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12.08.14

Links 9/12/2014: Greg Kroah-Hartman Interview, Fedora 21 Imminent

Posted in News Roundup at 10:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Marines ask Northrop Grumman to switch G/ATOR radar computers from Windows to Linux software

    U.S. Marine Corps leaders are ready to switch software operating systems in a radar system designed to protect Marines on attack beaches from rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other low observables.

  • Linux Mobile-Desktop Convergence

    Over the past couple of years there has been talk of mobile-desktop convergence from various mobile and desktop OS providers. As a general concept, this sounds fantastic! Unfortunately once we dive into things a bit deeper, it appears this is easier said than done.

  • Server

    • Docker: Here, take the wheel – now YOU can run your own containers

      Docker is all the rage among hip startups and early adopters, but Docker the company would like to get its tech into enterprises, too – which is why it’s working on adapting its hosted Docker Hub service into a product specifically targeting large business customers.

    • Docker Founder Must Right His Ship

      Success can build a feedback loop that sustains its own momentum, making those who are successful certain they are doing the right thing. I don’t want to charge Docker with such hubris, but recent events illustrate why open source code projects function the way they do.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Randa Meetings 2014 – Another Great Success

        It’s been quite some time since the Randa Meetings 2014 and even this year’s edition of the KDE Community Summit called Akademy has already happened, but it’s still nice to look back and see what was accomplished at this KDE Tech Summit in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

      • On porting Fcitx KCM module to KF5

        Porting Fcitx KCM to KF5 is not that easy. It’s not only about porting kcm itself, but also porting missing part of fcitx-qt5 to Qt5 (mostly widgets). The old pkgconfig file is quite messed up, so I decided to experiment with extra-cmake-modules (ECM) a bit.

      • Dolphin Overlay Icons for ownCloud Sync Client

        Our recent ownCloud Client 1.7.0 release contains the new feature of overlay icons in GNOME nautilus, MacOSX and Windows. That is nice, but that makes us as old KDE guys sad as Dolphin was missing on the list.

      • Why do(n’t) you use Activities?

        On our quest for improving the concept of Virtual Desktops and Activities on the KDE Desktop, we once again ask you to share your experiences.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Ultimate Edition 4.3

        What is Ultimate Edition 4.3? Ultimate Edition 4.3 was built from the ground up debootstrapped from the Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Thar tree using Tmosb (TheeMahn’s Operating System Builder) which is also included in this release. This release is a Long Term Supported (LTS) release, supported until the year 2019. This release is most certainly worthy of the Ultimate Edition title. I personally hate KDE, and found it very visually attractive in all its “Wobbly Windowness” that I miss from the Mate desktop environment. I must admit I do miss the eyecandy that it provides off the rip. I have included many, many tools I am constructing that reside under the hood of virtually all Ultimate Edition releases, most newer and upgraded.

      • SparkyLinux 3.6 LXDE, MATE, Razor-Qt & Xfce

        I am happy to announce the fourth and the last this year iso images of SparkyLinux 3.6 “Annagerman” LXDE, MATE, Razor-Qt and Xfce. At the beginning, I’d like to thank to all of our small but strong community members for their help with searching and solving bugs and problems.

    • Screenshots

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Devuan: Unto Us a Fork Is Born

          We knew it was possible; the signs were all there. The Systemd Inferno, after all, had been raging for far too long.

          But more than a few of us were still holding out hope. “Things will surely get better,” we thought.

          Then the news came. The rumored Debian fork has now become real, and its name is “Devuan.”

        • MX-14.3 Is an OS Based on Debian That Can Bring Old Computers Back to Life

          MX-14, a fast, lightweight, and easy-to-install Linux Live CD distribution based on Debian stable, for Intel-AMD x86-compatible systems, has been upgraded to version 14.3 and is now available for download.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 15.04 to Get GTK+ 3.14 and Updated GNOME Packages

            The Ubuntu devs are considering upgrading the GTK+ packages to the latest 3.14 version, which was made available just a couple of months ago, a decision that would really help a number of other Ubuntu flavors as well.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.1 Freshens Up Linux Desktop

              Linux Mint 17.1, which was officially released on Nov. 29, provides users of the popular Linux desktop with an incremental update and some additional polish. Code-named Rebecca, Linux Mint 17.1 offers a choice of desktop user interfaces, the two primary ones being MATE and Cinnamon. The MATE desktop is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment. The GNOME Linux desktop community moved to the GNOME 3 desktop in 2011, a move that some desktop users did not embrace. In the Linux Mint 17.1 MATE edition, support has been added for the Compiz window manager, which can enable a desktop with multiple special effects for window transitions and events. The Cinnamon desktop, which was created by Linux Mint creator Celement Lefebvre, provides users with a familiar GNOME 2 look but also adds some of the advanced capabilities of newer GNOME releases. Linux Mint 17.1 builds on the innovations that first debuted in Linux Mint 17 earlier this year, with usability, interface and performance gains in several areas. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the improvements in the Linux Mint 17.1 release.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • How to get the most out of a Raspberry Pi? Your tech questions answered

      From robotics kits and ultrasound sensors to Arduino-based accessories and Lego Mindstorms

    • Tinkering with the Raspberry Pi A+

      The Raspberry Pi team is on fire (in a good way), making new Raspberry Pi models faster than we can review them.

    • $6 quad core SoC targets low cost 4K set-top boxes

      Allwinner unveiled a $6 “H3″ SoC targeting $35 to $50 OTT STBs, featuring four Cortex-A7 cores, a Mali-400 GPU, 4K HDMI output, and 5MP camera support.

      [...]

      Android and Linux are the most likely platforms here.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Samsung’s Gear VR headset is on sale now for $199

          The Gear VR, Samsung’s virtual reality headset, is now on sale through AT&T and Samsung’s US sites. The $199 headset fits around a Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, turning it into a mobile VR display. It was originally announced in September, but it’s so far only been slated for a vague early December launch, though it’s been available to try at a handful of malls around the country. The Gear VR was built in partnership with Oculus, and it incorporates a tracking sensor from the first Oculus Rift development kit, as well as a custom “Oculus Home” interface app. Unlike the Rift, though, it’s wireless and fairly light, and if you’ve already got a Note 4, it’s somewhat cheaper (if you don’t, you’ll have to add an extra $800 to the price above.) While it’s more polished than the current version of the Oculus Rift, however, it’s still an “Innovator Edition,” so be warned that you’re still essentially participating in a mass beta test of virtual reality.

        • Tizen DevLab and portathon coming to London 13 December

      • Android

        • A hacker’s journey: freeing a phone from the ground up, first part

          Every once in a while, an unexpected combination of circumstances ends up enabling us to do something pretty awesome. This is the story of one of those times. About a year ago, a member of the Replicant community started evaluating a few targets from CyanogenMod and noticed some interesting ones. After some early research, he picked a device: the LG Optimus Black (P970), bought one and started porting Replicant to it. After a few encouraging results, he was left facing issues he couldn’t overcome and decided to give up with the port. As the device could still be an interesting target for Replicant, we decided to buy the phone from him so that I could pick up the work where he stalled.

        • Commercials for Amazon’s crappy phone in Amazon Prime videos?

          If you want your phone to sell, make it better. If it’s as good as other Android-based phones or as good as the iPhone then people will buy it. But you DO NOT disrupt someone’s TV show to peddle your second-rate phone or any of your other products.

          I canceled Amazon Prime tonight. If you want my business back, Amazon, then make sure you remove all commercial interruptions from Prime programming. Otherwise, I’ll be using Netflix exclusively. If I wanted commercials, I’d watch network TV or cable.

        • The best Android phones for the holiday season

          There are lots of Android phones out there, but sometimes it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, Android Central has a holiday guide to help you complete your Android shopping list.

        • The best Android phones

          These are the best Android smartphones that are currently available. Price listed is for each carrier’s monthly payment over 24 months. Up-front, on-contract pricing will be higher, usually between $100 and $300, depending on the phone. Click through to each carrier’s listing for off-contract costs.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Channel 4 chose open-source MuleSoft over ‘prohibitively expensive’ Oracle and Microsoft

    Channel 4 is using MuleSoft open-source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in order to more efficiently share information on application program interfaces (API) with businesses outside the broadcaster.

  • SK Telecom develops open-source oneM2M IoT platform

    SK Telecom has completed the development of an open-source Internet of Things platform based on OneM2M, the M2M and IoT standards partnership, Business Korea reports. SK Telecom launched an M2M platform in 2008. The operator has also participated in the development of open-source platform Mobius from late 2011 as a national project, together with the Korea Electronics Technology Institute and Ntels. As oneM2M announced a candidate for an IoT/M2M standard in August of this year, SK Telecom implemented the standard with the Mobius, finishing the development of a commercialization-ready platform.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Leverage Strong Development Tools from Your Browser

        There continues to be very strong demand for web and application development skills in the job market, and there is especially demand for people familiar with open development tools. One of the biggest trends going among developers is leveraging browser extensions focused on developers.

      • Mozilla Joins Hour of Code

        This campaign launched in 2013, to align with Computer Science Education Week, and to demystify code and show that anyone can learn the basics. While we’re surrounded by technology and the web in our daily lives, few people understand how it all works. In our mission to protect the open web as a global resource for all, we must educate others about how and why the web exists, but also how the web is a creative platform with endless possibilities and opportunities now and for our future.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Funding

    • Errplane Snags $8.1M To Continue Building Open Source InfluxDB Time Series Database

      Errplane founders Paul Dix and Todd Persen had an idea for a company last year around anomaly detection in data center monitoring, but they soon realized that field was crowded and it would take a long time to build out the infrastructure for the company. At the same, time they heard from customers they were more interested in the underlying infrastructure than the service they were offering, and they did something brave. They decided to pivot and build an open source product that would meet the needs of the entire market, rather than try to compete directly.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • European Commission to update its open source policy

      The European Commission wants to make it easier for its software developers to submit patches and add new functionalities to open source projects. Contributing to open source communities will be made central to the EC’s new open source policy, expects Pierre Damas, Head of Sector at the Directorate General for IT (DIGIT). “We use a lot of open source components that we adapt and integrate, and it is time that we contribute back.”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • OpenMotics improves home automation

      OpenMotics is an open source home automation hardware and software system that offers features like switching lights and outputs, multi-zone heating and cooling, power measurements, and automated actions. The system encompases both open source software and hardware. For interoperability with other systems, the OpenMotics Gateway provides an API through which various actions can be executed.

    • Wanted: a tinkerer’s charter

      Users should be allowed to fiddle with the way consumer products work without suffering penalties from governments or sanctions from manufacturers

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Lithuania e-government cloud gets document management tools

      “Out of 3500 public administrations and government institutions in the country, 2500 do not yet have a DMS”, says Arelija Orlova, a specialist working for Lithuania’s Information Society Development Committee. “By including this in SIRIP, we expect an increase in the use of e-documents, boosting electronic government services.”

Leftovers

  • More than a billion dollars a week in lost data

    Australian businesses lose over $65 billion a year from data loss and downtime per year, according to major new global study.

    Storage vendor EMC has published its annual global Data Protection Index, which includes data specifically on Australia.

    It found that more than three quarters (78%) of Australian IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident, and that 58% of organisations in Australia still lack a disaster recovery plan for emerging workloads, and just 7% have plans for big data, hybrid cloud and mobile.

  • Science

    • Germany: ‘International competitiveness depends on ICT’

      Germany’s international industrial position will rely on its increasing use of ICT, the Digital Economy Working Group writes in a report prepared for an IT summit in Hamburg last October. In all classic industries, innovation will rely on the use of ICT, the working group reports: “The digital economy is crucial for the future of Germany.”

  • Security

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Why aren’t more news outlets covering Sen. Rockefeller’s shameful attempt to kill FOIA reform?

      An uncontroverisal, mild Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reform bill may die on Monday, despite passing 410-0 in the House earlier this year, and with a similar bipartisan vote expected in the Senate. The bill had already been stripped of its most substantive provisions that government agencies objected to, but on Thursday, Democractic Senator Jay Rockefeller—who is set to retire at the end of the year—unilaterally placed a hold on the bill, apparently doing the bidding of federal agencies who don’t want any more of their communications subject to public scrutiny. (Senate rules allow a single Senator to hold up votes on bills in certain situations.)

    • Julian Assange clocks up four years at the Ecuadorian embassy

      WIKILEAKER Julian Assange is entering his fifth year as a man with a travel toothbrush and the heavy weight of legal charges over his head.

      Assange is languishing in luxury or spending his time between chair and treadmill, depending on who you listen to. He most certainly is not at liberty, however, and has been living in a room at the Ecuadorian embassy.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Chicken farmer who spoke out about factory farm abuses immediately audited by Perdue

      Almost immediately after the animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming released a video exposing the “humane” (read: atrocious) conditions for chickens raised on a factory farm for Perdue, the poultry giant audited the farmer who opened his doors to the cameras.

    • The Pentagon — the climate elephant: Expose the Pentagon, the world’s largest & most dangerous climate criminal!

      There is an elephant in the climate debate that by U.S. demand cannot be discussed or even seen. This agreement to ignore the elephant is now the accepted basis of all international negotiations on climate change.

      It is well understood by every possible measurement that the Pentagon, the U.S. military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

      Ever since the Kyoto Accords or Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1998, in an effort to gain U.S. compliance, all U.S. military operations worldwide and within the U.S. are exempt from measurement or agreements on reduction. The U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemptions. (Interpress Service, May 20, 1998)

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • Response to the HASC report on RIPA

      “When a senior Parliamentary Committee says that the current legislation is not fit for purpose, then this simply cannot be ignored. It is now abundantly clear that the law is out of date, the oversight is weak and the recording of how the powers are used is patchy at best. The public is right to expect better.

      “The conclusion of the Committee that the level of secrecy surrounding the use of these powers is permitting investigations that are deemed ”unacceptable in a democracy”, should make the defenders of these powers sit up and take notice. At present, the inadequacy and inconsistency of the records being kept by public authorities regarding the use of these powers is woefully inadequate. New laws would not be required to correct this.

    • HASC concludes that surveillance legislation is “not fit for purpose”.

      The Home Affairs Select Committee has published a report today into the use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, concluding that the legislation “is not fit for purpose” and “needs a complete overhaul”.

    • A shadowy consortium opposes your Internet privacy

      It should be obvious why we need SPDY. Ever since Edward Snowden demonstrated that Internet paranoia is justified, a stream of discoveries has made always-on, end-to-end encryption even more desirable. The recent move by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, and others, who announced they will back a new nonprofit to promote and enable secure communications on the Internet, was welcome – by most of us.

    • Secretive UK Court That Approves Of GCHQ Surveillance Says That GCHQ Surveillance Doesn’t Violate Human Rights

      For a while now, we’ve been covering various legal challenges in Europe related to the GCHQ’s surveillance activities. One of the main cases, brought by Amnesty International and Privacy International, argued that the surveillance violated the European Convention on Human Rights (specifically article 8, on right to privacy, and article 10, on freedom of expression). While it was always expected that the case would eventually go to the European Court of Human Rights, the first step was the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in the UK — a secretive court that reviews complaints about surveillance, but (as with nearly all “secretive courts” charged with “oversight” on the intelligence community) almost always sides with the intelligence community. Between 2000 and 2012 the IPT only sided against the intelligence community 10 times out of 1468 cases brought (about half of one percent of all cases). In other words, this is a court that (in secret) regularly okays GCHQ’s surveillance efforts on UK citizens.

    • Court finds that GCHQ’s Tempora is fine and dandy

      THE UK COURTS have found that GCHQ’s Tempora system is legal in principle under the inglorious Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

      Pressure group Privacy International challenged Tempora in the courts, and this weekend it got its answer. It did not like it.

    • The beginning of the end of the private mail server

      Thanks to overzealous filtering by mail relays, the small mail server is becoming an endangered species

    • NSA warrantless bulk phone metadata spying continues unabated

      The NSA’s bulk phone metadata spying program was renewed for another 90 days, the fourth time the warrantless snooping has been reauthorized following President Barack Obama promising reform last January, the government said Monday.

  • Civil Rights

    • New York City Officer Cleared In Chokehold Death Was Sued By Other Black Men

      The white New York City police officer who put unarmed black Staten Island resident Eric Garner in a chokehold moments before his death has been accused by other black men of violating their civil rights while he was on patrol.

      A grand jury’s decision on Wednesday not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for his role in the videotaped confrontation that left 43-year-old Garner dead has sparked days of protests by groups claiming U.S. law enforcement unfairly targets African-Americans and other minorities.

    • Farage blames immigration for traffic on M4 after no-show at Ukip reception

      The Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, has blamed his late arrival at an event on immigration. He was due to appear at a “meet the leader” drinks reception as Ukip prepared to host its first Welsh conference. But he was running more than two hours late and failed to show.

    • No felony charges for SPD cop’s bone-breaking punch of handcuffed woman

      Federal prosecutors say they will review an incident in which a Seattle police officer punched and seriously injured a handcuffed, intoxicated woman, after King County prosecutors said Friday they won’t charge the officer.

    • Another Batch Of Baggage Handlers Accused Of Stealing From Luggage; Because Airport ‘Security’ Isn’t

      Now, if this were a one time thing, it might not even be that noteworthy. But this seems like fairly common practice at airports. A few years ago, we wrote about TSA agents stealing iPads and stories of TSA agents and baggage handlers stealing stuff from luggage are not at all hard to find. In fact, reports from a few years ago noted that over 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from passnegers in the past decade.

    • Kennedy Airport bag handlers accused of stealing from passengers’ luggage

      Seven bag handlers at Kennedy Airport have been charged with stealing electronics, jewelry and other items worth more than $20,000 from checked luggage, Queens prosecutors said Wednesday.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Piracy ≠ Theft? Movie Industry Workers Speak Out

        The mantra often heard from Hollywood’s leaders is that pirates are thieves. However, not all people in the industry feel that way. Today we present the views of four regular filmmakers on this controversial topic, what the impact is on the industry, and what can be done in response.

      • Concern Over Russian “Piracy Buster” Internet Tax

        Russian officials have expressed caution over proposals to introduce an Internet tax to compensate copyright holders for online piracy. The proposals, which were put forward by the Russian Union of Rightsholders, are said to be worth around $860m a year to creators.

12.07.14

Links 7/12/2014: New Linux Release, Marines and Prisoners on GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 9:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • November 2014 OSI Newsletter

    The OSI Board met in San Francisco, CA USA on November 11th and 12th, 2014 with a focus on strengthening the organization’s current outreach efforts and building new bridges between open source communities. The Board was excited to review five new applications for Affiliate Membership as well as implement several new initiatives to help drive Individual Membership through the recognition of various roles and levels of access among our community. This included new Individual Membership discounts for students, volunteers working on OSI supported activities, those already members of OSI Affiliate organizations, members of Free Software Foundation and complimentary memberships based on need.

  • Pydio: open source alternative to Dropbox & Box

    Pydio 6.0 an open source file sharing solution that is said to offer “tight control of information” on the scale demanded by enterprises and service providers.

  • Open Source Continues its March into the Enterprise

    These include LibreOffice and OpenOffice for front-office productivity tools, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres for databases, Pentaho for decision support, SugarCRM and Hipergate for customer relationship management, Apache Lucene, Opentext, Filenet, and Documentum for content management, and RedHat JBoss as an application server.

    While open source applications specifically for the core functions of the insurance industry are still few and far between, there are a few options, such as OpenUnderwriter.

    The main issue with open source is that while the software provides all the components needed for IT operations, expertise is needed to pull it all together for the business. But there’s always a good case to be made for open source, and often, this comes right from commercial IT vendors themselves. Prashant Parikh of CA Technologies, for instance, recently posted the reasons why open source makes sense.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Hotspots: My Firefox OS phone saved the day

        However, and as paradoxical as it may be, I own a ZTE Open Firefox OS phone, which I use basically to check my email and calendar on the go, quickly browse a web page, and receive messages from family members.

        I practically never use the function that gives the device its name (telephone), that, is, making calls. I see my phone as a tiny tablet thingie and use it as such.

        But today, I had to take care of my 4-year-old daughter. It was raining and she is recovering from a bad flu, so going out was out of the question. The cable was not working, so no TV for her… which she did not really mind. But she wanted to use her computer to see her favorite videos online and we had no connection.

        What to do? I used the phone as a hotspot to share its Internet connection with my laptop.

      • Mozilla All Hands: They can’t hold us!

        I also spent some time talking to folks about Firefox in Ubuntu and rebranding Iceweasel to Firefox in Debian (fingers crossed something will happen here in 2015). Also it was great to participate in discussions around making all of the Firefox channels offer more stability and quality to our users.

      • Mozilla will finally bring Firefox to iOS

        I used to be a big fan of Firefox, and I still use it for certain things. But it just doesn’t have the mindshare that it used to have back when it’s big claim to fame was being the alternative to Internet Explorer. Mobile has been where the growth is, and many mobile users have gravitated to Safari, Chrome and other browsers on their phones and tablets.

      • Mozilla wants to put Firefox on iOS

        Mozilla has been staunchly opposed to an iOS version of its Firefox browser for a while. It wants to use its own web engine, but Apple will only let companies use its in-house code in the name of security. However, the organization is clearly having a change of heart — VP Jonathan Nightingale has revealed that Mozilla wants to bring Firefox to iOS. He didn’t say how it would happen, but it’s most likely that the company will use Apple’s engine and layer a custom interface on top, like Google does with Chrome. We’ve reached out to Mozilla and will let you know if it can say more.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Long Time No See – DevAssistant 0.10 is Here

      DevAssistant 0.10.0 is sort of pre-1.0.0, so for next release, we’re planning to go from Beta to Stable. That’s a big promise, but I think at this point DevAssistant can afford that. There will be some backwards incompatible changes between 0.10.0 and 1.0.0, but after that we’ll keep things stable until 2.0.0. In addition to that, we’re planning a major GUI overhaul – basically we’ll rewrite it from scratch, since we want it to look completely different. We’re working with Mo Duffy on the design and while it’s not finished yet, some preliminary sketches can be found at Mo’s fedorapeople page.

    • Weblate 2.1

      Weblate 2.1 has been released today.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Pesticides May Contribute to Farmers’ Depression and Suicides

      According to Bienkowski’s report, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson, Cathy Milbourn, writes that of the seven pesticides examined, “only aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are still registered and in use.” The EPA cancelled the registrations of ethylene dibromide, 2,4,5-T, dieldrin, and parathion, Milbourn said. Aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are undergoing EPA review.

    • China looking to curb fertilizer, pesticide use

      China, the world’s top producer of rice and wheat, is seeking to cap the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have helped to contaminate large swathes of its arable land and threaten its ability to keep up with domestic food demand.

      More than 19 percent of soil samples taken from Chinese farmland have been found to contain excessive levels of heavy metals or chemical waste. In central Hunan province, more than three quarters of the ricefields have been contaminated, government research has shown.

    • Delay in law on plain packs for cigarettes angers MPs

      Failure to push through law in time for general election would be seen as ‘victory’ for big tobacco and lobbyists

    • Please Write to Your MP about Plain Packaging for Cigarettes

      I was disturbed to read in the Guardian that the UK government may be wavering on introducing plain packs for cigarettes. Failing to do so before the General Election would be seen as a huge victory for the tobacco companies, and have knock-on effects around the world.

      [...]

      As you know, what is particularly interesting about these cases is that they use the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process in order to claim an indirect expropriation of property. Since the company is doing this through subsidiaries – one in Switzerland, the other in Hong Kong – it is not even clear whether those cases can proceed. However, it is evident that one of the main reasons Philip Morris is taking this route is to intimidate other countries thinking about bringing in plain packs measures. Indeed, New Zealand has put its own plans on hold pending the result of the Australian case, which shows that strategy is having its effect.

  • Security

    • North Korea calls claims of its Sony Pictures hacking ‘false rumor’

      North Korea on Sunday denied claims that it had hacked into Sony Pictures, calling the allegations a “false rumor” spread by South Korea.

      The U.S. film company had come under cyber attack late last month after a series of threats from North Korea for its comedy movie “The Interview,” in which the CIA plots to assassinate the country’s young leader Kim Jong-un.

    • U.S. movie about killing N.K. leader will likely be ‘blockbuster’

      A soon-to-be-released comedy film about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will likely be a “blockbuster” thanks to the strong protests Pyongyang has raised about it, the U.S. human rights envoy said Friday.

    • OpEdNews Hacked, I Meet With an FBI Agent

      On Tuesday, it appears that OEN was hacked. An article that was not submitted by an editor, not submitted through the queue and not submitted by a trusted author, was published by someone who signed up the same day. The article reported that a hacker group, Cyberberkut, had hacked the phone of a member of Joe Biden’s diplomatic entourage to Ukraine.

      The anomaly– an article published outside the usual routes– led me to investigate and discover that one of the IP addresses the submitter used was associated with malware– SQL insertion, spam, even blackmail.

      I checked the name of the purported author and found someone in Ukraine with that name. But the photo used in the author ID did not match. I did a reverse image search using tineye.com and there were no other copies anywhere. I hid the article and checked google Webmaster tools, which is my first go-to place to check for malware on the site. Our webmaster also checked his tracking system. No malware was detected. I had already removed one image from Reuters because it violated copyrights. Vidya removed another image that had been included and a link, because they are higher risk for SQL insertion of malware.

    • FBI investigates threatening emails sent to Sony employees at Culver City studio

      The company has been scrambling to repair the damage to its computer system after a hack by a group calling itself Guardians of Peace.

    • Hacking at Sony has similarities with earlier attacks in Middle East and South Korea

      In 2012, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company and Qatar’s RasGas were hit by a virus known as Shamoon that damaged tens of thousands of computers. In 2013, more than 30,000 PCs at South Korean banks and broadcasting companies were hit by a similar attack by a virus dubbed DarkSeoul malware.

    • Friday’s security updates

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Suspension of Zoabi from Knesset Raises Questions about Israeli Democracy

      In July 2014 Haneen Zoabi, the first Arab Israeli woman to be elected to the Israeli legislative body, the Knesset, was banned by the Knesset Ethics Committee from all Knesset activities. As Lahav Harkov reported in October 2014, this was a direct response to her declaration that the June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers (later found murdered) was not an act of terrorism.

      [...]

      They covered Zoabi’s initial suspension and followed her story of failed appeals to the Knesset and the High Court. Corporate news sources such as CNN and the New York Times, on the other hand, have not reported on any aspect of the matter, while Al-Jazeera America briefly mentions Zoabi’s suspension at the end of an article about Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire.

    • ​Watching the watchmen: US shield to protect drones from ‘spoofing’ cyber-attacks
    • Chile’s Neoliberal Flip Flop

      The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.

    • Prefer cautious presidents

      I prefer a cautious president to a reckless one. Invading Iraq was reckless, doubling down on that is foolish.

    • Ukraine: Lethal Aid And Weapons Authorized By U.S. House Resolution 758, Will Obama Take On Vladimir Putin?

      Lethal aid to Ukraine has been authorized by recently passed United States House Resolution 758, which calls for President Barack Obama to send both lethal and non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military. If the U.S. Senate passes similar legislation, it’s possible Obama may choose to escalate the confrontation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

    • Better for the US to stop costly wars, nuke upgrade

      The American people ought to realize — and critically respond to — the dangers involved in two directions of national-security policy that their government is pursuing:

      1) It is escalating the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (while extending its war in Afghanistan), and 2) discarding a previously espoused disarmament agenda in order to push a “massive modernization of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines,” to cost beyond $1 trillion over 30 years.

      These are concerns not only of Americans. They also affect the rest of the world’s peoples.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • The C.I.A.’s Power to Purge

      Not only that, Mr. Aftergood found out the National Archives and Records Administration had already offered tentative approval in August of the plan to — as a spy might put it — disappear the email of every worker but the C.I.A.’s top 22 managers, three years after they left the agency.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • U-S Petro Dollar Hegemony and Global Imperialism
    • Why Shell could buy BP for just £5 a share

      One of Britain’s oldest oil companies BP could be about to be sold to its biggest rival for a fiver per share.

      The rumoured deal, if realised, would complete one of the most ignominious falls for the once great Persian Oil company that powered Britain’s Navy to victory during the First World War.

    • Fracking Footprint Visible from Space

      Methane gas, a main component linked to damaging climate change, is being released in record amounts in the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. The Four Corners regions is one of the prime location for fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. A joint study by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA finds that the environmental impacts of fracking are more significant than previously documented. With the help of a new satellite instrument — the European Space Agency’s SCIAMACHY — a team at University of Michigan has been able to get regional methane measurements over the entire United States back in 2009. Using this tool, they were able to identify the hotspot at the Four Corners. The footprint is so large it is visible from space.

  • Finance

    • Supplemental Poverty Measure Provides More Accurate Measure of U.S. Poverty

      Currently the official government measure of poverty under-represents the number of poor in the United States. The seemingly simple formula, created in the 1960s, has set the national poverty threshold for decades. Last year the official poverty threshold was about $23,600 for a family of two adults and two children. Yet our official poverty yardstick fails to recognize the difference in standards of living across the United States. Whether a family lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming or San Francisco, California, where the average housing costs are 225% higher than Cheyenne, the government standard makes no adjustment for regional variations in cost of living.

    • California, the Golden State, Is Actually the Poorest of All

      It has the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Napa Valley wineries. It has something else, according to the Census Bureau. It’s the poorest state in the world’s largest economy.

    • Does China Really Have The Most Powerful Economy In The World?

      Market Watch columnist Brett Arends wrote that China has surpassed America as the number one economy, a move he claims may lead to a collapse of U.S. political and military hegemony. But does China truly have the strongest economy in the world?

      [...]

      We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A.

    • Costs of Global Capitalism

      The ILO report’s key chart below summarizes the key wage results of global capitalism over the last decade. Economic growth, rising real wages, and rising standards of living are the economic reality of China. Economic crisis, stagnant wages, and deepening inequalities of income and wealth are the economic realities for western Europe, the US, and Japan.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • 5 Most Insidious Conspiracy Theories of 2014

      I’ve found that the conspiracy theories spread most widely — and the ones that seem plausible to many, unfortunately — are those based on current headlines and often propagated by public figures such as politicians, celebrities and media figures. They travel by word-of-mouth at light speed and become “a known fact.” These theories are often believed by those who assume there must be a coherence behind world events and occurrences don’t just happen randomly. Using that as our criteria, here are the most insidious conspiracy theories of 2014.

  • Censorship

    • No female ejaculation, please, we’re British

      Though this compendium is strangely lacking in frogs or any other animals (perhaps they’re catalogued elsewhere), it is a list of the new pornography restrictions that the UK government—through the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, something I’d never heard of before today—introduced on 1 December to ‘safeguard children.’ Which is the same reason five major UK Internet service providers (ISPs) gave for blocking my own website, even though it’s more about literature, publishing, and current affairs than it is about pornography. (Most of these ISPs unblocked the site when I told them that there were no words on it that could be ‘deemed sensitive to a young audience.’)

    • New world for Britain’s online smut: censorship
    • British Censors Ban Spanking, Female Ejaculation And Other Sex Acts From Online Porn

      Lawmakers in the United Kingdom have deemed face-sitting to be a “life-endangering” act worthy of censorship, the Independent reports.

    • U.K. Censors Online Porn; Spanking, Rough Sex, Other Assorted Kink Banned

      Continuing on its recent censorship-happy path, the U.K. government amended regulations this week to prohibit online porn from depicting a variety of erotic activities. Now-illicit acts range from the very specific (female ejaculation; “spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a gentle level”) to the incredibly broad (“verbal abuse”). But basically, the U.K. has banned BDSM and certain forms of fetish porn—or at least, charging money for that sort of porn.

    • The UK’s sexist new pornography restrictions aren’t just an act of state censorship, but could be the first step towards something even worse

      As you might have already heard, an act of state censorship has been declared against British pornography in the guise of innocuous regulation. But what you might not know is that it has also marked the first stage in a campaign to impose global trade sanctions. Strangely, this proposition has received less coverage.

    • The Spectator at war: Censorship and mystification

      Let us say that we have not ourselves suffered from the Censorship at all. We have never submitted, and have never been asked to submit, any article to the Press Bureau. Such censorship as has been exercised in our columns has been the purely voluntary censorship which is exercised at all times, whether in war or in peace, by every editor who has any sense of public duty, and that remark, we believe, applies to the whole British Press, daily and weekly. We have, of course, constantly asked ourselves whether it would be wise on general grounds to make this or that comment, or whether we ought to refrain from comment which we thought sound in itself because we knew or believed it to run counter to the Government view, and to be likely to interfere with their action and policy. Our feeling was that, as the Government and not we were responsible for the conduct of the war, it was our business as good citizens to support their action, even when we did not think it wise. There can be only one driver of a coach, and as long as he is on the box he must be trusted, and no effort must be made to jog his elbow or snatch at the reins. For example, there are certain things which we believe it would be to the public interest to say about foreign States, and which it would be practically impossible for the Government to suppress even under the most exaggerated interpretation of the rights of the Censor ; but these comments we have not made on the ground just given—that it is the Government who are responsible for foreign affairs, and we must not do anything which in their opinion, whether right or wrong is no matter, would injure or weaken them in the difficult task before them.

    • Russia and Turkey Lead on Internet Censorship Growth, Survey Shows

      Internet users in Russia and Turkey have been subjected to the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year, according to the latest Freedom on the Net survey.

    • Pakistan, China among top 10 worst countries for Internet freedom

      Majority among the top ten worst countries are from Asia, including Iran, Syria, China, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

    • Copyright Law as a Tool for State Censorship of the Internet

      When state officials seek to censor online speech, they’re going to use the quickest and easiest method available. For many, copyright takedown notices do the trick. After years of lobbying and increasing pressure from content industries on policymakers and tech companies, sending copyright notices to take media offline is easier than ever.

    • Independent news portals now popular due to government’s censorship

      The government crackdown on the media during the anti-government protest and corruption scandals of last year and the two elections this year have led to the growth of a number of independent news portals as an alternative source of information for many in Turkey.

  • Civil Rights

    • Sean Hannity Finds A Way To Make Eric Garner’s Death About Benghazi

      Hannity Indignant Over Boehner’s Calls For Congressional Hearings On Garner’s Death Rather Than Benghazi

    • You Can’t Live With Us: 53 Britons Stripped of Citizenship

      The issue of UK citizens being stripped of their nationality has not been well covered, especially in major US news outlets. For example, since 2003 the New York Times has published only three stories on the topic, while the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today have published just one story each, for a total of just six stories over the course of eleven years in major US newspapers. Instead, significant coverage of this issue comes from the independent sources, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maintains an ongoing series of reports under the title, “Citizenship Revoked.”

    • An MRAP Is Not a Blanket

      Americans watched in horror as the police descended on peaceful protesters in Ferguson…

    • Long-awaited CIA torture report could pose risks to hostages: State Department

      Secretary of state John Kerry has asked Senator Dianne Feinstein to “consider” the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques.

    • Kerry asks Feinstein to consider CIA report timing
    • CIA Won’t Defend Its One-Time Torturers
    • Kerry to Feinstein: Consider timing of CIA report
    • WHITE HOUSE GETTING COLD FEET OVER EXPOSING CIA’S TORTURE SECRETS
    • Inside the Battle Over the CIA Torture Report
    • John Kerry asks to delay CIA torture report
    • Lawmakers Insist On Release Of CIA Torture Report, Despite Administration’s Objections
    • As CIA, senators settle feuds, long-awaited ‘torture’ report imminent
    • New Obstacle Arises to Release of CIA Torture Report
    • MARK UDALL PROMISES AMERICA WILL “BE DISGUSTED” AT CIA TORTURE REPORT

      The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, is soon expected to release its summary of the so-called CIA Torture Report, the committee’s four-year-long investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture practices. Release of the summary is the result of months of wrangling and negotiating with the White House on what would be released to the public and when—and it will likely be heavily redacted. During an interview conducted on Friday, November 21, by Esquire writer at large Scott Raab, outgoing senator Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost his reelection race on November 4, once again said that if the report is not released in a way he deems transparent, he would consider all options to make it public. In this excerpt from the interview, Raab asks Udall if he will read the document into the record on the floor of the Senate before he leaves in January, an act for which he cannot be prosecuted.

    • ARE YOU THERE, CIA? IT’S ME, SIOBHAN.

      These are boom times for national security reporters, with government surveillance becoming a major topic after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA documents, but one of the most well-known journalists on the intelligence beat, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to throw in the towel and join the Dark Side—in Gorman’s case, a global communications company called Brunswick, where she will reportedly focus on privacy and data security.

      Gorman has done very solid reporting for the Journal and her previous employer, The Baltimore Sun. She has been prolific–and not just on the printed page. It turns out that she has had a lot of correspondence with the Central Intelligency Agency’s public affairs office, 246 pages of which were provided to us under a Freedom of Information Act request. We published the emails without comment earlier this year, as part of a story about reporter Ken Dilanian’s eyebrow-raising interchanges with the CIA, but in the event Gorman or her employers need a copy of her correspondence with our spymasters (perhaps the Journal has already revoked her access to its computers), we are re-upping them.

      It’s colorful reading—Gorman shows a lot of interest in learning about the CIA’s gym facilities (“I was just told that the facilities at the black sites were better than the ones at CIA”), and a year to the day after the killing of Osama bin Laden she cheerily began an email to the agency by asking, “So do I wish you a ‘happy anniversary’ today’?” There’s also this mysterious missive she sent the CIA about an apparent meeting she had with an agency official: “What prompted my guest to leave so suddenly? Bat phone rang twice, and then he excused himself?” And a word of warning to her next boss at Brunswick—watch what you say, because Gorman, when asking the agency for guidance on a rumor that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had been killed, explained to the CIA that the info came from the editor of her paper “but his tips aren’t always accurate.”

    • US: Release Torture Report

      The US Senate’s intelligence committee should release as planned its report summary on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program, Human Rights Watch said today. The White House’s expressed support for the release has been undermined by statements from the State Department raising concerns over the timing of the release and possible foreign policy implications.

    • Udall plays with a loaded deck

      Udall can wield a lot of power, forcing even classified portions of the report into the spotlight.

    • Rand Paul — from ophthalmologist to US Constitution guardian

      The 51-year-old doctor was sent to Washington by voters furious with a system that kept swelling the national debt, and anxious over what Paul sees as government zeal for war and encroachment on American civil liberties.

    • Feinstein fights to release torture report before GOP takeover

      The full report runs 6,700 pages, covering the committee’s review of 6.2 million pages of documents from the CIA and the Defense Department. Feinstein met fierce resistance from the CIA during the entire investigation, and now with less than a week before she hands the Intelligence Committee gavel to North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, she is battling the White House over its refusal to declassify the report.

    • Anger against police tops Sunday talk shows
    • Police violence in US UN documents torture

      The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.

    • Top police officer: many viewing child abuse images should be treated on NHS

      Norfolk chief constable Simon Bailey believes thousands on police database ‘pose no threat’ and don’t belong in prison

    • New York’s Next Killer-Cop Grand Jury

      Mass protests in New York were stretching into their third day when a new grand jury was announced on Friday. Not for the case of Eric Garner—a previous grand jury’s decision earlier this week not to indict the officer seen choking him on film before he died sparked the current protests. The latest grand jury will investigate the death of Akai Gurley, another unarmed black man who was killed by a police officer months after Garner’s death, in what the department says was an accidental shooting.

    • Abject failure of US to come clean on torture

      Now, more than ever, it is vital to show the world that real democracies are not like terrorist groups because they demand real accountability

    • Why Hosting Rudy Giuliani To Talk About Race Is A Bad Idea
    • Reporting the News Like Black Lives Don’t Matter

      “Black lives matter” is the rallying cry of the burgeoning nationwide movement against police killings. The Associated Press (12/5/14), covering that movement, has produced a perfect example of what journalism looks like when black lives don’t matter.

      [...]

      Or even to make the basic medical point that being able to talk is a sign that you don’t need the Heimlich maneuver–not that you don’t need a cop to stop administering a notoriously lethal chokehold.

      You don’t get any of those points in the article, because AP didn’t feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don’t matter.

  • DRM

    • Why Marvin has become my favorite ebook app

      Oh, and if you need to you can move your Kindle books over to Marvin via Calibre by removing the DRM. I, of course, do not advise you to do this one way or the other. It’s entirely your choice and may be affected by whatever the relevant laws are for that sort of thing. ;)

12.06.14

Links 7/12/2014: Typhoon Hagupit, AURORAGOLD

Posted in News Roundup at 7:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Separating The Opportunities From The Obstacles In Open-Source Networking

    Open standards have driven the networking market since the earliest days of the Internet. While the use of open source for networking is a more recent phenomenon, it is no less important. A major industry transition to open source for software-defined networking (SDN) is under way, and users and vendors stand to benefit. Some expectations, however, may need to change.

    While the original idea behind SDN — separating the control from the data plane in network switches — has turned out to be just one of many architectural approaches that have emerged, it did catalyze massive interest in software and open source within the networking world. Things like APIs and DevOps tools became relevant to network engineers, and open source movements emerged to fulfill the need for increased automation and flexibility as organizations moved deeper into the cloud.

  • Google’s New Open Source Project Lets You Add Live Streaming to Your App

    The numbers all point to the same conclusion: When it comes to modern communication mediums, videoconferencing is becoming increasingly popular.

  • 11 open source tools to make the most of machine learning

    These 11 machine learning tools provide functionality for individual apps or whole frameworks, such as Hadoop. Some are more polyglot than others: Scikit, for instance, is exclusively for Python, while Shogun sports interfaces to many languages, from general-purpose to domain-specific.

  • Samsung’s strategic commitment to upstream open source development

    The Linux Foundation’s Linux.com website reports that Samsung’s open source group is now “hiring aggressively” and plans to double the size of the group in the coming years.

  • The 10 Coolest Open Source Apps of 2014
  • Open-source tools will benefit military and Wisconsin vehicle makers

    All of the software Negrut’s team develops will eventually be made publicly available through a website. “We believe making it all open source is the best way to ensure this transfer of technology from us to industry, where people can take advantage of the techniques and the software that we develop as part of this project, so as to foster innovation here or elsewhere in industry,” Negrut says.

  • Intel announces new Stephen Hawking speech system will be open source
  • Hawking’s speech software goes open source for disabled

    The system that helps Stephen Hawking communicate with the outside world will be made available online from January in a move that could help millions of motor neurone disease sufferers, scientists said Tuesday.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • HP Steps Up Big Data Game with Cloud-Based Helion Offering

      Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) made another significant move within the Big Data market this week with the announcement of Haven OnDemand, which brings the data analytics and app development features of the company’s Vertica and IDOL platforms to the cloud.

      The tools, which are hosted on the Helion cloud, provide access to Vertica’s data analytics functionality, as well as the capabilities of IDOL, which is designed to assist developers in building apps that leverage big data.

    • Mirantis Targets Developers with Hosted OpenStack Solution

      Mirantis is betting that ease of use and simple documentation will speed OpenStack adoption. That’s the goal behind the new “Developer Edition” of Mirantis OpenStack Express, which the company calls “the fastest and easiest way to get an OpenStack cloud.”

  • Databases

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Reclaiming the PDF from Adobe Reader

      In October, it was discovered that Adobe had removed the link to download Adobe Reader, its proprietary PDF file viewer, for use with a GNU/Linux operating system.

      While it is still possible to install Adobe Reader on GNU/Linux, Adobe’s attempts to hide access to the product for certain users is only one example of its systematic neglect of its GNU/Linux user base, and falls in line with many others as a demonstration of the importance of free software–software that no company or developer can neglect or hide. As the Windows and OSX versions of the software were developed through version 11, the GNU/Linux version was long stuck at version nine. For several years the software has lacked important features, security improvements, and support against malware attacks and other intrusions. Yet, by “locking in” Adobe Reader users and making it difficult for them to migrate to a free software PDF viewer, Adobe has, in effect, degraded the power of the PDF as a free document format, a standard the purpose of which is to be implemented by any potential piece of software and to be compatible with all. The company has abandoned the principle of program-agnostic documents, bringing about a lose-lose situation for all.

      By being led to rely on the proprietary software for tasks like sharing documents and filling out forms without the option to use a free software reader in its place, entreprises, the public sector, and institutions of higher learning have also fallen victim to this neglect, all as Adobe insidiously seeks to maintain a hold on its market share. Within institutions such as government–institutions that ought not to rely on any proprietary software, to begin with–it is concerning that Adobe Reader has often been taken to be the only option for interacting with PDF files and for communicating with the electorate.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Valve and Steam broadcasting, Dolphin emulator, and more

      Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Steam Broadcasting beta, the open source Dolphin emulator, QEMU’s advent calendar, and game releases for Linux.

    • An open source future for synthetic biology

      If the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) tells us something indisputable, it is this: GMO food products from corporations like Monsanto are suspected to endanger health. On the other hand, an individual’s right to genetically modify and even synthesize entire organisms as part of his dietary or medical regimen could someday be a human right.

    • Open-source gadget lets you invent your own Internet of Things

      This is why Ville Ylläsjärvi thinks Thingsee One, the open source, Internet of Things gadget his company is Kickstarting, will have staying power. Thingsee One isn’t just a sensor-stuffed piece of hardware, it’s a developer kit for other hardware makers. “We’re solving the hardware equation for them,” he says. “Startups can develop their solution using Thingsee One, get on with tests and pilots on the field using Thingsee One, and in many cases get their first customers using Thingsee One.”

    • Open Data

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Fox’s John Stossel Thinks Secondhand Smoke Isn’t Deadly

      Fox’s John Stossel claimed that “there is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people,” ignoring years of studies and a 2014 Surgeon General report that determined millions of Americans have died as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke.

    • Monsanto Seeks to Bring GM Corn to the Ukraine

      Monsanto has been making headway toward bringing GMOs (genetically modified organisms) into Ukraine. Former Ukraine President, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a proposed $17 billion loan to Ukraine from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in late 2013, because the loan required the introduction of GMO seeds and Ukrainian law bars farmers from growing GM crops. Long considered “the bread basket of Europe,” Ukraine’s rich black soil is ideal for growing grains, and in 2012 Ukrainian farmers harvested more than 20 million tons of corn.

  • Security

    • Report: 31 percent of detected threats in 2014 attributed to Conficker

      Six years after first being spotted in the wild, Conficker is still making its rounds online, and new research suggests that 31 percent of this year’s top threats involved the worm.

      Conficker capitalizes on unpatched machines that are still running Windows XP, as well as systems operating pirated versions of Windows, according to F-Secure’s Threat Report H1 2014, which identifies the top 10 threats of the first half of 2014. The countries most at risk for the worm are Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Malaysia and France.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • “U.S. Drones Kill 28 ‘Unknowns’ for Every Intended Target”
    • U.S. drones kill 28 innocents for every ‘bad guy’
    • November Drone Report: Strikes Spike in Yemen, Children Reportedly Killed in Pakistan
    • Arithmetic of Precision Drone Strikes: Kill 28 to Eliminate 1 Target
    • The Drone War: Mitigating Collateral Damage
    • A “Precise” U.S. Drone War? Report Says 28 Unidentified Victims Killed for Every 1 Target

      A new report finds U.S. drone strikes kill 28 unidentified people for every intended target. While the Obama administration has claimed its drone strikes are precise, the group Reprieve found that strikes targeting 41 people in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 other, unnamed people. In its attempts to kill al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri alone, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults; al-Zawahiri remains alive. We are joined by Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at Reprieve and author of the new report, “You Never Die Twice: Multiple Kills in the U.S. Drone Program.”

    • Obama’s Drone Campaign: Portrait of a Failed War on Terror

      Murderous US Foreign Policy Only Recruits More Terrorists

    • Shaky drones

      The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes by arguing on grounds of efficiency.

    • The dirty consequences of our clean wars

      The fact that only 25% of airstrikes in Iraq and 5% of airstrikes in Syria are pre-planned, with the vast majority being undertaken by aircraft and drones ‘on the fly’ (i.e. when a ‘target of opportunity’ is spotted) will no doubt impact on the number of civilian casualties killed in this air war.

    • In Yemen, al Qaeda’s Greatest Enemy Is Not America’s Friend

      Locals describe Manasa as a village, but it’s little more than a complex of houses loosely clustered around an earthen courtyard at the end of a bumpy dirt track five hours from Yemen’s capital of Sanaa.

    • Former PM slams US Vice President for comments on M’sian judiciary

      Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (pix) slammed US Vice President Joe Biden for his comment on Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy trial in which he said that the appeal against the conviction was a chance for Malaysia to “promote confidence” in its judiciary.

      “The Vice President needs to look at his own country first. In America, citizens are given life sentences and they do not even know about it, the government sentences them and uses drones to kill them.

      “This is the country that is advising us about the sanctity of law? It seems that they have an ulterior motive for Anwar to become the Prime Minister,” said Mahathir.

      Biden was unusually direct about his remarks on Twitter recently saying that the Malaysian government’s use of legal system & Sedition Act to stifle the opposition raises rule of law concerns.

    • From Ferguson to Yemen: What If We Aren’t So Different After All?

      While saddened by the news out of Ferguson, Missouri this past week, I am not surprised. Once again an unarmed black teen was shot dead by an “other than” black man, and the legal industry was used to exonerate the killer. I say legal industry, because it is no longer a system of due process and equal protection, and no longer seeking justice. It is merely an industry which allows experts and insiders to use the law to further their own agenda.

    • Drone strikes kill nine in Yemen

      A suspected US drone strike in Yemen killed nine alleged al-Qaida militants early on Saturday, a security official said, as authorities continue their search for an American photojournalist held by the extremists.

    • War by media and the triumph of propaganda

      Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

      Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

      These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

      The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

    • Navy Seeks to Practice Using Electromagnetic Radiation Weapons Over U.S. Soil

      It is estimated that enough electromagnetic radiation will be emitted to melt human eye tissue and cause breast cancer, not to mention the damage to the environment and wildlife on lands ostensibly under federal protection. The Growler planes employ electronic technology to jam enemy radar. Navy officials aim to fly training programs over U.S. lands some 260 days a year. As Jamail writes, “What is at stake is not just whether the military is allowed to use protected public lands in the Pacific Northwest for its war games, but a precedent being set for them to do so across the entire country.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • The Vatican has found hundreds of millions of euro “tucked away”

      THE VATICAN’S ACCOUNTS czar said last night that he had stumbled across hundred of millions of euros “tucked away” in various accounts, describing the windfall as a relic of the papacy’s medieval but soon-to-be reformed financial set-up.

      “We have discovered that the (Vatican’s financial) situation is much healthier than it seemed,” the Australian cardinal Pell told Britain’s Catholic Herald.

  • Censorship

    • Russia Threatens To Ban BuzzFeed

      Russia has warned BuzzFeed that it will ban access to the entire site over a post published on Wednesday about a deadly gunfight in the capital of Chechnya.

      BuzzFeed received an email on Friday from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal communications agency, saying that the post “contains appeals to mass riots, extremist activities or participation in mass (public) actions held with infringement of the established order.” It cited statutes laid out by the prosecutor general’s office and said access to the site “is restricted by communications service providers in the territory of the Russian Federation.” It has given BuzzFeed 24 hours to remove the post or face a total ban.

    • Chaos Computer Club on the blocking of our website in UK

      A significant portion of British citizens are currently blocked from accessing the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) website. On top of that, Vodafone customers are blocked from accessing the ticket sale to this year’s Chaos Communication Congress (31C3). [1]

      Since July 2013, a government-backed so-called opt out list censors the open internet. These internet filters, authorized by Prime Minister David Cameron, are implemented by UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). Dubbed as the “Great Firewall of Britain”, the lists block adult content as well as material related to alcohol, drugs, smoking, and even opinions deemed “extremist”.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Green activists from Ecuador harassed by police on way to climate summit

      Activists say their presence at the meeting in Peru would be embarrassing to President Rafael Correa, who wants to drill for oil in the Amazon

    • If Eric Garner’s killer can’t be indicted, what cop possibly could? It’s time to fix grand juries

      Grand juries were designed to be a check on prosecutors and law enforcement. Instead, they’ve become a corrupt shield to protect those with power and another sword to strike down those without. And it’s now all too obviously past time the system was overhauled to fix that.

    • British military base in Bahrain is a ‘reward’ for UK’s silence on human rights, say campaigners

      The Royal Navy will set up a permanent base in Bahrain, to the dismay of human rights campaigners who say the base is a “reward” for the British’s government silence over torture, attacks on peaceful protesters and arbitrary detention in the tiny kingdom.

    • Rookie NYPD officer who shot Akai Gurley in Brooklyn stairwell was texting union rep as victim lay dying

      In the six and a half minutes after Peter Liang discharged a single bullet that struck Gurley, 28, he and his partner couldn’t be reached, sources told the Daily News. And instead of calling for help for the dying man, Liang was texting his union representative. What’s more, the sources said, the pair of officers weren’t supposed to be patrolling the stairways of the Pink Houses that night.

    • SAFE hosts de-hired professor from University of Illinois

      Salaita, who was set to begin a tenured position at Illinois this fall, had his job offer retracted after a number of donors, students and faculty at the school contended that he was anti-Semitic.

    • The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate

      Nobody’s willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that exploded in New York yesterday after yet another non-indictment following a minority death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.

    • Man who filmed Eric Garner in chokehold says grand jury was rigged

      Ramsey Orta — who recorded the July 17 incident in which Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold shortly before he died on his cellphone — told the Daily News the grand jury ‘wasn’t fair from the start,’ and claims his testimony only lasted 10 minutes. ‘I think they already had their minds made up,’ he said.

    • Sunday Explainer: The unprecedented immigration powers awarded to Scott Morrison

      In the words of Motoring Enthusiast Party Senator Ricky Muir, the upper house was faced with a choice between a “bad decision or a worse decision”. He opted for what he decided was the former, and gave the government the final vote it needed for the controversial Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment bill to pass the Senate, 34 votes to 32. The amended legislation was then rushed through the House of Representatives, which was due to have its final sitting day of the year on Thursday, but returned on Friday to pass it into law in just 12 minutes.

    • Stephen Colbert Slams Fox News’ Willful Ignorance On Race Relations

      Colbert: Non-Indictments For Police Shootings Could Be Seen “As Part Of A Larger Troubling Trend. Or, You Could Be Fox News.”

    • Violence erupts in Greece

      A march through central Athens to mark the sixth anniversary of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager quickly turned violent Saturday, as marchers damaged store fronts and bus stations, and set fire to clothes looted from a shop.

      Clashes also broke out between police and demonstrators marching through the northern city of Thessaloniki. At night, police fired tear gas and stun grenades after a crowd of marchers beat up two plainclothes policemen there.

    • As protests mount, Athens braces for the worst

      For more than 20 days now, 21-year-old anarchist Nikos Romanos has been on hunger strike, demanding prison leave to attend lectures after he passed university entrance exams.

    • Theresa May’s child sexual abuse inquiry faces new storm

      Two members of Theresa May’s panel inquiring into child sex abuse are facing calls to resign after being accused of sending threatening or insulting emails to victims who had criticised the inquiry.

      Lawyers for one abuse survivor have written to the home secretary to complain of a string ofunsolicited communications, including an allegedly threatening email sent two days before an official meeting that both panellists and an abuse survivor were due to attend.

    • Body Cameras Worn by Police Officers Are No ‘Safeguard of Truth,’ Experts Say

      Michael Brown’s family, on the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision, called for all police in the United States to wear body cameras.

      Mayor Bill de Blasio, in announcing that some of New York’s police officers would begin wearing them, said “body cameras are one of the ways to create a real sense of transparency and accountability.”

      And on Monday, President Obama said he would request $75 million in federal funds to distribute 50,000 body cameras to police departments nationwide, saying they would improve police relations with the public.

    • Kerry Puts Brakes on CIA Torture Report

      Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.

      [...]

      But those concerns are not new, and Kerry’s 11th-hour effort to secure a delay in the report’s release places Feinstein in a difficult position: She must decide whether to set aside the administration’s concerns and accept the risk, or scuttle the roll-out of the investigation she fought for years to preserve.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

Links 6/12/2014: BioShock Comes to GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 3:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Marines dump Microsoft for Linux OS on Northrop Grumman radar

    Just weeks after Northrop Grumman got approval to begin building a new breed of mobile radar systems for the Marine Corps, the Corps has asked the defense contractor in Linthicum to change the operating system.

    The Department of Defense announced a $10.2 million contract modification Wednesday to change the operator command and control software on its G/ATOR radar system Microsoft Windows XP to a Defense Information Systems Agency compliant Linux OS.

    Ingrid Vaughan, director of the program, said the change would mean greater compatability for laptop computers used to control the system in the future.

    In a statement released Friday, she said Microsoft Windows XP is no longer supported by the software developer and the shift to a DOD approved Linux operating system will reduce both the complexity of the operating system and need for future updates.

  • Server

    • IBM Partners With Docker, Launches Containers Service

      IBM partners with Docker, launches the IBM Containers Service and becomes the first company to sell integrated solutions with Docker Hub Enterprise.

    • Docker Has a New Orchestration Platform but APIs Can’t Come Soon Enough

      The launch also included the first of a set of accompanying open APIs aimed at helping ecosystem partners create products and services that align and integrate with the new Docker orchestration offerings. In high demand from developers, the timeline for future APIs is not for several months, which may disappoint some ecosystem partners who have already been waiting for some time for the “plugin APIs” that will enable them to integrate their ecosystem products with the Docker Engine.

    • Where to Find a SysAdmin Job

      The role of system administrator means candidates “need to operate at a somewhat higher level of abstraction,” as Heikki Topi, a professor of computer information systems at Bentley University and a member of the education board at the Association for Computing Machinery, has put it.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Expands Management Team to Respond to Growth
    • Linux Foundation names Portland’s Steve Westmoreland as CIO

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the Linux open source computer operating system, added to its Oregon staff this week by hiring Portland’s Steve Westmoreland as chief information officer.

    • Open Source: Linux Operating System Introduced in 1991

      In the beginning, software was free, something you needed to make the hardware run. Then Microsoft (MSFT) and others demonstrated that people would pay for proprietary code, and for a long while software wasn’t free. But proprietary code was often clunky, and what worked on one kind of computer had to be re-created on others. Soon people realized there was a better way, and software became free again, sort of. Open-source software is essentially software that’s open to the public for tinkering, and over time that tinkering makes the code stronger. Linux, the classic example, is an operating system that’s been so extensively customized and built upon, versions of it now run everything from data centers, PCs, TVs, and cars to your Android smartphone. Companies still charge for apps and services, but much of the technology we use today is based on building blocks that are free and open to the imagination.

    • Linux Foundation Adds New Leaders, New Events for 2015

      Over the past couple of years, The Linux Foundation has emerged as a very influential organization overseeing not only directly Linux-related initiatives, but important technology efforts including building out “The Internet of Everything.” This week, the foundation made a series of announcements, including the news that it is expanding its leadership team, and news about events that the foundation will sponsor in 2015. Here is more.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • Linux Benchmarks Of Intel’s Edison Module

        Intel’s Edison Module is a development platform for prototyping wearable computing devices and IoT devices. Here’s some Linux benchmarks with the Intel Edison running on Debian.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Zorin: That is Flexibility!

      About 2 years ago I tried Zorin 6.0 and have used it and upgraded it on one of my computers since. I especially like the Zorin OS desktop experience because I can change it to look like Windows 7 or like Mac. That is flexibility! I also enjoy the Ubuntu type repository system!

    • Puzzle GNU/Linux: Integrated Pieces Create an Intriguing OS

      Puzzle GNU/Linux is a strange OS distribution that shows the value of open source ingenuity. This Linux distro is built around a hybrid desktop that is highly customizable.

    • Reviews

      • Makulu Linux 6.0 KDE: Guaranteed to make you smile

        Another Makulu Linux distribution was released today, and that’s always good news! This time it is the KDE desktop for the Makulu 6.x series. The Xfce version of this was just released a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t expect for there to be any major surprises: I hope that means this will not be a very lengthy post.

      • Linux Lite 2.2 Review – Consumes Low Memory, But Failed to Wake My PC from Sleep

        ‘Linux Lite’ is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases. It includes the lightweight & fully functional XFCE desktop environment, comes with full support for proprietor multimedia playback & a few applications of its own (software updater, additional app installer, a ‘cleaner’…) that should assist a novice user for easily managing the installed operating system.

    • New Releases

      • Q4OS 0.5.22 version released

        The new version improve font appearance for GTK2 applications and brings more accurate GTK2 styles in both classical and modern Q4OS themes. Lookswitcher, the tool to switch between Q4OS desktop themes, now works flawlessly, it has been fixed to prevent styles mixing on some rare switch attempts. Shortcuts in non-default Kickoff menu have been updated. More internal improvements has been made and several minor bugs has been closed.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • CentOS Rolls Along as openSUSE 12.3 Nears EOL

        Karanbir Singh today announced the inaugural release of CentOS rolling builds. CentOS will be releasing monthly respins of CentOS to include “all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates.” In other news, openSUSE 12.3 nears the end of its support and hit game BioShock Infinite looks to be heading to a Linux machine near you.

      • Tumbleweed is rolling along

        It has been more than a month since the new structure of opensuse Tumbleweed was announced (see my earlier post), and we have seen it in practice for a month.

      • Opensuse linux for education 13.2 — a review

        Overall, this is a nice package. It might be a good place to start for someone wanting to try out opensuse for the first time.

      • openSUSE 12.3 Is Approaching End of Life Fast

        openSUSE 12.3 is now very close to reach End of Life and the support cycle will be terminated in a few weeks time, meaning no more updates will be provided for the aging operating system.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Release for CentOS Linux Rolling media
      • ALERT: A Software Security Transparency Breach Warning

        The example of how the NSA intentionally inserted weakened string constants into Elliptic Curve Cryptography lay hidden for several years, in fact, and was only exposed by a languishing open Red Hat trouble ticket. What was odd was how given the potential seriousness of the incident, no action was being taken to look at the source code and change it. As more comments appended to the ticket, the level of suspicion grew to the point of where NIST was forced to open up an investigation.

      • Red Hat, Huawei Partner on OpenStack for NFV

        The two tech vendors see the OpenStack solution as an ideal platform for telecommunications vendors that want to bring NFV to their networks.

      • Building an analytics cloud on OpenShift

        Communication and collaboration between development and operations can be difficult to achieve in many organizations, especially in larger environments. These two areas have traditionally operated within ‘silos’ separate from each other – something that can lead to delays and miscommunication.

      • Red Hat and Partners Aim to Infuse Open NFV Tools in Telco Data Centers

        As 2014 draws to a close, we’re seeing a lot of action from telecom players and the open source community surrounding Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology. Telecom companies have traditionally had a lot of proprietary tools in the middle and at the basis of their technology stacks. NFV is an effort to combat that, and to help the parallel trends of virtualization and cloud computing stay as open as possible.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Release Critical Bug report for Week 49
      • Slackware, Crux, Pisi, Manjaro, Devuan… Freedom-Fighters Or Luddites?

        Debian is going astray. Unless they wake up, many loyal devotees of Debian will move to other distros that do IT the right way. I’m a little old to be distro-hopping but even I can see the necessity of escaping the entanglement, the single point of failure, and the loss of control that systemd represents.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Meizu MX4 Running Ubuntu Touch Surfaces

            Meizu is really under the spotlight lately. The company has launched their latest handset just recently, Meizu is doing great as far as sales go and everything seems to be in place. This Chinese OEM has big plans, no doubt about that. They have signed an agreement with Alibaba a while back in order to use parts of Alibaba’s YunOS in their own Flyme OS and basically created a partnership between two companies. That’s not the only agreement Meizu signed in the last couple of month, just last month this company has agreed partnership with Canonical, a UK-based company which is known as the creator and developer of Ubuntu operating system some of us are very familiar with. Ubuntu OS has been available for PCs for a long time now, but this company created a mobile version of this OS (Ubuntu Touch) as well and we’ve seen it in action when Canonical showcased it on one of the Nexus handset a while back, I really don’t recall which one was it. Ubuntu was also shown off on Meizu MX3 a while back and it will be arriving on Meizu handsets officially in Q1 2015 according to the agreement which Canonical and Meizu signed.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • KitKat BSPs support TI Sitara and BeagleBone Black

      Adeneo announced Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) BSPs for the TI Sitara AM335x and Sitara AM437x development platforms and the AM335x-based BeagleBone Black SBC.

      Adeneo Embedded is a Platinum Member of the TI Design Network, and has previously released a number of Linux and Android BSPs (board support packages) for Texas Instruments processors and development boards. In Feb. 2013, for example, Adeneo announced an Android BSP for the TI OMAP 5 family of system-on-chips.

    • £50 MIPS is a micro-computer running Android and Linux

      Rapberri Pis are all the rage these days, but now there’s a new kid on the micro-computing block. Unveiled by British chip design company Imagination Technologies, the MIPS Creator CI20 is being dubbed as a rival mini-comp to the venerable Pi.

    • Creator CI20 is an Android or Linux-powered Raspberry Pi competitor

    • Phones

      • Android

        • A video history of Android

          Today, Android is the world’s most pervasive mobile operating system on the planet, powering millions of smartphones, tablets, wearables, and more. But that wasn’t always the case, and Android’s public life started from humble beginnings just about six years ago.

        • Android motorcycle helmet open for pre-order

          Skully announced a limited public pre-order round for its Android-based head-up display motorcycle helmet, available for $1,499 through Jan. 8.

          The “world’s first augmented reality motorcycle helmet,” was a record-breaking $2.8 million Indiegogo success this summer, says Skully. (The frozen Indiegogo page shows a total of $2.44 million, but hey, it’s still a lot of money.) The helmets are now shipping, and beginning Monday, anyone can order the smart helmet, as long as you have $1,499 left in your holiday gift fund.

        • ​Lollipop 5.01 review: The Android release we’ve been waiting for

          Is it finally safe to upgrade to Android 5 after the recent release of Android 5.01? Based on my experiences with my pair of 2013 Nexus 7 tablets, the answer is an unqualified yes.

        • 10 of the best Android apps from November 2014

          November sure was a busy month for new apps and notable updates; from photo recognition, to launchers, to Biz Stone’s new app for sharing random thoughts.

        • Top 10 Android Apps For November 2014

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • You Couldn’t Make It Up

      Tony Blair names Henry Kissinger as his role model.

    • Tony Blair’s wealth estimated at £10m

      Tony Blair has insisted that his much-criticised business dealings with dubious governments round the world have not been as lucrative as people think – as one of his staff suggested his wealth amounted to about £10m.

  • Finance

    • Billionaires Featured Four Times As Often As the Poor on TV News

      In June 2014, Frederick Reese’s Mint Press report highlighted the fact that the advocacy group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a study showing that the three major broadcast newscasts – ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News – featured billionaires almost four times as often as individuals affected by poverty. Poverty is an issue that affects 50 million Americans, a significantly larger number of individuals than the 482 billionaires that these newscasts covered.

    • It’s official: America is now No. 2

      Hang on to your hats, America.

      And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.

      There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

      It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.

      The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • ALEC Fumes: Transparency Threatens Corporate Free Speech!

      After spending hundreds of millions of undisclosed funds on state and federal elections, the corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council are demanding that state legislators preserve their “right” to anonymously spend money on politics and curry favor with elected officials, and to thwart shareholder efforts to hold the corporations they own accountable.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

12.05.14

Links 5/12/2014: Image of Meizu MX4, Tizen 2.3 Rev1 SDK, $65 MIPS Development Board, YotaPhone 2

Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Washing, Kali Story, and Fedora RC4

    In the Linuxphere today Adam Williamson announced Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 4. Lifehacker is running an interview with Kali developer Mati Aharoni and the Linux Foundation released a study on Linux usage trends. Patrick Masson discusses “openwashing” and Linux gaming reaches new milestones. In software news Opera 26 was released, Eric Geier presents firewall options, and The Register features 10 “freeware apps” for Linux.

  • Unhappy Node.js users fork the Joyent-run project, creating community-driven io.js

    The Node.js server-side Javascript runtime is today’s hot thing. You might say it’s the Ruby on Rails of the ’10s. Where developers used to code in Perl and PHP, then Ruby/Rails, today’s startup-fueled web-development world is all about Javascript on the server, and Node is the grease that makes it all go.

  • The Ongoing Wars Against Free Tech

    We’re still suspicious of their motives and know they would destroy us tomorrow if they could — but that doesn’t worry us, because they can’t. They have too much on their plate as they fight for survival. But even if they didn’t we still wouldn’t be afraid — not of them, nor of Oracle or anyone else who’d like nothing better than to squish us under their thumbs. We’ve won. As Dwight Merriman, co-founder of DoubleClick – a closed company if ever there was one — told me recently when I asked him about open source in the enterprise, “I think it’s mainstream.” He should know; he’s on our side now.

    These days the future of FOSS is pretty secure; we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. We even seem to be slowly gaining the upper hand on the patent front, with many recent court rulings taking the wind out of the trolls’ sails, if you’ll excuse the cliche.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Fraudulent apps stalk Apple’s App Store

      The scale of the problem became apparent in an open source project where I volunteer, the Apache OpenOffice community. For several months, the user support mailing list has been bothered with apparently random questions — some very angry — from people seeking support for an iPad app. The community has been confused by these questions, since they have nothing to do with any work at Apache; Apache OpenOffice doesn’t even have an iOS version.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD-Forked Bitrig Finally Sees Its Initial Release

      Back in 2012 OpenBSD got forked as Bitrig and as of this week the initial release is finally available.

      Bitrig launched to focus on supporting modern architectures, a focus on LLVM/Clang rather than GCC, and other modern development focuses compared to OpenBSD carrying a lot of legacy support.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • Become a Conservancy Supporter Today!

      The current Zeitgeist of the broader Open Source and Free Software community incubated his disturbing mindset. Our community suffers now from regular and active cooption by for-profit interests. The Trade Association Executive’s fundraising claim — which probably even bears true in their subset of the community — shows the primary mechanism of cooption: encourage funding only from a few, big sources so they can slowly but surely dictate project policy.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

Leftovers

  • CIOs fight back in battle for control of ICT spending

    CIOs are under pressure from their line-of-business colleagues who are reportedly exerting greater influence over IT purchasing decisions, according to a newly released global study.

    The shift away from CIOs has caused them to change their priorities for their businesses as they turn to new measures to regain control of ICT spending.

  • Science

    • To address tech’s diversity woes, start with the vanishing Comp Sci classroom

      In May 2014 at the all-girls Emma Willard School in upstate New York, nearly a third of the school’s 300+ students were preparing for their final Advanced Placement (AP) exams. But exactly three were studying for the AP Computer Science exam—and they weren’t doing so on campus. The school (full disclosure: my alma mater) completely eliminated its computer science program in 2009.

  • Security

    • Sony Pictures leak shows employees used worst passwords ever

      Everyone is bad at passwords; that’s nothing new. But if you’re working at a high-profile studio like Sony, perhaps you should choose a better password than “s0ny123″ or “password.”

    • Google Can Now Tell You’re Not a Robot With Just One Click

      On Wednesday, Google announced that many of its “Captchas”—the squiggled text tests designed to weed out automated spambots—will be reduced to nothing more than a single checkbox next to the statement “I’m not a robot.” No more typing in distorted words or numbers; Google says it can, in many cases, tell the difference between a person or an automated program simply by tracking clues that don’t involve any user interaction. The giveaways that separate man and machine can be as subtle as how he or she (or it) moves a mouse in the moments before that single click.

    • “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” is as annoying as reCAPTCHA if…

      When completing an online form, proving that you’re not a robot can be very annoying. Sometimes even frustrating, especially if the website uses reCAPTCHA or a similar implementation of a system that asks you to decipher some cryptic text.

      I don’t use reCAPTCHA on this website, but I do encounter it on other websites. So it was heart-warming to learn that Google has released a new implementation of reCAPTCHA called No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA that doesn’t come with reCAPTCHA’s annoying aspects.

      The official announcement has it that “a significant number of users will be able to securely and easily verify they’re human without actually having to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead, with just a single click, they’ll confirm they are not a robot.”

      What’s not to like about that? But is it as simple as that? And how does the system know that the entity completing a form is a human and not an automated script? The simplest way to find out is to try and complete an online form protected from bots by No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Unhappy Node.js users fork the Joyent-run project, creating community-driven io.js

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas

      After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • A political statement – not a principled plan

      With more money available the prices of houses at the lower end will increase – a bribe to current homeowners with houses valued between £125k and £750k – exactly those swing voters predominantly located in marginal constituencies.

    • Chicago Tribune Ignores Experts On New City-Wide Minimum Wage Increase

      Chicago City Council Voted To Increase Minimum Wage To $13 Per Hour In 2019. On December 2, Chicago’s 50-member city council “overwhelmingly” approved a plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $13 per hour by 2019 with only five alderman opposing the measure. Chicago will raise its minimum wage to $10 next year, and increase the minimum wage “by steps of 50 cents and $1″ until the $13 dollar an hour mark is reached in 2019. Approximately 400,000 workers in the city will be affected by the increase. [Associated Press, 12/2/14]

    • Zero-hours contracts are forcing me out of teaching

      I love teaching. It is what I was born to do. I’m a thirtysomething further education teacher with a first class degree, a PGCE, qualified teacher status and two subject specialisms, who has repeatedly been rated outstanding in my teaching.

      I’m also a parent of a 15-year-old child with an autistic spectrum disorder and straight after I have written this piece, I will be leaving teaching.

      I’m not unusual. I’ve been on zero-hours contracts for some time and it has finally got to me. I’m tired of thinking I’ve secured a future for me and my child, tired of thinking I won’t have to worry about whether we both eat or whether we have heating, tired of worrying how we will cope if my child loses their school coat. As I explained yesterday on 5Live, I’ve decided to leave teaching for a supermarket job that will give me the security of knowing how much I’ll have available to pay my bills each month.

  • Privacy

    • Securing Blockchain.info Users with Tor and SSL

      Over the past couple of weeks there has been a marked increase in the number of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against Tor users of web based Bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain.info. One user reported 63 bitcoin stolen, and there were many other examples as the thefts continued despite warnings to users. The attacks were so successful that Blockchain resorted to blocking all traffic to the wallet service from Tor exit nodes.

    • Sifting Fact from Fiction with All Writs and Encryption: No Backdoors

      Following recent reports in the Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica, there’s been new interest in the government’s use of a relatively obscure law, the All Writs Act. According to these reports, the government has invoked the All Writs Act in order to compel the assistance of smartphone manufacturers in unlocking devices pursuant to a search warrant. The reports are based on orders from federal magistrate judges in Oakland and New York City issued to Apple and another unnamed manufacturer (possibly also Apple) respectively, requiring them to bypass the lock screen on seized phones and enable law enforcement access.

    • Congress Quietly Decides To Delete Key NSA Reform In CRomnibus Agreement

      You may recall, back in June, that there was a key House vote that took NSA supporters by surprise. An amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill pushed by a bi-partisan team of Thomas Massie, Jim Sensenbrenner and Zoe Lofgren passed overwhelmingly, with a plan to slam the door shut on questionable NSA “backdoor searches” (as described in detail earlier). The House voted 293 to 123, making it a pretty clear and overwhelming statement that Congress did not, in fact, support such practices by the NSA.

    • Use Tor Browser, get your computer blacklisted

      But I was surprised today when I tried to use it from Tor Browser and it failed to generate a short URL. Instead, I got this message: “Your computer is blacklisted; cannot make ur1s!”

  • Civil Rights

    • An ‘Entertaining’ Lesson on How Cops Can ‘Win the Media’ After They Kill

      The class, taught by PR agent Rick Rosenthal, focused on such topics as “Managing the Media When Things Get Ugly (Think Ferguson).” A flyer promoting the class promised, “In addition to the Ferguson case study, this fast-paced class is jam-packed with the essential strategies and tactics, skills and techniques that will help you WIN WITH THE MEDIA!”

      Sound boring? Not at all! “The training is also highly entertaining,” the flyer emphasized. “You will learn a lot, and you’ll have fun doing it!”

    • Many Convicted of Crimes They Didn’t Commit

      Why are people falsely convicted? The reasons include mistaken witness identification, false confession, official misconduct, perjury, false accusation, and false or misleading forensic evidence. As Lavender reports, “The factors involved in a wrongful conviction vary depending on the crime.” In child sexual abuse cases, for instance, over 80% of exonerations involve perjury or false accusation. By contrast, in sexual assault cases, a majority of exonerations hinge on mistaken witness identification.

    • Baggage-theft ring busted at JFK Airport

      Seven contractors were rounded up for swiping electronic items, jewelry and other items from checked baggage at Kennedy Airport’s Terminals 4 and 7 between 2012 and June of this year, officials said. The thieves would then sell the items they stole.

    • In NYT’s Retelling of Eric Garner’s Death, the Officer’s Arm Has a Mind of Its Own

      It’s debatable whether or not you’d refer to Garner as resisting; he’s certainly loudly protesting that he’d done nothing wrong, and he does not appear eager to put his hands behind his back to be handcuffed. But that “resistance” lasted a few seconds before he was choked.

    • NYPD Invokes Notorious Glomar Response

      The Glomar Response dates back to the 1970s, and allows agencies to respond that they can “neither confirm or deny” as a response to requests for information made under the federal Freedom of Information Act, when responding might compromise national security or privacy. As CJ Ciaramella writes, “The Glomar doctrine gives agencies the obvious power to hide the existence of records, but it also allows agencies to short-circuit the appeal process, since requestors can’t file an appeal for records they don’t know exist.” In Abdur-Rashid’s case, the NYPD argued that responding to his request would disclose, in Campbell’s words, “sensitive information about the department’s investigative techniques.”

    • Wash. Post Digs In Its Heels On Botched Immigration Fact Check

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • What Canada can teach the U.S. about net neutrality

      If there are two ways in which the Internet is similar in the United States and Canada, it’s that it’s slow and expensive in both places relative to many developed countries. The big difference, however, is that Canada is looking into doing something about it.

      The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—the northern equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—is in its second week of hearings on how to ensure that Internet subscribers get access to the newest and fastest services at the best prices possible.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP Update XLIV

      One reason for this hiatus is that there has been a change at the top. Karel De Gucht has relinquished his post, which has been taken by the Swede Cecilia Malmström. She is adopting a very different style, not least in terms of her attitude to the public. Faced by the growing scepticism about TTIP’s benefits, and anger over its complete lack of any meaningful transparency, Malmström has taken a conciliatory approach, promising more openness, some of which has now been announced.

      But Malmström is still trotting out the same old misinformation about TTIP. In a recent opinion piece she published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the paragraph about ISDS is particularly pernicious. Malmström says that European member states have signed a total of 1400 agreements that include ISDS; this is presumably to “prove” that ISDS is completely normal and totally harmless. Neither is true.

    • Copyrights

      • ISPs Must Take Responsibility For Sony Movie Leaks, MP Says

        As the fallout from the Sony hack continues, who is to blame for the leak of movies including Fury, which has been downloaded a million times? According to the UK Prime Minister’s former IP advisor, as “facilitators” web-hosts and ISPs must step up and take some blame.

      • Court Orders French ISPs to Block The Pirate Bay

        The Paris Court has ordered French ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. The legal action, brought by anti-piracy group SCPP, resulted in an injunction ordering local service providers to “implement all necessary measures” to render not only the site inaccessible, but also its proxies.

12.03.14

Links 3/12/2014: Tails 1.2.1, Android for Desktops, Openwashing

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Openwashing: adopter beware

    It’s great to see where open source software and the communities that support it are today. Many of those who have worked over the years to develop feature-rich applications and enterprise ready systems, that not only compare to, but exceed proprietary options, must feel like pinching themselves.

  • Interview: Apache Software Foundation Elevates Drill to Top-Level Project

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which stewards more than 200 Open Source projects and initiatives, has announced that Apache Drill has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

    Apache Drill is billed as the world’s first schema-free SQL query engine that delivers real-time insights by removing the constraint of building and maintaining schemas before data can be analyzed.

  • How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?

    At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.

    For example, US health care, like pretty much every business category, is full of Linux and FOSS, and is to some degree connected on the Net. Yet, it remains a vast feudal system of suppliers that nearly all work to lock doctors, hospitals and labs into dependency on closed, proprietary, incompatible, non-interoperable and non-substitutable systems. I’ve witnessed these up close as a patient. In one case, diagnostic scans by one machine and software system couldn’t be read by computers with software designed to read the output of a different company’s scans. In another case, records kept by one specialty failed to inform another specialty in the same hospital. The first one gave me a case of pancreatitis, and the second one gave my mother a fatal stroke.

  • Samsung’s Open Source Group is Growing, Hiring Developers (Video)

    The open source group is admittedly a small team for such a large company. But it indicates a significant shift in the company’s approach to development – and one that is gaining in popularity among enterprises, in general. Companies start by using open source software, then advance to participating in open source communities, contributing upstream, and adopting open source practices internally.

  • Cisco Goes Open-Source for Big Data Security Analytics

    Cisco is no stranger to the open-source world and is now expanding its efforts with the OpenSOC (Security Operation Center), which is a project that is freely available on Github.

  • Stephen Hawking’s new Intel talking system to be made open-source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 34.0.5 Lands in All Supported Ubuntu Distros

        Canonical has updated the Firefox packages in the repositories for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 14.10. If you have this application installed right now, the next system update should bring the latest version.

      • New tablet UI for Firefox on Android

        The new tablet UI for Firefox on Android is now available on Nightly and, soon, Aurora! Here’s a quick overview of the design goals, development process, and implementation.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Selling a Non-Product: The Multifaceted OpenStack

      When the Rackspace team first created the idea of an open stack, they knew that the opportunity was not just to build public clouds. Rather, the software was to service companies that were using all kinds of cloud or virtualization technologies. It was built with flexibility in mind. “That involved more than just how they might package it and distribute it,” explained Metacloud VP Scott Sanchez.

    • jKool Unveils Open Source SaaS Platform for Spotting Patterns in Big Data
    • Apache Drills into Hadoop

      In a big week for Big Data, Apache Drill becomes a top level project as Hadoop 2.6.0 is released.

      It’s a big week for Big Data and the open source Hadoop ecosystem. The Apache Hadoop 2.6.0 project was released on Nov. 30, and today the Apache Drill project announced it had become a top level project in the Apache Software Foundation.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • Nzega’s Digital Library Becomes a Reality

      We installed the FreeBSD operating system on each of the workstations. FreeBSD is an open source derivative of Unix that is renowned for its speed, customizability and rock-solid stability. We also installed a variety of open source software packages from a repository that we created on the Mini. The second Mini serves as a backup and content mirror, which we aim to sync once per year with new material and as needed.

      For both teachers it was their very first exposure to FreeBSD. They enjoyed the control and customizability of the installation process, as well as the wide availability of open source software packages in the repository (more than 20,000).

    • BSDCan 2015 call for papers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Announcing netdev 0.1

      Netdev 0.1 (year 0, conference 1) is a community-driven conference geared towards Linux netheads. Linux kernel networking and user space utilization of the interfaces to the Linux kernel networking subsystem are the focus. If you are using Linux as a boot system for proprietary networking, then this conference may not be for you.

    • Watch Movies and TV Shows for Free with the Latest Popcorn Time

      Streaming movies and TV shows directly from torrents without having to download them is the main purpose of Popcorn Time. The devs have released a small update for the application and they have fixed a number of small problems that have been reported by the community.

    • Kodi 14.0 Prepares for Massive Release, XBMC to Be Finally Replaced

      Kodi 14.0 RC, the successor of the current XBMC project, has been released and is now available for testing. The famous media hub is preparing for a major name change, but the devs also plan to make the 14.0 branch the best one so far.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Data Loss And Downtime Costs The UK £10.5 Billion Per Year

    78 percent of UK organisations are not confident that they can fully recover after a disruption

    Data loss and downtime cost enterprises $1.7 trillion around the globe in the past year – the equivalent of nearly 50 percent of Germany’s GDP.

  • Science

    • New research suggests that we learned to metabolize alcohol by eating spoiled fruit

      Anyone born after Prohibition (i.e., anyone reading this) was likely taught growing up that alcohol is, at its core, a poison. Really fun poison. Poison that leads to dancing. Poison that makes you drunk-text your co-worker and spend the next six days caked in cold sweat and nauseous from dread.

      Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms that classification. We actually developed our ability to consume alcohol around 10 million years ago when we started to eat rotten fruit.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

      Ask an agribusiness exec about sustainable agriculture, and you’ll likely get an earful about something called “precision agriculture.” What is it? According to Yara, the fertilizer giant, it’s technology that “enables farmers to add the specific nutrients needed for their crop, in exactly the right amount, at the right time.”

    • Ebola Story Puts Old Fears in New Virus

      In other words, Ebola is less a story about a bizarre new disease and its unpredictably disastrous capacities, and more a sad old story about poverty and priorities.

  • Security

    • there are no good constant-time data structures

      Imagine you have a have a web site that people can access via a password. No user name, just a password. There are a number of valid passwords for your service. Determining whether a password is in that set is security-sensitive: if a user has a valid password then they get access to some secret information; otherwise the site emits a 404. How do you determine whether a password is valid?

      The go-to solution for this kind of problem for most programmers is a hash table. A hash table is a set of key-value associations, and its nice property is that looking up a value for a key is quick, because it doesn’t have to check against each mapping in the set.

      Hash tables are commonly implemented as an array of buckets, where each bucket holds a chain. If the bucket array is 32 elements long, for example, then keys whose hash is H are looked for in bucket H mod 32. The chain contains the key-value pairs in a linked list. Looking up a key traverses the list to find the first pair whose key equals the given key; if no pair matches, then the lookup fails.

      Unfortunately, storing passwords in a normal hash table is not a great idea. The problem isn’t so much in the hash function (the hash in H = hash(K)) as in the equality function; usually the equality function doesn’t run in constant time. Attackers can detect differences in response times according to when the “not-equal” decision is made, and use that to break your passwords.

      So let’s say you ensure that your hash table uses a constant-time string comparator, to protect against the hackers. You’re safe! Or not! Because not all chains have the same length, “interested parties” can use lookup timings to distinguish chain lookups that take 2 comparisons compared to 1, for example. In general they will be able to determine the percentage of buckets for each chain length, and given the granularity will probably be able to determine the number of buckets as well (if that’s not a secret).

      Well, as we all know, small timing differences still leak sensitive information and can lead to complete compromise. So we look for a data structure that takes the same number of algorithmic steps to look up a value. For example, bisection over a sorted array of size SIZE will take ceil(log2(SIZE)) steps to get find the value, independent of what the key is and also independent of what is in the set. At each step, we compare the key and a “mid-point” value to see which is bigger, and recurse on one of the halves.

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Security Audit Automation Made Easy with SCAP

      Security automation can be defined as the use of standardized specifications and protocols to perform specific common security functions.

      Which leads us to SCAP – the Security Content Automation Protocol, an industry and government initiative to automate security audits and compliance.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Latest ISIS attack on Kobanê implicates Turkey once more

      Ever since ISIS commenced its attack on Kobanê the town has been cut off from the outside world. ISIS controlled the western, southern and eastern fronts and the hermetically sealed border with Turkey formed an unsurpassable border in the north. The Turkish armed forces (TSK) have maintained a heavy military presence at the border, with dozens of tanks stationed on hills overlooking Kobanê, regular patrols along the border fence and watch towers and outposts every few kilometers.

    • Primary Sources: Emails Show FBI Worked to Debunk ‘Conspiracy Theories’ Following Michael Hastings’ Death

      When journalist Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles last year, rumors immediately began to surface on social media suggesting his death was tied to a federal investigation into his work.

      The claims attracted widespread media interest when WikiLeaks tweeted the day after the crash that Hastings had contacted the anti-secrecy group’s attorney and said that the FBI was investigating him. The FBI was then bombarded by inquiries from journalists who tried to confirm or deny the allegations, and the bureau struggled to come up with a statement to debunk what it referred to as “rampant conspiracy theories.”

      [...]

      VICE News obtained dozens of internal FBI emails that provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the bureau managed the inquiries into Hastings’ death and the rare steps it took to shoot down claims that he was the target of a federal probe. The documents were turned over in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit VICE News jointly filed with Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in FOIA research.

      [...]

      That day, Eimiller also sent out an email to FBI special agents across the country under the subject line “Urgent Media Issue” and linked to a New York magazine report about the growing conspiracy theories surrounding Hastings’ death. She said the reports had attracted the interest of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice, and that FBI headquarters “would like to debunk growing conspiracy theory if possible (assuming that’s what it is).”

      “Has anyone’s division been contacted in relation to an FBI investigation that may have led to foul play in the car crash death Tuesday of reporter, Michael Hastings,” Eimiller wrote. “There are many reports on the Internet that Hastings was being investigated by the FBI. He died in a car accident in LA on Tuesday. Before his death, according to a tweet, he told others he worried he was the subject of an investigation. None of this is confirmed and the LAPD is reporting no foul play in car crash based on evidence. This is getting the attention of DOJ and the Director’s Office.”

  • Censorship

    • A long list of sex acts just got banned in UK porn

      While the measures won’t stop people from watching whatever genre of porn they desire, as video shot abroad can still be viewed, they do impose severe restrictions on content created in the UK, and appear to make no distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults.

  • Civil Rights

    • ‘There were hundreds of us crying out for help’: the afterlife of the whistleblower

      In his former life, Dr Raj Mattu was an internationally recognised cardiologist. On course for a professorship in London, he nonetheless jumped at the chance to return to his home town of Coventry in 1997, to set up a medical school at Warwick University and help turn the large district Walsgrave hospital into a teaching facility. It was a choice he would live to regret.

    • IGs form front line of war on waste and fraud, but weak links remain

      Allegations against top officials at the State Department were devastating and had to be suppressed, so the agency’s inspector general quickly obliged, delivering what amounted to a cover-up of a cover-up.

      What happened at the State Department is not unusual, recent disclosures show.

    • Big Brother Watch supports campaign to limit pre-charge bail to 28 days

      Living in limbo with no indication as to when a charge may or may not be brought is a form of punishment in itself. The impact on a person’s day to day life, health and mental wellbeing is profound. Your life is simply put on hold with no right to appeal.

    • Columnist Often Called ‘Racist’ Doesn’t Think Police Activists Should Use That Word

      Exhibit A is the fact that members of the audience at a conference laughed when NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton attributed the drop in New York City’s crime rate to “the cops.”

    • THE AMERICAN DEEP STATE: An Interview with Peter Dale Scott for the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio

      The following is a transcript of a recent interview conducted by Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips for the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. They sat down with noted author and scholar Peter Dale Scott to discuss his latest book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy. This wide-ranging discussion examines the “Deep State,” an evolving level of secret government separate from the elected government. Scott looks at the origins of the deep state, its communications and finances, and its involvement in landmark events, from the JFK assassination to Watergate, to September 11th and beyond.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality essential to our democracy

      In May, HBO comedian John Oliver opened his segment on net neutrality by saying, “The cable companies have figured out the great truth of America: If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.” He then delivered an incisive 13-minute monologue that was anything but boring, drawing more than 7 million views on YouTube. Indeed, as Oliver demonstrated so effectively, while net neutrality may seem like a dull subject, protecting it is essential to not only the future of the Internet, but also the future of our democracy.

    • U.S. House subcommittee postpones hearing on net neutrality

      A key House panel has delayed a hearing on the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to write new Internet traffic rules aimed at assuring “net neutrality.”

      The U.S. House of Representatives Communications and Technology subcommittee had been expected on Dec. 10 to quiz all five FCC commissioners about so-called net neutrality rules that would regulate the how Internet service providers (ISPs) manage web traffic that travels through their networks.

    • Net Neutrality: France Is Playing The Telcos’ Game

      Seven months after the historic vote in the European Parliament on Net neutrality, the Council of the European Union could soon bury this fundamental principle. While its inclusion in French law could be debated in the coming months, it is high time for the government to put an end to is doublespeak and supports an uncompromising defense of Net Neutrality in front of its European partners. However, in Brussels, the French government seems in tune with the lobbying of big telecom operators.

12.02.14

Links 2/12/2014: Chromebooks Surge, Android Outselling iOS Sixfold

Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux holiday shopping guide

    Traditionally, finding gifts for the Open Source-loving, Linux-running person in your life has not been terribly easy to accomplish. Not so this year. It seems the world is filled with Linux-powered gadgets and gizmos galore. What follows are my personal recommendations (ranging in price from $35 to well over $1,000) that, I feel, most Linux enthusiasts would be stoked to receive – and every single one is powered by one Linux-based system or another.

  • December 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Readers’ Choice

    I love the Readers’ Choice issue. I jokingly say it’s because all the work is done by the community, but honestly, it’s because I love hearing the feedback from everyone. Year after year, I inevitably learn about a new technology or application, and I’m usually surprised by at least one of the voting results. It’s also an “unthemed” issue, which means our articles can be from any discipline in the Linux world. Welcome to the Readers’ Choice issue of Linux Journal.

  • Learn to reprogram your BigTrak in RasPi issue 5
  • Coolest Things You’ve Done with Linux
  • Friendship & the Linux Community

    Linux is a global community…a quarrelsome community, I will give you that, but a community nonetheless. We are richer by many degrees for our links to each other within this community. We are friends within the Linux community. A community where real friendships do in fact begin.

  • Desktop

    • Now crowdfunding: A laptop that protects your digital rights

      Do you have any idea what your laptop is doing deep down? Is there any way to find out? Usually, the answer is no. Anything could be in there, and as Edward Snowden’s revelations have disclosed, plenty of people in official positions want to make sure that “could be” becomes “is.”

      Until now, if you wanted a laptop where you or someone you trust could inspect all the source code needed to use it, you had to build it yourself. But a new crowdfunding campaign wants to make a laptop that’s designed to use open source software and comes with open source-licensed code to everything, even the firmware.

    • The impact of the Linux philosophy

      All operating systems have a philosophy. And, the philosophy of an operating system matters. What is the Linux philosophy and how does it affect the community? How has it changed software development for the ages?

      Whether we know it or not, most of us have some sort of philosophy of life. It may be as simple as, “Be kind to others,” or it might be a very complex life philosophy.

    • Google Chromebooks Outsell iPads in U.S. Schools

      Chromebooks from vendors such as Acer, HP, Samsung and Dell edged out iPads in sales to U.S. schools during the third quarter, according to new data from IDC.
      Google’s low-cost Chromebook laptops have for the first time overtaken Apple’s iPads in sales to U.S. schools.

  • Server

    • Docker, Part 2: Whoa! Spontaneous industry standard! How did they do THAT?

      Today, Docker is powered by Libcontainer, rather than the more widespread LXC. The switch has some very real implications for the future of Docker, for its potential adoption and for its interaction with the community.

    • Cavium Debuts 48-Core ARM Server Chip

      From an operating system perspective, Cavium’s MontaVista software division worked on optimizing its Linux distribution for the new ThunderX SoC. Chugh also noted that Cavium’s other distribution partners, including Canonical and Red Hat, have been working on enabling Linux on ThunderX.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE (in) Austria
      • Interview with Esfir Kanievska

        I guess it was back in 1999 or so, I just installed my first Photoshop ever. I had no clue what a graphic tablet is, so I grabbed the mouse to create my worst digital painting ever.

      • The QML State Machine

        The Qt 5.4 release is coming closer and it brings a whole lot of nice things: high DPI support, Qt WebChannel, and much more. One of these very cool, yet maybe slightly inconspicuous, new features is the QML State Machine. It brings a fully featured state machine to the QML world, which is a finite automaton consisting of states, transitions that define on which event to transit from one state to another, and event handlers that are called when a stated is left or entered.

      • Google Code-In 2014 is ON!

        Google Code-In 2014 just started and I chose KDE as my main organisation for the 3rd time I am on this contest. For those who are not familiar: GCI is an open-source development competition for students all around the world, held by Google every year. This year we have 12 organisations: Apertium, BRL-CAD, Copyleft Games, Drupal, FOSSASIA, Haiku, KDE, Mifos, OpenMRS, Sahana, Sugar Labs and Wikimedia Fundation. Everything there is around tasks, these do include:

  • Distributions

    • Best distro of 2014 poll

      This poll will be open for two weeks. Do your best. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I will include your responses as a separate entry in my best distro article. I must tell you, in advance, that the result of this poll will not affect my own decision, but it will be quite interesting to see what you think, and whether our options coincide in some strange way. Now, off you go. See ya.

    • Reviews

      • Living free with Trisquel GNU/Linux 7.0

        Trisquel’s system installer is essentially the same installer Ubuntu uses, but with a few minor changes to the appearance and some of the options. The installer asks us to select our preferred language and provides us with a link to view the distribution’s release notes. Next we are given the chance to download software updates while the installer is running. The following screen asks if we would like Trisquel to automatically divide up our hard disk for us or if we would like to manually partition our hard drive. Manual partitioning is quite straight forward and I found it easy to navigate the disk partitioning screen. Trisquel gives us the option of working with Btrfs, ext2/3/4, JFS and XFS file systems. I opted to install Trisquel on a Btrfs partition. While partitioning the disk we can also choose where to install the distribution’s boot loader. The following screen gets us to select our time zone from a map of the world. Then we confirm our keyboard’s layout and create a user account for ourselves. We can decide to encrypt the contents of our home directory. The installer copies its files to our hard drive and then asks us to reboot the computer.

    • New Releases

      • Q4OS: Debian Stable with the Trinity Desktop Environment

        Q4OS is like Exe GNU/Linux a distribution using the Trinity desktop and based on Debian Stable. In fact I could have picked Exe as well for review but Q4OS just had a new release and it looks cleaner from the start. It was simply the novelty factor that pulled me towards it and it’s got a few nice touches of its own as we shall see. Version 0.5.20 was just released on 11/11/2014 and is available both for the mainstream 32 (i386) and 64-bit architectures. The images are a modest 314MB and 337MB respectively which makes for a speedy download and will definitely fit on your CD or even older USB sticks.

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Marye Anne Fox to Leave Red Hat Board of Directors Next Summer

        For more than a decade, Fox has played an invaluable role on Red Hat’s Board of Directors, bringing passion, insights and wisdom to Red Hat and its shareholders.

      • CoreOS is building a container runtime, Rocket

        Rocket is a new container runtime, designed for composability, security, and speed. Today we are releasing a prototype version on GitHub to begin gathering feedback from our community and explain why we are building Rocket.

      • CoreOS issues its own open-source container technology, amid all the Docker hype

        CoreOS, a startup building a server operating system in the shadow of enterprise giants like Red Hat, has ridden the coattails of Docker and its trendy container technology for deploying and running applications. Now CoreOS has come out with its own standard.

      • CONTAINER WARS: CoreOS blasts Rocket rival at Docker

        CoreOS, the lightweight Linux distro based around Linux containers and Docker, will develop its own application container tech to compete against Docker.

      • Fedora

        • Who matters in the Server Working Group ? You do!

          At the last meeting Miloslav raised the issue that some people feel that not being a voting member of the working group is perceived as not having their opinion valued and may discourage participation. Luckily for us we have quite a few participants that didn’t get that nonexistent memo and are providing great contributions to the Fedora Server project.

    • Debian Family

      • SSD adventures and fun times!

        In June, I bought a new laptop, and a new SSD for it. I used that model of SSD before (Samsung 840 Evo), although not for a long time, so I wasn’t expecting anything unusual.

        Since the laptop is a slower one, I installed Debian as follows: connect SSD to my workstation, do an install on it (via Virtualbox connected to the raw device), disconnect and install in the laptop. First sign of trouble was that the SSD didn’t boot reliably. I said – maybe my Virtualbox method (new method) wasn’t right – so I reinstalled on the laptop, and everything was mostly OK.

      • Debian Gets Forked

        A group of Debian developers have announced that they are forking the Debian source code to start a new Linux project, which they have dubbed Devuan (pronounced “DevOne” in English). The group, which calls itself the Veteran Unix Admin (VUA) collective, is alarmed about the drift of most major Linux distos toward the systemd service manager daemon. A service manager is the first process that starts on a Linux system, and it has the role of starting other processes. The init tool served as a universal service manager for Linux and for many Unix systems until recently, when several Linux vendors became concerned that the init code was too slow and not versatile enough for modern systems.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch for Mobile Devices Almost Ready

            Canonical still hasn’t finished “converging” Ubuntu Linux across PCs, servers, phones and tablets, but it’s now closer than ever with a new development release of Ubuntu Touch, which partners Meizu and Bq are using to build the open source mobile devices that should appear in the new year.

          • Unity 8 Has Received Improvements For Desktop Usage

            Now, Unity 8 looks pretty much like an oversized tablet, but Canonical has assured the Ubuntu fans that Unity 8 for desktop will not be a desktop optimized clone of Ubuntu Touch’s Unity 8, but a more modern Unity 7-like interface.

          • CompuLab launches Utilite2: Tiny ARM-based Ubuntu/Android PC

            CompuLab is updating its Utilite line of tiny, low-power desktop computers. The new Utilite2 is 30 percent smaller than last year’s Utilite. But the company says the new model offers up to twice the performance, thanks to a more powerful processor.

          • Tiny mini-PC boasts quad-core Cortex-A15 SoC

            CompuLab unveiled a second-gen Ubuntu and Android ready Utilite2 mini-PC based on a quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600, that shrinks to 3.4 x 3.4 x 1.1 inches.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 394
          • Fanless Android/Linux ”desktop” pairs Snapdragon quad with mSATA storage

            Embedded PC maker CompuLab has created a tiny Linux “desktop” based on ARM hardware. The Utilite2 crams a Snapdragon SoC along with a surprising selection of goodies into a die-cast aluminum chassis that measures just 3.4″ x 3.4″ x 1.1″. Linaro-based Linux builds will support the machine, which will also be offered with a Google Play-approved version Android 4.4.3 KitKat.

          • UbuTab: An Ubuntu Tablet With A Terabyte Hard Drive

            The UbuTab is an Ubuntu tablet that was announced last week as a “1TB Ubuntu tablet for media lovers.” Nearly all consumer tablets ship with solid-state storage but the UbuTab is packing in a 7mm thick 1TB spinning hard drive for offering the greater storage capacity at a reasonable price.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Hands-on with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE

              The final rease of Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE was announced this weekend. I have picked up both versions, and I have installed them on a number of computers around here, with both legacy (MBR) and UEFI boot. The results have been very good, as expected.

              As anyone who has been around Linux much probably knows, Linux Mint (numbered) is derived from Ubuntu. However, starting with Mint 17 the releases no longer track the latest Ubuntu releases. Mint is now based on the Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases and will update their own distribution as they see fit.

              That means that although Ubuntu recently released 14.10, this Mint release is still based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and the new Mint numbering system indicates that (this is 17.1, not 18), although the name change is a bit contrary to that (17.1 is called Rebecca rather than Q…, but I guess Q-names are not easy to come up with.

            • Setting up Linux Mint 17.1 for the first time

              Given a choice between a DVD disc and a USB stick, I’d go with the USB option. Mint, and any other operating system, will install and run much faster from it.

            • Linux Mint 17.1 released

              The final release of Linux Mint 17.1 is now available to download. You can opt for the Cinnamon or MATE versions of Linux Mint 17.1, depending on which desktop you prefer to use. MATE now has support for the Compiz window manager, and Cinnamon has had numerous improvements including performance tweaks and additional polish.

            • Systemd to Free BSDs, Mint 17.1, and Coolest Things

              Today was another busy day in Linuxland. Linux Mint 17.1 was released over the weekend and a couple of reviews have emerged already. Katherine Noyes says some Linuxers are thinking of heading towards the free *BSDs and Shawn Powers has a list of some of the coolest things folks do with Linux. Jasper St. Pierre explains what’s wrong with package managers and Dedoimedo.com is running a best distro of 2014 poll. Ian Sullivan explains how to “De-Chrome” laptops and Bryan Lunduke has a holiday shopping guide.

            • Linux Top 3: Linux Mint 17.1 Goes GA, Fedora 21 Goes RC, Devuan Forks Debian

              Linux Mint has emerged in recent years to become one of the most popular Linux distributions, thanks in no small part to its focus on creating the best possible desktop experience for users.

            • Linux Mint Project Releases Mint 17.1

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny i.MX6 COM and dev kit offer triple camera inputs

      E-con released a Linux-friendly i.MX6 based COM with optional eMMC, WiFi, BLE, Ethernet, and -40 to 85°C support, plus a dev kit with triple camera inputs.

    • New FUZE Tribute Special Edition

      The FUZE is an all-in-one computing workstation that houses the Raspberry Pi and comes with the easy-to-learn FUZE BASIC language and electronic components (LEDs, buttons, a light sensor, resistors, etc). Fun and simple to use for both parents and children.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Introduction to Tizen IVI Webinar

          Do you want to learn more about the exciting world of Tizen IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment)? As part of their webinar series, Geoffroy Van Cutsem from Intel’s Open Source Technology Center presents a Tizen IVI session. In this 40-minute session Geoffroy discusses some of the challenges for the automotive industry such as multi-user requirements and security. You can learn how Tizen IVI addresses Automotive requirements, Architecture overview, Tizen IVI roadmap and more.

      • Android

        • Google Nexus 6 review: A larger Moto X with fewer Motorola enhancements

          The Nexus 6 is the best Nexus ever and for once a Nexus device is not lacking in any specification. The price reflects the high-end nature of the Nexus 6, but the competition in the Android marketplace is also much stiffer than it was in the past. I still need to use the Nexus 6 a bit more with my T-Mobile SIM to convince myself it isn’t the device for me. I enjoy large screen smartphones, but find other offerings to be more compelling.

        • Android’s Material Design reaches into Linux

          A new OS has been proposed, based on Linux and Android’s Material Design specifications. Jack Wallen opens up his hat of supposition to imagine the possibilities this platform could bring to life.

        • Jack And Jill Are Google’s New Compilers For Android App Developers

          Android has gone through quite a few changes during its short 6 years of life. The Android that drives most of the world’s smartphones of today would be almost unrecognizable to what was launched in late 2008. We’ve seen massive visual changes, expansion to almost every conceivable form factor, and a completely fleshed-out content ecosystem for multimedia and apps. As the operating system matured, some elements have successfully grown with it, and others have become dead weight. Naturally, progress calls for the replacement of those pieces that haven’t scaled well. We’ve seen an excellent example of this when ART came to replace Dalvik as the standard Android runtime. With the release of Lollipop, a similar project emerged that promises to replace a part of the existing app development toolchain with a pair of new compilers called Jack and Jill.

        • Google Glass will return in 2015 with Intel inside, says WSJ

          2015 will see Google launch a new model of its Glass headset, which will be powered by an Intel chip and offer longer battery life than the current Explorer Edition, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google Glass has already been through a couple of small iterative upgrades — one to add compatibility with prescription lenses and another to double the RAM — but the shift to a new processor could signal a more thorough overhaul of the entire wearable.

        • The Android 5.0 Lollipop Review

          Google has been very busy with their expansion of Android as a platform this year. At Google IO we saw the announcement of endeavors like Android TV and Android Auto. But the stars of the show were a preview of the next version of Android, code named Android L, and Google’s new Material Design principles for interface design across all of their products. In the years since Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich released, we’ve seen the launch of Jellybean and KitKat, but both of these versions were very iterative improvements upon 4.0 and had equally iterative version numbers with Jellybean being major versions 4.1 through 4.3 and KitKat being 4.4. Lollipop is given the major version number of 5.0, and it’s quite fitting as it’s arguably the biggest advancement to Android in a long time. It comes with an entirely new interface based on Material Design, a new application runtime, and many new features that I could not hope to summarize in this paragraph.

        • More Android Apps Arriving for Chrome OS and Chromebooks

          Just a few years ago, before Android marched to its dominant position in the mobile market, there was much speculation that Google might merge Chrome OS and Android. Early last year, I wrote a post on why that won’t happen.

          However, an interesting corollary trend is now appearing. Following an initial round of Android apps that can run on Chrome OS, more and more are arriving. The news was announced on a Chrome G+ page, bringing the total number of apps available across Chrome and Android to more than 40.

        • Android Devices Driving Shipment Volumes, iOS Drives Revenues

          Llamas noted Apple does not appear to have a huge play in the low-end of the market like Android, and until it does, the main battle for Apple is at the high-end of the market.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Open Leadership Has Become Essential

    Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, “a community for individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software,” took me through his thoughts on those principles during a conversation at the HATCH experience.

  • 10 Open Source Security Tools from Google, Facebook, Netflix and Cisco

    Choice has long been a defining feature of the world of free and open source software, and the constellation of options only gets bigger every year. Often it’s brand-new projects causing the increase, but sometimes the growth happens in another way, when tools that were developed for a company’s internal use get opened up for all the world to see, use and improve.

    That, in fact, is just what has been happening lately on a grand scale in the security arena, where numerous major companies have been opting to open the doors to their own, in-house tools. Google, Facebook and Netflix are all among the companies taking this approach lately, and it’s changing the security landscape significantly.

  • SD Times blog: Surveys show open source makes for faster secure development

    One of the things we see a lot of here at SD Times is surveys. It’s a great idea for your company to survey its customers, and the resulting information can be really useful—not just to your company, but to those of us who track the industry and its trends.

    Thus, I was fairly disturbed by the results of a recent survey by Mendix that found that enterprise developers are having a very hard time giving the business folks what they’ve asked for. Gottfried Sehringer, vice president of marketing at Mendix, painted a fairly bleak picture of the state of enterprise development.

  • Why there’s no open-source standard-bearer for the network

    Open-source software plays an increasingly prominent role in many areas of modern business IT – it’s in servers, databases and even the cloud. Vendors like Red Hat, Canonical and others have managed to graft open-source principles onto a profitable business model. The former company became the first open-source-centered business with $1 billion in annual revenue in 2012.

  • Why change is hard for any open source community

    A lightning talk recap about how the Apache Foundation has always done things a certain way at ApacheCon Budapest by Rich Bowen.

    As you know, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has a number of open mottos that we like to use. Like, “Community Over Code,” and “No Jerks Allowed.” Another popular motto recently has been “We’ve Always Done It That Way.”

  • Gngr Begins Open-Sourcing Their Web Browser Code

    When Gngr was originally announced as a privacy-minded web browser, they said the code would be opened up after the initial release. In the past few days though, some of the Gngr components are being published on GitHub.

  • 8 ways to contribute to open source without writing code

    Talking to developers and reading about open source I often get the feeling that the general notion is that open source is just about code and commits. Put another way, “If you don’t make commits for a project you are not contributing to it.” Or so they say. That notion is far from the truth in my eyes. Let me tell you why.

  • Nginx 1.7.8 Updates Open-Source Web Server

    Today a new incremental version of nginx was released with the 1.7.8 milestone update.

  • Stephen Hawking unveils ‘life changing’ new voice technology in London

    Intel said they planned to make the system open-source and free for users.

  • Intel reinvents Stephen Hawking’s voice systems and will open source the software
  • Stephen Hawking’s speech software goes open source for disabled
  • Stephen Hawking’s new speech system is free and open-source

  • Events

    • Zenoss Survey Shows the Momentum of Open Source Clouds

      There is now no question that countless IT departments are turning to open source cloud computing platforms instead of proprietary ones. Several recent roundups of survey results have illustrated that, and I recently covered cloud survey results from IDG Enterprise here.

    • Defining Software Defined Networking: Part 1

      Over the next several weeks we will run a seven-part series about software defined networking (SDN). The stories serve as education resources and as a way to help better understand what SDN means to people developing and managing new stack infrastructures.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • 5 Open Source Business Intelligence Tools

        It’s impossible to imagine making good business decisions without the right information to back up the decision making process. Business intelligence (BI) tools help by making it easy to extract and understand the information that you need from the mass of business data that you collect and store. In other words, they can help turn piles of data into meaningful insights that help you run your business.

  • Funding

    • Open source Hadoop distributor Hortonworks sets terms for $78 million IPO

      Hortonworks, which develops and supports open source distribution of Apache Hadoop for enterprises, announced terms for its IPO on Monday. The Palo Alto, CA-based company plans to raise $78 million by offering 6 million shares at a price range of $12 to $14. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Hortonworks would command a fully diluted market value of $659 million.

  • BSD

    • Is It Time to Give BSD a Try?

      It’s never easy to stand by and watch a relationship in trouble, but that’s just how things have been feeling here in the Linux blogosphere of late.

    • How did you get into BSD?

      We’ve got a fun idea for the holidays this year: just like we ask during the interviews, we want to hear how all the viewers and listeners first got into BSD. Email us your story, either written or a video version, and we’ll read and play some of them for the Christmas episode. You’ve got until December 17th to send them in (that’s when we’re prerecording).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Tin Whiskers Brewery bucks the trend of secret recipes

      If there’s one business that values secrecy it’s brewing beer. Most breweries hold their cards very close to their chests. They keep their recipes and techniques away from the prying eyes of competitors to retain a competitive advantage.

    • Nature makes all articles free to view

      All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

    • Bill Gates and the True Nature of Open Access

      ReadCube is available for Windows, Macintosh and the iPhone – but not GNU/Linux, so this is a retrograde step purely in terms of platforms: PDFs may be clunky, but at least they can be read on most systems. And of course, in order to prevent people from downloading or printing a paper, ReadCube wraps PDFs with DRM. Again, that is making publishing less open than it is now. It also shuts out the visually-impaired, who will be unable to use their screen-readers if the files are locked up in a proprietary format on the ReadCube site: that’s a huge kick in the teeth for a community that has enough problems to content with.

    • The WASP Resurrection System Provides an Open Source Stop and Save System for 3D Printers

      Living in Florida, we experience thunderstorms on a daily basis in the summertime. Literally our power goes out for a few seconds at a time and this happens at least a few times a week. This makes running a 3D printer during the months of May, June, July, August and September almost impossible, unless you have it hooked up to a battery backup. Even then, there are times when the power is out longer than that battery can handle. Up until now, there really has not been a reliable method to recover a print job if the power running that 3D printer were to go out.

  • Programming

    • Network clock examples

      Way back in 2006, Andy Wingo wrote some small scripts for GStreamer 0.10 to demonstrate what was (back then) a fairly new feature in GStreamer – the ability to share a clock across the network and use it to synchronise playback of content across different machines.

    • Why developers love and hate PHP

      PHP, the venerable server-side scripting language, is famous for its use in Web development. First released in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, it has been leveraged by the likes of WordPress and Facebook and reportedly is used in 82 percent of websites whose server-side programming language is known, according to W3Techs. The language is slightly behind Java in the PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index, and it ranks sixth in the rival Tiobe index. A high-performing upgrade, PHP 7, is due in 2015.

    • Google’s Go 1.5 To Feature Many Improvements

      The updates due for Google’s Go 1.5 programming language implementation are aplenty and should better position this promising language.

    • New features in Git 2.2.0

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Now HTML 5 is finished, W3C boss Jeff Jaffe discusses what comes next

      The development of HTML 5 has been the major driver for web standards for the past five years or so, and it was finally sent as a Recommendation to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the end of October. Does that mean it’s finished and done with? If so, what comes next?

Leftovers

  • Science

    • That Takeout Coffee Cup May Be Messing With Your Hormones

      Most people know that some plastics additives, such as bisphenol A (BPA), may be harmful to their health. But an upcoming study in the journal Environmental Health finds that entire classes of plastics—including the type commonly referred to as styrofoam and a type used in many baby products—may wreak havoc on your hormones regardless of what additives are in them.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Black Friday Now Just Another Opportunity to Mock the Poor

      But O’Neil has a point, and it’s one that irks me as well. It’s similar to my irkitude over loyalty cards. Some of this, I’ll admit, is just my own personal brand of curmudgeonliness, but mainly it’s because the discounts they provide have become so damn big in recent years. For me, loyalty cards are optional if I feel like being cranky about it, but most people no longer have that luxury. If you’re living on a working-class income, you flatly can’t afford to give up a 10 or 15 percent discount on your food every week. You have to fork over your loyalty card number, and that means everything you buy is sliced, diced, tracked, and sold to every marketer in the world. Don’t like it? If you’re poor, that’s tough. Your privacy is no longer even an option.

    • Full Show: The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy

      From luxury skyscrapers — taller, more expensive and exclusive than ever before — the dark shadows of plutocracy are spreading across the commons of democracy.

    • Report: ‘FIN4′ hackers are gaming markets by stealing insider info

      Cybercriminals have been discovered hacking more than 100 companies to access insider information about mergers and other business deals that could affect stock prices.

      The group, dubbed “FIN4” in a report from the cybersecurity company FireEye, is targeting top executives, lawyers, consultants and others with private information about mergers and acquisitions, especially in the health-care and pharmaceuticals industries.

    • Lawyers targeted in sophisticated email hack attack seeking insider-trading info, consultant says

      Often, attempts to get email recipients to click on bogus links are easily recognized because of grammar and spelling errors or ridiculous claims about vast sums of money a stranger is seeking the recipient’s financial backing to obtain.

      But that isn’t true of a year-long scheme to hack into the email of health-care industry executives, general counsel, corporate law firms, scientists and others likely to know of information that could affect the price of stock in pharmaceutical companies, a security consultant says.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • “Right To Be Forgotten”: Privacy Watchdogs Turning Censors of the Net

      “The guidelines published by European privacy watchdogs underline the serious issues raised by the EU Court of Justice decision of the right to de-indexation. The Right To Be Dereferenced puts in jeopardy freedom of expression and access to information. By entrusting search engines and administrative authorities with the responsibility to arbitrate between the right to privacy and freedom of speech, the Court’s decision worsens the dangerous drift towards an extra-judiciary regulation of the Internet. Now, these guidelines sanctify this decline of the Rule of Law rather than inviting the legislator to clarify the law in order to strike an appropriate balance between privacy and freedom of expression. If nothing is done, the CNIL (French DPA) will condone private censorship of the Internet, increasing confusion of roles created by the recent law on terrorism1, which already gives it authority over the administrative blocking of websites.” said Philippe Aigrain, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

  • Privacy

    • MegaSync Your Cloud Data for True Internet Privacy

      You may recall, the take down of Kim Dot Com’s MegaUpload by the U.S. Government. Kim Dot Com said it was “a death sentence without a trial”.

      Mega with MegaSync client changes all that.

      Now, Mega can reliably claim what is legally termed ‘plausible deniability’ for what clients store on their site, by virtue of how this method of encryption works.

    • Privacy as Innovation Interview

      A recent inter­view I gave while in Stock­holm to the Pri­vacy as Innov­a­tion pro­ject:

    • Keynote at Internetdagarna, Stockholm, November 2014
    • Microsoft Buys Email App Acompli For $200M, Will Still Support Gmail And Other Competitors

      Just before Thanksgiving here in the U.S., a Microsoft blog post accidentally leaked the company’s intention to buy mobile email application Acompli. Though the blog post itself was pulled down, the URL still revealed the forthcoming acquisition. Today, the two companies are officially confirming the news, with the Acompli team of around two dozen joining Microsoft as a part of a $200 million+ deal.

    • Lions, Tigers, Bears, and FBI Warnings, Oh My!

      It really has grown to a fever pitch lately.

      What stuck in my craw today was a Bloomberg report Exclusive: FBI warns of ‘destructive’ malware attack in the wake of the SONY attack.

      Like, I should be mortified maybe? Do these ‘brainiacs’ remember StuxNet?

      Would it help to revisit the topic? I’d rather not, thank you very much. Please feel free to read the Wikipedia link on the subject.

      It was the perfect road-side billboard if there ever was for why Microsoft Legacy (x86) Windows should be abandoned on grounds of National Security.

      Sadly, the software industry hasn’t changed and quite frankly isn’t going to as long as ‘big business’ is married to a security-flawed ‘by design’ operating system.

  • Civil Rights

    • Iranian Opportunity

      Iran has undoubtedly improved, but remains a theocratic state with an appalling human rights record, where the persecution of gays is particularly horrifying. There are only two countries in the world with systems of government so appalling as to have seats reserved for clerics in the legislature. One is Iran. The other is the United Kingdom.

    • Social media T&Cs branded as ‘meaningless drivel’

      Its report on the responsible use of social media data, published today, has condemned internet companies for making users sign up to long, incomprehensible legal contracts and calls for an internationally recognised standard or kitemark to identify sites with clear terms and conditions.

    • If You Don’t Mind A Little Perjury, You Can Convict Two People For The Same Crime

      So, the police had a suspect convicted for this burglary. And the corroborating video showed that Greenlee performed the criminal act on her own. But that wasn’t enough. They brought charges against Smith “for committing the same December 19 burglary of the Dollar General store.”

      This double-charging obviously presented an issue. The state prosecutor’s case hinged on Greenlee’s testimony, something that (a) contradicted her previous testimony during her guilty plea and (b) the surveillance recording of the incident. None of that deterred the state from attempting to achieve the impossible. The state prosecutor warned the jury that it was going to have to come to terms with the fact that the State was willing to use perjury to achieve its goal of putting two people in jail for the same criminal act. Of course, it worded it a bit differently.

    • Brazen Young Facebook Pimpette Nabbed By Police After She Bragged About Her Crimes On Facebook

      I’m always amazed at how often social media plays a role in the attempted exploits of dumb criminals. Whether it’s posing with the merchandise they recently stole, posting a video of the crime itself, or sharing the police’s bulletin seeking their arrest, our idiot bad guys just seem to love posting dumb stuff to Facebook in particular. But even correcting for a younger criminal, it’s difficult not to judge someone unbelievably stupid in the era of online surveillance when they elect to run their underage prostitution ring on Facebook and coordinate their illicit business via Facebook’s messaging app.

    • Police arrest 2 teens for prostitution ring

      Venice police arrested a second teenager in a prostitution ring going around three Sarasota County high schools.

      Police say the ring leaders were a 17-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy.

    • St. Louis Police Claim It’s Their ‘First Amendment’ Rights Not To Protect Football Players Who Supported Protestors

      It’s been pretty obvious that law enforcement in the St. Louis area has a rather tenuous grasp on the concept of the First Amendment. Obviously, they’ve done a fairly terrible job recognizing the right to “peaceably assemble” for quite some time, even having a court declare its “5 second rule” approach unconstitutional. They’ve also ignored the freedom of the press by repeatedly arresting journalists. And, remember, the local prosecutor has claimed that it was really all those people speaking out on social media who were to blame.

    • U.N. investigators urge Obama to release CIA report
    • ‘Being homeless is better than working for Amazon’

      I am homeless. My worst days now are better than my best days working at Amazon.

      According to Amazon’s metrics, I was one of their most productive order pickers – I was a machine, and my pace would accelerate throughout the course of a shift. What they didn’t know was that I stayed fast because if I slowed down for even a minute, I’d collapse from boredom and exhaustion.

      During peak season, I trained incoming temps regularly. When that was over, I’d be an ordinary order picker once again, toiling in some remote corner of the warehouse, alone for 10 hours, with my every move being monitored by management on a computer screen.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Kim Dotcom Plans U.S. Internet Party After New Zealand Failure

        “I’m not a pirate. I’m not a fugitive. I’m not a flight risk,” Dotcom tweeted today. “I’m your Internet freedom fighter and Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016.”

      • Kim Dotcom Announces United States Political Party

        Kim Dotcom will launch a political party in the United States next year. Run by American citizens, Internet Party US will feature “celebrity founders” from the music, movie and Internet sectors. Dotcom will be its PR man and is already warning that “Hillary” faces her “worst nightmare” in 2016.

      • US Efforts to Jail Dotcom Fail as Kim Walks Free

        Efforts by the United States government to have Kim Dotcom put back behind bars have failed. Arguments that the Megaupload founder poses a flight risk ahead of his extradition battle next summer were rejected by the Auckland District Court and the entrepreneur walked away a free man.

      • Kim Dotcom at liberty after US copyright corps lose court battle

        KIM DOTCOM remains at liberty despite the best efforts of the copyright corps and cops to strip him of his possessions and right to roam.

        Dotcom admitted that he is personally stoney broke thanks to a combination of legal fees and sanctions.

        The Mega business is still running, but is in the hands of his family, and Dotcom said that his finances have been eviscerated by a legal team that, from the sounds of it, did some work and then swaggered off in their alligator shoes when the money ran out.

      • Eagles Sue Concert Footage Archivist Over Bootleg Performances

        Glenn Frey and Don Henley seek the Shelley Archives’ entire vault after theatrical showing of unlicensed Eagles footage

12.01.14

Links 1/12/2014: Linux 3.18 RC7, Devuan Debated

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • China’s Nicaragua Canal Could Spark a New Central America Revolution

      Many of those who’ve come together here to protest have been loyal supporters of President Daniel Ortega since he was part of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) junta that overthrew the Somoza dynasty in 1979. They backed him when the Sandinistas tried to establish their own Cuban-inspired dictatorship. They backed him in his war against the CIA-trained Contra rebels in the 1980s. And when the country started holding legitimate elections in the 1990s, they backed him in his bid to build the FSLN into a powerful political party that eventually returned him to the presidency—a position he does not look like he’ll give up any time soon. But right now these Sandinistas are absolutely enraged by plans to evict them from their lands to make way for his latest and by far most grandiose project: the Interoceanic Canal.

    • Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret

      When 28 civilians were killed in Athens, it wasn’t the Nazis who were to blame, it was the British. Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith reveal how Churchill’s shameful decision to turn on the partisans who had fought on our side in the war sowed the seeds for the rise of the far right in Greece today

    • Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo and the Rights of the Serbian Minority: Ten Years After The “March Pogrom 2004″
    • Jordanian’s comic book tales counter terrorist ideologies

      Bakhit, 36, is a Jordanian comic book author and entrepreneur who creates Middle Eastern stories that are an alternative to terrorist ideologies. His field research has included surveys of children in poor neighborhoods in and around the Jordanian capital of Amman and in Syrian refugee camps.

    • The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes

      The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes by arguing on grounds of efficiency. These targeted strikes, it claims, always kill the intended targets and minimise civilian casualties. This rationale, as many suspected, has turned out to be false. According to research done by NGO Reprieve, drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have ended up killing 28 unknown people for every targeted militant. This will come as no surprise to critics of drone strikes who have always maintained that poor intelligence all but guarantees that many civilians will end up being killed by these supposedly pinpoint weapons. The US has tried to elude its responsibility for civilian deaths by classifying any male of military age as a militant unless it is specifically proven he is a civilian. This is a kind of casual racism which assumes anyone in the tribal areas of Pakistan got what they had coming. For the US, Fata is packed with militants and anyone it targets there must surely be a militant. It has bombed wedding parties and funerals but always claimed that its precision strikes went after only militants.

    • US flies roughly 85 percent of airstrikes against Islamic State, in complex mix of tactics, politics

      U.S. fighter planes and drones have conducted 819 strikes, compared to 157 from the 10 other countries, states the detailed report obtained last week by FoxNews.com.

    • Nigeria: Kano mosque blasts death toll above 102

      Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan vowed to track down the perpetrators of the bomb blasts that killed more than 100 people at the central mosque in the city of Kano.

    • Intervention feeds terrorism

      The “Global Terrorism Index,” published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, reported last week that fatalities due to terrorism have risen fivefold in the 13 years since the 9/11 attacks, despite the U.S.-led “war on terror” that has spent $4.4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and anti-terrorist operations elsewhere. But it’s not really “despite” those wars. It’s largely because of them.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • We may never have another coldest year in history

      A surge of Arctic air has left much of the continental U.S. shivering in unusually bitter November cold. But this early foray into winter weather is just a small blip in the overall global picture, which is of a warming world that is still on track to see 2014 set the mark for hottest year on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.

  • Finance

    • The Meaning of Black Friday

      When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths.

    • “Even it Up”: Inequality Spirals out of Control

      Since the financial crisis of 2009, the number of billionaires has more than doubled, to 1,645, showing that while those at the top have recovered quickly, the benefits of economic growth are not being reaped by the vast majority. Even more staggering, the world’s richest 85 people hold the same amount of wealth as half the world’s poorest population. The consequences of extreme inequality are harmful to everyone. It not only deprives millions of people better life chances, it fuels crime, conflict, and corruption. “Failure to tackle inequality will leave hundreds of millions trapped in poverty unnecessarily.”

    • 90-Year-Old Florida Man Charged for Feeding the Homeless Again, Still Won’t Stop
    • Europe feels sting in the tail of Russia sanctions

      At a technology fair in Moscow last month, European executives faced the new reality of doing business in Russia since the West imposed sanctions: the number of companies at the international showcase had shrunk by half from a year ago.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Corporate and Financial Sectors Dominate the Boards of Public TV Stations

      In October 2014, Aldo Guerrero of Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR) reported that individuals with connections in the corporate and financial sectors dominate the executive boards of public television stations. FAIR conducted a study to determine trustee occupations, specifically to discover their corporate connections. They researched the boards of five major public television stations in the United States: WNET of New York City/Newark, WGBH of Boston, WETA of Washington, DC, WTTW of Chicago, and KCET of Los Angeles. The study reveals that 84% of the boards’ 182 members have corporate backgrounds, and 138 members are “executives at elite businesses.” The report also provides the percentage of corporate and non-corporate board members for each television station. WTTW and WNET had the highest percentage of corporate members, 92%.

  • Privacy

    • The Snowden Effect, Quantified

      The failure of the USA Freedom Act in the Senate earlier this month was a disappointment to many in favor of reforming the National Security Agency. The bill, far from perfect, and certainly incomplete in its scope was thought of by some as a possible first step. To others, it was a way for Congress to pass something that merely looked like reform.

    • THE US/UK CAMPAIGN TO DEMONIZE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES AS TERRORIST ALLIES

      In May, 2013, a British Army soldier, Lee Rigby, was killed on a suburban London street by two Muslim British citizens, who said they were acting to avenge years of killings of innocent Muslims by the British military in, among other places, Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the attackers, Michael Adebolajo, had also been detained and tortured in 2010 in Kenya with the likely complicity of Her Majesty’s Government. The brutal attack on Rigby was instantly branded “terrorism” (despite its targeting of a soldier of a nation at war) and caused intense and virtually universal indignation in the UK.

    • Deconstructing the Jeremy Becker troll network

      The former Twitter account @JbJabroni10 has a long history of harassment on Twitter against people involved in the net freedom movement, and notably against myself (@puellavulnerata) and Tor developer Runa Sandvik (@runasand). Over the last four and a half months, some ‘journalists’ from Pando have been whipping up a harassment campaign against us, relying heavily on getting a cluster of associated trolls to make the most unsupportable accusations they are unwilling to make themselves, and then retweeting them. The target of this doxxing, @JbJabroni10, was a prominent member of that network, and has been frequently retweeted by the Goebbelsesque propagandist @YashaLevine in recent weeks. Since he has deleted all his accounts and certain other members of the Pando mob have been pretending he is some sort of fallen hero (see fig. 1, 2), this is being written to document the evidence against him, all his known sockpuppets and as much of his history as it has been possible to recover.

    • The Pando Tor conspiracy troll

      The military and government throws research money around with reckless abandon. That no more means they created Tor than it means they created the Internet back in the 1970s. A lot of that research is pure research, intended to help people. Not everything the military funds is designed to kill people.

      There is no single “government”. We know, for example, that while some in government paid Jacob Appelbaum’s salary, others investigated him for his Wikileaks connections. Different groups are often working at cross purposes — even within a single department.

      [...]

      Dissidents use Tor — successfully. We know that because the dissidents are still alive. Even if it’s a secret conspiracy by the U.S. government, it still does what its supporters want, helping dissidents fight oppressive regimes. In any case, Edward Snowden, who had access to NSA secrets, trusts his own life to Tor.

    • New Facebook Rules Will Sting Entrepreneurs

      Chrisy Bossie built a $100,000-a-year gemstone e-commerce business by sharing information about her products on her company’s Facebook page several times a week.

    • White House Push To Allow FBI Phone Hacks Could Hurt Intelligence Gathering

      Through public speeches and secret meetings, FBI Director James Comey has been pushing to stop companies like Apple and Google from encrypting users’ phone data. Two former Navy SEALs say that the policy that the FBI and the Justice Department are pursuing would hurt men and women in uniform and possibly even our allies by forcing them to use insecure devices and services for communication.

    • The FBI’s Desired Encryption Back Doors Could Harm Intelligence Gathering, Military Operations

      While FBI director James Comey discusses all the inevitable horrors encrypted phones are poised to wreak on the nation’s youth, those in the encryption business are pointing out how encrypted phones make things safer for our nation’s military.

    • UK Government Brings In Yet More Counter-Terrorism Measures — Including Internal Exile

      The UK has the sad distinction of leading the way in the West when it comes to playing up the terrorism threat to justify the introduction of disproportionate surveillance laws. One of the favorite rhetorical tricks employed here is to invoke the “capabilities gap”: this refers to the fact that the security services are unable to capture all communications in the same way they once could. But it’s a misleading comparison.

      [...]

      The parallels between the UK and Soviet Russia become more painfully apparent by the day.

    • German loophole allows BND spy agency to snoop on own people

      The revelation comes after a BND employee was arrested in July on suspicion of selling secret documents to a CIA contact. Rather than report the contact to their allied German counterparts, the US spy agency was reported to have paid the agent €25,000 (£20,000) for 218 documents classified as confidential or top secret.

  • Civil Rights

    • VIP paedophile ring ‘abused teenage boy INSIDE Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle’

      A teenage boy working at Buckingham Palace revealed he was groomed and sexually abused by a VIP paedophile ring there.

      The lad was also assaulted at the Royal Family’s Scottish retreat Balmoral, according to shocking Home Office files, reports the Sunday People.

      In a heartbreaking note, the boy – then just 16 – told how he was the victim of “exploitation of the highest order”.

      The chilling claims could now be the subject of a police investigation into ­historic allegations of child sex abuse in the 1970s and 80s – linked to MPs and powerful figures.

    • UN Report Documents Torture, Police Violence in US

      There are some significant revelations. The committee notes that the US government had filed reservations to the Convention on Torture at the time of ratification, indicating that some practices condemned by the treaty would continue, and that the Obama administration has refused to alter this “restrictive interpretation” of the anti-torture treaty or introduce a prohibition of torture into federal law.

    • The UN Just Issued a Scathing Critique of America’s Justice System

      A new report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture released Friday expressed “deep concern at the frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals,” as well as “the alleged difficulties to hold police officers and their employers accountable for abuses.”

    • British spies ‘bugged Scotland Yard’: Letter claims conversations with Met over Libyan case intercepted

      Britain’s security and intelligence agencies were last night rocked by claims that they bugged Scotland Yard detectives who were investigating the agencies’ own alleged malpractice.

      A Yard spokesman yesterday confirmed that police are investigating the allegations – which stem from documents disclosed in court by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

      If substantiated, the claims – set out in a letter to Met commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe from Cori Crider, a director of the human rights charity Reprieve – would mean that one arm of the State supposed to keep the country safe from terrorism spied on another, the Metropolitan Police.

    • Britain’s GCHQ monitored Irish internet traffic

      Britain’s surveillance body, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), could be tapping underwater cables connecting Ireland to the global web, according to a new document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released by German media.

    • Active Duty and Veteran Military Families Must Use Food Pantries to Meet Basic Needs
    • The OTHER Government Revolving Door: Sheriff’s Departments, State Troopers Provide New Homes For Bad Cops

      It’s not just our nation’s legislators that enjoy a “revolving door” — one that moves them from Congress to the private sector and back again, to the mutual benefit of legislators and certain industries… not so much the rest of America.

    • Officers who left LPD after complaints find jobs with sheriff, patrol

      John McGahan, the Lincoln Police Department’s 2013 Officer of the Year who resigned this year after Internal Affairs accused him of using excessive force, is now working at the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office.

    • The Legality of the Voting Rights Act: An Equal Vote for Natives

      It has been over 50 years after the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Native Americans (both Indians and Alaska Natives) still do not possess equal access to voting polls, as Stephanie Woodward reports for In These Times.

      Unequal voting access has produced lower voting turnout among Natives for two distinct reasons. The first being that voting polls lie off of reservations. This creates a myriad of extra costs including travel funds and loss of income. Many natives cannot afford the gas money needed to get to these polls as well as taking a half day off of work. The other sanction upon Native voting is fear. There have been accounts of numerous hate crimes, murders, and even police brutality against Natives in the surrounding areas off of reservations. This along with the language barrier cause the few Natives who can afford the travel expenditures to avoid voting for fear of the repercussions.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It’s Important

      Cuban also offered up a Q&A session with the Washington Post because, Post writer Nancy Scola informs us, “there’s nothing that Cuban dislikes more than untested conventional wisdom” (aka the need for net neutrality rules). Most of us by now know the U.S. broadband market isn’t free or functional — it’s a broken duopoly, slathered in a layer of regulatory capture, preying on a captive audience incapable of voting with their wallets.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Sony films ‘Fury’ and ‘Annie’ said stolen in studio cyberattack

        The recent picture “Fury,” a Brad Pitt war movie, and the yet-to-be-released “Annie” and “Still Alice” have appeared on file-sharing sites, said the person, who sought anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter. The website TorrentFreak, a news site on file-sharing, said “Fury” was the second-most-downloaded film at one site.

      • Kim Dotcom beats US bid to get him thrown back in jail

        Kim Dotcom has successfully fended off an American government bid to put in him back in a New Zealand jail for allegedly violating his bail.

        “That was a good win today, but also another attempt by the US government to get my liberty removed—it’s unbelievable,” Dotcom told Ars by phone late Sunday night.

      • Torrent Site Admin Sentenced to Five Months Prison

        Following an initial investigation and complaint filed by Rights Alliance in 2012, this week the admin of a Sweden-based torrent site learned of his fate. Dismissing claims that the site had been sold four years earlier, a court sentenced the 40-year-old to a five month jail sentence.

      • Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Picks Up Fight for a Free Internet

        Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde was released from prison earlier this month. Today he looks back at his tough time in prison and to the fights ahead, including the battle for a free and open Internet. Peter sees data as the oil of the 21st century and likens the fight against piracy to the invasion of Kuwait.

      • YouTube Briefly Shuts Down Blizzard’s Own YouTube Channel For Copyright Infringement

        YouTube’s ContentID system gets mocked quite frequently for bogus takedowns, which happen with unfortunate frequency. The latest, as pointed out by YouTube star Total Biscuit is that Blizzard’s own damn YouTube channel for World Championship Series StarCraft, WCSStarCraft, was down for at least 40 minutes earlier today.

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