed, especially since she was against the Iraq War and other acts of President George W. Bush’s administration.

    • A Cosmopolitan Defense of Snowden

      Like me, Goldsmith believes there’s no chance Snowden will get a pardon, even while admitting that Snowden’s disclosures brought worthwhile transparency to the Intelligence Community. Unlike me, he opposes a pardon, in part, because of the damage Snowden did, a point I’ll bracket for the moment.

    • HPSCI: We Must Spy Like Snowden To Prevent Another Snowden

      I was going to write about this funny part of the HPSCI report anyway, but it makes a nice follow-up to my post on Snowden and cosmopolitanism, on the importance of upholding American values to keeping the servants of hegemon working to serve it.

      As part of its attack on Edward Snowden released yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee accused Snowden of attacking his colleagues’ privacy.

    • Protect Intelligence Whistleblowers

      To get to the offices of the congressional intelligence committees, you must follow a shaft of sunlight down a circular staircase, into the bowels of the Capitol, and down a corridor until you reach heavy wooden doors guarded by an armed sentry. Behind those doors, there are no windows, there is no sunlight. Behind those doors, members of Congress and their staff review our nation’s most secret espionage programs. And on occasion, whistleblowers have helped shine a light into this dark and secret world.

      But high-profile leakers Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning indicated that they thought approaching Congress would be futile, even dangerous. That is because there is a history of prosecution of whistleblowers and myriad internal hurdles to clear before anyone can report possible classified wrongdoing to Congress—hurdles that are greater in the intelligence arena than any other. So instead they went to the media.

      This must change. Congress must encourage whistleblowers concerned about sensitive intelligence programs to approach the committees first, not to go straight to the media. If the committees made a few changes to welcome whistleblowers, they might avoid having sensitive intelligence programs revealed, while strengthening our national security.

    • Hit Job: Congress Attacks Ed Snowden, Continues Ostrich-style “Oversight”

      If you’re a current or former member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) or a current or former staff member of the same and you’ve decided to read this, I commend you. It will be the first step in a multi-step program you’ll need to undergo in order to come to terms with how the nearly 40 year-old institution that you are or were a part of, an instiution that was originally designed to police the Intelligence Community, has instead become’s its chief guardian — and in so doing, enabled that same Intelligence Community to become the single biggest threat to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that we’ve faced in the history of the Republic.

    • Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower

      Oliver Stone’s “Snowden,” a quiet, crisply drawn portrait of the world’s most celebrated whistle-blower, belongs to a curious subgenre of movies about very recent historical events. Reversing the usual pattern, it could be described as a fictional “making of” feature about “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary on the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. That film seems to me more likely to last — it is deeper journalism and more haunting cinema — but Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.

      In the context of this director’s career, “Snowden” is both a return to form and something of a departure. Mr. Stone circles back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy that have propelled his most ambitious work, and finds a hero who fits a familiar Oliver Stone mold. Edward (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, leaning hard on a vocal imitation) is presented as a disillusioned idealist, a serious young man whose experiences lead him to doubt accepted truths and question the wisdom of authority. He has something in common with Jim Garrison in “J.F.K.” and Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July,” and also with Chris Taylor and Bud Fox, the characters played by Charlie Sheen in “Platoon” and “Wall Street.”

    • NYPD Says Talking About Its IMSI Catchers Would Make Them Vulnerable to Hacking

      Typically, cops don’t like talking about IMSI catchers, the powerful surveillance technology used to monitor mobile phones en masse. In a recent case, the New York Police Department (NYPD) introduced a novel argument for keeping mum on the subject: Asked about the tools it uses, it argued that revealing the different models of IMSI catchers the force owned would make the devices more vulnerable to hacking.

      Civil liberties activists are not convinced. Christopher Soghoian from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote in an affidavit as part of a petition against the NYPD’s decision not to share this information, “It would be a serious problem if the costly surveillance devices purchased by the NYPD without public competitive bidding are so woefully insecure that the only thing protecting them from hackers is the secrecy surrounding their model names.”

      The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), an affiliate of the ACLU, has been trying to get access to information about the NYPD’s IMSI catchers under the Freedom of Information Law. These devices are also commonly referred to as “stingrays”, after a particularly popular model from Harris Corporation. Indeed, the NYCLU wants to know which models of IMSI catchers made by Harris the police department has.

      “Public disclosure of this information, and the amount of taxpayer funds spent to buy the devices, directly advances the Freedom of Information Law’s purpose of informing a robust public debate about government actions,” the NYCLU writes in a court filing. The group has requested documents that show how much money has been spent on the technology.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • 4 Things to Consider When Running Social Media Campaigns About Texas Inmates

      Two such advocates reached out to EFF: Esther Große and Carrie Christensen. These women work with a high-profile inmate, Kenneth Foster, to try to secure his release and reform Texas’ so-called “Law of Parties,” which allows the state to assign capital punishment to accessories to a murder, even if they didn’t actually commit the act. Foster was facing the death penalty under this rule, but hours before his scheduled execution in 2007, Gov. Rick Perry commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Ever since, Foster has engaged in political activism from behind bars through his writing and poetry.

      Esther and Carrie had been running various social media accounts to support Foster. They maintained editorial control of these accounts and posted his writing. But they voluntariliy suspended these accounts after the new TDCJ rule was announced for fear of the impact on Foster. EFF communicated (.pdf) with TDCJ on their behalves to establish better clarity on what will and will not be permitted under the policy. Based on the information we and others (.pdf) received from TDCJ, we can now share lessons we’ve gleaned for operating a social media campaign regarding an inmate.

    • FBI Agent Posing as Journalist to Deliver Malware to Suspect Was Fine, Says DOJ

      In 2007, an FBI agent impersonated an Associated Press journalist in order to deliver malware to a criminal suspect and find out his location. According to a newly published report from the Department of Justice, the operation was in line with the FBI’s undercover policies at the time.

      Journalistic organisations had expressed concern that the tactic could undermine reporters’ and media institutions’ credibility.

      “We concluded that FBI policies in 2007 did not expressly address the tactic of agents impersonating journalists,” the report from the Office of the Inspector General reads.

      The case concerned a Seattle teenager suspected of sending bomb threats against a local school. FBI Special Agent Mason Grant got in touch with the teen over email, pretending to be an AP journalist. After some back and forth, Grant sent the suspect a fake article which, when clicked, grabbed his real IP address. Armed with this information, the FBI identified and arrested the suspect.

    • Tesla is suing an oil-company executive it says impersonated Elon Musk

      Tesla is suing an oil executive under suspicion of impersonating Elon Musk to dig up confidential financial information from the company, Forbes reported on Wednesday.

      The lawsuit, reportedly filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, claimed that Todd Katz, the chief financial officer for Quest Integrity Group, emailed Tesla’s chief financial officer using a similar email address as Musk’s looking to gain information that wasn’t disclosed in an earnings call with investors.

    • Tesla sues oil exec for impersonating Elon Musk

      Tesla Motors is suing an oil pipeline service executive in a California court, claiming the man impersonated Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an attempt to gain undisclosed financial information.

      The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, says Quest Integrity Group CFO Todd Katz sent an email to Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler from a Yahoo email address similar to one Musk has used in the past.

      A spokesman for the Quest’s parent company called the allegations involving company officials “unsubstantiated” and “absurd.”

    • Former hacker blasts Love’s trial as an ‘absurd ordeal’

      ALLEGED HACKER Lauri Love, the 31-year-old British citizen accused of breaking into the systems of the FBI, the US Missile Defence Agency and the Federal Reserve Bank in 2013, has lost his appeal over extradition to the US.

      The judgement was delivered within minutes of the commencement of this afternoon’s session at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

      Love’s lawyer, Tor Ekeland, said that Love had “embarrassed” the US authorities and that they had “very bad security and these hacks used exploits that were publicly known for months”.

      Former hacker and ex-Anonymous and LulzSec mouthpiece Jake ‘Topiary’ Davis attended the hearing and live tweeted the verdict, calling it “a horrible decision” and “a mess from the start”.

      According to Davis, Love was immediately advised by the judge that he could appeal against the decision and that the case would be sent on to the Secretary of State while he remains, for the time being, on bail.

      Love, referring to his appeal, told press and supporters outside the court: “This means we’ve been given a higher platform. There will be justice. Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

    • Lauri Love to be extradited to the US to face hacking charges, court rules

      Briton Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges of hacking, Westminster Magistrates’ Court ruled on Friday.

      Love faces up to 99 years in prison in the US on charges of hacking as part of the Anonymous collective, according to his legal team.

      Handing down her ruling at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, district judge Nina Tempia told Love that he can appeal against the decision. The case will now be referred to the home secretary Amber Rudd while Love remains on bail.

    • Judge Rules to Extradite Alleged UK Hacker Lauri Love

      Copy This URL

      Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges related to his alleged involvement in #OpLastResult, a UK judge has ruled today.

      Speaking at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this afternoon, Judge Nina Tempia said: “I will be extraditing Mr Love, by which I mean I will be passing the case to the Secretary of State.”

      The ruling, which lasted under five minutes, was attended by Love, his parents, and around 40 supporters. Leaving court, some of his supporters derided the decision, shouting: “Bullshit, kangaroo court!”

    • Lauri Love loses fight against extradition

      Lauri Love has lost his court case against extradition to the US to face hacking charges.

      Love was indicted in US courts in 2013 after it emerged that he had hacked into servers at the Federal Reserve, NASA, Missile Defence Agency and the US Army as part of hacker group known as Anonymous.

      He and his doctors have consistently argued in extradition hearings that he should not be extradited to the US from his home in south-eastern England because he suffers from Asperger syndrome and depression. Love has repeatedly told the media that he would rather commit suicide than face trial in America.

    • Alleged hacker Lauri Love to be extradited to US

      An autistic man suspected of hacking into US government computer systems is to be extradited from Britain to face trial, a court has ruled.

      Lauri Love, 31, who has Asperger’s syndrome, is accused of hacking into the FBI, the US central bank and the country’s missile defence agency.

      Mr Love, from Stradishall, Suffolk, has previously said he feared he would die in a US prison if he was extradited.

    • Computer activist Lauri Love loses appeal against US extradition

      Lauri Love, the student accused of hacking into the computer systems of the US missile defence agency, Nasa and the Federal Reserve, has lost his appeal against extradition to America.

      Judge Nina Tempia said the 31-year-old, who has Asperger syndrome, could be cared for by “medical facilities in the United States prison estate” and implied that he should answer the “extremely serious charges” in the country where the damage was inflicted.

      Love, who lives with his parents in Newmarket, Suffolk, was granted permission to appeal against Friday’s ruling and given bail pending further legal action. The battle over his fate could eventually reach the European court of human rights in Strasbourg and last several years.

      There were gasps in the courtroom as Tempia read out her ruling, which followed a full case hearing in June. Love’s supporters, who stormed out of Westminster magistrates court in London shouting “kangaroo court”, fear he could face up to 99 years in a US jail if convicted on all counts.

    • UK Court Says Lauri Love Can Be Extradited To Face Hacking Charges In The US

      There’s little to be gained by adding up the maximum possible jail sentence facing Love. Rest assured, if convicted, it will likely be over a decade. Consolidation of the cases and charges is likely, but more than one of the charges carry possible 10-year sentences.

      Meanwhile, back in the UK, Love has managed to escape being jailed for refusing to turn over passwords and encryption keys to law enforcement. UK investigators fought hard to force Love — who they’ve never formally charged — to crack open multiple seized devices for them. This attempt was shot down in May by a judge who viewed this as an end run around protections built into RIPA, the laws governing law enforcement’s investigatory powers.

      The final decision on Love’s extradition is in the hands of Elizabeth Truss, the recently-appointed Secretary of State for Justice. Truss’ previous government work doesn’t really provide much guidance on which side she’ll come down on this, but her voting record tends to indicate she’s more sympathetic to national security/law enforcement interests than those of her constituents. Considering the UK and US have a very cozy surveillance relationship, it stands to reason Truss will likely decide to appease the DOJ, rather than overturn the court’s decision.

    • Swedish appeals court upholds detention order for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

      A Swedish appeals court on Friday upheld a detention order for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, dismissing the latest attempt by the 45-year-old Australian to make prosecutors drop a rape investigation from 2010.

      The decision by the Svea Court of Appeal means that the arrest warrant stands for the 45-year-old computer hacker, who has avoided extradition to Sweden by seeking shelter at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012.

      Assange, who denies the rape allegation, has challenged the detention order several times. He says he fears he will be extradited to the United States to face espionage charges if he leaves the embassy.

    • Muslims are most disliked group in America, says new study

      Muslims are the most disapproved group in America, according to a new study, amid increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric from conservative politicians.

      A new study from sociologists at the University of Minnesota, which analysed Americans’ perceptions of minority faith and racial groups, found that their disapproval of Muslims has almost doubled from about 26 per cent 10 years ago to 45.5 per cent in 2016.

      Amid increasing focus on immigration, refugees and national security and in the wake of multiple terrorist attacks around the world, the study found that almost half of those surveyed would not want their child to marry a Muslim, compared to just 33.5 per cent of people a decade earlier.

    • Court: Officer Killed Man Less Than a Second After Command

      A Southern California police officer gave a man less than a second to raise his hands before opening fire and killing him, a federal appeals court noted Friday in rejecting the officer’s request to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against him.

      The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Tustin Police Officer Osvaldo Villarreal couldn’t reasonably have feared for his safety when he shot 31-year-old Benny Herrera after responding to a domestic dispute call in December 2011.

      That determination ran counter to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, which said in 2013 that the shooting was reasonable and justified because Villarreal fired after Herrera ignored orders to show his hands.

      A video captured by a police dashboard camera shows otherwise, according to the 9th Circuit judges who cited the footage.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • NYC Kills Internet Browsing At Free WiFi Kiosks After The City’s Homeless Actually Use It

      Earlier this year, New York City undertook one of the biggest free city WiFi efforts ever conceived. Under the plan, an outfit by the name of LinkNYC is slated to install some 7,500 WiFi kiosks scattered around the five boroughs that will provide free gigabit WiFi (well, closer to 300 Mbps or so), free phone calls to anywhere in the country (via Vonage), as well as access to a device recharging station, 311, 911, 411 and city services (via an integrated Android tablet). The connectivity and services are supported by a rotating crop of ads displayed on the kiosks themselves.

    • Is New York City’s Public Wi-Fi Actually Connecting the Poor?

      Two young men sit on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 54th Street, huddled against a tall silver obelisk on a hot summer day. One man is sprawled on the ground in dirty sweatpants, and the other is 20-something, shirtless and examining an iPhone plugged into the kiosk’s USB port. Around them on the ground is a backpack, a duffel, loose cigarettes, and a roughed-up phone.

      LinkNYC, New York City’s newest communications network, includes more than 350 kiosks installed on sidewalks throughout the city and was created to repurpose payphone infrastructure through public kiosks offering free internet, phone calls, and USB charging ports. The project is a collaboration between the city and a consortium of private technology and media companies including Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet (read: Google) company, and represents an important innovation in the “smart city” movement integrating information and communication technologies into all aspects of urban life.

    • cloudflare and rss

      Let’s say somebody has a blog that I’d like to read. Subscribe to even. Let’s say they have an RSS link on their page. This should be easy.

      Now let’s say the blog in question is hosted/proxied/whatever by Cloudflare. Uh oh.

      Just reading the blog in my browser is now somewhat hampered because Cloduflare thinks I’m some sort of cyberterrorist and requires my browser run a javascript anti-turing test. But eventually the blog loads, I read it, click the RSS link to subscribe, see that it is in fact XML rendered in my browser, and copy the link.

    • Internet speed – you don’t get what you pay for

      The age old cry is that “The internet too slow.” In part that has been exposed by the raft of new AC routers that may be able to connect at up to a gigabit in your network but grind to a halt when it hits the internet.

      The internet speeds offered by Telcos, ISPs and RSPs are a theoretical maximum speed – more guidelines really and they are under no real obligation to provide even a fraction of the advertised speed. The vast majority of ADSL connections are heavily contended (bandwidth is shared by other users on the same DSLAM), so when the kids get home, internet speeds slow even more.

      Like any advertised goods or services, you should get what you pay for – a kilo of fruit must weight a kilo, or there are huge fines for “short weight.” But it seems ISPs are dead against that principle telling the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to butt out.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Cuba, US hold first talks on intellectual property

      Cuba and the US held their first talk on the issue of intellectual property, the island’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Monday.

      A statement revealed that Daniel Marti, Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator at the White House visited Havana on September 8-9 and met with representatives of the Cuban Office of Industrial Property, the National Centre of Copyright, the Faculty of Law of the University of Havana, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment.

      Marti was accompanied by officials from the State Department, the Copyright Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Xinhua news agency reported.

      “In this first official meeting between Cuba and the US on intellectual property, the parties exchanged views on current regulations in the respective countries … and the legal framework of the two states for the protection of trademarks, patents and legal copyright,” read the statement.

    • Copyrights

      • Alleged KickassTorrents Owner Denied Access to U.S. Counsel

        This week the U.S. sent notice to Polish authorities indicating it wants to extradite Artem Vaulin, the alleged owner of KickassTorrents. Vaulin’s defense team is reviewing the request but warns that the case is turning into an international due process problem, as he is still unable to meet his U.S. counsel.

      • European Commission wants to break the web, give publishers the right to charge for inbound links

        The European Commission’s “copyright modernisation” plan is an unmitigated disaster, but there’s one particularly insane section of it that I want to call your attention to: the “link tax,” which entitles publishers to payment when people link to them on the internet.

        Fundamentally, this is the insane idea that companies own the information about where they and their assets are located, a shitty idea that we’ve been making fun of since 2001, which the elected European Parliament has repeatedly rejected, which experiments in Germany and Spain have shown to be a disaster.

        But the unelected, thoroughly captured bureaucrats of the European Commission refuse to let go of this ridiculous plan.

      • Nobody Is Watching Kim Dotcom’s Livestreamed Extradition Hearing

        Remember Kim Dotcom? He’s the convicted fraudster-turned rich dude who ran MegaUpload, that file storage website that hosted a ton of pirated content. In January 2012, Dotcom was raided by New Zealand authorities and he’s been in legal purgatory ever since. Right now, Dotcom is fighting extradition by the United States for charges of online piracy.

      • Incumbents rule

        The European Union’s online reforms help the old more than the new

      • Wi-Fi providers not liable for copyright infringements, rules top EU court

        Businesses such as coffee shops that offer a wireless network free of charge to their customers aren’t liable for copyright infringements committed by users of that network, the ruling states—which, in part, chimes with an earlier advocate general’s opinion. But hotspot operators may be required, following a court injunction, to password-protect their Wi-Fi networks to stop or prevent such violations.

        In 2010, Sony sued Tobias McFadden, who provides free Wi-Fi access at his lighting and sound system shop in Munich, Germany. The company claimed a copyrighted song had been offered for download from his wireless network. Although he wasn’t the individual responsible for the infringement, the local court mulled a ruling of indirect liability because the network hadn’t been secured.

      • Copyright Trolls Now Threatening College Students With Loss of Scholarship, Deportation

        In all of our coverage of copyright trolls, those rent-seeking underdwellers that fire off threat letters to those they suspect of copyright infringement with demands designed to extract cash without having to actually take anyone to court, it’s quite easy to become somewhat numb to the underhanded tactics they employ. Between specifically targeting folks over pornography in order to minimize the chance that anyone might want to actually go to trial, to the privacy invading tactics occasionally used when a court case actually commences, it becomes easy to simply shrug at the depravity of it all.

        But there is a special place in hell for copyright trolls who falsely inform students that failure to pay on receipt of threat letters, or who falsely inform foreign students that deportation could result from a failure to pay. According to at least one university in Canada, this is apparently a new favored tactic among some copyright trolls.

      • Another Bad EU Ruling: WiFi Providers Can Be Forced To Require Passwords If Copyright Holders Demand It

        For quite some time now, we’ve been following an odd case through the German and then EU court system, concerning whether or not the operator of an open WiFi system should be liable for copyright infringement that occurs over that access point. Back in 2010, a German court first said that if you don’t secure your WiFi, you can get fined. This was very problematic — especially for those of us who believe in open WiFi. The EU Court of Justice agreed to hear the case and the Advocate General recommended a good ruling: that WiFi operators are not liable and also that they shouldn’t be forced to password protect their access points.

        The ruling, unfortunately, says that WiFi operators can be compelled to password protect their networks. It’s not all bad, in that the headline story is that WiFi operators, on their own, are not liable for actions done on the network, but that’s completely undermined by the requirement to password protect it if a copyright holder asks them to.

      • Do memes violate copyright law?

        Who owns a meme—those pictures, videos and ideas that go viral on the internet?

        In the case of the Socially Awkward Penguin, the answer might be National Geographic, since a staff photographer took the original penguin picture. Around 2009, internet users got hold of that photo, changed the background, added text and made it an internet phenomenon.

        But stock photo company Getty Images says it controls the penguin—and its meme progeny. Last year, Getty Images, which licenses National Geographic’s pictures, told the German company Get Digital that it owed license fees for using the penguin meme on one of its blogs. And Getty’s bill was twice the normal licensing fee, according to Get Digital.

      • Apparently, Ubuntu is ‘infringing’ Paramount’s Copyrights over Transformers movie!

        For some unknown reason, Paramount Pictures has decided that the freely distributed Ubuntu OS torrents are “infringing” their copyrights on Transformers movie! Paramount Pictures recently sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google, accusing Ubuntu OS of infringing their copyrights.

      • Torrent Site Founder, Moderator and Users Receive Prison Sentences

        The 28-year-old former operator of a French-based torrent site has been ordered to serve a year in jail and pay a five million euro fine. A moderator received a four-month suspended sentence. Somewhat unusually, four regular users of the site were tracked down by their IP addresses. They too received custodial sentences.

09.16.16

Links 16/9/2016: Uber Uses GNU/Linux, Dell’s New Laptops

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Delinkage Of R&D Costs From Product Prices

      It is essential that policy makers reform the systems for financing R&D, and de-link the costs of R&D from the prices of products.

      First, let’s reflect on why we have high drug prices. When we grant monopolies on products, through patents or other measures, the company that has the monopoly exploits the monopoly, fairly predictably, to maximize profits, and increasingly, this means aggressive pricing.

      Why do we have public policies to create monopolies? Because that is part of our system of funding R&D. That is really the only reason to create the monopolies in the first place.

      But, there is an alternative that would do a better job of funding R&D, with low drug prices, and that is a system that is based on delinkage.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Latest Estimate Pegs Cost of Wars at Nearly $5 Trillion

      The total U.S. budgetary cost of war since 2001 is $4.79 trillion, according to a report released this week from Brown University’s Watson Institute. That’s the highest estimate yet.

      Neta Crawford of Boston University, the author of the report, included interest on borrowing, future veterans needs, and the cost of homeland security in her calculations.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Swedish Court Upholds Arrest Warrant for Julian Assange

      The 45-year-old Australian has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, seeking refuge there after exhausting all his legal options in Britain against extradition to Sweden.

      Assange has refused to travel to Stockholm for questioning over the rape allegation, which he denies, due to concerns Sweden will extradite him to the US over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

      This is the eighth time the European arrest warrant has been tested in a Swedish court. All of the rulings have gone against him.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Exxon lobbying: New documents reveal push against electric cars

      Exxon is lobbying the UK government to stop them pushing for electric vehicles as a way of tackling climate change or air pollution, according to documents obtained under Freedom of Information rules (FOI) by DeSmog UK.

      The documents reveal the firm lobbied UK transport department officials in three separate presentations given after the UK signed up to the Paris agreement on climate change last year.

    • Two hurt as train derailed in flood landslide near Watford Junction

      The 06:19 BST service from Milton Keynes to Euston left the track at about 07:00 BST, Network Rail said.

      A portion of the train derailed and was then hit by another train. It was a “glancing blow” and the other train continued on its way.

      A man was treated for a neck injury and a woman treated for chest pains.

      London Midland and Virgin services remain “severely disrupted” from the north-west, Scotland, and the Midlands.

  • Finance

    • Hatch Still Trying To Change The Finalized TPP Deal To Make It Even Worse For Other Nations

      As Techdirt noted in 2014, by agreeing to the “fast track” procedure for trade deals, Congress has essentially given up its power to change them. That’s a two-edged sword. Although it makes the ratification process simpler, because things like TPP and TTIP must be accepted or rejected in their entirety, it also means that political bosses have no ability to tweak the text to make it more likely the deals will be ratified. That’s coming back to bite one of the people who introduced the fast track bill, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch.

    • Deutsche Bank: No plan to pay $14B Justice Dept. settlement

      Deutsche Bank AG said Friday it does not intend to pay $14 billion to settle civil claims with the U.S. Department of Justice for its handling of residential mortgage-backed securities and related transactions.

      The bank confirmed in a statement that the Justice Department had proposed a settlement of $14 billion and asked the German bank to make a counter proposal.

    • Northern Powerhouse: George Osborne to stay and fight for project

      George Osborne has said he will stay in the Commons to “fight for the things I care about” as he launches a think tank to promote the Northern Powerhouse.

      Mr Osborne, who was sacked as chancellor by Theresa May, said: “I don’t want to write my memoirs because I don’t know how the story ends.”

      There had been a “bit of a wobble” by Mrs May over the project, he said.

      No 10 says Mrs May is building on his plan to create a northern economy to rival London and the South East.

    • Over 200 Economics & Law Professors Urge Congress To Reject Corporate Sovereignty Provisions In Trade Deals

      We’ve written quite a lot for years about the massive problems with “corporate sovereignty” provisions in trade agreements — so-called “investor state dispute settlement” (ISDS) provisions — that allow companies to “sue” countries for regulations they feel are unfair. These aren’t heard by courts, but rather by “tribunals” chosen by the companies and the countries. Some supporters of these provisions claim that there’s really nothing wrong with them because they help encourage both investment in different countries and more stable and fair regulations.

    • TPP members agree not to renegotiate sweeping free trade deal

      The 12 countries that signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade pact earlier this year agreed Monday that they will not renegotiate the deal, Japan’s TPP minister Nobuteru Ishihara said.

      The minister also told reporters the 12 nations confirmed they will move ahead with domestic processes quickly to adopt the U.S.-led trade pact.

      Ishihara’s remarks came after he joined ambassadors and other representatives from 11 countries for a TPP meeting at the official residence of U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy in Tokyo.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • State Department Delays Records Request About Clinton-Linked Firm Until After The 2016 Election

      Beacon Global Strategies is a shadowy consulting firm that’s stacked with former Obama administration officials, high profile Republicans and a number of Hillary Clinton’s closest foreign policy advisers. But beyond its billing as a firm that works with the defense industry, it is unclear for whom specifically the company works, exactly what it does, and if Beacon employees have tried to influence national security policy since the firm’s founding in 2013.

      And now the Obama administration has complicated the effort to find out — at least until after the presidential election. Last week, the State Department delayed its response to a 2015 public records request for any correspondence between Beacon and agency officials until May 2017.

    • Nigel Farage aide defects to Tories claiming a mass exodus from Ukip

      One of Nigel Farage’s closest aides, who headed Ukip’s media operation for three years, has said the party has “disintegrated” and that she has joined the surge of members and supporters turning to the Conservatives.

      Alexandra Phillips said Theresa May had delivered on all key elements of Ukip’s 2015 election manifesto “within a matter of months”, leaving her former party with few places to go in policy terms.

      “I think ideologically the Tories are doing the Ukip dance now,” she said, pointing to policies on Brexit, immigration, grammar schools and fracking. Phillips said Farage had been “inspirational” to work with and would be remembered as “one of the most incredible politicians of our generation”.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Congressman In Charge Of OPM Hacking Report Announces Plan To Investigate Stingray Use Next

      It’s a good point, one fresh in the mind of millions thanks to the just-delivered OPM report. The government appears willing to take security seriously if it means doling out tax dollars to dozens of agencies with cyberstars in their eyes and crafting bad legislation, but not so much when it comes to actually ensuring its own backyard is locked down.

      Chaffetz was one of the legislators behind the 2015 attempt to turn the DOJ’s Stingray guidance into law, laying down a warrant requirement for US law enforcement. Unfortunately, the bill went nowhere. Presumably, a thorough investigation into law enforcement use of this repurposed war tech might prompt more legislative cooperation in the future.

      Chaffetz has done little to endear himself to security and law enforcement agencies since his arrival on the Hill. In addition to the failed Stingray warrant bill, Chaffetz also partnered with Ron Wyden to attempt to add a warrant requirement for law enforcement GPS tracking — something the Supreme Court almost addressed in its US v. Jones decision.

    • Edward Snowden: House Intelligence Committee Slams NSA Leaker As Disgruntled Employee, Thief
    • Congress Celebrates Snowden Release by Accusing NSA Whistleblower of Invading Privacy
    • ‘He is not a whistleblower. He is a criminal’: Scathing congressional report slams Edward Snowden and says he leaked secrets that ’caused tremendous damage’ to national security
    • ‘He is not a whistleblower. He is a criminal’: Scathing congressional report slams Edward Snowden and says he leaked secrets that ’caused tremendous damage’ to national security
    • NSA Whistleblower Condemns Mass Surveillance | UK-Argentina Relations Thaw

      Today’s main stories: NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, protagonist of the film The Good American which is premiered in the UK tonight, reveals that the 9/11 attacks in New York and many more recent terrorist attacks across Europe could have been avoided if the US had not relied on methods of mass surveillance. Bill Binnie and the film’s director, Friedrich Moser join us in the studio to discuss the ethics of mass surveillance and whether Edward Snowden could receive a presidential pardon.

    • National Security Officials Offer Hedged Support For Strong Encryption

      As Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr mount another attempt to legislate holes in encryption, national security officials are offering testimony suggesting this is no way to solve the perceived problem. Another encryption hearing, again hosted by a visibly irritated John McCain (this time the villain is Twitter), featured testimony from NSA Director Michael Rogers [PDF] and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre [PDF] — neither of whom offered support for mandated backdoors.

      As nice as that sounds, the testimony wasn’t so much “We support strong encryption,” as it was “We support strong encryption*.”

      Lettre’s testimony follows statements of support for encryption — and opposition to legislated backdoors or “golden keys” — with the veiled suggestion that the government will be leaning heavily on tech companies to solve this problem for it.

    • If Snowden Doesn’t Know Privacy Protections of 702, That’s a Problem with NSA Training

      The House Intelligence Committee just released a report — ostensibly done to insist President Obama not pardon Snowden — that is instead surely designed as a rebuttal to the Snowden movie coming out in general release tomorrow. Why HPSCI sees it as their job to refute Hollywood I don’t know, especially since they didn’t make the same effort when Zero Dark Thirty came out, which suggests they are serving as handmaidens of the Intelligence Community, not an oversight committee.

      There will be lots of debates about the validity of the report. In some ways, HPSCI admits they’re being as inflammatory as possible, as when they note that the IC only did a damage assessment of what they think Snowden took, whereas DOD did a damage assessment of every single thing he touched. HPSCI’s claims are all based on the latter.

      There are things that HPSCI apparently doesn’t realize makes them and the IC look bad — not Snowden — such as the claim that he never obtained a high school equivalent degree; apparently people can just fake basic credentials and the CIA and NSA are incapable of identifying that. The report even admits a previously unknown contact between Snowden and CIA’s IG, regarding the training of IT specialists. BREAKING: Snowden did try to report something through an official channel!

    • Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower

      Oliver Stone’s “Snowden,” a quiet, crisply drawn portrait of the world’s most celebrated whistle-blower, belongs to a curious subgenre of movies about very recent historical events. Reversing the usual pattern, it could be described as a fictional “making of” feature about “Citizenfour,” Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary on the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. That film seems to me more likely to last — it is deeper journalism and more haunting cinema — but Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.

      In the context of this director’s career, “Snowden” is both a return to form and something of a departure. Mr. Stone circles back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy that have propelled his most ambitious work, and finds a hero who fits a familiar Oliver Stone mold. Edward (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, leaning hard on a vocal imitation) is presented as a disillusioned idealist, a serious young man whose experiences lead him to doubt accepted truths and question the wisdom of authority. He has something in common with Jim Garrison in “J.F.K.” and Ron Kovic in “Born on the Fourth of July,” and also with Chris Taylor and Bud Fox, the characters played by Charlie Sheen in “Platoon” and “Wall Street.”

    • If Someone Is Testing Ways To Take Down The Internet, Perhaps It’s Time To Build A Stronger Internet

      This article is getting a collective “oh, shit, that’s bad” kind of reaction from many online — and that’s about right. But, shouldn’t it also be something of a call to action to build a better system? In many ways, it’s still incredible that the internet actually works. There are still elements that feel held together by duct tape and handshake agreements. And while it’s been surprisingly resilient, that doesn’t mean that it needs to remain that way.

      Schneier notes that there’s “nothing, really” that can be done about these tests — and that’s true in the short term. But it seems, to me, like it should be setting off alarm bells for people to rethink how the internet is built — and to make things even more distributed and less subject to attacks on “critical infrastructure.” People talk about how the internet was originally supposed to be designed to withstand a nuclear attack and keep working. But, the reality has always been that there are a few choke points. Seems like now would be a good time to start fixing things so that the choke points are no longer so critical.

    • As “Snowden” Opens, Three Largest Rights Groups in U.S. Call on Obama for a Pardon

      The day after the New York premiere of Oliver Stone’s new movie, “Snowden,” the three largest human rights organizations in the U.S. teamed up to launch a campaign calling on President Obama to pardon the NSA whistleblower.

      Snowden himself spoke via video from Moscow at a press conference Wednesday morning alongside representatives from the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International.

      Snowden called whistleblowing “democracy’s safeguard of last resort” and argued that if the Obama administration does not reverse its practice of prosecuting whistleblowers, it would leave a legacy of secrecy that is damaging to democracy.

    • Rights Groups, Riding Film Publicity, Urge Pardon for Edward Snowden

      Three human rights groups on Wednesday urged President Obama to pardon Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who leaked secret documents about National Security Agency surveillance in 2013 and is living in Russia as a fugitive from criminal charges.

      The start of the campaign coincides with the theatrical release this week of the movie “Snowden,” a sympathetic, fictionalized version of his story by the director Oliver Stone. Together, the film and the campaign, called “Pardon Snowden,” opened a new chapter in the debate about the surveillance Mr. Snowden revealed and about whether his leaks will go down in history as whistle-blowing or treason.

    • Former CIA Officer: President Obama Should Pardon Edward Snowden

      This week, Edward Snowden, multiple human rights and civil rights groups, and a broad array of American citizens asked President Obama to exercise his Constitutional power to pardon Snowden. As a former CIA officer, I wholeheartedly support a full presidential pardon for this brave whistleblower.

      All nations require some secrecy. But in a democracy, where the government is accountable to the people, transparency should be the default; secrecy, the exception. And this is especially true regarding the implementation of an unprecedented system of domestic bulk surveillance, a mere precursor of which Senator Frank Church warned 40 years ago could lead to the eradication of privacy and the imposition of “total tyranny.”

      That today we are engaged in a meaningful debate about whether such a system is desirable is almost entirely due to the conscience, courage and conviction of one man: Edward Snowden. Without Snowden, the American people could not balance for themselves the risks, costs and benefits of omniscient domestic surveillance. Because of him, we can.

      For this service, the government has charged Snowden under the World War I-era Espionage Act. Yet Snowden did not sell information secretly to any enemy of America. Instead, he shared it openly through the press with the American people.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • CBP Fails to Meaningfully Address Risks of Gathering Social Media Handles

      Last month we submitted comments to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, opposing its proposal to gather social media handles from foreign visitors from Visa Waiver Program (VWP) countries. CBP recently provided its preliminary responses (“Supporting Statement”) to several of our arguments (CBP also extended the comment deadline to September 30). But CBP has not adequately addressed the points we made.

      [...]

      As we said in our comments, we do not doubt that CBP and DHS are sincerely motivated to protect homeland security. However, the proposal to collect social media handles has serious flaws—and the government has failed to adequately address them.

    • Sarah Harrison on Snowden’s escape, Oliver Stone’s film, Assange, Courage and whistleblowers

      Sarah Harrison, Courage’s acting director and longtime WikiLeaks journalist, has sat down for several interviews to discuss various news items happening this week: the premiere of Oliver Stone’s film ‘Snowden,’ Harrison’s return to the UK after years of effective exile, and WikiLeaks’ US releases.

      After she assisted Edward Snowden escape from Hong Kong to Moscow, and stayed with him in Sheremetyevo Airport in Russia with hopes of reaching Latin America, Harrison was advised to stay out of the UK, where British terrorism laws threaten to criminalize journalistic work. She’s lived in Berlin for the last three years, but since David Miranda’s recent legal success challenging his 2013 detention in Heathrow, Harrison’s lawyers suggested she could attempt to return home.

    • FBI can’t pretend to be the AP without special approval. They can pretend to be Apple.

      As a number of outlets have reported, the DOJ IG just released a report on FBI’s impersonation of a journalist in 2007 to catch a high school student making bomb threats. As I will explain in more detail in a follow-up post, it somewhat exonerated the Agents who engaged in that effort. It also gives reserved approval of an interim policy FBI adopted this June (that is, well after the press complained, and just as the IG was finishing this report) that would prevent the FBI from pulling a similar stunt without higher level approval.

      But some of the details in the report — as well as one of its recommendations — suggests that the FBI would still be able to pretend to be a software company including a software update. Here’s the recommendation.

    • How Washington Blew Its Best Chance to Fix Immigration

      In June, not long after Donald Trump attacked an Indiana-born judge because he was “Mexican,” I went to go see Representative Raúl Labrador in the Longworth Office Building on Capitol Hill. Labrador, an Idaho Republican, cuts an unusual profile in Washington. Born in Puerto Rico, he was raised Mormon by a single mother in Las Vegas and now, as he told me, represents “one of the most conservative districts in the United States, one of the whitest districts in the United States.” Labrador came to Congress as part of the Tea Party wave of 2010 and later helped found the Freedom Caucus, the House’s conservative vanguard. He was also a pivotal member of a bipartisan group of eight House members who, in early 2013, came together in hopes of producing comprehensive legislation to fix the nation’s immigration system.

      Today, nearly every word of that last sentence feels as if it were ripped from a political fiction of “West Wing”-level implausibility. Immigration is the conflict that has eaten the 2016 elections — relegating other pressing issues to the margins, embodying Washington’s political dysfunction, further polarizing a divided country and, above all, fueling the presidential campaign of a man who began his candidacy by vowing to build a wall to keep Mexico from sending “rapists” to America. In recent weeks, even Trump’s own campaign seems to have grown alarmed by the political toxicity of what it has unleashed, embarking on a series of incoherent revisions before settling back on hard talk about creating a “special deportation task force.”

    • Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’

      Why are white men poised to get rich doing the same thing African-Americans have been going to prison for?

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • This Bill Could Stop Protectionist State Broadband Laws, But ISP Control Over Congress Means It Won’t Pass

      We’ve noted for years that one way incumbent broadband providers protect their duopoly kingdoms is by quite literally buying state laws that protect the status quo. These laws, passed in roughly twenty different states, prevent towns and cities from building their own broadband networks or in some instances from partnering with a private company like Google Fiber. Usually misleadingly presented by incumbent lobbyists and lawmakers as grounded in altruistic concern for taxpayer welfare, the laws are little more than pure protectionism designed to maintain the current level of broadband dysfunction — for financial gain.

      Earlier this year, the FCC tried to use its Congressional mandate under the Communications Act to eliminate the restrictive portions of these laws in two states. But the FCC’s effort was shot down as an overreach by the courts earlier this month, and the FCC has stated it has no intention of continuing the fight. That leaves the hope of ending these protectionist laws either in the hands of voters (most of whom don’t have the slightest idea what’s happening) or Congress (most of whom don’t want the telecom campaign contributions to stop flowing).

  • DRM

    • Apple Surveys Its Users About Headphone Port

      In the wake of Apple’s controversial announcement that it’s newest strain of iPhones will not be including a headphone jack, it’s been reported that the company is now sending out survey emails to Macbook Pro users that reference a potential removal of the headphone port in future models.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Boise State Somehow Got A Trademark On Non-Green Athletic Fields

        It’s football season again, which means some significant portion of America is routinely spending some significant chunk of its weekends watching some significant portion of male college students give some significant portion of each other irreparable brain damage. It’s an American thing, I suppose. Also, an American thing is the acquisition of overly broad trademarks that border on the laughable. Intersecting these two bastions of American pride is Boise State, with a recent NY Times article discussing how the school managed to trademark athletic fields that include grass that is blue, with attorneys working with the school suggesting that any non-green colored field might result in trademark action.

    • Copyrights

      • Free Wi-Fi in cities? ‘We panicked for five minutes. Then we realised it’s not serious’

        Telecoms companies were as surprised as anyone when Jean-Claude Juncker announced Wednesday (14 September) that the European Commission wants every city and village in the EU to offer some free public Wi-Fi by 2020.

        “We panicked for five minutes. Then we realised it’s not serious,” one industry source said.

        Juncker mentioned the plan during his annual “State of the Union” speech early yesterday.

        But the proposal that was published a few hours later doesn’t actually guarantee free wireless internet access.

09.15.16

Links 15/9/2016: CUPS 2.2, Copyright Undermines European Internet Users

Posted in News Roundup at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Opens Doors for Comms Startups

    Open source can break down barriers to startups and innovation in the comms industry, which can often be resistant to new ideas.

    “Our industry as a whole has a high barrier to entry for startups, and new small companies,” Tom Anschutz, distinguished member of the AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) technical staff, said, speaking on a panel about the future of the data center. “With open source, SDN and NFV, one of the roles and responsibilities of innovating and bringing new things to the industry has opened up.”

    However, while open source provides great value, somebody’s got to provide packaged support, Trey Hall, vice president of marketing and technology for Walker and Associates, said. Barriers to entry are low, but support is still challenging.

  • What Open-Source Software Could Mean For Agriculture

    A lot of computer software is proprietary – you have to buy it, and modifying the code is strictly off-limits. But another type of software – called “open-source software” – performs as its name implies. Anyone is free to inspect, modify or enhance it.

    Over the years, this method of coding has led to some useful innovations, primarily for a variety of everyday computing tasks that pretty much anyone using the Internet today unknowingly takes advantage of. Now, open-source software is bleeding into the agriculture industry.

  • TaxBrain: Open source economic forecasting

    As economic policy becomes more complex, it grows less transparent.

    To bring some insight into the data and forecasts, the American Enterprise Institute’s Open Source Policy Center (OSPC) has developed a new approach to policy analysis.

    The TaxBrain web application lets users simulate and study the effect of tax policy reforms using open source economic models. Developed and launched in April by OSPC, TaxBrain aims “to make economic policy analysis more transparent, accessible and scientific,” AEI officials said.

  • Top 10 Google Open Source Projects You Must Know

    Google is a titan in the technology industry. Google has contributed to nearly every front of technology, and, since the Alphabet restructuring, has become the single most valuable company in the world. Google has also made some notable contributions to the open source community in the form of Android, Chromium OS, Go, Material Design Icons etc.

  • CloudBees Announces First Enterprise Distribution of Jenkins, Combining Open Source Innovation with Enterprise-Class Reliability and Stability
  • From MIT to MapR, Big Data Training is Becoming Easily Accessible
  • 3 open source alternatives to PowerPoint

    PowerPoint is one of those programs whose use has become so ingrained in the corporate world that it is probably running the risk of becoming completely genericized, in the same way that some people use Kleenex to refer to all tissues, or BAND-AIDs to refer to all bandages.

    But presenting a slideshow doesn’t have to mean using PowerPoint. There are a number of totally capable open source alternatives to PowerPoint for giving visual presentations. In many cases, the features of these “alternatives” are so compelling that, unless you’re absolutely forced to use PowerPoint, I don’t know why you still would.

  • Global group communication and culture tips

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Mirantis Acquires TCP Cloud to Advance Kubernetes Ambitions

      Based in Prague, TCP Cloud provides managed services around deployments of OpenStack, OpenContrail and Kubernetes technologies. Mirantis CEO Alex Freedland says the addition of technology developed by TCP Cloud will reduce the amount of time it would have taken Mirantis to move OpenStack to Kubernetes by six to nine months. As a result, he says, Mirantis expects to show the first fruits of a joint development effort involving CoreOS, Google and Intel in the first quarter of 2017.

    • Marrying Ephemeral Docker Containers to Persistent Data

      Docker containers are ephemeral by design. They come and they go like a herd of hyperactive squirrels, which is great for high availability, but not so great for preserving your data. Kendrick Coleman of EMC {code} demonstrated how to have both ephemeral containers and persistent data in his talk called “Highly Available & Distributed Containers” at ContainerCon North America.

      As container technologies become more complex, using them becomes easier. Coleman gave a wonderful presentation using a Minecraft game to demonstrate persistent data storage with ephemeral containers, and did it all live. This setup requires two technologies that were not available as recently as a year ago: Docker SwarmKit and REX-Ray.

    • Docker + Golang = Heart

      This is a short collection of tips and tricks showing how Docker can be useful when working with Go code. For instance, I’ll show you how to compile Go code with different versions of the Go toolchain, how to cross-compile to a different platform (and test the result!), or how to produce really small container images.

      The following article assumes that you have Docker installed on your system. It doesn’t have to be a recent version (we’re not going to use any fancy feature here).

    • Docker Partner Program Unlocks DevOps, ALM Opportunities

      When Docker unveiled a formalized channel program today, partners gained a new springboard that could launch them deeper into DevOps, application lifecycle management and various managed services.

      The partner program launch was nearly three years in the making. To understand the journey, rewind to January 2014. That’s when the software container company hired former Red Hat Channel Chief Roger Egan as senior VP of sales.

      At the time, Egan told me Docker’s influence across the IT market could eventually eclipse Linux’s impact. Sure, Linux freed the world from expensive Unix servers and enabled data center consolidation projects. But containers, he reasoned, could speed application deployments across all types of on-premises and cloud systems.

    • Front Ends and Extensions Take Hadoop in New Directions

      Across the history of data analytics, marquee-level applications have always given rise to useful front ends and connectors that extend what the original applications were capable of. For example, the dominance of the spreadsheet gave rise to macros, plugins, and extensions. Likewise, the rise of SQL database applications ushered in database front ends, plugins, and connectors. Now, Big Data titan Hadoop is inspiring its own ecosystem of powerful extensions and front ends.

      To explain what a difference these extenders and connectors can make, here are some examples of how Hadoop can be taken in new directions with these tools.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • It’s time to make LibreOffice and OpenOffice one again

      Let’s talk about OpenOffice. More than likely you’ve already read, countless times, that Apache OpenOffice is near the end. The last stable iteration was 4.1.2 (released October, 2015) and a recent major security flaw took a month to patch. A lack of coders has brought development to a creeping crawl. And then, the worst possible news hit the ether; the project suggested users switch to MS Office (or LibreOffice).

      For whom the bells tolls? The bell tolls for thee, OpenOffice.

      I’m going to say something that might ruffle a few feathers. Are you ready for it?

      The end of OpenOffice will be a good thing for open source and for users.

    • Oracle happy to let Apache Foundation adopt NetBeans

      The IDE allows development in Java and in other languages and runs operating systems that can fire up a JVM. As the Foundation explains in its proposal, “NetBeans has approximately 1.5 million active users around the world, in extremely diverse structures and organizations.” Students, teachers, “large organizations who base their software on the application framework beneath NetBeans” and many others use the tool.

      But the Foundation points out that “NetBeans has been run by Oracle, with the majority of code contributions coming from Oracle.”

      Moving the project to the Foundation is therefore seen as a way “to expand the diversity of contributors and to increase the level of meritocracy in NetBeans.”

      The Foundation seems to be betting that things can’t get worse with the potential for more contributors that would come with its stewardship. The proposal therefore says that “… though Oracle will relinquish its control over NetBeans, individual contributors from Oracle are expected to continue contributing to NetBeans after it has been contributed to Apache, together with individual contributors from other organizations, as well as self-employed individual contributors.”

  • Healthcare

    • Yes, We’ve Migrated!

      Since March, 30 2000 Linux Medical News has been on the Zope-based Squishdot blog before there was blogs software. After 16 years and 1963 articles (has it been that long?) we’ve finally moved to WordPress. As always, for 16 years, your announcements your news your opinions are welcome at http://linuxmednews.com

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Guile 2.1.4 released (beta)

      We are delighted to announce GNU Guile release 2.1.4, the next pre-release in what will become the 2.2 stable series.

      This release fixes many small bugs, adds an atomic reference facility, and improves the effectiveness of integer unboxing in the compiler. See the release announcement for full details and a download link.

  • Public Services/Government

    • MEP: publicly funded software should be public

      Software developed with public funds should be made available as free and open source software, says Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda. Sharing source code should become a standard in IT procurement across the EU, the MEP says.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Copyleft and data: databases as poor subject

      Open licensing works when you strike a healthy balance between obligations and reuse. Data, and how it is used, is different from software in ways that change that balance, making reasonable compromises in software (like attribution) suddenly become insanely difficult barriers.

    • What the rise of permissive open source licenses means

      This FUD about open source software is mainly about open source licensing. There are many different licenses, some more restrictive (some people use the term “protective”) than others. Restrictive licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) use the concept of copyleft, which grants people the right to freely distribute copies and modified versions of a piece of software as long as the same rights are preserved in derivative works. The GPL (v3) is used by open source projects such as bash and GIMP. There’s also the Affero GPL, which provides copyleft to software that is offered over a network (for example as a web service.)

      What this means is that if you take code that is licensed in this way and you modify it by adding some of your own proprietary code, then in some circumstances the whole new body of code, including your code, becomes subject to the restrictive open source license. It was this type of license that Ballmer was probably referring to when he made his statement.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Dutch public agencies fail to register open data on national portal

        Less than one in ten Dutch public agencies has registered any open data on the national open data portal. For municipalities, this falls to only one in twenty. These are the main results of an assessment performed by the Open State Foundation.

        According to the foundation, from 1,069 government organisations only 89 have datasets that can be found via the central government’s open data portal: Although all ministries and provinces have registered one or more datasets, datasets from only 21 of a total of 395 municipalities, seven of 246 regional cooperation bodies, 12 of 155 Self-Governing Bodies and four of the 23 water boards can be found. High Councils of State and Public Bodies have not registered any open datasets yet.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Meet Hyperledger: An “Umbrella” for Open Source Blockchain & Smart Contract Technologies

      It’s hard to believe I’ve been working at The Linux Foundation on Hyperledger for four months already. I’ve been blown away by the amount of interest and support the project has received since the beginning of the year. As things really start to take off, I think it’s important to take a step back to reflect and recapitulate why and what we’re doing with Hyperledger. Simply put, we see Hyperledger as an “umbrella” for software developer communities building open source blockchain and related technologies. In this blog post, I’m going to try to define what we mean by “umbrella,” that is, the rationale behind it and how we expect that model to work towards building a neutral, foundational community.

    • Hitchhiker’s Guide to IoT Standards and Protocols

      The framework of course depends on if your deployment is going to be internal, such as in a factory, or external, such as a consumer product. In this conversation, we’ll focus on products that are launching externally to a wider audience of customers, and for that, we have a lot to consider.

    • Standards Move at Snail’s Pace for the NFV Community

      There’s a general consensus among people working on telco virtualization that open source groups are replacing traditional standards groups.

      “In open source, code is the coin of the realm; express yourself with something that is useful,” said Tom Anschutz, distinguished member of AT&T’s technical staff, speaking yesterday at Light Reading’s 2016 NFV & Carrier SDN event.

Leftovers

  • Gmail hit by global outage

    A global Gmail outage that began at 1.16am AEST this morning has affected millions of users across the world.

    Nine hours later, at 10.45am AEST, the company was still claiming that the service had been restored for “some users” as it did four times earlier after the initial announcement of the breakdown of the service.

    The first message at 1.16am said there were indications that the issue only affected Google for Work Gmail users.

    Subsequent messages did not clarify whether this was correct or not.

    About 40 minutes later, Google said it had identified the root cause of the issue and was implementing a “potential fix”.

  • Science

    • A ‘Memory Hacker’ Explains How to Plant False Memories in People’s Minds

      We tend to think of memories as perfect little time capsules—important records of past events that matter to us and made us who we are, as unchangeable as a dragonfly stuck in amber. Well, they’re anything but. I recently met with Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist who specializes in the science of memory. “I am a memory hacker,” Shaw told me. “I use the science of memory to make you think you did things that never happened.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Alcohol Industry Bankrolls Fight Against Legal Pot in Battle of the Buzz

      The fight against legalized pot is being heavily bankrolled by alcohol and pharmaceutical companies, terrified that they might lose market share.

      On the heels of a filing last week that revealed that a synthetic cannabis company is financing the opposition to legal marijuana in Arizona comes a new disclosure this week that a beer industry group made one of the largest donations to an organization set up to defeat legalization in Massachusetts.

      The Beer Distributors PAC, an affiliate that represents 16 beer-distribution companies in Massachusetts, gave $25,000 to the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy Massachusetts, tying it for third place among the largest contributors to the anti-pot organization.

    • UN High-Level Panel On Access To Medicines Issues “Landmark” Report

      The long-awaited report by the United Nations High Level Panel on Access to Medicines was released today, making many recommendations. The panel calls for countries to embrace the policy space available in the World Trade Organization intellectual property rules, and invest more in health. It also calls for negotiation of a binding international treaty on research and development, delinking prices from R&D costs, greater transparency in drug pricing, public health impact assessments in free trade agreements, and encouragement to better use international legal tools available to countries to ensure affordable medical products. And it lays out the path ahead, calling for several new bodies to be created to take recommendations forward.

    • Pharma Company Funding Anti-Pot Fight Worried About Losing Business, Filings Show

      Pharmaceutical executives who recently made a major donation to an anti-marijuana legalization campaign claimed they were doing so out of concern for the safety of children — but their investor filings reveal that pot poses a direct threat to their plans to cash in on a synthetic cannabis product they have developed.

      On August 31, Insys Therapeutics Inc. donated $500,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, becoming the single largest donor to the group leading the charge to defeat a ballot measure in Arizona to legalize marijuana.

      The drug company, which currently markets a fast-acting version of the deadly painkiller fentanyl, assured local news reporters that they had the public interest in mind when making the hefty donation. A spokesperson told the Arizona Republic that Insys opposes the legalization measure, Prop. 205, “because it fails to protect the safety of Arizona’s citizens, and particularly its children.”

      A Washington Post story on Friday noted the potential self-interest involved in Insys’s donation.

      Investor filings examined by The Intercept confirm the obvious.

    • Slovakia food producers call on govt to reject TTIP to stop the EU “being flooded” with GMOs

      EXCERPT: TTIP has met resistance from the public, governments and parliaments of both Austria and France. The controversial deal will reduce consumer protection as well as the safety of foodstuffs.

    • MSF Report Calls On Governments To Repair, Remodel Biomedical R&D

      Governments are urged to do more to promote the development of desperately-needed new medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics at affordable prices and address the failures of research and development (R&D) in a new report by Médecins Sans Frontières.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • DevOps and the Art of Secure Application Deployment

      Secure application deployment principles must extend from the infrastructure layer all the way through the application and include how the application is actually deployed, according to Tim Mackey, Senior Technical Evangelist at Black Duck Software. In his upcoming talk, “Secure Application Development in the Age of Continuous Delivery” at LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe, Mackey will discuss how DevOps principles are key to reducing the scope of compromise and examine why it’s important to focus efforts on what attackers’ view as vulnerable.

    • Sept 2016 Patch Tuesday: Microsoft released 14 security bulletins, rated 7 as critical

      Microsoft released 14 security bulletins for September, seven of which are rated critical due to remote code execution flaws. Microsoft in all its wisdom didn’t regard all RCEs as critical. There’s also an “important rated” patch for a publicly disclosed flaw which Microsoft claims isn’t a zero-day being exploited. But at least a 10-year-old hole is finally being plugged.

      Next month marks a significant change as Microsoft says it intends roll out “servicing changes” that include bundled patches. Unless things change, not all Windows users will be able to pick and choose specific security updates starting in October.

    • Microsoft Patches Zero Day Flaw Used In Two Massive Malvertising Campaigns [Ed: Microsoft, as usual, told the NSA about this months before patching]

      Microsoft was first notified about the so-called information disclosure bug in September 2015, security vendor Proofpoint said in an alert this week. But a patch for it became available only after Trend Micro and Proofpoint reported the bug again to Microsoft more recently when researching a massive malvertising campaign being operated by a group called AdGholas, the alert noted.

    • Finnish police: Keep your car keys in the fridge

      If there’s a car in your yard that has automatic, so-called ‘smart’ keys, you should consider keeping the keys in the fridge. That’s the message from Finnish police, who say that high-tech criminals could hack cars with such systems.

      “It sounds strange, but it makes sense,” said Jari Tiiainen of the National Bureau of Investigation.

      These so-called smart keys work by emitting a signal when the driver touches the door handle. The lock opens when it recognises the key’s signal. Criminals have technology that can strengthen that signal even from a hundred metres away—well inside the residential property where most owners keep their keys, according to Eero Heino of the If insurance company.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Putin-Bashing Fuels Hard-line Russian Reaction

      Last week, Hillary Clinton told reporters on her campaign plane that the Russians are trying to disrupt the U.S. elections to discredit the process and sow discord among Americans. This goes one step further than her previous charges of Russian influence through the “Kremlin’s candidate,” Donald Trump, or still earlier, the claim that the Democratic National Committee’s server had been hacked by intelligence services reporting to Vladimir Putin. Of course, all these charges were made without proof.

    • Donald Trump’s Not Anti-War, He Just Wants the U.S. Military to Focus on Stealing Oil

      Donald Trump’s attempt to present himself as an anti-war candidate is based on his perfect 20/20 hindsight of the disastrous consequences of regime change in Iraq and Libya — military campaigns he publicly supported when they were popular, and only turned against after they went wrong.

      To better understand that Trump really is, as he insisted during the Republican primary campaign, “much more militaristic” than even George W. Bush, it helps to look at how often he has presented his bizarre plan to use the United States military as the muscle in a global protection racket, aimed at extorting oil from countries we destroy.

    • Philippine president calls for US special forces to leave Mindanao

      Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, in a speech before newly sworn-in government officials on September 12, called for US special forces to leave the southern island of Mindanao. The next day, in an address to the Philippine Air Force, he said the Philippines would no longer stage joint patrols with the United States in the South China Sea.

      Duterte also declared he was looking to secure arms from China and Russia, saying he would send Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana to these countries to see what they had to offer.

      The statements mark a further souring of ties between Manila and Washington under the new president. The US State Department responded by saying it had received no formal notice from the Philippines regarding its special forces in Mindanao and thus would not pull the troops out.

    • Getting Fooled on Iraq, Libya, Now Russia

      A British parliamentary inquiry into the Libyan fiasco has reported what should have been apparent from the start in 2011 – and was to some of us – that the West’s military intervention to “protect” civilians in Benghazi was a cover for what became another disastrous “regime change” operation.

      The report from the U.K.’s Foreign Affairs Committee confirms that the U.S. and other Western governments exaggerated the human rights threat posed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and then quickly morphed the “humanitarian” mission into a military invasion that overthrew and killed Gaddafi, leaving behind political and social chaos.

    • Pressure Mounts to Punish Russia For Hacking Without Evidence And Before Investigations Are Concluded

      While it’s certainly possible Russia has been busy using hackers to meddle in (or at least stoke the idiot pyres burning beneath) the U.S. elections, we’ve noted how actual evidence of this is hard to come by. At the moment, most of this evidence consists of either comments by anonymous government officials, or murky proclamations from security firms that have everything to gain financially from stoking cybersecurity tensions. Of course, transparent evidence is hard to come by when talking about hackers capable of false flag operations while obfuscating their footprints completely.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • BBC climate coverage is evolving, but too slowly

      For years, the BBC has been criticised for the false balance of its climate change coverage. And for years, the BBC has apparently been doing “ongoing work” to fix it. So far, however, this ‘reform’ has been more like a triumph of the middling. Yes, the BBC may broadcast less outright misinformation, but as a scientist and a citizen, I still feel let down by its continually careless handling of climate denial – most recently two weeks ago. This nod to mediocrity is a disservice to science, to public trust, and to the biggest news story in the world. And it is a huge, missed opportunity.

      As a young PhD graduate working on climate change solutions, I am confronted daily by a world where the warnings of science are undercut by Fox ‘News’ and its ilk. It is a very different world to the trustworthy BBC broadcasts of David Attenborough and the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures that I grew up with, which helped inspire me to become a scientist. But as a recent BBC News segment by Science Editor David Shukman sadly reminded me, those worlds can too easily collide.

    • Compassion Isn’t a Crime: Giving Thirsty Pigs Water Isn’t a Crime

      On the summer day of June 22, a Van Boekel Hog Farms slaughterhouse transportation truck headed to Fearman’s Pork Inc. was stationary, Anita Krajnc, the co-founder of Toronto Pig Save, and another activist stopped to give the pigs water and document their experience. The driver confronted the two women and told them to stop giving the pigs water. While Krajnc asked the driver to show compassion, he threatened her with physical assault and called the police.

      Now Krajnc is being charged with criminal mischief — interference with the use, enjoyment of and operation of property — under $5,000 for showing thirsty pigs compassion. Although there are reports that she’s willing to go to jail.

      Compassion is NOT criminal! Why do inmates on death row get a last meal, but innocent pigs are denied water? Why are praised for helping thirsty dogs and cats, but charged as criminals for helping pigs?

    • UK to ban fishing from a million square kilometres of ocean

      The UK is to ban commercial fishing from a million square kilometres of ocean around British overseas territories, the government said on Thursday.

      In total, the government is creating marine protected areas around four islands in the Pacific and Atlantic, including the designation this week of one of the world’s biggest around the Pitcairn Islands.

      A 840,000 sq km (320,000 sq mile) area around Pitcairn, where the mutineers of the Bounty settled, becomes a no-take zone for any fishing from this week. St Helena, around 445,000 sq km of the south Atlantic ocean and home to whale sharks and humpbacks, is now also designated as a protected area.

      The foreign office said it would designate two further marine protection zones, one each around two south Altantic islands – Ascension by 2019 and Tristan da Cunha by 2020.

      Sir Alan Duncan, minister of state for Europe and the Americas, said: “Protecting 4m sq km of ocean is a fantastic achievement, converting our historic legacy into modern environmental success.”

    • Standing Rock Sioux on the front lines of the climate emergency

      The fight by the Standing Rock Sioux to halt the Dakota Access Pipeline has emerged as one of the defining climate justice fights in the United States.

      It has also become a central focal point of the ongoing worldwide struggle by indigenous peoples to have their treaty and land rights respected by other governments and corporations. (The fact that corporations operate as de facto government is a galling example of the need for the Green Party).

      Representatives of more than 280 Native American tribes have now participated in the occupation, an unprecedented gathering of indigenous peoples after centuries of war, genocide, and land theft.

      Indigenous people are among the most vulnerable communities on the front lines of the climate crisis, and are leading the fight. Corporations have repeatedly used force to extract fossil fuels from their lands with approval from government attorneys and military forces. Major pipeline projects invariably cut across Native lands while bypassing white suburban communities.

      We must follow the lead of indigenous communities that have protected their land for countless generations, and work together in solidarity to ensure a thriving planet for future generations and all living beings.

      Ajamu Baraka, my Vice Presidential running mate, and I visited the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s occupation last week. We went to demonstrate Green Party solidarity with their struggle. The silence of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on this issue is deafening.

  • Finance

    • Juncker’s CETA support undermines pledges on climate and citizens’ rights

      European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker today reaffirmed his commitment to CETA – the EU-Canada trade deal – calling it as “the best and most progressive agreement that we have ever entered into.”

      His comments came during the annual State of the European Union address, where he also spoke about his regret at the slow pace of the ratification of the Paris climate agreement (“Dragging our feet on ratification affects our credibility and makes us look ridiculous”) and promised to protect farmers (“The Commission will always stand by our farmers”) and citizens’ rights (“In Europe, consumers are protected against cartels and abuses by powerful companies”).

    • September 15, 2016 Publication

      TiSA is often considered the “little” brother of the two “big” trade agreements TPP or TTIP – but this view seems more and more inappropriate, as the global economy is shifting towards a service-oriented/based economy. According to the World Bank, world-wide trade in services in 2015 was around 13% of the global GDP; for the EU it is even twice that figure (around 24% of its total GDP). But it is not just these numbers alone that prove that the TiSA negotiations deserve a much higher attention in the public discussion as they currently have:

    • Former DWP disabilities minister set to be suspended from Parliament for leaking payday loan report to Wonga

      A former DWP minister with responsibility for disabled people is set to be suspended from the House of Commons for leaking a parliamentary report to a payday lender.

      Justin Tomlinson shared the findings of a draft report into regulating payday loans with an employee of Wonga.

    • Justin Tomlinson faces suspension for Wonga report leak

      A former DWP minister with responsibility for disabled people is set to be suspended from the House of Commons for leaking a parliamentary report to a payday lender.

      Justin Tomlinson shared the findings of a draft report into regulating payday loans with an employee of Wonga.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • A Busy Day for the Bears

      Finally, there was the “appearance” at a security conference by Guccifer 2.0, the guy who has released the DNC emails that gave the Democrats an excuse to force Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s to resign, though they had been looking for an excuse for some time.

      In point of fact, Guccifer 2.0 didn’t appear in person at the conference. Rather, he sent a speech which got read at the conference, with the transcript released to journalists. The speech focused on the negligence of software companies in security. Guccifer went on for several paragraphs about the power and sloppiness of tech companies, arguing they were to blame for hacks.

    • Trump’s Call for a Flood of Poll Watchers Could Disrupt Some Voting Places

      Donald Trump’s campaign website implores voters to “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” by signing up as observers. He warned people at an Aug. 12 campaign event in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Clinton could win the state only by cheating, and he asked supporters to “go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don’t come in and vote five times.” Less than a week later, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, encouraged a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, to help ensure a fair election by serving as poll watchers because “you are the greatest vanguard for integrity in voting.”

    • Here’s Where the Candidates Stand on 3 Crucial Science Topics

      In August, the presidential campaigns of Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and Libertarian Gary Johnson were sent 20 crucial science topics to consider. The questions for each topic were determined by leading American scientific institutions and what they felt were today’s most pressing issues in science and technology.

    • Guccifer 2.0 strikes again: DNC chair blames ‘Russian agents’

      The Democratic National Committee chairwoman said the DNC was the victim of a Russian cyberattack after the infamous hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 — who leaked internal Democratic documents ahead of the party’s convention this summer — released more apparent DNC documents Tuesday.

      The most recent leak includes information about the DNC’s finances, donors’ personal contact information and the DNC’s network infrastructure, according to CNN. The leak also includes vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine’s cell phone number and the contact information for several top White House officials, NBC News reported. No emails appear to have been included.

    • How a Harmless Frog Became a ‘Nazi Symbol’: Pepe’s an Issue in US Election

      Additionally, the first link Google provides when searching for Pepe the frog is a new page on the Clinton website explaining how the popular meme, dating to 2008, is now a symbol of white supremacy.

      Over on Wikipedia, editors have been engaged in an edit war, after the page was changed to say that the anthropomorphic frog is associated with Trump, white nationalism, and the alt-right.

    • Colin Powell calls Trump ‘national disgrace’ in hacked emails

      Former secretary of State and retired four-star general Colin Powell called Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “a national disgrace” and “international pariah,” and said “Hillary’s mafia” was trying to drag him into Clinton’s email scandal in personal emails that were leaked by hackers, according to online news organizations BuzzFeed and The Daily Caller.

      Powell made the remarks about Trump in a June 17, 2016, email to Emily Miller, a journalist who once worked under Powell as a deputy press secretary at the State Department. In the email Powell said Trump, “is in the process of destroying himself, no need for the Dems to attack him,” according to BuzzFeed. “Paul Ryan is calibrating his position again,” Powell said of the speaker of the House who had only recently decided to endorse Trump at the time of the email.

      An aide to Powell confirmed the hack Wednesday, telling The New York Times “they are his emails.”

      Around 30,000 stolen Powell emails were given to DCLeaks.com by unnamed hackers, The Daily Caller reported. There is speculation among some computer experts and Democratic politicians that DCLeaks has ties to Russian intelligence services, according to The Wall Street Journal. There is concern that leaks from the site are intended to influence the outcome of the upcoming presidential election.

    • Five dramatic revelations from Powell’s leaked emails

      Candid emails from former Secretary of State Colin Powell are causing a stir across the country with their blunt assessment of a host of Washington’s stars.

      The emails, released by hackers behind a WikiLeaks-type website believed to have ties to Russian intelligence, show Powell criticizing Donald Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney.

      The remarks, made by Powell in private to friends and colleagues, contrast with the statesmanlike image cultivated over a long military and political career.

      Powell served under President George W. Bush and endorsed Barack Obama in his two White House bids, and has generally avoided controversy in and out of office.

      The emails, first reported by BuzzFeed and The Intercept, were posted under password protection at DCLeaks. A spokesperson for Powell confirmed to media outlets that the emails were his.

      The website that leaked the emails reportedly has a relationship with Guccifer 2.0, who leaked damaging emails from Democratic groups earlier this summer, according to security experts.

      Here are five of their most eyebrow-raising revelations.

    • Research Proves Google Manipulates Millions to Favor Clinton

      In this exclusive report, distinguished research psychologist Robert Epstein explains the new study and reviews evidence that Google’s search suggestions are biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. He estimates that biased search suggestions might be able to shift as many as 3 million votes in the upcoming presidential election in the US.

      Biased search rankings can swing votes and alter opinions, and a new study shows that Google’s autocomplete can too.

      A scientific study I published last year showed that search rankings favoring one candidate can quickly convince undecided voters to vote for that candidate — as many as 80 percent of voters in some demographic groups. My latest research shows that a search engine could also shift votes and change opinions with another powerful tool: autocomplete.

    • Colin Powell, in Hacked Emails, Shows Scorn for Trump and Irritation at Clinton

      Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has long been one of the high priests of the Washington establishment, staying quiet in this year’s raucous presidential campaign while tending to his reputation as a thoughtful officer and diplomat.

      But a hack of Mr. Powell’s email this week has ripped away the diplomatic jargon and political niceties to reveal his unvarnished disdain of Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” his personal peeves with Hillary Clinton and his lingering, but still very raw, anger with the Republican colleagues with whom he so often clashed a decade ago.

      There has been an expectation that Mr. Powell, who waited until the final weeks to endorse Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, would do the same for Mrs. Clinton this year. But in one 2014 email released online, Mr. Powell lamented that while he respected Mrs. Clinton, he would “rather not have to vote for her,” describing the Democratic presidential nominee as having “a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational.”

      The emails make clear that if Mr. Powell endorses Mrs. Clinton, he will be motivated by intense feelings about Mr. Trump, whom he also called an “international pariah.”

    • Foreign Spending on U.S. Elections Threatens National Security, FEC Commissioner Says

      Calling foreign influence on U.S. elections “a matter of national security,” FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub is joining her colleague Ann Ravel in calling for the full commission to plug the flow of foreign money into American political campaigns.

      In a new memo to her five fellow commissioners, Weintraub writes that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision created “new avenues for corporate political activity would make our democracy vulnerable to foreign individuals, corporations, and governments that seek to manipulate our elections.” Weintraub will ask the full FEC at its meeting on Thursday to begin the process of writing new regulations to deal with Citizens United and foreign money.

      Weintraub cites recent reporting by The Intercept on a $1.3 million donation by a U.S. corporation owned by Chinese citizens to a Super PAC backing Jeb Bush as evidence that this is not a “hypothetical” issue. “A person would have to be wearing some very rose-colored glasses,” Weintraub writes, “to think there are not foreign operatives interested in exploiting any vulnerability to influence our elections.”

      Her fellow commissioner Ann Ravel called on the FEC to take action in August, in the wake of The Intercept’s story.

      The Citizens United decision opened up a peculiar loophole for foreign money. Federal law prohibits “foreign nationals” — a legal term encompassing foreign individuals, corporations and governments — from putting money into the U.S. political process. But federal law also states that any company legally incorporated in the U.S., no matter its ultimate ownership, is a U.S. national.

    • 2016 Election Lawsuit Tracker: The New Election Laws and the Suits Challenging Them

      There are 15 states with new voting laws that have never before been used during a presidential election, according to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice. These laws include restrictions like voter ID requirements and limits on early voting. Many are making their way through the courts, which have already called a halt to two laws in the past month — one in North Carolina and one in North Dakota.

    • Another Unrealistic Trump Policy Proposal: Homeschool Vouchers

      GOP nominee Donald Trump has said he plans to spend billions of dollars on so-called school choice programs. The $20 billion in federal funds would be available only to what he says are 11 million children living in poverty who are also “trapped in failing schools.” Families will be eligible for vouchers to send their children to charter, magnet or even private religious schools. Last Friday, he announced the policy would include homeschooling as well.

      “School choice is at the center of this civil rights agenda, and my goal is to provide every single inner-city child in America that is trapped in a failing government school the freedom to attend the school of their choice,” he said at a conservative voters conference. “School choice also means that parents can homeschool their children. Hundred percent.”

      But there’s one problem with Trump’s homeschooling plan: Impoverished homeschoolers mostly don’t exist.

    • The Green Party’s Jill Stein goes on the trail, packs a tent

      Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, stepped out of her small tent at the edge of the Missouri River here, where she’d slept in an encampment of protesters the night before. The tent and tarps of her small entourage had been procured second-hand right before this visit, and the plan was to leave the items behind as a donation to the cause.

      It was still early in the day, and a warrant had not yet been issued for her arrest — that would come much later. For the moment, this least known and most quixotic of the presidential candidates was but one of thousands of people who’d gathered to try to stop the construction of a planned $3.8 billion, 1,200-mile Dakota Access Pipeline, which they fear will desecrate sacred burial lands and potentially poison the water source for millions downstream.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Deadspin Mocks New Owners Univision By Cleverly Reposting Deleted Mitch Williams Story As New Story About The Lawsuit

      Right, so remember how over the weekend the spineless execs at Univision decided to delete six articles from various Gawker properties? The reasoning made very little sense. The company claimed that since it had only agreed to acquire the assets of Gawker, but none of the liabilities, it felt that it needed to delete the six articles that were part of existing lawsuits (they also changed an image in one that was the subject of a copyright dispute). As we (and basically everyone else) pointed out, this was ridiculous on multiple levels. First, due to the single publication rule, any liability likely would be only for that initial publication. But, more importantly, the lawsuits in question were all pretty obviously bogus.

      Univision has been trying to go into damage control mode, including a long interview with JK Trotter at Gizmodo, answering a bunch of questions from angry Gawker reporters. Univision continues to stand by the line that this was solely and 100% about the terms of the transaction, in which they were not acquiring any liabilities, no matter how ridiculous those liabilities might be. They insisted there was no editorial analysis or First Amendment analysis — it was just about the liabilities. Gawker’s reporters are still not happy and have apparently discussed the possibility of a walkout. They’ve also directly posted their unhappiness about the decision.

      But Timothy Burke at Deadspin (one of the former Gawker properties) took things one step further. Somewhat brilliantly, he’s written a brand new article about the latest happenings in a lawsuit involving former Major League Baseball pitcher Mitch Williams. If you don’t know, two of the articles that were taken down were about Williams, and he had sued Gawker over them. Of course, the court had already tossed out the claims against Gawker, since the statements made in the earlier Deadspin articles were all either substantially true or protected opinion. But the overall case continues. Williams is suing MLB Network, which fired him after Deadspin’s original posts. So, in this new article about the lawsuit against MLB Network, Burke uses the opportunity to effectively repost every bit of content that was taken down by Univision management. And this is why it’s clever: he’s not just reposting it, but reposting it from the lawsuit.

    • Censorship Gets Lost In Translation

      It may be the most famous photo of the Vietnam War: A 9-year-old girl flees naked down a highway with other frightened children after American warplanes dropped napalm on their village in an action targeting Viet Cong guerillas.

      Associated Press photographer Nick Ut snapped the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot of Kim Phuc and the other children in 1972. Nearly every daily newspaper in the world ran the photo at the time and in the years that followed. For Americans and our allies, it brought home the suffering of the war and the unanticipated consequences of what we presumed were our good intentions; for our Cold War adversaries, the shot was propaganda manna from the Communist equivalent of heaven.

    • Opinion: Why editors were wrong to damn Facebook for censorship

      Facebook’s initial argument that posting the iconic photo would make it more difficult subsequently to refuse to post other photos of naked children was arguably disingenuous but also just plain faulty. Surely a company with the obvious, indeed mindboggling, technical chops that Facebook possesses, has the ability to create an algorithm to take such markers as Pulitzer Prizes into account when making publication calls. Although there are bigger issues here related to letting algorithms make such editorial judgements in the first place, with or without human assistance, the problem in this particular case really should not have arisen at all.

      But editors also are on shaky ground in trying to dictate to Facebook what it should or should not publish. It is in fact ironic that they should think doing so is appropriate, let alone righteous, behaviour.

    • The Big Read: Facebook is a prissy censor

      Don’t you just hate it when this happens? As content curator for one of the world’s largest social media platforms, you delete a picture you consider obscene. Then some Norwegian woman writes an angry post. So you delete her post, too.

    • Sega Takes Potshots At DMCA-Happy Nintendo While Being Cool About Fan Games

      While Nintendo has been making waves for some time with its overly aggressive DMCA takedowns of any fan-work that includes its intellectual property, the company has really ramped things up lately. Recent actions include the takedown of a Mario fan game, a remake of a 25-year-old Metroid title, and engaging in all kinds of craziness over its Pokemon Go title. It was enough that one of Nintendo’s biggest rivals couldn’t help but take a subtle potshot at it, while simultaneously treating Sega fans like human beings.

      Daniel Coyle, on Twitter as SuperSonic68, headed up a team of Sonic the Hedgehog fans in the development of a fan-made 3D Sonic game. Their work has been received rather well as of late, including on gaming blogs and YouTube channels. When one YouTube channel, GameGrumps, did a “let’s play” of the fan game, it appears that Sega noticed and reached out in the comments section with a poke at Nintendo’s aggressive nature and some encouragement.

    • Facebook denies it’s a media company despite censorship decisions

      Facebook makes value judgements about what can appear in News Feed and what’s censored, but insists its a tech company not a media editor.

      At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, writer Josh Constine sat down with Adam Mosseri, a VP at Facebook and head of News Feed, to hear more about how policies control what you see.

      The talk started with Constine asking Mosseri much content people consume daily on their News Feed. Mosseri shared a new statistic, which is that the average Facebook users reads a little over 200 stories a day on their feed, which is about 10 percent of the 2,000 possible stories Facebook has to show them each day.

    • Director stood against censorship at Cal State Long Beach: Letters

      Cal State Long Beach President Jane Close Conoley effectively canceled the performance of “N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk” at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center. Center Director Michele Roberge resigned, in protest calling the cancellation a form of censorship, but Conoley said she did not intend censorship and said the canceled performance lacked educational value. No matter that the show played at CSULB last year and no student complained. Conoley did say that unnamed professors and sponsors complained.

      Conoley has every right to critique the performance. But canceling something because it lacks educational value is censorship that goes beyond the academic pale. Her censorship policies, if left to stand, will suffocate the creative imagination at CSULB.

      Roberge stood up for academic values. The president should not accept her resignation. If she accepts it, then she should be the one who is resigning. In that case, I hope that faculty, students and all members of the Long Beach community who value freedom of expression call for the president’s resignation.

    • How Chinese Censorship Affects You

      Under the Communist Party, China remains a culturally suppressive society defined by censorship rather than free speech.

      Yet Chinese censorship stifles not only the Chinese citizenry, but also the American public. As globalization accelerates and state-sponsored firms commit to private investment in the West, the Communist Party grows increasingly influential beyond its own borders.

    • Action against sexual harassment in schools is more about protecting the male orgasm than girls

      How much pain and suffering is the male orgasm worth? Is there ever a time when a man’s right to access hardcore pornography is outweighed by the rights of young women to feel safe?

      I am wondering this in light of today’s Women and Equalities Committee Report into sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools. The way in which young men see their female peers is tainted, poisoned by broader cultural narratives about what female bodies are for. Boys are not born with a need to hurt and humiliate for pleasure, but they are acquiring it, and fast.

    • Education, Not Censorship, Is The Key To Addressing Children’s Access To Porn
    • Kick sex education out of schools
    • Schools ‘should teach pupils about porn’: report
    • Facebook ‘censors’ Dakota Access pipeline protest livestream – activists
    • Facebook censored a live stream video posted by Dakota pipeline protesters
    • Dakota Pipeline Protesters Claim Facebook Censored Video of Mass Arrest
    • Anti-pipeline activists claim Facebook censored their live video
    • Dakota Pipeline Activists Accuse Facebook of State Collusion
    • At Least 20 Dakota Pipeline Protesters Arrested
    • Armed Police in Riot Gear Arrest 22 During #NoDAPL Lockdown
    • Bulgaria: Regional media outlets dependent on local governments

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Obama to Welcome Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi for Talks on Sanctions

      President Barack Obama welcomes Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi to the White House Wednesday, where he is eager listen to her views on how far the U.S. should go in lifting sanctions on the southeast Asian country.

      It will be her first visit to the U.S. as State Counselor and Foreign Minister – a position she assumed after her party’s decisive win in last November’s elections. The country’s military era constitution bars her from holding the title of president because her late husband and children are foreign citizens.

      Aung San Suu Kyi spent more than 20 years under house arrest in the country formerly known as Burma. Her meeting with Obama in the Oval Office is viewed as another clear indication that she is Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader.

    • Chelsea Manning will undergo gender transition surgery, lawyer says

      Imprisoned former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has learned that she will receive gender transition surgery, her lawyer told CNN, in what could make her the first US prison inmate to undergo such a procedure.
      Manning, a transgender woman, was convicted of stealing and disseminating 750,000 pages of documents and videos to WikiLeaks.

      The former US Army soldier is serving a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, an all-male Army prison in eastern Kansas, despite her request to transfer to a civilian prison. Her lawyers say she has been denied medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, a condition in which there is a conflict between a person’s physical sex and the gender he or she identifies with.

    • Chelsea Manning Ends Hunger Strike, Will Get Gender Affirming Surgery

      U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning will receive gender affirming surgery, and is ending her hunger strike after five days, her lawyers have confirmed.

      “I am unendingly relieved that the military is finally doing the right thing,” Manning said in a statement. “I applaud them for that. This is all that I wanted — for them to let me be me. But it is hard not to wonder why it has taken so long.”

      Until her surgery, the military will still require Manning to keep her hair short.

    • Romeo and Juliet and Sexting: 17-Year-Old Faces Child Porn, Assault Charges for Consensual Sex with Girlfriend

      “After being arrested, I was suicidal and hopeless,” Austin Yabandith, a 17-year-old from Superior, Wisconsin, recalls. “As of right now, I am just hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.”

      The “worst” would be pretty bad. After discovering indecent photos of Austin’s 15-year-old girlfriend on his cell phone—as well as a video of the couple having sex—authorities charged him with sexual assault of a child, sexual exploitation, and possession of child pornography. The sexual assault charge is considered a Class C felony, and carries a maximum (though unlikely) sentence of 40 years in prison.

    • Two dead in water riots in India’s Silicon Valley

      Relative calm has been restored to the Indian city of Bangalore following the deaths of two men amid riots over an ongoing water dispute.
      Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to protesters to exercise restraint and follow the law as a heavy paramilitary presence was deployed Wednesday. Protests began earlier this week over a water sharing deal between the Indian states of Karnataka and neighboring Tamil Nadu.

      One demonstrator was shot dead by police, Karnataka chief minister S Siddaramaiah said in a press conference Tuesday. Another died in hospital following injuries sustained from a fall while fleeing police during Monday’s clashes.

    • Why Uzbekistan’s Jews already miss the iron fist of their late ruler

      Driving through this dusty desert city of many ornate and ancient mosques, Shirin Yakubov recalls the ruthlessness of her country’s recently deceased president of 25 years.

      “He killed all of them, every last one,” she says of Islam Karimov’s role in the 2005 police massacre of hundreds of suspected Islamists in the eastern city of Andijan following unrest.

    • New fires leave cars ‘destroyed’ in Copenhagen

      One car was burnt in the Amager district and another was torched four hours later in Nørrebro.

      “Both cars are completely destroyed, and we are investigating the fires as arson,” Copenhagen Police spokesman Carsten Reenberg told news agency Ritzau.

      The incidents marked the fourth consecutive night of car fires in the Copenhagen area and bring the total of vehicles burnt since mid-August to over 50.

    • MPs slam ‘national scandal’ of FGM- Britain’s hidden crime

      FGM is typically carried out on girls aged between five and eight. It involves total or partial removal of or injury to female genitalia for non-medical reasons. It is often performed without anaesthetic or by someone without medical qualifications

    • Tyree King, 13, Fatally Shot by Police in Columbus, Ohio

      A police officer in Columbus, Ohio, fatally shot a 13-year-old boy he was trying to detain following reports of an armed robbery, officials said.

      Authorities identified the teenager as Tyree King. The Columbus Division of Police said in a statement that King “pulled a gun from his waistband” when officers attempted to take him and another male into custody Wednesday night.

    • LIU LOCKOUT OVER!!!

      This is an extremely significant victory for all faculty, be they tenured, contingent, tenure-track or adjunct. Be they at LIU or elsewhere.

      We all owe a great thanks to the stalwart faculty at LIU–and to their student supporters. They have demonstrated the limits of institutional fiat, for the good of all faculty everywhere.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • New EU rules promise 100Mbps broadband and free Wi-Fi for all

      The European Commission has promised free Wi-Fi in every town, village, and city in the European Union, in the next four years.

      A new grant, with a total budget of €120 million, will allow public authorities to purchase state-of-the art equipment, for example a local wireless access point. If approved by the the European Parliament and national ministers the cash could be available before the end of next year.

    • ‘High Noon’ Showdown Hearing In US Over Internet Control

      Former US Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz today used a 3.5 hour hearing of a Senate subcommittee he chairs to attempt to scare the US Commerce Department National Telecommunications and Information Administration away at the last minute from its plans to transition out of its stewardship role for the internet root zone system.

    • Gizmodo Completely Misses The Point Of Cord Cutting

      Roughly every month or so I’ll see a story proclaiming that cord cutting is a bad idea because you need to subscribe to multiple services to mirror the same overall volume of content you receive from pay TV. There are a few problems with that logic, first being that cord cutters aren’t looking to precisely duplicate cable TV. They’re looking to get away from paying a small fortune for hundreds of unwatched channels, including an ocean of religious programming, infomercials, whatever the Weather Channel is up to these days, and C-grade channels focused on inherently inane prattle.

      Writers of these pieces always seem to forget that broadcasters dictate the pricing of content on both platforms, so any surprise that the pricing of television remains somewhat high (when you pile on multiple streaming services) is just kind of silly. All told, “cord cutting is really expensive when I subscribe to every streaming service in the known universe” is just a weird narrative that just keeps bubbling up across various media outlets despite not really making much sense.

    • New York City Threatens To Sue Verizon For Failure To Meet Fiber Deployment Promises

      We’ve noted for years now how Verizon’s modus operandi is to promise uniform fiber deployment to a city or state in exchange for all manner of subsidies and tax breaks, then walk away giggling to itself with the job only partially complete. This story has played out time and time again thanks to city and state contracts struck behind closed doors without public transparency, allowing Verizon to bury numerous loopholes in the contract language. Other times, Verizon can lobby to weaken oversight so that there’s simply nobody left to hold Verizon accountable when it decides to laugh off the contract requirements.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • WIPO Committee Approves Forbin As New Top Copyright Official [Ed: the abusive WIPO put the copyright monopoly (industry) in charge of copyright]

        The nomination of Sylvie Forbin of France to be the next head of copyright issues at the World Intellectual Property Organization was finalised yesterday as the WIPO Coordination Committee approved her appointment. Forbin is set to start work at WIPO on Monday.

        Forbin would be the deputy director general for copyright and the creative sector at WIPO.

        She is a corporate lobbyist for media giant Viacom in Paris, and worked with French foreign service in the past.

      • WiFi Providers Can Be Forced To Require Passwords On Rightsholder Request, ECJ Rules

        The European Court of Justice today ruled that a shop offering WiFi is not liable for copyright infringements on its network but may be forced by rightsholders to require passwords to use the network.

      • EU Announces Absolutely Ridiculous Copyright Proposal That Will Chill Innovation, Harm Creativity

        This is not a surprise given the earlier leaks of what the EU Commission was cooking up for a copyright reform package, but the end result is here and it’s a complete disaster for everyone. And I do mean everyone. Some will argue that it’s a gift to Hollywood and legacy copyright interests — and there’s an argument that that’s the case. But the reality is that this proposal is so bad that it will end up doing massive harm to everyone. It will clearly harm independent creators and the innovative platforms that they rely on. And, because those platforms have become so important to even the legacy entertainment industry, it will harm them too. And, worst of all, it will harm the public greatly. It’s difficult to see how this proposal will benefit anyone, other than maybe some lawyers.

        Not surprisingly, the EU Commission is playing up the fact that this package does knock down some geoblocking in setting up more of a “single market” for digital content, but after Hollywood started freaking out about it, that proposal got watered down so much that plenty of content will still be geo-blocked. And there’s so much other stuff in here that’s just really, really bad. As expected, it includes a ridiculous ancillary copyright scheme, which should really just be called the “Google tax” for linking to copyright-covered content.

        The proposal does away with the liability limitations for platforms, effectively requiring any tech platform that allows user-generated/user-uploaded content to build or license their very own ContentID system. This is ridiculous. If the idea was to punish Google, this will do the opposite. Basically no startup will be able to afford this, and it will just lock in platforms like YouTube as the only option for content creators wishing to upload video. Protecting intermediary liability has been shown, time and time again, to enable new innovation and also to enable greater creativity and free speech — and the EU Commission basically just tossed it in the garbage because some Hollywood interests think (incorrectly) that internet companies “abuse” the protections.

      • Prenda’s Paul Hansmeier Loses His Law License; Won’t Be Filing Bogus ADA Lawsuits For Now

        Of course, when we last checked in with Hansmeier he was aggressively filing questionable ADA lawsuits, basically shaking down small retail stores for any possible violation of the ADA he could find. I’m guessing that’s going to need to stop — but I do wonder if he’ll find someone else to keep doing the legal work on that kind of scam.

        Anyway, Hansmeier has now had his assets liquidated in bankruptcy and his law license taken away. What’s next? Well, last we’d heard, it sounded like criminal charges were getting closer, so perhaps he has that to look forward to as well.

      • Scientists Realizing That EU Ruling On Copyright & Links Just Made Science Much More Difficult

        A recipe for disaster indeed.

        This is, of course, not the first time we’ve noted the problems of intellectual property in the science world. From various journals locking up research to the rise of patents scaring off researchers from sharing data, intellectual property keeps getting in the way of science, rather than supporting it. And that’s extremely unfortunate. I mean, after all, in the US specifically, the Constitution specifically says that copyrights and patents are supposed to be about “promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.”

        Over and over again, though, we see that the law has been twisted and distorted and extended and expanded in such a way that is designed to protect a very narrow set of interests, at the expense of many others, including the public who would benefit from greater sharing and collaboration and open flow of data among scientific researchers. Having the CJEU make things worse in Europe isn’t going to help Europe compete — and, unfortunately, it does not look like those in Europe looking to update its copyright laws understand any of this yet.

      • EU digital copyright reform proposals slammed as regressive

        The European Commission’s proposals to reform the region’s copyright rules, published in draft form today, have been criticized by tech companies and digital rights groups as regressive and a missed opportunity to modernize hopelessly outdated rules.

        The Open Rights Group accused the EC of ignoring EU citizens responses to an earlier consultation on the reform, and trying to bring in regressive rules that will force private companies to police the Internet.

        “The Commission’s proposals would fail to harmonise copyright law and create a fair system for Internet users, creators and rights holders. Instead we could see new regressive rights that compel private companies to police the Internet on behalf of rights holders,” said its executive director Jim Killock in a statement.

        A big point of concern for many critics is the EC seeking to shift the responsibility for identifying copyrighted content by requiring Internet companies that host user uploaded video, such as YouTube and Facebook, to proactively check for copyrighted material, rather than waiting to receive a take down request from a rights holder, as is the case now.

      • EU Commission Proposes Mandatory Piracy Filters For Online Services

        Today, the European Commission published its long-awaited proposal to modernize the EU’s copyright law. Among other things, it will require online services to install mandatory piracy filters. While the Commission intends to strengthen the position of copyright holders, opponents warn that it will do more harm than good.

      • European Commission introduces copyright on links; presents worthless copyright harshening proposal for the EU

        The European Commission has finally presented its long-awaited copyright reform proposal. It ignores everything positive the European Parliament demanded in the earlier Reda report, and doubles down on introducing copyright for links.

      • 10 Years in Prison For Online Pirates a Step Closer in the UK

        The UK Government’s Digital Economy Bill has moved a step closer to becoming law after its second reading in Parliament. With unanimous support, the current two-year maximum custodial sentence for online piracy is almost certain to increase to a decade. However, the reading also covered other familiar ground – pressure on Google to do something about piracy.

      • CJEU says that free Wi-Fi provider is not liable for third-party copyright infringements but may be required to password-protect its network to terminate infringements

        This reference for a preliminary ruling was made in the context of proceedings between Sony and a person (Tobias Mc Fadden) who operates a business selling and renting lighting and sound systems for various events.

        Mc Fadden owns a Wi-Fi connection that is open to anyone to use as it not protected by any password. The main reason why McFadden provides password-free free internet access is to drive traffic to his website and encourage customers to visit his shop.

        In 2010 that connection was used by someone other than Mc Fadden to download unlawfully a musical work to which Sony owns the copyright. Following Sony’s formal notice, Mc Fadden sought a negative declaration from the referring court.

        This dismissed it and upheld Sony’s counterclaim, granting an injunction against Mc Fadden on the ground of his direct liability for the infringement at issue and ordering him to pay damages, the costs of the formal notice, and costs.

        Mc Fadden appealed that decision, arguing that the provisions of German law transposing Article 12(1) of the ECommerce Directive would shield him from liability for third-party infringements.

      • Judge’s Opinion That EU Is Competent To Ratify Marrakesh Treaty Might Break Standstill

        The European Union has exclusive competence to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty on copyright exceptions for visually impaired people, the advocate general of the Court of Justice of the EU has found. This conclusion, which was well-received by representatives of the visually impaired, could speed up the ratification of the treaty by the EU.

      • Commission unveils new copyright package

        Further to the proposal for a regulation on cross-border portability of online content services in late 2015, the European Commission has just unveiled its new set of proposals to ameliorate EU copyright and achieve a fully functioning digital single market.

        These – among other things – include proposals for a new directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market and a regulation on certain online transmissions of broadcasting organisations and retransmissions. Both instruments, if adopted in their current form, will have a deep impact on the EU copyright framework, particularly with regard to online uses of copyright works, responsibilities of hosting providers, users’ freedoms, and authors’ contracts.

      • EU copyright plans a big win for old media, but public concerns ignored

        EU proposals for the “modernisation of copyright to increase cultural diversity in Europe and content available online” turn out to be an implementation of the old copyright industries’ wishlist, with little that addresses online users’ needs.

        As expected, the proposed Copyright Directive will give news and magazine publishers—described by the EU as “press publishers”—a new 20-year “ancillary copyright” over and above the normal copyright. Although it is not yet clear how this will work in practice, the intent is to enable press publishers to control the use of online snippets drawn from “daily newspapers, weekly or monthly magazines of general or special interest and news websites.”

      • European Commission Copyright Reform Proposal Sparks Many Jeers, Some Cheers [Ed: paywall]
      • Commission Proposal to Reform Copyright is Inadequate

        Today the EU Commission released their proposal for a reformed copyright framework. What has emerged from Brussels is disheartening. The proposal is more of a regression than the reform we need to support European businesses and Internet users.

        To date, over 30,000 citizens have signed our petition urging the Commission to update EU copyright law for the 21st century. The Commission’s proposal needs substantial improvement. We collectively call on the EU institutions to address the many deficits in the text released today in subsequent iterations of this political process.

09.14.16

Links 14/9/2016: Arya.ai’s Braid, MySQL Exploit Patched

Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 4 big ways companies benefit from having open source program offices

    At first glance, one big reason why a company not in the business of software development might more enthusiastically embrace an open source program office is because they have less to lose. After all, they’re not gambling with software products that are directly tied to revenue. Facebook, for example, can easily unleash a distributed key-value datastore as an open source project because they don’t sell a product called “enterprise key-value datastore.” That answers the question of risk, but it still doesn’t answer the question of what they gain from contributing to the open source ecosystem. Let’s look at a few potential reasons and then tackle each. You’ll notice a lot of overlap with vendor open source program offices, but some of the motivations are slightly different.

  • Everyone Wins With Open Source Software

    As open source software matures and is used by more and more major corporations, it is becoming clear that the enterprise software game has changed. Sam Ramji, CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, believes that open source software is a positive sum game, as reflected in his keynote at ApacheCon in Vancouver in May.

    Invoking his love of game theory, Ramji stated emphatically that open source software is a positive-sum game, where the more contributors there are to the common good, the more good there is for everyone. This idea is the opposite of a zero-sum game, where if someone benefits or wins, then another person must suffer, or lose.

  • 15 Top Open Source Artificial Intelligence Tools

    In a recent article, we provided an overview of 45 AI projects that seem particularly promising or interesting. In this slideshow, we’re focusing in on open source artificial intelligence tools, with a closer look at fifteen of the best-known open source AI projects.

  • To gamify or not to gamify community

    Years ago I was at a Canonical sprint in Europe, where a colleague, who was an active gamer, shared his idea for some kind of high-scores system in which community members could compete in the way they contributed. His off-the-cuff idea got me thinking.

    Although a competitive framework was not interesting to me—we had tried a hall of fame, which ultimately didn’t deliver the results we wanted—the idea of a gamification platform got me excited.

  • The future of money

    What happens when the way we buy, sell and pay for things changes, perhaps even removing the need for banks or currency exchange bureaus? That’s the radical promise of a world powered by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. We’re not there yet, but in this sparky talk, digital currency researcher Neha Narula describes the collective fiction of money — and paints a picture of a very different looking future.

  • Bitmain launches open-source bitcoin mining pool

    Bitmain, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of Bitcoin mining hardware, has announced the launch of an open-source bitcoin mining pool, as a part of its free bitcoin block explorer, analytics tool and bitcoin wallet BTC.com.

  • Bitmain Launches BTC.Com, a New Open-source Bitcoin Mining Pool with Zero Mining Fee!
  • In Race for Bitcoin Mining Profits, Fortune Favors the Old
  • New BTC.Com Mining Pool Wants To Set New Min ing Standards
  • One of Bitcoin’s Biggest Miners is Launching a Second Pool
  • Bitmain’s BTC.Com Mining Pool Goes Live
  • Open Source Execution without Dropping Windows

    IT managers are seeking alternative ways to replace their legacy software, without dropping Windows operating system due to high cost implementation and license dependency of proprietary software. Open Source software has found its way into enterprises infrastructures as it provides access to third party vendors and developers to modify the software and publish them. They are also known as Free or Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). FLOSS licenses users with the freedom to study and modify the program, to run for any function and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified source code (without having to pay royalties to previous developers). And, enterprises can update the FLOSS executions according to their requirement and also publish it for the other user’s requirement. This is one of the reasons why enterprises appreciate Open Source products and its advantages.

    Due to the open nature of the software, the design deliberations are open in contrast to the closed processes of proprietary vendors’ software. Also, the Open Source software products are easy to assess and evaluate with the help of the Community and Help pages. Open Source allows anyone to contribute code and permits software to integrate with not commonly encountered use cases, that a proprietary vendor would least taken into consideration. In terms of innovation, the Open Source development reflects Bill Joy’s law: “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” That is unfeigned for all the software vendors, so leveraging a product with potentially larger developer base enables access to greater innovation.

  • Startup Arya.ai Launches Open Source AI Tool Braid

    Braid is designed as an open source tool for developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. According to Vinay Kumar Sankarapu, CEO and founder of Arya.ai, by introducing open sourcing key tools in AI, the emerging field will grow faster and developers will be able to easily design more impactful applications.

  • Arya.ai’s Braid Aims to Weave Together Neural Network Components

    Startup Arya.ai on Monday introduced Braid, an open source tool available for free to companies developing neural networks. Braid is a flexible, customizable, modular meta-framework that works with operating systems for deep learning. It is designed for rapid development and to support arbitrary network designs. It is simple and scalable, for use with networks that need to handle many data points at large volume, Arya.ai said. Braid allows for quick experimentation without having to worry about the boilerplate components of the code.

  • Arya.ai launches Braid to integrate ‘deep learning’ into systems
  • Arya.ai announces the global launch of ‘Braid’, an Open Source deep learning tool
  • Arya.ai Launches AI Tool To Build Intelligence Quickly Into Systems
  • Open Source Release Cycle Tyranny

    The little talked about stress of Open Source project release management…

    So I really enjoy writing code. Been doing it for years, since I was 8! I still do it now when work needs me to, or in my less than copious free time.

    The problem I tend to find on these projects is that you can make them as simple or as complex as you like. This can be a curse and a blessing.

    For me it tends to be a curse.

  • Oracle’s NetBeans Headed to The Apache Software Foundation

    Oracle’s open-source NetBeans IDE could become the next former Sun Microsystems project to land at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

  • Apache Announces Updated Syncope Identity Management Toolset

    In recent posts, we’ve taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been moving up to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent months. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support and more.

    Recently, Apache Bahir became a Top-Level Project (TLP). Now, the foundation has announced that it is making available Apache Syncope 2.0, a digital identity and access management system. Implemented in Java EE technology, Apache Syncope is designed to keep enterprise identity data consistent and synchronized across repositories, data formats, and models.

    “Syncope 2.0.0 is a major milestone for the community,” said Francesco Chicchiriccò, Vice President of Apache Syncope, and one of the original creators of the project. “The numbers of this release look great –new features, new components and tools, new contributors, more enterprise appeal, and even more extensibility.”

  • Events

    • Bastille to Lead Industry Discussions on Wireless Hacking at GNU Radio Conference 2016

      Researchers Balint Seeber, Marc Newlin and Matt Knight to Speak and Host Wireless Hacking Challenge for Conference Attendees

    • The Future at the Internet’s Edge

      With the current focus on the cloud it might seem that the Internet works from the center out — if the Internet can be said to have a center. And with the massive move of IT infrastructure to the cloud, DevOps folks might be wondering what this means for the future of their careers and if increasing centralization will mean a shrinking job market, a question Robert Shimp with Oracle’s Linux and virtualization unit, took a stab at answering at last month’s LinuxCon.

      [...]

      Shimp was giving a presentation on “Linux Administration in Distributed Cloud Computing Environments.” Despite the use of the word “Linux” in the title (it was LinuxCon, after all), he spent the first half of his presentation laying out his vision for what the Internet holds in store, with none of it being Linux specific. The future, it seems, will almost certainly be operating system agnostic.

    • Keynote: Open Source is a Positive-Sum Game – Sam Ramji, CEO, Cloud Foundry Foundation
    • Free Software Directory recapping the “Golden Oldies” meeting
    • FSF Events: Free Software Foundation community meetup (Washington, D.C.)

      Come share snacks and refreshments with the free software community. FSF campaigns manager Zak Rogoff will be happy to talk about our ongoing battle against Digital Restrictions Management in Web standards, the recent European net neutrality victory, our role in the new White House source code policy, and almost anything else you ask him about. The FSF will provide the first round of snacks and beers, with more available from the menu.

      This is an informal gathering for anyone interested in spending time with the free software community or learning more about the FSF; you are welcome, whether you are free software noob or hacker extraodinaire.

  • Databases

    • MySQL 0-day could lead to total system compromise
    • MySQL Exploit Evidently Patched

      News began circulating yesterday that the popular open source database MySQL contains a publicly disclosed vulnerability that could be used to compromise servers. The flaw was discovered by researcher Dawid Golunski and began getting media attention after he published a partial proof-of-concept of the exploit, which is purposefully incomplete to prevent abuse. He said the exploit affects “all MySQL servers in default configuration in all version branches (5.7, 5.6, and 5.5) including the latest versions.” In addition, MariaDB and Percona DB which are derived from MySQL are affected.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • NetBeans Java IDE Might Become An Apache Incubator Project

      A proposal posted today is looking to shift the NetBeans integrated development environment from being an Oracle project to one within the Apache incubator space.

      Geertjan Wielenga, an Oracle employee who serves as the project manager for Oracle JET and NetBeans, posted a proposal today looking to offload NetBeans from being the open-source IDE maintained at Oracle to becoming “Apache NetBeans.”

    • Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

  • Healthcare

    • Taunton’s open source success: a new era for electronic patient records

      Almost one year ago our organisation, Taunton and Somerset NHS FT, achieved an important milestone in delivering transformational change in our digital programme: we became the first NHS trust to go live with an open source electronic patient record (EPR).

      Some may have perceived this as a risky choice. An open source EPR was untested within the NHS, and NHS organisations can tend to do what everyone else has already tried. Yet we saw that, by having a flexible system that had no licence fees, we would be able to tailor the system as we went along, to suit the needs of our clinicians, patients and our healthcare partners in Somerset.

    • Navigating the challenges of international teamwork

      OpenEMR, OpenMRS, and VisTA are three of the most well-known open source applications in the health IT genre. OpenEMR has worldwide acceptance as a complete and flexible electronic healthcare records (EHR) system that can be tweaked with relative ease to work anywhere. That is evident in its adoption by the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, the Peace Corps, and most recently by the Health Services Dept of Israel. OpenMRS is a respected tool set and API that has been predominantly used in Africa, and has been adopted for targeted healthcare needs all over the world. Despite being a US-based project, its adoption in the US is minimal. VisTA is the US Veteran’s Administration EHR and it is now, due mainly to the formation of OSEHRA.org, beginning to get traction in other countries as a solution to the high cost of proprietary EHR systems for hospitals. New on the horizon are projects like FHIR, started in Australia, and adopted by hl7.org.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Udacity plans to build its own open-source self-driving car

      Sebastian Thrun’s online education startup Udacity recently created a self-driving car engineering nanodegree, and on stage at Disrupt today Thrun revealed that the company intends to build its own self-driving car as part of the program, and that it also intends to open source the technology that results, so that “anyone” can try to build their own self-driving vehicle, according to Thrun.

      The crowdsourced vehicle plans will ultimately be created in service of the school, rather than a product in and of itself. The open-sourcing of the data should help other projects ramp up, and will include driving data and more to contribute to other people’s projects.

    • Q&A: SFU alumna launching new “open source” food co-op

      SFU alumna Jennifer Zickerman is making it easier to access locally grown, high quality herbs through her venture, the Lower Mainland Herb Growers Co-op.

      The co-operative offers economy of scale to local small growers growing culinary herbs. It will buy fresh herbs from local growers, then dry and package them as culinary herb blends and distribute them to retail stores.

      Zickerman first developed this business idea as a student in SFU’s Community Economic Development (CED) program. She pitched it as part of the program’s annual Social Innovation Challenge, winning $12,000 to implement her idea.

      The co-op’s high quality products aim to replace the poor quality dried herbs found in most retail stores that are imported from countries with poor environmental and labour standards.

      Local farmers will also have a new market for a crop that grows well in this climate and requires few artificial supports such as fertilizer, pesticides and greenhouses.

    • Open Data

      • Chile’s green energy future is powered by open data analysis

        Open source software and open data play key roles in implementing Chile’s long-term energy planning, identifying ways to get the maximum value from development, minimizing its impact, and requiring less development overall.

        Over the past two years, our company—in partnership with the Centro UC Cambio Global of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile—has been designing, building, and testing a framework to support Chile’s Ministry of Energy in policy evaluation and regional hydroelectric power planning activities. Open source software and open data play a key role in this framework, but before I explain how, I need to summarize the context.

      • DYNAcity project starts mobility pilot in Flemish City of Ghent

        The mobility service is based on information published on the open data portal of the City of Ghent. It also incorporates data from innovative sources like thermal cameras and a carpool system. Participants in the pilot will receive travel advice each morning through a pop-up on their mobile phones.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

  • Programming/Development

    • How to help developers help themselves

      Developers need help. It comes with the territory for software companies employing thousands of developers, many who live and work in remote locations all over the world. At Red Hat, Rafael Benevides doles out lots of help. He teaches developers about tools and practices so they can be more productive, and he’ll be taking the show on the road for the tech conference All Things Open this year where he’ll share his specfic thoughts on cloud development.

Leftovers

  • Adblock Plus finds the end-game of its business model: Selling ads

    Eyeo GmbH, the company that makes the popular Adblock Plus software, will today start selling the very thing many of its users hate—advertisements. Today, the company is launching a self-service platform to sell “pre-whitelisted” ads that meet its “acceptable ads” criteria. The new system will let online publishers drag and drop advertisements that meet Eyeo’s expectations for size and labeling.

    “The Acceptable Ads Platform helps publishers who want to show an alternative, nonintrusive ad experience to users with ad blockers by providing them with a tool that lets them implement Acceptable Ads themselves,” said Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus.

    Publishers who place the ads will do so knowing that they won’t be blocked by most of the 100 million Adblock Plus users. The software extension’s default setting allows for “acceptable ads” to be shown, and more than 90 percent of its users don’t change that default setting.

    Eyeo started its “acceptable ads” program in 2011. With the new platform, it hopes to automate and scale up a process that until now has been a cumbersome negotiation. What once could take weeks, the company boasts in today’s statement, now “takes only seconds.”

  • Science

    • 5 Ways The Modern World Is Shockingly Ready To Collapse

      As technology embraces the digital, abandoning the crude and primitive notion of “physical existence” entirely, the idea that you actually own the media you buy is vanishing faster than that goddamn Walkman you swore was in the closet. And it’s more than inconvenient for consumers; it may be apocalyptic for our society.

      [...]

      If you tried to purchase an Adobe product recently, you’re already aware of this trend. As of 2013, you can no longer buy programs such as Photoshop, Flash, or Dreamweaver. You can only “subscribe” to them for a monthly fee. Yes, now you have the privilege of paying for your software forever. Isn’t the future wonderful?

  • Hardware

    • Kernel NET Policy Still Being Tackled For Simplified, Better Networking Performance

      With the latest version of the patches, the NET policy subsystem is now disabled by default, the queue selection algorithm has been modified, amd there are various other changes. For those failing to remember what this is all about, “NET policy intends to simplify the network configuration and get a good network performance according to the hints(policy) which is applied by user. It provides some typical “policies” for user which can be set per-socket, per-task or per-device. The kernel will automatically figures out how to merge different requests to get good network performance. NET policy is designed for multiqueue network devices. This implementation is only for Intel NICs using i40e driver. But the concepts and generic code should apply to other multiqueue NICs too.”

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Philip Morris loses investment arbitration against Uruguay’s anti-tobacco legislation

      Furthermore, Mr. Born held that the terms of the Switzerland-Uruguay Bilateral Investment Treaty cannot be understood to provide the host state
      with a ‘margin of appreciation’ – a concept developed in a different context, namely the European Convention on Human Rights. The case has been used by NGOs (see for instance the Global Justice Now website) as an example of the allegedly deterrent effect of investment arbitration on states that intend to issue public health measures (so-called ‘regulatory chill’). The dismissal of Philip Morris’ claims shows that such fears are largely unfounded. On the other hand, even though the arbitral tribunal’s majority decision is well-reasoned, the question remains whether it is appropriate to bring about a result whereby a lawful business can be subjected to a such severe restriction in respect of core assets, such as its brands, without being paid any compensation (even in case of a public health measure). In this respect, the dissenting opinion of Mr. Born raises convincing arguments in favour of Philip Morris.

    • Abolish Bottled Water

      Bottled water is a con. It makes about as much sense as designer bottled air, but after a few decades on the market, one’s instinct often says to reach for a bottle of Dasani when your mouth’s dry and brain’s half-pickled on a hot day. It’s not water, it’s Water, baby!

      Bottled water in Canada comes from aquifers near the Great Lakes, where it’s pumped for $3.71 per million litres by companies that later sell it for a massive profit. This is in a country where dozens of First Nations communities are living under decades-long boil water advisories, and all of their drinkable water is trucked in by the bottle. Naturally, it comes from Nestle and other corporate producers.

      Policymakers and activists have raised calls to hike the price that companies pay to pump water from municipal sources, but some experts say that doesn’t go far enough. Instead, according to critics, the practice of pumping water for a profit should be banned wholesale for social and scientific reasons and Nestle’s license to do so shouldn’t be renewed by the provincial government.

  • Security

    • Securing the Programmer

      I have a favorite saying: “If you are a systems administrator, you have the keys to the kingdom. If you are an open-source programmer, you don’t know which or how many kingdoms you have the keys to.” We send our programs out into the world to be run by anyone for any purpose. Think about that: by anyone, for any purpose. Your code might be running in a nuclear reactor right now, or on a missile system or on a medical device, and no one told you. This is not conjecture; this is everyday reality. Case in point: the US Army installed gpsd on all armor (tanks, armored personnel carriers and up-armored Humvees) without telling its developers.

      This article focuses on the needs of infrastructure software developers—that is, developers of anything that runs as root, has a security function, keeps the Internet as a whole working or is life-critical. Of course, one never knows where one’s software will be run or under what circumstances, so feel free to follow this advice even if all you maintain is a toddler login manager. This article also covers basic security concepts and hygiene: how to think about security needs and how to keep your development system in good shape to reduce the risk of major computing security mishaps.

    • Software-Defined Security Market Worth 6.76 Billion USD by 2021
    • Two critical bugs and more malicious apps make for a bad week for Android
    • Let’s Encrypt Aiming to Encrypt the Web

      By default, the web is not secure, enabling data to travel in the clear, but that’s a situation that is easily corrected through the use of SSL/TLS. A challenge with implementing Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security has been the cost to acquire an SSL/TSL certificate from a known Certificate Authority (CA), but that has changed in 2016, thanks to the efforts of Let’s Encrypt.

      Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit effort that that was was announced in November 2014 and became a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project in April 2015. Let’s Encrypt exited its beta period in April 2016 and to date has provided more than 5 million free certificates.

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • [Mozilla:] Cybersecurity is a Shared Responsibility

      There have been far too many “incidents” recently that demonstrate the Internet is not as secure as it needs to be. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve seen countless headlines about online security breaches. From the alleged hack of the National Security Agency’s “cyberweapons” to the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails, and even recent iPhone security vulnerabilities, these stories reinforce how crucial it is to focus on security.

      Internet security is like a long chain and each link needs to be tested and re-tested to ensure its strength. When the chain is broken, bad things happen: a website that holds user credentials (e.g., email addresses and passwords) is compromised because of weak security; user credentials are stolen; and, those stolen credentials are then used to attack other websites to gain access to even more valuable information about the user.

      One weak link can break the chain of security and put Internet users at risk. The chain only remains strong if technology companies, governments, and users work together to keep the Internet as safe as it can be.

    • IoT malware exploits DVRs, home cameras via default passwords

      The Internet of Things business model dictates that devices be designed with the minimum viable security to keep the products from blowing up before the company is bought or runs out of money, so we’re filling our homes with net-connected devices that have crummy default passwords, and the ability to probe our phones and laptops, and to crawl the whole internet for other vulnerable systems to infect.

      Linux/Mirai is an ELF trojan targeting IoT devices, which Malware Must Die describes as the most successful ELF trojan. It’s very difficult to determine whether these minimal-interface devices are infected, but lab tests have discovered the malware in a wide range of gadgets.

    • Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet

      First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it’s overwhelmed. These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don’t like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion. There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense. But largely it’s a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins.

    • Internet’s defences being probed: security expert

      A big player, most possibly a nation state, has been testing the security of companies that run vital parts of the Internet’s infrastructure, according to well-known security expert Bruce Schneier.

      In an essay written for the Lawfare blog, Schneier, an inventor of the Blowfish, Twofish and Yarrow algorithms, said that the probes which had been observed appeared to be very carefully targeted and seemed to be testing what exactly would be needed to compromise these corporations.

      Schneier said he did not know who was carrying out the probes but, at a first guess, said it was either China or Russia.

      Pointing out that the easiest way to take a network off the Internet was by using a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, he said that major firms that provide the basic infrastructure to make the Internet work had recently seen an escalation of such attacks.

    • Hackers smear Olympic athletes with data dump of medical files

      Hackers are trying to tarnish the U.S. Olympic team by releasing documents they claim show athletes including gymnast Simone Biles and tennis players Venus and Serena Williams used illegal substances during the Rio Games.

      The medical files, allegedly from the World Anti-Doping Agency, were posted Tuesday on a site bearing the name of the hacking group Fancy Bears. “Today we’d like to tell you about the U.S. Olympic team and their dirty methods to win,” said a message on the hackers’ site.

      The World Anti-Doping Agency confirmed it had been hacked and blamed Fancy Bears, a Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage team that is also known as APT 28 — the very same group that may have recently breached the Democratic National Committee.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • What If America Happened To Forget The September 11th Attacks?

      The United States will never forget the September 11th attacks. It is interwoven into the fabric of the nation. Its identity is partially defined by remembering the horror that unfolded that day, but that is part of why a provocative question must be asked: What if America happened to forget the attacks?

      For fifteen years, politicians, military leaders, celebrities, corporate executives, as well as the families of those killed on 9/11, have deployed the words “Never Forget” when speaking about the attacks. The words function as a kind of pledge, a loyalty oath to show one’s allegiance to the country. Those who do not pledge to “Never Forget” may not be as American as those who openly relive trauma by sharing where they were that day, even if these individuals were nowhere near the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.

      Yet, what are people pledging when they reflexively attach these words to memories or statements?

      Pentagon Deputy Secretary Bob Work declared at the Pentagon’s 9/11 memorial the “enemy” will “fail because all of us as Americans will never forget what we stand for. We will remain steadfast in our determination to stamp out this evil and secure a better future for our children. And we will work together collectively to create a world free from terror and oppression.”

      Work also said, “We must never allow—never allow—those who were lost to ever fade from our memories…as well as those who have sacrificed in the long wars ever since. And we must continue to allow them to motivate us in our continuing struggle against those who would seek to destroy that which we hold dear.”

    • #NeverForget911 . Wait, did something happen yesterday besides #ClintonCollapse ? I forgot.

      #NeverForget911 . Wait, did something happen yesterday besides #ClintonCollapse ? I forgot.

      OK, ok, serious now. It’s been 15 years now people, so we can talk about this kind of thing, ‘kay? That’s what anniversaries are for, after all.

      Peter Bergen, at CNN, who is often the sanest clown in the CNN circus, tell us that al Qaeda really blew it on 9/11.

      “Like the attack on Pearl Harbor,” says Bergen, “9/11 was a great tactical victory for America’s enemies. But in both these cases the tactical success of the attacks was not matched by strategic victories. Quite the reverse.” He goes on to remind us the U.S. totally kicked Japan’s butt.

      Now it can get a little fuzzy when you try to jam 9/11 and al Qaeda into the Saving Private Ryan narrative framework. So it’s important to understand what Bergen thinks al Qaeda’s goal was with the attacks 15 years ago. I’ll quote him so when I call him an idiot a bit later, you’ll understand my reasoning:

      “Bin Laden believed that al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington would result in an American withdrawal from the Middle East. Instead, the United States quickly toppled the Taliban and al Qaeda… The United States not only did not reduce its influence in the Middle East, but it also established or added to massive bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. And, of course, it also occupied both Afghanistan and Iraq. Bin Laden’s tactical victory on 9/11 turned out to be a spectacular strategic flop.”

    • In Leaked Emails, Iraq War Architect Expressed Relief That Brexit Distracted From U.K. War Inquiry

      Newly leaked emails show how a key U.K. architect of the Iraq war expressed relief that the “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union would reduce media coverage of the devastating results of an inquiry into the United Kingdom’s role in the the war.

      On July 4, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw emailed former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to discuss the upcoming release of the Chilcot Report– a document detailing the British government’s inquiry. The report probed, among other things, the depth of private British commitment and support for the American-led war in Iraq.

      In anticipation of coming press coverage, Straw asked Powell to review a statement in a Word document he drafted. He wrote that the “only silver lining of the Brexit vote is that it will reduce medium term attention on Chilcot — thought it will not stop the day of publication being uncomfortable.”

    • Pushing NATO to Russia’s Southern Flank

      In pursuit of a new Cold War with Russia, Official Washington wants to expand NATO into the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, creating the potential for nuclear war to protect a sometimes reckless “ally,” writes Jonathan Marshall.

    • The Existential Madness of Putin-Bashing

      Official Washington loves its Putin-bashing but demonizing the Russian leader stops a rational debate about U.S.-Russia relations and pushes the two nuclear powers toward an existential brink, writes Robert Parry.

    • ‘They Let Everybody Know the US Was on the Side of This Coup’ – CounterSpin interview with Mark Weisbrot on the ouster of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff
    • China and Russia Press Ahead, Together

      The G20 summit in China marked a possible tectonic shift in global economic power, with China’s President Xi pushing for a new model based on physical connectivity, like “One Belt, One Road,” writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.

    • Post-9/11’s Self-Inflicted Wounds

      The damage done to U.S. foreign policy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was largely self-inflicted, a case of wildly overreacting to Al Qaeda’s bloody provocation, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

    • Al Qaeda’s Ties to US-Backed Syrian Rebels

      The new ceasefire agreement between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which went into effect at noon Monday, has a new central compromise absent from the earlier ceasefire agreement that the same two men negotiated last February. But it isn’t clear that it will produce markedly different results.

      The new agreement incorporates a U.S.-Russian bargain: the Syrian air force is prohibited from operating except under very specific circumstances in return for U.S.-Russian military cooperation against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, also known as Daesh, ISIS or ISIL. That compromise could be a much stronger basis for an effective ceasefire, provided there is sufficient motivation to carry it out fully.

    • Israel’s Bogus Civil War

      Is Israel on the verge of civil war, as a growing number of Israeli commentators suggest, with its Jewish population deeply riven over the future of the occupation?

      On one side is a new peace movement, Decision at 50, stuffed with former political and security leaders. Ehud Barak, a previous prime minister who appears to be seeking a political comeback, may yet emerge as its figurehead.

      The group has demanded the government hold a referendum next year – the half-centenary of Israel’s occupation, which began in 1967 – on whether it is time to leave the territories. Its own polling shows a narrow majority ready to concede a Palestinian state.

    • Donald Trump, After Blasting Iraq War, Picks Top Iraq Hawk as Security Adviser

      Donald Trump named former CIA director and extremist neoconservative James Woolsey his senior adviser on national security issues on Monday. Woolsey, who left the CIA in 1995, went on to become one of Washington’s most outspoken promoters of U.S. war in Iraq and the Middle East.

      As such, Woolsey’s selection either clashes with Trump’s noninterventionist rhetoric — or represents a pivot towards a more muscular, neoconservative approach to resolving international conflicts.

      Trump has called the Iraq War “a disaster.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • ‘Affair Assange’ – Malicious handling of a political case

      In a few days the Swedish court shall rule on Assange’s freedom; or it will rule in favour of prosecutor Ny. This article deals with prosecutor Marianne Ny’s assaying anew to influence the court, in exactly the same fashion that she did the last time; I question Ny’s statement, made during her press conference, on Swedish prosecutors fairness, ­and that “all should be treated equal”; I base my query on factual cases, i.e. allegations against a right-wing Swedish politician that were similar to the one against Assange, and that were quickly dropped by the prosecutors at the time Assange was under arrest in London by orders of Ny. This article also refers to the Swedish media reactions after the revelations in the recent TV program Uppdraggranskning, which dealt with the extradition of Assange to the US. This program – aired the same day of Ny’s press conference –partly failed to comment, or even mention, the resolution of the UNGWAD ruling for the immediate freedom of Mr Assange; and partly omitted for the Swedish viewers crucial facts which ascertain the absolute existence of a ‘criminal investigation’ against Assange in the US, based among other on the new laws on terrorism. All that makes the extradition of Assange to the US not only ‘probably’ – as publicly acknowledged for the first time in the Swedish state-owned media (or for that part in all mainstream media of Sweden)– but also its request by the US highly incumbent.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Who Is Funding the Dakota Access Pipeline? Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo

      We continue our conversation Food & Water Watch’s Hugh MacMillan about his new investigation that reveals the dozens of financial institutions that are bankrolling the Dakota Access pipeline, including Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. “They are banking on this company and banking on being able to drill and frack for the oil to send through the pipeline over the coming decades,” MacMillan says. “So they’re providing the capital for the construction of this pipeline.”

    • Wind power is going to get a lot cheaper as wind turbines get even more enormous

      In a nugget of very good news for the renewable energy sector, a survey of 163 wind energy experts has found that in the coming decades, the cost of electricity generated by wind should plunge, by between 24 and 30 percent by the year 2030, and even further by the middle of the century.

      One key reason? New wind projects are about to get even more massive, in both the offshore and onshore sectors. As turbines get taller and access stronger winds, and as rotors increase in diameter, it becomes possible to generate ever more electricity from a single turbine.

      “Our experts clearly anticipate a significant potential for further cost reductions, both onshore and offshore,” said Ryan Wiser of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who conducted the study with colleagues from several other institutions, including the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an International Energy Agency task force on wind energy.

    • One in 10 UK wildlife species faces extinction, major report shows

      More than one in 10 of the UK’s wildlife species are threatened with extinction and the numbers of the nation’s most endangered creatures have plummeted by two-thirds since 1970, according to a major report.

      The abundance of all wildlife has also fallen, with one in six animals, birds, fish and plants having been lost, the State of Nature report found.

      Together with historical deforestation and industrialisation, these trends have left the UK “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, with most of the country having gone past the threshold at which “ecosystems may no longer reliably meet society’s needs”.

      The comprehensive scientific report, compiled by more than 50 conservation organisations, spells out the destructive impact of intensive farming, urbanisation and climate change on habitats from farmland and hills to rivers and the coast. It found that the fall in wildlife over the last four decades cannot be blamed on past harm, but has continued in recent years.

    • Highest Water Levels During Hurricane Hermine

      NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services maintains a permanent observing system that includes 210 continuously operating water level stations throughout the U.S. and its territories. These water level stations provide real-time oceanographic and meteorological observations, which are critical data for communities, particularly during storms impacting the coast.

      This graphic depicts highest water levels along the coast throughout the duration of this storm. Highest water levels are measured in feet above Mean Higher High Water (MHHW). MHHW is defined as the average daily highest tide. Inundation typically begins when water levels exceed MHHW.

  • Finance

    • France backs Barroso ethics inquiry

      French President François Hollande on Tuesday endorsed the investigation into the conduct of former European Commission chief José Manuel Barroso, aimed at deciding if he broke EU law by joining Goldman Sachs in July.

      “I fully support this initiative,” Hollande said, two days after Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker ordered a probe into his predecessor’s decision to take up the role as chairman and senior adviser at the international arm of the investment bank.

      “When you know that Goldman Sachs was one of the reasons for the difficulties we encountered” during the financial crisis, “that justifies a procedure, the one that Juncker has just started,” the French president said during a trip to Bucharest, AFP reported.

    • The 101 on how global trade treaties came to threaten the environment

      Such accusations have been made lately against a bewildering alphabet soup of global treaties now under negotiation, including the TTP, TTIP, and TISA.

      NAFTA protests rage on worldwide, reignited by recent Chapter 11 cases and the threat of new and looming trade treaties such as TTP, TTIP and CETA. Photo by Billie Greenwood licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 generic license

    • Globalisation, Glocalisation, Glokatisation

      History tells us periods of globalisation do not come smoothly. According to economic commentator Thomas Friedman, our current era of globalisation is new, unique, terrifying and exciting. As exciting as it is, such change can be disquieting and the spoils of globalisation are not equally distributed. Against this new political and economic backdrop is a political reaction which, consciously or unconsciously, seeks to reverse this trend. This idea of a policy reaction is the subject of a recent US Chamber of Commerce report, “Preventing Deglobalization: An Economic and Security Argument for Free Trade and Investment in ICT.”

      Friedman divides globalisation into three phases. The first, starting with the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, runs from 1492 to 1800, which he argues is the globalisation of countries. The second phase is from 1800 to 2000, a time dominated by the Industrial Revolution, in which companies become globalised. In our present era, from 2000, it is the individual who joins globalisation. Not everyone wins, and periods of increased globalisation are often followed by periods of political turmoil. The ICT sector is a dominant sector driving change in our current wave of globalisation.

    • Census Shows Post-Recession Rebound — But Many Are Still Worse Off Than in 2007

      There is much to cheer in the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 report on American incomes, poverty, and health coverage released Tuesday.

      Median real income household income rose 5.2 percent from 2014 to 2015, and the poverty rate declined by 1.2 percentage points.

      The percentage of Americans without health insurance coverage declined to 9.1 from 10.4 in 2014. Overall, the number of Americans without health insurance declined to 29 million.

      These numbers point to an economy that is seriously starting to rebound from the Great Recession. The Census also notes that number of “full-time, year- round workers increased by 2.4 million in 2015.”

      But many Americans continue to see their incomes lag behind where they were around a decade ago.

      Median household income increased from 2014 to 2015, but it is still 5 percent behind where it was in 2007.

    • Techdirt Podcast Episode 90: Is Capitalism Over?

      As technology ushers more and more things towards the realm of “post-scarcity”, an inevitable conversation has arisen around the very roots of capitalism and what this rapid change means for our economic systems at the most fundamental levels. But the answer is far from simple — is capitalism dying? Can it evolve? Is the whole question being framed incorrectly? This week, we discuss the notion of a post-capitalist world, what it might look like, and how close it actually is.

    • More Details On How Corporate Sovereignty Provisions, Like Those In TPP & TTIP, Are Dangerous

      A few weeks ago, we wrote about a really great and detailed look by BuzzFeed’s Chris Hamby into “investor state dispute settlement” (ISDS) provisions in international trade agreements — something we refer to as corporate sovereignty, because it enables companies to effectively force countries away from certain regulations. Hamby’s piece was about how rich corporate execs were using corporate sovereignty provisions to get out of criminal prosecutions. That was only part I of his investigation. Part II of the series may have been the most useful, because it detailed how the mere threat of an ISDS case could pressure countries into changing regulations. This is super important, because one of the key talking points from defenders of corporate sovereignty provisions is to point to stats on actual cases. But if the threats are really effective, the stats on cases really is only showing a portion of what ISDS is doing.

    • TPP Goes Down to the Wire: Help Stop It by Joining Our Call-In

      It’s now or never for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). It’s almost certain that if the TPP can’t pass during the lame duck session of Congress in its present form before the new President takes office, it won’t pass at all.

      You may also have heard that a lame duck vote on the TPP is off the table—but that’s false. In fact, the administration’s pressure for such a vote to take place following the election has never been greater. Officials held a new round of meetings just last week with business interests to encourage them to sell the flawed agreement to an increasingly skeptical public and Congress. So you shouldn’t believe for a moment that the TPP can’t still pass within the next few months. It can.

    • Security Territory and Population Part 5: Governmentality And Introduction to Foucault’s Method

      As a simple example, for a number of years, Keynesianism was the form of knowledge about the economy. Then it was replaced by neoliberalism. That’s the historical situation as I see it today. Why it changed, the genealogy of that change, is open to discussion. One strand of the discussion can be found in Philip Mirowski’s Never Let A Serious Crisis Go To Waste.

      4. Foucault suggests that the family as a model for the economy had to be overcome and replaced by operations on the population as a whole. As we know, the idea of the family as model for both government and for government of the economy as a whole has not died out, but like most bad ideas will never die.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Donald Trump and the Art of Spinning Secrets Into Lies

      This year, some suggested that Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, should not be privy to classified briefings due to his habit of sneezing out the unfiltered contents of his head into the public domain. “This man is dangerous,” said Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrats’ minority leader, in a recent interview. Reid suggested that intelligence officials deceive Trump with phony secrets: “Fake it, pretend you’re doing a briefing,” he said.

      In 1952, Harry Truman started the practice of letting presidential candidates sample secret intelligence. Three candidates have since declined to receive the special briefings — Barry Goldwater in 1964, Walter Mondale in 1984, and Bob Dole in 1996. But how to deal with a candidate who can’t keep his mouth shut? In Trump’s case, fairness prevailed over caution. President Obama decided to admit Trump into the classified world, although this year’s briefings are reportedly classified at the level of secret, not top secret as they were during the 2008 race.

    • FBI calls Clinton email probe ‘different’ as key witness ditches House hearing

      As lawmakers continued to probe Hillary Clinton’s private email use, the aide who set up the service declined to appear before the House committee. FBI officials had to be given a summons to produce documents on the investigation.

      On Tuesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee summoned contractors and former State Department officials who set up and maintained Clinton’s email servers and mobile devices. However, the key Clinton aide, Bryan Pagliano, did not show up for the hearing, pleading Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination.

      The afternoon before, the committee dressed down FBI’s Acting Assistant Director for Congressional Affairs Jason Herring, who was at pains to explain his absence from a major meeting last week and the bureau’s reluctance to hand over unredacted investigation documents.

    • Clinton Aides Complain About Double Standard, But Media Also Went After Bush Foundation

      Claiming victimhood after critical coverage of Saudi donations to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton campaign Press Secretary Brian Fallon recently whined on Twitter that comparable Saudi links to a Bush family foundation didn’t receive anything like the same level of media scrutiny.

    • Samantha Bee: Have We Come to Demand ‘Meaningless Campaign Coverage’ From Our Media? (Video)

      A furious “Full Frontal” host returned from a break to rail against NBC’s Matt Lauer—who oversaw the recent live forum featuring presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump—and the rest of the members of the mass media who are failing to ask tough questions during this election cycle.

    • Colin Powell Urged Hillary Clinton’s Team Not to Scapegoat Him for Her Private Server, Leaked Emails Reveal

      Former Secretary of State Colin Powell attempted to discourage Hillary Clinton and her team from using him as a scapegoat for her private email server problems, according to newly leaked emails from Powell’s Gmail account.

      “Sad thing,” Powell wrote to one confidant, “HRC could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me to it.”

    • Media Undermine Democracy by Speculating Wildly About Undermining Democracy

      This is pure, unadulterated speculation—the kind of “what if, then they might” house of cards one would expect from an episode of Ancient Aliens, not in one of the most influential papers in the English-speaking world. In a moment of outright self-parody, Applebaum notes that “rumors of election fraud can create the same hysteria as real election fraud” while spending 800 words doing nothing but spreading rumors of election fraud. We have met the rumormonger, Ms. Applebaum, and she is you.

      One sure way to undermine confidence in US elections is to speculate wildly about such scenarios. Evidence-based discussions of the potential for electoral fraud are useful–and it’s important to note that there’s always a risk of voting manipulation–but running away with wholly speculative scenarios built on even more speculative scenarios, while pontificating about “media hysteria, hearings, legal challenges, mass rallies, a constitutional crisis,” does nothing to inform the reader, much less address the real dangers of election fraud. It simply serves to frighten the public by cynically appealing to our baser Cold War instincts.

    • FBI Director: Our Electronic Voting System Is Such A Complete Mess, It Would Be Difficult To Hack

      There’s been plenty of talking going around this election cycle about the terrible security problems with our current voting technology — along with some conspiracy-theory level talk of foreign agents looking to “hack” the election. We haven’t been very impressed with officials telling us all to calm down and it’s difficult to see how FBI director James Comey did himself any favors by basically arguing that the voting system is secure… mainly because of what a complete and utter mess it is. The larger point he’s making is somewhat valid, if clunky, in the fact that each state runs their own voting, so it’s not like hackers can get into one central system and wreak havoc. The different systems definitely make it harder.

    • Former Attorney General Speechwriter: James Comey Most Autonomous FBI Director Since J. Edgar Hoover

      Riley Roberts, speechwriter for former attorney general Eric Holder, has a fascinating examination of James Comey’s first four years as the head of the FBI. It details his frequently-antagonistic relationship with, well, nearly everyone, as well as his long history of going head-to-head with high-ranking government officials.

      Roberts says no FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover has acted with such autonomy. The unprecedented public discussion of the agency’s Clinton email investigation is just one such example. While Comey was undoubtedly correct that there was significant public interest in not just the outcome, but the inner workings of the investigation, his decision to hold a press conference and release investigative documents came as a surprise to his closest colleagues.

    • What Do the Presidential Candidates Know about Science?

      Jill Stein (G): It is a major concern that many Americans don’t trust our scientific and regulatory agencies, and extremely unfortunate that there are valid reasons for this declining trust that must be addressed.

      For example, the current FDA commissioner appointed by President Obama was a highly paid consultant for big pharmaceutical corporations, as Senator Sanders pointed out in opposing his nomination. In the case of Vioxx, the FDA approved a profitable pain reliever that caused up to 140,000 cases of heart disease, and even tried to silence its own scientists who discovered this deadly side effect.

    • Presidential Debates: 76 Percent of Americans Want Four-Person Debates: Clinton, Johnson, Trump, Stein, Why Are Establishment Elites Preventing It

      A recent USA Today poll found 76% of voters want debates with four candidates including not just the two most hated candidates in history, the Republican and Democratic nominees and their vice presidential running mates, but Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka of the Greens, and Gary Johnson and Bill Weld of the Libertarians.

      Any candidate on enough ballots to achieve 270 electoral college votes should be in the debates. The people have a right to see all candidates debating the issues who are on their ballots.

      The deceptive debate commission, which is called a debate commission just to hide the truth: it is a corporation of the Democrats and Republicans whose purpose is to limit debates to their two parties, has no legitimacy. It has a major conflict of interest – why should the two establishment parties decide their opponents cannot debate? It is an obvious conflict of interest that the media should be calling out. The media should join the demand of the people – open debate are essential for democracy.

    • The Candidates’ Views on America’s Top 20 Science, Engineering, Tech, Health & Environmental Issues in 2016

      The candidates for president have responded to America’s Top 20 Science, Engineering, Tech, Health & Environmental Issues in 2016. These key issues affect voters’ lives as much as the foreign policy, economic policy, and faith and values views that candidates traditionally share with journalists on the campaign trail. Several of America’s leading science and engineering organizations are urging the candidates and the press to give them equal priority in the national dialogue. For three cycles, presidential candidates have chosen to share their views here, as the Democratic and Republican candidates did in 2008 and 2012. In 2016, we also invited the Green and Libertarian candidates.

    • Fact-checking Donald Trump’s Charity Claims

      Donald Trump says he has donated millions to charity.

      Earlier this year, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold set out to prove him right.

      But finding evidence to support Trump’s claims turned out to be surprisingly difficult. The Republican presidential nominee provided few details. His campaign offered little help. Even Trump’s son, Eric, who runs his own charitable foundation, couldn’t cite specific donations.

      Fahrenthold reached out to dozens of charities, and took to Twitter, asking his followers for leads. Despite his exhaustive efforts, he hasn’t been able to come close to accounting for the $8.5 million Trump publicly pledged over a 15-year period.

    • Clinton’s penchant for secrecy goes back decades

      She responded this way when challenged about potential conflicts of interest involving her family’s foundation, and again when questioned about her use of private email to conduct government business.

      And now, when asked about her health Sunday, Hillary Clinton has fallen back on the same strategy she has used for decades: silence.

      Her secrecy seems to create as much controversy – if not more – than the initial issue itself, perpetuating a belief held by most voters since the start of the presidential campaign that she is not honest.

      In other words, Clinton’s careful attempts to avoid political trouble only seem to get her into more political trouble.

    • CBS News edits transcript, video clip of Bill Clinton discussing Hillary’s health

      CBS News edited a video clip and transcript to remove former President Bill Clinton’s comment during an interview that Hillary Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee, “frequently” fainted in the past.

      Bill Clinton sat down with CBS’s Charlie Rose on Monday to try to clear the air around questions regarding his wife’s health after she collapsed while getting into a van at a 9/11 memorial ceremony on Sunday.

      “Well, if it is, then it’s a mystery to me and all of her doctors,” Bill Clinton said when Rose asked him if Hillary Clinton was simply dehydrated or if the situation was more serious. “Frequently — well, not frequently, rarely, on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing’s happened to her when she got severely dehydrated, and she’s worked like a demon, as you know, as secretary of State, as a senator and in the year since.”

      But the “CBS Evening News” version cut Clinton’s use of “frequently” out. And a review by The Hill of the official transcript released by the network shows that Clinton saying “Frequently — well, not frequently,” is omitted as well.

      Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller first discovered the edit of the television version

    • Jill Stein Cites FAIR’s Correction of MSNBC Falsehood
    • Google Supports Hillary

      Everything in America, including our Internet search engine, is corrupt. Progressive Stephen Lendman reports that Google has put its search engine in support of Hillary, a crazed warmonger with medical problems, as president of the US.

      What is extraordinary is that the rest of the world’s governments have accepted US control of the Internet and relies on the United States, the tyrannical government of which despises every country that is not an American puppet state. Why militarily powerful countries such as Russia and China and rich countries such as China allow Washington to control the Internet is the mystery of our time.

      The need is desperate for competing Internet systems and search engines available to all, or the Internet will become another censored provider of Washington propaganda.

    • REVEALED: Google staffers have had at least 427 meetings at the White House over course of Obama presidency – averaging more than one a week

      Newly compiled data reveals Google and its affiliates have attended meetings at the White House more than once a week, on average, since President Barack Obama took office.

      Numbers crunched by the Campaign for Accountability and the Intercept show 169 Google employees have met with 182 government officials in the White House.

      The meetings took place at least 427 times. The data used spans from Obama’s first month in office in 2009 until October 2015, and includes government meetings with representatives of Google-affiliated companies Tomorrow Ventures and Civis Analytics.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Another Day, Another Problem With Facebook’s Random Decisions To Block Content

      Last week one of the big stories of the week was Facebook blocking people from posting an iconic photo from the Vietnam War because it showed a young girl, naked, running from an attack. After lots of press and lots of public outcry, Facebook relented and claimed that it would be adjusting its policies. And yet… another week, another set of stories of problems on Facebook. It’s unclear how widespread this is, but on Monday there were suddenly reports (on Twitter, of course) of Facebook randomly blocking perfectly reasonable links. The first example I saw of this was reports that Facebook was blocking this story from The Intercept about Rep. Barbara Lee’s lone vote against the PATRIOT Act (the only member of the House to vote against it) a few days after September 11th.

    • German Lawyer Details Politics and Double-Standards of Facebook Censorship

      On his website, Hamburg lawyer and blogger Joachim Steinhöfel collects deleted Facebook comments which didn’t pose a threat. He believes that the platform is under political pressure, and that it isn’t neutral in its approach to censorship. Currently, he is preparing a case against Facebook, and may set a precedent.

      “Facebook-Sperre — Wall of Shame” is Steinhöfel’s website, where he documents the site’s methodology for blocking posts. He believes the site’s decisions are motivated by politics rather than its own stated principles.

    • Silje Mari on Instagram Censorship

      My Instagram account is where I can share with my followers and also the rest of the world who I am as a person. I tend to share thoughts and beliefs on individual posts and can be very outspoken if it is something I feel strongly about. Recently however, Instagram has been removing some of my posts due to not following their community guidelines.

      It started with them removing one picture of me which was censored to apply with their community guidelines, to me then retaliating by posting another censored picture. My nipples were not visible in these pictures. Instagram still removed them. They have also removed two older posts which were creative pictures by photographers, not showing any nipple. I will be reposting theses pictures later on.

    • ‘Censorship of the internet is harmful to dialogue’

      Editors Sunetra Sen Narayan and Shalini Narayanan analyse the growth of new media in Digital India from a broad communications and interdisciplinary perspective in their latest book titled, India Connected, published by Sage Publications.

      The book critically examines the growth of new media in India and offers a perspective on the opportunities and challenges it poses to governance, development, businesses as well as in social marketing efforts.

      Narayan has more than 25 years of experience in communications, including in advertising, print journalism, documentary film production and teaching. She is currently associate professor at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication. Narayanan, D.Phil, is an independent media consultant and trainer with two and a half decades of experience in the government and non-government sectors.

    • Statement from Gawker Media Editorial Union on Univision’s Deletion of News Stories

      Univision has said that it bought Gawker Media because it believed in the work that our publications do. That work, for well over a decade, was only possible because we knew that our company leadership would defend it if it came under frivolous legal attack.

      Univision’s first act on acquiring the company was to delete six true and accurate news stories from our archive, because those stories had been the targets of frivolous or malicious lawsuits. This decision undermines the foundation of the ability of Gawker Media’s employees to do our work. We have seen firsthand the damage that a targeted lawsuit campaign can do to companies and individual journalists, and the removal of these posts can only encourage such attempts in the future.

      We condemn this action by Univision’s executives in the strongest possible terms. It sets an alarming precedent both for our relationship with our new owners and for the business of journalism as a whole. It is unacceptable for a publisher to delete legitimate and true news stories for business reasons.

    • Cuba’s Telecom Monopoly Banning Text Messages Containing Words Like ‘Democracy’

      The door to modernizing Cuba’s communications networks opened slightly wider recently after the FCC removed the country from the agency’s banned nation list. That allows fixed and wireless companies alike to begin doing business in Cuba as part of an overall attempt to ease tensions between the States and the island nation. And while Cuba has been justly concerned about opening the door to NSA bosom buddies like AT&T and Verizon, it’s still apparently not quite ready to give up some of its own, decidedly ham-fisted attempts to crack down on free speech over telecom networks.

      A recent investigative report by blogger Yoani Sanchez and journalist Reinaldo Escobar found that the nation has been banning certain words sent via text message with the help of state-owned telecom monopoly ETECSA. The report, confirmed in an additional investigation by Reuters, found that roughly 30 different keywords are being banned by Cuba’s government, including “democracy,” “human rights,” and the name of several activists and human rights groups. Words containing such keywords simply aren’t delivered, with no indication given to the sender of the delivery failure.

    • Palestinian women fight elections name ‘censorship’

      With Palestinian municipal elections delayed, authorities will now have time to fix a contentious issue surrounding the names on the candidate lists.

      Some of the literature used for the polls in the West Bank and Gaza that were scheduled for October had replaced the names of female candidates with “sister of…”, “wife of…” or just their initials.

      The issue first rose to prominence at the end of August when female voters and candidates started using a hashtag to voice their dissent and to call for women’s names to be properly represented.

    • How YouTube is Using Censorship to Choose Advertisers Over Content Creators

      YouTube has been trending in the news due to various reports from YouTube creators displaying notifications received from the video-sharing website saying that their videos have been demonetized. In case you’re unfamiliar with how YouTube stars earn money, they have an AdSense account which allows them to earn revenue from ads on their videos. When a video is demonetized, it means the creator is unable to receive income from the AdSense revenue from said video.

      The company, unfortunately, has the right to do this. In fact, they’ve been demonetizing videos since 2012, when they first introduced their new “ad-friendly” guidelines. At the time, and today, the company uses an algorithm to remove videos that do not follow the rules. But, even though the company has previously held guidelines for ad-friendly content, the descriptions of what is considered ad-friendly are vague and seem to censor creators, rather than help them create better content.

    • Lionel Shriver sparks censorship row in Australia after criticising cultural appropriation ‘fad’

      American author Lionel Shriver has sparked an international row about censorship, artistic licence and respect for minorities after she delivered a scathing attack on the concept of “cultural appropriation.”

      Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, which was turned into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton, was invited to the Brisbane Writers Festival to speak about fiction and identity politics.

      But instead of delivering a mild address, her speech so shocked the organisers that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks – hastily arranging a conference to rebut her views.

    • Mehta asks film industry to come together on censorship

      Filmmaker Hansal Mehta has often been at loggerheads with the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and the director has appealed to the film fraternity to come together against censorship.

    • Hansal Mehta asks film industry to come together on censorship
    • Pokemon Go The Latest Tool For Russian Government To Silence Speakers It Doesn’t Like

      On the list of countries I’ve always wanted to visit but would be somewhat scared if I did, Russia is probably near the top. While there are certainly more dangerous parts of the world for any variety of reasons, I’ve found that the thing that gets me in the most trouble is my big mouth — and the Russian government has made a habit of coming down on any kind of speech it doesn’t like with a hand heavier than a Russian bear. This government uses its own laws in perverse ways to accomplish this, notably its laws that make it illegal to offend others on religious grounds, as seen chiefly in its treatment of punk band Pussy Riot.

      This use of religious protectionism has proceeded to the present. The Russian government recently announced that it was locking up a noted atheist blogger for two months. His crime? Playing Pokemon Go in a church.

    • Israeli Official Who Promoted Genocide on Facebook Now Fighting ‘Incitement’ on Social Media
    • Israel: Facebook complying with requests to takedown inciting content, claims Ayelet Shaked
    • Israel and Facebook join hands to decide what is censored
    • Facebook and Israel Government Team Up To Tackle Terrorism On Social Media
    • Facebook to help Israel censor comments
    • Why Is Israel Letting Facebook Off the Hook on Incitement?
    • Israel teams with Facebook to fight terrorism
    • Facebook to let the Israelis help censor your news feed

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • ‘We Are Criminalizing Transparency to Protect Illegitimate Uses of Power’

      If the expression “I can’t breathe” holds power for you, it’s because of Ramsey Orta. He’s the one who held his cellphone camera steady while New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked the life out of Eric Garner in July of 2014.

      Garner was Orta’s friend. He used to give Orta’s daughter a dollar to spend at the local store every time they walked past. Ramsey Orta’s been sentenced to four years in prison stemming from drug and weapon charges, those that stuck among the many and various police have brought against him since the Garner video came to light.

      Chris Leday uploaded video of Alton Sterling’s killing at the hands of Baton Rouge police. Reporting to work the next day, he was arrested, handcuffed and shackled by civilian and military officers. First he “fit a description,” then it was assault charges that didn’t exist; finally, it was unpaid traffic tickets.

    • How you can help India’s first free public library for the Tibetan exile community

      Earlier this year, I wrote about a wonderful library project that Tibetan friends in India are putting together for a Tibetan exile community there, with the support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Here’s an update from my friend Phuntsok Dorjee, who is one of the organizers.

    • Settler Colonialism on Trial at Standing Rock

      The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s remarkable struggle to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline sparked a movement. Thousands of people – including representatives from more than 180 indigenous nations – traveled to North Dakota in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as they defend their rights and protect nature. The companies behind the Dakota Access Pipeline responded by using attack dogs and bulldozing their sacred sites in order to forcibly displace them. Mounting pressure from the movement forced the Obama administration to intervene and temporarily stop the construction of the pipeline on indigenous land. However, it would be a mistake to believe that the struggle is over. The U.S. government has a long way to go in regards to respecting its treaties with Native American peoples.

    • Arrest warrant for muckraking U.S. journalist

      New York, September 12, 2016 — Prosecutors in the U.S. state of North Dakota should immediately drop all criminal charges against broadcast journalist Amy Goodman, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Goodman, who hosts the global news program Democracy Now!, faces criminal trespass charges in connection with her reporting on protests against the construction of an oil pipeline opposed by Native American tribes in the region.

      The warrant, issued September 8, followed Goodman’s filming of security guards using dogs and pepper spray to disperse protesters seeking to stop the construction of the pipeline, according to Democracy Now! and National Public Radio. Both protesters and security guards were injured in the September 3 clash, according to the reports.

      The Morton County’s Sherriff’s Department issued a statement saying that protesters entered private land after breaking down a fence, according to the NPR report. Democracy Now! reported on its website that an officer from the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation acknowledged in an affidavit that Goodman is seen in the video identifying herself as a journalist and interviewing protesters. If convicted of the misdemeanor charge, Goodman could face a maximum penalty of 30 days in jail.

    • I Was a CIA Whistleblower. Now I’m a Black Inmate. Here’s How I See American Racism

      It is a strenuous, unceasing effort to cope with the ordeal of being incarcerated at a federal prison. I find myself identifying with the title character from Shakespeare’s “Richard II” when he laments his own effort to adjust to confinement by wondering, “I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world.” I do my best to resist the thought that prison is a reflection of our society, but the comparisons are unavoidable. Unlike “Richard II,” my “studying” has not been so much a comparison as an unhappy realization.

      From the moment I crossed the threshold from freedom to incarceration because I was charged with, and a jury convicted me of, leaking classified information to a New York Times reporter, I needed no reminder that I was no longer an individual. Prison, with its “one size fits all” structure, is not set up to recognize a person’s worth; the emphasis is removal and categorization. Inmates are not people; we are our offenses. In this particular prison where I live, there are S-Os (sex offenders), Cho-Mos (child molesters), and gun and drug offenders, among others. Considering the charges and conviction that brought me here, I’m not exactly sure to which category I belong. No matter. There is an overriding category to which I do belong, and it is this prison reality that I sadly “compare unto the world”: I’m not just an inmate, I’m a black inmate.

      Thinking that you know about something and actually experiencing it are completely different. Previously, my window into prison life was informed, in part, by the same depictions in movies, TV shows, and books that the rest of America has seen. And unfortunately, as a child I heard firsthand so many stories about prison life from people I knew that it seemed commonplace. I expected there to be a separation of the races — by some accounts “necessary” racial segregation — because that is what I saw, read, and heard. My expectations and naiveté could not prepare me for actually living in it, however.

      I didn’t have to be taught the rules of prison society, particularly in regard to racial segregation, because they are so ingrained in just about every aspect of prison society that they seem instinctual. Even though there is no official mandate, here, I am my skin color. Whenever, in my stubborn idealism, I refuse to acknowledge being racially categorized and question the submission to it, the other prisoners invariably respond, “Man, this is prison.”

    • Hillary Clinton: Boycotting North Carolina Is Noble and Just; Boycotting Israel Is Bigoted and Hateful

      Could someone explain why it’s noble, enlightened, justifiable, and progressive to boycott an American state, but hateful, bigoted, retrograde, and evil to support a boycott of a foreign country that has been imposing a brutal, discriminatory, and illegal occupation for many decades, a boycott that is led by people with virtually no political rights? How did that happen? Hillary Clinton is far from the only person espousing this bizarre distinction — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as but one example, is punishing companies that support a boycott of Israel while forcing state employees to honor the boycott of North Carolina — but what could possibly justify U.S. politicians drawing the moral and ethical lines about boycotts in this manner?

    • FBI Arrests Two Suspects Involved With Hacking Of CIA Director’s Personal Email Account

      If nothing else, the CWA hackings proved government agencies like the DHS and FBI must not be able to hear themselves talk when they demand more data on Americans, despite not being able to secure the information they already have from 16-year-old hackers who go by the name of “penis” on Twitter. Their efforts also made it clear that most cell phone service providers’ authentication processes have miles to go before they even approach “competent.”

    • New court hearing over ‘imprisoned’ daughter as deadline for return passes

      On August 3, a judge in London ordered Saudi academic Mohammed Al-Jeffery to return his daughter, Amina, to Britain.

      The deadline set by Mr Justice Holman has now passed and she has not yet returned.

      His order was that Mr Al-Jeffery had to “permit and facilitate” his daughter’s return to England or Wales by 4pm on Sunday.

    • Lead Investigator For CIA ‘Torture Report’ Explains Why It Was Necessary To Hijack A Copy Of The ‘Panetta Review’

      The Guardian has published a long report detailing Senate staffer Daniel Jones’ experience with the CIA while acting as the Senate Committee’s chief investigator during the compilation of the “Torture Report.” While much has already been written about the CIA’s actions during this time, the Guardian’s multi-part piece gives the public an insider’s look at the effort the agency went through to disrupt the preparation of the report.

      The process started off on the wrong foot. It was the New York Times, not the agency itself, that initiated the Senate’s examination of the CIA’s counterterrorism efforts.

    • North Dakota’s Governor Declared a State of Emergency to Deal With Peaceful Oil Pipeline Protesters. We Call It a State of Emergency for Civil Rights.

      Something historic is happening in North Dakota. People are protesting an oil pipeline. And the people who are protesting the oil pipeline are mostly Native Americans.

      It’s historic because the 200 or so tribes that are protesting the construction of the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline have not united together for more than 150 years. Several thousand indigenous people from across the county have journeyed to a little-known pasture on the prairie just miles from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation — where the oil pipeline is slated to cross the Missouri River — to protect the land the tribes consider sacred and culturally significant as well as the water necessary for life. The protectors, as the protesters call themselves, are defending the land and water using little more than the right to assemble and speak freely, a long-standing protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution.

      Unfortunately, there is another kind of history happening here. It’s a history that is all too familiar to indigenous people; it is the shameful cycle of government-sanctioned disregard for the human and civil rights of Native Americans. In response to the pipeline protests, North Dakota’s government suppressed free speech and militarized its policing by declaring a state of emergency and calling out the National Guard.

    • Call in Congress for Family Court Reform

      On a Saturday evening in late March 2008, a 41-year-old Maryland man named Mark Castillo drowned his three children in the bathtub of a Baltimore hotel room.

      Castillo and his wife of 10 years, Amy, had been embroiled in a grueling custody dispute. Amy Castillo had repeatedly warned the courts that her mentally ill husband was unraveling, and had physically threatened her and their children. As a result, she tried to persuade the judge in the custody case to end Castillo’s unsupervised visits with the children.

      But the judge was not persuaded. He chose instead to rely on the testimony of a court-appointed psychologist, who said Castillo posed no risk to his family. Castillo’s visits with his children remained unchanged. Less than a year later, the children were dead. Castillo turned himself in hours after he killed them, having failed in his attempt to also kill himself. Castillo pleaded guilty in 2009 and is currently serving three life terms without the possibility of parole.

      Anti-domestic violence plan to cite the Castillo case and others like it at a Congressional briefing in Washington on Tuesday in an attempt to gain support for family court reform. The advocates say that children are too often endangered by family courts and the supposed experts those courts rely on. Psychologists used by the courts to help make decisions “in the best interest” of children, the advocates argue, often lack expertise in child abuse and domestic violence.

    • Oklahoma’s Top Court: Companies Can’t Set Own Rules for Injured Workers

      A national campaign to rewrite state laws and allow businesses to decide how to care for their injured workers suffered a significant setback Tuesday when the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that Oklahoma’s version of the law is unconstitutional.

      The 2013 legislation gave Oklahoma employers the ability to “opt out” of the state workers’ compensation system and write their own plans, setting the terms for what injuries were covered, which doctors workers could see, how workers were compensated and how disputes were handled. The statute was backed by the oil and gas industry and retailer Hobby Lobby.

      Buoyed by the success in Oklahoma, proponents took the idea nationwide as a coalition led by Walmart, Lowe’s and several of the largest retail, trucking and health care companies sought to pass similar laws across the country. Bills and draft proposals have been floated in Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Illinois.

    • Tell Justin Trudeau to Fight for Web Developer Saeed Malekpour

      Imagine: you’re a programmer who loves to code. You’re studying at college, but you’re also working as a freelance web developer. In what spare time you have, you polish and release your best work under an open source license, for the world to use. Your father has grown sick and may be dying, and so you take a short break to travel back to the country of your birth to visit him.

      After the long flight, you take a walk along the streets of the capital — perhaps to shake off your jetlag. Two men approach you, and begin aggressively questioning you. You’re confused. Are they police officers? Without warning, they grab you by the arm, handcuff you, and force you into an unmarked sedan. You are thrown into solitary confinement, and held there for months, out of contact with the outside world. You are tortured. You are told that you are a criminal mastermind behind a network of evil websites. If you confess, they say, you will be released. You confess. They show your confession on national television. Your mother has a heart attack when the confessions are shown. You are sentenced to death. Your father dies as you await your execution.

    • More Proof the U.S. National Anthem Has Always Been Tainted with Racism

      The decision of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to sit during the pregame playing of the national anthem has had a larger impact than anyone could have foreseen.

      President Obama has weighed in, endorsing Kaepernick’s “constitutional right to make a statement.” When Kaepernick changed his protest to kneeling instead of sitting, teammate Eric Reid joined him. Brandon Marshall of the Denver Broncos followed suit and lost an endorsement deal. Marcus Peters of the Kansas City Chiefs raised a fist during the anthem, a la John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the 1968 Olympics. An unidentified Navy sailor who took a seat in solidarity with Kaepernick may face disciplinary action. The protest has even spread to high school players across the country.

    • Reporter who documented guard dogs charged with trespassing at pipeline protest site

      A reporter from Democracy Now! who documented security personnel with guard dogs working for Dakota Access Pipeline is facing criminal trespassing charges in Morton County.

      Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Amy Goodman of New York for a Class B misdemeanor, according to court documents.

    • North Dakota Wants to Arrest Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman for Engaging in Journalism

      So much for the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

      Despite well-established freedom of the press protections that outline and guarantee the rights of reporters who cover breaking news stories—including confrontations between demonstrators and authorities—North Dakota officials have charged Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman with criminal trespassing after she documented private security personnel’s use of dogs to attack Native American foes of the Dakota Access Pipeline project.

      Video footage obtained by Goodman, an internationally respected and frequently honored independent journalist, helped to alert Americans to the tactics being used to stop demonstrations against the pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies. On Friday, the Obama administration halted work on key portions of the $3.8 billion pipeline project—recognizing concerns raised by the tribe and environmental activists.

    • Fired for not shooting, West Virginia cop breaks silence

      A Marine veteran says he was fired from the Weirton, West Virginia Police Department because he did not shoot an armed black man who was looking for “suicide by cop.” Two other officers arrived and killed the man, whose gun was not loaded.

      Stephen Mader, 25, answered a call on May 6 from a distraught woman who said her boyfriend was trying to commit suicide. He tried to de-escalate the situation using his Marine Corps and police academy training, he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Weirton is a city of about 20,000 in the West Virginia panhandle, 36 miles west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

    • The Native American, the Palestinian: A Spirited Fight for Justice

      Thousands of Native Americans resurrected the fighting spirit of their forefathers as they stood in unprecedented unity to contest an oil company’s desecration of their sacred land in North Dakota. Considering its burdened historical context, this has been one of the most moving events in recent memory.

      The standoff, involving 5,000-strong Native American protesters, including representatives of 200 tribes and environmental groups, has been largely reduced in news reports as being a matter of technical detail – concerning issues of permits and legal proceedings.

      At best, both the tribes and the oil company are treated as if they are equal parties in a purportedly proportionate tussle.

      “’Dakota’ means ‘friendly’ and yet, it seems, neither side has been too friendly to each other,” wrote Mark Albert in the website of the American broadcasting television network, CBS.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Netflix Urges FCC To Crack Down On Broadband Usage Caps

      We’ve long pointed how how broadband usage caps (especially on fixed-line networks) are arbitrary, punitive and confusing. In addition to being totally unnecessary, broadband caps open the door to anti-competitive behavior (like zero rating a company’s own content but not a competitor’s). The idea that caps are necessary to manage the network has long been debunked, and even the ISPs themselves have admitted that caps have nothing to do with congestion. Broadband caps are little more than glorified price hikes on captive markets, useful to protect legacy TV revenues from streaming video.

    • Netflix wants annoying data caps to be illegal

      Netflix wants you to be able to stream plenty of TV shows whether you’re at home or on a mobile connection, so it’s pushing for the US government to make some data caps illegal.

      In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission last week, Netflix said that the commission should consider banning data caps on wired internet connections and banning “low” data caps on mobile connections.

      “Data caps (especially low data caps) and usage based pricing discourage a consumer’s consumption of broadband and may impede the ability of some households to watch internet television in a manner and amount that they would like,” Netflix writes.

    • Engineers propose a technology to break the net neutrality deadlock

      Stanford engineers have invented a technology that would allow an internet user to tell network providers and online publishers when and if they want content or services to be given preferential delivery, an advance that could transform the network neutrality debate.

      Net neutrality, as it’s often called, is the proposition that internet providers should allow equal access to all content rather than give certain applications favored status or block others.

      On home networks, favored status is known as fast track delivery. On mobile devices the terminology is zero-rating, because favored traffic does not count against data usage caps.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Kenya In Drive To Get Artisans, Designers To Embrace IP

      While it is common knowledge that Kiondo is a Kenyan product produced not just by artists by ordinary women as well, it is widely believed in Kenya that the product was patented in Tokyo, Japan by some entrepreneur, something that is both shrouded in myth and controversy.

      “I do not care if the basket was patented in Japan or not, all I know is that making covers for the basket gives me an income. In fact, I do not understand all this talk about patents or what they are all about,” Musyoka, told Intellectual Property Watch, his homemade needle in hand as he joins pieces of leather together to make the baskets.

      Musyoka, like the tens of artisans and creators working at the popular market frequented by foreign tourists, displays little knowledge of intricacies surrounding patents.

    • Group Of Nations Demand UN Investigative Report On WIPO Director [Ed: background here]

      About a dozen members of the World Intellectual Property Organization yesterday demanded to be provided with a report conducted by the United Nations Office of Investigation and Oversight Services (OIOS) on allegations against the WIPO director general.

      “The report was requested by Member States and should be available to Member States,” they said in a statement, available here, to the WIPO Coordination Committee. “We reiterate our request that the CoCo [Coordination Committee] Chair immediately formally request that OIOS produce a full version of the OIOS report, redacted only to protect witness confidentiality, and to provide this to member states no later than September 26, one week before the General Assemblies. It is imperative for organizational transparency and Member State oversight. Any further delays in releasing the report are unacceptable.”

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Shouldn’t Hold Technology Back

        The FCC is about to make a decision about whether third-party companies can market their own alternatives to the set-top boxes provided by cable companies. Under the proposed rules, instead of using the box from Comcast, you could buy your own from a variety of different manufacturers. It could even have features that Comcast wouldn’t dream of, like letting you sync your favorite shows onto your mobile phone or search across multiple free TV, pay TV, and amateur video sites.

        We’ve been closely following the “Unlock the Box” proposal since it was first introduced in February, but its history goes back much further. Congress first authorized the FCC to enact rules bringing competition to the set-top box market 20 years ago, as a part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. We’re so close to finally unlocking the box, but pay TV providers and big content companies have been throwing out every distracting argument they can to stop it.

      • Advertiser Tells Court It’s Not Liable for Pirate Sites

        Advertising network JuicyAds has told a California federal court that it’s not responsible for pirate sites that use its service to generate revenue. The case is the first where an ad-company stands accused of aiding pirate sites, which has been a major complaint from entertainment industry insiders in recent years.

      • More on the European Supreme Court’s hyperlink ruling and why reactions are all over the map

        Reactions have been all over the map about the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling on the legality of hyperlinks to infringing material. Some outlets despair that links can be illegal, others rejoice that links to infringements can be legal. The legal landscape is complex and there are many underlying issues – not the least being what the law says today, versus what the law should be saying.

        The Electronic Frontier Foundation screamed out in despair that “this terrible ruling is hard to fathom” in a post titled that the ECJ “ushes in a dark era for hyperlinks”. In contrast, TorrentFreak proclaimed that the ruling means “linking is (usually) not infringement” (updated since original publication). There are other opinions and analysis pieces on the ruling all over the scale.

        Why is this? A large amount of the confusion can be summed up in the conflation of two completely different issues: the first and obvious issue is whether the ruling is reasonable as the law stands today, but there’s also the issue of what the law says today versus what the law should be saying according to common sense of the net generation. While opinions vary on the morality of the copyright monopoly among the net generation, most seem to agree that you should be able to talk about a resource on the net, the same way you’re able to describe an address in a city without that description being illegal in itself (so-called “Analog-Equivalent Rights”). But this is not what the law looks like today.

      • No new copyright for news sites, say young MEPs ahead of EU State of the Union

        MEPs Julia Reda (Greens/EFA, Germany), Marietje Schaake (ALDE, Netherlands), Brando Benifei (S&D, Italy) and Dan Dalton (ECR, United Kingdom) joined forces today to reject the European Commission’s proposal for a new extra copyright for European news websites. Commission President Juncker is expected to announce the plan in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.

      • Wikimedia, EDRI, and others call for EU Copyright Package to uphold DSM fundamental principles

        Wikimedia, EDRI, Application Developers Alliance, along with other associations advocating for digital rights and NGOs representing digital creators and platforms, addressed a letter [available here] to, among others, EU Commission’s President Junker, Vice-President Ansip, and Commissioner Oettinger, urging the Copyright Package expected to be released on 15 September to uphold

        “the fundamental principles of the Digital Single Market such as rights of citizens to freedom of information, access to knowledge and the limitation of intermediaries’ liability, which lie at the very foundations of the internet”.

        In the letter published on 9 September, the signatories request the EU Commission:

        - Not to create a new ancillary right for publishers. After the tragic experiments in Spain and Germany, the signatories stress, that – you guys should have understood that distorting copyright to tax snippets produce “no positive outcomes but has harmed consumers, innovation and the internet at large” — i.e., not only Google, but many other small companies and startup aggregating and indexing news on the internet and struggling to fill the gap between old media and digital revolution. In the same regard, the signatories also urge the Commission to publish the response to the public consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and on the ‘panorama exception’. The signatories say that “many have pointed out that new ancillary rights for publishers were harmful”.

09.13.16

Links 13/9/2016: ​Linus Torvalds’ Laptop, NethServer 7 “Bruschetta” Released

Posted in News Roundup at 4:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • You’re a step closer to getting $55 from the PS3 Linux debacle lawsuit

    Open up your wallets—Sony might have as much as $55 for you. PlayStation 3 owners who lost the ability to run Linux on their consoles following a 2010 firmware update should soon be getting a notice from the console maker that it is settling a class-action lawsuit over the debacle.

    A California federal judge signed off (PDF) on the accord (PDF) Thursday, and notices of the deal will be sent via e-mail to those on the PlayStation network. Those notices should reach as much as 77 percent of the affected class members, according to the court. Other advertisements about the deal will be advertised online.

    Those eligible for a cash payment of either $9 or $55 are “all persons in the United States who purchased a Fat PS3 model in the United States between November 1, 2006, and April 1, 2010.”

  • Desktop

    • Cub Linux – a mix of Chromium and Ubuntu Linux

      Cub Linux(Cub comes from Chromium + Ubuntu) is a unique and elegant result of a combination of the finest properties of Chromium browser and popular Ubuntu Linux. It is a simple yet powerful, web-focused Linux distribution with modern features and components such as fast speeds, Google integration, web applications and many more from Chromium web browser and hardware compatibility, multiple mainstream applications in Ubuntu Linux.

    • Dear EFF, please investigate Microsoft for malicious practices regarding Windows 10 [Ed: Vista 10 is proof that — just as Establishment politicians are immune from law enforcement — so are proprietary software giants]

      Microsoft’s practices with their newest operating system, named Windows 10, has been ignorantly unethical at best and malicious at worst.

      The problems begin with the upgrades. Reports everywhere state that people are being tricked or forced into upgrading to Windows 10 from their current, preferred version of Windows.

    • The Best Linux Desktop for Work

      Wait, you doubt that there’s a best Linux desktop for work? Yes I know some users do. A lot of folks out there still believe you need a proprietary operating system to get work done.

      But speaking as a user who uses various Linux distros everyday to get work done, I can tell you that for most people it’s a matter of preference. Sure, there are legacy software exceptions to this rule. However between the move to the “cloud” and new Linux compatible applications popping up all the time, I’ve found Linux is great for getting work done.

      In this article, I’ll look at some of the most popular desktop Linux distros for getting work done, along with some software recommendations to make using Linux a smoother process overall.

    • ​Linus Torvalds reveals his favorite programming laptop

      I recently talked with some Linux developers about what the best laptop is for serious programmers. As a result I checked out several laptops from a programmer’s viewpoint. The winner in my book? The 2016 Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. I’m in good company. Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, agrees. The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, for him, is the best laptop around.

    • Ubuntu Infringing, AlienBob Quits, Linus’ Laptop

      The top story today proves once again that Hollywood has way too much power. A DMCA takedown request to Google, to which they relented, included an address to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS. In other news, Slackware developer and Slackware Live founder Eric “AlienBob” Hameleers has given his notice and Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Alpha 2 was released. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols spoke to Linus Torvalds about his development computer and Matt Hartley posted some ideas for the perfect Linux desktop.

  • Server

    • Five Linux Server Distros Worth Checking Out

      Pretty much any of the nearly 300 Linux distributions you’ll find listed on Distrowatch can be made to work as servers. Since Linux’s earliest days, users have been provisioning “all purpose” distributions such as Slackware, Debian and Gentoo to do heavy lifting as servers for home and business. That may be fine for the hobbyist, but its a lot of unnecessary work for the professional.

      From the beginning, however, there have been distributions with no other purpose but to serve files and applications, help workstations share common peripherals, serve-up web pages and all the other things we ask servers to do, whether in the cloud, in a data center or on a shelf in a utility closet.

    • How we used Linux

      Industrial Automation is an industry that’s always 10 years behind mainstream technologies. This is partly due to the large monopoly held by the three main players, Siemens, Allen Bradley & Wonderware. This has led to an unfortunate lack of innovation, especially in native industrial web applications, Which are almost nonexistent.

      At Bubble Automation we saw this as an issue. Most clients who wanted remote monitoring capabilities of their sites were stuck using clunky add-ons. Add-ons requiring large license fees and maintenance costs, or insecure TeamViewer/VNC connections needing third party tools to be installed on the clients machines.

    • NethServer 7 “Bruschetta” Server-Oriented Linux OS to Support Nextcloud 10

      Softpedia was informed by Alessio Fattorini from the CentOS-based NethServer Linux operating system about the availability of the second Beta development milestone of the upcoming NethServer 7 release.

      The first Beta of NethServer 7 “Bruschetta” was released on July 13, 2016, so it took the developers exactly two months to push a new Beta out the door for early adopters and public beta testers who either want to help them fix bugs and polish existing features, or just get an early taste of what’s coming in the server-oriented distribution.

      Being fully in sync with the CentOS 7 Linux repositories, NethServer 7 Beta 2 is here today, September 12, 2016, to add support for the Nextcloud 10 self-hosting cloud server platform, support for implementing advanced static routes with specific selection of metric and device, as well as to force a default gateway. It also adds a brand new bandwidth monitoring module called BandwidthD, along with a POP3 connector module.

    • NethServer : An all-in-one server for Small and Medium enterprises

      NethServer is an all-in-one Linux distribution based on CentOS, which is the clone of popular commercial Linux distribution Red hat Enterprise Linux. It ships with powerful, yet easy to use web interface that enables us to install plenty of pre-configured modules with a single mouse click. It is completely free, and 100% open source distribution supported by many contributors and community members all over the world. NethServer is opt for small office and medium enterprise organizations, and of course you can use it for large enterprises if you have sufficient high-end configuration system.

    • IBM Claims new Linux X86 killer server can do the impossible

      Brace up for the new Linux-based all-powerful lineup that has been said to be capable of doing just about anything. According to IBM who made the announcement, the new X86 based servers are made with heavy computing in mind. IBM is of the opinion that with the new machines, it will be much easier to run deep learning, AI as well as big data analytics.

      With the new servers, cognitive workloads can be propelled better and that the efficiency of the data centre will be greatly improved, IBM added. They said that the new server is equipped with a new chip that also combine innovations gotten from “OpenPOWER”, a community that is known to deliver performances on higher levels with a computing efficiency that is far better than that of x86-based server.

    • 8 best practices for building containerized applications

      Containers are a major trend in deploying applications in both public and private clouds. But what exactly are containers, why have they become a popular deployment mechanism, and how will you need to modify your application to optimize it for a containerized environment?

    • User-Centric Networks Will Drive New Architectures

      The average person today is surrounded by a cloud. Smartphones alone connect people to a wide array of content and services. Add the other devices they interact with in the office or in their connected home, and the concept of user-centric network (UCN), created and controlled by the user over networks selected by the user, has emerged.

      Users will be able to pick and choose network resources to create their own virtual networks and, in effect, become their own service provider. This is done today on a closed basis and at the scale of social networks such as Google and Facebook, but tomorrow small communities will be able to do the same.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Torvalds Announces the Release of Linux Kernel 4.8 RC6, One More to Go

      It’s still Sunday in the U.S., so Linus Torvalds just published his weekly announcement to unleash yet another Release Candidate (RC) development snapshot of the upcoming Linux 4.8 kernel series.

    • Linux 4.8-rc6 Kernel Released
    • 2016 LiFT Scholarship Winner Kurt Kremitzki: Solving Food Scarcity With Linux and Open Source

      I was introduced to Linux in the era of Red Hat Linux 9, but I thought it *was* Linux, and when “Enterprise” was added I stopped using it. Several years ago, I picked up Ubuntu and started using it full time. More recently, besides use at home, I applied what knowledge I have of Linux to a robotics competition, using the Raspberry Pi, hosted by the American Society of Agricultural & Biological Engineers in New Orleans last year. When a similar competition was assigned to an introductory Control Theory class I took last semester, the professor opted to have me assist the TA and all my classmates in teaching basic Linux skills and Python programming to do a simple maze following project.

    • Linux 3.14.79

      I’m announcing the release of the 3.14.79 kernel.

      All users of the 3.14 kernel series must upgrade.

    • Google Developer Kees Cook Details The Linux Kernel Self-Protection Project

      At the Linux Security Summit last month, Google developer Kees Cook shared the current workings of the Kernel Self-Protection Project (KSPP). The project, he said, goes beyond user space and even beyond kernel integrity. The idea is to implement changes to help the kernel protect itself.

      To understand the importance of the project, Cook said, we need to think about the multitude of devices running Linux, such as servers, laptops, cars, phones, and then consider that the vast majority of these devices are running old software, which contains bugs. Some of these devices have very long lifetimes, but the lifetime of a bug can be longer still.

    • The State of Kernel Self Protection Project by Kees Cook, Google
    • Linux kernel 3.14 declared end-of-life. Colonel Kitten informs platoon

      As you know, we take our mission to look after the Linux kernel very seriously in this platoon and I am sad to inform you that one of our top kernel agents has been given a burn notice.

      [...]

      From now on, kernel version 3.14 is to be regarded as end-of-life and removed from operations.

      Intelligence has reached us from major corporal Greg Kroah-Hartman that version 3.14.79, which constitutes a list of 12 fixes, marks the end of this chapter.

    • Btrfs Finally Has A Concise Status Page

      The Btrfs file-system finally has a concise status page so users can quickly and easily know the status of various features.

      A Phoronix reader wrote in that he believes due to his consistent requests of Btrfs developers is now this “Nouveau-like” status page for indicating the state of different file-system features.

    • Canonical Shaky On Sharing

      Remember Canonical, the company that produces the distribution Ubuntu GNU/Linux? They have a hard time even mentioning “Linux” on their website yet they manage to customize the Linux kernel for their distro without actively contributing the modifications to kernel.org.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Returns Home, QtCon Talks Videos Available

        KDE has finished its fantastic week, celebrating 20 years of hacking and freedom fighting together with Qt, VLC and FSFE in Berlin. We finished our week with a fun day trip to Pfaueninsel, Berlin’s Peacock Island.

        Videos from many of the talks are now available to download with the rest being added in the coming weeks. They are also linked from the conference program with slides, where available.

        Many thanks to the organisers of the conference. We have now returned to our homes around the world to implement our plans for the next 20 years of being the best community for end-user software.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Maps marching towards 3.22

        So, I just rolled the 3.21.92 release of GNOME Maps. This is final beta release before the next stable (3.22.0).

        The most noteworthy change will ofcourse be the new tile provider, replacing the discontinued MapQuest tiles, courtesy of Mapbox!
        We have also backported this to prior stable versions to keep things working in current distribution releases, and for the future we will also have the ability to swich tile sources without patching release versions, as Maps now fetches a service definition file. And maybe (if time and effort permits) we might expand into the territory of client-side rendering of vector data, which opens up some possibilties, such as rendering various layers of interesting stuff such as a specific type of point-of-interests, like “show all restaurants in this area”.

      • GUADEC 2017 to take place in Manchester, UK

        It is with great pleasure that the GNOME Foundation announces next year’s GUADEC to be held in Manchester, United Kingdom during the summer of 2017. The GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) brings together hundreds of users and developers every year to further the GNOME Project. It is one of the Foundation’s longest-standing and most noteworthy events.

        Manchester is located about 160 miles (260 km) northwest of London, with Manchester Airport providing easy access for international guests, as well as plenty of public transportation. It has a long history of being a place of learning and innovation, with over 20 Nobel Prize winners having worked or studied in Manchester, Chetham’s Library being the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, and notable accomplishments like the splitting of the atom by Ernest Rutherford in the early 1900s.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Solus Stands on Its Own

        If I had to pick one operating system of the year, I would be picking Ubuntu MATE 16.04, if Solus hadn’t come along and stolen the title.

        If it was a contest (and let’s admit it; it is.) this would be nothing short of a gripping and dramatic victory for Solus’ lead developer Ikey Doherty and team, especially in this new generation of proven and truly great Linux systems. If it wasn’t for the fact that the Linux community at-large was full of such amazing and cooperative people, I would call it a distro war.

        Now, before I get called out for trying to “sensationalize”, let’s get something straight. In recent weeks I have heard the words “competition” and “competitors” used more in the interchange of “fellow developers of other distros” than I have ever heard in my years of involvement with open source.

        And I’m proud to say that I welcome it with open arms. Nothing makes you better than someone trying to outdo you. At the moment, no one is trying to outdo you like Team Solus, so you’d better eat your Wheaties.

      • A Detailed Review On Elementary OS 0.4 Loki

        Elementary is a beautiful distribution, I can’t deny that actually, but the system itself with its default software isn’t out-of-the-box usage ready, for example you need to install LibreOffice yourself, also some bugs and usability problems exist in the software (Like the files compression problem, you can’t compress files).

        Elementary team actually pointed to a good point about developing desktop distributions, normal users like doctors, teachers, police staff, banking staff and others need beautiful easy-to-use interfaces, things like what elementary already provide, which is actually great, but system stability and efficiency is also very important to the end user, which has sort of lackness a bit in elementary.

        The developers should focus on solving such bugs in both the system and the software before releasing it to the public, beside testing it for the needs of the daily average user, it’s not important to just to do UI/UX improvements and introduce a very tweaking-needed operating system at the end, or let the user search for essential software by himself.

        Elementary introduces a great part of what Linux users really need and what may really take the desktop industry, however, they need to focus more on the system core instead of just the system look and feel.

      • Apricity OS 07.2016

        All in all, I like what Apricity is trying to do. The project is relatively new and off to a good start. There are some rough edges, but not many and I think the distribution will appeal to a lot of people, especially those who want to run a rolling release operating system with a very easy initial set up.

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Nominations Open for 2017 Red Hat Innovation Awards
      • Red Hat Virtualization 4: An Overview

        Red Hat’s clearly investing in adding value to the open source KVM (kernel virtual machine) project and integrating virtual machine technology more tightly into other products to make it easier for enterprises to adopt and use the complete Red Hat software environment. Red Hat Virtualization 4 (RHV4) is the next step in that campaign.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • PostgreSQL 9.5: A quick start on Fedora 24

          PostgreSQL is one of the most popular object-relational database management system (shortened to ORDBMS) and is 100% open-source. It is not purely about relations anymore: PostgreSQL is more and more about NoSQL as well. The following article is a short tutorial to set up PostgreSQL 9.5 on Fedora 24, so it can be used for a development environment. For a production deployment, it is recommended to use a different set-up and harden the service.

        • Heroes of Fedora (HoF) – F24 Final

          Welcome back to the final installment of Heroes of Fedora 24 – Final edition! The purpose of this post is to recognize the contributors who made a difference in releasing Fedora 24 Final. Below you’ll find stats for Bodhi updates, release-validation tests, and Bugzilla reports. Without further ado, let’s get started!

        • Downgrading Fedora ‘rawhide’ -> Fedora 24

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • iMX6-based IoT module gains an easily customizable carrier board

      Gumstix unveiled a baseboard for TechNexion’s Linux-friendly, i.MX6-based, Pico-IM6X COM that can be customized with its Geppetto design service.

      Gumstix continues its Geppetto tour of major IoT-oriented ARM computer-on-modules with a customizable “PICO-IMX6 Development Board” designed to actualize the TechNexion PICO-IMX6 module. Built around NXP’s Cortex-A9-based i.MX6 Solo, DualLite, or Quad SoCs, the PICO-iMX6 is notable for its small, 40 x 36mm footprint and its Intel Edison-compatible expansion connector.

    • Hands-on: Blue Hydra can expose the all-too-unhidden world of Bluetooth

      I installed Blue Hydra by “cloning” its Ruby code from its GitHub repository on an older MacBook Air I’d configured with Kali GNU/Linux “Rolling” (64 bit), a security-testing-focused version of Debian, and a SENA UD100 USB Bluetooth adapter. Blue Hydra will work on other Debian-based distributions, and it’s even pre-installed as part of the current release of Pentoo (a security-focused live CD version of Gentoo Linux). Pwnie Express has also packaged Blue Hydra for use with its line of sensors (though not with the PwnPhone), and it can be integrated with the company’s Pulse security monitoring and auditing service.

    • New Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk Drone Development Kit Makes Use of Ubuntu Snappy and ROS

      Dubbed Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk, the new development kit is here to help developers create obstacle avoidance and autonomous robots and drones that use the slimmed-down version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution designed for embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices, Ubuntu Snappy Core, as well as ROS (Robot Operating System).

      “Parrot developed S.L.A.M.dunk to be as easy and user-friendly as possible for developers, researchers, integrators, and academics,” reads the press release. “All Ubuntu functionalities and benefits from ROS (Robot Operating System) framework are embedded in the Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk making it user-friendly. The HDMI port makes it possible to develop directly on the product.”

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source routers deliver low cost, flexibility

    Open source software offers an economical and flexible option for deploying basic home, SMB or even enterprise networking. These open source products deliver simple routing and networking features, plus they are combined with security functionality, starting with a basic firewall and possibly including antivirus, antispam and Web filtering. These products can be downloaded and deployed on your own hardware, on a virtual platform, or in the cloud. Many of them sell pre-configured appliances as well. We reviewed five products: ClearOS, DD-WRT, pfSense, Untangle and ZeroShell. We found that ClearOS, pfSense, and Untangle could be appropriate for home use all the way up to the enterprise environment.

  • Review: 5 open source alternatives for routers/firewalls

    Open source software offers an economical and flexible option for deploying basic home, SMB or even enterprise networking. These open source products deliver simple routing and networking features, like DHCP and DNS. Plus, they are combined with security functionality, starting with a basic firewall and possibly including antivirus, antispam and Web filtering.

    These products can be downloaded and deployed on your own hardware, on a virtual platform, or in the cloud. Many of them sell pre-configured appliances as well if you like their feature-set or support, but don’t want to build your own machine.

  • Puppet Marches Forward, Takes Note of DevOps Employment/Salary Trends

    Folks who are focused on container technology and virtual machines as they are implemented today might want to give a hat tip to some of the early technologies and platforms that arrived in the same arena. Among those, Puppet, which was built on the legacy of the venerable Cfengine system, was an early platform that helped automate lots of virtual machine implementations. We covered it in depth all the way back in 2008. Fast-forward to today, and Puppet is still making news, creating jobs and more.

    Here are some of the recent notable newsbytes from Puppet, including its 2016 DevOps Salary Survey results.

  • Yahoo Open Sources Pulsar, a Powerful Low-Latency Messaging System

    For the past year, we’ve taken note of the many open source projects focused on Big Data that have been contributed to the community. Some of these are real difference makers–strong enough for new startup companies to align around them with business models focused on them. While the Apache Software Foundation has has announced many of these, some of the bigger tech companies are contributing as well.

    Now Yahoo has open sourced a distributed “publish and subscribe” messaging system dubbed Pulsar that’s capable of scaling while protecting low latencies. Yahoo uses Pulsar to drive several of its own in-house applications.

  • Arya.ai launches open source tool called Braid to rapidly integrate AI into systems

    Artificial Intelligence start-up Arya.ai announced on Monday the global launch of ‘Braid, an open Source tool to build intelligence quickly into systems. “Open sourcing key tools in AI, will help discover newer, interesting and more impactful use cases and applications for AI that we may not have even thought of,” said Vinay Kumar Sankarapu, CEO and founder of Arya.ai.

    Technology companies and start-ups trying to create products that use Artificial Intelligence are racing to build neural networks. By their very nature however, neural networks are complex and call for Deep Learning. Building neural networks, which are not unlike actual human brains with their complex layers, is a resource-intensive, expensive and time consuming process. And yet, these need to function flawlessly at large scale to handle tasks like speech and language processing, image processing, intelligent virtual assistants and even self-driving cars.

  • BTC.com Launches New, Open Source Mining Pool

    BTC.com has launched a new, open source bitcoin mining pool. Out of the gate, the pool seems to have some advantages in the pool sector of the mining industry. They have iOS and Android apps ready from launch, but the highlight is the efficient system underneath the platform.

  • How to Participate in Open Source Projects

    Some huge startup successes in recent years have come from the open source community, but many developers are still hesitant to devote much (or any) of their spare time to new open source projects. For those that do recognize the value, there’s still the question of how to participate, and in what? Allow us to help.

  • EximBank deploys Allevo open-source FinTP to achieve Sepa compliance

    As the SEPA scheme becomes applicable for non-Euro countries as well, EximBank, a Romanian state-owned bank dedicated to corporate financing, chooses to partner with Allevo in order to ensure the smooth alignment of bank operations to the Sepa standard.

    By implementing the open-source transactions processing solution offered by Allevo, the bank now processes its low-value payment instructions denominated in Euro according to the industry requirements.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • Copyleft and data: database law as (poor) platform

      Defenders of copyleft often have to point out that copyleft isn’t necessarily anti-copyright, because copyleft depends on copyright. This is true, of course, but the more I think about databases and open licensing, the more I think “copyleft depends on copyright” almost understates the case – global copyleft depends not just on “copyright”, but on very specific features of the international copyright system which database law lacks.

  • Education

    • Open Library Foundation Established

      The Open Library Foundation has been established to promote open source projects for libraries and to foster and support contribution, distribution, and sustainability of the benefits of these projects. The foundation provides the infrastructure for librarians, developers, designers, service providers, and vendors to collaborate with innovative open source technologies and develop transformative solutions for libraries.

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

    • Can open source and education save our electronic voting systems?

      With the recent disclosures of Democratic National Committee emails, allegations the election is rigged and other political machinations, conversations about the security of the general election are growing more frequent. People are asking, “How safe is my vote?”

      It has become such an important issue that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson discussed classifying election systems as critical infrastructure, entitling the states to the same level of cyber protection as the national power grid and the financial system. While classifying election infrastructure as critical may be a step in the right direction, it won’t be a cure-all for what ails us. To save our electronic voting system, we need to learn from the past to ready our systems for future demands.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Government Partnership turning five, refocusing on transformative impact

      This month, the Open Government Partnership (OGP) is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Over the past five years the project has grown into a movement of 70 countries and thousands of civil society organisations, together creating National Action Plans whose implementation is assessed by the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM).

    • Licensing with Open Source and Creative Commons: Not as Simple as it Seems

      The culture of sharing is deeply embedded in the 3D printing community. This doesn’t mean that it is universal, but rather that it is more of a choice not to participate. Sharing openly is seen as something to be declared proudly and its absence somewhat suspiciously regarded. A recent think piece authored by Michael Weinberg (tagline for his blog: ‘I put things here so they are on the internet’) brings to light some interesting difficulties being brought about by the success of the open source and Creative Commons copyright movements.

    • Global citizens unite to improve housing with open design and development

      Mass-scale collaboration in free and open source software has proven so successful the concept has expanded to free and open source hardware. A strong case can be made that the area of hardware with the most promise for an open source approach is appropriate technology (AT).

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • I Built A Smart Clock

        Software is my comfort zone, you don’t get burnt, electrocuted, or spend a whole day 3D printing just to find out your design is shit. My plan was to compensate for all the hardware imperfection in software. Have it be self-tuning, smart and terrific.

        I chose to have NodeJS drive the clock. Mostly because I have recently got comfortable with it, but also because it is easy to give this project a slick web interface.

  • Programming/Development

    • The unspeakable horror of Visual Studio PDB files

      When compiling C-like languages, debug information is not a problem. It gets written in the object file along with code and when objects are linked to form an executable or shared library, each individual file’s debug info is combined and written in the result file. If necessary, this information can then be stripped into a standalone file.

      This seems like the simplest thing in the world. Which it is. Unless you are Microsoft.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • With Nod to Flint Crisis, Senate Weighs a $9 Billion Water Infrastructure Bill

      With senators in a standoff over annual spending bills, the chamber is expected as soon as Wednesday to take up a bipartisan, $9 billion measure that would authorize spending on the nation’s water infrastructure. The bill includes $280 million to address the crisis over contaminated drinking water in Flint, Mich., as well as funding to combat the pollution runoff that has fed the vast bloom of algae in the waterways of southeastern Florida.

      The water bill, introduced by Senators Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, and James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, is a rare sign of agreement between one of the most liberal and one of the most conservative members of Congress. It has wide bipartisan support, and staff members expect it to receive more than 80 votes.

      However, the prospects for combining the bill with a more modest $5 billion House measure, which contains none of the Flint provisions, remain uncertain.

    • How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

      The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

      The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

      “They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA paper.

    • Sugar industry bought off scientists, skewed dietary guidelines for decades

      Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they’d downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

      One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government’s current dietary guidelines. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats—for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic.

      The bitter revelations come from archived documents from the Sugar Research Foundation (now the Sugar Association), dug up by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Their dive into the old, sour affair highlights both the perils of trusting industry-sponsored research to inform policy and the importance of requiring scientists to disclose conflicts of interest—something that didn’t become the norm until years later. Perhaps most strikingly, it spotlights the concerning power of the sugar industry.

      “These findings, our analysis, and current Sugar Association criticisms of evidence linking sucrose to cardiovascular disease suggest the industry may have a long history of influencing federal policy,” the authors concluded.

    • Military data reveals obesity issue, and it’s getting worse

      It’s not exactly clear why America’s military personnel are getting fatter. Could be that 15 years of war have weakened the focus on fitness. Could be that millennials, with their penchant for sedentary activities like playing video games and killing time on social media, aren’t always up to the rigors of military life. Could be all the burgers, fries, cakes and pies served in chow halls around the world.

      And maybe, too, the military is simply reflecting the nation’s broader population, whose poor eating habits are fueling an alarming rise obesity rates.

      This much is clear, though: Today’s military is fatter than ever.

    • Shifting Mindsets To Improve Access To Medicine

      When I took on the leadership of the Access to Medicine Foundation from Wim Leereveld, our long-time CEO and founder, the first order of business was to carve the Foundation’s path for the years ahead. To balance my ideas, as well as the evidence we already had on the influence of our work, I wanted to hear first-hand what value we bring to people.

      We also discussed many inspiring ideas – mindset shifts – that would improve access to medicine. I want to share some of them with you. Some ideas will be familiar, while others may be new. I hope they provide food for thought and inspiration to engage with our work in new ways.

      [...]

      Private sector players must also lend their expertise. Not only the big pharma companies, but also local healthcare companies, banks, logistics firms and so on. To achieve universal health coverage, we need to collectively address incentives for innovation and guarantee a sustainable, reliable supply of affordable healthcare products and services. At the Access to Medicine Foundation, our analysis has revealed examples of how pharma companies are taking action. We need equivalent insight into how other players are stepping up.

  • Security

    • Moving towards a more secure web

      To help users browse the web safely, Chrome indicates connection security with an icon in the address bar. Historically, Chrome has not explicitly labelled HTTP connections as non-secure. Beginning in January 2017 (Chrome 56), we’ll mark HTTP sites that transmit passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure.

    • UK Politician’s Campaign Staff Tweets Out Picture Of Login And Password To Phones During Campaign Phone Jam

      When we talk password security here at Techdirt, those conversations tend to revolve around stories a bit above and beyond the old “people don’t use strong enough passwords” trope. While that certainly is the case, we tend to talk more about how major corporations aren’t able to learn their lessons about storing customer passwords in plain text, or about how major media outlets are occasionally dumb enough to ask readers to submit their own passwords in an unsecure fashion.

      But for the truly silly, we obviously need to travel away from the world of private corporations and directly into the world of politicians, who often times are tasked with legislating on matters of data security and privacy, but who cannot help but show their own ineptness on the matter themselves. Take Owen Smith, for example. Smith is currently attempting to become the head of the UK’s Labour Party, with his campaign working the phones as one would expect. And, because this is the age of social media engagement, one of his campaign staffers tweeted out the following photo of the crew hard at work.

    • WiredTree Warns Linux Server Administrators To Update In Wake Of Critical Off-Path Kernel Vulnerability

      WiredTree, a leading provider of managed server hosting, has warned Linux server administrators to update their servers in response to the discovery of a serious off-path vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s handling of TCP connections.

    • How OPNFV Earned Its Security Stripes and Received a CII Best Practices Badge

      Earning the CII badge will have a HUGE impact on OPNFV’s general approach to building security into the development model (something all open source projects should model). Statistics show that around 50 percent of vulnerabilities in a software are “flaws” (usually design fault/defective design, which is hard to fix after software has been released) and 50 percent bugs (implementation fault). Following these best practices will hopefully address both design and implementation faults before they become vulnerabilities.

    • MySQL Hit By “Critical” Remote Code Execution 0-Day

      The latest high-profile open-source software project having a bad security day is MySQL… MySQL 5.5/5.6/5.7 has a nasty zero-day vulnerability.

      Researchers have discovered multiple “severe” MySQL vulnerabilities with the CVE-2016-6662 being marked as critical and does affect the latest MySQL version.

      This 0-day is open for both local and remote attackers and could come via authenticated access to a MySQL database (including web UI administration panels) or via SQL injection attacks. The exploit could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code with root privileges.

    • CVE-2016-6662 – MySQL Remote Root Code Execution / Privilege Escalation ( 0day )
    • Is Debian the gold standard for Linux security?
    • 10 Best Password Managers For Linux Operating Systems

      With so many online accounts on the internet, it can be tediously difficult to remember all your passwords. Many people write them down or store them in a document, but that’s plain insecure. There are many password managers for Windows and OS X, but here we’ll look at some of the best password managers for Linux.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Linux with a irc trojan.
    • On Experts

      There are a rather large number of people who think they are experts, some think they’re experts at everything. Nobody is an expert at everything. People who claim to have done everything should be looked at with great suspicion. Everyone can be an expert at something though.

    • OPM Hacking Report Says Agency Missed One Set Of Attacks, Spent Little On Cybersecurity [Ed: spent on Windows]

      The twice-hacked Office of Personnel Management has had little to offer but promises of “taking security seriously” and free identity theft protection for the thousands of government employees whose personal information was pried loose by hackers.

      Twice-hacked, because there was one breach the OPM did discover, and one it didn’t. While it spent time walling off the breach it had detected, another went unnoticed, leaking enough info on government employees that the CIA began worrying about the safety of agents located abroad.

      A new report [PDF] by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (which AP refers to but, oddly, does not feel compelled to LINK to, despite it being a completely PUBLIC document) details where the OPM initially went wrong.

    • Hollywood Keeps Insisting Tech Is Easy, Yet Can’t Secure Its Own Screeners

      While some will just look at this and mock Hollywood for bad security practices, it does raise more serious questions: if Hollywood can’t figure out its own (basic) technology issues, why does it think that the tech industry should solve all its problems for it? If it doesn’t even understand the basics, how can it insist that those in Silicon Valley can fix the things that it doesn’t understand itself?

      We’re already seeing this with the MPAA’s ridiculous and misguided freakout over the FCC’s plan to have cable companies offer up app versions so that authorized subscribers can access authorized, licensed content. The MPAA and its think tank friends keep falsely insisting that the FCC’s recommendation requires the cable companies to ship the actual content to third parties. But the plan has never said that. It only required that third-party devices be able to access the content — such as by passing through credentials so that the content could flow from the (licensed) cable service to the end user.

      The fact that these guys don’t seem to understand the basics of how the technology works comes through not just in the fact that they failed to secure their screener system, but also in the policy proposals that they keep making. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to take those policies seriously when they seem to be based on a fundamental ignorance of how technology actually works.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • France foiling terror plots ‘daily’ – Prime Minister Manuel Valls

      The French prime minister has said the country’s security services are foiling terror plots and dismantling militant networks “every day”.

      Manuel Valls said about 15,000 people were being monitored for radicalisation as the country continues its drive against jihadist militants.

      Previously the authorities said about 10,000 were identified as high-risk.

      A boy of 15 was arrested at his home in Paris on Saturday on suspicion of planning an attack over the weekend.

      Investigators said he had been under surveillance since April and he had been in touch with a French member of so-called Islamic State (IS), Rachid Kassim.

    • French PM: More terror attacks coming, 15,000 under surveillance

      France must expect “new attacks” by terrorists, with more “innocent victims,” the French prime minister Manuel Valls warned yesterday when he spoke on Europe 1 radio. He also revealed that French police are monitoring 15,000 people who are “in a process of radicalisation.”

      Valls told the radio station: “every day, the intelligence services, the police, the national gendarmerie, thwart attacks, and track down terrorists. We are a target, everyone understands this. This week, at least two attacks have been foiled.”

      More information about one of those planned attacks has now emerged. Several women and a 15-year-old boy have been arrested in connection with a failed terror attack on Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The Guardian reports that one woman has been charged.

    • Fifteen Years After 9/11, Blindness to the Islamist Threat Is Official Policy

      If there is a theme to this 15th annual observance — the word “anniversary” just seems so wrong — of the most lethal enemy attack ever carried out on American soil, it is erasure.

      At least that’s what they’re being told in Owego, N.Y. There, a Muslim activist group is demanding that the town’s 9/11 memorial be erased. Not all of it; just the word “Islamic.”

      Carved into the memorial — the point of which is to signify that which we must never forget — is the factual assertion that, on September 11, 2001, “nineteen Islamic terrorists” carried out coordinated suicide-hijacking attacks against the United States.

    • Dozens of Aid Groups Say UN Relief Effort Being ‘Manipulated’ by Syrian Government

      In a stinging open letter (pdf), published exclusively by The Guardian, the 73 organizations announced their decision to withdraw from the Whole of Syria program due to concerns that UN agencies based in the Syrian capital of Damascus, as well as their partners, particularly the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), are operating and distributing aid “under the substantial influence” of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

      Namely, the groups say, humanitarian programs are being implemented in government areas while besieged areas are being deprived of those same services.

      “The Syrian government has interfered with the delivery of humanitarian assistance in multiple instances, including the blocking of aid to besieged areas, the removal of medical aid from inter-agency convoys, the disregard for needs-assessments and information coming from humanitarian actors in Syria, and the marginalization of other humanitarian actors in the critical planning phases of crisis response,” states the letter, which was sent to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

    • 9/11 Fifteen Years After: What Might Have Been

      However, the 9/11 attacks have assumed a significance far greater than all other terrorist acts in the world.

      Most Americans believe that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were unprovoked and came out of the blue. However, a quick glance at the history of American military involvement in the Middle East shows that many Muslims in the Middle East had been on the receiving end of many violent American invasions and attacks.

      To name just a few, during the First Persian Gulf War, (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991), codenamed “Operation Desert Shield”, more than 100,000 sorties were flown dropping 88,500 tons of bombs, many against Iraqi targets not only in Kuwait but in Baghdad. Between 20,000 and 26,000 Iraqi military personnel were killed and 75,000 others were wounded, and there were at least 3,500 civilian fatalities from bombing.

      Apart from the attack on a bunker in Amiriyah, causing the deaths of 408 Iraqi civilians who were in the shelter, there was the attack on the fleeing Iraqis between Kuwait and Basra (known as Highway of Death), when between 1,400 and 2,000 vehicles were hit and up to 10,000 soldiers and civilians were killed.

    • ISIS Fighter Reveals Group’s Plan If Defeated in Syria

      This is the pattern all over Syria and Iraq. Protagonists may not love the side they are on, but at least it enables them to fight an enemy whom they fear and hate. He cites as an example one of his earlier commanders, a Kurdish emir named Abu Abbas al-Kurdistani, subsequently killed in battle, who had been imprisoned without trial and tortured in Iraqi Kurdistan for four years. Kurdistani said that Isis was ideal for himself because it was “the best option for oppressed people” and gave him “the opportunity to take revenge.” Nowhere in the interview does Faraj acknowledge the role that Isis atrocities have played, not just in Syria and Iraq but across the world, in creating a host of enemies for the movement who now encircle it and are threatening to overwhelm it.

    • Jill Stein: I would not have assassinated bin Laden

      Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said in an interview published Sunday that she would not have ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

      Marking the 15th anniversary of September 11 terror attacks, Stein instead told the Des Moines Register that she would have tried to bring the terror leader to trial in accordance with international law.

      “I think assassinations … they’re against international law to start with and to that effect, I think I would not have assassinated Osama bin laden but would have captured him and brought him to trial,” Stein said while campaigning in Iowa over the weekend.

      Stein also pointed to recent reports hinting at the involvement of some Saudi Arabian officials in the attacks.
      “I think all evidence certainly points to bin Laden, but the 9/11 attackers had assistance and funding and bin Laden had assistance and funding.”

    • U.S. Cyber Command’s weapons will be created by contractors

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • The Derangement Of Journalists Against Transparency

      Officials from President Barack Obama’s administration collude with Wall Street executives to push for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The FBI monitors “professional protesters” in Baltimore and Ferguson. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s aides discuss whether to release a video showing the extrajudicial killing of a young black man by the city’s police.

      Michigan Governor Rick Snyder withheld the results of lead testing in Flint. Immigration and Customs Enforcement privately lobbied against California legislation to reduce deportations of law-abiding immigrants. State Department officials likely colluded with TransCanada executives as early as 2011 on the Keystone XL pipeline project.

      All of these stories share something in common. The public learned about what government officials were doing because emails were subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Journalists obtained those emails, and the public was able to use the information to mobilize opposition to government action.

      Vox’s Matt Yglesias recently outed himself as a Journalist Against Transparency or a jatter. He argued, very incorrectly, that emails and other electronic records produced by “conversational” communication tools should not be subject to FOIA.

      Over at Muck Rock, a site dedicated to helping the public pursue FOIA requests, Michael Morisy appropriately corrected Yglesias. He failed to mention anything about privacy exemptions or the so-called “deliberative process privilege,” which exists to protect officials from the exact thing he railed against in his piece: to enable frank conversations among government officials.

    • Colin Powell’s Email To Clinton About Personal Devices Shows Routing Around FOIA Is Business As Usual

      On one hand, Powell wanted to keep some communications (those with “friends”) private, which is understandable. On the other, he clearly states he conducted official business with his private device — including communications with other State Department officials, who were using their own personal email accounts.

      It’s not just a Powell thing or a Clinton thing. It’s a government thing. Many government officials utilize personal devices and accounts. Many of them get away with it. Many government officials say nice things about transparency, too — all the while creating a stockpile of “public” documents the public never gets a chance to see, much less know exists.

      The full statement — which was partially quoted in the FBI investigation documents — shows routing around FOIA requirements, record preservation policies, and government accountability ideals comes as naturally to government officials as board of directors’ positions at favored corporations following retirement from the public sector. After discussing the issues he had with State Department security, the NSA, CIA, etc. about the supposed threat personal devices posed to government security, Powell notes the real threat is… the public.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Oceans Are Absorbing Almost All of the Globe’s Excess Heat

      Ocean temperatures have been consistently rising for at least three decades. Scientists believe that global sea surface temperatures will continue to increase over the next decade as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.

      According to a report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature released last week, the Southern Hemisphere has experienced intense warming over the past decade, with strong heat accumulation in the midlatitude regions of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

      Natural patterns such as El Niño and La Niña can have year-to-year effects on temperatures. Individual storms can also influence ocean temperatures for months or longer. But the overall temperature trends by decade reveal a backdrop of human-caused warming.

    • Indonesian firms pay farmers to be slash-and-burn ‘fall guys’

      Pay a landowner in Sumatra as little as 500,000 rupiah, or just S$52, and he will clear his land for farming using the easiest and cheapest method possible – fire.

      Throw in a few hundred dollars more and he will farm any crop, from oil palm to trees for pulpwood, on his land, which can vary in size from one to a few dozen hectares.

      Such arrangements by plantation firms are not only common in rural Indonesia, but they also make locals ready “fall guys” for the companies when the authorities look for culprits of slash-and-burn violations, say green activists.

      “The firms use the farmers as their shields, which absolve them of wrongdoing because it shifts the blame squarely on the farmers,” said Greenpeace Indonesia campaigner Yuyun Indradi.

      Plantation conglomerates and their suppliers are often accused of turning a blind eye when farmers they pay to plant their crops use fire to clear land, he said.

    • Fukushima Backlash Hits Japan Prime Minister

      Nuclear power may never recover its cachet as a clean energy source, irrespective of safety concerns, because of the ongoing saga of meltdown 3/11/11 at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Over time, the story only grows more horrific, painful, deceitful. It’s a story that will continue for generations to come.

      Here’s why it holds pertinence: As a result of total 100% meltdown, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) cannot locate or remove the radioactive molten core or corium from the reactors. Nobody knows where it is. It is missing. If it is missing from within the reactor structures, has it burrowed into the ground? There are no ready answers.

      And, the destroyed nuclear plants are way too radioactive for humans to get close enough for inspection. And, robotic cameras get zapped! Corium is highly radioactive material, begging the question: If it has burrowed thru the containment vessel, does it spread underground, contaminating farmland and water resources and if so, how far away? Nobody knows?

    • Making Case for Clean Air, World Bank Says Pollution Cost Global Economy $5 Trillion

      Air pollution is the fourth-leading cause of premature deaths worldwide and the problem only continues to worsen, but governments have been reluctant to make the dramatic changes necessary to curb polluting industries in favor of cleaner alternatives.

      In an effort to strengthen the case for action, the World Bank along with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington, Seattle released a joint study (pdf) Thursday warning about the economic effects of pollution-related fatalities.

      In 2013, one in every 10 deaths was caused by diseases associated with outdoor and household air pollution—such as lung cancer, stroke, heart disease, and chronic bronchitis. And, according to the study, these fatalities cost the global economy roughly $225 billion in lost labor income. That number rises to more than $5 trillion when accounting for so-called “welfare costs” —what people are willing to pay for the reduction or prevention of pollution-induced death.

    • Obama Pipeline Plot Twist Is Not a Victory—And Could Erase the Struggle

      All Native struggles in the United States are a struggle against erasure. The poisoning of our land, the theft of our children, the state violence committed against us — we are forced to not only live in opposition to these ills, but also to live in opposition to the fact that they are often erased from public view and public discourse, outside of Indian Country. The truth of our history and our struggle does not match the myth of American exceptionalism, and thus, we are frequently boxed out of the narrative.

      The struggle at Standing Rock, North Dakota, has been no exception, with Water Protectors fighting tooth and nail for visibility, ever since the Sacred Stone prayer encampment began on April 1.

      For months, major news outlets have ignored what’s become the largest convergence of Native peoples in more than a century. But with growing social media amplification and independent news coverage, the corporate media had finally begun to take notice. National attention was paid. Solidarity protests were announced in cities around the country. The National Guard was activated in North Dakota.

      The old chant, “The whole world is watching!” seemed on the verge of accuracy in Standing Rock.

    • London weather: Experts issue health warning as capital faces hottest September day in 10 years

      Experts have issued health warnings as Londoners prepare to bask in 30C heat on the hottest September day in a decade.

      The Met Office have issued a ‘level two’ heat warning across the capital tomorrow, as the city is set to be hotter than Mexico City.

      The flash heatwave has prompted fears that young children and the elderly could succumb to heat exhaustion and dehydration.

      A spokesman for the Met Office said: “This is an important stage for social and healthcare services who will be working to ensure readiness and swift action to reduce harm from a potential heatwave.

    • Health warnings issued as Britain set for hottest September day for 50 years

      Health warnings have been issued ahead of what promises to be the hottest September day in Britain for more than 50 years.

      As Britain basks in a three-day-heatwave this week, temperatures are due to peak at between 30C and 32C in some areas on Tuesday, with the balmy weather set to begin on Monday.

      The sizzling temperatures will be felt most in the East of England, the South East, the capital and the East Midlands, which will all be put on a heatwave Level 2 status from Monday evening, Public Health England (PHE) said.

    • Palm oil producer caught flouting codes of conduct

      A coalition of NGOs documenting deforestation in Indonesia has cast doubt on the effectiveness of the code of conduct used by the palm oil industry. EurActiv’s partner Journal de l’Environnement reports.

      It is the fire season in Indonesia: voluntary forest fires, lit by companies to clear tropical forest to make way for plantations of oil palms as far as the eye can see.

      The NGO coalition Mighty has accused Korindo, a Korean conglomerate with large interests in the wood industry and wind turbine construction, of being behind massive deforestation operations in Insodesia. The NGOs used footage from cameras mounted on drones, satellite photos and videos taken in the provinces of Papua and North Maluku to draw attention to the destruction of 50,000 hectares of virgin forest, home to birds of paradise, tree-kangaroos and thousands of other species.

    • Eurozone Says ‘No Thanks’ To Indonesian Nutmeg

      The European Union has banned imports of nutmeg from Indonesia after it was discovered the spice exceeded the safety limits for aflatoxin, a natural toxin produced by certain species of fungi which can cause liver failure.

      Indonesia’s nutmeg contains 200 part per billion aflatoxin, far exceeding EU’s required limit of 15 ppb.

      “Our supply of nutmeg has been rejected on several occasions, especially by Brussels [Belgium], said Banun Harpini, head of the agricultural quarantine body at the Agriculture Ministry.

  • Finance

    • EU finance ministers line up behind tax ruling against Apple

      Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem urged Apple Saturday to “get ready” to pay up, as he and counterparts from other EU nations lined up behind a finding that the technology giant owes billions of euros due to more than a decade of improperly low taxation.

      Apple’s bill could reach 19 billion euros ($21 billion) with interest, and both the company and Ireland, Apple’s European headquarters are appealing the European Commission ruling. But on the last day of an EU finance ministers’ meeting focused on ways to harmonize tax rules for international companies, Dijsselbloem told reporters that these “have an obligation to pay taxes in a fair way.”

    • When your boss is an algorithm

      “We are people, not Uber’s tools!”

    • Saudia Arabia: Can’t Pay Its Bills, Yet Funds War on Yemen

      Almost exactly a year after Salman bin Albdulaziz Al Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and head of the House of Saud, hurriedly left his millionaire’s mansion near Cannes with his 1,000 servants to continue his vacation in Morocco, the kingdom’s cash is not flowing so smoothly for the tens of thousands of sub-continental expatriates sweating away on his great building sites.

      Almost unreported outside the Kingdom, the country’s big construction magnates – including that of the Binladen group – have not been paid by the Saudi government for major construction projects and a portion of the army of Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and other workers have received no wages, some of them for up to seven months.

      Indian and Pakistani embassies approached the Saudi government, pleading that their workers should be paid. Economists who adopt the same lickspittle attitude towards the Saudi monarchy as the British Government, constantly point out that the authorities have been overwhelmed by the collapse of oil prices. They usually prefer not to mention something at which the rest of the world remains aghast: deputy crown prince and defence minister Mohamed bin Salman’s wasteful and hopeless war in Yemen. Since the king’s favourite son launched this preposterous campaign against the Houthis last year, supporting the internationally recognized Yemeni president against Shia Muslim rebels, aircraft flown by Saudi and Emirati pilots (aided by British technical “experts” on the ground) have bombed even more hospitals, clinics and medical warehouses than America has destroyed in Serbia and Afghanistan combined since 1999.

      The result? A country with 16 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, whose Aramco oil company makes more than $1bn a day and now records a budget deficit of $100bn, cannot pay its bills. At first, the Yemen fiasco was called “Operation Decisive Storm”, which – once it proved the longest and least decisive Arab “storm” in the Middle East’s recent history – was changed to “Operation Restore Hope”. And the bombing went on, just as it did in the pre-“hope” “storm”, along with the help of the UK’s “experts”. No wonder the very same deputy crown prince Mohamed announced this year that state spending on salaries would be lowered, yet individual earnings would rise.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Doctor Says Hillary Clinton has Pneumonia After NYC Incident

      Clinton’s health has been an obsession of right-wing conspiracy theorists but Sunday’s events have now raised her health to the level of “legitimate campaign issue.”

    • Jill Stein in Iowa: I would not have assassinated Osama bin Laden

      Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s candidate for president, said Sunday in Iowa that she would not have assassinated Osama bin Laden but would have brought him to justice for his role in the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

      “I think assassinations … they’re against international law to start with and to that effect, I think I would not have assassinated Osama bin Laden but would have captured him and brought him to trial,” Stein said.

      Bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, was shot and killed by U.S. special forces during a raid at a residence in Pakistan in 2011. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and a failed attack that downed a passenger jet in Pennsylvania, killed nearly 3,000 people. Today, tens of thousands of people have become ill and thousands have died from illnesses attributed to the attacks.

      Stein made her comments in an interview before her first Iowa campaign appearance, a rally that attracted more than 150 on the grounds of the Iowa State Capitol. The organizer and several of the speakers were former national delegates of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. During the rally, Stein argued for a renewable energy and jobs program that she says would eliminate fossil fuel use in the U.S. by 2030.

    • Why This FBI Whistleblower Seconds Jill Stein’s Call For A New 9/11 Investigation

      After the events of September 11, 2001, as a longtime FBI agent and division legal counsel, I blew the whistle on the FBI’s failure to act on information provided by the Minneapolis field office that could have prevented the attacks.

      On this sad 15th anniversary of 9/11, I am encouraged to see that Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein put out a statement calling for a new investigation not afflicted by all the limitations, partisan obstacles and other problems that adversely affected the 9/11 Commission.

      It’s what so many of us have long called for, including me personally (see here and here) as someone with a front row seat to the FBI’s initial cover-ups. The FBI was only one of the agencies and political entities which strived to cover up the truth of why and how they all ignored a “system blinking red” in the months before the attacks. So successful had this been that when I testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2002, I actually felt I had to explain why the truth was important. That we “owed it to the public, especially the victims of terrorism, to be completely honest” and “learning from our mistakes” were two of the reasons I came up with.

    • How to avoid the FTC not “liking” your next campaign

      The US Federal Trade Commission is clamping down on native advertising and the use of endorsements on social media. A settlement with Lord & Taylor in March provides a number of lessons for brands, as outlined by Meryl Bernstein

    • Trump complains the debates will be “rigged,” suggests scrapping moderators

      One week ago, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told reporters that despite his history of media bashing, he “respects” the four moderators selected by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Today Trump is already complaining that the moderators will be “very unfair” because they will go “really hard” on him.

      “So I think we should have a debate with no moderators,” Trump suggested on Monday, “just Hillary and I sitting there talking.”

    • Green Party Ballot Access at Highest Levels in 2016

      Green Party ballot access campaigns have had more success in 2016 than ever before, according to Rick Lass, Ballot Access Coordinator for the Jill Stein campaign.

      You can check out the Greens’ infographic to see states turn green as each state’s required signatures are submitted. So far, 43 states are green. Lass is sure that Greens will make it onto 44 state ballots, plus Washington, D.C.

      The only state so far, with no chance of turning green is South Dakota. Greens failed to gain ballot access there, and the state does not allow write-in campaigns. Greens failed to gain ballot access, but will be running write-in campaigns in Indiana, North Carolina, and Georgia.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The narrow Facebook mindset

      We live in a time of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and young people being offended by other people’s opinions – to a point where they seem to be perfectly willing to silence others.

      For society, this is disastrous. For a community to evolve, different opinions and ideas must be tested against each other in a free and open debate. Especially unconventional or controversial ones. Without a free exchange of thoughts, democracy becomes pointless. Without diversity, our culture will die. Without new input, there will be no progress.

      Especially young people ought to question everything, explore new ideas and oppose conformity. Instead, today many of them seem to be narrow-minded, politically conform, anxious, and frantic. I’m pretty sure this is a new phenomenon.

      Why are people so easily offended, upset and disgruntled these days?

    • Governments Around the World Deny Internet Access to Political Opponents

      Whether or not your ethnic group has political power in the country where you live is a crucial factor determining your access to the Internet, according to a new analysis.

      The effect varies from country to country, and is much less pronounced in democratic nations. But the study, published today in Science, suggests that besides censorship, another way national governments prevent opposing groups from organizing online is by denying them Internet access in the first place, says Nils Weidmann, a professor of political science at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

      Internet access is clearly linked to individuals’ socioeconomic status and the level of development where they live. These factors contribute to “digital divides” seen throughout the world. In the new analysis, Weidmann and his coauthors aimed to shed light on a factor that isn’t as well understood: political divisions between ethnic groups.

    • Five innovative ways social media has been used to avoid censorship

      George Orwell once said “freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. By that definition, social media is the perfect place to express our freedom, either by posting ill-informed political opinions or telling celebrities we think they’re rubbish.

      It’s been 12 years since the launch of Facebook, Twitter is 10, and Instagram is 6. For 2.3 billion of us, social media has become embedded in our daily lives, even changing the terminology we use. We Instagram rather than than taking a photo, we Facebook rather than update our friends.

      But beyond pedestrian daily posts, social media has also been used to showcase amazing displays of human solidarity: #LoveWins in Orlando, #YesAllWomen to fight sexism and #BringBackOurGirls to tackle terrorism.

      Here are five of the most unique and brilliant ways social media has been used to avoid censorship and out the truth.

    • Univision Execs Have No Backbone: Pull A Bunch Of Gawker Stories Over Legal Disputes

      People celebrating the “demise” of Gawker in being forced into bankruptcy by a questionable lawsuit and ruling from Hulk Hogan, financed by Peter Thiel keep insisting that it has no real impact on the freedom of the press. And yet… things keep showing that’s wrong. Gawker filed for bankruptcy and sold off its assets to media giant Univision, who agreed to close down the flagship Gawker site, and redistribute some of the reporters to other sites. But late Friday, Univision management made another decision, and this one is horrific: they agreed to delete six stories on the site (with a seventh one being considered) because those stories were the subject of lawsuits against Gawker.

      The reasoning given by Univision is that it only agreed to buy the assets of Gawker, not the liabilities, and keeping those stories posted gave it liability. First of all, this is wrong on the legal side of things.

      [...]

      But that’s not the most disturbing thing here. The really problematic issue is that the stories that are being removed involve stories where the lawsuits are almost entirely completely bogus SLAPP suits designed to annoy Gawker, rather than with any serious legal basis. So, for example, the two stories that Gawker published about Shiva Ayyadurai, the guy who keeps trying to convince the world that he invented email when he didn’t. We’ve discussed Ayyadurai and his bogus claims many times, and also covered the lawsuit. There is no legitimate reason to take down those posts.

      Perhaps even more incredible is that Univision also agreed to take down the story that nutty troll Chuck C. Johnson had filed against Gawker over. That’s a lawsuit that is so ridiculous it was laughted out of court in Missouri. And while Johnson filed a nearly identical lawsuit (including references to Missouri) in California, it was similarly going nowhere, and Johnson recently said that he’d dropped the case.

    • Bogus Defamation Lawsuit Using Fake Plaintiff And Defendant Challenged By Public Citizen

      More evidence has surfaced that the online reputation management business is shady as all hell. Previously, we’ve covered the use of fake websites used to generate bogus DMCA takedowns by copy-pasting negative reviews in full and claiming these were the original works of bogus contributors by backdating the posts. We’ve also covered the even shadier and more legally-dubious tactic of filing bogus lawsuits — using both fake plaintiffs and fake defendants — to obtain court orders to delist negative reviews, bypassing the site where they’re actually hosted in attempts to force Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al. to make them vanish from search results.

      Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen — thanks to the investigative skills of FIRE employee/Popehat contributor Adam Steinbaugh — has uncovered another bogus libel lawsuit targeting negative reviews and comments. The standard M.O. is in effect. “Plaintiff” magically locates person behind anonymous review and gets them to sign a retraction. This legal paperwork never makes its way to the site where the review is actually hosted, however. The court order obtained through bogus means is instead served to search engines, resulting in the desired effect: the vanishing of negative content.

      This follows closely on the heels of a bogus lawsuit in which the person whose name appears as a plaintiff claimed to have no input in the legal proceedings. While the jury (not the courtroom one) is still out on those claims, in this case it’s been confirmed that the supposed plaintiff had nothing to do with the lawsuit containing his apparently forged signature.

    • Facebook is imposing prissy American censorship on the whole rest of the world

      Dontcha just hate it when this happens? As content curator for one of the world’s largest social media platforms, you delete a picture you consider obscene. Then some Norwegian woman writes an angry post. So you delete her post, too.

      I mean, who does she think she is? The Prime Minister of Norway? Oh wait.

      In case you missed it: last week, Norwegian author Tom Egeland posted to his timeline the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo The Terror of War, which depicts children, including a naked girl, running from a napalm attack, as a status concerning photos that “changed the history of warfare” .

      Egeland’s account was suspended. The editor-in-chief of Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, then published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg protesting Facebook’s actions, and including the photo.

    • Facebook thanks Norway PM after censorship row
    • Facebook has the disturbing power to rewrite our collective history

      In 1972, a harrowing photograph of a young girl screaming out in pain from a napalm burn was on the front page of newspapers around the world. This photo taken by Nick Ut is often credited with helping to make real for audiences the atrocities of the Vietnam War, contributing to a shift in public opinion of the long-running conflict. It is an essential part of our collective history and shared visual consciousness. And last week, Facebook tried to censor it.

      Facebook initially defended its decision to take down the photo because its subject, a young girl, is naked—a violation of the company’s community standards. Facebook has since reversed its decision, acknowledging “the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.” But the larger issues raised by Facebook’s censorship of this historical image are far from resolved.

      While most people have seen Ut’s photo, few know the young girl’s story. In one of the defining events of my life, I had the opportunity to meet and interview Kim Phuc, the subject of this iconic photograph.

    • Facebook Admits Pulitzer-Winning Photograph Is Not Child Pornography

      You probably recognise Nick Ut’s infamous 1972 photograph of charred Vietnamese children running away from the site of a napalm incidienary bomb detonated by the South Vietnamese Air Force in Trang Bang. Earlier this week, however, Facebook effectively banned the Pulitzer-winning photograph from its own site. Now the site is backtracking as quickly as it can.

    • SABC 8 journalist will continue fight against censorship following resignation

      One of the SABC 8, journalist Jacques Steenkamp who announced his resignation on Monday, will continue to fight censorship at the public broadcaster, his wife Nadia told News24.

      “He was unhappy and he made his mind up to resign and accepted a job in Auckland in New Zealand. Even after court nothing has really changed for him but he is still intent on fighting censorship at the SABC,” Nadia told News24.

      Steenkamp will be starting at his new job at the Sunday Star Times as a news director on November 21.

      “He is not immigrating. Nothing stops him from coming back to South Africa. He loved the SABC until things started changing,” she said.

    • Why Facebook’s “It’s too hard” excuse for Vietnam war photo takedown is bullshit

      On Friday, Facebook started deleting posts containing “The Terror of War,” Nick Ut’s photo depicting a young Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack on her village; Facebook approach this photo with a scorched earth (ahem) policy, even deleting it when it was posted by the Prime Minister of Norway.

      Facebook’s excuse for this is that “it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others.”

      Dan Hon’s magnificent rant in response goes like this: the engineering mindset that approaches difficult technical challenges with relish and gusto, but approaches difficult social challenges as though they were fundamentally insoluble and off-limits, is a giant, steaming cop-out. If you can build a billion-person, world-scale comms platform, can you credibly throw your hands up and give up on solving the problems it creates?

    • Face it, Mr Zuckerberg, you’re a news editor too

      Masters of the world can wobble wildly when prodded hard from below – when, for example, a brushfire of derision and anger makes Facebook cancel its last announcement.

      See the sudden swirl of events. Facebook bans a famous war picture of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing US napalm attack from its pages. The Norwegian writer of the news feature related to it protests and gets dumped from the site for his pains. Norway’s prime minister is similarly treated. But the battling editor of Aftenposten, writing a “Dear Mark” front-page letter, finally wins a full Zuckerberg retreat in a mumble of words about “adjusting our review mechanisms”.

      So much for the laughing cavaliers of Silicon Valley, looking arthritically bureaucratic. Thanks for waking up “dear Mark”. But there’s a lasting point here that must come and come again.

      Facebook, though now the biggest carrier of digital news on Planet Earth, says it isn’t an editor or publisher, merely a humble platform. But now watch it change algorithms like any publisher in a jam. Watch it take editorial decisions, switching idiocy for sense. And watch it drain advertising revenue pretty voraciously from the news sites it carries. Dear Mark is part of our news world now. And he needs to be fully, intelligently engaged in it.

    • Israel Meets Facebook Officials Over Incitement Complaints
    • University of Chicago Dean Takes Stand Against Tyranny of Political Correctness, Censorship
    • COMMENTARY: Colleges need to confront the ‘snowflake situation’
    • Williams: Academic giants and dwarfs

      The University of Chicago’s president, Dr. Robert J. Zimmer, wrote a Wall Street Journal article, titled “Free Speech Is the Basis of a True Education.” In it, he wrote: “Free speech is at risk at the very institution where it should be assured: the university. Invited speakers are disinvited because a segment of a university community deems them offensive, while other orators are shouted down for similar reasons. Demands are made to eliminate readings that might make some students uncomfortable. Individuals are forced to apologize for expressing views that conflict with prevailing perceptions. In many cases, these efforts have been supported by university administrators.”

    • WH: Administration ‘Prided Itself’ on Transparency, Has Record FOIA Censorship

      White House Spokesman Josh Earnest says the Obama Administration “has prided itself and made transparency in government a genuine priority,” as the Associated Press reports 77% of Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests are censored or completely denied.

      “This administration has prided itself and made transparency in government a genuine priority and he (President Obama) believes the American people were well served by that, he believes that our government is more effective because of the way that he has made that principal a genuine priority in this administration,” Earnest said during a White House press conference on Monday.

    • Overseas anime censorship gives the Love Live! girls gigantic dick arms

      …by making it seem like the young ladies have gigantic penises growing out of their shoulder sockets. That’s instantly what many thought they were seeing in Japan, where a mosaic effect is placed over genitalia in adult videos.

      As you’d expect, Love Live! is heavy on musical scenes, and idol choreography involves a lot of outstretched hands, which help promote a feeling of oneness with the audience. Unfortunately, Japanese pop idols aren’t the first group to show enthusiasm for posing with a raised arm.

    • Facebook Is Collaborating With the Israeli Government to Determine What Should Be Censored
    • Facebook and Israeli Government Team Up to Censor Posts
    • Facebook to censor violent anti-Semitic incitement
    • Facebook works with Israel to curb posts inciting violence
    • Facebook and Google team-up with Israel to censor posts inciting violence
    • Facebook, Israel Seal Deal to Crack Down on Palestinians Online
    • Israel meets Facebook officials over incitement complaints
    • Facebook Complying With 95% of Israeli Requests to Remove Inciting Content, Minister Says
    • Facebook and Israel Agree to Tackle Terrorist Media Together
    • Facebook Teams Up With Israel Against Social Media Terror, Incitement
    • Facebook, Israel planning to oversee “incitement” of violence on platform
    • Facebook. Complied with 95% of the government’s removal requests.
    • Shaked: ‘Penny has dropped’ for Facebook on incitement
    • ‘Facebook removed 95% of terror incitement requested by Israel’
    • Shaked and Erdan meet with Facebook heads to remove posts inciting anti-Semitism
    • Israel, Facebook to set up joint anti-incitement teams
    • Facebook removes terror-inciting content at Israel’s request
    • Facebook to work with Israel over terrorist incitement online
    • Senior Facebook execs in Israel to talk about social-media incitement
    • Facebook partners with Israel to end violence

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Landlords Are Using a New Digital Tool to Dig Up Dirt on Potential Tenants

      With record-high housing prices in some Canadian cities, a lot of people are having a tough time finding a decent place to live. Landlords are being inundated with applications. Well, those landlords have a new tool to screen their wannabe tenants: Naborly, a startup that analyzes up to 500 data points on each potential renter, scouring everything from media mentions to Facebook profiles, even accounting for employment stability to warn landlords if a tenant might struggle to pay rent.

      Dylan Lenz, the Toronto-based founder of Naborly, was inspired to make the website after travelling to India with his wife in the summer of 2014. They rented out a property they owned in Kelowna, BC, and came back to find what he describes as $22,000 worth of damage. “This was an awful experience,” Lenz recalled in an interview. “The basement was flooded due to the tenants trying to make an above-ground swimming pool, and there were two giant trucks of garbage on the property.”

      [...]

      Naborly’s software, for example, can scour publicly available social media sources to verify an applicant’s identity, or to figure out if they might have a pet dog that they didn’t disclose with their application.

      Naborly also looks at macroeconomic trends such as the price of gas, the stability of the economy locally versus nationally, and how that applicant’s field of work is faring.

      “If someone is a 28-year-old graphic designer in Toronto, our software can compare you to others in that same field, age group and region and see what would happen if that designer is placed in the requested property,” Lenz said.

    • Does the NSA have a duty to disclose zero-day exploits?

      To say the National Security Agency (NSA) prefers to lay low and shuns the limelight is an understatement. One joke said about the secretive group, widely regarded as the most skilled state-sponsored hackers in the world, is NSA actually stands for “No Such Agency.”

      But now a recent leak has put the group right where it loathes to be—squarely in the headlines. Last month, a group called “The Shadow Brokers” published what it claimed were a set of NSA “cyber weapons,” a combination of exploits, both zero day and long past, designed to target routers and firewalls from American manufacturers, including Cisco, Juniper and Fortinet.

    • Long-Secret Stingray Manuals Detail How Police Can Spy on Phones

      Harris Corp.’s Stingray surveillance device has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in law enforcement for more than 15 years. The company and its police clients across the United States have fought to keep information about the mobile phone-monitoring boxes from the public against which they are used. The Intercept has obtained several Harris instruction manuals spanning roughly 200 pages and meticulously detailing how to create a cellular surveillance dragnet.

      Harris has fought to keep its surveillance equipment, which carries price tags in the low six figures, hidden from both privacy activists and the general public, arguing that information about the gear could help criminals. Accordingly, an older Stingray manual released under the Freedom of Information Act to news website TheBlot.com last year was almost completely redacted. So too have law enforcement agencies at every level, across the country, evaded almost all attempts to learn how and why these extremely powerful tools are being used — though court battles have made it clear Stingrays are often deployed without any warrant. The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department alone has snooped via Stingray, sans warrant, over 300 times.

    • Why Oliver Stone’s Snowden is the Best Film of the Year
    • We Interview Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zachary Quinto & More for Snowden
    • ACLU & ‘Snowden’ Director Call on Obama to Pardon Edward Snowden
    • Joseph Gordon-Levitt Explains Why He’s the Perfect Person to Play Snowden
    • The ACLU Is About to Launch a Campaign Asking Obama to Pardon Edward Snowden
    • ACLU seeks an Obama pardon for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden
    • Edward Snowden: ACLU and Amnesty seek presidential pardon
    • ACLU and Amnesty International ask Obama to pardon Snowden
    • Human Rights Groups to Launch All-Out ‘Pardon Snowden’ Campaign
    • The ACLU is launching a campaign to pardon Edward Snowden
    • Oliver Stone Talks Secrets, Spies, and Snowden
    • Director Oliver Stone Feared Being Hacked While Making Snowden Film
    • What Should Happen to Edward Snowden? A Q&A With His Lawyer
    • ACLU campaign to argue Obama should pardon Snowden
    • Shailene Woodley on ‘Snowden,’ whether she’ll do next ‘Divergent’ film
    • ‘Snowden’ director Oliver Stone urges Obama to issue pardon
    • Oliver Stone on “boy scout”-like Edward Snowden
    • Joseph Gordon-Levitt on playing whistleblower Edward Snowden
    • Transcript of Alan Rusbridger’s Lunch with the FT with Edward Snowden
    • Here’s How Joseph Gordon-Levitt Nailed His Edward Snowden Voice
    • Joseph Gordon-Levitt explains that odd Edward Snowden voice he does in his new biopic
    • The Snowden Movie Might Actually Be Worth Seeing
    • The NSA whistleblowers who vetted Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ biopic
    • ‘I hope Obama pardons Snowden’: Director Oliver Stone hails subject of his new biopic about NSA contractor who revealed U.S. government-run surveillance programs

      Renowned filmmaker Oliver Stone wants US President Barack Obama to pardon Edward Snowden.

      During an appearance at the Toronto film festival to promote the opening of his new movie, Stone, the conspiracy-loving director, spoke on behalf of the former NSA analyst who in 2013 revealed details of classified U.S. government surveillance programs.

      Since leaking the information, Snowden has been living in Russia, which granted him temporary asylum.

      After the revelations, Snowden fled to Hong Kong and eluded authorities by hiding among Sri Lankan refugees living in cramped tenements.

    • NSA whistleblower’s life turned into film

      The story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reads like the plot of a Hollywood thriller.

      Not surprisingly, a film directed by Oliver Stone, has been made about Snowdon’s decision in 2013 to leak top secret information about the NSA surveillance activities.

    • ‘Snowden’ portrays the infamous NSA leaker as a hero, but leaves many big questions unanswered

      The new film “Snowden” is a wildly entertaining thriller centered around the most-wanted man in the world, though I was left with many more questions than when I started.

      The Oliver Stone-directed film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden takes viewers through most of Snowden’s adult life in a series of flashbacks amid interactions with journalists in a Hong Kong hotel.

    • Joseph Gordon-Levitt Says Edward Snowden Is ‘The Most Extreme Of Patriots’

      When asked about what Gordon-Levitt wanted to come across while portraying a controversial figure such as Snowden, the actor revealed that the primary thing for him was how much the ex-NSA contractor cared for the U.S.

      Snowden is largely perceived as damaging to the U.S., someone who betrayed his own country, but the former NSA contractor does not see it in the same light. Gordon-Levitt also does not see him as a rogue. The actor went on to elaborate that Snowden is “the most extreme of patriots” in his opinion.

      “I think there’s two different kinds of patriotism and, you know, we were talking a second ago about how a drama shows an evolution of somebody. One kind of patriot just believes that everything their country does is right, no matter what, without asking any questions. But there is another kind of patriot which can only exist in a free country like the United States of America who holds the government accountable and who will ask questions. And this is what Edward Snowden has done in the most extreme of ways,” notes the actor in an interview with Hollywood Reporter.

    • House Intelligence Committee to Discuss Classified Report on Snowden Ahead of Movie Launch

      The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence will meet this Thursday to discuss former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who in 2013 gave journalists a massive cache of classified documents detailing the U.S. global surveillance regime.

      The intelligence oversight panel will be discussing a report prepared by members and staff concerning Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures, according to Jack Langer, director of communications for Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif.,

      The report is the product of “around two years” of work, he told The Intercept. While Langer noted that the report is classified, he said the committee might publish an unclassified executive summary — though there aren’t any specific plans yet for its release, or to hold public hearings about its contents.

      When asked whether the timing of report had anything to do with talk of Snowden’s return to the United States — to be pardoned or to face trial — Langer said the two events were unrelated.

      The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and prominent activists are launching a campaign Wednesday to urge President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden. The announcement is expected to take place at an event in New York, where Snowden will speak via live stream from Moscow.

    • Edward Snowden’s 40 days in a Russian airport – by the woman who helped him escape

      Sarah Harrison, the British WikiLeaks journalist who successfully spirited Edward Snowden from Hong Kong to safe(ish) asylum in Russia, has told The Register how she did it – and what’s next for the NSA whistleblower, and for Julian Assange. She spoke to us a week before the Oliver Stone film Snowden is released*, although she hasn’t actually seen the movie herself.

      Back in May 2013, Snowden was based in Hawaii, working as a sysadmin on contract to the US National Security Agency. He had already contacted journalists with information he felt needed to be made public, among it classified documents pertaining to the US’s PRISM surveillance programme. Shortly after stories from the archive he had taken from the firm were starting to surface, he told his employer that he was heading to the US mainland for medical treatment, but instead he flew to Hong Kong.

    • Facebook isn’t just fighting ad blockers, it’s fighting the underlying causes of blocking

      Independent publishers are terrified of platform dependency these days, and for good reason: According to Parse.ly, Facebook is the No. 1 source of traffic to their sites.

      Facebook and Google together account for 65 percent of digital ad revenue, according to Pew’s State of the News Media 2016 report. To put that in perspective, that’s up from around 0 percent just 10 years ago. Facebook is absolutely crushing them in mobile, too, where the real user growth is — and there, it’s not even close.

      That’s the reality, and it’s led a lot of publishers to conclude they’d be better off not competing with Facebook for eyeballs, choosing instead to forsake the exclusivity of their own properties and publish directly to the social network. Many side observers now believe we will soon witness the end of the dot-com — i.e. the wholesale migration of content away from independent publisher properties and onto Facebook.

      The thing is, Facebook has demonstrated recently that it’s willing to change its algorithm whenever it wants, and that publishers can’t rely on it as a stable channel. A savior for publishers Facebook is not. Indeed, publishers’ anxiety is both very real and very justified.

    • Federal Judge: Hacking Someone’s Computer Is Definitely a ‘Search’

      Courts across the country can’t seem to agree on whether the FBI’s recent hacking activities ran afoul of the law—and the confusion has led to some fairly alarming theories about law enforcement’s ability to remotely compromise computers.

      In numerous cases spawned from the FBI takeover of a darkweb site that hosted child abuse images, courts have been split on the legality of an FBI campaign that used a single warrant to hack thousands of computers accessing the site from unknown locations, using malware called a Network Investigative Technique, or NIT. Some have gone even further, arguing that hacking a computer doesn’t constitute a “search,” and therefore doesn’t require a warrant at all.

      But a federal judge in Texas ruled this week that actually, yes, sending malware to someone’s computer to secretly retrieve information from it—as the FBI did with the NIT—is a “search” under the Fourth Amendment.

      “[T]he NIT placed code on Mr. Torres’ computer without his permission, causing it to transmit his IP address and other identifying data to the government,” Judge David Alan Ezra of wrote Friday, in a ruling for one of the NIT cases, in San Antonio, Texas. “That Mr. Torres did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his IP address is of no import. This was unquestionably a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • BSO Deputies Fatally Shoot Pompano Beach Man Who Was Eating Chicken Wings

      Deputies were responding to a call about a domestic disturbance. When they arrived, they were directed to the back yard, where the man (whose name has not yet been released) was holding a knife. Both deputies opened fire. Pompano Beach Fire Rescue later confirmed the man was dead on the scene.

      Neighbors who were present at the time of the shooting say the man was shot in the back six times. BSO has not yet confirmed that.

    • Cast-Out Police Officers Are Often Hired in Other Cities

      As a police officer in a small Oregon town in 2004, Sean Sullivan was caught kissing a 10-year-old girl on the mouth.

      Mr. Sullivan’s sentence barred him from taking another job as a police officer.

      But three months later, in August 2005, Mr. Sullivan was hired, after a cursory check, not just as a police officer on another force but as the police chief. As the head of the department in Cedar Vale, Kan., according to court records and law enforcement officials, he was again investigated for a suspected sexual relationship with a girl and eventually convicted on charges that included burglary and criminal conspiracy.

      “It was very irritating because he should never have been a police officer,” said Larry Markle, the prosecutor for Montgomery and Chautauqua counties in Kansas.

      Mr. Sullivan, 44, is now in prison in Washington State on other charges, including identity theft and possession of methamphetamine. It is unclear how far-reaching such problems may be, but some experts say thousands of law enforcement officers may have drifted from police department to police department even after having been fired, forced to resign or convicted of a crime.

    • ‘Met ignored extremism among my fellow Muslim officers’

      A former counterterrorism sergeant has attacked the Metropolitan police for failing to tackle extremist views among some of its Muslim officers for fear of being labelled “Islamophobic”.

      Javaria Saeed, a practising Muslim who worked in Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism division, complained to her bosses after she witnessed a fellow Muslim officer saying female genital mutilation (FGM) — illegal in the UK since 1985 — was a “clean and honourable practice ” and “shouldn’t be criminalised”.

    • If You’ve Smoked Weed In The Past, You May Be Banned From Entering The US

      Matthew Harvey was banned from the United States for one reason – he smoked weed and was honest about it. He was planning to cross the border to take his 3-year-old Lika to California’s Disneyland.

    • In France, another item of clothing has become a symbol of an ongoing culture war

      The subject of women’s clothing in France became a worldwide topic of discussion last month after images of a Muslim woman being forced to remove her burkini at a beach by armed police officers spread online.

      The images focused attention not only on the recent bans on the full-body burkinis in some French cities, but also the nationwide ban on full-face Islamic veils in public spaces, implemented in 2011.

      This week, a dispute about how women should dress has again erupted in France — but this time, the circumstances were notably different.

    • Sounding the Alarm on Predictive Policing

      “Predictive policing” sounds good on paper. After all, what could go wrong with a data-based approach to law enforcement?

      It turns out: plenty. That’s why Free Press joined a broad coalition of civil rights, privacy and technology groups in sounding the alarm about how predictive policing reinforces racial bias.

      The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights mobilized the coalition, which counts the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, Color Of Change and the NAACP among the 17 signers. The statement released last Wednesday notes that “the data driving predictive enforcement activities — such as the location and timing of previously reported crimes, or patterns of community- and officer-initiated 911 calls — is profoundly limited and biased.”

      Indeed, a damning report from the tech consulting group Upturn, which surveyed the nation’s 50 largest police forces, confirms this view. Upturn found “little evidence” that predictive policing works — and “significant reason to fear that [it] may reinforce disproportionate and discriminatory policing practices.”

      Nearly all of the predictive-policing systems in use in the United States come from private vendors. The systems draw on existing crime data to forecast where future crimes might occur. The idea is that this knowledge will help police departments determine where to focus their law-enforcement activities.

    • An Unprecedented Faculty Lockout

      Long Island University told 400 professors and union members not to come back to work when the school year started.

    • Support Students and Professors in the LIU Lockout

      Thousands of students at Long Island University-Brooklyn walked out of classes at noon today in solidarity with their professors who have been locked out of teaching.

      Students are not getting the education they deserve and professors are not being fully compensated. Meanwhile, students are paying for classes that are being taught by substitutes, including unqualified administrators. If LIU’s administration is successful, this will set a dangerous precedent for higher education institutions in America. That’s wrong.

    • DNA Dragnet: In Some Cities, Police Go From Stop-and-Frisk to Stop-and-Spit [Ed: doesn’t typically end well]

      The five teenage boys were sitting in a parked car in a gated community in Melbourne, Florida, when a police officer pulled up behind them.

      Officer Justin Valutsky closed one of the rear doors, which had been ajar, and told them to stay in the car. He peered into the drivers’ side window of the white Hyundai SUV and asked what the teens were doing there. It was a Saturday night in March 2015 and they told Valutsky they were visiting a friend for a sleepover.

      Valutsky told them there had been a string of car break-ins recently in the area. Then, after questioning them some more, he made an unexpected demand: He asked which one of them wanted to give him a DNA sample.

      After a long pause, Adam, a slight 15-year-old with curly hair and braces, said, “Okay, I guess I’ll do it.” Valutsky showed Adam how to rub a long cotton swab around the inside of his cheek, then gave him a consent form to sign and took his thumbprint. He sealed Adam’s swab in an envelope. Then he let the boys go.

      Telling the story later, Adam would say of the officer’s request, “I thought it meant we had to.”

    • DOJ To Researchers: First Amendment Does Not Protect Violating Websites’ Terms Of Services

      The woefully out-of-date CFAA — the product of panicked early-80s legislating in response to underdeveloped hacker fears — continues to hold back research (both of the security and non-security kind) when not being wielded like the prehistoric weapon it is by the DOJ and multiple entities who prefer bludgeoning the messenger to fixing their broken systems.

      Because of the ongoing misuse and abuse of a badly-written law (aided and abetted by some terrible court decisions), a group of academic researchers has decided to proactively sue the government over its terrible legislation, rather than wait around to get sued/indicted for attempting to determine if individual websites exhibit bias against certain users.

      They’ve enlisted the help of the ACLU, which filed its suit against Attorney General Loretta Lynch back in June. The DOJ has responded with a motion to dismiss [PDF] that claims everything is wrong with the lawsuit, from the issue of standing to multiple failures to state a claim under the First and Fifth Amendments.

    • Conviction Overturned In Case Of Rutgers Student Whose Roommate Committed Suicide After Being Secretly Filmed

      Four and a half years ago, we wrote about our serious concerns about the conviction of Dharun Ravi, a Rutgers student who surreptitiously filmed his roommate engaged in a sexual encounter. The roommate, Tyler Clementi, later killed himself, after finding out that he had been filmed. That part was a big story, and kicked off a variety of discussions, some of which were more reasonable than others. But as we noted back then, what was most troubling about the legal case and conviction of Ravi was that he was really being prosecuted for what Clementi did, rather than what Ravi did.

      As we noted, Ravi filming Clementi was definitely creepy, immature and dumb. But criminal? If Ravi had just filmed Clementi and nothing happened, there never would have been a prosecution. Ravi was really being prosecuted because Clementi killed himself — and that’s problematic. As we’ve explained a few times, while there’s an obvious emotional reaction to someone killing themselves, no one fully knows why they did it other than the individuals themselves. And, blaming others for mean things they may have done after someone commits suicide is a really dangerous place to go. It actually encourages suicide by letting people think that killing themselves will “punish” those who are tormenting them. But the biggest thing is that we shouldn’t blame one person based on the actions of another.

    • Muslims urged not to SLAUGHTER ANIMALS in the streets of France at Eid

      The animal rights activist has urged the French government to intervene to prevent “barbarism” and work towards “appeasement” asking instead that followers of Islam make sacrifices by giving to the poor.

      In France the government has been providing skips because many followers discard their carcasses to rot in the streets after they have killed them.

      While it is illegal to slaughter an animal publicly it is allowed for Muslims to go to a slaughterhouse and carry out the act for religious reasons.

      However, those breaking the law and killing animals outside of mandated areas became such a problem environmental health departments had to step in to provide bins because sheep carcasses were causing a public health problem.

    • Shot girl Mary Shipstone’s safe house revealed by solicitor error

      The address of a girl fatally shot on her doorstep by her estranged father was accidentally sent to him by her mother’s solicitor, it has emerged.

      Mary Shipstone, aged seven, was shot twice as she returned to the safe house in East Sussex in 2014 with her mother.

      Yasser Alromisse shot her in the head and then turned the gun on himself.

      Mary’s mother told police her solicitor had inadvertently sent her address to him in legal papers, a serious case review said.

      Lyndsey Shipstone told BBC South East: “He shot her the second time so I would see him do it.

      “And through not murdering me, because he had the opportunity… I was going to be the one who was going to have to live with what he did.”

      Mary died later in hospital.

    • Weirton terminates officer who did not fire at man with gun

      After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.

      Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.

      “I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.

      The man was Ronald D. “R.J.” Williams Jr., 23, of Pittsburgh, and what happened in the seconds after Mr. Mader’s initial decision is still being investigated by Mr. Williams’ family as well as the West Virginia Civil Liberties Union.

    • Florida police kill black man while he eats dinner in his backyard

      Broward Sheriff’s deputies responded to a domestic violence call Friday evening at the home of Gregory Frazier in Pompano Beach. His sister, Deborah, had called authorities after she claimed Frazier, 56, and his daughter were involved in a fight.

      However, the fight had reportedly ended by the time the officers arrived at the home. The two white deputies were directed to the backyard, where they found Frazier eating.

      [...]

      Officers ordered Frazier to get on the ground, to which he responded, “Leave me alone,” according to his nephew Quartaze Woodard. When order to the ground once more, Frazier gave them the same response. Police then opened fire, according to Mr Woodard.

      Police handcuffed the wounded Frazier, before attempting to perform CPR. Officers reported that Frazier was dead at the scene.

    • Luxembourg foreign minister wants Hungary out of EU

      Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, has called for Hungary to be thrown out of the European Union. EurActiv Germany reports.

      “We cannot accept that the EU’s fundamental values are being massively violated,” Asselborn told German newspaper Die Welt. Anyone who builds fences to stem the flow of refugees or limits press freedoms and the independence of the judiciary, as Hungary has been accused of doing, should be temporarily or permanently “excluded from the EU”, warned the foreign minister.

      He added that “Hungary would have no chance at becoming an EU member today.”

      Asselborn said that the EU cannot tolerate “such misconduct” on the part of Hungary and the exclusion would be “the only way of preserving the cohesion and values of the European Union”.

    • EU should kick out Hungary, says Luxembourg minister

      Hungary should be excluded from the EU, Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jean Asselborn has said.

      Ejecting Hungary is “the only possibility to preserve the cohesion and the values” of the EU, he said in an interview to German daily Die Welt, published on Tuesday (13 September), three days before a EU leaders summit about the bloc’s future without the UK.

      “We cannot accept that the basic values of the European Union are massively violated,” he said.

      He said any state that “builds fences against war refugees, or who hurts press freedom and independence of judiciary, must be excluded for the EU temporarily or for ever if needed”.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Netflix Pushes FCC to Crack Down on Usage Caps

      Netflix is urging the FCC to crack down on broadband usage caps, stating that they unfairly limit consumers’ ability to consume streaming video services. Netflix has long has an adversarial relationship with ISPs, and often for good reason. Usage caps on fixed-line networks are specifically designed to protect ISP TV revenues from Netflix competition, allowing an ISP to both complicate and generate additional profit off of the shift away from legacy TV.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Canada’s Anti-Counterfeiting Chargeback Project: Paying Back Deceived Consumers

      A Canadian initiative to fight online counterfeiting and piracy that enables deceived consumers to get their money back is yielding results, a Canadian official said last week. Project Chargeback means to cut the profit margin of counterfeiters on the internet, and supplement legal recourse for right holders.

    • Important Agenda For WIPO Coordination Committee Tomorrow [Ed: WIPO is a mess internally]

      On 12 September, a powerful member-state committee at the World Intellectual Property Organization will consider the nomination of a new head of copyright, and a sensitive agenda item on a highly secret UN report on whether the WIPO director general engaged in wrongdoing.

    • Copyrights

      • Google Highlights DMCA Abuse in New Copyright Transparency Report

        Google has released a new and improved version of its Copyright Transparency Report. The revamped report makes it easier to get insights into over a billion reported URLs. Among other things, Google now specifies how many URLs it does not remove and why, highlighting various cases of DMCA abuse.

      • Hyperlinks Under Attack in Europe (or “When You Thought It Could Not Get Worse”…)

        DisCo readers may remember that, last February, my colleagues Matt Schruers and Jakob Kucharczyk explained that Europe’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), would have to rule on a case about hyperlinks that could decide the fate of the World Wide Web in Europe. They were not joking around.

        Well, yesterday the CJEU published its ruling on GS Media (C-160/15) – and it’s as bad as we feared it could be. But let’s take a step back first.

      • ‘Will Trump Shut Down The Pirate Bay?’

        Apparently, there’s a rumor circulating that The Pirate Bay might shut down soon. Various news sites have been speculating about the demise of the popular torrent site and what may happen next… Could Donald Trump be the one to pull the trigger?

09.11.16

Links 11/9/2016: Chakra GNU/Linux Refresh, Wine Staging 1.9.18

Posted in News Roundup at 10:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel 3.14 Reached End of Life, Users Urged to Move to Linux 4.4 LTS

      We reported the other day that the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel branch is about to reach end of its life, and that one more maintenance version will be released in the next couple of weeks.

    • Allwinner A33 DRM Support Coming In Linux 4.9

      Maxime Ripard of Free Electrons has sent in the Allwinner DRM driver pull request that will ultimately land for the Linux 4.9 kernel merge window.

      New to report on for the young Allwinner DRM driver is support in the sub4i-drm code for the Allwinner A33 SoC. Aside from the Allwinner A33 SoC, there are various other bug fixes and updates.

  • Applications

    • Dstat – Versatile resource statistics tool for Linux

      Dstat – versatile tool for generating system resource statistics & replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat. Dstat is another handy tool for monitoring systems during performance tuning tests, benchmarks or troubleshooting. It overcomes some of other tools limitations and adds some extra features, more counters and flexibility.

      I really impressed by dstat utility when analyzing the tool to prepare the article. I excited then i dig into deep on dstat utility usage, wow! awesome features which i didn’t find any performance monitoring tools.

      You can monitor additionally MySQL database activity, batter percentage info for laptop, number of dbus connections, fan speed, nfs utility, postfix, system temperature sensors, power usage, etc,., more & more. I personally advise every administrator to give a try, which will help you to improve the troubleshooting skill a lot.

    • PostfixAdmin 3.0

      I just released the long awaited PostfixAdmin 3.0.

    • Samba 4.5 Is a Massive Release That Improves Security, Adds Many New Features

      Samba 4.5 has been released and it is the latest, newest stable branch of the widely-used, free, cross-platform, and open-source software project that re-implements the SMB/CIFS networking protocol on UNIX-like platforms.

      Samba is being used by default in numerous, if not all GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as on Apple’s macOS, to allow users to access network shares from other computers that run Microsoft Windows, and interact with them to exchange any file format that exists today.

    • The new v40 TrueType interpreter mode

      FreeType 2.7 ships the new v40 TrueType instructions interpreter version enabled by default. It finally brings DirectWrite/ClearType-like rendering to the screen, or ‘subpixel hinting’ as some FreeType code calls it. Actually, there is no subpixel hinting.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine or Emulation

      • Release 1.9.18

        The Wine Staging release 1.9.18 is now available.

      • Wine-Staging Adds 1D Textures For D3D10/D3D11

        There is finally a new Wine-Staging version with release notes to talk about for this more-experimental version of Wine.

      • Wine Staging 1.9.18 Adds Experimental Support for 1D Textures in D3D10 and D3D11

        After being away since June, the Wine Staging development team is back to announce the new features incorporated in the latest version of the open-source software that let’s users run Windows apps and games on their Linux boxes, Wine Staging 1.9.18.

        Based on the recently released Wine 1.9.18, Wine Staging 1.9.18 is here to bring you all the neat features and improvements implemented in the respective development version of Wine, such as the ability to support multiple kernel drivers in only one process, improvements to the WebServices reader, and better joystick support.

    • Games

      • Ioquake3 Is Finally Moving To Its New OpenGL Renderer By Default

        The ioquake3 open-source game engine project that’s built around the Quake III: Arena code-base is finally moving to its new renderer by default and abandoning the original 17-year-old renderer.

        Beginning next month they will be defaulting new ioquake3 installs to using their “OpenGL 2″ renderer and in November will disable the original renderer for all ioquake3 installations.

      • Agricola spinoff and Patchwork pass Greenlight, heading to Linux

        Two more digital incarnations of designer Uwe Rosenberg’s hit 2-player board games are coming to Linux on Steam, as they’ve both now passed their Greenlight campaigns!

        Yes, they are mobile ports, just as Le Havre: The Inland Port is, but that doesn’t mean they’re of poor quality. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I’ve played all three on Android (and the Le Havre spinoff additionally on Linux), and they’re all fantastic and well-polished implementations. DIGIDICED is a team of only 4 developers, but they’re really doing a great job with the licenses. They’ve even shown evidence of acting on user feedback with Le Havre, so I feel confident in recommending them to my fellow Linux gamers.

      • Wargame: European Escalation works once again for Nvidia users, two years after breaking

        It seems Wargame: European Escalation was broken for nearly two years (see this forum post) for Nvidia GPU users on Linux.

      • Curvatron, a simple yet interesting evolution of the old game ‘Snake’, we have free keys for you

        Curvatron has recently been released on Linux and the developer sent in a bunch of keys for you lucky people. The game itself is inspired by the old game ‘Snake’ that was on rather old Nokia mobile phones.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma 5.7.4 and several important package updates available in Chakra

        The latest update for KDE’s Plasma series is now available to all Chakra users, together with other important package updates mostly for the core repository.

        Plasma 5.7.4 includes a month’s worth of bugfixes and new translations, with the changes mostly found in the plasma desktop and workspace packages.

      • Chakra GNU/Linux Gets LibreOffice 5.2.1 and KDE Plasma 5.7.4, Vulkan API Support
      • KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS Desktop to Offer a More Efficient Pager, Per-Screen Pagers

        KDE developer Eike Hein reports on various improvements to pagers that will be implemented in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, due for release on October 4, 2016.

        We reported a couple of months ago that the next major version of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, build 5.8, will be a long-term supported one. KDE Plasma 5.8 will also be the first LTS (Long Term Support) version of the renowned desktop interface used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems by default.

      • QtCon + Akademy 2016

        This year Akademy take place along with QtCon in Berlin, Germany. It is a year of great celebration for some free software communities, so they decided to get together to celebrate in a single event. KDE is celebrating 20 years, while VideoLAN and FSFE are celebrating 15 years. It was a historic moment and I could not miss it, so I went to Berlin for the second time (the first was to attend the Desktop Summit 2011).

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • A Detailed Review On Elementary OS 0.4 Loki

        It’s also worth to mention that the distribution is almost empty; No many default applications are already installed, for example even LibreOffice isn’t installed so you can’t manage your documents or open them, you almost only have the elementary OS applications, Files, Photos, Videos.. But nothing else, and this is not a very good deal comparing it to a size of 1.4GB for the ISO file. You will need to do a lot of downloading after you install the system on your hard drive.

    • New Releases

      • Linux From Scratch and BLFS 7.10 Books Released to Support GCC 6.2.0, Glibc 2.24

        Bruce Dubbs from the Linux From Scratch (LFS) and Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) projects, which let users build their own Linux-based operating systems from scratch, proudly announced the release of LFS 7.10 and BLFS 7.10.

      • 4MLinux 20.0 Distribution to Be the First to Run on UEFI PCs, Core Beta Out Now

        Today, September 11, 2016, 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia about the availability of the Beta release of the Core Edition of his upcoming 4MLinux 20.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

        Still powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series, 4MLinux 20.0 is now in development, and it looks like it incorporates the Glibc (GNU C Library) 2.23 and BusyBox 1.25.0 core components, along with GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6.1.0 for compiling the programs included in the final release of the GNU/Linux distribution.

      • Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Alpha 2 Release and August Donation Totals

        The feedback from our first alpha release has reported the Moksha desktop on the 16.04 base is as stable as ever, so the only reason this remains with a pre-release tag is due to some rough edges in terms of polish. There are some minor issues with the default theme under our new 16.04 base and I am still looking to make time to compile a non-PAE kernel image and create a separate disc image for that.

      • Bodhi 4.0 Linux OS Gets a Second Alpha Build, Remains Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

        Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland is pleased to announce on September 11, 2016, the release and immediate availability of the second Alpha development snapshot of his upcoming Bodhi 4.0.0 GNU/Linux distribution.

        Bodhi 4.0.0 Alpha 2 remains based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, and it looks like it brings an up-to-date Bodhi Builder tool that the developer uses to build his Ubuntu derivative. Moreover, the latest security and software versions pushed upstream in the Xenial repos have also been imported in the Bodhi 4.0.0 distribution, which uses the most stable release of the Moksha desktop environment.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • debhelper 10 is now available

        Today, debhelper 10 was uploaded to unstable and is coming to a mirror near you “really soon now”. The actual changes between version “9.20160814” and version “10” are rather modest. However, it does mark the completion of debhelper compat 10, which has been under way since early 2012.

      • Unseen changes to lintian.d.o

        We have been making a lot of minor changes to lintian.d.o and the underlying report framework. Most of them were hardly noticeable to the naked. In fact, I probably would not have spotted any of them, if I had not been involved in writing them. Nonetheless, I felt like sharing them, so here goes.

      • Derivatives

        • It Looks Like Descent OS 5.0 Linux Will Be Based on Debian After All, Not Ubuntu

          After deciding to switch base one more time and move to Ubuntu, again, Descent OS Linux developer Brian Manderville announced at the beginning of the year first Alpha release of his upcoming Descent OS 5.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

          It took the developer two years to bring us an Alpha build of its Ubuntu MATE-based Descent OS 5.0 distribution, and we haven’t heard anything from him in the meantime. No Beta, not another Alpha build has been released since the February announcement of Descent OS 5.0 Alpha, which was based on Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Launcher List Indicator Update Adds PPA, New Workspaces Features

            Did you find the Launcher List Indicator we wrote about recently useful? If so, you’ll want to check in with the latest version that’s available.

            Why?

            Well, a number of you said how more useful this applet would be if the launcher lists changed depending on which workspace you use.

            Well, this applet now supports exactly that!

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Download Linux Mint 18 KDE Edition

              The KDE Edition of Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” was officially released recently at Friday, 9 September 2016. You can download the ISO files from these links.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Women & Free Software projects

    To many women, a large social group of men they are supposed to join may be intimidating – the same could probably be said of any men joining a large social group primarily populated of women. But when what looks intimidating reveals itself as being actually oppressing , that is the moment we have a true problem. Male developers shunning, criticizing, belittling and offending female developers because they are females, even when not necessarily expressed in an explicit way, is purely not acceptable. It is neither on the most basic moral grounds nor in the letter and spirit of the Free Software movement. The Internet, unfortunately, reveals protracted bullies, the kind of people who would probably not have the guts to ask the targeted woman out, or even not dare look at a female developer in the eyes and tell her what he would be able to write from the comfort of his own keyboard, miles away from her.

  • RoundCube-Next Is Woefully Behind Schedule

    After raising more than $103,000 USD last year via crowd-funding the RoundCube-Next web-based email client doesn’t really appear to be going anywhere.

    A massive crowdfunding campaign was launched in early 2015 to make RoundCube-Next a reality where they raised $103,541 of their original $80k goal. RoundCube-Next is/was supposed to be completely redesigned, offer integrated chat functionality, support video conferencing with WebRTC, integrate cloud file access, and offer a new and quite nice looking responsive UI.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • Some notes on programming languages and web development

      Even before I begin, I must state that I’m not a web developer. I’ve never been one, and I have no intention to turn into one either. It isn’t that I don’t like developing web applications. On the contrary, I find the topic incredibly interesting. It’s just that everything I need has pretty much already been developed by web developers, so I’ve never had to write an app myself. Add to that my lack of interest in pursuing a career the software development industry – I prefer my research – the implications are that I will always prioritise research related development.

      Take this blog, for example. It once used to be a WordPress deployment, but I eventually got fed up with it bleeding the resources of my shared hosting space and moved to a static site. I didn’t even bother learning a new language like Ruby to use Jekyll. I found something that was written in Python, a language that I know pretty well – Pelican – which works really well. So, really, for my web requirements, I tend to pick the path of least effort.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Is there a ‘club culture’ at the heart of the NHS’s quality regulator?

      A look at the Care Quality Commission’s choice of inspection chairs and overall processes reveals a predominantly white, male, corporate culture that risks letting down patients and staff.

    • U.S. Healthcare System Culls the Wheat from the Working Class Chaff

      Americans are an oddly and beautifully diverse lot, but the healthcare industry has us all figured out. For decades now, maintaining control over American lives and any vestige of the American dream has become increasingly the purview of big business. And no one relishes and maintains more direct control over the health and safety of every American life than the healthcare industry.

      No terrorist group is stronger or more threatening. No political candidate is more menacing – not even Donald Trump. Standing ever at the ready to pass judgement on the value or lack thereof of your life, my life, and every American life stands the health care industry and its stockholders. Until we recognize the depth of the internal threat from the collusion that drives the medical-financial-industrial-complex (the MFIC), we won’t change this system to one that truly values health and life over profits.

      The MFIC includes all the obvious suspects – the for-profit health insurance industry, big Pharma, medical device manufacturers, the giant hospitals and providers’ groups, and the collection agencies and financiers who keep the flow flowing. I have to add to that group all stockholders in these corporations who cannot reasonably assert any deniability about profiting personally from the pain of others. If you own stock in one of these areas, you are supporting the slow, sure genocide of those Americans deemed expendable by the healthcare system.

    • Brexit camp abandons £350m-a-week NHS funding pledge

      Leaders of the cross-party campaign that persuaded the British people to leave the EU have dropped their pre-referendum pledge of a £350m-a-week spending bonanza for the NHS.

      Many of those who headed the Vote Leave campaign, including its former chair, Labour MP Gisela Stuart, and Michael Gove, the Tory former justice secretary, are re-forming this weekend, creating a new pressure group called Change Britain.

      Other top names involved in the organisation, which says it is being established to help “deliver the UK’s referendum result in the most effective way”, include former chancellor Nigel (Lord) Lawson, Digby Jones, former head of the CBI, and David (Lord) Owen, the former Labour foreign secretary.

      But despite the NHS pledge having been at the heart of their message in the run-up to the 23 June vote, and displayed on the official Vote Leave battlebus, the Change Britain website made no mention of the NHS in its manifesto about how to make a success of Brexit.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • What You Really Should #NeverForget on 9/11

      Happy 9/11 Day, our fifteenth anniversary together. If it was a child, she’d be almost ready to drive. They do grow up so fast, don’t they?

      We’re instituted full background checks, body scanners and cavity searches at my home for all guests and pets (can’t be too careful!), which keeps me pretty busy, so this will be a short post. Because they hate our freedoms, we’ve taken them away for safekeeping.

    • What Was the Saudi Involvement in the 9/11 Attacks?

      To this day, there is no clarity about the role of the Saudi Arabian government or individual Saudis with close ties to the government in the 9/11 attacks. We know that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. We know that the bin Laden family had close ties to the family of George W. Bush. We know that right after the attack, wealthy Saudis living in the United States frantically contacted the Saudi Embassy in Washington asking to leave because they feared a backlash. Just days after the attack, some 140 Saudis, including about two dozen members of the bin Laden family, were mysteriously spirited out of the country with little questioning by the FBI.

      [...]

      Members of Congress were allowed to read the 28 pages in a secure, soundproof facility in the basement of the Capitol, but they were not allowed to take notes, bring any staff, or talk about the content. After reading the 28 pages, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said, “They’re the most consequential pages in the 1,000-page report.” Massie said the section was “shocking” and he had to “stop every couple pages and try to rearrange my understanding of history.”

      Former Sen. Bob Graham, who chaired the investigation, fought hard to get the section released. “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” said Graham. He suggested that the Bush and Obama administrations refused to release the information for fear of alienating an influential military and economic partner.

    • US and Russia plan Joint Air Command to hit Terrorists in Syria

      Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced an agreement on a Syria plan between the US and Russia late on Friday, which they said the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad had agreed to.

    • Photo of the Week: A Tense Look Between President Obama and Vladimir Putin
    • Who, apart from its people, wants peace in Yemen?

      Following the collapse on August 6 of the Kuwait negotiations between Hadi’s internationally recognised government in exile on the one hand and the Huthi-Saleh alliance on the other, diplomatic activity to bring the war to an end has notably increased, particularly on the part of the external actors. How serious are their efforts? Will they achieve anything? Meanwhile the living conditions for Yemenis continue to deteriorate.

    • How America Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the War on Terror

      The “War on Terror,” which former President George W. Bush officially launched in late-September 2001, and which President Obama officially rebranded as “The Series of Persistent Targeted Efforts to Dismantle Specific Networks of Violent Extremists That Threaten America” in May 2013, has, at this point (i.e. fifteen years into it), become our official consensus reality … or in other words, “just the way things are.” An entire generation has come of age during the “National State of Emergency With Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks,” which President Obama recently extended. For most of this unfortunate generation (which some are calling “Generation Homeland”), the sight of soldiers in body armor, rifles held in the sling-ready position, patrolling the streets of their towns or cities, the absurd “security procedures” at the airport, the hysteria pumped out by the mainstream media, the sanctimonious memorialization of anything even remotely connected to the “Certain Terrorist Attacks” in question, and all the rest of it, is entirely normal, the way their world has always been.

      Of course, this is also the first generation for whom the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 are nothing but hazy childhood memories, or historical events they learned about in school, or on television, or the Internet. Odds are, what they learned about them was that “America” was attacked that day by a group of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, for no apparent logical reason, other than that “they hate our freedom.” Chances are they also learned that the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing and destabilizing of numerous other countries (i.e. Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and any others I’ve forgotten to mention), the indefinite detentions, the assassinations, the torture, the illegal mass surveillance, the militarization of society generally, and all the other familiar features of the “state of emergency” that has been in effect for as long as anyone their age can remember … that all of this has something to do with “protecting Americans” or “America’s interests.”

      My heart goes out to this generation … or at least to all those in their early twenties who have been bombarded with this official narrative since more or less the day they were born and yet somehow have managed to maintain their sanity (and who continue to struggle on a daily basis to recognize, analyze, deconstruct, and otherwise fend off the relentless barrage of ideological bullshit aimed at their heads). Resisting the force of the official narrative is exhausting, and usually unrewarding, at least in professional and financial terms (unless, of course, one enjoys being marginalized). It’s so much easier to do like the king in The Parable of the King and the Poisoned Well, drink the Kool-Aid, and embrace the madness. Never mind that the official narrative doesn’t actually make much sense, or have anything to do with … well … history … or facts, or other stuff like that.

    • ‘Newspeak’, the U.S. and Palestine

      Let’s see how ‘Newspeak’ has been utilized in describing the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine.

      Rarely a day goes by that some Israeli politician isn’t screaming about an existential threat to that rogue nation. The Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, which includes churches, labor unions and universities voting to divest from Israeli holdings; scholars refusing to take part in academic projects with Israel, and entertainers refusing to perform there, along with the ‘rank and file’ boycotting Israeli products, is decried as an ‘existential threat’. Criticism by any nation of illegal settlements is seen as an ‘existential threat’. Palestinian resistance, that of a poorly armed, starved, occupied and blockaded population, is seen as an existential threat. The list is really endless.

      The United States government, of course, owned by the Israeli lobby AIPAC (Apartheid Israel Political Affairs Committee), buys right into this, with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money going to Israel, and laws being passed in various states banning the boycotting of Israel. How any elected official thinks such a law will ever stand up to a court challenge, and how they think such a law can be enforced, is beyond the understanding of this writer. But they all agree that these and other criticisms of Israel threaten the very existence of that country.

      Now, it must be remembered that Palestine has no army, navy or air force. Its imports are severely restricted, and its exports, thanks to the occupation and blockade, are almost non-existent. Israel continually ‘confiscates’ (read: steals) Palestinian land to build huge new housing developments, all in violation of international law. Palestine faces a very real existential threat, but is seen as threatening Israel. This is certainly Newspeak.

    • Why the Syrian People Won’t Accept a Deal to Remove Assad

      Once again a plan for democratic transition in Syria has been drawn up by a coalition of opposition groups meeting in London, supported by the usual suspects in the shape of Turkey, the EU, US, and Gulf States. It is described as a detailed plan committing Syria to democratic and religious pluralism. Predictably, and the reason why it is a non-starter, it contains the pre-condition of Bashar al-Assad’s removal from power.

    • Media Trumpet Another Phony “Secret Nuclear Deal” Story

      Two major media outlets — Reuters and The Washington Post — pushed another Iran “secret side deal” story last week, ignoring obvious facts that revealed it as clever political deception aimed at sabotaging the nuclear agreement with Iran.

      Stories in both of those outlets suggested that a leading think tank had revealed a secret deal that allowed Iran to exceed various qualitative and quantitative limits placed on it under the nuclear agreement reached last year — the main current theme of political opponents of the agreement. The stories were based on claims in a report co-authored by David Albright, the head of the Institute for Science and International Security, who has long been treated by corporate media as the leading “independent” expert on Iran’s nuclear program.

      In fact, as Truthout revealed in 2014, Albright had abandoned any independence he had maintained on Iran as early as 2008 and had aligned his position on nuclear negotiations with Iran with those of the Bush administration and Israel.

      Albright wrote in the report, “We have learned that some nuclear stocks and facilities were not in accordance with JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] limits on Implementation Day, but in anticipation the Joint Commission had earlier and secretly exempted them from the JCPOA limits.”

    • 15 Years after 9/11, can we Recover our Republic?

      The Founding Fathers thought keeping a standing army was a danger to democracy. The great wars of the twentieth century appear to have imbued the United States with a permanent standing army, and this institution has been reinforced by the September 11 attacks. Or rather it has been reinforced by how Washington elites have decided to respond to those attacks. They have responded with lawlessness. If only we had treated al-Qaeda as the criminals they are instead of creating a ‘war on terror’ then we would have relied more on courts and due process and less on force majeure.

      Perhaps the US military itself is not a danger to democracy, but that it is there, well-trained and well-equipped, creates a constant temptation for presidents to use it. And war presidents are imperial presidents, as we have seen with both Bush and Obama.

      The pretext of national security born of wars has been fatal to our basic liberties. Both Bush and Obama sought to have their intelligence agencies carry out massive domestic surveillance and both have killed and buried the Fourth Amendment.

    • Despite ‘28 pages’ release, Saudi’s 9/11 involvement still buried

      The White House thinks releasing the “28 pages” summarizing Saudi involvement in 9/11 satisfied the public’s need to know. But don’t be fooled. The full story remains buried under more than 100,000 pages of other, still-secret documents.

      The public didn’t even get to see everything that was in those long-classified 28 (actually 29) pages from the congressional inquiry, which narrowly focus on Saudi government officials’ contacts with just two of the 15 Saudi hijackers during their stay in San Diego. The Obama administration blacked-out critical information throughout the document.

      In all, there are nearly 100 separate redactions, ranging from single words, such as names of Saudi suspects, to paragraphs and entire sections of text. Obama’s censors offered no reason why any of that information had to be kept secret 15 years after the attacks, even though such explanations are required as part of declassification reviews.

    • Will Christie Whitman Follow Her 9/11 Apology With One for Her Nuke Shill Game?

      Soon after the 9/11 terror attacks 15 years ago today, then-US EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman assured New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe.

      Today she has issued a “heartfelt” apology, admitting that her misleading advice caused people to die. But will she also apologize for pushing lethal atomic reactor technologies that could kill far more people than 9/11?

      Back in 2001, Whitman went public to “reassure the people of New York and Washington D.C. that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.” She also said, “The concentrations are such that they don’t pose a health hazard….”

      The Environmental Protection Agency itself later said there was insufficient data to offer such assurances.

    • Ex-EPA boss Whitman offers first-ever apology for bad info on post-9/11 air quality: ‘People have died because I made a mistake’

      The former head of the Environmental Protection Agency apologized for the first time for her declaration a week after 9/11 that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe.

      Christine Todd Whitman conceded Friday that it was a mistake to give the all-clear at Ground Zero and said she was sorry for the ongoing health crisis that still grips first responders.

      Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, quickly added that she never lied about the air quality and repeated that she was simply passing on information given to her by government scientists.

      “Whatever we got wrong, we should acknowledge, and people should be helped,” Whitman told the Guardian. “I’m very sorry that people are sick.”

      The mea culpa comes as several reports leading up to the 15th anniversary have underscored the consequences of letting people stay at Ground Zero. The reports reveal the fallout of inhaling toxic dust was worse than predicted. “I’m very sorry that people are dying, and if the EPA and I in any way contributed to that, I’m sorry,” Whitman said. “We did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.”

    • The Time U.S. Spies Thought Al Qaeda Was Ready to Nuke D.C.

      On Christmas Eve 2003, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the secretive U.S. National Security Agency, made a secure phone call to his British counterpart, David Pepper, the director of the Government Communications Headquarters.

      “Happy Christmas, David,” Hayden said, speaking to Pepper from NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade, Maryland, about 20 miles from the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Such social calls weren’t unusual. The NSA and GCHQ were the closest of allies in a global hunt for the phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications of spies and terrorists.

      But Hayden had more on his mind than season’s greetings. In recent days, the NSA had been collecting what Hayden would later describe as a “massive amount of chatter”—phone calls and emails from terrorists—that suggested al Qaeda was planning multiple attacks inside the United States, timed to the holidays.

      “One more thing, David,” Hayden said after the two men exchanged pleasantries. “We actually feel a bit under threat here. And so I’ve told my liaison to your office that should there be catastrophic loss at Ft. Meade, we are turning the functioning of the American [signals intelligence] system over to GCHQ.”

      There was a long pause as Pepper absorbed what his American colleague had just told him.

    • Barbara Lee’s Lone Vote on Sept. 14, 2001, Was as Prescient as it was Brave and Heroic

      Almost immediately after the 9/11 attack, while bodies were still buried in the rubble, George W. Bush demanded from Congress the legal authorization to use military force against those responsible for the attack, which everyone understood would start with an invasion of Afghanistan. The resulting resolution that was immediately cooked up was both vague and broad, providing that “the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

    • Retaliation: Reality Vs. Pundit Fantasy

      It’s worth recalling the US response to the bombing of a Berlin disco in April 1986, which resulted in the deaths of two US service members: The US immediately bombed Libya, which it blamed for the attack. According to Libya, 36 civilians were killed in the air assault, including the year-old daughter of Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy (Washington Post, 5/9/86). It is unlikely that Libyans considered this a “pinprick.” Yet these deaths apparently had little deterrence value: In December 1988, less than 20 months later, Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in an even deadlier act of terrorism the US blames on Libyan agents.

      Likewise, a few months after a suicide bombing of the US embassy in Beirut in April 1983 that killed 63 people, the United States used battleships to pound hostile targets in Lebanon. This is hardly “issuing subpoenas,” but this violence did not deter another, more deadly suicide attack in October 1983, killing 241 US and 58 French military personnel.

      More recently, in 1998, Bill Clinton sent 60 cruise missiles, some equipped with cluster bombs, against Osama bin Laden’s Afghan base, in what was presented as retaliation for the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One missile aimed at Afghan training camps landed hundreds of miles off course in Pakistan, while a simultaneous attack in Sudan leveled one of the country’s few pharmaceutical factories. Media cheered the attacks (In These Times, 9/6/98), though careful investigation into the case revealed no credible evidence linking the plant to chemical weapons or Osama bin Laden, the two justifications offered for the attack (New York Times, 10/27/99; London Observer, 8/23/98).

      Despite the dubious record of retaliatory violence in ensuring security, many pundits insist that previous retaliation failed only because it was not severe enough. As the Chicago Tribune‘s John Kass declared (9/13/01), “For the past decade we’ve sat dumb and stupid as the US military was transformed from a killing machine into a playpen for sociologists and political schemers.” This “playpen” dropped 23,000 bombs on Yugoslavia in 1999, killing between 500 and 1,500 civilians, and may have killed as many as 1,200 Iraqis in 1998’s Desert Fox attack (Agence France Presse, 12/23/98).

    • How Israel Stole the Bomb

      When Israel launched a covert scheme to steal material and secrets to build a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials looked the other way and obstructed investigations, as described in a book reviewed by James DiEugenio.

    • 9/11: A Story of Attacks, Horror, Victims, Heroes and Jingoistic Shame

      No. The Neo-Cons are unrepentant and still trying to advance themselves on the lie that their once and forever war justifies more than their prosecution and conviction in The Hague. Here is a belligerent and unrepentant Dick Cheney passing the torch of evil to his spawn Liz Cheney in the august pages of the Wall Street Journal…

    • America’s War against Terror Drugs Justice

      It’s a reminder that doesn’t get much attention elsewhere in the massive article that the US brought a bunch of (right wing) terrorists to the United States and effectively gave them shelter from justice in their own country.

      One reason the terrorists were spirited away to the US — and thereby hidden from the Peace and Justice process in Colombia — is because they had ties to former President Álvaro Uribe, as well as the CIA. In the one war where the US declared both sides terrorists, it managed to find a way to avoid treating “our” terrorists like we do all others.

      Compared to either the sentences your average low level drug dealer gets or your average young Muslim kid set up by the FBI, the sentences these key players in the drug and terror industry are remarkably light: 7.5 years on average for the paramilitaries and 10 for the drug lords, according to the NYT’s calculation.

      As such, I think this is one of the most important articles for you to read today, on Never Forget day. It reveals a dramatically different model for a war on drugs and terror than the Foreverwar we’re marking today, one in which America’s favored terrorists get impunity and the victims of terrorism get shafted.

    • It’s Not Enough to Remember 9/11

      To Michael Moore’s everlasting credit, these two scenes were never included in the film in any way. The 9/11 responders were not wanting sympathy. They wanted to be remembered. They wanted us to remember, and perhaps they wanted us to show just a fraction of the commitment to their well-being that they had committed to others — to the point of risking their lives if necessary. And we have failed them greatly.

    • The Lost Innocence of 9/11

      The renewed patriotism and commitment we felt a decade ago has decayed, sullied by jingoism, xenophobia and paranoid fantasies about race and religion. At the panel, Linda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York observed, “What stops another 9/11 is not profiling, but all New Yorkers becoming partners and friends.”

      We actually had that for a while in those first days and weeks of smoke and ash, those days when the smell of vaporized metal and electrical cable and God knows what else filled our air; so pungent you could taste it.

    • North Korea accused of ‘maniacal recklessness’ after nuclear test triggers earthquake

      North Korea has confirmed it has conducted its most powerful nuclear test to date, marking the 68th anniversary of its founding with a reminder to the world that it may be edging closer to developing a warhead capable of striking the US mainland.

      Friday morning’s test, which triggered a magnitude 5.3 earthquake, drew immediate condemnation from North Korea’s neighbours and Washington.

      Barack Obama, who was briefed on board Air Force One by National Security Adviser Susan Rice as he returned to the US from an Asian tour, said provocative actions by North Korea would have “serious consequences”.

      “To be clear, the United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state,” Obama said in a later statement. He said he would work “to take additional significant steps, including new sanctions, to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions.”

      The UN security council agreed at an urgent meeting on Friday to immediately begin work on a new raft of sanctions.

      During the meeting behind closed doors, the council strongly condemned the test and agreed to begin drafting a new resolution under article 41 of the UN charter, which provides for sanctions.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Fall of the Wild: Study Documents ‘Catastrophic Decline’ in World’s Untouched Places

      Wilderness, though remote by nature, is not immune to the ravages of humanity. In fact, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology, the world’s wild places are undergoing “catastrophic decline” and could be facing elimination within decades if monumental policy shifts are not implemented.

      “If we don’t act soon, there will only be tiny remnants of wilderness around the planet, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and for some of the most vulnerable human communities on the planet,” warned lead author Dr. James Watson, of the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. “We have a duty to act for our children and their children.”

      Watson and his team mapped wilderness areas around the globe, which were defined as “biologically and ecologically intact landscapes free of any significant human disturbance,” and then compared that to one produced by the same methods in the early 1990s.

      The amount of wilderness loss in those two decades was “staggering,” according to co-author Dr. Oscar Venter of the University of Northern British Colombia.

    • National Guard on Standby in North Dakota Before Court Ruling on Dakota Access Pipeline

      North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple has activated the National Guard ahead of today’s ruling on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s lawsuit against the U.S. government over the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg is set to rule today on an injunction in a lawsuit challenging the Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to issue permits for the pipeline, arguing it violates the National Historic Preservation Act. This comes as over 1,000 people representing more than 100 Native American tribes are gathered along the Cannonball River by the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to resist the pipeline’s construction. It’s been described as the largest unification of Native American tribes in decades. We go to North Dakota for an update from Tara Houska, national campaigns director for Honor the Earth.

    • Why Rivers, Why Now?

      For over ten years, I’ve worked on campaigns to protect forests and secure land rights for communities around the world. And this month, I’m thrilled to take on a new position, as the Executive Director of International Rivers.

      Why rivers? Why now? Believe it or not, it’s not such a big stretch.

      Throughout my career, I’ve worked to ensure that development is fair and equitable, that people’s rights are respected, and that their livelihoods are upheld with dignity. Rivers are an often overlooked but critical part of an ecosystem, and they are essential to the livelihoods of billions of people. Freshwater fisheries are the primary source of protein for millions. Fertile river basins nourish and irrigate farms to feed the world. And rivers provide critical energy and sanitation services. For many indigenous communities, they are also a sacred source of life.

      I joined International Rivers because it’s the only international organization fully dedicated to protecting rivers and the lives they support. This sharp, savvy group has always had an outsized impact relative to its size, jumpstarting a global river protection movement thirty years ago. Over the organization’s lifetime, it’s prevented more than 200 bad projects and supported thousands of communities around the world to defend their rights and territories in the face of wasteful development projects. From our back of the envelope calculations, we’ve channeled $174 billion from destructive dams towards better alternatives. This is an organization that takes on the big fights undaunted by entrenched interests with deep pockets, and time and again, wins equally big.

    • Shell begins production at world’s deepest underwater oilfield

      Royal Dutch Shell has started production at the world’s deepest underwater oil and gas field, 1.8 miles beneath the sea surface in the Gulf of Mexico.

      The first oil pumped from the Stones field, 200 miles south of New Orleans, comes after billions of dollars of investment from Shell over the last three years.

      The achievement will anger many climate change campaigners, but will boost annual pay for Shell’s chief executive, Ben van Beurden, under the group’s controversial performance bonus arrangements.

    • ‘A Good Day for Elephants’: Ban on Domestic Ivory Trade Passes

      In a bid to stop the killing of elephants for their tusks, world governments voted at a major conservation conference to urge the closure of all domestic ivory markets.

      After fierce debate, disagreements and walkouts the motion was adopted on the final day of the International Union for Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress, a 10-day meeting that drew 9,000 people to Honolulu, Hawaii this month.

      The domestic ban was backed by most of the 217 state and national members of IUCN, as well as over 1,000 conservation groups that are part of the union. But some countries, including Japan, Namibia and South Africa, argued against the ban.

      The international trade in ivory has been banned since 1989 but in many countries, including the US, UK and China, domestic ivory trading is still allowed for antiques.

    • Ban on domestic ivory trade passes at international summit

      Nations and environmental groups have agreed to shut down the domestic ivory trade, despite the resolution nearly being derailed by objections from countries including Japan and South Africa.

    • ‘Picking on’ Volkswagen: Why Follow Dieselgate?

      One of our commenters described my attention to Dieselgate as ‘picking on’ Volkswagen. It’s not as if there haven’t been scandalous problems with other automotive industry manufacturers, like General Motors’ ignition switches or Takata’s airbag failures, right?

      But Volkswagen earns greater attention here at this site because:

      1) A critical mass of emptywheel readers are not familiar with the automotive industry, let alone manufacturing; they do not regularly follow automotive news. Quite a number are familiar with enterprise information security, but not car manufacturing or with passenger vehicle security. Many of the readers here are also in policy making, law enforcement, judiciary — persons who may influence outcomes at the very beginning or very end of the product manufacturing life cycle.

      2) This is the first identified* multi-year incidence in which an automotive industry manufacturer using computer programming of a street-ready vehicle to defraud consumers and willfully violate multiple U.S. laws. This willfulness wholly separates the nature of this risk from other passenger vehicle vulnerabilities, ex: Fiat Chrysler’s hackable Uconnect dashboard computers or Nissan’s unprotected APIs for keyless remotes. (These latter events arose from inadequate info security awareness though responsiveness of vehicle manufacturers after notification may be in question.)

      3) Volkswagen Group is the single largest passenger vehicle manufacturer in Europe. This isn’t a little deal considering half of all passenger vehicles in Europe are diesel-powered. Health and environmental damage in the U.S. from 600,000 passenger diesels has been bad enough; it’s taking lives in the tens of thousands across Europe. 75,000 premature deaths in 2012 alone were attributed to urban NO2 exposures, the source of which is diesel engines. It was testing in the U.S. against U.S. emissions standards which brought VW’s ‘cheating’ to light making it impossible for the EU to ignore any longer. The environmental damage from all Volkswagen passenger diesels combined isn’t localized; these additional non-compliant emissions exacerbate global climate change.

  • Finance

    • Who Gains Most From School Choice? Not Low-Income Students Of Color

      As parents and students reenter public schools for a new year, they’re hearing a lot about “school choice.”

      Having “choice,” they’re told, lets parents send their kids to schools other than their assigned neighborhood school, such as a charter school, a magnet school, or, in some cases, even a school in another district.

      No doubt school choice will benefit some parents – just as any market-based system has some winners and some losers. But who really stands to gain most from choice and why?

      “We will rescue kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice,” Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump declared at the Republican National Convention. Reporters at Education Week have noticed Trump’s campaign is “increasing focus” on the subject, and recently hired a policy expert, with a background in crafting education policy in Indiana, to “work on school choice issues.”

    • Huge Consumer Scam Results in Paltry Fines—and Little Else—for Wells Fargo

      Banking behemoth Wells Fargo, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, was fined a mere $185 million by various regulators on Thursday for opening millions of unauthorized accounts that racked up fees for consumers and bonuses for employees.

      The biggest fine came from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which levied its largest-ever penalty: $100 million. The Los Angeles City Attorney and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were also party to the settlement.

      “Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses,” said CFPB director Richard Cordray on Thursday. “Because of the severity of these violations, Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the CFPB has ever imposed.”

    • Black to School: The Rising Struggle to Make Black Education Matter

      Indeed, billionaire philanthrocapitalists have upended education over the past 15 years by backing a series of major policy changes — codified in the No Child Left Behind Act, the Race to the Top initiative and the Common Core State Standards. These policies have badly damaged education for all kids and have had particularly harmful effects on Black and Brown communities. Today, increasing numbers of people have discovered that these reforms are in reality efforts to turn the schoolhouse into an ATM for corporate America.

    • How inmates are organizing a nationwide strike from behind bars

      Whenever an inmate and a guard get into an altercation, Melvin Ray sees an opportunity to connect and educate. After stepping in and trying to de-escalate the situation, he’ll talk to his fellow inmate and ask him how he got here. Not just “here,” in the sense of an altercation stemming from the emotional stresses of being incarcerated. Or “here,” in terms of the conviction that sent him to prison in the first place. Ray, ultimately, presses a larger point: “You’re not here because of that crime. You’re here because someone has figured out a way to make money off of you.”

      These sorts of one-on-one conversations are critical for organizing incarcerated people, and Ray — who also goes by Bennu Hannibal Ra-Sun — knows this better than anyone. He is one of the founders of the Free Alabama Movement, or FAM — a prisoner-led human rights group that is organizing what could become the largest nationwide prison work stoppage, starting September 9, the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison uprising.

      Along with Support Prisoner Resistance and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, or IWOC, of the IWW labor union, FAM issued a call to action earlier this summer, with an estimated 40 prisons in 24 states expected to participate. Much like the inmates who took over New York’s infamous correctional facility in 1971, today’s prisoners are fighting against the conditions of their imprisonment, especially the conditions under which they are forced to work, which many describe as slavery.

    • Leading Economists Oppose TPP Provision Giving Corporations Upper Hand in Investor-State Disputes

      As the Obama administration begins a new push to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership, known as the TPP, more than 200 of the country’s leading economists and legal scholars have written a letter urging Congress to reject the 12-nation trade pact, citing its controversial investor-state dispute settlement. Critics say the so-called ISDS regime creates a parallel legal system granting multinational corporations undue power. We speak with Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “This is an agreement so repugnant that members of Congress do not want to vote for it,” says Lori Wallach.

    • Elizabeth Warren: Apple’s Tax-Shirking Schemes Show Congress Must Reform US Code

      The ongoing Apple tax scandal in Europe is the perfect opportunity to reform the U.S. tax code, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times on Thursday.

      Multinationals and their lobbyists on Capitol Hill are pushing U.S. Congress to give them favorable deals even as the U.S. Department of the Treasury finalizes reporting requirements for American corporations with offices in foreign countries that could help expose their “jaw-dropping variety of tax-dodging schemes,” Warren wrote.

      “But instead of bailing out the tax dodgers under the guise of tax reform, Congress should seize this moment to take three crucial steps to repair our broken corporate tax code.”

      Last week, the European Commission slapped Apple with a $14 billion tax bill in a decision that came almost a year after it was revealed that the company had stockpiled $181 billion in profits in offshore funds in Ireland, more than any other American company. The commission found that Ireland’s levy on Apple was so lenient that it amounted to illegal state aid.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Open Letter to NBC Moderator Calls for Candidates to Debate ‘Democracy Itself’

      That is, democracy: issues ranging from money in politics to voting rights to freedom of the press. “Each of these topics deserves a full inquiry,” the letter reads. “Each affects, at the most fundamental level, who has power in this country and who doesn’t.”

      And “power— more specifically, the distribution of power—in this country affects every aspect of American life,” according to the missive, “from trade deals to criminal justice, from water quality to access to medical treatment. In the most extreme cases, power decides not only how people live, but if they live.”

      Voters deserve to hear presidential candidates speak about a system they’ve described as “rigged,” pro-democracy groups said on Thursday.

      “It’s evident this election cycle that Americans are fed up with a democracy that isn’t working for them,” said Rahna Epting, chief of staff at Every Voice.

      “At a time in which many Americans are losing faith in our government and public trust in politicians is at record lows, it’s critical that Lester Holt give voters a chance to hear from our presidential candidates about their take on our democracy and how they plan to restore people’s faith in the system,” she said.

    • Paranoid politics: how does Donald Trump get away with it?

      The paranoid style of politics accords enormous power to the enemy; it represents them as being able to change the normal course of history in an evil way.

      Hofstadter argues much of the enemy’s function lies in what can be condemned. The enemy’s supposed lack of morality gives paranoid stylists an opportunity to project and express similar aspects of their own minds.

      By focusing on Clinton’s alleged evil, corruption and lies, Trump’s and his supporters attempt to deny their own, simultaneously giving them voice and legitimising calling Clinton “crooked”, “weak”, “unstable” and “the Devil”.

    • Clinton ‘feeling great’ after getting overheated at 9/11 event

      Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeatedly has raised questions about Clinton’s health and whether she had the “stamina” to serve as president.

      In December 2012, Clinton, 68, suffered a concussion and shortly afterward developed a blood clot.

    • Hillary Clinton Appeared To Faint At 9/11 Ceremony

      Hillary Clinton abruptly left the 9/11 ceremony at Ground Zero this morning because she “felt overheated,” according to her campaign.

      A senior law enforcement official told The Daily Beast that Clinton looked pale when she arrived at the ceremony. She left the ceremony at about 9:30 a.m., according to pool reports. As she walked away from the ceremony, according to numerous law enforcement officials, she slumped and appeared to faint. Then, according to the sources, her detail put her into a waiting vehicle.

      “They threw her in like she was a side of beef,” a senior law enforcement official told The Daily Beast.

    • Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign

      But the issue is that Clinton kept reporters totally in the dark for 90 minutes after her abrupt departure from the 9/11 memorial service for a health-related matter. No reporter was allowed to follow her. (Clinton has resisted a protective pool for coverage because Donald Trump refuses to participate in one.) This is, yet again, the Clinton campaign asking everyone to just trust it. She got overheated! But she’s fine now!

    • BBC Quietly Owns Up to Blatant Propaganda Lies

      Nine months after a massive propaganda campaign based on outright lies, the BBC quietly sneaked out an admission on its website tucked away in “corrections and complaints”. As the BBC went all out to galvanise support for bombing Syria, the meme was pumped out relentlessly that opponents of bombing Syria were evil and violent misogynist thugs, bent on the physical intimidation of MPs. Leading the claims was Stella Creasy MP.

      9 months after the propaganda had its effect – run on every news bulletin of every single BBC platform – the BBC published this correction, carried on zero news bulletins of any BBC platform.

    • Sanders, the “Progressive” Plutocrat, and the Supreme Court Vacancy

      Having made such profound campaign errors in his handling of this appointment as a candidate, it is still not too late for Senator Sanders to call on President Obama to make a recess appointment. The Democratic National Convention and the summer recess of seven weeks that expired on Labor Day was the best opportunity for making this demand. But there will be future recesses. Progressives should demand that Sanders call on President Obama to make a recess appointment of a progressive justice who will reliably fulfill the litmus test that he ascribes to Clinton without any evidence. He should also insist that Clinton join him in making this request. Progressives could let Sanders know that if he is too timid to take this action there is no reason to fund his “Our Revolution” venture or buy his book.

    • ‘Overheated’ Hillary Clinton Leaves 9/11 Event Early, Is Helped Into Vehicle

      Video shown on Twitter pages appears to show Clinton waiting at the curb as an official vehicle pulls up. As she is being led to the vehicle, she stumbles, her legs buckle and she is supported by aides before being helped into the vehicle. Witnesses said she lost a shoe in the incident.

    • Fooled Again

      The naive hopes of Bernie Sanders’ supporters—to build a grass-roots political movement, change the Democratic Party from within and push Hillary Clinton to the left—have failed. Clinton, aware that the liberal class and the left are not going to mount genuine resistance, is running as Mitt Romney in drag. The corporate elites across the political spectrum, Republican and Democrat, have gleefully united to anoint her president. All that remains of Sanders’ “revolution” is a 501(c)(4) designed to raise money, including from wealthy, anonymous donors, to ensure that he will be a senator for life. Great historical events happen twice, as Karl Marx quipped, first as tragedy and then as farce.

      The multibillion-dollar extravaganza of our electoral Circus Maximus is part of the smokescreen that covers the ongoing devastation of globalization, deindustrialization, trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, endless war, climate change and the intrusion into every corner of our lives by the security and surveillance state. Our democracy is dead. Clinton and Donald Trump do not have the power or the interest to revive it. They kneel before the war machine, which consumes trillions of dollars to wage futile wars and bankroll a bloated military. To defy the fortress state is political suicide. Politicians are courtiers to Wall Street. The candidates mouth the clichés of justice, improvements in income equality and democratic choice, but it is a cynical game. Once it is over, the victors will go to Washington to work with the lobbyists and financial elites to carry out the real business of ruling.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Facebook backs down on censoring ‘napalm girl’ photo after public outcry

      In a letter on its front page, Norwegian daily Aftenposten lashed out at Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg for “limiting freedom” after Facebook removed the image from the newspaper’s profile page earlier this week for violating its policy against showing nudity.

      Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg weighed in, posting on her Facebook page, “Facebook gets it wrong when they censor such images.” She added: “I say no to this type of censorship.”

      Hours later, Solberg’s post—which included the image—was removed from her account.

    • Tuur Demeester Defends Theymos’ Censorship of The Bitcoin Community

      Throughout the years, there have been a few people in the Bitcoin world who generate a lot of negative friction. Even though their intentions may be good, the way they go about things leaves much to be desired. Censorship in the Bitcoin world is unacceptable, and many people see Theymos as one of the culprits. But Tuur Demeester is supporting his “style”, which creates even more discussion among enthusiasts.

      To be clear, running a Bitcoin community forum and subReddit is a tedious task. While there is a lot of activity on these platforms, there is also a lot of spam and irrelevant news. When heated debates take place, a wide variety of opinions are presented. In a lot of cases, name-calling and foul mouthing are becoming all too common. Maintaining order requires some harsh actions now and then.

      But there is a vast difference between handling an unruly crowd and censorship. In the Bitcoin world, the latter option is becoming more prevalent as time passes. Anyone who speaks out against Bitcoin Core is silenced. Altcoin supporters get banned. People who voice their opinion may find themselves shadowbanned in the blink of an eye.

    • Nominations open for 2017 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards

      Beginning today, nominations for the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards Fellowship are open. Now in their 17th year, the awards honour some of the world’s most remarkable free expression heroes. Previous winners include Chinese digital activists GreatFire, Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat and Angolan investigative journalist Rafael Marques de Morais.

    • Western Publishers Submit to Islam
    • The real Islamophobia? Free speech dying in West

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Governing Google

      As for Google, without a more ‘joined up’ EU legal and regulatory framework integrating digital rights and economic concerns, users may need to look to solutions outside the law.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Seumas Milne named as aide who wanted Hebrew wording removed from Labour Passover greeting

      Seumas Milne, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest advisers, told a party worker to remove the Hebrew from a Passover greeting because it might look “Zionist”, it has been claimed.

      Mr Milne, Labour’s executive director of communications, is said to have wanted to delete the wording “Chag Kasher VeSameach,”, which translates as “A Happy and Kosher Holiday,’ from Mr Corbyn’s Pesach message to the Jewish community.

      According to Dave Rich, a senior official of the Community Security Trust, Mr Milne felt “the use of Hebrew implied support for Zionism”.

    • Don’t be surprised if Colin Kaepernick prompts more schoolchildren to sit for the Pledge of Allegiance

      Colin Kaepernick is a role model whether you like it or not. Many view Kaepernick’s choice of protest as disrespecting the flag, our armed forces and America itself, but the vitriol toward the football player represents the fears that children may grasp the power of civil disobedience. Students who idolize athletes like Kaepernick may also mimic him at school and sit during the pledge of allegiance in protest.

      Children in our broken U.S. school system have many reasons to take a seat.

      Every morning in most public and private schools, students recite the Pledge of Allegiance, although schools can’t legally force them to do it. The 1943 Supreme Court decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, ruled that students are protected by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment of the Constitution. Consequently, schools can’t force students to stand, recite, salute, place a hand on one’s heart or acknowledge the Pledge in anyway if the student objects.

    • The National Anthem’s False Notes

      One August morning in a small French town in Normandy 250 years ago, a crucifix that stood as a monument in the heart of town was found mutilated. People were upset. They wanted blood. (Irony has never been Catholics’ strongest suit.) No one had any idea who’d done it, so it was necessary to invent a suspect.

      The mob chose a 20-year-old aristocrat, the Knight of La Barre, who was known to run around town doing irreverent things with a couple of equally free-thinking late adolescents. The proof of his guilt was simple: during a religious procession, he refused to take off his cap and stand respectfully. Blasphemy! La Barre was interrogated, tried, and tortured, his head was chopped off in front of an immense and cheering crowd and he was burned.

      Substitute dogma for freedom and the cruelty and stupidity of men has no bounds. I was reminded of the treatment of La Barre by the entirely predictable controversy surrounding an NFL quarterback’s decision not to stand up for the national anthem before a game. No one is calling for Colin Kaepernick’s head, at least not literally, but he’s been all but guillotined nonetheless, and for what? For finally deciding, as too few athletes do, to show that he’s not exclusively an object of entertainment making $12 million a year. He decided to protest police brutality and racism his way, with a quiet act that doesn’t take away from anybody else’s right to believe what they will.

      [...]

      Why confront racism and police injustice when you can hold an inquisition on who’s patriotic and who’s not, who’s behind our military and who’s not? When you can just scream U-S-A, U-S-A, the new anthem of goons too challenged by multisyllabic words or complete sentences to propose more reasoned arguments? And when all else fails, let it come down to that gibberish equivalence: compared to soldiers and the flag that represents them, apparently to the exclusion of everyone else, you, civilian whiner, are nothing.

    • High School Football Players Take Knee for Anthem Across Country

      High school football players across the US followed San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s lead and declined to stand for the national anthem Friday night and Saturday afternoon.

      It appears that Kaepernick has started a movementwith his silent protest during the national anthem during a pre-season game on August 26. Kaepernick said his “taking a knee” was to protest racial oppression and police brutality in the United States.

    • Chelsea Manning Begins Hunger Strike Against Prison Conditions

      U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning announced she began a hunger strike in protest of her prison conditions as she serves a 35-year sentence for leaking classified documents.

      Advocacy group Fight for the Future shared a statement from the 28-year-old transgender woman as she demanded written assurances from the Army she will receive all of the medically prescribed recommendations for her gender dysphoria and that the “high tech bullying” will stop. “High tech bullying,” is what Chelsea describes as “the constant, deliberate and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.”

      Following her sentencing, Chelsea has respectfully requested that the US Government give her treatment for her gender dysphoria. Over a year later, Chelsea filed a lawsuit in September of 2014, where she sued the government to get a battery of treatments. As a result, she began hormone therapy in February of 2015.

    • ‘Whose Side Are You On?’ Dakota Access Emerges as Pivotal Battleground

      It took months of fierce resistance, thousands camped out in protest, dozens of arrests, and a brutal encounter with attack dogs, but the tribal fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) has emerged as a national moment of truth for the political establishment, as well as the hundreds of thousands who have voiced support for the Standing Rock Sioux in this pivotal moment.

      In anticipation of Friday’s federal court ruling that could temporarily halt pipeline construction, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple officially activated the National Guard to increase the security presence around the peaceful prayer camps, which heightened tensions for many tribal members.

      “To an average non-Native person, that might feel safe,” Faith Spotted Eagle, an Ihanktowan elder, explained to Indian Country Today. “To us, it feels really familiar, and it personally takes me back to the Whitestone Massacre,” she said, referring to the 1863 attack by the U.S. military on the very same land occupied by the prayer camp. “But we know how to handle these situations…We pray.”

    • Exclusive: Migrant Mother Says She Was Pushed to End Hunger Strike to Win Release from Detention

      In an exclusive interview, we speak with a woman held for nine months with her four-year-old daughter at the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania as they seek asylum from El Salvador. She describes how she won their release only after she bowed to pressure to break her hunger strike and eat an apple. She agreed to do an interview if we did not show her face or use her real name. “Maria” had just arrived in Arlington, Texas. She must now wear an electronic monitor around her ankle. Democracy Now! correspondent Renée Feltz filed this report.

    • Jill Stein Spray Paints a Bulldozer and More Protesters Lock Down at #NoDAPL

      Over two thousand Natives have gathered in Standing Rock, North Dakota, in what some are calling the largest Indigenous convergence in more than a century. More than 100 nations are represented at multiple camps, with Natives travelling to Standing Rock from reservations and cities around the country, all with one aim: to thwart construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. If constructed, the Dakota Access pipeline would transport crude oil from the North Dakota Bakken region through South Dakota and Iowa into Illinois — crossing the Missouri in treaty lands. On Tuesday, Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein also joined protesters on the frontline, speaking alongside Indigenous movement leaders and vandalizing a bulldozer as protesters cheered. Stein spray-painted the words “I approve this message” on a piece of equipment that had been shut down by protesters.

Links 11/9/2016: 20 Years of KDE, Budgie 10.2.7 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • issue #45: Zines, Kubernetes, Trojans, myLG, InfluxDB, hop & more!
  • HPE Boosts SUSE, Rootkit Targets Linux & More…

    Damn if the days aren’t already getting too short for this old soul who no longer feels comfortable driving after dark. This is made worse by the fact I live way out in the country — miles from nowhere, as they say — meaning I’m pretty much stuck in the house at night. The good news is, this means that these days I’m getting a lot of writing done.

    Now on to this weeks FOSS news…

    We’ll start with the good news. The Creative Commons has scored a victory in Austria. This started as one of those right versus left sort of stories, involving a left leaning film collective, Filmpiraten, and the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, or FPO. It seems that Filmpiraten posted a video to YouTube documenting protests against Akedemikerball, an annual event hosted by the FPO each year in Vienna that brings right wing leaders to Austria. Also, each year it brings thousands of protesters.

  • Server

    • IBM unveils new Linux-based servers to boost AI, deep learning

      IBM on Thursday revealed a series of new servers designed to help propel cognitive workloads and to drive greater data centre efficiency.

      Featuring a new chip, the Linux-based lineup incorporates innovations from the “OpenPOWER” community that deliver higher levels of performance and greater computing efficiency than available on any x86-based server.

  • Kernel Space

    • [Older] Linux is 25. Yay! Let’s celebrate with 25 stunning facts about Linux.
    • Memfd Transport Now Enabled By Default For PulseAudio

      With this summer’s PulseAudio 9.0 release was support for Memfd-based transport. That support is now enabled by default in time for PulseAudio 10.

      This feature is about using Memfd on modern versions of the Linux kernel as a transport / shared memory method in place of the existing POSIX SHM shared memory transport. Memfd has been around since Linux 3.17 and this transport method for PulseAudio should be more secure and modern — for allowing better sandboxing/container support, etc.

    • Graphics Stack

      • It’s Been Another Exciting Week Of RADV Development (Radeon Vulkan)

        The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver continues to look promising and there’s been a lot more code being merged the past few days.

        Since last weekend when writing about RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Continues Building Up Features Quickly, there have been 17 pages of commits landing in the code repository (Mesa semi-interesting branch) by David Airlie and Bas Nieuwenhuizen.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Frameworks 5.26.0 Improves the Breeze Icons, Plasma Framework, and Sonnet

        Today, September 10, 2016, the KDE project announced the release of the KDE Frameworks 5.26.0 collection of over 70 add-on libraries for the Qt5 GUI toolkit.

      • KDE Frameworks 5.26 Released
      • KDE neon – Weak lighting

        KDE neon is an interesting project. If we ignore the world, it does bring some fresh new changes into the Plasma universe, with significant improvements but also a handful of bugs and glitches. If we expand our view to include all other distributions, the scintillating allure of neon begins to fade. It does not have any killer features that make it a worthy rival to other, well-established home players.

        The visual distinction from Kubuntu is a small one, the smartphone support is lacking, the media support can be slightly polished, the package manager is awful, the app layer thin, and you can’t really pimp the distro because the beauty framework is utterly broken. I did like that more stuff works than before, but it’s like priding yourself on getting the highest fail grade in the classroom. Overall hardware support, network excluded and resource utilizations are probably the only redeeming features, but even then, by a tiny margin. Which gets quickly drowned in the sea of bugs, errors, problems, and glitches. Samba is another sore point.

        At the end of the day, this distro is a cool test bed for what Plasma has in store, but it does not have the critical mass of goodies needed for any serious use. The recent wave of distros was pretty much awful, so you might be tempted to look at them, but no. Any old Ubuntu based on 14.04 is way better, and so is the new Fedora. CentOS 7, too. In the end, neon needs a lot more work before I can phrase the word recommended in association with its behavior. Overall, 5/10. But, compare it to the K-flavored Xerus, and there’s still hope. To be continued.

      • Project: Integrating Sentinel-2 data into Marble

        In conclusion the project has paved the groundwork for future efforts on Sentinel-2 data integration, which will lead to Marble Virtual Globe being the first in it’s kind to possess this quality data, it being open for users all around the world to create and develop with.

      • Embedded Notifications for Externally Modified Files

        In the past, KTextEditor notified the user about externally modified files with a modal dialog. Many users were annoyed by this behavior.

      • Kate & Akademy Awards 2016

        Dominik and me got the Akademy 2016 Award for our work on Kate and KTextEditor.

      • [Krita] Experimental OSX Build Available
      • Another Happy Birthday
      • Hello World

        I guess I should tell you all a little about myself. I learned C++ in high school computer science, but that was long ago. Since then, I have never stopped programming toys for myself and others. I have been a Linux user since around when I started in computer science and have used KDE as my main DE for just about the entire time. Around 2003, I switched to purely open source software. You see, I had always dabbled, but I just was not really ready to stop using the other proprietary operating systems. Then, in 2005, I started to become a fairly active member over at the Kubuntu forums. I started mostly doing it as a fun way to expand my knowledge base while helping others.

      • AtCore test
      • First Year As a Mentor
      • QtCon wrap up

        We had an incredible time in Berlin. First the training day by KDAB and then three conference days packed full with topics ranging from how to set up an open source organisation to fine tuning Qt graphics.

        Second. a shout out to the communities that we had the pleasure to work with to create QtCon, FSFE, KDE and VideoLAN, and of course to our partners KDAB, you guys rock!

        Last but definitely not least, Thank You obviously to all the volunteers from the different communities!

      • Day 6 at Akademy 2016
      • Back from Akademy
      • Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 14-Akademy Day3-4)
      • Akademy
      • Plasma 5.8: Per-screen Pagers

        The other day I wrote about the Pager improvements awaiting in Plasma 5.8. In the comments user btin re-raised the issue of limiting the Pager’s display to the screen it’s currently on, instead of being all-exclusive.

        At the time I wasn’t sure we could still sneak this in before feature freeze, but thanks to the screen-awareness of the new backend (which, to recap, is shared with the Task Manager and already needs to determine what screen a given window resides on), it turned out to be easy enough to do!

      • Kdenlive 16.08.1 released

        We are happy to announce a new dot release with some improvements and various fixes. We also celebrate some code contribution from Harald Albrecht (TheDive0) hoping to see more devs joining our team.

      • Akademy 2016 is over :(
      • New features in Krita 3.0.1
      • “20 Years of KDE” book released!
      • 20 Years of KDE

        A tour through the moments that marked the 20 years of community history, starting with the technologies that made possible its existence.

      • Happy 20 Years, KDE

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Spending GNOME’s privacy money

        In 2013, the GNOME Foundation ran a successful campaign that raised funds for enhancing privacy features in the GNOME desktop and application suite. Unfortunately, subsequent changes in the organization left GNOME without a clear plan for how best to use the earmarked funds, so they remain—untouched—in GNOME’s bank account. At GUADEC 2016 in Karlsruhe, Germany, the topic of how to utilize the money was revisited, and a plan has now begun to take shape.

      • Announcing Gtef, an incubator for GtkSourceView

        Gtef – the acronym for “GNOME Text Editor Framework” – is a new library that eases the development of GtkSourceView-based text editors and IDEs. It can serve as an incubator for some GtkSourceView features.

      • Wrap-up from this cycle of Outreachy

        Now that all interns have completed their work, I wanted to share a few final thoughts about this cycle of Outreachy. Hopefully, this post will also help us in future usability testing.

        This was my third time mentoring for Outreachy, but my first time with more than one intern at a time. As in previous cycles, I worked with GNOME to do usability testing. Allan Day and Jakub Steiner from the GNOME Design Team also pitched in with comments and advice to the interns when they were working on their tests and analysis.

      • GNOME 3.22 – Whats New | GNOME Files (Nautilus)

  • Distributions

    • Budgie 10.2.7 Released

      We’re thrilled to announce the release of Budgie 10.2.7, the last release in our 10.2 series that aims to resolve a multitude of issues as well as land some user experience improvements.

    • Solus 1.2.0.5 Released

      Today we are providing a minor update to Solus 1.2 in the form of Solus 1.2.0.5. This release enables us to address a multitude of issues that have since been resolved after the release of Solus 1.2…

    • This Week in Solus – Install #35

    • New Releases

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • LinuxScreenshots.org is closed.

        LinuxScreenshots.org is closed.

        An archive of all screenshot tours from this site have been made freely available to the community, which consists of 2300 releases from 580 distributions.

        You may download this archive for fun, or to start your own Linux screenshots website. Please help seed torrents.

    • Arch Family

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • Trying out openSUSE Tumbleweed

        While distribution-hopping is common among newcomers to Linux, longtime users tend to settle into a distribution they like and stay put thereafter. In the end, Linux distributions are more alike than different, and one’s time is better spent getting real work done rather than looking for a shinier version of the operating system. Your editor, however, somehow never got that memo; that’s what comes from ignoring Twitter, perhaps. So there is a new distribution on the main desktop machine; this time around it’s openSUSE Tumbleweed.

        Most rational users simply want a desktop system that works, is secure, and, hopefully, isn’t too badly out of date. Tumbleweed is not intended for those users; instead, it is good for people who like to be on the leading edge with current versions of everything and who are not afraid of occasional breakage. It’s for users who like an occasional surprise from their operating system. That sounds like just the sort of distribution your editor actively seeks out.

        More to the point, Tumbleweed is a rolling distribution; rather than make regular releases that are months or years apart, the Tumbleweed developers update packages individually as new releases come out upstream. Unlike development distributions like Rawhide, Tumbleweed does not contain pre-release software. By waiting to ship a release until it has been declared stable upstream, Tumbleweed should be able to avoid the worst unpleasant surprises while keeping up with what the development community is doing.

      • Daimler AG Migrates its Mission Critical Servers to Suse Linux

        SUSE technologies are helping Daimler AG, the German automotive behemoth, to migrate a large proportion of its mission-critical servers from proprietary UNIX operating systems to ‘the open and flexible Linux platform’.

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Weeks 2016/36

        Another week with 4 snapshots has passed, sadly some issues managed to sneak in but, as you are used to by Tumbleweed already, we managed to resolve the issues on the mailing list in no time and made sure that upcoming snapshots get the fixes asap. The snapshots published were 0901, 0905, 0907 and 0908.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • The New Features Expected In DNF-2, Currently In Development

          DNF(Dandified YUM) is a relatively new package manager for Fedora , a community-supported Linux distribution. Referred to as the next generation YUM package manager, DNF was introduced in Fedora 18 and has ever since been the default package manager for this popular distribution.

        • PHP 5.5 is dead

          After PHP 5.4, and as announced, PHP version 5.5.38 was the last official release of PHP 5.5

          Which means that since version 5.6.25 and version 7.0.10 have been released, some security vulnerabilities are not, and won’t be, fixed by the PHP project.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Paramount Wipes “Infringing” Ubuntu Torrent From Google

            It’s no secret that copyright holders are trying to take down as much pirated content as they can, but targeting open source software is not something we see every day. Paramount Pictures recently sent a DMCA takedown to Google, listing a copy of the popular operating system Ubuntu. An honest mistake, perhaps, but a worrying one.

          • The first international UbuCon in Europe

            UbuCon Europe 2016 is the first conference dedicated to the European Ubuntu community. Look forward to two days full of talks, workshops, demos, exhibitions and (hopefully) great food! Social events in the evenings will give you the opportunity to meet fellow community members and visit some of Essen’s most beautiful sights!

          • [Older] Canonical certifies big software solutions at Facebook’s new lab

            Today at the OCP Technology Day, Facebook announced the grand opening of its new hardware lab space in Menlo Park to validate and certify software solutions and Canonical was one of the first to test its solutions are OCP compliant.

            At the new lab, enterprise and carrier-grade Big Software solutions were deployed including OpenStack Mitaka and Ubuntu Storage on OCP Leopard, Honey Badger, and Knox. These solutions were deployed to bare metal in time measured in minutes and hours instead of days or weeks due to the use of two key technologies: Juju and MAAS, both of which are tested and validated at Facebook’s new facilities.

          • Compiling Ardour on Ubuntu Linux from Source Code

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Design Team working on Spices website

              About a week ago, I decided to create a new team, dedicated to artwork, style and design for Linux Mint. The main goal of this team is to restyle our various websites, but also long term to work in coordination with the development team to make various aspects of our distribution more pleasing to the eye.

              Artists who recently helped with web design were invited to join, and the team now has 8 members.

              I’d like to thank Carlos Fernandez already for his involvement and Eran Gilo for the beautiful work he’s already produced.

            • Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon Edition : See What’s New

              Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon Edition is the latest version of Linux Mint 18 featuring the latest Cinnamon 3.0 as default desktop environment.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Sun gets it wrong, we’re here to help. [Ed: for context]

    Recently the Sun published an article by Ryan Sabey (@ryansabey), “UNION HACK Jeremy Corbyn’s digital democracy manifesto ‘would let foreign spooks rob UK’”. The post included several criticisms from government officials and pundits challenging the quality and security of open source software, cautioning readers, “sensitive data could be at risk under Labour leader’s plans.”

    Mr. Corbyn’s, “Digital Democracy Manifesto” calls for public bodies in the U.K. to, “encourage publicly funded software and hardware to be released under an Open Source license,” and “financially reward staff technicians who significantly contribute to Open Source projects”.

    Neil Doyle, who the Sun simply identified as an expert, warned, “cyber-criminals and foreign intelligence agencies would have a field day” under such an approach while, “private firms or individuals would be reluctant to get involved in public sector projects.”

    Adding further criticism was British MP Nigel Adams who said Mr. Corbyn’s initiative, “ignores the issue of Internet abuse” adding, “his shambolic policies could leave us open to malicious attack and put our national security at risk.”

  • Open source at the European Broadcasting Union/Eurovision

    Exactly ten years ago, motion graphics artist Jonas Hummelstrand posted a message on a web forum. It read: “In 15 minutes the Swedish election TV-show airs, and we’ll be outputting a lot of real-time graphics directly from Flash!” Jonas was excited. He stood at the cradle of something new, but he probably had no clue how big his baby would turn out to be.

    Jonas is the main person behind CasparCG, the open source professional graphics and video playout software developed by Swedish public broadcaster SVT. This year, a decade after its conception, CasparCG was used for the Eurovision Song Contest graphics, including all of the animated votes counting.

  • Yahoo! Open Sources Pulsar, a Pub/Sub Messaging Platform

    According to Yahoo!, Pulsar is a low latency Pub/Sub messaging system that can be scaled horizontally across multiple hosts and datacenters. Yahoo! has been using Pulsar in production for Mail, Finance, Gemini Ads, Sherpa, and Sports since Q2/2015. By making it open source, they hope it will be widely used by being integrated with other open source products. Yahoo! has deployed Pulsar in over ten datacenters, reaching over 100B msgs/day spread over 1.4 million topics with an average publish latency of less than 5ms. Pulsar comes with guaranteed delivery of messages and two persisted copies, automatic cursor management for message readers and cross-datacenter replication.

  • Penn researchers develop open-source software to infer evolutionary track of tumor metastasis

    Individual cells within a tumor are not all the same. This may sound like a modern medical truism, but it wasn’t very long ago that oncologists assumed that taking a single biopsy from a patient’s tumor would be an accurate reflection of the physiological and genetic make-up of the entire mass.

    Researchers have come to realize that cancer is a disease driven by the same “survival of the fitter” forces that Darwin proposed drove the evolution of life on Earth. In the case of tumors, however, individual cells are constantly evolving as a tumor’s stage advances. Mobile cancer cells causing metastasis are a deadly outcome of this process.

  • Open365 mail – You’ve got … something?

    Ladies, gentlemen, everyone else. Not that long ago, I reviewed Open365, a free, open-source, cloud-based productivity suite based on LibreOffice, with some nice spicy additions. I liked it. It’s a pretty decent product, with a lot of potential. But there’s still a lot more work to be done.

    The one aspect of the five-app combo you get in Open365 that I missed in the earlier article is the mail functionality. You have the three power programs – LibreOffice Writer, Calc and Impress – plus GIMP, with the mail client as the fifth element. Get the joke? Oh my. Well, it is time to right all past wrongs and give the final piece of the cloud suite its due review. Rhyme. Word.

  • Julia Reda, MEP: “Proprietary Software threatens Democracy”

    Julia Reda ended the QtCon, a conference for the Free Software community, with a closing keynote on, among other things, Free Software in the European Public Sector.

    Ms Reda, a member of the EU Parliament for the Pirate Party, explained how proprietary software, software that forbids users from studying and modifying it, has often left regulators in the dark, becoming a liability for and often a threat to the well-being and health of citizens.

    An example of this, she said, is the recent Dieselgate scandal, in which auto-mobile manufacturers installed software that cheated instruments that measured fumes in test environments, only to spew illegal amounts of toxic exhaust into the atmosphere the moment they went on the road.

    Ms Reda also explained how medical devices running proprietary software posed a health hazard for patients. She gave the example of a woman with a pacemaker who collapsed while climbing some stairs due to a bug in her device. Doctors and technicians had no way of diagnosing and correcting the problem as they did not have access to the code.

    Also worrying is the threat software with restrictive licenses pose to democracy itself. The trend of substituting traditional voting ballots with voting machines is especially worrying, because, as these machines are not considered a threat to national security, their software also goes unaudited and is, in fact, unauditable in most cases.

  • Events

    • LibreOffice Conference 2016

      It was the third big open source desktop conference we’ve managed to get to Brno (after GUADEC 2013 and Akademy 2014). 3 days of talks, 150 attendees from all over the world, 4 social events.

      The conference went pretty well from the organizational point of view. Feedback has been very positive so far. People liked the city, the venue (FIT BUT campus is really, really nice), the parties, and catering during the conference. TDF board even lifted Red Hat to the highest sponsorship level for the amount of work we did for the conference. The only major bummer we had was no online streaming. It’s quite easy to set it up with the university’s built-in video recording system, but the university didn’t allow it in the end. Nevertheless, we treated online streaming as nice-to-have. Video recordings are important to us and we’ll do our best to get them online as soon as possible.

    • Git microconference accepted into LPC 2016
    • Git Microconference Accepted into 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference

      The Linux kernel community has been using Git for more than a decade, but it is still under active development, with more than 2,000 non-merge git commits from almost 200 contributor over the past year. Rather than review this extensive history, this Micro Git Together instead focuses on what the next few years might bring. In addtion, Junio will present on the state of the Git Union, Josh Triplett will present on the git-series project, and Steve Rostedt will present “A Maze Of Git Scripts All Alike”, in which Steve puts forward the radical notion that common function in various maintainers’ scripts could be pulled into git itself. This should help lead into a festive discussion about the future of git.

    • Rumors of OpenOffice Demise Exaggerated

      LibreOffice spun out from OpenOffice in the aftermath of the Oracle/Sun acquisition. It was one of many projects including Hudson/Jenkins and MySQL/MariaDB that got forked. To the best my knowledge while all those forks have strong user bases and have become the default tools in their respective domains – the original projects persist.

    • Token-based authorship information from Git

      At LinuxCon North America 2016, Daniel German presented some research that he and others have done to extract more fine-grained authorship information from Git. Instead of the traditional line-based attribution for changes, they took things to the next level by looking at individual tokens in the source code and attributing changes to individuals. This kind of analysis may be helpful in establishing code provenance for copyright and other purposes.

      German, who is from the University of Victoria, worked on the project with Kate Stewart of the Linux Foundation and Bram Adams of Polytechnique Montréal. It was a “combination of research plus hacking”, he said, and the results were fascinating.

  • BSD

    • TrueOS vs. DragonFlyBSD vs. GhostBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. PacBSD Benchmarks

      For your viewing pleasure this weekend are benchmarks of TrueOS 20160831 (the rolling-release distribution formerly known as PC-BSD), DragonFlyBSD 4.6, GhostBSD 10.3, FreeBSD 11.0-RC2, and PacBSD 20160809 (formerly known as Arch BSD) all benchmarked from the same system! Plus for reference to the Linux numbers are Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS and Clear Linux 10040 being compared to these BSDs on the same tests and hardware.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • GPL Time-bomb an interesting approach to #FOSS licensing

      In short I have put a time limit of 3 years to make money out of the product and if I am unable it is turned over to the world to use as they see fit. Even better, assuming searchcode server becomes a successful product I will be forced to continually improve it and upgrade if I want to keep a for sale version without there being an equivalent FOSS version around (which in theory could be maintained by the community). In short everyone wins from this arrangement, and I am not forced to rely on a support model to pay the bills which frankly only works when you have a large sales team.

      Here’s hoping this sort of licencing catches on as there are so many products out there that could benefit from it. If they take off the creators have an incentive to maintain and not milk their creation and those that become abandoned even up available for public use which I feel is a really fair way of licencing software.

    • The kernel community confronts GPL enforcement

      Some of the most important discussions associated with the annual Kernel Summit do not happen at the event itself; instead, they unfold prior to the summit on the planning mailing list. There is value in learning what developers feel needs to be talked about and, often, important issues can be resolved before the summit itself takes place. That list has just hosted (indeed, is still hosting as of this writing) a voluminous discussion on license enforcement that was described by some participants as being “pointless” or worse. But that discussion has served a valuable purpose: it has brought to the light a debate that has long festered under the surface, and it has clarified where some of the real disagreements lie.

      It all started when Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), proposed a session on “GPL defense issues.” Interest in these issues is growing, she said, and it would be a good time to get the kernel community together for the purposes of information sharing and determining what community consensus exists, if any, on enforcement issues. It quickly became clear that some real differences of opinion exist though, in truth, the differences of opinion within the community may not be as large as they seem. Rather than attempt to cover the entire thread, this article will try to extract some of the most significant points from it.

  • Programming/Development

    • Moving to Pelican and GitHub pages

      I have decided to move to using GitHub pages and Pelican to create my person ‘hub’ on the Internet. I am still in the debate about moving some content over to the new hub, but have not made a decision yet.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Marylanders face hefty rate increases for Obamacare

      The cost of health insurance plans offered under the Affordable Care Act will jump 20 percent or more next year under rates to be announced Friday by Maryland regulators.

      The CEO of Maryland’s largest insurer defended the hefty rate increases and said the federal law that expanded health insurance to most Americans needs to be changed if it is to remain sustainable.

      “We regret that such rate increases are needed,” said Chet Burrell of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. “It is the last thing on earth we want. But no company can sustain the kinds of losses we have seen.”

    • A fourth Zika-positive mosquito pool identified in Miami Beach

      Despite local backlash against the use of a controversial insecticide, the first round of aerial spraying to curb the spread of Zika virus in South Beach took place early Friday. It lasted about 30 minutes.

      A plane contracted by Miami-Dade County flew in the darkness just after 5 a.m. for the first of four spraying cycles that officials hope will quickly bring down the number of mosquitoes carrying Zika virus in Miami Beach.

      The drone of the plane could be heard and lights could be spotted from Ocean Drive as it passed over the water three times. Few people were out. Some joggers hurried by in Lummus Park, where a few men slept along the rock wall. Restaurant staff were cleaning sidewalk tables.

    • NHS in England at ‘tipping point’ – hospital bosses

      NHS leaders in England say they have reached a “tipping point” and cannot maintain standards for patients on the funding they are getting.

      Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said many hospital bosses wanted to “sound a warning bell” to political leaders.

      It comes after latest figures showed record levels of delayed hospital discharges and patient waiting times.

      The government has said it is giving NHS England the £10bn it asked for.

      NHS Providers, the organisation that represents hospitals in England, says unless urgent funding is provided it will have to cut staff, bring in charges or introduce “draconian rationing” of treatment.

      It highlights that 80% of England’s acute hospitals are in financial deficit, compared with 5% three years ago – while missed A&E waiting time targets have risen from 10% to 90%.

    • Arizona Drug Firm Insys Makes Synthetic Pot Compound, Spends Big to Defeat Legal Pot

      A Chandler-based drug firm under investigation for its aggressive sales of a lethal painkiller claims that the large donation it made to a group that opposes marijuana legalization was an attempt to protect the public’s safety.

    • Seriously ‘Sinister’ Big Pharma: Opioid Maker Bankrolls Opposition to Pro-Pot Referendum

      It has been revealed that the maker of a powerful, addictive opioid drug is bankrolling the opposition to the effort to legalize and regulate marijuana for recreational use in Arizona.

      The Phoenix New Times reported Thursday that Insys Therapeutics, the company behind the fentanyl-based medication Subsys, made a $500,000 donation to the group Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy (ARDP), which is leading the campaign against Proposition 205.

      On the ballot in November, Prop. 205 would allow people 21 years of age or older to possess up to one ounce of marijuana and grow up to six plants in their homes as well as establish a department to regulate the drug’s cultivation and sale.

      It appears that Insys is trying to “eliminate the competition,” according to the New Times, which noted that the company “expects to soon launch a pharmaceutical version of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.”

      What’s more, Insys is currently facing numerous state investigations for deceptively marketing and selling Subsys, which is intended to treat cancer pain, and coercing doctors to promote it to patients for off-label uses. Fentanyl is estimated to be 80 times as potent as morphine and hundreds of times more potent than heroin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and may be fatal to users.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Sen. Bob Graham: Before 9/11, Bush and Cheney Made Sure Plot and Saudi Gov. Role Would Not be Exposed

      Senator Bob Graham, former co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells Paul Jay that the Bush administration created a culture of “not wanting to know” about potential terrorist attacks among American intelligence agencies, who have rewritten history with “aggressive deception” since 9/11.

    • House unanimously passes bill to allow 9/11 lawsuits against Saudi Arabia

      The House on Friday passed legislation allowing the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia in U.S. courts, days before the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

      The legislation passed unanimously by voice vote, to thunderous applause.

      The bill, which passed the Senate unanimously in May, now heads to President Obama’s desk, where its future is uncertain.

      The White House has hinted strongly it will veto the measure. Obama has lobbied fiercely against it, arguing it could both strain relations with Saudi Arabia and lead to retaliatory legislation overseas against U.S. citizens.

      But lingering suspicion over Saudi Arabia’s role in the 9/11 attacks and pressure from victims’ families made the bill a popular bipartisan offering on Capitol Hill.

      The bill’s popularity puts the president in a delicate position. Supporters are hoping Obama will be leery of expending political capital he desperately needs during the lame-duck session.

      The president is hoping lawmakers will pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a criminal justice reform measure and confirm Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

      If Obama does choose to veto the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, supporters believe that they have the two-thirds majority needed to override him — a first during his presidency.

    • Despite Obama’s Veto Threat, US House Votes to Allow 9/11 Victims to Sue Saudi Arabia
    • Netanyahu’s Land-Grab Strategy

      Behind the smokescreen of the broader Mideast chaos, Israel pursues a strategy of gobbling up Palestinian lands to establish de facto control of the West Bank while confining indigenous Arabs to isolated cantons, explains Alon Ben-Meir.

      [...]

      Netanyahu is not deterred by the criticism and condemnation from the international community. He takes the position that building new housing units is largely in settlements that will eventually be part of a final status deal in exchange for land swaps, as if he has the right to unilaterally decide which settlements will be incorporated to Israel proper without an agreement with the Palestinians.

    • Palestinian Hunting Season

      May 2017 will mark fifty years of Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank characterized by institutionalized inequality and injustice toward Palestinians. At the bidding of the government, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) routinely and violently confronts Palestinians, but also Israeli and international dissidents who dare challenge the continued expansion and entrenchment of the illegal settlements in the West Bank and the blockade of the Gaza strip. Protesters run the risk of getting cursed, spat on, detained, beaten up, stoned, stabbed, shot, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured or any combination thereof. Moreover, in an unfortunate yet predictable move, the Israeli government has recently declared war on the nonviolent boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

      Like clockwork, every few years a cycle of violence disproportionately bathes Palestinian society in blood and tears and serves to further fortify the occupation (see Israeli Occupation for Dummies). According to renowned scholar Ilan Pappe, Israeli society needs a regular dose of war not only as a means to justify its excessive military budget and lucrative arms industry, but as a tool to reaffirm itself as a cohesive settler-colonialist entity faced with an existential threat.

    • How Everything Became War

      The laser-guided Hellfire missile is highly accurate. When one is fired from a Predator drone at an alleged enemy of the United States, whether in the deserts of Yemen, the mountains of Pakistan or elsewhere, it rarely misses. The remarkable innovation of pairing an unmanned aerial vehicle with a deadly precise missile emerged soon after Sept. 11, 2001. The United States has reportedly used this tool extensively against potentially thousands of terrorist targets around the world in the subsequent 15 years.

      Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, former adviser at the Defense Department and influential voice in U.S. policy circles, is one of the many critics of America’s “direct action” program using these drones. In her new book, “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything,” she argues that drone strikes rely on problematic legal justifications and that their effectiveness and legitimacy cannot be independently evaluated because of the program’s secrecy. These strikes, along with government opacity about them, she believes, will ultimately undermine the international rule of law, further weaken America’s moral standing and set the stage for others to follow our law-bending lead.

      For Brooks, drone strikes are but one illustration of the challenges we face in this new era of conflict. She contends that the distinction between war and peace has blurred and that the consequences for international law are enormous and underappreciated. Her core argument is that international law, as well as U.S. government organizations, have not kept pace with this smudging of the line. Her book is a cri de coeur that unless we build legal foundations that stand some chance of containing war and legitimating our actions, and restructure our agencies to accommodate new realities, we risk inviting further chaos, eroding the values upon which America was built and failing future generations. While ambitious and astute, the book is also diffuse and in some important ways misses its targets.

    • Nearly 500 more US Troops sent to Iraq for Mosul Attack in advance of Election Day

      Stars and Stripes is reporting that the number of US troops in Iraq has risen from 4,000 to 4,460 in preparation for the Iraqi government campaign against Mosul.

      The WSJ reported that the government of Iraqi prime minister Haydar al-Abadi wants to begin the campaign in October.

    • Demonize and Distract: Sanitizing Syria for the Masses

      But we know that the entire Syrian fiasco was engineered by the CIA with cash, guns, and training, and unceasing support from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at our behest. It is a long-standing neoconservative plan to break the so-called Shia Crescent that runs from Lebanon through Syria to Iran. These are, of course, the independent-minded states that have thus far refused to accept either Israeli colonization of Palestinian land or permit Western-backed energy projects to take shape on their territory. Hence the need to dismember them into tiny, feckless statelets that pose no challenge to either Tel Aviv or Washington.

      But this is hidden behind the fog of war and a domestic haze of media nuance. This entire conflict could reasonably be said to hinge on a single phrase: “moderate rebels.” The words “moderate” and “rebel” make all the difference in the telling of this fable. The truth is that we have hijacked Arab Spring discontent and festooned it with brigades of terrorist mercenaries procured from around the Middle East and Asia, all with the singular mandate to take down the Assad government. Tens of thousands of jihadists have been injected by NATO into a multi-confessional state governed by an elected leader who won a larger percentage of the electorate than our liberal messiah Barack Obama.

    • The Death of One of Washington’s Favorite Tyrants

      The death of long-time Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has brought rare U.S. media attention to the Central Asian country of 30 million. Uzbekistan is ranked among the half dozen worst countries in the world for human-rights abuses. What U.S. government officials and our media mostly ignore, however, is that American taxpayers subsidized that regime and its brutal security apparatus for most of Karimov’s thirty-five years in power.

      Torture has been endemic in Uzbekistan, where Karimov banned all opposition groups, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human-rights workers and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually took as many as two million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest. Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literallyboiled alive.

      Karimov became leader of the Uzbek Communist Party in 1989 while the country was still part of the Soviet Union. He backed the unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hardliners against reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 and personally opposed Uzbek independence. But finding himself president of a sovereign state when the Soviet Union suddenly dissolved, he quickly modified his position, changing his first name to “Islam” and morphing into an Uzbek nationalist.

    • North Korea’s Understandable Fears

      Every year, America pays its vassal-state South Korea huge sums of U.S. taxpayer money to mount 300,000-man-strong military “games” that threaten North Korea. North Koreans view images that never seem to make it to U.S. kitchen tables: hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S. armaments swarming in from the sea, hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops – their turrets and rifles pointed north – and nuclear-capable U.S. warplanes screaming overhead.

      But when a young dictator straight out of central casting responds to U.S. threats with an underground test on North Korea’s founding day, it’s the number-one story on the front page of the New York Times.

    • Donald Trump’s View of Military Sexual Assault Is Chauvinistic — and Not Uncommon

      Donald Trump’s latest attempt to deflect criticism about a 2013 tweet in which he blamed the prevalence of sexual assault in the military on the presence of women has been to criticize the military court system for letting offenders go unprosecuted.

      But a big reason the military court system is so ineffective at punishing sexual assault offenders is precisely because senior members of the chain of command are involved — and too many share Trump’s view that rape and sexual assault are inevitable given the circumstances.

    • Fifteen Years After 9/11, Neverending War

      In the days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when Congress voted to authorize military force against the people who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the hijackings, few Americans could have imagined the resulting manhunt would span from West Africa all the way to the Philippines, and would outlast two two-term presidents.

      Today, U.S. military engagement in the Middle East looks increasingly permanent. Despite the White House having formally ended the wars Iraq and Afghanistan, thousands of U.S. troops and contractors remain in both countries. The U.S. is dropping bombs on Iraq and Syria faster than it can make them, and according to the Pentagon, its bombing campaign in Libya has “no end point at this particular moment.” The U.S. is also helping Saudi Arabia wage war in Yemen, in addition to conducting occasional airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia.

      Fifteen years after the September 11 attacks, it looks like the War on Terror is still in its opening act.

    • The Truth About 9/11

      Internationally, the greatest threat to America’s security is, of course, nuclear armed Russia which has enough intercontinental and sea-launched missiles to wipe the United States off the map. Accordingly, Washington’s most important foreign and national security priority is maintaining calm, well-mannered relations with Russia and its leadership.

      Instead, we have Hillary Clinton and her frantic war party neocons trying to provoke Russia at every turn and giving Moscow the impression that she will start a war with Russia. It was precisely such war talk and sabre rattling that in 1983 during the Able Archer crisis brought the US and USSR to within minutes of a full-scale nuclear war.

      For all Trump’s bluster and Islamophobia, he is absolutely right about seeking good relations with Moscow. The schoolyard demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin by the Clinton camp and its tame US media is childish, shameful and unworthy of a great power.

    • A 9/11 Retrospective: Washington’s 15-Year Air War

      On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda launched its four-plane air force against the United States. On board were its precision weapons: 19 suicidal hijackers. One of those planes, thanks to the resistance of its passengers, crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The other three hit their targets — the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — with the kind of “precision” we now associate with the laser-guided weaponry of the U.S. Air Force.

      From its opening salvo, in other words, this conflict has been an air war. With its 75% success rate, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mission was a historic triumph, accurately striking three out of what assumedly were its four chosen targets. (Though no one knows just where that plane in Pennsylvania was heading, undoubtedly it was either the Capitol or the White House to complete the taking out of the icons of American financial, military, and political power.) In the process, almost 3,000 people who had no idea they were in the bombsights of an obscure movement on the other side of the planet were slaughtered.

      It was a barbaric, if daring, plan and an atrocity of the first order. Almost 15 years later, such suicidal acts with similar “precision” weaponry (though without the air power component) continue to be unleashed across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and sometimes elsewhere, taking a terrible toll — from a soccer game in Iraq to a Kurdish wedding party in southeastern Turkey (where the “weapon” may have been a boy).

      The effect of the September 11th attacks was stunning. Though the phrase would have no resonance or meaning (other than in military circles) until the U.S. invasion of Iraq began a year and a half later, 9/11 qualifies as perhaps the most successful example of “shock and awe” imaginable. The attack was promptly encapsulated in screaming headlines as the “Pearl Harbor of the Twenty-First Century” or a “New Day of Infamy,” and the images of those towers crumbling in New York at what was almost instantly called “Ground Zero” (as if the city had experienced a nuclear strike) were replayed again and again to a stunned world. It was an experience that no one who lived through it was likely to forget.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks Source Chelsea Manning Starts Hunger Strike

      Chelsea Manning, the U.S. army private convicted in 2013 for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, has announced she has started a hunger strike to protest what she calls “constant and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.”

    • How should history measure the Obama administration’s record on transparency?

      Given the fundamental role that whistleblowers play in highlighting fraud, waste and abuse, an administration’s record upon the incidence, manner and prosecution of whistleblowers (or policies that protect or expose them) is a critical part of its open government record. The way a White House takes legal or administrative action regarding leaks that demonstrate unconstitutional behavior in the executive branch matters.

      On the one hand, the Obama administration added to congressional legislation with more protections for whistleblowers through an executive order, save for an exemption for those working in or contracting for the intelligence agencies. On the other, there have been a record number of cases filed against whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. The double standard for “senior administration officials” quoted in stories favorable to the White House and whistleblowers who go to the press with embarrassing facts is one that no future administration should espouse.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • 10 Percent of the World’s Wilderness Has Been Lost Since 1990s

      Wilderness areas around the world have experienced catastrophic declines over the last two decades, with one-tenth of global wilderness lost since the 1990s, according to a new study.

      Since 1993, researchers found that a cumulative wilderness area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon has been stripped and destroyed.

      The shrinking wilderness is due, in part, to human activity such as mining, logging, agriculture, and oil and gas exploration. The researchers said theirfindings underscore the need for international policies to recognize the value of wilderness and to protect wilderness areas from the threats they face. [In Images: One-of-a-Kind Places On Earth]

      “Globally important wilderness areas — despite being strongholds for endangered biodiversity, for buffering and regulating local climates, and for supporting many of the world’s most politically and economically marginalized communities — are completely ignored in environmental policy,” study lead author James Watson, an associate professor in the School of Geography Planning and Environmental Management at the University of Queensland, in Australia, said in a statement.

    • Erased By False Victory: Obama Hasn’t Stopped DAPL

      All Native struggles in the United States are a struggle against erasure. The poisoning of our land, the theft of our children, the state violence committed against us — we are forced to not only live in opposition to these ills, but also to live in opposition to the fact that they are often erased from public view and public discourse, outside of Indian Country. The truth of our history and our struggle does not match the myth of American exceptionalism, and thus, we are frequently boxed out of the narrative.

      The struggle at Standing Rock, North Dakota, has been no exception, with Water Protectors fighting tooth and nail for visibility, ever since the Sacred Stone prayer encampment began on April 1.

      For months, major news outlets have ignored what’s become the largest convergence of Native peoples in more than a century. But with growing social media amplification and independent news coverage, the corporate media had finally begun to take notice. National attention was paid. Solidarity protests were announced in cities around the country. The National Guard was activated in North Dakota.

    • Texas Tribes Mobilize in Solidarity With Sioux Against Dakota Access Pipeline

      As members of more than 100 tribal nations continue their historic standoff against the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, Texas tribes protested in solidarity at the headquarters of the Dallas-based company behind the project — Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) — and spotlighted the company’s conflicts of interest and corrupt practices in their own state.

      Just before poorly trained private security officers sicced dogs on Indigenous water defenders protecting sacred burial grounds in North Dakota over the weekend, Indigenous activists with the American Indian Movement of Central Texas (AIMCTX) gathered more than 1,000 miles away at the corporate headquarters of ETP in Dallas on September 2 to decry CEO Kelcy Warren’s “Black Snake” pipeline projects and pray in rhythm to Native drumsongs.

    • Fasten your seat belt – turbulence is on the rise

      United Airlines Flight 880 was carrying more than 200 passengers from Houston, Texas, to London’s Heathrow airport two weeks ago when it was battered by turbulence that threw people on to the cabin ceiling. Twenty-three people were injured. “We were flying along as smooth as can be and then were just slapped massively from the top as if someone had torpedoed us,” one passenger told journalists.

      The aircraft, a Boeing 767-300, made an emergency landing at Shannon airport and the injured were taken to University Hospital, Limerick. No one was seriously hurt but all went through a terrifying experience and one, say experts, which will increasingly affect flights.

  • Finance

    • British Trade Secretary Calls Country ‘Too Lazy and Fat’

      Britain’s international trade secretary called the country “too lazy and fat” and described business leaders as more interested in playing golf on a Friday than seeking new trade opportunities.

      “This country is not the free trading nation that it once was. We have become too lazy and too fat on our successes in previous generations,” Liam Fox said at an event on Thursday for the right-wing group Conservative Way Forward, BBC News reported.

    • Panama Papers: Denmark to pay $1.3M-plus for leaked data to probe tax evasion

      Tax officials in Denmark are reportedly paying an unknown source around £1 million (~$1.3M) for secret financial information on hundreds of Danish nationals.

      Their names appear in the Panama Papers, leaked earlier this year, which consist of 11.5 million files from the database of Mossack Fonseca—the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm.

      This is the first time, according to Danish newspaper Politiken, that Denmark has agreed to buy information on possible tax evaders in this way. Denmark also seems to be the first country to admit that it’s acquiring data from a source with access to the leaked Mossack Fonseca documents. [Update: apparently Iceland made an earlier deal—see comment below.]

    • Stop the Fed Before it Kills Again

      Why has the Fed created incentives for US corporations to loot their companies and drive them deeper into debt?

      Despite four consecutive quarters of negative earnings, weak demand and anemic sales, US corporations continue to load up on debt, buy back their own shares and hand out cash to their shareholders that greatly exceeds the amount of profits they are currently taking in. According to the Wall Street Journal: “SandP 500 companies through the first two quarters of the year collectively returned 112% of their earnings through buybacks and dividends.”

      You read that right, US corporations are presently giving back more than they are taking in, which is the moral equivalent of devouring one’s offspring.

    • Did Obama Administration’s Policies Contribute to Chicago’s Deadly Violence?

      For many years, parents and education activists in Chicago have warned that the deliberate destruction of neighborhood public schools was causing a rise in violence. The city, first under Arne Duncan, now under Rahm Emanuel, ignored the critics, and made a virtue of closing public schools, opening charter schools, and sending kids long distances to new schools. Mayor Emanuel recognized that the critics’ complaints had some validity. He didn’t stop the school closings–in fact, he closed 50 public schools in a single day, an unprecedented action in American history. But to assuage the critics, he established “safe passages,” supposedly to assure students’ safety as they adapted to new and longer routes to their new schools. In 2013, a student was raped while walking to school on a “safe passage” route.

    • Palestinian Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley Ask PayPal to Level the Playing Field

      The letter to Dan Schulman, CEO of PayPal, states, “We are writing to urge you to extend PayPal’s services to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza thereby removing a major limitation on the Palestinian technology sector, one of the only bright spots in the overall economy. More importantly, extending PayPal services would resolve the current discriminatory situation whereby PayPal’s payment portal can be accessed freely by Israeli settlers living illegally (per international humanitarian law) in the West Bank while it remains unavailable to the occupied Palestinian population.”

    • Rio’s Olympic wounds are still raw

      Project 100 is a special report on Olympic-related evictions in Rio de Janeiro, run by Brazil’s Agencia Publica – an independent, woman-led and non-profit investigative journalism agency committed to the facilitation of democratic debate and the promotion of human rights. The project investigates one of the untold stories of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro: what has happened to the lives of those affected by the city’s large-scale evictions programme?

      Between 2009 and 2015, the Rio de Janeiro City Hall reported that 22,059 families – 77,206 individuals – had been subject to eviction. Authorities claim only one community removal, the highly publicised Vila Autódromo, was a consequence of Olympics development and a general lack of official data on Olympics-related removals provides a veil of secrecy as to the true social impact of the event.

    • Priorities

      I am being laid off by my employer, IBM. Jobs in the Netherlands move to lower-wage countries like Poland and India, while IBM changes course towards a “cognitive” future in which there is less interest in the traditionally skilled technical IT jobs.

      Unparalleled (because forced) job cuts in the Netherlands are the result of that change of focus. Almost 10% of the IBMNL work force is sent away in a “re-balancing” operation and I am out of a job per November 1st.

      On an intellectual level I understand the reasons for this. It is nothing personal and it also has nothing to do with the appreciation of my performance. I have scored among the top 5% of IBM Netherlands employees during my performance reviews of the last couple of years, which is quite decent for someone aged 55 in a technical role. Nevertheless, I am affected personally and my close circle is affected too.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • North Dakota issues arrest warrant for Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman

      Amy Goodman, host and executive producer for Democracy Now, has been criminally charged for documenting attacks on indigenous protesters.

      Last week, a Democracy Now film crew captured footage of private security contractors hired by the oil companies behind the Dakota Access Pipeline attacking protesters with dogs and pepper spray. Video of the attacks went viral on social media, with Democracy Now’s story about the attacks garnering over 131,000 shares on Facebook as of this writing. WDAZ reported that Goodman, along with Cody Charles Hall, a media spokesman for the Red Warrior Camp, have both been charged with criminal trespassing.

    • Breaking: Arrest Warrant Issued for Amy Goodman in North Dakota After Covering Pipeline Protest [iophk: "DN is closer to what NPR used to be than what NPR is now. These days NPR just toes the line in all areas, but especially in regards to tech policy coverage."]

      An arrest warrant has been issued in North Dakota for Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman. Goodman was charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor offense. A team from Democracy Now! was in North Dakota last week to cover the Native American-led protests against the Dakota Access pipeline.

      On Sept. 3, Democracy Now! filmed security guards working for the Dakota Access pipeline company using dogs and pepper spray to attack protesters. Democracy Now!’s report went viral online and was rebroadcast on many outlets, including CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and Huffington Post.

      “This is an unacceptable violation of freedom of the press,” said Amy Goodman in a statement. “I was doing my job by covering pipeline guards unleashing dogs and pepper spray on Native American protesters.”

    • Donald Trump Is Us

      We cannot look at the sun for long. When reality gets too painful and unbearably bright, we avert our eyes. But let’s hear it for the military, the same military that counseled caution before our mad, destabilizing plunge into Iraq and Afghanistan arranged by George W. Bush’s coterie of erstwhile draft-dodgers.

      Military analysts are talking climate change as a prime “national security” issue. Small wonder; a lot of their island and coastal naval bases are on the brink of inundation. Also, the military appreciate “the chain of causation” from climate change disasters to the destabilization of nation states and the rise of new forms of terrorism.

      The DOD’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review called climate change an “accelerant of instability” and a “threat multiplier.” The National Academy of Sciences in 2015 noted that climate change fueled the beginning of Syria’s civil war. Longer-lasting and more severe droughts, combined with government refusal to deal with crop failures and livestock deaths. set the stage for the current chaos.

    • For Clinton v. Trump: Blame Corporate Media

      Labor Day has come and gone; the campaign season is now in high gear. Getting to this point was hard for anyone paying attention. It will soon be worse a hundred-fold.

      The collective intelligence of the American people is about to be insulted even more shamelessly than it has already been — as the sales campaigns for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump rev up, seemingly without budget constraints.

      Now would therefore be a good time to lay in a supply of anti-emetics, before the stores run out.

      Ahead lies a barrage of news, impossible to avoid, of an electoral contest that makes a mockery of American “democracy.” That, unfortunately, is the least of it. The more portentous problem is what it is all leading to – a Clinton presidency.

    • Trump vs. Clinton: Predictions Have Consequences

      That brings us to the last factor, which I shall call the factor of the “importance of voting” at all. There are many eligible voters who are skeptical that voting makes any real difference in what happens after the election. This group may be subdivided into those who feel it is of no importance at all and those who waver on this question. The waverers may be persuaded not to vote for their only mildly preferred candidate if they feel they know the outcome but not if they feel uncertain about the outcome.

    • Servicewomen Get Short Shrift in Commander-in-Chief Forum

      Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton sparred separately on military matters with back-to-back appearances on NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum on Wednesday. Trump stuck with his usual empty bombast, assuring a meek Matt Lauer that he would fix things up just fine – while offering no concrete plans or budgets. Clinton had more substance, stating she would not put ground troops in Iraq or Syria, and stressing the steadiness and temperament needed for the job.

      Lack of timely treatment of veterans in Veterans Affairs hospitals got a good deal of the attention from both candidates. But in all the discussion about PTSD and the need for mental health treatment, one group was all but ignored – female service members. They were barely mentioned, except when one questioner from the audience asked Donald Trump what he would do about sexual assault in the military.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • CENSORSHIP CAUSES BLINDNESS

      The one line I remember from high school history is “clear and present danger.” Established in the Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, this phrase outlines that speech creating a “clear and present danger” can be punished. So what speech constitutes a “clear and present danger” that someone’s First Amendment rights can be abridged?

      This past April, Lindsey Riback, the news editor at the Albany Student Press, wrote an informative article detailing the resources available to report sexual assault in her article, “Sexual Assault Reports up 200 Percent at UAlbany.” Although this headline may seem shocking, the content explained that the increase in resources on campus to report sexual assault contributed to the sharp increase in reports. This headline came into question as the Accepted Student Open House rolled around. A University at Albany tour guide instructed other guides to remove any newspapers from the Lecture Center that displayed this headline so that prospective students and their families wouldn’t see it.

      On Saturday, April 16, I attended this open house. At the time, I was a high school senior and had decided to major in English. I wanted to double major, but I was wrestling with which second major to pick. History? Linguistics? Journalism? These possible majors circulated in my mind; I couldn’t pick a definitive path. That is, until I heard Professor Rosemary Armao speak for the Journalism Department. The idea that I could talk to others and learn mounds of information—all through researching and reporting—appealed to me. Even more, the enthusiasm with which Professor Armao presented drew me to the right path: journalism.

    • YouTubers are accusing the site of rampant censorship

      YouTube is the third-largest website on Earth, a behemoth viewed by millions each day. It’s also “over” — or on the brink of it — according to a group of outraged creators who claim the company has begun censoring them.

      The controversy springs from confusion over YouTube’s long-standing policy of disabling ads on videos that could draw advertiser complaints. Those include videos that are violent, sexually suggestive, or that contain drug use or bad language.

      But whereas YouTube has historically hidden demonetization notifications in its video analytics dashboard — meaning that some creators never saw them — the company recently began sending notices by email and alerting them directly on video pages.

    • YouTube Video Creators Not Happy With “Demonetization” Of Some Content
    • New censorship restrictions on YouTube hit users in the pocket

      Kiwis who post videos online featuring “contentious issues” like sex, drugs and political speech could be hit in the pocket as YouTube clamps down on users profiting from them.

      User Dolan Dark, who only wanted to be known as “Jay”, has 191,000 subscribers but said he was unable to make money from two of his videos which were not deemed “advertiser friendly” under new regulations.

      Users who post videos to the site have the option to “monetise” their content whereby adverts are added to the start of the video.

    • Facebook censors iconic napalm photo: Are algorithms undermining news?

      A Norwegian newspaper editor publicly censured Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after his social media platform took down a famous wartime photograph, citing concerns about child pornography.

      Facebook’s decision to censor the famous photo of a naked child fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam war has prompted questions about Facebook’s policies and its use of algorithms to control the content posted online.

    • Facebook will follow in Murdoch’s footsteps

      Once Rupert Murdoch performed this role, now increasingly Zuckerberg and Google do. To think they were ever likely to be more benevolent than the corporations of old is to subscribe to magical thinking.

    • Censoring Our War Crimes

      Facebook has backed down amidst outraged charges of censorship after deleting the iconic photo of a naked burned Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. Demonstrating questionable journalistic standards now being increasingly challenged, the social network deleted the harrowing, Pulitzer Prize-winning image by AP photographer Nick Ut – which shows nine-year-old Kim Phuc running screaming from her village of Trang Bang after she was severely burned by napalm dropped by South Vietnamese planes on June 8, 1972 – in the name of “maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community.”

      Phuc survived. Despite years of ongoing pain and surgeries related to her burns, she now lives in Canada, runs a foundation dedicated to help other child victims of war, and sometimes speaks about the powerful impact of one of the most famous war photographs of all time taken by the Vietnamese, then-21-year-old Ut. The recent uproar came after Norwegian author Tom Egeland included it in a Facebook post about photos that changed the history of wars, and in this case perhaps helped end one. Facebook removed the picture, Egeland protested, Facebook banned him and then proceeded to remove the image several more times when it was defiantly re-posted by other high-profile Norwegians – including Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who charged, “If you edit past events or people, you change history, and you change reality.”

    • Vietnam photo censorship reignites debate over Facebook’s responsibilities

      Facebook’s decision to temporarily censor the iconic Vietnam War photo of Kim Phúc has set off alarm bells for journalism watchdogs and reignited the debate over the social media company’s editorial responsibilities.

    • Does Facebook need to act more like a news organization?

      Facebook’s decision Friday to reverse its ruling about an iconic photo from the Vietnam War that it initially said violated company policy is raising the issue about whether it is a social media platform or a news distributor.

      The reversal followed online uproar after Facebook deleted the famous photo of Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm attack from a Norwegian author’s Facebook page.

    • ‘Facebook needs an editor’: media experts urge change after photo dispute

      Tensions between Facebook and the news industry boiled over this week when the social media corporation censored a Pulitzer-winning Vietnam war photo, because it featured a naked child and violated site “community standards”.

      The dispute over the “napalm girl” image, which a Norwegian writer published in a post about historic warfare photography, ended Friday when Facebook reversed its decision, acknowledging the “global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time”.

      But the spat has exposed what journalists and ethicists say are fundamental flaws in the way Facebook controls and spreads news. Critics say the company’s decisions were driven by PR concerns and should serve as a wake-up call to free speech advocates about how powerful Facebook has become– and how ill-equipped the corporation is for its role, however unwilling, in journalism.

    • Facebook’s Censorship Problem Is What Happens When a Tech Company Controls the News

      In the space of a single day, Facebook has managed to: Draw condemnation from a Norwegian news organization for censoring a famous work of photojournalism from the Facebook News Feed.

    • Dear Mark. I am writing this to inform you that I shall not comply with your requirement to remove this picture.

      The demand that we remove the picture came in an e-mail from Facebook’s office in Hamburg this Wednesday morning. Less than 24 hours after the e-mail was sent, and before I had time to give my response, you intervened yourselves and deleted the article as well as the image from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

      To be honest, I have no illusions that you will read this letter. The reason why I will still make this attempt, is that I am upset, disappointed – well, in fact even afraid – of what you are about to do to a mainstay of our democratic society.

    • What Facebook’s Aftenposten Censorship Teaches Us About Facebook’s Role As Worldwide Editor In Chief
    • Facebook reverses ‘napalm girl’ photo censorship following media pressure
    • Correction: Norway-Facebook-Napalm Girl story
    • Facebook makes u-turn on decision to censor an iconic Vietnam War photo
    • Facebook Pulled Down This Iconic Image From The Vietnam War, Restored It After Social Uproar
    • Facebook’s big content problem

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • [Purism] We updated our FAQ — Here’s why it matters

      Recently, we have updated our Frequently Asked Questions. “Who cares!” you might say. Well, here’s why I think it may be more important than you think. For the longest time we had five FAQ’s. Five. As a small company with little staff, FAQ’s and documentation were initially not as big of a priority as they perhaps should have been. Things that needed to be addressed have often been put on the back burner as we had larger issues to address. But, in recent weeks, we have begun to try and make changes in our approach, changes in our communication with you.

      As we have begun this process, we are altering our previous method of outreach and communication to focus, quite simply, on these aspects: “more,” “better” and “engagement.” We have heard many of your calls for us to communicate more often and better. We consider important, especially for the free and open source community, to have engagement and a back and forth dialogue between you and us. From here on, this blog will be updated more often with all of us chipping in at times. Our FAQ’s have been updated to address many of the common questions that we get asked and it will continue to be updated as more questions come in to us. With our new communication team, we have also recently changed our approach on social media as well, aiming for more engaging conversations with you and moving away from the previous “privacy news fire hose” approach where we were sharing too many Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD) articles that overall impaired our credibility. All in all, we’d like to bring some fun back to our social media process and to talk WITH you instead of AT you.

    • Brexit won’t harm UK security, says US former spy chief

      Brexit will not make “one bit of difference” to Britain’s intelligence relationship with the rest of Europe and the US, according to a former senior official with the National Security Agency.

      William Binney, a technical director for the US intelligence agency turned whistleblower, said GCHQ will continue to share data and resources with organisations around the world following Britain’s retreat from the EU.

    • Zachary Quinto: Calling Snowden a ‘Treasonist is Absurd’
    • ‘Let him come home:’ Star Trek’s new Spock calls Espionage Act charges against Snowden ‘absurd’

      Hollywood heartthrob Zachary Quinto, who plays Star Trek’s new Spock and Edward Snowden in Oliver Stone’s new film, has spoken out in defense of the NSA whistleblower, who is now in exile in Russia, calling the Espionage Act charges against him “absurd.”

      The star was speaking at the premier of the latest film, Snowden, which tells the story of the young programmer’s interest in espionage work and eventual disillusionment with it, leading to one of the most significant revelations in recent history.

    • Star Trek’s new Mr Spock Zachary Quinto slams spying charges against whistleblower Edward Snowden as ‘absurd’

      Hollywood heartthrob Zachary Quinto has spoken out in defence of Edward Snowden, slamming the spying charges made against him as “absurd”.

      Quinto, who plays Star Trek ‘s new Spock, said the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower should be returned to the US and called for authorities to drop charges against him.

      Fugitive Snowden, who is seeking asylum in Russia granted by Vladimir Putin, is responsible for the biggest leak in modern US history.

      He quit his £130,000-a-year job at the NSA after claiming he could not stand by and watch the civil liberties of millions of people be eroded.

      Quinto, who stars in Oliver Stone’s new film Snowden, which tells the story of the young programmer’s early interest in espionage work, said at the Toronto premiere: “I do think he should be able to come back [to America].

    • Toronto Film Review: Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’

      Oliver Stone’s docudrama, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is the director’s most exciting — and relevant — movie in years.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Kazakhstan makes former deputy PM new prime minister

      Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev promoted a former deputy premier on Friday to succeed longtime ally prime minister Karim Massimov, who he has transferred to the role of security chief.

      Massimov, who had led the cabinet since 2014 was dismissed and made the Central Asian country’s internal security chief Thursday, on the back of a summer that saw a spike in homegrown radical violence.

      The appointment of Bykytzhan Sagintayev as premier temporarily ends speculation that Dariga Nazarbayeva -Nazarbayev’s 53-year-old daughter – might take up higher office.

    • Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA’s ‘failed coverup’ of torture report

      For six years, Daniel Jones was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee’s inquiry into CIA detentions and interrogations carried out in the post-9/11 Bush era. Jones and his team turned 6.3m pages of internal CIA documents into a scathing study which concluded that torture was ineffective and that the CIA had lied about it to two presidents, Congress and the US public.

      But before Jones’s investigation was released in December 2014, the CIA searched through Senate files on a shared, firewalled network that had been set up by the agency for Jones and his team to securely receive classified documents.

      The CIA accessed Jones’s work and even reconstructed his emails, sparking an unprecedented clash between the agency and its legislative overseers on Capitol Hill.

    • Follow Colin Kaepernick, Change the World

      Take Colin Kaepernick. By choosing not to stand for the national anthem, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback has stood up for justice. He has raised awareness of police brutality and oppression against African-Americans in the United States. He has exposed the anti-Muslim origins of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and forced us to address the uncomfortable: institutional racism. Kaepernick’s act of rebellion was a risk from the start. The cost to him has been a stream of criticism and public blowback. But his courage has sparked a national conversation on free speech and what it means to be an American in the 21st century.

    • Diversity Bloat Is All About Colleges Looking Good While Not Doing Much

      Yet, there are so many programs — and not just in college — where fellowships, for example, are offered based on skin color. That’s not fair and its also insulting to black students from middle-class environments (or better) and from intact families who do well in school, but may be lumped in by skin color as having gotten special boosts.

    • 7 Police Officers to Be Charged in Bay Area Sex Scandal

      A prosecutor in California said on Friday that criminal charges would be filed against seven current or former police officers in the San Francisco Bay Area, capping a monthslong investigation into allegations of officers having sex with a teenage prostitute.

      The allegations had roiled the Oakland Police Department, and five of those being charged were from that agency.

      The charges include obstruction of justice, engaging in an act of prostitution and engaging in a lewd act in a public place, Nancy E. O’Malley, the district attorney for Alameda County, Calif., said in a statement.

      A former deputy from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office and a former officer from the Livermore Police Department also face charges, the statement said.

      A prostitute, the 19-year-old daughter of a police dispatcher, claimed that she had had sex with multiple officers from agencies around the Bay Area. At least one of the relationships began while she was a minor, Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland has said. The prostitute said the police had routinely tipped her off to raids.

    • A Grammar Lesson of Experience

      It was so successful in turning out ersatz privately educated pupils that I have been mistaken for one more or less since. And there is no doubt at all that this helped me get in to the fast stream of the FCO – in an intake in which I was one of only two state school educated entrants in the fast stream. There were two graduate entry streams – administrative (fast stream) and executive (slow stream). In 1984 there were just two state school entrants in the fast stream, and no private school entrants in the slow stream.

      It is this plucking of hearty young yeomen and turning them into officers for which Theresa May nostalgically yearns. But I absolutely hated the school. I hated the discipline, I hated the militarism, I hated the narrow thought. I hated it so much I performed terribly – I got a B and two E’s at A Level and scraped into university on clearing. Yet once in University with much more personal freedom, I flourished and never in my entire University career came less than top in any exam I took, culminating in a first class degree. The grammar school system had almost destroyed my potential because of my reaction against its class divisiveness.

    • The Politics of Nonviolence

      These days, the question for me is: What are the politics of nonviolence? Nonviolence is a whole new way of life, but it is also a methodology of social change, a power at our disposal, a spiritual path, a way to relate to others, and a way of hope for the whole human race, despite the odds.

    • If You’re Not a Feminist – What the Hell is Wrong with You!!?

      I am a male human being.

      And you’d better believe I’m a feminist.

      I wear that label proudly.

      The other day a friend of mine heard one of my articles was published in Everyday Feminism. And he said, “Kind of a backhanded compliment. Isn’t it?”

      Hell no!

      What does that mean? Would someone suppose that a man being considered a feminist somehow made him less of a man?

      On the contrary. I think it makes him more of one. It makes him a decent freakin’ person.

    • Truthdigger of the Week: Former British Ambassador and Whistleblower Craig Murray

      This week, Murray was denied entry into the United States via the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. The program is intended to enable “most citizens or nationals of participating countries to travel to the United States for tourism or business for stays of 90 days or less without first obtaining a visa.” Murray is set to chair the presentation of this year’s Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence, which takes place Sept. 25, to CIA-torture whistleblower John Kiriakou.

    • Federal Regulation Saves Millions of Lives

      Fifty years ago this month (on September 9, 1966), President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety laws that launched a great life-saving program for the American People.

      I was there that day at the White House at the invitation of President Johnson who gave me one of the signing pens. In 1966, traffic fatalities reached 50,894 or 5.50 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. By 2014, the loss of life was 32,675 or 1.07 fatalities per hundred million vehicle miles traveled. A huge reduction!

      This was an astounding success for a federal safety program that included mandatory vehicle-safety standards (seat belts, airbags, better brakes, tires and handling among other advances) and upgrading driver and highway-safety standards.

      When the crashworthy standards were first proposed in 1967, Henry Ford II warned that they “would shut down the industry.” Ten years later on NBC’s Meet the Press he conceded, “We wouldn’t have the kinds of safety built into automobiles that we have had unless there had been a federal law.”

    • We need bolder politicians
    • Protest Targets Expo ‘Spreading War on Our Communities’

      Hundreds of people gathered in California on Friday to protest Urban Shield, the annual expo showcasing police and military weapons and offering SWAT training in the Bay Area.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Who controls the internet? Ted Cruz’s fantasy vs. the reality

      In June, Senator Ted Cruz released a video declaring that President Obama is on the verge of “giving the internet away” to Iran, Russia and China. The video deploys an appropriately menacing soundtrack, some cyber-spooky glitch effects, and the threat of a “mini UN” taking over our beloved bastion of free speech and free enterprise—unless Congress acts before a deadline of September 30. Cruz upped the drama last week, in preparation for Congress returning from summer vacation, by launching a countdown clock on his website.

  • DRM

    • DRM products are defective by design. Time to tell users what they’re buying

      Digital products are weird: they are inert without software to animate them, and software is so technologically and legally weird that it can be very hard to know exactly what you’re buying.

      But there just might be some clarity on the horizon, thanks to documents I recently filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), signed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), several publishers and public interest groups and 20 EFF supporters with important (and alarming!) stories to tell.

      In 1998, the US Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 makes it a felony to bypass or tamper with “access controls” (today we call these “DRM” or “digital rights management”). Originally this was used to ensure that no one reconfigured their games console to play unofficial games (meaning that the console maker could extract fees from games companies without fear of competition) and that DVD players weren’t modified to play out-of-region discs. But software proliferated and the DMCA wasn’t far behind.

      [...]

      Apple repeatedly did this with iTunes, while Nintendo designed the 3DS game system to render itself permanently inoperable if an update detected evidence of tampering. This means that any solution the FTC comes up with will require extensive disclosures from the more baroque DRM schemes – which is as it should be. You can’t consent without being informed, and the entire basis for taking away our rights with DRM products is that we’re consenting when we “choose DRM”. All of this is just a sticking plaster, of course.

      The real solution is to reform the laws that protect DRM – DMCA 1201 in the US, EUCD Article 6 in the EU, among others – to ensure that doing legal things with your own property remains legal. The fact that this principle needs legal protection tells you how bonkers the whole thing is. That’s why EFF has filed a lawsuit against the US government seeking to invalidate Section 1201 of the DMCA.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Trolls Claim Student Pirates Could Lose Scholarships, Face Deportation

        Copyright trolls are known for their dubious tactics but a new report from Canada shows just how low they can sink. According to the University of Manitoba’s copyright office, among a flood of 8,000 piracy notices are some warning students that they could lose their scholarships or even be deported if they don’t pay a fine.

      • Linking after GS Media … in a table

        Readers may remember that a few months ago I published a table that I had prepared for my students at the University of Southampton, attempting to summarise the position of the Court of Justice of the European Union as regards linking to protected content.

09.10.16

Links 10/9/2016: Elementary OS Loki, Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE Edition

Posted in News Roundup at 11:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Cub Linux Is a Worthy Chromixium Offspring

      Cub Linux 1.0 has much of the stability and maturity of a more established Linux distro.

      It is a great alternative to Google’s semi-proprietary Chrome OS locked into the popular Chromebook hardware.

      Cub Linux is a Chrome OS clone that runs on nearly any aging or newer computer with the user’s choice of the fully open-sourced Chromium Web browser or Google’s Chrome browser.

    • How Chromebooks Are About to Totally Transform Laptop Design

      Google’s first Chromebook was the kind of laptop you’d design if you didn’t give a damn about laptop design. It was thick, heavy, rubbery, boring, and black. Black keys, black body, black trackpad, black everything. Everything about the Cr-48 was designed to communicate that this device was still an experiment. Even the name, a reference to an unstable isotope of the element Chromium, was a hint at the chaos raging inside this black box. “The hardware exists,” Sundar Pichai told a crowd of reporters at the Cr-48’s launch event in December of 2010, “only to test the software.”

      Moments later, Eric Schmidt took the stage and preached about how the “network computer” tech-heads had been predicting for decades was finally ready to change the world. “We finally have a product,” Schmidt said, “which is strong enough, technical enough, scalable enough, and fast enough that you can build actually powerful products on it.” Apparently already sensing the skeptical feedback Chrome OS would get, he gestured toward the audience and told them “it does, in fact, work.”

    • 7 Reasons Why You Should Buy a Chromebook

      Chromebook is a different thing from Netbooks with the fact that it does not have Windows being a huge difference. Chromebooks thus run on a fresh and different operating system that while it is not an old OS it isn’t a desktop kind of OS either but a mobile one.

      Chromebooks have pretty hardware, especially if the Haswell processors they are running on, which are energy efficient, are anything to go by. Nonetheless, there are many reasons why buying Chromebooks make a lot of sense.

    • Why Linux? – Some Reasons For Converting To Linux

      Many organisations and businesses world wide are converting their core computer operating system to Linux as opposed to other operating systems for a number of reasons some of which we shall discuss here in after (why linux),this is mostly because of problems faced in daily computer usage both at home and at the work place.

  • Server

    • Containerizing Stateful Applications

      In this post, we discussed what application state is, the different types of application states you are likely to encounter. We also covered how each type of state can be managed in a containerized environment. In most cases, several options are available to choose from. So, although containers are ephemeral, the application state does not need to be!

      My goal for this post was to show that stateful applications can be containerized. So, how did I do? We would love to hear your feedback and experiences, or if you have any questions I can help answer.

  • Kernel Space

    • Stabilising performance after a major kernel revision

      A topic related to upstreaming patches on kernel forks related to embedded platforms is currently being discussed for Kernel Summit 2016. This is an age-old topic related to whether it is better to work upstream and backport or apply patches to a product-specific kernel and worry about forward-porting later. The points being raised have not changed over the years and still comes down to getting something out the door quickly versus long-term maintenance overhead. I’m not directly affected so had nothing new to add to the thread.

    • The Hyperledger Project is growing like gangbusters

      If you had any doubt there is broad industry interest in blockchain, look no further than the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project. It has grown by 170 percent since its formal launch in February, now counting 80 members compared to the original 30 founding members.

    • Great Technology Never Gets Old? Linux Celebrates 25 years!

      In the IT world of 1991, the desktop market was just blossoming, the personal computer was becoming more powerful, intel were breaking Moore’s law with reckless abandon, and Microsoft were starting to get their act together with a brand new exciting development that was to hit the streets a year later, called Windows. The server market was also expanding. An interminable list of organizations including IBM, HP, Sun, TI, Siemens, ICL, Sequent, DEC, SCO, SGI, Olivetti were building proprietary chips, machines and UNIX variants. UNIX had already by that stage enjoyed significant success since making the leap from academia to commerce, and everyone was trying to get a share of the spoils.

    • Linux Kernel 3.14 LTS Is About to Reach End of Life, Update 3.14.78 Out Now

      After informing the community about the availability of Linux kernel 4.7.3 and Linux kernel 4.4.20 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS.

      Linux kernel 3.14.78 LTS is the seventy-eighth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel series, which appears to approach its end of life soon, according to Greg Kroah-Hartman, who states “The 3.14.y kernel series is coming to an end. There will be only one more release after this one, of this kernel series before it will be marked as end-of-life. You have been warned.”

    • ZFSOnLinux 0.6.5.8 Now Supports The Latest Linux Kernels

      ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.8 was released on Friday as the newest version of this OpenZFS file-system implementation.

      ZFSOnLinux 0.6.5.8 is an important release as it finally is the first stable version providing support for the past few Linux kernel versions: Linux 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 are now supported by ZOL. Meanwhile this code remains compatible with kernels going back to Linux 2.6.32.

    • Graphics Stack

      • SLPC-Based Power Management Still Being Worked On For Intel’s DRM Driver
      • NVIDIA Releases 370.28 Drivers for Linux

        Unfortunately, I don’t tend to notice when Linux drivers get released; it’s something I want to report more frequently on. Luckily, this time, I heard about NVIDIA’s 370.28 graphics drivers while they were still fresh. This one opens up overclocking (and underclocking) for GeForce 10-series GPUs, although NVIDIA (of course) mentions that this is “at the user’s own risk”. It also fixes a bunch of Vulkan bugs.

      • Input threads in the X server

        A great new feature has been merged during this 1.19 X server development cycle: we’re now using threads for input [1]. Previously, there were two options for how an input driver would pass on events to the X server: polling or from within the signal handler. Polling simply adds all input devices’ file descriptors to a select(2) loop that is processed in the mainloop of the server. The downside here is that if the server is busy rendering something, your input is delayed until that rendering is complete. Historically, polling was primarily used by the keyboard driver because it just doesn’t matter much when key strokes are delayed. Both because you need the client to render them anyway (which it can’t when it’s busy) and possibly also because we’re just so bloody used to typing delays.

      • The Threaded Input Support In X.Org Server 1.19

    • Benchmarks

      • Intel Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP Linux Benchmarks

        Recently I purchased a Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP processor as a $300 Xeon with eight physical cores but clocked at just 1.7GHz and without any Turbo Boost while the TDP is 85 Watts. Here are some benchmarks compared to other LGA-2011 v3 CPUs in my possession under Linux along with an AMD FX reference point too and followed by some Skylake Xeon benchmarks.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Krita 3.01 Beta Released

        The popular Krita painting program keeps getting even better. This new beta release of 3.01 includes features added from Google Summer of Code programmers. This screencast does a very good job explaining the new features, including new animation tools.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Photos final landing with Google Photos

        Well, that doesn’t go hand in hand, right? Things are awesome but they are not stable initially. GNOME Photos faced things no differently. While we had landed patches for Google Photos sharing earlier this summer,it took time to get stable and handling those shared images. It’s not only about the sharing but all the things around it.

      • Presenting at the Government IT Symposium

        I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting “Usability testing in open source software” at the 35th Annual Government IT Symposium, in December 2016!

      • Thank you, Karlsruhe!

        GUADEC is the GNOME Foundation’s primary annual event, held every year in a different European city. The conference brings together contributors, enthusiasts, and partners from around the world for three days of talks, followed by three days of workshops (called “Birds of a Feather” sessions). This year, the event took place in Karlsruhe, Germany between the 12th and 17th of August. As always, the conference was a great opportunity for contributors from around the world to meet, make plans, and have fun.

        Presentations covered significant developments in GNOME technologies such as Flatpak, GNOME Software, Builder, and new GTK+ features. There were also talks by GNOME’s partners, including Red Hat, SUSE, and Endless. In addition, the Foundation announced the debut of its newest conference, LAS GNOME, to be held this September in Portland, Oregon. In case you couldn’t make it, here’s a link to the 2016 GUADEC talks.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Linux Lite 3.2 to Land on November 1, 2016, Offer Dual-Booting with Other OSes

        Softpedia has been informed today by the creator and lead developer of the user-friendly Linux Lite operating system, Mr. Jerry Bezencon, about a few interesting facts regarding the upcoming major release of the GNU/Linux distribution.

      • Elementary OS Loki Has Arrived

        If you have been using Elementary OS Freya, you should be incredibly excited about the prospect of seeing your platform of choice gain even more polish. For those that have never given Elementary a chance, Loki will be a perfect introduction to one of the most elegant and user-friendly Linux desktops on the market.

        I highly recommend that every Linux user at least kick the tires of Elementary OS Loki. Elementary was the first distribution to permanently sway me from Ubuntu and it shows no signs of releasing me any time soon. And since today, September 9, 2016 is the official release day of Loki, now is the perfect time to find out if Elementary OS Loki can sway you.

      • Elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” Released

        Elementary OS 0.4 is powered by the Linux 4.4 kernel.

      • elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” Officially Released, It’s Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

        Just a few minutes ago, the guys over elementary were extremely proud to announce the release and immediate availability of the elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” GNU/Linux operating system.

        elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” has been in development for the past three or four months, during which it received two Beta milestones, and we have to admit that we were expecting to see the Release Candidate (RC) build as well, but it looks like the devs decided it’s time for the popular operating system to hit the stable channels.

        And there you have it, elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” in all of its beauty is now ready to take over your personal computers, and the best part is that it’s based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, which means that Loki is also an LTS (Long Term Support) OS, which will receive security and software updates until 2021.

      • Elementary OS 0.4 ‘Loki’ Ubuntu-based Linux distribution achieves stable release

        There are too many Linux distributions nowadays. While many people feel that there is no such thing as too much choice, I respectfully disagree. Quite frankly, the Linux developer community is spread too thin, leading to wasted resources and slow movement on projects. For end users, it can be hard to find the best operating system for them, as there are far too many from which to pick.

        With all of that said, there is plenty of room for some distributions — when they make a substantial impact, that is. Elementary OS (stylized as elementary OS) isn’t the most popular Linux distro, and it certainly isn’t the best. However, this Ubuntu-based operating system is focusing on something that some competitors do not — user interface, which ultimately contributes to the overall user experience. It is because of this that Elementary is so important to the Linux community — it matters. Today, Elementary 0.4 (code-named ‘Loki’), achieves stable status.

      • Upcoming Linux Distributions Releasing In September 2016

    • Screenshots/Screencasts

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Now Has a Default Wallpaper, Available in Two Flavors

            The development of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system continues at a fast pace, and we can see more and more software updates arriving every single day in its official software repositories.

          • You Can Now Register for the First European Ubuntu Conference, UbuCon Europe

            Softpedia was informed by Marius Quabeck from UbuntuFun.de that the registration for the upcoming UbuCon Europe conference for Ubuntu Linux users and developers is now open.

            We informed our readers about UbuCon Europe, which is the very first European Ubuntu conference put together by a group of Ubuntu members, earlier this year, and told them that it would take place between November 18-20, at the Unperfekthaus in Essen, Germany.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE Edition Officially Released, Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

              Today, September 9, 2016, Clement Lefebvre has proudly announced the release and immediate availability of the final version of the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE Edition operating system.

            • Mint 18 KDE Released as Spices Designed Team Announced

              Linux Mint 18 for KDE users is finally here more than two months after the MATE and Cinnamon versions. Clement Lefebvre announced the release today on the Linuxmint.com blog saying, “It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.” The day before Lefebvre introduced his new Artwork Design team and some of their early work. They’re to make Mint even more beautiful.

              Linux Mint 18 KDE features Plasma 5.6 decorated with the same general Mint theme and images as found in the other spins. The KDE edition previously featured a more blue colored theme, but with version 18 it sports a very similar look as the others with green and gray the prominent colors. Man hours were a part of the reason for the change, but primarily it was probably to provide a more uniform look across the various desktops. However, if it was a matter of personnel and time, perhaps that is no longer a problem.

              Yesterday Lefebvre announced the formation of a new artwork design team. This new team is to dress up the Cinnamon Spices Website, then perhaps others, and finally will collaborate with the development team on the distributions’ look and feel. According to Lefebvre’s post, the eight member team consists, at least partially, of artists who have helped Mint in the past and joined the new team by invitation. Lefebvre singled out two such artists in his post and shared Eran Gilo’s new Cinnamon logo as well as the site’s new look. The new updated Website theme is not live as of yet, but it will be a major improvement when it is. The Cinnamon Spices Website is a gallery and repository for Cinnamon desktop themes, applets/desklets, and extensions.

            • Linux Mint 18 KDE is here — download the open source Windows 10 alternative now

              Regardless of your feelings about the iPhone, you cannot deny that this week belongs to Apple. The company is certainly dominating much of the world’s attention. With that said, there is certainly more going on in the technology world than a new version of a popular smartphone. Some desktop Linux users for instance, would probably be more excited about a new version of a distribution, and today, a significant OS sees release.

              What is the desktop OS of which I speak? Linux Mint 18 ‘Sarah’. True, that distribution is not really new, but this variation is — KDE. Yes, a new version of Mint — featuring the Plasma desktop environment and associated apps — is available today. Could the open source operating system be a good alternative to Windows 10?

            • wattOS R10 Linux Distribution Released, Now Based on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS

              The much-awaited wattOS R10 has arrived in all its glory. This power efficient GNU/Linux distribution is based on the latest Ubuntu 16.04.1 long term release. The current release only provides LXDE desktop environment and Microwatt edition will be released later. The wattOS R10 release also brings broader support for older hardware.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Your Open Source Project Is Not A Product

    I’ve spent a good bit of time explaining the ins and outs of open source products: what they are, how to make money with them, and what they are not. Namely, products are products, no matter the source code license they are published under. But there’s a journey that a software project must undergo before it can be accurately labeled with the moniker “product.” This journey includes, but is not limited to, the open source supply chain going from upstream bits to downstream product, as well as a bit of special sauce branding, complete with trademark, that applies only to the supported product. But, I can feel a bit of grousing bubbling just under the surface: Why does it have to be so complicated?

  • The 7 Dimensions of Good Open Source Management

    Organizations use open source software to gain competitive advantage in many ways: to speed up software delivery, save money on development, to stay flexible, and to stay on the leading edge of technology.

    But using open source software, and especially integrating and redistributing it in products and services, carries with it added complexity and risk. Code coming in from multiple sources, under different licenses and with varied quality and maturity levels, can expose organizations to issues with security, integration, support and management — not to mention legal action — if the code is not properly managed.

  • Abbott: Success with Interns

    Laura Abbott marks the end of the latest round of open-source internships at Outreachy with a blog post reflecting on “what makes an internship successful,” especially as seen in the kernel team’s internships.

  • Keeping DOS alive with FreeDOS

    I wanted to share a recent interview with OpenSource.com about the FreeDOS Project, an open source software project that’s been close to me since 1994. Jason Baker from Red Hat interviewed me about FreeDOS, why we started it, and what to expect in FreeDOS 1.2 (out later this year).

  • Open source technology gains steam in data center, but challenges loom

    Despite new developments with the Open Compute Project and other groups, challenges remain when it comes to open source implementation in the data center. Explore them with these FAQs.

  • May the Fork Be with You: A Short History of Open Source Forks

    Debian is one of the oldest Linux-based distributions that became the base of many distros. One of the most popular Debian forks is Ubuntu. Ubuntu takes Debian packages and builds its own packages. It has its own software repository, it’s own kernel. Though many would argue whether Ubuntu is a fork or not, even Mark Shuttleworth is not fully sure.

  • Penn software helps to identify course of cancer metastasis, tumor ‘evolution’

    Canopy is an open-source software so oncologists will be able to use it to identify potential biomarkers for different cancer cell populations within tumor specimens that are associated with drug resistance and invasive malignancy, among other characteristics.

  • The New Research and Development (R&D) Model – Open Source Projects

    I have written in the past how the International Multimedia Telecommunication Consortium (IMTC) has generated some great use case specifications on Real-Time Media and Software Defined Networking (RTM SDN) and how the Open Network Foundation (ONF) has realized these use cases with a new open source project for RTM SDN called Project Atrium Enterprise. However, what most don’t realize is how open source has changed the world in how we do Research and Development (R&D) as an industry.

    I for one, having been in a closed source world for many years, didn’t realize how innovation is being incubated in a totally different model than the past. I always thought open source projects were what developers did in their spare time and that features were just punted over the wall with no rhyme or reason. Now, I knew that open source Linux was widely used as the operating system of choice for embedded systems; however, what I didn’t understand is how open source projects really worked and how they have been funded.

  • Descent: Underground builds open-source gaming depot

    Descendent Studios, makers of Descent: Underground, announced the open-source release of several Unreal Engine 4 plugins they developed for the game. The studio rolled out their GitHub repository on the heels of last week’s announcement that Descent: Underground won an Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) Fund grant from Razer. Descent: Underground was the first high-end action title to natively support all of the major desktop VR headsets: OSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift.

  • FRAUDAR: How A New Open Source Algorithm Aims To Kill Social Media Frauds

  • Events

    • What you need to know about PostgresOpen 2016

      PostgresOpen is the longest running PostgreSQL conference in the United States. This week I had the pleasure of chatting with Stephen Frost, who is the program committee chair and a main organizer of PostgresOpen, which takes place this year in Dallas, TX from September 13-15. We talked about who goes, what sessions to look for, and their charity event which will be helping a cause near and dear to my heart: diversity in tech.

    • Bloomberg to Hold Weekend Node.js Hackathons in New York and London

      In 2014 Bloomberg hosted its first “Open Source Day” event, which was an experiment to see if we could combine the company’s long history of volunteerism with open source collaboration. We brought one of the Git project’s core developers to New York City, got about 30 employees signed up, and they spent the day learning how to build, test, and improve Git. The event was such a success that we’ve held a half-dozen more, and they’ve grown into weekend events with attendees from our Engineering team, local universities and colleges, and of course the open source community.

  • Databases

    • Open Source InfluxDB 1.0 Time-Series Database Released

      InfluxData Inc. said its new open source InfluxDB time-series database — just moved to version 1.0 — was almost three years in the making.

      Written in the Go programming language, InfluxDB 1.0 was designed to process time-series data with high availability and high performance requirements, the company said.

      Although most popular in Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data analytics development, time-series databases have many other use cases, according to InfluxData.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Trying Out & Failing With OpenIndiana, Solaris 11.3 On The Broadwell-EP System

      After testing seven Linux distributions and eight BSDs on the new Xeon E5-2609 v4 Broadwell-EP + MSI X99A WORKSTATION system, I next decided to try getting some fresh Solaris-based results.

      Unfortunately, using OpenIndiana nor Oracle Solaris was successful.

      With the OpenIndiana tests I was using their newest “Hipster” ISOs bundled with the MATE desktop. I was able to get to the MATE desktop after selecting the VESA driver option from the boot-loader, then it looked like things may be going well for this Illumos-based operating system on this modern Broadwell-EP system where I’ve been testing all these Linux/BSD distributions as of late. However, after firing up the graphical installer, as soon as the actual installation process began the installer window immediately disappeared… Then a few seconds later the system was completely unresponsive. Rebooting again, same problem.

    • LibreOffice 5.2.1 Open Source Office Suite Released With 105 Bug Fixes

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software Foundation stresses necessity of full user control over Internet-connected devices

      The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the integration of Internet technology into a wider range of home devices than previously envisaged by most users. Early adopters of IoT may now have homes with Internet-connected lightbulbs, alarm systems, baby monitors and even coffee machines. Internet integration allows owners to have greater flexibility over their devices, making it possible to turn on their air conditioning as they leave work to cool the house before they return, to have curtains that automatically close based on sunset time, or lights that automatically turn off after the owner has left the house. Each individual benefit may seem marginal, but overall they add significant benefit to the owners.

    • GnuTLS 3.5.4

      Released GnuTLS 3.4.15, and GnuTLS 3.5.4 which are bug fix releases in the current and next stable branches.

      Added the GnuTLS-SA-2016-3 security advisory.

    • Friday “Golden Oldies” Free Software Directory IRC meetup: September 9th
    • Free Software Directory meeting recap for September 2nd, 2016

      This week’s meeting had a special theme of looking at the categories and other user interface elements of the directory. The directory is one of the most frequently visited resources maintained by the Free Software Foundation, often by users who may not be familiar with free software. So we want to make sure the way that it presents itself is welcoming and useful. The first hour of the meeting was dedicated solely to discussing these issues.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • The rise of the shareable document

        Higher education is increasingly embracing different concepts of openness, from open access to open education resources (OER). But where does that other open concept—open source—fit into this model? Open source represents the best way to ensure these materials can be easily modified, without risk of material suddenly becoming unchangeable or inaccessible.

  • Programming/Development

    • V8 JavaScript Engine 5.4 Brings More Performance Improvements

      Version 5.4 of the V8 JavaScript Engine has been released. This is another hefty update to V8 and it brings the favorite kind of work we like talking about: more performance improvements.

      V8 Release 5.4 brings reductions in peak memory usage of on-heap memory up to 40% by tuning the garbage collector for low-memory systems. The off-heap peak memory usage has improved by up to 20% as well thanks to simplifying the V8 JavaScript parser.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Adobe Flash Player Free Download Available for Linux [Ed: Adobe realises too late that GNU/Linux isn’t going away]
    • Flash has become so outcast, even Porn websites are ditching it
    • Pornhub, RedTube ditch Flash to hook up with HTML5
    • Top smut site stops Flashing, adopts HTML5
    • Tasty open standards: Pornhub to dump Flash in favor of HTML5

      The march of HTML 5 dominance across the web has received an arousing boost with the news that popular porn site Pornhub is dumping flash in favor of the open web standard.

      Whereas porn usually leads when it comes to embracing new technologies, the decision by Pornhub to abandon Flash was a case where instead it was following others, in particular Google The search giant announced in August that it would begin removing all support for Flash in its market-leading Google Chrome browser from version 53 that was due to be released in September.
      Pornhub does, however, lead the porn industry, with competitors including YouPorn, xHamster, and RedTube still relying on Flash to serve their content.

    • [Older] Is the GPL the right way to force IoT standardization?

      The Internet of Things has tremendous potential, but remains a mishmash of conflicting “standards” that don’t talk to each other. As various vendors erect data silos in the sky, what is actually needed is increased developer communication between disparate IoT projects.

      I’ve argued before that this is one reason IoT needs to be open sourced, providing neutral territory for developers to focus on code, not business models. But there’s still an open question as to what kind of open source best facilitates developer-to-developer sharing. In Cessanta CTO and co-founder Sergey Lyubka’s view, the restrictive GNU General Public License (GPLv2) is the right way to license IoT, at least for now.

Leftovers

  • Acquiring Apigee, Google Makes Another Big Cloud Move

    Google is making some significant moves to bolster its presence in cloud computing. In its latest move, the company said it is acquiring cloud software company Apigee in a deal valued at about $625 million. Apigee offers API management solutions that help companies’ digital services interact with applications used by customers and partners. For example, Apigee Edge is an intelligent API management solution that helps businesses manage open source APIs “to securely share services and data across multiple channels and devices.”

    Just this week, Google also partnered with Box to allow users of the popular Box enterprise cloud storage and content services platform edit documents with Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, while keeping them stored on Box. Many enterprise users will applaud that move as it will give them more coud storage freedom. What is behind all these cloud moves from Google?

  • The Real Impact Of Your Phone

    Your phone uses the equivalent of two refrigerators’ worth of electricity every year.

    No, charging your phone doesn’t suck up as much energy as your TV, Apple TV, your fridge, or your vacuum does. But if you add in all of the electricity required to store and move data across high-speed cable and wireless networks and climate-controlled server farms to deliver an hour of video to your phone each week, in the space of a year it adds up to more power than two new Energy Star refrigerators consume in the same time.

    The estimate, from a 2013 report by the U.S. National Mining Association and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity—is a controversial one, but perhaps no estimate of the energy impact of our electronics use isn’t: measuring the aggregate impact of the supply chain and infrastructure behind your phone across its life cycle is a very difficult thing to do.

  • 5 Foreign School Rules Way Better Than The American Version

    If you’ve ever read anything on the internet, you know that the American education system isn’t doing so hot. Of course, poorly spelled rants against barely understood aspects of politics and culture aren’t the sole provenance of the United States, but global national education statistics do give some weight to the “Stupid American” stereotype. There are, however, several ready-made solutions to our many, many problems. All we have to do is swallow our pride and let other countries teach us how to become more better at schooling.

  • html email comments

    I’m not sure which is more disturbing. The decision to embed version history in every email they send, or the inconsistent date formats, or the strange mix of HTML, C, and C++ style comments. Using — is a particularly poor choice of decoration within an HTML comment, by the by.

    I’m also having a fun time imagining staying at a hotel 50 years ago, then receiving a follow up letter spattered with white out covering up various notes from the marketer to the secretary. “Insert reference to upcoming holiday here.”

  • The 100% correct way to validate email addresses

    Congratulations. From this day forward, you will no longer squander your time trying to work out the perfect regex to validate email addresses. You will also never again run the risk of rejecting what is, in fact, a strange, valid email address.

    The trick is to first define what we mean by ‘valid’.

  • Science

    • Australia’s ‘innovation future’ needs a kick along, says Internet Australia

      Internet Australia wants to see the country do more to achieve its potential as a world-leading “innovation nation” and has repeated its call for a Digital Future Forum of government and industry leaders, trade unions and academics to develop a roadmap for innovation.

      IA chief executive Laurie Patton told the Digital Strategy Innovation Summit in Sydney on Wednesday there needs to be agreement between all political parties and industry on the direction Australia should take to achieve a national innovation agenda for the country.

    • 13 Academics Who Have Become Shills for Corporate Giants in the Food, Agrochemical and Fossil Fuel Industries

      There’s nothing new or unusual about corporate and academic collaboration. IBM, for instance, has partnered with universities around the country since the 1940s to support computer science education. This relationship is mutually beneficial both for the tech giant and the institutions sponsored. IBM’s grant dollars provide welcome funding for research and equipment for students, all while fostering a new class of computer scientists and engineers.

      University-business partnerships, however, require a careful balance. Take the tobacco industry. According to a 2012 study by Harvard professor Allan Brandt, cigarette makers all but invented the concept of industry-academic conflicts of interest. Since the 1950s, cigarette companies have sought to influence the debate about the dangers of smoking to sell more of their products. One tactic used was aligning with university-based science and underwriting millions of dollars for favorable research.

  • Hardware

    • Why water sports and the iPhone 7 don’t mix

      APPLE’S NEW iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are being advertised as “water and dust resistant” but water sports enthusiasts should take note that they are not water and dust proof.

      The difference is important if you are a scuba diver who always needs to be connected, because you’ll get nowhere with Cook & Co if you send your waterlogged phone back for replacement under warranty.

      “iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are splash, water and dust resistant and were tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP67 under IEC standard 60529,” said Apple’s get-out clause.

      “Splash, water and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.”

      Interestingly, the blurb doesn’t mention dust damage so speedway riders may be OK.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Washing Our Hands of Toxins

      The bacteria on your skin is safer than these two chemicals the FDA just banned from your soap.

    • Your brain is sponging up toxic nanomagnets from polluted air

      Anyone who’s lived in a smoggy city would likely welcome the idea of using widely dispersed air filters to soak up all those toxic tidbits floating around—unless, of course, those filters were functioning human brains.

      Our noggins naturally catch and collect the toxic, magnetic nanoparticles that we inadvertently inhale from polluted air, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those wee particles, made of the strongly magnetic iron oxide compound, magnetite, have been found in human brains before and were thought to be normal and harmless byproducts of biological processes. But according to the new study, a closer examination of minuscule metal balls in 37 human brains revealed that they’re actually from smog, formed during combustion or friction-derived heating, such as slamming on the brakes of a car.

      Whether the particles are harmful is hazy, but the authors note that the nanomagnets have two troubling features: they can interact with misfolded proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease to produce reactive oxygen species, which can severely damage cells; and large amounts of them in the brain correlated with Alzheimer’s disease in earlier studies. Given these potential risks, the authors—a team of researchers from the UK and Mexico—suggest that exposure to them “might need to be examined as a possible hazard to human health.”

      Lead author Barbara Maher, physicist and co-director of the Centre for Environmental Magnetism and Paleomagnetism at Lancaster University in the UK, got the idea to examine the brain-embedded particles knowing that magnetite nanoparticles are abundant in air pollution.

    • Anti-depressants given to children soar by nearly 30 per cent in 10 years

      There has been a massive increase in prescribing of anti-depressants to children over the last decade – but more than 40 per cent are drugs that have been shown not to work and which can have toxic side-effects, according to new research.

      A study of almost 360,000 patients aged six to 18 in Wales found there had been a 28 per cent rise in anti-depressants given out by GPs, raising fears of the “medicalisation” of unhappiness and the ordinary emotional turmoil experienced by teenagers.

      However the researchers said it could also be because children were now getting the help they needed due to a fall in the stigma attached to mental health problems.

      Curiously while the number of prescriptions per child, per year went up, the number of diagnoses of depression fell, which the academics suggested was a sign that doctors were trying to avoid “labelling” young people as mentally ill.

    • Sri Lanka conquers malaria

      Sri Lanka has become malaria-free. On September 5, the World Health Organisation officially recognised this huge public health achievement. The WHO certifies a country so when the chain of local transmission is interrupted for at least three consecutive years; the last reported case was in October 2012. With no local transmission reported, Sri Lanka’s priority since October 2012 has been to prevent its return from outside, particularly from malaria-endemic countries such as India. There were 95, 49 and 36 cases reported in 2013, 2014 and 2015 respectively, all contracted outside Sri Lanka. In a commendable initiative, Sri Lanka adopted a two-pronged strategy of targeting both vector and parasite, undertaking active detection of cases and residual parasite carriers by screening populations irrespective of whether malaria symptoms were present. Early detection and treatment of asymptomatic parasite carriers, who serve as reservoirs of infection, played a crucial role in interrupting the chain. While this was achieved by means of house visits and by starting mobile clinics in high-transmission areas, real-time monitoring through effective surveillance systems, community awareness and mobilisation also played their role. The public sector and the private sector were oriented to the common goal of eliminating malaria by enhancing case notification and achieving 100 per cent detection and confirmation through tests. Sri Lanka expanded the coverage of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets to protect high-risk populations, and used multiple methods to reduce mosquito numbers.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Ten-year-old Windows Media Player hack is the new black, again

      Net scum are still finding ways to take down users with a decade-old Windows Media Player attack.

      The vector is a reborn social engineering hatchet job not seen in years in which attackers convince users to run executable content through Windows Media Player’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality.

      Windows Media Player will throw a DRM warning whenever users do not have the rights to play content, opening a URL through which a licence can be acquired.

      Now malware villains are packing popular movies with malicious links so that the DRM warning leads to sites where they’re fooled into downloading trojans masquerading as necessary video codecs.

    • Luabot Malware Turning Linux Based IoT Devices into DDoS Botnet

      The IT security researchers at MalwareMustDie have discovered a malware that is capable of infecting Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices and web servers to launch DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

    • Home-router IoT Devices Compromised for Building DDoS Botnet

      IoT (Internet-of-Thing) devices have been used to make a botnet earlier also just like attackers recently compromised 8 different popular home-routers that are IoT brands to make a botnet out of them which executed a DDoS attack at the application-level against several servers of certain website. Discoverer of this application-level DDoS alternatively HTTPS flood assault of Layer 7 is Sucuri the security company.

    • New Linux Trojan Discovered Coded in Mozilla’s Rust Language [Ed: don’t install it. Easy.]

      A new trojan coded in Rust is targeting Linux-based platforms and adding them to a botnet controlled through an IRC channel, according to a recent discovery by Dr.Web, a Russian antivirus maker.

      Initial analysis of this trojan, detected as Linux.BackDoor.Irc.16, reveals this may be only a proof-of-concept or a testing version in advance to a fully weaponized version.

      Currently, the trojan only infects victims, gathers information about the local system and sends it to its C&C server.

    • The Limits of SMS for 2-Factor Authentication

      A recent ping from a reader reminded me that I’ve been meaning to blog about the security limitations of using cell phone text messages for two-factor authentication online. The reader’s daughter had received a text message claiming to be from Google, warning that her Gmail account had been locked because someone in India had tried to access her account. The young woman was advised to expect a 6-digit verification code to be sent to her and to reply to the scammer’s message with that code.

    • Telnet is not dead – at least not on ‘smart’ devices

      Depending on your age, you either might or might not have used Telnet to connect to remote computers in the past. But regardless of your age, you would probably not consider Telnet for anything you currently use. SSH has become the de facto standard when it comes to remote shell connection as it offers higher security, data encryption and much more besides.

      When we created our first honeypots for the Turris project (see our older blog articles – 1, 2, 3), we started with SSH and Telnet, because both offer interactive console access and thus are very interesting for potential attackers. But SSH was our main goal, while Telnet was more of a complimentary feature. It came as a great surprise to discover that the traffic we drew to the Telnet honeypots is three orders of magnitude higher than in the case of SSH (note the logarithmic scale of the plot below). Though there is a small apples-to-oranges issue, as we compare the number of login attempts for Telnet with the number of issued commands for SSH, the huge difference is obvious and is also visible in other aspects, such as in the number of unique attacker IP addresses.

    • Israeli Online Attack Service ‘vDOS’ Earned $600,000 in Two Years

      vDOS — a “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — has been massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets.

      The vDOS database, obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com at the end of July 2016, points to two young men in Israel as the principal owners and masterminds of the attack service, with support services coming from several young hackers in the United States.

    • Cisco’s Network Bugs Are Front and Center in Bankruptcy Fight

      Game of War: Fire Age, your typical melange of swords and sorcery, has been one of the top-grossing mobile apps for three years, accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. So publisher Machine Zone was furious when the game’s servers, run by hosting company Peak Web, went dark for 10 hours last October. Two days later, Machine Zone fired Peak Web, citing multiple outages, and later sued.

      Then came the countersuit. Peak Web argued in court filings that Machine Zone was voiding its contract illegally, because the software bug that caused the game outages resided in faulty network switches made by Cisco Systems, and according to Peak Web’s contract with Machine Zone, it wasn’t liable. In December, Cisco publicly acknowledged the bug’s existence—too late to help Peak Web, which filed for bankruptcy protection in June, citing the loss of Machine Zone’s business as the reason. The Machine Zone-Peak Web trial is slated for March 2017.

      “Machine Zone wasn’t acting in good faith,” says Steve Morrissey, a partner at law firm Susman Godfrey, which is representing Peak Web. “They were trying to get out of the contract.” Machine Zone has disputed that assertion in court documents, but it declined to comment for this story. Cisco also declined to comment on the case, saying only that it tries to publish confirmed problems quickly.

      There’s buggy code in virtually every electronic system. But few companies ever talk about the cost of dealing with bugs, for fear of being associated with error-prone products. The trial, along with Peak Web’s bankruptcy filings, promises a rare look at just how much or how little control a company may have over its own operations, depending on the software that undergirds it. Think of the corporate computers around the world rendered useless by a faulty update from McAfee in 2010, or of investment company Knight Capital, which lost $458 million in 30 minutes in 2012—and had to be sold months later—after new software made erratic, automated stock market trades.

    • The H Factor – Why you should be building “human firewalls”

      It is often the illusive “H Factor” – the human element – that ends up being the weakest link that makes cyber-attacks and data breaches possible.

    • White House appoints first Federal Chief Information Security Officer

      The White House announced Thursday that retired Brigadier General Gregory J. Touhill will serve as the first federal Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

      “The CISO will play a central role in helping to ensure the right set of policies, strategies, and practices are adopted across agencies and keeping the Federal Government at the leading edge of 21st century cybersecurity,” read a blog post penned by Tony Scott, US Chief Information Officer, and J. Michael Daniel, special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator.

    • Xen Project patches serious virtual machine escape flaws

      The Xen Project has fixed four vulnerabilities in its widely used virtualization software, two of which could allow malicious virtual machine administrators to take over host servers.

      Flaws that break the isolation layer between virtual machines are the most serious kind for a hypervisor like Xen, which allows users to run multiple VMs on the same underlying hardware in a secure manner.

    • This USB stick will fry your unsecured computer

      A Hong Kong-based technology manufacturer, USBKill.com, has taken data security to the “Mission Impossible” extreme by creating a USB stick that uses an electrical discharge to fry an unauthorized computer into which it’s plugged.

      “When the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges — all in the matter of seconds,” the company said in a news release.

    • WordPress urges users to update now to fix critical security holes

      WordPress is urging webmasters to update their CMS packages as quickly as possible to protect their domains from critical vulnerability exploits.

      On Thursday, the content management system (CMS) provider released a security advisory alongside the latest version of WordPress, 4.6.1. Now available, the update patches two serious security problems, a cross-site scripting vulnerability and a path traversal security flaw.

      The XSS flaw, discovered by SumOfPwn researcher Cengiz Han back in July at the Summer of Pwnage bug bounty project, allows attackers to use a crafted image file, upload to WordPress, and inject malicious JavaScript code into the software.

      An attacker can exploit this vulnerability to perform a range of actions, including stealing session tokens and login credentials, as well as remotely execute malicious code.

      The second critical issue, reported by Dominik Schilling from the WordPress security team, is a path traversal vulnerability discovered within the upgrade package uploader.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • US Veterans Support Lawsuit over ‘Targeted Killing’ by Drone

      Three U.S. veterans are supporting Faisal bin Ali Jaber, whose brother-in-law and nephew were killed in 2012 in a drone strike.

      Three former drone operators backed a lawsuit against the U.S. drone program on Thursday to push for more accountability in deadly drone strikes.

    • Veterans back fight by relative of drone victims: People should know ‘how a screw-up can lead to the death of their family members’

      Three military veterans once involved in the U.S. drone program have thrown their support behind a Yemeni man’s legal fight to obtain details about why his family members were killed in a 2012 strike.

      The veterans’ unusual decision to publicly endorse the lawsuit against President Obama and other U.S. officials adds another twist to Faisal bin Ali Jaber’s four-year quest for accountability in the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew, who he believes needlessly fell victim to one of the most lethal covert programs in U.S. history.

      The former enlisted service members told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a recent filing that they believe the 2012 drone strike serves as a case study of how mistakes frequently occur in the nation’s targeted-killing program, where life-or-death decisions are based upon top-secret evidence.

      The veterans say they “witnessed a secret, global system without regard for borders, conducting widespread surveillance with the ability to conduct deadly targeted killing operations.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s National Security Advisers Are a “Who’s Who” of the Warfare State

      Hillary Clinton is meeting on Friday with a new national security “working group” that is filled with an elite “who’s who” of the military-industrial complex and the security deep state.

      The list of key advisers — which includes the general who executed the troop surge in Iraq and a former Bush homeland security chief turned terror profiteer — is a strong indicator that Clinton’s national security policy will not threaten the post-9/11 national-security status quo that includes active use of military power abroad and heightened security measures at home.

      It’s a story we’ve seen before in President Obama’s early appointments. In retrospect, analysts have pointed to the continuity in national security and intelligence advisers as an early sign that despite his campaign rhetoric Obama would end up building on — rather than tearing down — the often-extralegal, Bush-Cheney counterterror regime. For instance, while Obama promised in 2008 to reform the NSA, its director was kept on and its reach continued to grow.

      Obama’s most fateful decision may have been choosing former National Counterterrorism Center Director John Brennan to be national security adviser, despite Brennan’s support of Bush’s torture program. Brennan would go on to run the president’s drone program, lead the CIA, fight the Senate’s torture investigation, and then lie about searching Senate computers.

    • Wolf Blitzer Is Worried Defense Contractors Will Lose Jobs if U.S. Stops Arming Saudi Arabia

      Sen. Rand Paul’s expression of opposition to a $1.1 billion U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia — which has been brutally bombing civilian targets in Yemen using U.S.-made weapons for more than a year now — alarmed CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday afternoon.

      Blitzer’s concern: That stopping the sale could result in fewer jobs for arms manufacturers.

      “So for you this is a moral issue,” he told Paul during the Kentucky Republican’s appearance on CNN. “Because you know, there’s a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there’s going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States. That’s secondary from your standpoint?”

      Paul stayed on message. “Well not only is it a moral question, its a constitutional question,” Paul said. “Our founding fathers very directly and specifically did not give the president the power to go to war. They gave it to Congress. So Congress needs to step up and this is what I’m doing.”

    • Syrian conflict: US and Russia agree peace moves

      Russia and the US have announced an agreement on Syria starting with a “cessation of hostilities” from sunset on Monday.

      Under the plan, the Syrian government will end combat missions in specified areas held by the opposition.

      Russia and the US will establish a joint centre to combat so-called Islamic State and al-Nusra fighters.

      The announcement follows talks between US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.

    • US, Russia condemn latest North Korea nuclear test

      The U.S. and Russia led global condemnation of North Korea Friday, after the reclusive state said it had completed a fifth nuclear test.

      Speaking in Geneva ahead of talks on Syria, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated the nuclear test carried out in the early hours of Friday would be referred to the Security Council.

      Kerry said that the topic will be discussed within “the context of the United Nations,” according to Reuters.

      Previous U.N. Security Council resolutions had banned North Korea from trialling new ballistic missiles, or carrying out nuclear testing. Lavrov said Friday that U.N. resolutions “must be followed.”

    • Putin Politely Expresses His Amazement At Western Stupidity

      In an interview with John Micklethwait of BloombergBusinessweek, Putin was asked about Russia’s desire to expand its influence geographically. Putin answered as follows:

      “I think all sober-minded people who really are involved in politics understand that the idea of a Russian threat to, for example, the Baltics is complete madness. Are we really about to fight NATO? How many people live in NATO? About 600 million, correct? There are 146 million in Russia. Yes, we’re the biggest nuclear power. But do you really think that we’re about to conquer the Baltics using nuclear weapons? What is this madness? That’s the first point, but by no means the main point.

    • Obama Flinches at Renouncing Nuke First Strike

      The U.S. threat to launch a first-strike nuclear attack has little real strategic value – though it poses a real risk to human survival – but President Obama fears political criticism if he changes the policy, as Jonathan Marshall explains.

    • Saudi Arabia cannot pay its workers or bills – yet continues to fund a war in Yemen

      In Saudi Arabia itself, the government seems unable to cope with the crisis. The ‘Arab News’ says that 31,000 Saudi and other foreign workers have lodged complaints with the government’s labour ministry over unpaid wages. On one occasion, the Indian consulate and expatriates brought food to the workers so that their people should not starve

    • Do tragedies like 9/11 have an expiration date?

      Fifteen years ago, the world watched as the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States played out before their eyes.

      The images are unforgettable, and the stories of those who died and those who rushed to the scene dominated media coverage for months after the attacks.

      But the way people mark the anniversary has in many ways changed from a collective experience that the masses were a part of, to a more personal experience, according to Brian A. Monahan, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at Marywood University in Scranton, Penn.

      Monahan notes that fifteen-years-later there are two groups of people who experienced the attacks in very different ways — those who were around and watched the events unfold, and the second group of people who weren’t alive or were too young to remember.

    • Air Force, Running Low on Drone Pilots, Turns to Contractors in Terror Fight

      The American military’s extensive use of drones against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups has resulted in a shortage of Air Force pilots and other personnel to operate the aircraft, leading the Pentagon to rely more on private contractors for reconnaissance missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

      Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used contractors to perform many duties traditionally carried out by uniformed personnel, like protecting military bases and feeding service members. The contractors who are now serving as drone pilots are based in the regions where the drones are flown, and they are legally prohibited from being “trigger pullers” and firing weapons, Air Force officials said. But there is no limit on the type of reconnaissance they can perform, and they are providing live video feeds of battles and special operations.

    • Mark Weisbrot on Brazilian Overthrow, Shahid Buttar on Copwatcher Retaliation

      This week on CounterSpin: A federal prosecutor in Brazil determined that the bookkeeping maneuver with which twice-elected president Dilma Rousseff had been charged by her right-wing opposition did not constitute a crime. Rousseff’s congressional opponents include a number of people themselves facing charges, including bribery, electoral fraud, kidnapping and homicide. Then Rousseff was ousted. Many Brazilians are calling it a coup, but the official US position is, what now? We’ll hear about what’s happening in Brazil from Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    • ‘What Is Aleppo?’ A Fateful Question for Libertarian Presidential Nominee Gary Johnson
    • What Is Aleppo? This.

      Libertarian Gary Johnson’s blank gaze at the name “Aleppo” is shocking – about as shocking as yesterday’s chlorine gas attack constituting yet another war crime there, or the New York Times’ three corrections to get right just what Aleppo is and isn’t, or the way Twitter exploded about one guy’s unreal ignorance while generally ignoring almost an entire population’s annihilation, or the pitiable fact that another presidential candidate actually knows less than Trump, or the even more miserable fact that Johnson’s bewilderment pretty much sums up U.S. policy, press knowledge and levels of public awareness on Syria, which is, as Johnson so astutely noted, “a mess.” No, this wasn’t “a stumble” or “blunder” or “gaffe.” It’s the sorry state of our national political landscape. What’s not shocking here: Nobody in Aleppo has heard of Johnson either – they’re way too busy trying to stay alive.

    • What Aleppo Is and Is Not

      The fact that Johnson had apparently never heard of the strategically important city — and even failed to guess that it was the name of a city (he told Whoopi Goldberg later that he thought it might have been an acronym) — stunned Mike Barnicle, the columnist who asked him what he would do about the situation there if he was elected president.

      When Johnson asked what Aleppo (or A.L.E.P.P.O. — or, a leppo) might be, Barnicle replied, with open contempt, “You’re kidding.”

      But Johnson, it turns out, was not alone.

      As remarkable as that moment was, it was quickly followed by reports on Johnson’s cluelessness that included basic errors about who was fighting in the city and why the tragedy there matters to the rest of the world.

      Taken together, those error-strewn reports suggest that American journalists and pundits have become so completely focused on the horse-race aspect of electoral politics that they are paying almost no attention to the biggest foreign policy crisis that will face the next president.

      The tone was set by Christopher Hill, a former United States ambassador to Iraq who is now the dean of international studies at the University of Denver.

    • ‘What Is Aleppo?’ Asks Gary Johnson–and NYT Gives Three Wrong Answers

      Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, when asked in an MSNBC interview (Morning Joe, 9/8/16) what he would do about the battle raging over the Syrian city of Aleppo, responded, “What is Aleppo?”

      That’s troubling, that a presidential candidate would be unaware of one of the main battlefields in one of the world’s deadliest conflicts. But even more troubling is that the New York Times, the US paper of record, can’t seem to figure out what Aleppo is, either.

      As FAIR contributor Ben Norton noted in a piece for Salon (9/8/16), the Times‘ Alan Rappeport (9/8/16) wrote a piece about Johnson’s gaffe that described Aleppo as “the de facto capital of the Islamic State,” or ISIS. That’s wrong; the de facto capital of ISIS is Raqqa, a city halfway across Syria from Aleppo.

      This was then changed in an edit to describe Aleppo as “a stronghold of the Islamic State.” That’s also wrong; the main rebel faction in Aleppo is Jabhat al-Nusra, better known as the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria—a bitter rival of ISIS. ISIS itself has little presence in the city.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Three Devices

      I really don’t want to get bogged down in the Hillary email story. But given the ongoing discussions about whether claims she used the personal server to avoid oversight have merit, I did two more things. First, I did this timeline. Without going into too much detail, there are decisions made after requests for emails that suggest avoiding oversight was driving some of this. That’s especially true given the conflicting stories from Paul Combetta pertaining to his actions in late 2014 and March 2015; he ended up deleting Hillary’s emails after being informed of the House Oversight request for them. He may have only revealed that with an immunity deal.

      The other detail I want to focus on is the number of devices Hillary had. Hillary defenders often point to her claim that she used the Blackberry for convenience to claim she surely wasn’t avoiding oversight. But I think the FBI report shows that she had three devices, not just one.

      Most of the attention on the number of her devices focuses on the fact that she had 13 serial BBs, none of which were handed over to the FBI (instead of her actual BBs,, Williams & Connolly turned over two other BBs, though without SIM or SD cards).

      It is true that her 13 BBs were used serially, not at once, which makes Hillary Clinton just like Tom Brady in her serial use of phones: she’s just a famous person who likes to swap out her phones all the time. The difference being that Tom Brady was told he didn’t need to keep his phone, whereas Hillary was under record-keeping obligations even before any investigation started. And Brady at least had had his comms reviewed by lawyers before he deleted his phone.

      But it’s not the 13 BB detail that poses problems to Hillary’s single device claim. It’s this passage.

    • NBC’s Military Forum Was a Master Class on How Not to Hold Candidates Accountable

      The “Commander-in-Chief Forum” with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that NBC’s Matt Lauer moderated Wednesday night was billed as a way to interrogate the presidential candidates on substantive veterans’ and national security issues.

      But from the questions chosen to the format, the event served as little more than a class on how not to hold the candidates accountable.

      In the 25 minutes devoted to Clinton, nearly half was spent by Lauer grilling her about her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state (one veteran also asked about the issue). That left little room for questions on policies she presided over while in office.

    • Documents Show U.S. Military Expands Reach of Special Operations Programs

      The United States is spending more money on more missions to send more elite U.S. forces to train alongside more foreign counterparts in more countries around the world, according to documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act.

      Under the Joint Combined Exchange Training program, which is designed to train America’s special operators in a variety of missions — from “foreign internal defense” to “unconventional warfare” — U.S. troops carried out approximately one mission every two days in 2014, the latest year covered by the recently released documents.

      At a price tag of more than $56 million, the U.S. sent its most elite operators — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and others — on 176 individual JCETs, a 13 percent increase from 2013. The number of countries involved jumped even further, from 63 to 87, a 38 percent spike.

    • What’s Behind Barack Obama’s Ongoing Accommodation of Vladimir Putin?

      When a major party cynically espouses a set of beliefs as a tactic for winning an election, those beliefs get entrenched in popular discourse and often endure well past the election, with very significant consequences. The most significant such rhetorical template in the 2016 election — other than the new Democratic claim that big-money donations do not corrupt the political process — is that Russia is a Grave Enemy of the U.S.; anyone who advocates better relations or less tension with Moscow is a likely sympathizer, stooge, or even agent of Putin; and any associations with the Kremlin render one’s loyalties suspect.

      Literally every week ushers in a new round of witch hunts in search of domestic Kremlin agents and new evidence of excessive Putin sympathies. The latest outburst was last night’s discovery that Donald Trump allowed himself to be interviewed by well-known Kremlin propagandist and America-hater Larry King on his RT show. “Criticizing US on Russian TV is something no American, much less an aspiring prez, should do,” pronounced Fred Kaplan. Other guests appearing on that network include Soviet spy Bernard Sanders (who spoke this year to Putin crony and RT host Ed Schultz), Bill Maher (whose infiltrates American culture through his cover as a comedian hosting an HBO program), and Stephen Hawking (whom the FSB has groomed to masquerade as a “physicist” while he carries out un-American activities on behalf of Putin).

    • The ‘Ethiopian Spring’: “Killing is not an answer to our grievances”

      The Ethiopian leadership remains in denial. The long meetings of its ruling bodies have culminated in a report on 15 years of national “rebirth”, in which it awards itself good marks, while acknowledging the existence of a few problems here and there.

    • UN Team Heard Claims of ‘Staged’ Chemical Attacks

      United Nations investigators encountered evidence that alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian military were staged by jihadist rebels and their supporters, but still decided to blame the government for two incidents in which chlorine was allegedly dispersed via improvised explosives dropped by helicopters.

      In both cases, the Syrian government denied that it had any aircraft in the areas at the times of the purported attacks, but the U.N. team rejected that explanation with the curious argument that Syria failed to provide flight records to corroborate the absence of any flights. Yet, if there had been no flights, there would be no flight records.

    • Greenwashing Wars and the US Military

      The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has come in for criticism due to its lack of attention to the detrimental effects of wars and military operations on nature. Considering the degree of harm to the environment coming from these human activities, one would think that the organization might have set aside some time at its World Conservation Congress this past week in Hawaii to specifically address these concerns.

      Yet, of the more than 1,300 workshops crammed into the six-day marathon environmental meeting in Honolulu, followed by four days of discussion about internal resolutions, nothing specifically addressed the destruction of the environment by military operations and wars.

    • America’s new war: drone to death-ray

      The United States sent a senior official to the Arms Trade Treaty conference meeting in Geneva on 22-26 August to make the case for controls on exports of armed drones. The diplomat concerned, Brian Nilsson of the Bureau for Political Military Affairs, presented a draft document to establish principles for such exports, “with the express purpose of holding meetings with foreign delegations attending the conference and encouraging them to sign onto the declaration.”

      In its way this appears to be a milestone in arms proliferation and international diplomacy, where Washington at last recognises a reality that has long been tracked in this series of columns and elsewhere: the proliferation of armed drones across the world, a process which the US itself – as a leading global producer and exporter – is deeply implicated. The Pentagon thinks it is reasonable to develop a technology that gives it an edge in the new era of ‘remote warfare’. But once many other people learn to do it, the edge disappears. It is time, then, to argue for arms control.

    • Will Either Clinton or Trump End the Forever War?

      Perhaps the most enduring question of Barack Obama’s presidency is a deceptively simple one: is the United States at war?

      “America is at a crossroads,” Obama said in a speech at the National Defense University in 2013. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.” He then quoted James Madison, the fourth US president, who wrote, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

      The speech was the closest Obama has come while in office to winding down — rhetorically, at least — what George W. Bush famously called the “Global War on Terror.” Yet, if Obama’s goal was to end, or even simply define, the war by the end of his eight years as president, he has failed. The country remains on a “perpetual wartime footing,” a phrase he used in the 2013 speech. That is due in part to the rise of ISIS (also known as Daesh), but the Obama administration’s militarism extends far beyond Iraq and Syria. And even the rise of ISIS’s precursor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, came as a direct response to the US occupation of Iraq.

    • Are We Just Going to Pretend Another President Didn’t Give Iran Their Money?

      Hold on a second. Common sense got caught in my throat there for a minute. The crime dog on this case is…this guy? I mean, really, this guy? At least Trey Gowdy was a prosecutor once. This guy is a former reality show star who first got famous as a politician by whining about his congressional salary. This is that deep bench again.

      But, since we are handed this lemon, let’s make some lemonade, shall we? Let’s go back to the golden days of early 1981, when the great sunshine of Amon-Ra Reagan had fallen upon the land, and some hostages came home—after which $12 billion in Iranian assets that Jimmy Carter had frozen suddenly were thawed. Six years later, he let them have $454 million more of their assets. There was a great unfreezing under the Reagan Administration.

    • Robert Scheer: U.S. Pledge of $90 Million to Laos Glosses U.S. History Terrorizing Civilians

      As President Obama toured an exhibition of prosthetics made for Laotians who lost limbs when bombs exploded years or even decades after the United States dropped them on Laos during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. announced it would provide $90 million over the next three years to help Laos clear the remaining explosives.

      The unexploded bombs are 30 percent of the total that the United States dropped on the country—a total Obama described as “more bombs on Laos than [on] Germany and Japan during World War II.” So far, such ordnance has killed or injured more than 20,000 people.

    • A 9/11 Retrospective: Washington’s 15-Year Air War

      On the morning of September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda launched its four-plane air force against the United States. On board were its precision weapons: 19 suicidal hijackers. One of those planes, thanks to the resistance of its passengers, crashed in a Pennsylvania field. The other three hit their targets — the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. — with the kind of “precision” we now associate with the laser-guided weaponry of the U.S. Air Force.

      From its opening salvo, in other words, this conflict has been an air war. With its 75% success rate, al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mission was a historic triumph, accurately striking three out of what assumedly were its four chosen targets. (Though no one knows just where that plane in Pennsylvania was heading, undoubtedly it was either the Capitol or the White House to complete the taking out of the icons of American financial, military, and political power.) In the process, almost 3,000 people who had no idea they were in the bombsights of an obscure movement on the other side of the planet were slaughtered.

      It was a barbaric, if daring, plan and an atrocity of the first order. Almost 15 years later, such suicidal acts with similar “precision” weaponry (though without the air power component) continue to be unleashed across the Greater Middle East, Africa, and sometimes elsewhere, taking a terrible toll — from a soccer game in Iraq to a Kurdish wedding party in southeastern Turkey (where the “weapon” may have been a boy).

    • Jill Stein calls for new 9/11 investigation

      “The Bush Administration initially said an inquiry was unnecessary, claiming that the perpetrators had been identified and their methods and motives were clear.”

      Stein described the 9/11 Commission report as containing many “omissions and distortions.”

      “The 9/11 Commission was not given enough money, time, or access to relevant classified information,” Stein said. “The Stein/Baraka campaign believes a new inquiry is necessary.”

    • Clinton: No US ground troops in Iraq, Syria; Trump: Steal Iraqi Oil

      The NBC Candidates Forum continued the shameful corporate coverage of the Great American Meltdown that is our election season. That season has given us a Faux Cable News that runs clips of only one side and pays out hush money to cover up how its blonde anchors were not so much hired as trafficked; a CNN that has hired a paid employee of the candidate as a consultant and analyst; and networks that won’t mention climate change or carbon emissions the same way they won’t mention labor unions. They aren’t even trying to do journalism any more– cable “news” is mostly infotainment as a placeholder between ads for toilet paper. I can’t bear to watch it most of the time and just read the news on the Web. If I have to watch t.v. I turn on local news (often does a better job on national stories too) or Alarabiya and Aljazeera, which for all their faults do actually have real news (and their faults cancel out one another). I can always get the transcript for the cable news shows; reading it is faster and less painful than having to watch.

      The NBC Forum didn’t really challenge either candidate on implausible statements, but on the whole engaged in a lot of badgering of Hillary Clinton while letting Donald Trump get away with outright misstatements of the facts and tossing him a lot of softballs.

    • What the U.S. Military Doesn’t Know (and Neither Do You)

      Sometimes the real news is in the details — or even in the discrepancies. Take, for instance, missions by America’s most elite troops in Africa.

      It was September 2014. The sky was bright and clear and ice blue as the camouflage-clad men walked to the open door and tumbled out into nothing. One moment members of the U.S. 19th Special Forces Group and Moroccan paratroopers were flying high above North Africa in a rumbling C-130 aircraft; the next, they were silhouetted against the cloudless sky, translucent green parachutes filling with air, as they began to drift back to earth.

      Those soldiers were taking part in a Joint Combined Exchange Training, or JCET mission, conducted under the auspices of Special Operations Command Forward-West Africa out of Camp Ram Ram, Morocco. It was the first time in several years that American and Moroccan troops had engaged in airborne training together, but just one of many JCET missions in 2014 that allowed America’s best-equipped, best-trained forces to hone their skills while forging ties with African allies.

    • Mexico Threatens to Cancel Treaty That Ceded Texas and California to U.S. If Trump Gets Elected

      While Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump might have taken a victory lap after his meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, those south of the U.S. border are not.

      Finance Minister Luis Videgaray resigned Wednesday, after backlash from the invitation to Trump to meet with Peña Nieto. Now, Mexican Senator Armando Rios Piter is proposing legislation that could put Mexico in conflict with the United States.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Let’s Get Back To The Data’: Relentless Attacks On Assange Distract From Content Of WikiLeaks Releases

      Attacks on WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, including accusations of collusion with foreign governments, are growing more commonplace in the media as Election Day approaches.

      As the political establishment pushes back against WikiLeaks’ revelations of U.S. war crimes and corruption, political pundits have even threatened Assange’s life. Meanwhile, despite a total lack of evidence, the Clinton campaign continues to try to tie Assange to Russia, reviving a Cold War “red scare” narrative that the mainstream media seems all too eager to assist.

      Mickey Huff, media literacy expert and director of Project Censored, told MintPress News that the media’s focus on Assange distracts from more important stories, including the actual content of the leaks released by WikiLeaks. A professor of social sciences at Diablo Valley College near San Francisco, Huff co-authors an annual report on censorship and propaganda in the media.

      “I think we’re losing sight of the information these people are leaking,” he said. “It’s an ultimate distraction, a bait and switch.”

      Criticism of Assange hasn’t been limited to attacks on his character, though. Political pundits, as well as some government officials and political candidates, have made serious threats against him. And treatment of Assange seems unlikely to improve under the next administration.

      “He’s almost like a different version of an Osama bin Laden, a bogeyman du jour,” Huff said. “He’s someone that can be a whipping boy at almost any time if it’s necessary.”

    • Sweden puts pressure on Ecuador over questioning Julian Assange

      Swedish authorities have blamed the Ecuadorian embassy in London over delays in questioning its famous resident, Julian Assange, about sexual assault allegations.
      “So far we heard nothing more from them,” Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny told reporters on Wednesday, after Ecuador said last month it would allow Assange to be interrogated inside the embassy.

      “We are waiting to be told how and when this interview will take place, and if we will be able to be present while it’s been held,” said Ny, who added that Swedish investigators are ready to travel when needed.

    • ‘I saw no reason to give Assange special treatment’

      Few new details emerged at a press conference held by Ny and her colleague Ingrid Isberg in Stockholm on Wednesday to update Swedish and international media on the ongoing investigation.

      Ny said she had been told that the Svea Court of Appeals would announce on Friday whether to uphold or throw out Stockholm District Court’s decision to keep Assange remanded in custody ‘in absentia’ over a 2010 rape allegation, an accusation which the 45-year-old Australian denies.

      A major point of contention is that Assange has yet to be questioned in the case. After exhausting legal options in Britain, he fled to Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012. Ny said she had been trying to interrogate him since 2010 and defended a decision not to seek permission to meet him in London at an earlier stage.

    • DOJ Proudly Trumpets Its Completely BS 91% FOIA Response Rate

      Let’s face it: the DOJ isn’t going to change until forced to — “presumption of disclosure” or not. This administration has done almost nothing to push for greater transparency and neither of the incoming presidential candidates — Hillary “Homebrew” Clinton or Donald “I Can Make My Own Laws, Right?” Trump — are likely to have a positive effect on government accountability going forward.

      Certainly, there are still legislators who are pushing for better transparency, but they’re stymied by powerful agencies like the DOJ — and, often, the administration itself. The DOJ presides over agencies which have done everything but order a hit on prolific FOIA requesters like Jason Leopold. And, while the move towards a “release to one, release to all” policy on FOIA responses is better for the public in general, it’s also likely intended to discourage journalists from chasing down obscure government secrets by removing the possibility of “scooping” competitors.

      The worst part is the DOJ likely doesn’t care whether the general public believes its inflated response numbers. Like far too many federal agencies, it has long since shrugged off any pretense of acting in the public’s interest. Its “91%” whitewash of its FOIA responsiveness covers up a 50-60% response rate — one that’s likely good enough for government work. Especially the sort of work few in the government show any interest in performing.

    • Bob Graham: Release More 9/11 Records

      The government also knows more today about the 16 hijackers who lived outside California than when the 28 pages were classified in 2003. Much of that information remains secret but should be made public. For example, the F.B.I. for a time claimed that it had found no ties between three of the hijackers, including their leader, Mohamed Atta, and a prominent Saudi family that lived in Sarasota, Fla., before Sept. 11. The family returned to the kingdom about two weeks before the attack. But in 2013, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by investigative reporters led to the release of about 30 pages from an F.B.I.-led investigation that included an agent’s report asserting “many connections” between the hijackers and this family. The F.B.I. said the agent’s claim was unfounded, and the family said it had no ties to the hijackers. Still, a federal judge in 2014 ordered the bureau to turn over an additional 80,000 pages from its investigation, and he is reviewing those for possible public release.

    • Libeling Leakers: Julian Assange, Wikileaks and the Russian “Connection” [Ed: says Schindler. This guy.]

      Schindler’s analytical imagination then falters in attempting to link the dots. In releasing material that has a provenance to Russian hackers, “WikiLeaks is doing Moscow’s bidding and has placed itself in bed with Vladimir Putin.”

      The language is a neat libel assuming that an organisation that releases material provided to it by an individual, or entity, is then doing that body’s bidding, all body and consciousness, as a subservient political instrument. WikiLeaks has, in fact, shown itself to be very much independent, much to the irritation of governments and in certain instances its supporters. The devil’s work is often trying.

      At the New York Times, the strategy and outlook adopted by Schindler is replicated. The first is demonising Russia as a disinformation giant, weaponising information to weaken opponents. Neil MacFarquhar is certainly one captivated with the notion that Russia has that “powerful weapon” which he calls “the spread of false stories.” (How frightfully original.)

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Study Finds Greenhouse Gases Doubled the Chances of Louisiana’s Flooding Rains

      Human-caused climate change likely doubled the chances of the torrential rains that caused deadly flooding in Louisiana and damaged 60,000 homes in the state, a new study has found.

      Less than a month after the deluge that killed 13 people, a team of scientists have just published an analysis of rainfall records going back to the 1930s alongside computer model simulations.

      Lead author of the study Dr. Karin van der Wiel, a research associate at both Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had now “changed the odds” for Louisiana being hit by torrential downpours.

      Compared to the year 1900, the model analysis had clearly shown that the extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had increased the chances of a torrential downpour in that Gulf Coast region.

      Van der Wiel told DeSmog, “The odds for a comparable event have now changed by at least 40 per cent, and our best estimate is a doubling. That is because of the increases in greenhouse gases.”

    • Fossil Fuel Industry Paid for Meetings with GOP Attorneys General to Plan Attack on Clean Power Plan

      Fossil fuel giants Murray Energy and Southern Company paid for meetings with Republican attorneys general to discuss their opposition to the Clean Power Plan less than two weeks before the same GOP officials petitioned federal courts to block the Obama administration’s signature climate proposal, according to private emails (see below) from state attorneys general obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. The meetings took place at an August 2015 summit hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) in West Virginia, where attendees were offered the opportunity to meet with GOP attorneys general in exchange for financial donations to help reelect the Republican state prosecutors.

      Confidential documents also reveal that some of the GOP attorneys general again discussed “the future of the fight to stop the Clean Power Plan” at a meeting of the Republican Attorneys General Association’s 501(c)(4) organization, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, this past April.

      The previously unknown meetings and financial donations – revealed in copies of conference materials, most stamped “confidential,” that were emailed to state attorneys general who attended the summit and obtained by CMD through public records requests – offer the first look at the behind-the-scenes coordination between GOP attorneys general and the fossil fuel industry to undermine the implementation of the Clean Power Plan.

    • What You Need to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest

      Over the past month, thousands of protesters, including Native Americans from more than 100 tribes across the country, have traveled to North Dakota to help the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe block the Dakota Access Pipeline from being built.

      Last week, the Standing Rock Nation filed an emergency petition to overturn the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for the pipeline, which will be located a half-mile from the reservation through land taken from the tribe in 1958. The tribe says they were not consulted and a survey of the area found several sites of “significant cultural and historic value” in the pipeline path, including burial grounds.

      But on Saturday, Dakota Access crews began bulldozing anyway, leading to a violent confrontation between protesters and security guards. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was at the construction site as security guards attacked protesters with pepper spray and dogs.

    • Amazon burns as Brazil signs Paris pledge

      Brazil’s new president, Michel Temer, will next week sign up to the Paris Agreement on climate change by committing Brazil to a reduction of 37% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, and of 43% by 2030.

      But critics say that the commitment glosses over the government’s failure to address the legal and illegal forest clearance that is adding to global warming.

      Brazil’s emissions are the seventh highest in the world, and they come mostly from what is called land-use change − in other words, deforestation.

      The government has promised that all illegal deforestation will be ended by 2030 – which, as critics point out, allows for it to continue for another 14 years − and sidesteps the thorny question of legally-permitted deforestation.

    • Obama on Climate Change: The Trends Are ‘Terrifying’

      Seventy-four years ago, a naval battle off this remote spit of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean changed the course of World War II. Last week, President Obama flew here to swim with Hawaiian monk seals and draw attention to a quieter war — one he has waged against rising seas, freakish storms, deadly droughts and other symptoms of a planet choking on its own fumes.

      Bombs may not be falling. The sound of gunfire does not concentrate the mind. What Mr. Obama has seen instead are the charts and graphs of a warming planet. “And they’re terrifying,” he said in a recent interview in Honolulu.

      “What makes climate change difficult is that it is not an instantaneous catastrophic event,” he said. “It’s a slow-moving issue that, on a day-to-day basis, people don’t experience and don’t see.”

    • ‘I Want to Win Someday’: Tribes Make Stand Against Pipeline

      Verna Bailey stared into the silvery ripples of a man-made lake, looking for the spot where she had been born. “Out there,” she said, pointing to the water. “I lived down there with my grandmother and grandfather. We had a community there. Now it’s all gone.”

      Fifty years ago, hers was one of hundreds of Native American families whose homes and land were inundated by rising waters after the Army Corps of Engineers built the Oahe Dam along the Missouri River, part of a huge midcentury public-works project approved by Congress to provide electricity and tame the river’s floods.

      To Ms. Bailey, 76, and thousands of other tribal members who lived along the river’s length, the project was a cultural catastrophe, residents and historians say. It displaced families, uprooted cemeteries and swamped lands where tribes grazed cattle, drove wagons and gathered wild grapes and medicinal tea.

    • North Dakota Tribe’s Request to Stop Work on Pipeline Denied

      The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s attempt to halt construction of the four-state Dakota Access oil pipeline near their North Dakota reservation, a cause that has drawn thousands to join a protest, was denied Friday by a federal judge.

      The tribe had challenged the Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to grant permits at more than 200 water crossings for Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners’ $3.8 billion pipeline, saying that the project violates several federal laws, including the National Historic Preservation Act, and will harm water supplies. The tribe also says ancient sacred sites have been disturbed during construction.

      U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington denied the tribe’s request for a temporary injunction in a 58-page opinion. A status conference is scheduled for Sept. 16.

    • Obama administration orders ND pipeline construction to stop

      The Obama administration said it would not authorize construction on a critical stretch of the Dakota Access pipeline, handing a significant victory to the Indian tribe fighting the project the same day the group lost a court battle.

      The administration said construction would halt until it can do more environmental assessments.

    • The Obama administration just made a major announcement on the Dakota Access Pipeline

      The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced it will be temporarily halting construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline effective immediately.

      The ruling came down shortly after a federal judge cited with the pipeline companies in denying a motion filed by indigenous tribes to stop pipeline construction. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had granted permits to Energy Transfer Partners’ family of companies to build a $3.8 billion, 1100-mile pipeline crossing four states that would carry as many as 578,000 barrels of oil per day across indigenous land and the Missouri River, which supplies drinking water to approximately 17 million people.

    • Gov. Brown signs sweeping legislation to combat climate change

      California will become a petri dish for international efforts to slow global warming under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday, forcing one of the world’s largest economies to squeeze into a dramatically smaller carbon footprint.

      “What we’re doing here is farsighted, as well as far-reaching,” Brown said at a signing ceremony at Vista Hermosa Natural Park in downtown Los Angeles. “California is doing something that no other state has done.”

      The legislation, SB 32, requires the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, a much more ambitious target than the previous goal of hitting 1990 levels by 2020.

      Cutting emissions will affect nearly all aspects of life in the state — where people live, how they get to work, how their food is produced and where their electricity comes from.

    • A Whistle-Blower Accuses the Kochs of “Poisoning” an Arkansas Town

      In June, Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the billionaires Charles and David Koch, launched a new corporate public-relations campaign called “End the Divide,” to advance the notion that Koch Industries is deeply concerned by growing inequality in America. An ad for the campaign urges viewers to “look around,” as an image of an imposing white mansion is replaced by one of blighted urban streets. “America is divided,” an announcer intones, with “government and corporations picking winners and losers, rigging the system against people, creating a two-tiered society with policies that fail our most vulnerable.”

      The message was surprising, coming from a company owned by two of the richest men in the world, who have spent millions of dollars pushing political candidates and programs that favor unfettered markets and oppose government intervention on behalf of the poor. But no trouble appeared to have been spared in the commercial’s creation. It features a cast of downtrodden Americans of all colors and creeds. To portray corporate greed, it includes a shot of a Wall Street sign, followed by a smug businessman looking down at the camera, dressed in a flashy suit and tie. But, according to Dickie Guice, who worked as a safety coördinator at a large Koch-owned paper plant in Arkansas, the company need not have gone to such lengths. Instead of scouting America for examples of social neglect, the Kochs could have turned the cameras on their own factory.

      This summer, Guice decided to speak out about the paper mill in Crossett, a working-class town of some fifty-two hundred residents ten miles north of the Louisiana border.* The mill is run by the paper giant Georgia-Pacific, which has been owned by Koch Industries since 2005. According to E.P.A. records, it emits more than 1.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals each year, including numerous known carcinogens. Georgia-Pacific says that it has permits to operate the mill as it does, and disputes that it is harming local health and safety. But as far back as the nineteen-nineties, people living near the plant have described noxious odors and corrosive effluents that have forced them to stay indoors, as well as what seems to them unusually high rates of illness and death. Speaking by phone from his home, in Sterlington, Louisiana, Guice pointed the finger directly at the mill’s owners, and described a corporate coverup of air and water pollution that he says is “poisoning” the predominantly African-American community.

    • Volkswagen engineer pleads guilty in emissions scandal

      In a Detroit District Court today, 62-year-old engineer James Robert Liang pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the government, commit wire fraud, and violate the Clean Air Act. Liang, currently a California resident, worked for Volkswagen’s diesel development department in Wolfsburg, Germany from 1983 to 2008.

      Volkswagen Group has been beset by scandal since last September, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made public that VW had been including illegal software in diesel Volkswagens and Audis. The software detected when the cars were being tested in a lab so that they could pass emissions tests, but once the cars hit real-world conditions, the software circumvented the emissions control system to spew large amounts of nitrogen oxide (NOx) into the atmosphere.

      According to the plea agreement (PDF), in 2006 Liang and others began building the EA 189 diesel engine that has been the center of the controversy. When the engineers realized they couldn’t meet consumer expectations and US air quality standards at the same time, they began looking into using illegal software (often known in the auto industry as a “defeat device”). By 2008, Liang worked to “calibrate and refine the defeat device.” Later that year, he moved to the US to help with “certification, testing, and warranty issues” for the company’s new diesels.

    • Finance

      • Holy Crap: Wells Fargo Has To Fire 5,300 Employees For Scam Billing

        This story is crazy. Late yesterday it was revealed that banking giant Wells Fargo had to fire 5,300 employees over a massive scam in which those employees created over 2 million fake accounts to stuff with fees in order to meet their quarterly numbers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also fined the company $185 million ($100 million to the CFPB, $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and another $50 million to Los Angeles).

      • University of California hires India-based IT outsourcer, lays off tech workers

        The University of California is laying off a group of IT workers at its San Francisco campus as part of a plan to move work offshore.

        The layoffs will happen at the end of February, but before the final day arrives the IT employees expect to train foreign replacements from India-based IT services firm HCL. The firm is working under a university contract valued at $50 million over five years.

        This layoff may have huge implications. That’s because the university’s IT services agreement with HCL can be leveraged by any institution in the 10-campus University of California system, which serves some 240,000 students and employs some 190,000 faculty and staff.

      • University of California’s outsourcing is wrong, says U.S. lawmaker

        A decision by the University of California to lay off IT employees and send their jobs overseas is under fire from U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif) and the IEEE-USA.

        The university recently informed about 80 IT workers at its San Francisco campus, including contract employees and vendor contractors, that it hired India-based HCL, under a $50 million contract, to manage infrastructure and networking-related services.

        The university employees will remain on the job until the end of February, but before then they are expecting to train their foreign replacements. The number of affected employees may expand. The university’s IT services agreement with HCL can be leveraged by any institution in the 10-campus system.

        “How are they [the university] going to tell students to go into STEM fields when they are doing as much as they can to do a number on the engineers in their employment?” said Lofgren, in an interview.

        Peter Eckstein, the president of the IEEE-USA, said what the university is doing “is just one more sad example of corporations, a major university system in this case, importing non-Americans to eliminate American IT jobs.” This engineering association has some 235,000 members.

      • Don’t buy the new iPhone until Apple pays its taxes

        Apple is about to launch a new iPhone. I remember when, under Steve Jobs, the arrival of a new iPhone was a breathless and secretive affair, as though Willy Wonka himself was emerging from his factory and making impossible claims of his improbable technology. And if the iPhone didn’t quite live up – if it took years to get copying and pasting, or if Siri was basically a party trick – no one minded so much, because Jobs was the tech universe version of the late Gene Wilder, giving an idiosyncratic performance nobody can explain or match.

        How far we’ve fallen. I’m writing this the night before the iPhone 7 unveiling, and I know nothing will surprise us. You heard it here first: the new iPhone will look and act almost exactly like the current iPhone to any normal person. It will probably be a little faster, come in a new color choice, and be absolutely boring. This time the big killer feature, apparently, is that there’s no headphone port.

        How fantastic – I have been looking for an opportunity to throw away all my headphones and buy new ones directly from Apple. I can’t wait to watch Tim Cook ploddingly explain how much better everything will be in the new version. I love listening to Cook because when you look in his eyes you can tell he knows he’s a second-string community theater actor trying desperately to speak fancy words he learned by rote, following in the footsteps of the man who had the job before he did, Sir Laurence Goddamn Olivier.

      • Why don’t bankers go to jail? You asked Google – here’s the answer

        Ask Kweku Adoboli why bankers do not go to jail, and he would no doubt look surprised. A London-based trader at the Swiss bank UBS, Adoboli was jailed in November 2012 for what police described as the biggest fraud in UK history. He racked up £1.2bn of losses through secretive trades – and at one point those trades could have forced UBS to take a £7bn hit, enough to bring down the Swiss bank.

        He is not the only banker to have been incarcerated. Nick Leeson – jailed in Singapore for bringing down Barings in 1995 – is now on the after-dinner speaking circuit. In August, he announced free trading programmes intended, he said, to “help people not make the same mistakes I did”.

        Tom Hayes is behind bars, serving 11 years after being convicted for rigging Libor interest rates. Four former Barclays bankers have also been jailed for conspiring to fraudulently rig global benchmark interest rates.

        But those who ask why bankers have not gone to jail are probably thinking of the 2008 banking crisis and, with the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers approaching (15 September 2008), the question may once again be at the front of people’s minds. After Lehmans collapsed, more than £65bn of taxpayer funds were pumped in to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds Banking Group and a rescue package put in place for Bradford & Bingley. Northern Rock had been nationalised earlier in 2008.

      • Uber drivers dealt setback in background-check lawsuit

        Uber won a courtroom victory on Wednesday when an appeals court ruled that drivers are subject to individual arbitration in a lawsuit over background checks, a ruling that might help the ride-hailing company fend off another costly class action lawsuit filed by its drivers.

        While the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals found that agreements signed by two former drivers for the service over background checks “clearly and unmistakably” require legal disputes be settled by a private arbiter, the reasoning may be applied to another class action lawsuit filed by drivers over the company’s employment classifications. Uber agreed to settle that lawsuit earlier this year — an agreement that was rejected by a federal judge last month.

        Arbitration is a method frequently used by companies for resolving legal conflicts outside of the court system. However, critics say that binding arbitration clauses give corporations an unfair advantage over employees and consumers who do not have the resources to challenge companies individually.

      • Denmark to pay for Panama Papers data on tax evaders

        “We must use the necessary measures to catch the tax evaders hiding fortunes in for example Panama with the aim to avoid paying tax in Denmark,” Minister for Taxation Karsten Lauritzen said in a statement.

        “We cannot be sure of the end result, but everything suggests that it is useful information that the Danish tax authority will now pursue.”

        The government would pay the source an amount in the “lower millions” of kroner (one million kroner is €134,000, $151,000) for the material, which it estimated could contain information on 320 cases involving between 500 and 600 Danish taxpayers.

        The Danish tax authority had already received a “sample” of the data free of charge, the Ministry of Taxation said.

        “Against this backdrop it is the tax authority’s assessment that the information is sufficiently relevant and valid to initiate tax investigations of a number of the companies and individuals appearing in the material,” it said.

      • When one job won’t pay the bills and several gigs is the new normal

        Tough. Like slavery. Difficult and ineffectual. A few of the sentiments expressed by 83 participants who responded to an Yle straw poll about the rigours of holding down multiple jobs. The views indicate that for the most part, moonlighting can easily become a physical drain and lead to exhaustion. For others, extra work gigs provide a pleasant change of routine and welcome extra income.

      • U.S. Added 177,000 jobs in August, All of Them in the Service Industry

        In portraying herself as a virtual Barack Obama third term, Clinton ties herself not only to a foreign policy that continues to inflame the Middle East, but also to his domestic economic record. A key element is job creation, the cornerstone of any real growth.

        For example, during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary Clinton praised Obama’s efforts to steer the nation’s recovery.

        “Now, I don’t think President Obama and Vice President Biden get the credit they deserve for saving us from the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes,” she told the crowd in Philadelphia. “Nearly 15 million new private-sector jobs… And an auto industry that just had its best year ever.”

        Leaving aside some fuzzy math to get to that tally of 15 million new jobs, Clinton purposefully passes off quantity with what we’ll call quality.

        A quality job is one that is sustainable, with full-time status and benefits, the kind of work that both rebuilds America’s soul while at the same time makes work more profitable than unemployment benefits and aid. Most importantly for the greater economy, a quality job is one that allows the worker to put money into society. Rising tide lifting all boats.

      • Greasing the Outstretched Hands

        Donald Trump with his tangled business dealings is a walking conflict of interest, but Hillary Clinton’s connections to the world of high finance and political pull creates its own problems with outstretched palms, writes Michael Winship.

      • Confessions of a Brexist

        Fighting my way through this underground morass I emerged into the pergola-ed light of Victoria station. After getting my ticket—no credit cards accepted at the ticket machines, clearly another bit of Brexit wagon-circling—I stared for a long time up at the big board of departures and arrivals. I simply couldn’t find the name of my destination Pulborough in West Sussex. The announcement soon came: Industrial Action in the South of England. What with pensions halved by the referendum and worker’s rights under assault it’s no wonder that during this hot end of summer one can’t help but think of the Winter of Discontent. A recent study to be read in yesterday’s papers showed that many in Britain will have to postpone retirement till their mid-eighties if they hope to get by.

        Eventually, I devised a way to get to my mother-in-law’s Sussex village. As the train exited the post-industrial, post-Brexit gloom of London and began to make its way through the countryside, the conductor came through the carriage. I asked him about the reasons for the strike. It seems that the station guards in this privatized patch of the former national rail system want to retain their duty of signaling to the driver that the train is safe to leave the station. The company—called Southern—claims that this old-fashioned practice is no longer necessary and its elimination will lead to cost-savings. Naturally, the union sees this “efficiency” as a prelude to laying-off more workers.

        “It’s an odd strike,” I opined. “If there’s one thing the Brits are good at doing on their own these days, it’s shutting the door.”

      • Hawaiian seafood caught by foreign crews confined on boats

        Pier 17 doesn’t even show up on most Honolulu maps. Cars whiz past it on their way to Waikiki’s famous white sand beaches. Yet few locals, let alone passing tourists, are aware that just behind a guarded gate, another world exists: foreign fishermen confined to American boats for years at a time.

        Hundreds of undocumented men are employed in this unique U.S. fishing fleet, due to a federal loophole that allows them to work but exempts them from most basic labor protections. Many come from impoverished Southeast Asian and Pacific nations to take the dangerous jobs, which can pay as little as 70 cents an hour.

        With no legal standing on U.S. soil, the men are at the mercy of their American captains on American-flagged, American-owned vessels, catching prized swordfish and ahi tuna. Since they don’t have visas, they are not allowed to set foot on shore. The entire system, which contradicts other state and federal laws, operates with the blessing of high-ranking U.S. lawmakers and officials, an Associated Press investigation found.

      • And the Ship Goes Down

        The eternal promise of capitalist democracy is a future that somehow breaks from the past. In this alternate universe solutions to global warming, the threat of nuclear weapons, never-ending wars fought to control economic resources and the just distribution of political and economic power are always but one election away. Hillary Clinton is the agent of ‘effective’ change and Donald Trump is the agent of reactionary change. That the political and economic trajectories of the last half century have been uni-directional in favor of concentrated wealth and power are (1) the predicted outcomes of the theories by which they were sold and (2) antithetical to any notion of democratic representation as it is generally understood.

      • Rock Against the TPP: Artists & celebrities fight the Trans-Pacific Partnership
      • Prominent Scholars Decry TPP’s “Frontal Attack” on Law and Democracy

        More than 200 legal and economic scholars—including President Barack Obama’s Harvard Law School mentor Laurence Tribe—have penned a letter to Congress warning that the pro-corporate Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) regime enshrined in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) “threatens the rule of law and undermines our nation’s democratic institutions.”

        As ISDS “threatens to dilute constitutional protections, weaken the judicial branch, and outsource our domestic legal system to a system of private arbitration that is isolated from essential checks and balances,” the academics urge (pdf) lawmakers to reject the TPP, despite the Obama administration’s full-court press to pass the trade agreement during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress.

      • Don’t Buy the Hype — the TPP Won’t Secure the US

        As President Obama prepares to make his big lame-duck push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he’s narrowed his sales pitch for the deal down to two basic arguments, and he made both of them during an interview this weekend with CNN.

        The first argument the president is making in favor of the TPP is, of course, the idea that it’s going to be great for the American economy.

        According to him, the TPP will help us write the rules of the Asia-Pacific marketplace for decades to come.

        This is the standard argument for the TPP, and it’s the most obviously flawed.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Greasing the Outstretched Palms of the Candidates

        The recipe could not be simpler. Mix cynicism with greed, quickly stir and voila! American politics and government served up on a platter to the highest bidder.

        Call it low cuisine. And it doesn’t get any lower than what we’ve seen during this wretched campaign season — a presidential contest that, as one friend in Washington recently said, pits “the unethical versus the unhinged.”

        Psychiatric evaluations notwithstanding, for sure each of the two candidates is the byproduct of crony capitalism run amok. Donald Trump started out boasting that his much-flaunted wealth meant that he could self-fund his campaign and that this made him incorruptible, a feckless notion that went flying out the window as soon as he became the presumptive, official party nominee and went running to fat cat funders with his diminutive hands out.

        As The Washington Post’s Matea Gold reported Sept. 1, “The New York billionaire, who has cast himself as free from the influence of the party’s donor class, has spent this summer forging bonds with wealthy GOP financiers — seeking their input on how to run his campaign and recast his policies for the general election, according to more than a dozen people who have participated in the conversations.”

        And let’s not get started on the wacky world of Trump’s actual finances, his bragging about using cash to buy political favors, his failure to release tax returns, his dodgy connections with overseas banks, Russian plutocrats and organized crime. “… It is safe to say,” The New York Times recently reported, “that no previous major party presidential nominee has had finances nearly as complicated…” Now there’s a classic Times understatement for you.

      • Arrest Warrants Issued for Green Party’s Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka (Multimedia)

        Earlier this week, Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, traveled to North Dakota to join the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s protests against the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL). At one point during the demonstrations, Stein spray-painted a bulldozer with the words “I approve this message.” Baraka spray-painted “decolonization” on other construction equipment. Each has since been charged with vandalism and trespassing.

      • The terror against Ukraine’s journalists is fuelled by political elites

        Watching a video of journalists running for their lives amid choking smoke in a building set ablaze in Kyiv is horrifying. It is even more chilling to realise that some of these people are colleagues and close friends you have known for years.

        We would disagree on many political issues, but it is still shocking to see where the exercise of freedom of speech in post-revolutionary Ukraine can lead you. At the same time, the increasing violence against Ukraine’s journalists brings powerful voices at home and abroad together in the expanding uprising against Soviet mentality, which has plagued the country for the last 25 years.

      • The Trumpillary War Machine Is Bad News

        NBC then showed clips of 9/11 and of Obama announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden, but not a single image of a single body or bombed out house. After 15 years of immoral, illegal, catastrophic murder sprees, Clinton began by taking credit for her “experience” of having been part of making all those wars happen.

        So, Lauer asked her, not about any of those wars, but about her emails. Eventually he turned to Iraq, and she claimed to have learned her lesson. Although she still wanted war in Libya and several other countries and still wants it badly in Syria (though Lauer didn’t get into that), so she’s clearly learned nothing. She did claim accurately that Trump backed war on Iraq and Libya too, while still claiming inaccurately that Gaddafi was planning a massacre. Lauer confirmed and corrected nothing.

      • This Election Is Hillary Clinton’s to Lose, and She’s Screwing It Up

        Clinton’s gender is not her biggest liability. Her refusal to even attempt to embrace bold progressive valued…

      • ‘Commander-in-Chief’ Forum Panned as Colossal Failure of Journalism

        Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, called the forum “an absolute disgrace” and just more proof that the entire presidential debate system needs an overhaul. “Matt Lauer treated this forum less as a chance to educate voters about the real differences in temperament and policy between the candidates and more as a chance to do clickbait trolling,” Green said. “Instead of asking about big ideas, he asked small-bore questions that voters aren’t asking at their dinner tables.”

      • What Workers Aren’t Hearing from Democrats

        If ever there were a sign that the presidential race isn’t over yet, Democrats got one this week at eastern Ohio’s Canfield Fair.

        On Labor Day, an iconic holiday for what used to be a reliable Democratic constituency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump got an enthusiastic welcome from thousands of Youngstown-area fans who waited hours in the blazing heat to see him.

        This scene seemed all the more striking because it took place in a solidly blue-collar county that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. And because it was Trump’s second trip to the Democratic stronghold of Mahoning County in the past three weeks.

      • In Omaha, Jill Stein defends spray-painting bulldozer at North Dakota pipeline protest

        The Green Party presidential candidate — who is eagerly courting former Bernie Sanders supporters — told an Omaha crowd on Wednesday that she had no choice but to spray-paint a bulldozer at an anti-pipeline protest in North Dakota after being asked to by Indian leaders.

        Stein said she didn’t feel as if she could say “no” to such a simple request from people leading the fight against a crude-oil pipeline.

        Stein was charged Wednesday with two misdemeanor counts of vandalism and trespassing in North Dakota for her impromptu graffiti.

        “I felt like it was the least I could do in front of these Indian leaders, as they were putting their lives and their bodies on the line,” said Stein, who spoke at the Metropolitan Community College’s Fort Omaha campus.

      • Jill Stein says voters are ‘clamoring’ for other choices. She’s right.

        Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee for president, met Thursday with the Tribune Editorial Board and shared a few ideas you might typically associate with a fringe, environment-focused candidate: She spoke of nuclear disarmament, abandoning fossil fuels, etc.

        But darned if Stein, a physician who was raised in Highland Park, didn’t also articulate a frustration expressed this September by the majority of American voters, who seem restless over the country’s direction yet don’t like either major party candidate for president. Voters are “clamoring” for other choices, Stein tells us. They want “something else.”

        Yes, for her it’s a self-serving observation, but it happens to be accurate. Polls show a majority of voters have an unfavorable view of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Americans also say they’d be interested in considering a third-party candidate, even without knowing much about Stein or Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.

      • There Is an Arrest Warrant Out for Jill Stein

        Third-party presidential candidates have participated in acts of civil disobedience, risked arrest, been arrested and been jailed with some frequency over the past 150 years. So the fact that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein faces misdemeanor criminal charges in North Dakota stemming from a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline is hardly unprecedented.

        But it is politically significant.

      • A Debate Disaster Waiting to Happen

        There was not much of a contest in Wednesday night’s forum with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Mrs. Clinton answered the questions of the moderator, Matt Lauer, in coherent sentences, often with specific details. Mr. Trump alternated between rambling statements and grandiose boasts when he wasn’t lying.

        Mr. Lauer largely neglected to ask penetrating questions, call out falsehoods or insist on answers when it was obvious that Mr. Trump’s responses had drifted off.

        If the moderators of the coming debates do not figure out a better way to get the candidates to speak accurately about their records and policies — especially Mr. Trump, who seems to feel he can skate by unchallenged with his own version of reality while Mrs. Clinton is grilled and entangled in the fine points of domestic and foreign policy — then they will have done the country a grave disservice.

        Whether or not one agrees with her positions, Mrs. Clinton, formerly secretary of state and once a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, showed a firm understanding of the complex issues facing the country. Mr. Trump reveled in his ignorance about global affairs and his belief that leading the world’s most powerful nation is no harder than running his business empire, which has included at least four bankruptcies.

      • From Russian TV Network, Not So Much Love for Donald Trump

        Donald Trump’s interview with Larry King on the Russian-government-funded television network RT America is being widely seen in the mainstream U.S. media as evidence of unseemly coziness between Trump and authoritarian Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

        The interview came after months of claims by Democratic Party officials and news media pundits that the Russian government is trying to get Trump elected.

        RT America has a long history of coverage that benefits the Russian government and is critical of the United States, as many former employees have complained.

        But there’s one problem with the theory that RT America and the Russian government are fond of Trump: RT America is sometimes more critical of Trump than U.S. media.

      • Clinton, Trump, Lauer, All Lose Battle of the MSNBC CINC Forum

        In the end, it was actually America who lost last night at the MSNBC Commander-in-Chief forum, because one of these people will be our president in a few months, and the other two will no doubt live forever on our TVs.

      • Donald Trump Lacks Sense or Sensibility

        The most revealing moment in the presidential candidates’ first joint forum Wednesday night came when Donald Trump told the world how much he admires Vladimir Putin.

        Never mind that the Russian strongman invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea. Never mind that he supports the butcher Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Never mind that so many of his political opponents end up murdered or imprisoned. Never mind that U.S. officials suspect his government of trying to disrupt our election with cyberattacks. In Trump’s star-struck eyes, all of this makes him “a leader, far more than our president has been a leader.”

      • Donald Trump, a Gold Medalist in Playing America’s ‘Broken System’

        Better than anyone, Donald Trump made the case for why our campaign money system is rotten. Unsurprisingly, the prime example he used was himself.

        “I was a businessman,” Trump explained at a Republican debate in August 2015. “I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”

        Bravo. Sort of. In retrospect, it’s remarkable that Republican primary voters seemed to reward Trump for saying that he bought off politicians right and left, as if admitting to soft bribery was a sign of what a great reformer he would be.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Mass Aerial Surveillance Is a Growing Orwellian Concern in the United States

        Cameras at intersections and in public parks have become commonplace, but are you aware that a plane flying overhead could be tracking your every move?

        According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report in August, the city of Baltimore has been conducting surveillance over parts of the city with megapixel cameras attached to Cessna airplanes since at least January. This news comes after activists expressed concerns that mysterious Cessnas were seen flying above Black Lives Matter protests in 2015.

        FBI spy planes, equipped not just with cameras but with cellphone surveillance devices as well, have become a new phenomenon in the United States. While the agency says the planes are not designed for mass surveillance, that claim is getting shakier by the day, especially in light of evidence of what’s happening in places like Baltimore.

        The Stingray is a mobile cellphone surveillance device the size of a suitcase. Police departments across the country use the devices to collect cellphone data in specific areas of a town or city. The federal government has manned planes with these devices in the past, but to what extent they are in use federally and locally is unclear.

      • Let NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden return to US, urges Zachary Quinto

        Actor Zachary Quinto has called for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be allowed to return to America without facing espionage charges.

        The Star Trek actor said Mr Snowden had acted with “great courage” and it was “absurd” to brand him a “treasonist” while he remains in exile in Russia.

        Quinto plays journalist Glenn Greenwald in Oliver Stone’s new film Snowden, which tells the story of how the former NSA analyst leaked details of mass government surveillance in 2013.

      • Arrests over hacks of CIA and FBI staff
      • Snowden star Zachary Quinto is so paranoid he covers his laptop camera with tape
      • Zachary turns technophobe
      • Zachary Quinto paranoid about privacy after filming Snowden
      • Zachary Quinto Reveals He Covers His Laptop Cameras with Tape!
      • Top Officials Want to Split Cyber Command From NSA

        The Obama administration’s top defense and intelligence officials are proposing a plan to separate the spying and war fighting arms of America’s vast hacking apparatus, an idea that was recommended but rejected after the Edward Snowden revelations of 2013.

        Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have gotten behind the proposal to separate the National Security Agency, the digital spying arm, from U.S. Cyber Command, which develops and deploys cyber weapons, three national security officials tell NBC News. Representatives for both men declined to comment for the record.

      • This Hilariously Cruel Hoax Tweet Just Put Lots Of People On NSA’s Radar

        WHY WE CARE: Let’s break down what ‘s happening in this tweet. The picture on the left looks to be a screencap of a post about Google’s new initiative to thwart ISIS recruitment. The image on the right is another screencap, this one implying that if Google users look up “How to join ISIS,” the search algorithm will instead lead them to “World’s smallest horse.” (The world’s smallest horse is apparently a 14-inch pinto stallion named Einstein, and he is beyond adorable.) The actual text of the tweet is a deceptively earnest “Amazing. Well done, Google.” My personal reaction to seeing this collection of images and words was slightly skeptical amazement. It seemed like something cool that might exist, and stranger things have indeed happened. (It feels weird to casually use that expression now.) Apple’s iPhone 7 unveiling was going on simultaneously, with news of questionable technology hanging in the air already. I stopped short of actually trying out this preventative measure, though, skepticism winning the day. It turned out to be the right move. A lot of other people did not suspect anything fishy in Heck’s ultra-dry trolling tweet. Enough of the 7000+ retweeters fell for it, in fact, that there was a substantial increase in Google searches for “How to join ISIS.”

      • Police are surveilling the wrong targets due to incorrect IP addresses

        POLICE AND the security services frequently provide incorrect IP addresses in applications to intercept communications data with potentially “serious consequences” for the people targeted and the investigations that supposedly need the data.

        The details were contained in the latest annual report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner’s Office (IOCCO).

        The report does not provide a figure for the number of times that the security and law enforcement agencies have provided incorrect IP addresses, but the organisation said that it received reports of 1,199 known errors in 2015.

      • FBI arrests hackers who allegedly leaked info on government agents

        U.S. authorities have arrested two suspects allegedly involved in dumping details on 29,000 officials with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

        Andrew Otto Boggs and Justin Gray Liverman have been charged with hacking into the internet accounts of senior U.S. government officials and breaking into government computer systems.

        Both suspects were arrested on Thursday, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

        Boggs, age 22, and Liverman, 24, are from North Carolina and are allegedly part of a hacking group called Crackas With Attitude.

        From October 2015 until February, they used hacking techniques, including “victim impersonation” to trick internet service providers and a government help desk into giving up access to the accounts, the DOJ alleged.

      • Senators Burr & Feinstein Look To Bring Back Bill To Outlaw Real Encryption

        Back in May we noted that the ridiculous and terrible anti-encryption bill from Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein was dead in the water. The bill had all sorts of problems with incredibly broad and vague requirements, but the quick summary was that tech companies would have to figure out a way to backdoor all encryption, because if they received a warrant, they’d be required to decrypt any communication.

        Rather than get the message that this was a really, really bad idea, it appears that Burr and Feinstein have just gone back to the drawing board, trying to recraft the bill. Julian Sanchez got his hands on one of a few prospective new drafts that are being floated around and has an analysis of the update. The draft that Sanchez has seen tries to fix some of the problems, but doesn’t really fix the main problems of the bill.

      • Feinstein-Burr 2.0: The Crypto Backdoor Bill Lives On

        When it was first released back in April, a “discussion draft” of the Compliance With Court Orders Act sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) met with near universal derision from privacy advocates and security experts. (Your humble author was among the critics.) In the wake of that chilly reception, press reports were declaring the bill effectively dead just weeks later, even as law enforcement and intelligence officials insisted they would continue pressing for a solution to the putative “going dark” problem that encryption creates for government eavesdroppers. Feinstein and Burr, however, appear not to have given up on their baby: Their offices have been circulating a revised draft, which I’ve recently gotten hold of.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Records Show Obama Hired Behavioral Experts to Expand Use of Govt. Programs

        The Obama administration quietly hired 20 social and behavioral research experts to help expand the use of government programs at dozens of agencies by, among other things, simplifying federal forms, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch. The controversial group of experts is collectively known as the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) and it functions under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

        In 2015 Obama signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use behavioral science to sell their programs to the public, the records obtained by Judicial Watch reveal. By then the government had contracted “20 leading social and behavioral research experts” that at that point had already been involved in “more than 75 agency collaborations,” the records state. A memo sent from SBST chair Maya Shankar, a neuroscientist, to OSTP Director John Holdren offers agencies guidance and information about available government support for using behavioral insights to improve federal forms. Sent electronically, the memo is titled “Behavioral Science Insights and Federal Forms.”

        The records, obtained from the OSTP under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), also include a delivery by Holdren in which he insists that the social and behavioral sciences “are real science, with immensely valuable practical applications—the views of a few members of Congress to the contrary notwithstanding—and that these sciences abundantly warrant continuing support in the Federal science and technology budget.” Holdren, a Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate is a peculiar character who worked as an environmental professor at Harvard and the University of California Berkeley before becoming Obama’s science advisor. In the late 70s he co-authored a book with doomsayer Paul Ehrlich advocating for mandatory sterilization of the American people and forced abortions in order to depopulate the country. A head of the OSTP Holdren technically oversees the SBST.

      • Chelsea Manning Begins Hunger Strike, Demanding “Dignity and Respect” in Prison

        U.S. Army Whistleblower Chelsea Manning began a hunger strike in military prison Friday, her attorneys confirmed.

        “I need help. I am not getting any,” Manning wrote in a statement. “I was driven to suicide by the lack of care for my gender dysphoria that I have been desperate for. I didn’t get any. I still haven’t gotten any.”

        Manning announced her identity as a transgender woman on August 22, 2013, a day after she was sentenced to 35 years in military prison.

        After attempting to commit suicide in July, Manning was informed by military officials that she was being investigated for “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens.” She is facing indefinite solitary confinement, or a return to maximum-security detention.

      • Chelsea Manning Begins Hunger Strike to Protest Bullying by Prison and US Government

        Today, after years of requesting the care she needs for gender dysphoria, Chelsea Manning has released a statement about the start of her hunger strike.

        Chelsea is demanding written assurances from the Army she will receive all of the medically prescribed recommendations for her gender dysphoria and that the “high tech bullying” will stop. “High tech bullying,” is what Chelsea describes as “the constant, deliberate and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials.”

      • Panamanian Police Assault Indigenous Dam Protesters

        Panama’s national police left approximately 20 indigenous Ngäbe protesters injured last week in what one medic described as an “absurd and irresponsible act.”

        The protesters, all residents of Gualaquita, mobilized against the Barro Blanco hydro dam after the project’s owner and operator, Honduran-based Generadora del Istmo (GENISA) began flooding the Tabasará River basin with blessings from the government.

        It didn’t take long for Ngäbe communities within the basin to suffer the consequences. In the community of Kiad, local road connections were washed away by the flood waters leaving entire families geographically isolated. Houses were also submerged by the rising waters, along with significant archaeological sites in the region.

      • Chelsea Manning on Hunger Strike Citing Lack of Medical Treatment

        Chelsea Manning began a hunger strike today at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is serving a 35-year sentence for the leaking of hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

        Manning is seeking written assurances from the Army that she will receive the medical treatments for her gender dysphoria beyond the hormone treatment she began in early 2015. Manning has sued the government to get such treatments and to lift the male grooming standards she is subject to that prevent her from growing her hair out.

      • ‘Marriage is for ADULTS’ Sweden hit by huge number of child brides as young as ELEVEN

        An influx of underage brides who have arrived in the country during the crisis has left it facing fresh problems.

        In Denmark, a city which took a huge chunk of the nation’s 20,000 asylum seekers, is now considering banning child marriages.

        In February the Danes announced plans to separate child brides from their husbands upon arrival in the country.

        Oussama El-Saadi, a high-profile imam from a mosque in Aarhus, urged them to scrap the idea.

        Despite protests, politicians are choosing whether to vote in favour of not recognising it.

      • Indian workers staged one of the largest strikes in human history and no one in the USA noticed

        Tens of millions of unionized public sector workers walked off the job last Friday in a one-day strike against PM Modi’s plan to privatise public industries and increase foreign investment. It was one of the largest strikes in human history, if not the largest, and took place over Labour Day weekend.

        With the exception of a short notice by a guest on a CNN show, not one of the US networks ran a single story on the strike.

      • The Biggest Strike in World History? No Thanks, We’re Focusing on the New iPhone

        When tens of millions of workers go out on strike in the second-largest country in the world—and the third-largest economy in the world—resulting in what may be the biggest labor action in world history (AlterNet, 9/7/16), you’d think that would merit some kind of news coverage, right?

        Not if you’re a decision-maker at a US corporate media outlet, apparently.

        A coalition of trade unions in India representing some 180 million workers staged a one-day general strike on Friday, September 2, in protest of what they called the “anti-worker and anti-people” policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an advocate of neoliberal policies and increased foreign investment (Democracy Now!, 9/2/16). Assocham, India’s chamber of commerce, estimated that the economic impact of the strike was $2.4 billion–$2.7 billion (Hindustan Today, 9/3/16).

      • Teenagers jailed for attacking two families in southern France as ‘women were wearing shorts’

        Two teenagers have been jailed in southern France for their part in a brawl that saw three men violently attacked in front of their children after objecting to sexist comments directed at their wives.

        The two couples, a friend and their children were cycling in the city of Toulon in July when the two women were abused for wearing shorts by around 12 youths.

        Local prosecutor Bernard Machal said the teens hurled insults at the women, shouting “whore” and “go on, get naked”.

      • Inside the fight to reveal the CIA’s torture secrets

        Daniel Jones had always been friendly with the CIA personnel who stood outside his door.

        When he needed to take something out of the secured room where he read mountains of their classified material, they typically obliged. An informal understanding had taken hold after years of working together, usually during off-peak hours, so closely that Jones had parking privileges at an agency satellite office not far from its McLean, Virginia, headquarters. They would ask Jones if anything he wanted to remove contained real names or cover names of any agency officials, assets or partners, or anything that could compromise an operation. He would say no. They would nod, he would wish them a good night, and they would go their separate ways.

        [...]

        But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones’s fears, the agency’s inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy – allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.

      • Oliver Stone Interview: Why ‘Snowden’ Is His Answer to American Bullies

        Which is one reason why Stone met with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow, not once, or twice, but nine times. Stone will tell you: You can’t trust the United States government. You can’t trust the NSA, CIA, or FBI. You can’t trust the Hollywood studios, because those are corporations run by lawyers. And you certainly can’t trust the media.

      • Darsean Kelley Knew His Rights. He Got Tased Anyway.

        Police in Aurora, Colorado, got a call about a man pulling a gun on a kid. They had no description of the suspect. On their way to the scene, they stopped two Black men walking down the sidewalk.

        Darsean Kelley, one of the men, followed the officers’ orders to hold his hands above his head and turn around. His repeated requests for an explanation as to why they had been detained went unanswered. Even though it was clear he had no weapons and he was no threat to the officers, Darsean was tased in the back just as he said, “I know my rights.” Darsean fell backwards and hit his head on the pavement.

        The officers had no reason to detain them. They had done nothing wrong. When Darsean asked to talk to the officer’s boss, noting that there were witnesses to the tasing, the officer responded, “Hey, look right here. It’s all on video, sweetheart.”

      • Must Watch: Senator Ron Wyden Heads to the Senate Floor Today to Oppose Mass Hacking

        In a few hours, Senator Wyden will be going on the floor of the Senate to argue against updates to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

        You may have already heard of Rule 41: EFF and allied digital rights groups have been raising the alarm about this extra-legislative rule change. In short, the pending updates would make it easier for the government to get a warrant to hack1 into computers. It would be easy for law enforcement agents to forum shop, finding the most sympathetic judges in the country to approve these vague and dangerous warrants.

        What do we mean by “hack into computers”? In this case, the term refers to a wide range of poorly-defined techniques such as deploying malware to search, copy, and transmit private files from private computers, breaking into secure systems and accounts, exploiting vulnerabilities in widely-used software to turn our devices into surveillance tools, and much more.

      • The San Francisco 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick Kneeled So That We May All Stand Taller

        It’s hard to speak with your face pressed against concrete. Or when you can’t breathe. Or with a broken neck. And even when you manage to speak, people in power seek to silence you. Just ask the San Francisco 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick.

        The all-too-familiar voices of the status quo tried to quiet Kaepernick as soon as he began to protest. They want Americans of conscience to just sit down and shut up. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t say anything about kneeling. Kaepernick has been doing just that, and in doing so, has spoken volumes.

      • EFF to Court: Public’s Right to Access the Law Should Not be Blocked by Bogus Copyright Case

        The court in Washington, D.C., is hearing arguments in two cases against EFF client Public.Resource.Org, an open records advocacy website. In these suits, several industry groups claim they own copyrights on written standards for building safety and educational testing they helped develop, and can deny or limit public access to them even after the standards have become part of the law. Standards like these that are legal requirements—such as the National Electrical Code—are available only in paper form in Washington, D.C., in expensive printed books, or through a paywall. By posting these documents online, Public.Resource.Org seeks to make these legal requirements more available to the public that must abide by them. The industry groups allege the postings infringe their copyright, even though the standards have been incorporated into government regulations and, therefore, must be free for anyone to view, share, and discuss.

      • Who’s Left at Guantánamo? Fates of Dozens of Prisoners Are Undecided

        The last Guantánamo detainee to make the case for his release before a panel of senior administration officials is also the youngest man left at the island prison.

        In a hearing Thursday of Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Board, Hassan Ali Bin Attash, a Yemeni who is believed to be about 31 years old, said through representatives that he was working toward a high school GED diploma and hoped to join relatives in Saudi Arabia and find a job as a translator.

        Attash’s exact birthdate is uncertain, but he was certainly a young teen in 1997, when the U.S. military alleges that he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and began working for senior al Qaeda figures doing everything from bomb-making to logistics. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and spent the next two years being moved between CIA black-site prisons and interrogations in Afghanistan and Jordan before landing in Guantánamo in September 2004. While in U.S. custody, according to his own and other prisoners’ accounts, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from a bar by his wrists, and threatened with dogs and electric shocks, among other forms of torture. He was also severely tortured by the Jordanians.

      • Italy’s Mafia finds blood money in unexpected places

        Late last month, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake ripped through central Italy, leaving 292 people dead and many more seriously injured. While it would not have been unheard of for tremors to cause that much destruction in a developing nation, the anti-seismic reinforcement technology available in a wealthy European country like Italy should have prevented many of the buildings that ultimately fell from collapsing.

        The vast majority of those killed in the earthquake lived in the town of Amatrice, in northern Lazio, where the construction firm paid to carry out anti-seismic work had in fact links to organized crime, and utterly failed to conduct any sort of improvements.

        If the work had been completed as directed, far fewer people would have lost their lives. One now-infamous elementary school that crumbled in Amatrice, was renovated to resist earthquakes as recently as 2012 and at a cost of $785,000 USD – money that apparently went into the pockets of local Mafiosi.

      • Hope for the Philippines?

        Asked by reporters last week about the likelihood that Obama would raise criticisms of his human rights record, Duterte declared elliptically, “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You [Obama] must be respectful. Do not just throw questions. ‘Putang ina,’ I will swear at you in that [ASEAN] forum.”

        The mainstream media was shocked at the insulting suggestion that the U.S. president would have to be respectful to the Filipino president or risk provoking some reactive rudeness. Asked in Beijing if he would meet as planned with Duterte, Obama affected mild amusement at the “colorful” Filipino leader, saying his staff was deciding when and if a meeting will happen. Its cancellation was announced son afterwards. Obama would meet with the South Korean leader instead.

        [...]

        Washington, on the other hand, views the Communist Party of the Philippines, and the New People’s Army, as “terrorists.” Just as the U.S. views all left-wing armed movements as terrorists (unless and until they can be used for common purposes, as in the case of the Iranian MEK in Iraq). In 2002 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell took the unprecedented step of blacklisting the estimable Sison personally as a “terrorist” and the U.S. (spurred by then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) was surely behind the Dutch authorities’ raid on his house and his brief detention in 2007 on suspicion of ordering two murders in the Philippines the year before. (He was cleared of the charges and released.)

        [...]

        How would a President Hillary Clinton react, should the CPP acquire an established role in Philippines politics, Manila withdraw from recent military and “security” agreements, and the country draw closer to the PRC? Be assured her crooked cabal is already discussing coup plans. Because that’s what they do, thinking that as the “exceptional” nation they need not (as Hillary confidant Henry Kissinger once said in relation to Chile) “stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

        But that was 1970, when the U.S. had twice the share in global GDP than it has today and the world was divided by the Cold War. Ruling classes of nations forced to take sides at that time have seen been obliged by market and geopolitical forces to align, re-align, and hold out options for the future. Obama cannot snap his fingers and demand that Duterte cooperate with an anti-China, pro-U.S. balikitan program. Nor will his successor be able to do so.

        The next U.S. president might face an independent country whose people are attempting to resolve their own contradictions in their own way, rejecting interference from the putang ina in Washington. What could be more hopeful than that?

      • Child Refugees Forced to Sleep in Dirty, Vermin-Infested Cells: Report

        A scathing report from Human Rights Watch reveals the degrading and inhumane conditions under which hundreds of refugee children in Greece are being forced to sleep in dirty, vermin-infested police station cells, detention centers, and coast guard facilities for months at a time—in violation of Greek and international law.

      • ‘A Call to End Slavery’: Nationwide Prison Strike Kicks Off

        Prisoners across the United States are launching a massive strike on Friday, on the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, to protest what they call modern-day slavery.

        Organizers say the strike will take place in at least 24 states to protest inhumane living and working conditions, forced labor, and the cycle of the criminal justice system itself. In California alone, 800 people are expected to take part in the work stoppage. It is slated to be one of the largest strikes in history.

        In the era of Black Lives Matter, the issues of racist policing, the school-to-prison pipeline, and other factors that contribute to the mass incarceration crisis are coming to the forefront of civil and human rights movements.

        “Slavery is alive and well in the prison system, but by the end of this year, it won’t be anymore,” reads the call to action from groups including Support Prisoner Resistance, the Free Alabama Movement, and the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC). “This is a call to end slavery in America.”

      • Rendition Victim “Staggered” as MI6 Official Implicated in His Abuse Breaks Silence

        A man who was rendered to Gaddafi’s Libya in a joint MI6-CIA operation has written to Sir Mark Allen, the former MI6 official who was responsible for his ordeal, following a rare public comment by Sir Mark.

        In a recent article for the Catholic Herald, Sir Mark Allen – formerly head of counter-terrorism at MI6 – argued for a faith-based “answer to terrorism.”

      • Standoff at Standing Rock: Even Attack Dogs Can’t Stop the Native American Resistance

        The Missouri River, the longest river in North America, has for thousands of years provided the water necessary for life to the region’s original inhabitants. To this day, millions of people rely on the Missouri for clean drinking water. Now, a petroleum pipeline, called the Dakota Access pipeline, is being built, threatening the river. A movement has grown to block the pipeline, led by Native American tribes that have lived along the banks of the Missouri from time immemorial. Members of the Dakota and Lakota nations from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation established a camp at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers, about 50 miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota. They declare themselves “protectors, not protesters.” Last Saturday, as they attempted to face down massive bulldozers on their ancient burial sites, the pipeline security guards attacked the mostly Native American protectors with dogs and pepper spray as they resisted the $3.8 billion pipeline’s construction, fighting for clean water, protection of sacred ground and an end to our fossil-fuel economy.

        Standing Rock Sioux set up the first resistance encampment in April, calling it Sacred Stone. Now there are four camps with more than 1,000 people, mostly from Native American tribes in the U.S. and Canada. “Water is Life” is the mantra of this nonviolent struggle against the pipeline that is being built to carry crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois.

      • The Shameful Spectacle of Denying People Their Vote

        Every once in a while, the curtains part and we get a glimpse of the ugliest, most shameful spectacle in American politics: the Republican Party’s systematic attempt to disenfranchise African-Americans and other minorities with voter ID laws and other restrictions at the polls.

        If you thought this kind of discrimination died with Jim Crow, think again. Fortunately, federal courts have blocked implementation of some of the worst new laws, at least for now. But the most effective response would be for black and brown voters to send the GOP a message by turning out in record numbers, no matter what barriers Republicans try to put in our way.

        The ostensible reason for these laws is to solve a problem that doesn’t exist—voter fraud by impersonation. Four years ago, you may recall, a Republican Pennsylvania legislator let slip the real reason for his state’s new voter ID law: to “allow” Mitt Romney to win the state. In the end, he didn’t. But Republicans tried mightily to discourage minorities, most of whom vote Democratic, from going to the polls.

      • Attica: How the Suppression of an Uprising Fed the Prison Industry

        Anyone who wants to understand mass incarceration needs to understand Attica. And anyone who wants to understand Attica must read Heather Thompson’s new book, Blood in the Water, the first scholarly history of the Attica prison uprising. It is a riveting tale, but a difficult one to read. Several reviewers have noted that they had to stop reading at several points, to breathe and to wipe the tears from their eyes. I join that group. As difficult as it is, this is a story that must be told.

        Forty-five years ago today, on September 9, 1971, almost 1,300 prisoners took over an exercise yard at Attica prison. For months, they had filed petitions, written grievances and tried everything they could to ease the horrid conditions at Attica. They often were hungry, as prison officials only budgeted 65 cents a day per prisoner for food. There were few jobs and no opportunities for education. Racial and ethnic discrimination was rampant: Black prisoners were assigned the dirtiest, hardest manual labor jobs. While all mail was censored, any letters in Spanish were simply thrown away, hitting the Puerto Rican prisoners who received mail from their Spanish-speaking parents the hardest. Medical care was grossly inadequate, with one doctor for the entire prison. Guard brutality was unchecked.

      • Kaepernick’s Patriotism
      • The New Ancien Regime Arrives in the White House

        The United States is indeed exceptional. It is the only country that ushers in a new Presidency by displacing thousands of the highest Executive Branch officials. That leaves in place those who are indentured to public service but, with the exception of the uniformed military and Intelligence services, almost never make policy, direct its implementation or review it. ‘Change’ you can believe in because it is dictated by law and rooted tradition.

        It is one of the age’s secular mysteries how institutional integrity and coherent programs survive this upheaval. Foreigners in particular fret over how they are going to handle fresh personalities and new ideas. After all, all this motion could jeopardize their own plans and commitments. Anxiety is abated somewhat when they look back at other transitions to find that continuity eclipses innovation by a wide margin. There is more change of style than of substance. That holds for both persons and policies.

      • Earning the trust of human rights supporters

        Building public support for human rights reform is crucial. Without a broad and deep public constituency, legislators will not pass the necessary laws, supervisors will not enforce new rules, and citizens will not demand real accountability and change.

        For a long time now, we have known that non-governmental rights groups play a key role in these reform efforts. They lobby lawmakers and government, report abuses, and mobilize public attention, and these efforts are sometimes successful. All too often, however, human rights groups do this work without collecting much in the way of systematic evidence. As a result, they do not have an accurate sense of who are their strongest supporters, and which population sub-groups need more attention and persuasion.

      • Über-Globalization or Über-Xenophobia?

        The ground upon which greed rests is hard and fast while the ground upon which our moral discriminations rest is soft and fuzzy, mostly so because moral fronts serve the interests of greed. Greed works both sides of our party duopoly, both Democrat and Republican. They join in ignoring the anxieties and fears of both the working-class and the middle class, thus becoming, either openly or by silent concession, supporters of neoliberalism and über-globalization.

        Nevertheless, the disillusionment of the Many has found its leaders, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who though far different in their diagnosis and treatment equally ride the powerful wave of anger and discontent. That wave is now breaking against not only neoliberalism and über-globalization but against the Third Way/New Democrat collaboration advocated by Bill Clinton and one assumes to be continued by Hillary Clinton.

        A mixture of greed and hypocrisy, of Uriah Heep fronted by Seth Pecksniff, of real intent and alibi cover up surround all matters attending a bedrock force that has had much to do with the U.S.’s transformation from democracy to plutarchy, namely globalization and its many camouflages.

        Revolt against this now remains with Trump and his supporters, its manifesto being what I call über-xenophobia, xenophobia being the mildest preamble to the ugliness of the whole. Sanders’ own manifesto of revolt remained, like moral discriminations, soft and fuzzy, cerebral and un-visceral, while Trump’s continues to drum a message that like all percussion is felt not cogitated. Trump’s own distortions of sentences, of argument and exposition, of language and meaning testify to the fact that his appeal does not lie in conceptual understanding but elsewhere, lower, deeper, darker.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Ted Cruz Still Blatantly Misrepresenting Internet Governance Transition

        Just a few months ago, we wrote up a decently long post explaining why the upcoming “transition” of a piece of internet governance away from the US government was both a good thing and not a big deal. You can read those two posts on it, but the really short version is twofold: (1) the Commerce Department’s “control” over ICANN’s IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) was always pretty much non-existent in the first place; and (2) even having that little connection to the US government, though, only provided tremendous fodder for foreign governments (mainly: Russia & China) to push to take control of the internet themselves. That’s what that whole disastrous UN/ITU/WCIT mess was a few years back. Relinquishing the (non-existent) control, with clear parameters that internet governance wouldn’t then be allowed to jump into the ITU’s lap, helps on basically every point. It takes away a key reason that other countries have used to claim they need more control, and it makes it clear that internet governance needs to remain out of any particular government’s control.

        [...]

        In other words, as we’ve explained before, Ted Cruz’s concerns over the internet here are completely backwards. Up is down, black is white, night is day kind of stuff. Keeping the IANA connection to the US government is the kind of thing that opens up the possibility for Russia/China to exert more control over internet governance by routing around ICANN and its flawed, but better than the alternative, “multistakeholder” setup. Moving ICANN away from the US government, with strict rules in place that basically keep it operating as is, takes away one of the key arguments that foreign countries have been using to try to seize control over key governance aspects of the internet.

        If Cruz fears foreign governments taking control of internet governance, he should do the exact opposite of what he’s doing now. Let the Commerce Dept. sever the almost entirely imaginary leash it has on ICANN. Otherwise, other countries’ frustration with the US’s roles is a much bigger actual threat to how the internet is managed.

      • 4 reasons broadband data caps must die

        Everybody hates ‘em, but more and more Americans find themselves living under the confines of broadband data caps. Each month, millions of households wrestle with balancing their internet use against staying under their usage limits.

        As the number of users affected by data caps grows, so do the number of complaints. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agency has been looking at data caps: “It’s not a new topic to us, that’s for damn sure,” he said. But regulators and legislators have yet to do anything about them — and they should. Here’s why.

    • DRM

      • Why the proprietary MQA music encoding system is better than DRM, but still not good

        In June 2016, I wrote about the MQA proprietary closed-source music encoding system and shared my thoughts on why I felt the system is not a good thing. Since then, I’ve been reading more about MQA so this month I’ll share additional thoughts.

      • Analog: The Last Defense Against DRM

        With the recent iPhone 7 announcement, Apple confirmed what had already been widely speculated: that the new smartphone won’t have a traditional, analog headphone jack. Instead, the only ways to connect the phone to an external headset or speaker will be via Bluetooth, through the phone’s AirPlay feature, or through Apple’s proprietary Lightning port.

        Apple’s motivations for abandoning the analog jack are opaque, but likely benign. Apple is obsessed with simple, clean design, and this move lets the company remove one more piece of clutter from the phone’s body. The decision may also have been a part of the move to a water-resistant iPhone. And certainly, many people choose a wireless listening experience.

        But removing the port will change how a substantial portion of iPhone owners listen to audio content—namely, by simply plugging in a set of headphones. By switching from an analog signal to a digital one, Apple has potentially given itself more control than ever over what people can do with music or other audio content on an iPhone. We hope that Apple isn’t unwittingly opening the door to new pressures to take advantage of that power.

        When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording device.

    • Intellectual Monopolies

      • Changes to the Cider House Fight Club Patent Rules of Engagement the Game UK IPO

        The UK IPO will now be providing advance notice of grant to applicants. They will be issuing a communication informing an applicant that his/her application meets all requirements and will therefore proceed to grant. This will typically be 1 month’s notice, but 2 months’ if issued as the first examination report (as currently is the case).

        This will bring the UK procedure closer in line with the familiar Rule 71(3) EPC procedure at the EPO. Importantly, the change will give applicants a guaranteed period to decide whether to file a divisional application before the “allowed” application grants, and so stop divisional “foreshadowing” i.e. raising the possibility to the examiner that a divisional application might be of interest in a response to an examination report, and asking for time to decide before they grant the case.

      • General Court upholds Lundbeck pay-for-delay fine

        Fines of nearly €150 million imposed on pharmaceutical company Lundbeck and a number of generic rivals by the European Commission have been upheld by the EU General Court. The Court’s decisions are the first to find that pay-for-delay agreements breach EU antitrust rules

      • Copyrights

        • TorrentFreak Gets Its First YouTube Copyright Claim, And It’s Bull….

          After having covered many YouTube copyright and Content-ID horrors stories, we can now share a personal experience. A few days ago we uploaded the archive of old TorrentFreak TV episodes to YouTube and within hours we received our very first copyright claim. Ironically, it’s from a friend of the site and one of the last people we expected.

        • The Copyright Office Acts As Hollywood’s Lobbying Arm… Because That’s Basically How It’s Been Designed

          Last month, we wrote about a blog post by Public Knowledge questioning why the Copyright Office kept acting like a lobbying firm for Hollywood, often stepping into issues where it has no business and almost always pushing the Hollywood viewpoint. It turns out that was just a sneak peak of a much larger report that PK has now released on The Consequences of Regulatory Capture at the Copyright Office. The full 50-page report is worth a thorough read.

          It details the obvious bits concerning the revolving door between copyright maximalists and the Copyright Office, with much of top management coming from jobs in the entertainment industries, and then many former top Copyright Office folks going right back into that industry upon leaving. But the more interesting part of the report is looking at how frequently the Copyright Office appears to blatantly misinterpret copyright law in an attempt to expand what the law actually covers.

        • The FCC Has a Plan to Free Us From Our Cable Boxes

          If you do cable TV, you’re a renter. You need that set-top-box that connects the cable to your television, and chances are, your cable company won’t let you buy the thing. You’re forced to rent it, paying that monthly fee for years on end, shelling out far more than that box is really worth. But that might change.

          Today, the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a proposal that would force pay-TV providers to offer apps that let you bypass set-top-boxes altogether. Instead of plugging a set-top-box into your TV, you could just use cable through a device of your choice, like a Roku, an Xbox, or a Google Chromecast stick. Plus, you could watch on all sorts of other devices, like phones and tablets. If the new proposal passes, you say goodbye to that monthly fee forever.

          It may seem a little late to do something about this particular problem, given that analysts say more people are now cutting the pay TV cord. But there are still tens of millions of people paying for the tube, and the average subscriber pays $231 a year for the things, according to the Federal Communications Commission, and cost the country about $20 billion annually.

        • FCC Unveils Plan to ‘Unlock’ Set-Top Boxes After Brawl With Big Cable

          The Federal Communications Commission unveiled its long-awaited proposal to increase competition in the video “set-top box” market on Thursday, but the agency’s “compromise” plan faces no guarantee of final approval after months of furious pushback from the cable and entertainment industries.

          FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has made it a priority to break the cable industry’s dominance of the cable set-top box market, which forces most consumers to pay an average of $231 per year to rent these old-school devices, pouring nearly $20 billion annually into the coffers of Comcast, Charter and other industry giants, according to a 2015 Senate report.

        • Comcast Already Whining About New FCC Cable Box Plan, Despite It Being The Cable Industry’s Idea

          We’ve noted how the FCC’s plan to bring competition to the cable box fell apart over the last few months, thanks to a massive disinformation effort by the cable industry involving a flood of hugely misleading editorials and some help from the US Copyright Office. In short the cable industry used a sound wall of hired voices to claim that cable box competition would hurt consumer privacy, violate copyright, result in a huge spike in piracy, and was even racist. Despite these claims being nonsense, the unprecedented PR campaign managed to sway several FCC Commissioners that had originally voted yes on the proposal.

        • MPAA Freaks Out In Response To FCC’s Revised Set Top Box Plan

          Except, of course, there’s nothing in there that’s a copyright issue at all (just as there was nothing in the original proposal). The new proposal doesn’t impact copyright licensing at all. Just read it. It only requires that TV providers offer apps that are fully controlled by the provider, enabling subscribers to then access licensed content. There is no infringement here. There is no compulsory license. The TV providers still have the same license they’ve always had with the content providers. The end users still have the same contract they’ve always had with the TV providers. The only difference is that end users might not have to rent expensive boxes any more, and now the TV providers will make apps available to those subscribers, which can work on various boxes to access the same licensed content.

          The complaint here is really about the loss of control for the cable providers and the ability to shake down the public in renting boxes. The MPAA’s ridiculous complaint seems to be that it doesn’t like the content being made available on new devices without some sort of additional payment. But that’s not the law, and it’s certainly not copyright law. For years, we’ve known that it’s legal to use other devices to access content — the VCR and DVRs have both been declared legal. The MPAA’s complaint here is basically that it doesn’t like the fact that those court cases have gone against it, and it’s trying to pretend they did not.

        • Why the Pirate Party could end up running Iceland

          With the Icelandic Pirates crushing it in the polls and set to form the next government of a sovereign, carbon-neutral, strategically located nation, it’s worth asking how a party whose two issues — internet freedom and copyright reform — are wonky, minority interests rose to prominence.

          The answer is a combination of the contemptuous, naked corruption of the Icelandic establishment — the people who helped destroy the world’s economy — and the Pirates’ flexibility, frankness and basic decency.

        • ISP Deletes IP-address Logs to Fend Off Piracy “Extortion Letters”

          Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof continues to fight against copyright holders that target alleged file-sharers. The company explains that it has setup its logging policies in such as way that it can refuse requests for IP-address information from so-called copyright trolls, suggesting that other ISPs should follow suit.

        • Freedom to link threatened by EU court decision and copyright plans

          Today, the European Court of Justice significantly curtailed the freedom to hyperlink – one of the basic building blocks of the web. Together with the new special copyright protection for news articles the European Commission is planning to propose next week, the ability of Europeans to point to things online without having to fear breaking a law is in peril.

          Could the following message soon be commonplace on the European internet? Read on for details.

        • GS Media decision gives ammunition to copyright owners

          Copyright owners may be emboldened to take action against sites that provide links to infringing content following the CJEU’s ruling in the GS Media case. The dispute involved hyperlinks to sites hosting photos of a Playboy model

        • EU Court: Not-For-Profit Hyperlinking Usually Not Copyright Infringement

          A ruling from the European Court of Justice has clarified when the posting of hyperlinks to infringing works is to be considered a ‘communication to the public’. Those who post links to content they do not know is infringing in a non-commercial environment can relax, but for those doing so during the course of business the rules are much tighter.

        • Status of the hyperlink: (hyper) disappointing decision of the ECJ

          The European Court of Justice published today an important decision on the legal status of hypertext links, a key element of the Web. Sadly, it has chosen to discard the conclusion of the General Attorney, by ruling that posting a link to content illegally published online is a copyright infraction. This jurisprudence has contributed to weaken hyperlinks and how the Web works, at a moment were the European Commission is also questioning the liberty to link.

        • European Copyright Ruling Ushers in New Dark Era for Hyperlinks

          In a case which threatens to cause turmoil for thousands if not millions of websites, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided today that a website that merely links to material that infringes copyright, can itself be found guilty of copyright infringement, provided only that the operator knew or could reasonably have known that the material was infringing. Worse, they will be presumed to know of this if the links are provided for “the pursuit of financial gain”.

          The case, GS Media BV v. Sanoma, concerned a Dutch news website, GeenStijl, that linked to leaked pre-publication photos from Playboy magazine, as well as publishing a thumbnail of one of them. The photos were hosted not by GeenStijl itself but at first by an Australian image hosting website, then later by Imageshack, and subsequently still other web hosts, with GeenStijl updating the links as the copyright owner had the photos taken down from one image host after another.

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