Editors • About the Site • Comes vs. Microsoft • Using This Web Site • Site Archives • Credibility Index • OOXML • OpenDocument • Patents • Novell • News Digest • Site News • RSS

03.13.15

Links 13/2/2015: Chromebook Reviews, Age Of Wonders III Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 8:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Vaio vies with old friend Sony by launching an Android smartphone

    Shortly after ejecting from Sony, the folks at Vaio are going up against their former company with a smartphone to compete with the Sony Xperia line.

    The Vaio name will no doubt be familiar as the brand name of Sony’s laptops. But as part of a raft of cost-cutting measures, Sony spun off the laptop division last year. The new company kept the Vaio name and logo for its first couple of laptops and has now slapped the logo on the back of a mid-range phone.

  • Desktop

    • Hands on: Google’s new $999 Chromebook Pixel makes big changes under the hood

      Two years is eons in tech time, and that’s how long we’ve had to wait for a new Chromebook Pixel, which Google announced Wednesday. Yes, this is a new version of the super-premium, high-priced flagship that debuted to oohs, ahhs, and whys in early 2013, when most Chromebooks were little cheap plastic things, and desktop applications dominated. Not everyone saw the potential of a high-priced browser box.

    • Review: New Chromebook Pixel is still lovely hardware with limited appeal

      Chromebooks are cheap. They work best that way. It’s rare to find one north of $400, and the sweet spot is between $200 and $300. While they’ve got shortcomings, the cost is reasonable for what you get. In some cases, the limitations are even desirable.

      Only one Chromebook has truly gone against that grain—the Chromebook Pixel. It was the polar opposite of every other device bearing the name. The Pixel was high-quality hardware where others are low-rent, but even though it cost five times what you could pay for a regular Chromebook it didn’t really do much more. It’s a laptop as nice as it is niche.

    • 7 Neat Linux Tricks That Newbies Need to Know

      As a Linux newbie, it’s normal to struggle. Everything just feels so different from Windows and you find yourself scratching your head at the simplest of tasks. And while the command line makes Linux life much easier, it can be intimidating for a beginner.

      Fortunately, all it takes is a few simple tricks to get you comfortable within the terminal. Give it a few days and you may actually end up preferring the command line! Granted, there is a learning curve, but it’s not as hard as you think. I promise.

      If you’ve never used the command line before, I’d recommend that you first get acquainted with terminal before continuing. But if you’re feeling confident, feel free to keep reading anyway.

  • Server

    • GNU/Linux And The Bottom Line

      Since Amazon revitalized itself, in part by dropping that other OS, it’s gone on to be one of the most successful retail, virtualization and cloud infrastructure businesses around, all thanks to GNU/Linux.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Lightweight Desktop For Linux: What’s the Best One for You?

      When it comes to Linux, it seems like most people talk about the desktop environments with the most eye candy. While those desktops are great in their own way, they’re not for everyone. Not everyone is looking for something graphically intensive and pretty.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasmoid Tutorial 3 – Blending In

        We want to have consistent visual style amongst plasmoids that follows the user’s themes, along with consistent spacing throughout the shell. We want all “third party” plasmoids to follow these rules too.

      • Plasma 5.3 wallpaper contest

        Nuno (not Hugo) made the plasma 5.1 wallpaper and kver the wallpaper for plasma 5.2. The wallpapers are great and a good standard setting but in the past there are more than one wallpaper available in plasma. In the kde-wallpapers-4.8.x package there are Air, Ariya, Autumn, Azul, Blue Wood, Castilla Sky, Finally Summer in Germany, Flying Field, Fog on the West Lake, Fresh Moring, Grass, Hanami, Horos and Media Life.

      • 7 Leading Applications for KDE Plasma

        For the last three years, KDE Plasma has been the most widely used desktop on both the LinuxQuestions and Linux Journal polls. Part of this popularity is due to the innovations in the desktop itself, but an equally important part is the ecosystem of applications that depend on it.

        KDE Plasma applications are like no others on the desktop — and not simply because of the tradition that they must include a “K” in the name.

        Where GNOME desktop applications are carefully minimalistic, engineered to include only the most common features, KDE applications are crammed with every feature imaginable, and endlessly customizable. At times, KDE Plasma applications suffer from organizational problems because of their all-inclusivity. Yet at their best, many are among the killer apps of the Linux desktop.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • That’s a wrap

        Similar to many others, I had tried to find an appropriate place to begin contributing to FOSS before starting the OPW program. I still have a myriad of bookmarked posts and websites all devoted to getting involved in open source. It’s pervasive nature as a topic suggests that most people encounter similar barriers when trying to find a good starting point. Fortunately once you gain some momentum, it is so much easier to conserve or transfer that energy to a parallel aspect of a current project or to a completely new undertaking. This, perhaps, is the broader implication of my experience. I now have that momentum. I would like to give a big thank you to Tobias and Marina for answering all of my questions and fostering a supportive environment. I would also like to thank the GNOME community for making OPW possible.

      • OPW Retrospective

        Three months later, I’m done with my OPW internship with GNOME Music.

      • Development: GNOME 3.15.92 rc tarballs due (and more)

        We would like to inform you about the following:
        * GNOME 3.15.92 rc tarballs due
        * Hard Code Freeze

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Rugged, wireless-enabled COM runs Linux on AM437x

      CompuLab’s rugged, SODIMM-style “CM-T43″ COM runs Linux or Android on a TI AM437x, and offers up to 1GB RAM, 32GB flash, dual GbE, WiFi, BLE, NFC, and more.

    • Automotive bus open sourced with Linux-based design

      A German university is open sourcing a secure, two-tier Automotive Service Bus for car computers, available on a control unit running Linux on a PandaBoard.

      Technische Universität München (TUM) has open-sourced an automotive computer bus design developed as part of its “Visio.M” (Visionary Mobility) electric car project, according a Mar. 10 press release by TUM. Next week at the CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany, TUM will demonstrate the carbon fiber Visio.M prototype, which was backed by the German government with 7.1 million Euros, as well as the car’s newly open “Automotive Service Bus.”

    • Hybrid Embedded Computing? Intel Eyes New Niche With $89 Linux Compute Stick

      There’s plenty of talk these days about embedded Linux devices. But what if your device doesn’t have the open source OS already embedded, and you still want to use it to run apps? Intel (INTC) is catering to exactly that market—among other niches—with its Compute Stick, a USB device capable of booting TVs and other hardware that will sell for as low $89.

    • Cuberox – The Six-Faced Linux Powered Computer Is The Next Cool Gadget To Watch

      Gone are the days when computers would mean a flat screen monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. In this era of wearables, we are witnessing computers in every shape and form imaginable. Well, three passionate engineers Dmitriy Popov, Ilia Lisunov and Viacheslav Kim have come together to develop a computer in a cube. Called ‘Cuberox’, the team has developed a Linux OS powered computer that resides inside a cube shaped box that has displays on all of its six sides. As you can see from the image below, Cuberox has 16 x 16 pixel displays on each side which can show the information of the app you are running on it.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • How the new Wi-Fi, Bluetooth quick toggles work in Android 5.1

          Once your device receives the latest and greatest version of Android, you’ll want to know how to use these shortcuts.

        • Samsung Galaxy Note Series Android 5.0 Lollipop Release Update: Galaxy Note 4, Note 3, Note 2, Note Edge

          The Android 5.0 Lollipop update for the Galaxy Note series has made significant strides in the U.S. and beyond, with American carriers releasing updates for both the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy Note 3.

        • Nexus 6 Android 5.1 Update Impressions & Performance

          Earlier this week Google officially announced the highly anticipated and much needed Android 5.1 Lollipop update for many key Nexus smartphones and tablets. For now it’s rolling out to the Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10, with the 2013 Nexus 7 and more devices set to receive the latest software in the coming days. Here we’re taking a lot at how well Android 5.1 runs on the Nexus 6.

        • Google offers developers a sample Android app that works across phones, tablets, smartwatches, cars, and more

          Google today released a new sample app called Universal Music Player that works on smartphones, tablets, Android Auto, Android Wear, and Google Cast devices. The word “sample” is key here: This is a reference design for developers so they can learn how to implement a service that works across multiple form factors.

        • Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop Release: 10 Things to Expect

          Earlier this week, Google announced an Android 5.1 Lollipop update for Nexus smartphones and tablets. Google’s Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop release is now underway and we want to take a look at a few things we expect from Google and its brand new Lollipop update for the Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, Nexus 4, and more.

        • Tablet Wars Redux: Nexus 9 vs. iPad Air 2

          The tablet computer market, despite being dominated by the iPad, is in a constant state of agitation. With Amazon, Samsung, and Google coming out with their own line of tablets, the war for the bigger devices gets more and more intense every year. 2014, though was another one of those Apple vs. Google fights where both parties came out with the best line of products.

        • Run Android 5.0.2 Lollipop on Your PC with AndEX Live CD

          Arne Exton had the pleasure of informing Softpedia about its brand-new Android-based Live CD operating system that allows anyone to run the latest Android 5.0.2 “Lollipop” mobile operating system on desktop or laptop computers. The distribution uses Arne’s special Linux kernel 3.10.58-exton-android-x86+, which includes support for the NTFS file system, as well as some extra drivers.

Free Software/Open Source

  • ownCloud gets new release cycle

    ownCloud is a popular private cloud option within the FOSS community, now they’ve announced a series of changes that will affect enterprise and home users quite drastically. These changes include: a faster release cycle, new enterprise support options and a smaller download and installation footprint.

  • Open Source Crypto is Hard: Part 7846

    Our GnuPG strategy and code isn’t ready. We need to either make all that crypto stuff completely seamless, or improve the tools we expose to the user for manual work. Preferably both.

  • The Seven Habits Of Open Source

    Perhaps as recently as a decade ago, open source was still held in a sort of social exile. The sole preserve of server room technology and serious code geeks who knew how to tinker around inside the guts of the operating system, open source software was obviously quite powerful but didn’t seem to come with much of the touchy-feely user interface gloss that we had all gotten so used to.

  • Firing community members

    Things changed. We were starting to see more non-technical people joining, and when I started at Canonical as the Ubuntu community manager, I set my core goal to make Ubuntu a community in which anyone could participate. Others did the same, and the open source world started diversifying in skills. We started seeing designers, artists, advocates, translators, writers, marketeers, and more joining up.

  • Events

    • HGST gets closer to shipping 10TB HDD

      At the Linux Foundation Vault tradeshow in Boston, for Linux and open-source storage developers, the several hundred attendees got a glimpse of the future with a peek at HGST’s 10TB hard disk drives (HDD).

    • Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) 2015 March 23rd to 25th

      The Linux Foundation is sponsoring the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) 2015 on March 23 – 25 at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, California. The ELC is a vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using Linux in embedded products. This year’s event will expand to include tracks on Automotive Linux, IoT and Drones.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • List Of Free And Open Source CMS (Content Management System) Solutions

      Building websites by hand with all html/css pages was fine a couple years ago. Today any one can deploy a website without any knowledge of computers. The content management system (CMS) software make your life easy. A CMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD 5.7

      This is a partial list of new features and systems included in OpenBSD 5.7. For a comprehensive list, see the changelog leading to 5.7.

    • The OpenBSD Foundation Ideas List – GSOC 2015

      The OpenBSD Foundation is gathering projects to apply as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2015.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • LibrePlanet free software conference coming to MIT March 21-22

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and MIT’s Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) are once again teaming up to bring the LibrePlanet free software conference to Cambridge, March 21-22, 2015 at the Stata Center at MIT. LibrePlanet is an annual conference for people who care about their digital freedoms, bringing together software developers, policy experts, activists, and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments, and face challenges facing the free software movement. LibrePlanet 2015 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels.

    • The new and improved my.fsf.org

      The new look of the site marks the completion of migration from a legacy system to CiviCRM, an actively maintained constituent relationship management system, which we run on top of Drupal. This launch was a team project. The improved look and feel of the membership system was aided by the effort of former outreach and communications coordinator William Theaker, whose knowledge of CiviCRM proved invaluable during development. System administrators Lisa Maginnis and Stephen Mahood have done lots of hard work to update and improve our hardware and system architecture to handle the traffic we’ve been receiving.

    • GNU wget 1.16.3 released
    • Denemo 1.2.2 is released
    • IceCat 31.5.0 release

      GNUzilla is the GNU version of the Mozilla suite, and GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Firefox browser. Its main advantage is an ethical one: it is entirely free software. While the Firefox source code from the Mozilla project is free software, they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons. Also their trademark license restricts distribution in several ways incompatible with freedom 0.

  • Public Services/Government

    • French FOI authority: make tax source code public

      The source code for France’s income tax software should be made publicly accessible, says the country’s Freedom Of Information authority, the Commission d’accès aux documents administratifs (CADA). Source code for governmental applications is administrative information which should be made publicly available, CADA writes.

    • National Operational Plan aims to modernise Italian government

      Last month, the European Commission approved the Italian National Operational Plan (NOP) “Governance and Institutional Capacity 2014-2020″. According to Innovators PA, the “Network for Innovation in the Italian Public Administration” funded by the Department of Public Administration, the principles and instruments of the new plan are based on open government. Transparency, open data, participation, citizen engagement, risk management, preventing and combating corruption, and whistle-blowing (specifically in public procurement) are the main themes.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Cologne wants to extend eParticipation with Community Reporters

      The city of Cologne has developed a strong eParticipation policy to better involve citizens in local decision making. This concept is part of a larger plan aimed at making Cologne an Internet city. Its goal is to “further develop Cologne as a national and international location for internet technology and infrastructure”, the city said.

      [...]

      Illustrating this principle, Cologne is also testing the Community Reporter concept. This is aimed at democratising how citizens express their opinion through others channels such as video, audio or photos. This new approach is aimed at appealing to various citizen groups that are not involved in traditional eParticipation procedures, the city said. Young people may be targeted, for example. Community reporters are trained by a local adult education centre and other partners.

    • Open Data

      • Open source offline map tool for Android

        To realize the full potential of location-based smartphone apps, they should be built to support offline mode and original map graphics. Creating a custom offline map is the best choice. We were faced with this challenge as well, and the solution we came up with was creating a separate library for this purpose. That is how I developed the m​AppWidget code library.​

        We recently decided to open source it, and now mAppWidget is available to anyone in need of a mobile custom offline map solution.

      • OGP: Denmark updates its National Plan to include Open Data

        Denmark has included Open Data in its Open Government Partnership (OGP) National Action Plan and extended it to 1 July 2016. The country has also committed to promoting Open Government practices and to helping Myanmar to implement OGP practices throughout the country.

      • Exploring the Open Data Barometer

        A global movement to make government “open by default” picked up steam in 2013 when the G8 leaders signed an Open Data Charter – promising to make public sector data openly available, without charge and in re-useable formats. In 2014 the G20 largest industrial economies followed up by pledging to advance open data as a tool against corruption, and the UN recognised the need for a “Data Revolution” to achieve global development goals.

  • Programming

    • How GitHub Conquered Google, Microsoft, and Everyone Else

      This was a decade ago, before the idea of open source software flipped the tech world upside-down. The open source Linux operating system was already running an enormous number of machines on Wall Street and beyond, proving you can generate big value—and big money—by freely sharing software code with the world at large. But the open source community was still relatively small. When coders started new open source projects, they typically did so on a rather geeky and sometimes unreliable internet site called SourceForge.

Leftovers

  • The iRevolution That Wasn’t. Why Apple Watch will be rare iFlop more like Newton and Lisa than iPhone, iPad and the Macintosh

    So it was now time to see Apple’s latest attempt at iRevolution. Exactly what is the Apple Watch and what can it do? What we saw instead was an iDud. Yes the iChoir was still in an iTrance but the real world already woke up during the presentation that wait, there is nothing more? This is the same stuff we saw last September? Where is the iMagic? Where is the iRevolution. So now that we know, its time to do the autopsy of what went wrong with Tim Cook’s first new iToy released after Steve Jobs had died.

  • Science

    • This Congressman Doesn’t Want a Federal Science Board to Be Allowed to Consider Science

      Last year, the House of Representatives passed two absurd anti-science bills, the Secret Science Reform Act and the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act. It will come as no surprise that both bills, under the guise of “reform,” would have the practical effect of crippling the EPA’s efforts to assess science in a fair and timely way. I don’t have the heart to get into it — follow the links above for the details.

      The bills are back; the House considered them both again yesterday. Emily Atkin has the gory details if you’re interested. They might get a little further this time—the Democratic Senate didn’t take them up last year, obviously, but the GOP-controlled Senate might this year—though it won’t matter in the end, as Obama has threatened to veto both. So it’s mainly yet another act of reactionary symbolism from the right.

      All that is by way of background so I can draw your attention to a hilarious amendment attached to the Science Advisory Board bill. It comes by way of the bill’s sponsor, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.), a far-right, coal-country, climate-denying conservative of the old school.

    • American Millennials among the world’s least skilled people, says study

      Though the youngest Americans seem to be the most tech-savvy generation in history, their skill sets might not match up to the par set by their international peers.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • NTP’s Fate Hinges On ‘Father Time’

      In April, one of the open source code movement’s first and biggest success stories, the Network Time Protocol, will reach a decision point. At 30 years old, will NTP continue as the preeminent time synchronization system for Macs, Windows, and Linux computers and most servers on networks?

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Stop using RC4

      In other news, WebKitGTK+ 2.8 has full support for RFC 7465. That’s a fancy way of saying that we will no longer negotiate RC4 connections and you will now be unable to access the small minority of HTTPS sites that offer nothing but RC4. Hopefully other browsers will follow along sooner rather than later. In particular, Firefox nightly has stopped negotiating RC4 except for a few whitelisted sites: I would very much like to see that whitelist removed. Internet Explorer has stopped negotiating RC4 except when it performs voluntary protocol version fallback. It would be great to see a firmer stance from Mozilla and Microsoft, and some action from Google and Apple.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Transparency Reporting

    • State Dept. Employees Only Retained .01 Percent Of Emails As FOIA-Able ‘Official Records’

      With uncanny timeliness, the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General has released a report on the State Department’s email retention — or lack thereof. Not covered in the report is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email retention — or lack thereof. High-ranking State Department officials use a different email system (when not using personal accounts) that isn’t covered in this report.

    • Everything We Know About Hillary Clinton’s Email

      The New York Times reported Monday that the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate had exclusively used a private email account for her government business during her tenure as Secretary of State, rather than a government email account. And an Associated Press report Wednesday said Clinton used her own email servers, rather than a third-party provider like Gmail or Yahoo Mail. That’s raised questions about whether Clinton was making a deliberate attempt to prevent her messages from being disclosed by open records requests or subpoenas.

    • How to Email Like Hillary Clinton

      Many people have at least two email addresses: There’s the one you get for work, then there’s the one you use for personal business. And you might even have one to give all the companies who will send you junk mail until the world ends.

    • Julian Assange set to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London

      Swedish prosecutors are expected to question Julian Assange in his London refuge after the lead prosecutor bowed to pressure from his lawyers, Swedish legal opinion and the courts to attempt to break the deadlock in the case.

      Marianne Ny, who heads the investigation into accusations of rape and sexual molestation against the WikiLeaks founder, on Friday lodged a request with Assange’s lawyers to interrogate him in London and take a DNA sample – the first sign of movement in the case that has been deadlocked for nearly three years.

      The prosecutor will ask the UK government and Ecuador for permission to carry out an interrogation at Ecuador’s embassy in London, where Assange has been staying since August 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, from which he fears being handed over to the US to face espionage charges.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • NY Times Fails To Disclose Oil Funding Behind Pro-Oil Op-Ed

      In a March 10 New York Times op-ed, Robert Bryce falsely characterized the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) as an expensive “tax.” The standard, which requires oil refiners, blenders, and gasoline and diesel importers to blend a set amount of renewable fuel into their gasoline supply, was dismissed by Bryce as a “boondoggle” and a “rip-off.”

      But the Times failed to disclose Bryce’s financial incentive to attack the RFS, identifying him only as a “senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of a new report from the institute, ‘The Hidden Corn-Ethanol Tax.’” The Manhattan Institute has, in fact, received millions from oil interests over the years, including $635,000 from ExxonMobil and $1.9 million from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, where Charles Koch and his wife sit on the board of directors. Koch made his fortune from oil and currently has significant holdings in oil and gas operations.

  • Finance

    • Fox Figures Falsely Dub New Obama Student Aid Plan A “Bailout”

      Fox figures falsely labeled President Obama’s new plan to protect student borrowers a “bailout,” ignoring the realities of the plan as well as the student debt crisis that necessitated his executive action.

    • Yes, Wall Street Journal, It’s Possible to Be Not Generous Enough

      The Social Security Administration (SSA) analyzed the approval patterns of 12 low-allowance judges over the period from 2010-2013. It found their approval rate increased from 21 to 24 percent over this four-year period. During this period, the overall approval rate had fallen from 67 to 56 percent, implying gaps of between 32 percentage points and 56 percentage points. Note that the gaps between the overall approval rate and the approval rate of the low-allowance judges is considerably larger than the gap between overall approval rate and the approval rate of the high-allowance judges highlighted in the Wall Street Journal column.

    • California Proposes Bill To Ban All Unlicensed Bitcoin Businesses, Without Even Defining What That Means

      California, the state that prides itself as the birthplace of modern technology and whose policies such as the unenforceability of non-competes contributed substantially to the innovation ecosystem, recently proposed a law that requires innovators to get permission from the state, or be banned.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • WaPo, Owned by CIA’s Webmaster, Blasts Venezuela’s ‘State-Financed’ News

      Venezuelans are worried because US President Barack Obama declared a “national emergency” that called Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

      [...]

      Ah–the administration is just pretending there’s an “unusual and extraordinary threat” because it wants to invoke powers that it’s only legally allowed to use in an actual emergency. No biggie. Thanks for clearing that up, Washington Post!

      Unfortunately, Venezuelans don’t have Washington-savvy publications like the Post to set them straight.

    • CNN on the Frontiers of the Commercialization of News

      But faced with falling ad revenues, Time Warner is seeing opportunities to sell ads during programs that are “not so tied to breaking news.” That’s why on its New Day morning show, “a logo for General Mills’ Fiber One cereal shows up during weather reports.”

    • Covering Commercialization: A Conversation
    • Full Koch Press for ALEC Right-to-Work Bill in Wisconsin

      Wisconsin is governed by the 43 ALEC members who make up the leadership and GOP majority of both houses. Governor Scott Walker is an ALEC alumnus who signed 19 ALEC bills into office in his first year as governor.

    • Surprise! ALEC Scholar Says ALEC Right to Work Will Boost WI Economy

      Stop the presses! An American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “scholar,” Richard Vedder, says that Wisconsin’s proposed right-to-work law–which is lifted word-for-word from ALEC model legislation–will be great for Wisconsin.

    • According to Scott Walker, This Is What a Terrorist Looks Like

      One of the most remarkable things about the 2011 Wisconsin uprising was how a protest so massive and so sustained managed to be entirely peaceful. Thousands of people occupied the capital building, around the clock, for two weeks straight, without incident. For months, as many as 100,000 people at a time marched around the statehouse, and exercised their right to free speech and assembly–without arrests or violence.

  • Censorship

    • Google Keeps Rejecting Hollywood’s Broad Takedown Requests

      It’s no secret that Google and Hollywood have different views on the responsibilities of search engines. This is resulting in an interesting standoff where Google keeps rejecting requests to remove pirate sites from its search results. The MPAA apparently even tried to take down its own website as a test, but failed to do so.

    • MySpace – what went wrong: ‘The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’

      In 2015, Sean Percival is a partner at Silicon Valley seed accelerator 500 Startups, but from 2009 to 2011, he was working at MySpace as its vice president of online marketing – just as the social network lost its crown to Facebook.

      In a speech at the By:Larm conference in Oslo this week, Percival gave an insider’s view of what went wrong at MySpace, from the “massive spaghetti-ball mess” of its website and the “politics, greed” of parent company News Corporation to a doomed attempt to acquire music streaming service Spotify.

      His talk was aimed at startups looking to learn the lessons from MySpace’s decline, but it seemed as relevant for the largest internet companies today, such as Facebook, as they seek to avoid a similar fate.

    • WordPress Wins $25,000 From DMCA Takedown Abuser

      WordPress has scored an important victory in court against a man who abused the DMCA to censor an article of a critical journalist. The court agreed that the takedown request was illegitimate and awarded WordPress roughly $25,000 in damages and attorneys fees.

    • ISP Categorically Refuses to Block Pirate Bay – Trial Set For October

      Following a hearing last month during which agreement was sought between entertainment companies and Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget, the provider has confirmed there will be no compromise. The ISP will not block The Pirate Bay and insists that customers have the right to communicate freely online. A trial is now set for October.

  • Privacy

    • New Zealand Prime Minister Retracts Vow To Resign if Mass Surveillance Is Shown

      In August 2013, as evidence emerged of the active participation by New Zealand in the “Five Eyes” mass surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden, the country’s conservative Prime Minister, John Key, vehemently denied that his government engages in such spying. He went beyond mere denials, expressly vowing to resign if it were ever proven that his government engages in mass surveillance of New Zealanders. He issued that denial, and the accompanying resignation vow, in order to reassure the country over fears provoked by a new bill he advocated to increase the surveillance powers of that country’s spying agency, Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) — a bill that passed by one vote thanks to the Prime Minister’s guarantees that the new law would not permit mass surveillance.

    • Internet privacy, funded by spooks: A brief history of the BBG

      In 2014, Congress massively upped the BBG’s “Internet freedom” budget to $25 million, with half of that money flowing through RFA and into the Open Technology Fund. This $12.75 million represented a three-fold increase in OTF’s budget from 2013 — a considerable expansion for an outfit that was just a few years old. Clearly, it’s doing something that the government likes. A lot.

    • Think Different, standing up for Sheffield.

      I want to stand for a party that opposes mass surveillance and stands up for civil liberties. A party that understands the common good, that people must have jobs that pay fairly in an economy that benefits them, homes they can afford and access to great education. The Pirate Party does.

    • A Way Forward: Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath Explains Where Our Privacy is Now, and How We Fix It

      That’s why Data and Goliath is such an exciting book. On top of the ongoing avalanche of stories of cyberwarfare, data breaches and corporate snooping, the Snowden revelations have left many people confused and cynical about protecting their own privacy. Too many believe that nothing can be done to regain some of the privacy and power over our own lives that we have lost to ubiquitous mass surveillance. Worse, politics of fear have cowed citizens, congressmen and judges alike from claiming their important roles in oversight of national intelligence techniques and agencies.

    • valencia tracking device

      On March 4th, 2015, we found a tracking device inside of the wheel well of a car belonging to an attendee of the Circumvention Tech Festival in Valencia, Spain. This was reported in the local media.

    • WhatsApp slaps unofficial app users with permanent ban

      MESSAGING APPLICATION WhatsApp will issue those using third-party apps with a permanent ban from the service.

    • Snapchat Is Raising Money From Alibaba at a $15 Billion Valuation

      Snapchat is part of a breed of startups with multibillion-dollar valuations, with investors lining up to offer financing. With the latest deal, Snapchat would be ranked behind only mobile car-booking application Uber Technologies Inc. and Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp., according to data compiled by researcher CB Insights. Xiaomi is pegged at $45 billion, while Uber’s latest round valued it at $40 billion.

    • Facebook Is Facing a Massive Lawsuit Over Online Purchases Made by Kids

      The company has so far refused to refund purchases made by children without parental permission

    • Privacy advocates try to keep ‘creepy,’ ‘eavesdropping’ Hello Barbie from hitting shelves

      At a recent New York toy fair, a Mattel representative introduced the newest version of Barbie by saying: “Welcome to New York, Barbie.”

      The doll, named Hello Barbie, responded: “I love New York! Don’t you? Tell me, what’s your favorite part about the city? The food, fashion or the sights?”

    • Google Denies Narrow Warrant Request For Emails; Government Responds By Asking For Everything Ever

      Another participant in the Magistrate’s Revolt appears out of the unlikeliest of districts: Alaska. The court order, first pointed out by ACLU’s chief tech sorcerer, Chris Soghoian, features Judge Kevin McCoy telling the government to take its overly-broad search warrants and hit the road. Well, mostly. The order is without prejudice, which means the government still has options available, but from what’s stated by the judge, it won’t be the latest option the government deployed.

    • PRISM: UK government finds that bulk collection is not mass surveillance

      THE MUCH ANTICIPATED OFFICIAL government review into GCHQ bulk data collection has found that such activity is fine, and should not be considered mass surveillance. It also acknowledged that some legislative change is needed.

    • Report Says UK Citizens Must Give Up Right To Privacy Because ‘Terrorism’, Reveals Huge Secret Government Databases

      And that’s it: basically, the ISC is saying that all that is needed is a bit of a legal tidying-up. In terms of more detailed recommendations, the report suggests that the abuse of interception powers should be made a criminal offense — currently it isn’t — and that a new category of metadata called “Communications Data Plus”, which includes things like Web addresses, needs slightly greater protection than “traditional” telephone metadata.

    • European Governments Seeking To Water Down EU’s Proposed Data Protection Legislation
    • The Democratization of Cyberattack

      When I was working with the Guardian on the Snowden documents, the one top-secret program the NSA desperately did not want us to expose was QUANTUM. This is the NSA’s program for what is called packet injection–basically, a technology that allows the agency to hack into computers.

    • EFF Grabs Two More Docs From The NSA, Detailing Expanded Post-9/11 Surveillance Powers And Section 702 Justifications

      Thanks to its ongoing FOIA lawsuit against the NSA, the EFF has managed to secure another set of documents detailing the legal rationalizations behind the intelligence agency’s “collect it all” approach, as well as the FISA’s courts approval of expanded surveillance powers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

    • Why Online Attacks By Nations Are Problematic: Enemies Can Learn From Your Digital Weapons, Then Turn Improved Versions Against You

      The NSA is specifically concerned that Iran’s cyberweapons will become increasingly potent and sophisticated by virtue of learning from the attacks that have been launched against that country. “Iran’s destructive cyber attack against Saudi Aramco in August 2012, during which data was destroyed on tens of thousands of computers, was the first such attack NSA has observed from this adversary,” the NSA document states. “Iran, having been a victim of a similar cyber attack against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.”

      That’s because, unlike traditional physical weapons used against enemy infrastructure, digital versions are not generally destroyed during an attack. One of their big advantages is that once they have infiltrated and infected a target system, they can continue to carry out surveillance or attacks over a long time period. But that also means they may eventually be discovered — especially if they leak out — allowing them to be studied and improved in a way generally not possible with traditional weapons. Those new versions can then be directed elsewhere, including against the original attacker.

    • Government “Clarifies” Its Stance on NSL Gag Orders

      It seems the government doesn’t know where it stands when it comes to national security letters (NSLs).

    • Petraeus won’t serve a day in jail for his leaks. Edward Snowden shouldn’t either

      The sweetheart deal the Justice Department gave to former CIA director David Petraeus for leaking top secret information compared to the stiff jail sentences other low-level leakers have received under the Obama administration has led to renewed calls for leniency for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And no one makes the case better than famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

  • Civil Rights

    • Albuquerque PD encrypts videos before releasing them in records request

      Har-har-fuck-you, said Albequerque’s murderous, lawless police department, as they fulfilled a records request from Gail Martin, whose husband was killed by them, by sending her encrypted CDs with the relevant videos, then refusing to give her the passwords.

    • Albuquerque Police Dept. ‘Complies’ With Records Request By Releasing Password-Protected Videos… But Not The Password

      If there’s one thing the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) does well — or at least, frequently — it’s shoot and kill Albuquerque residents. Its officers’ obvious preference for excessive and/or deadly force attracted the notice of the DOJ, which issued a (mostly) scathing review that was tempered somewhat by the DOJ’s appreciation of the inherent risks of the job, as well as all the hard work the city’s officers do when not shooting Albuquerque residents.

    • Scott Walker’s CPAC Stumble is the Tip of the ISISberg

      Like Walker’s ISIS comments, the governor’s former body guard intentionally linked peaceful Wisconsin protestors and 9/11 terrorism. But national and local media skipped over the innuendo. The Walker Administration later let loose with more than 100 dramatic, handcuffed arrests of singers, including an octogenarian, a 14 year old, a local radio personality and the Raging Grannies.

    • Majority of use-of-force incidents not recorded by Denver cops’ body cams

      As the nation’s policing agents scramble to provide street officers with body cameras, a new study released Wednesday shows that a majority of use-of-force incidents weren’t captured by Denver police officers who are piloting use of the technology.

      There were a host of reasons for officers failing to turn on the body worn cameras (BWCs) in violation of Denver Police Department policy. According to an independent police monitor’s report, which surveyed the six months ending in December, only 26 percent of the use-of-force incidents in the studied policing district were captured on video.

    • EFF Files Brief In Support Of ‘Cannibal Cop’ To Keep The CFAA From Becoming Even MORE Abusive

      The US legal system took a step towards criminalizing thought when a New York court convicted a former NYPD officer of conspiring to kidnap, rape, kill and eat 100 women. The evidence against Gilberto Valle included chat logs and internet searches.

    • American contractor faces up to FIVE YEARS in Emirati prison and a $50,000 fine because he complained about his job on Facebook

      A hallmark of American life – griping about work – has landed a Florida man in a Middle Eastern jail.

    • Facebook rant lands US man in UAE jail

      An expat American has been arrested in the United Arab Emirates for comments he posted on Facebook while in the US.

      Helicopter mechanic Ryan Pate wrote the Facebook post while in Florida after arguing with employer Global Aerospace Logistics (Gal) over sick leave.

      On returning to Abu Dhabi from Florida, he was arrested for breaking the country’s strict cyber-slander laws.

      His trial is due to start on 17 March and he could face up to five years in jail and a large fine if found guilty.

    • Friend of man shot by Volusia Co. deputy calls killing ‘murder’

      Authorities have identified a man who died after being shot in the face by a Volusia County Sheriff’s deputy early Wednesday morning.

      The shooting happened while deputies served a search warrant for drugs in Deltona, authorities said.

    • Tech support scammer threatened to kill man when scam call backfired

      But one scammer took things to a new level by threatening to kill a man who pointed out that the scammer was trying to steal money.

      As we’ve reported numerous times, scammers pretending to work for Microsoft tech support call potential victims, tell them their computers are infected, convince them to provide remote access, and then charge them hundreds of dollars to fix imaginary problems.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Opinion: The FCC’s Net Neutrality Victory Is Anything But

      The day after the FCC’s net neutrality vote, Washington was downright frigid. I’d spoken at three events about the ruling, mentioning at each that the order could be overturned in court. I was tired and ready to go home.

      [...]

      And telecom lawyers? They love it: whatever happens, the inevitable litigation will mean a decade’s worth of job security.

    • Europe reverses course on net neutrality legislation

      Less than a year after the European Parliament voted to enshrine net neutrality in law, the principle has come under attack by the European Commission.

    • Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s top digital policymaker
    • The Cartoonist Has No Idea How Net Neutrality Works

      Earlier this week, the A Good Cartoon tumblr first posted a bunch of ridiculous and misleading political cartoons about net neutrality that showed zero understanding of net neutrality. And then the person behind the site remade many of those cartoons, but replaced the words in them with “the cartoonist has no idea how net neutrality works!” For reasons unknown, the original Tumblr post that had all of them has been taken down, but many of the images are still viewable via John Hodgman’s blog, and they’re worth checking out. Here are just a few with some additional commentary (because how can I not provide some commentary…)

    • Why America’s Internet Is So Shitty and Slow

      You may have heard that the internet is winning: net neutrality was saved, broadband was redefined to encourage higher speeds, and the dreaded Comcast-Time Warner Cable megamerger potentially thwarted. But the harsh reality is that America’s internet is still fundamentally broken, and there’s no easy fix.

    • Cable Proudly Declares Smart Shoppers A ‘Lower Quality’ Of Customer They Have No Interest In

      If you live in a broadband and TV market with anything even closely resembling competition, you’ve probably learned that the only way to get the best rates is to pit ISP retention departments against one another. Often only by seriously threatening to cancel can users force ISPs to bring out their best promotional offers, something you’ll have to repeat every few years if you don’t want to get socked with higher rates. The ideal consumer then, from the broadband and cable industry’s perspective, is one that grumbles a little bit but can’t be bothered to do a little extra legwork to secure better rates (read: the vast majority of users).

    • FCC Net Neutrality Rules Finally Released, Cue The ISP Lawsuits And Hyperbole

      Given the hysterical reaction to the FCC’s new net neutrality rules the last few weeks, it was easy to forget that nobody had actually read them yet. As noted previously, the lack of public documents wasn’t some sort of elitist cabal, but a routine (if stupid) part of FCC procedure restricting the agency from publicizing new rules until they’ve been voted on and include all Commissioner commentary. Of course, ISPs and congressional allies breathlessly opposed to Title II hadn’t read the rules either, preventing their lawyers from launching their expected legal assaults.

    • Nokia CEO: We Have To Get Rid Of Net Neutrality, Otherwise Self-Driving Cars Will Keep On Crashing Into Each Other

      Yes, according to Suri, there are going to be terrible pile-ups on the roads unless we get rid of net neutrality. Leaving aside the fact that low-latency communications across the internet will come anyway — if there’s one thing that’s certain in the world of digital technology, it’s that everything gets faster and cheaper — there’s another problem with this argument.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Will The Vulcan Salute Live Long And Prosper? The Rush To Lock Up ‘Cultural Expression’

      What does Leonard Nimoy’s “Vulcan salute” have to do with European newspaper headlines? They both might one day be regulated by new international intellectual property rules, if some have their way. One might think that what constitutes “intellectual property” is set in stone, but it isn’t. Around the world, different interests are lobbying for governments to create new types of intellectual property all the time.

    • The White House Has Gone Full Doublespeak on Fast Track and the TPP

      Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Orrin Hatch are now in a stand-off over a bill that would put secretive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement on the Fast Track to passage through Congress. The White House meanwhile, has intensified their propaganda campaign, going so far as to mislead the public about how trade deals—like the TPP and its counterpart, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)—will affect the Internet and users’ rights. They are creating videos, writing several blog posts, and then this week, even sent out a letter from an “online small business owner” to everyone on the White House’s massive email list, to further misinform the public about Fast Track.

    • EU’s Socialist Politicians Come Out Strongly Against Corporate Sovereignty — To A Certain Extent…

      Techdirt has been writing about corporate sovereignty for nearly two years now. The public is beginning to wake up to the dangers it poses, which means that politicians, too, are suddenly discovering that they need to have an opinion on the subject. Over in the European Union, attention is focused on the S&D (Socialists and Democrats) Group in the European Parliament. Because of the way seats were won in the recent EU elections, it is the S&D group that will make or break TTIP/TAFTA; that makes its position on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) crucial.

    • Copyrights

      • Mega Ponders Legal Action in Response to Damaging Paypal Ban

        Two weeks ago PayPal closed the account of cloud-storage service Mega, citing pressure from Visa and MasterCard. The ban has undoubtedly hurt Mega’s business, and CEO Graham Gaylard is in Europe to discuss possible legal repercussions against a report that’s partly responsible for the ban

      • Ebook Library Punishes Anti-Piracy Outfit For Wrongful DMCA Notices

        The Ultimate Ebook Library, TUEBL, is taking countermeasures against anti-piracy company MUSO for continued abuse of its DMCA takedown process. The ebook site is demanding the payment of a $150 fine, while threatening to ban MUSO’s IP-addresses and restore previously removed books if the company fails to comply.

      • U.S. Government Lists Top Torrent Sites as Piracy Havens

        A new report published by the United States Trade Representative has listed the world’s largest BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers as some of the most problematic copyright infringers in the world. Popcorn Time and its derivatives are mentioned too, with the former’s creation blamed on YIFY/YTS. Domain name registrars are also placed under the spotlight.

      • Cyberlocker Traffic Plummets, But Not Mega

        The past six months have not been good ones for some of the world’s leading file-hosting sites. Many have seen their traffic plummet as a result of Google algorithm changes, but interestingly some are bucking the trend. Mega.co.nz, for example, is doing better than ever.

      • Is 10 Years in Jail the Answer to Online Pirates?

        Physical counterfeiters can receive up to 10 years in jail under UK copyright law but should online pirates receive the same maximum punishment? A new report commissioned by the government reveals that many major rightsholders believe they should, but will that have the desired effect?

      • Lets Talk About the Music Industry…

        Many musicians believed that rhetoric that the reason they weren’t seeing profits from their hard work was due to evil music pirates and not deceptive industry accounting practices. They began to attack their own fanbases with accusation of music piracy, in some cases even filing lawsuits against some of their biggest fans. Meanwhile, the music industry continues its shady practices, laughing all the way to the bank while frustrated artists shoot their own foot off.

03.12.15

Richard Stallman: Why We Need Free Digital Hardware Designs

Posted in FSF, Hardware at 11:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

To what extent do the ideas of free software extend to hardware? Is it a moral obligation to make our hardware designs free, just as it is to make our software free? Does maintaining our freedom require rejecting hardware made from nonfree designs?

Free software is a matter of freedom, not price; broadly speaking, it means that users are free to use the software and to copy and redistribute the software, with or without changes. More precisely, the definition is formulated in terms of the four essential freedoms.

  • The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
  • The freedom to study the program’s source code, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
  • The freedom to make exact copies and give them or sell them to others.
  • The freedom to make copies of your modified versions and give them or sell them to others.

Applying the same concept directly to hardware, free hardware means hardware that you are free to use and to copy and redistribute with or without changes. But, since there are no copiers for hardware, aside from keys, DNA, and plastic objects’ exterior shapes, is the concept of free hardware even possible? Well, most hardware is made by fabrication from some sort of design. The design comes before the hardware.

Thus, the concept we really need is that of a free hardware design. That’s simple: it means a design that permits users to use the design (i.e., fabricate hardware from it) and to copy and redistribute it, with or without changes. The design must provide the same four freedoms that define free software. Then “free hardware” means hardware with an available free design.

People first encountering the idea of free software often think it means you can get a copy gratis. Many free programs are available for zero price, since it costs you nothing to download your own copy, but that’s not what “free” means here. (In fact, some spyware programs such as Flash Player and Angry Birds are gratis although they are not free.) Saying “libre” along with “free” helps clarify the point.

For hardware, this confusion tends to go in the other direction; hardware costs money to produce, so commercially made hardware won’t be gratis (unless it is a loss-leader or a tie-in), but that does not prevent its design from being free/libre. Things you make in your own 3D printer can be quite cheap, but not exactly gratis since you will have to pay for the raw materials. In ethical terms, the freedom issue trumps the price issue totally, since a device that denies freedom to its users is worth less than nothing.

The terms “open hardware” and “open source hardware” are used by some with the same concrete meaning as “free hardware,” but those terms downplay freedom as an issue. They were derived from the term “open source software,” which refers more or less to free software but without talking about freedom or presenting the issue as a matter of right or wrong. To underline the importance of freedom, we make a point of referring to freedom whenever it is pertinent; since “open” fails to do that, let’s not substitute it for “free”.

Is Nonfree Hardware an Injustice?

Ethically, software must be free; a nonfree program is an injustice. Should we take the same view for hardware designs?

We certainly should, in the fields that 3D printing (or, more generally, any sort of personal fabrication) can handle. Printer patterns to make a useful, practical object (i.e., functional rather than decorative) must be free because they are works made for practical use. Users deserve control over these works, just as they deserve control over the software they use.

Distributing a nonfree functional object design is as wrong as distributing a nonfree program.

Be careful to choose 3D printers that work with exclusively free software; the Free Software Foundation endorses such printers. Some 3D printers are made from free hardware designs, but Makerbot’s hardware designs are nonfree.

Must we reject nonfree digital hardware?

Is a nonfree digital hardware(*) design an injustice? Must we, for our freedom’s sake, reject all digital hardware made from nonfree designs, as we must reject nonfree software?

Due to the conceptual parallel between hardware designs and software source code, many hardware hackers are quick to condemn nonfree hardware designs just like nonfree software. I disagree because the circumstances for hardware and software are different.

Present-day chip and board fabrication technology resembles the printing press: it lends itself to mass production in a factory. It is more like copying books in 1950 than like copying software today.

Freedom to copy and change software is an ethical imperative because those activities are feasible for those who use software: the equipment that enables you to use the software (a computer) is also sufficient to copy and change it. Today’s mobile computers are too weak to be good for this, but anyone can find a computer that’s powerful enough.

Moreover, a computer suffices to download and run a version changed by someone else who knows how, even if you are not a programmer. Indeed, nonprogrammers download software and run it every day. This is why free software makes a real difference to nonprogrammers.

How much of this applies to hardware? Not everyone who can use digital hardware knows how to change a circuit design, or a chip design, but anyone who has a PC has the equipment needed to do so. Thus far, hardware is parallel to software, but next comes the big difference.

You can’t build and run a circuit design or a chip design in your computer. Constructing a big circuit is a lot of painstaking work, and that’s once you have the circuit board. Fabricating a chip is not feasible for individuals today; only mass production can make them cheap enough. With today’s hardware technology, users can’t download and run John H Hacker’s modified version of a digital hardware design, as they could run John S Hacker’s modified version of a program. Thus, the four freedoms don’t give users today collective control over a hardware design as they give users collective control over a program. That’s where the reasoning showing that all software must be free fails to apply to today’s hardware technology.

In 1983 there was no free operating system, but it was clear that if we had one, we could immediately use it and get software freedom. All that was missing was the code for one.

In 2014, if we had a free design for a CPU chip suitable for a PC, mass-produced chips made from that design would not give us the same freedom in the hardware domain. If we’re going to buy a product mass produced in a factory, this dependence on the factory causes most of the same problems as a nonfree design. For free designs to give us hardware freedom, we need future fabrication technology.

We can envision a future in which our personal fabricators can make chips, and our robots can assemble and solder them together with transformers, switches, keys, displays, fans and so on. In that future we will all make our own computers (and fabricators and robots), and we will all be able to take advantage of modified designs made by those who know hardware. The arguments for rejecting nonfree software will then apply to nonfree hardware designs too.

That future is years away, at least. In the meantime, there is no need to reject hardware with nonfree designs on principle.

*As used here, “digital hardware” includes hardware with some analog circuits and components in addition to digital ones.

We need free digital hardware designs

Although we need not reject digital hardware made from nonfree designs in today’s circumstances, we need to develop free designs and should use them when feasible. They provide advantages today, and in the future they may be the only way to use free software.

Free hardware designs offer practical advantages. Multiple companies can fabricate one, which reduces dependence on a single vendor. Groups can arrange to fabricate them in quantity. Having circuit diagrams or HDL code makes it possible to study the design to look for errors or malicious functionalities (it is known that the NSA has procured malicious weaknesses in some computing hardware). Furthermore, free designs can serve as building blocks to design computers and other complex devices, whose specs will be published and which will have fewer parts that could be used against us.

Free hardware designs may become usable for some parts of our computers and networks, and for embedded systems, before we are able to make entire computers this way.

Free hardware designs may become essential even before we can fabricate the hardware personally, if they become the only way to avoid nonfree software. As common commercial hardware is increasingly designed to subjugate users, it becomes increasingly incompatible with free software, because of secret specifications and requirements for code to be signed by someone other than you. Cell phone modem chips and even some graphics accelerators already require firmware to be signed by the manufacturer. Any program in your computer, that someone else is allowed to change but you’re not, is an instrument of unjust power over you; hardware that imposes that requirement is malicious hardware. In the case of cell phone modem chips, all the models now available are malicious.

Some day, free-design digital hardware may be the only platform that permits running a free system at all. Let us aim to have the necessary free digital designs before then, and hope that we have the means to fabricate them cheaply enough for all users.

If you design hardware, please make your designs free. If you use hardware, please join in urging and pressuring companies to make hardware designs free. █

Copyright 2015 Richard Stallman. Released under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives 3.0 license.

Links 12/3/2015: Continued Catchup and News

Posted in News Roundup at 9:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Why are women leaving the tech industry in droves?

      Ana Redmond launched into a technology career for an exciting challenge and a chance to change the world. She was well-equipped to succeed too: An ambitious math and science wiz, she could code faster, with fewer errors, than anyone she knew.

      In 2011, after 15 years, she left before achieving a management position.

      Garann Means became a programmer for similar reasons. After 13 years, she quit too, citing a hostile and unwelcoming environment for women.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • What the Hack! 56 Suspected Hackers arrested in the UK

      The UK National Crime Agency arrested 56 suspected hackers, including one 23-year-old male who allegedly attempted to hack his way into the U.S.’ Department of Defense in 2014. Not attempting to minimize the potential risks of hacking but how much does cyber-crime actually cost, what are the risks and what about those who hack the data of billions of internet users per day to, allegedly, “keep all of us safe?”

    • Beijing Strikes Back in US-China Tech Wars

      China’s new draft anti-terror legislation has sent waves across the U.S. tech community. If there is a brewing tech war between U.S. and China over government surveillance backdoors and a preference for indigenous software, China’s new draft terror law makes it clear that Beijing is happy to give the United States a taste of its own medicine. The law has already drawn considerable criticism from international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for its purported attempts to legitimize wanton human rights violations in the name of counter-terrorism. Additionally, China has opted to implement its own definition of terrorism, placing “any thought, speech, or activity that, by means of violence, sabotage, or threat, aims to generate social panic, influence national policy-making, create ethnic hatred, subvert state power, or split the state” under the umbrella of the overused T-word.

    • Canadian risks prison for not giving up phone’s passcode

      A Canadian charged for refusing to give border agents his smartphone passcode was expected Thursday to become the first to test whether border inspections can include information stored on devices.

    • The Ambassador who worked from a Nairobi bathroom to avoid State Dept. IT

      However, another Obama administration appointee—the former ambassador to Kenya—did do that, essentially refusing to use any of the Nairobi embassy’s internal IT. He worked out of a bathroom because it was the only place in the embassy where he could use an unsecured network and his personal computer, using Gmail to conduct official business. And he did all this during a time when Chinese hackers were penetrating the personal Gmail inboxes of a number of US diplomats.

    • CIA spends years trying to break Apple security

      Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the security researchers’ work, presented at an annual gathering called the “Jamboree” at a Lockheed Martin facility in northern Virginia. Attendees of the CIA-sponsored, secretive event — which has run for nearly a decade — discuss the exploitation of vulnerabilities and flaws found in commercial electronics, such as Apple’s iPhone and iPad product ranges.

    • Yahoo exec goes mano a mano with NSA director over crypto backdoors
    • Data Retention: Mass Surveillance Challenged Across Europe

      On 8 April 2014, the European Union Court of Justice invalidated the 2006 Directive on Data Retention. Through this decision, all the European legislations on data retention were seriously undermined, as the EUCJ considered that the generalised retention of data on non-suspicious individuals, furthermore for an extended period of time, is a form of mass surveillance incompatible with fundamental rights.

    • NSA Probably Doesn’t Have ALL of Hillary’s Emails … But Maybe Someone Should

      I’m among those who believes Hillary Clinton’s use of a privately run email server is an abuse of power. Doing so appears to have skirted laws ensuring good governance and it may well have exposed her communications to adversaries (including some who would have reason to use the contents of her email to help Republicans win the White House), even if her email would have been just as targeted at State, per reports about persistent hacking of it. While I don’t buy — in the absence of evidence — she did so to hide ties with the Clinton Foundation, I do think she did so not just for convenience, but for control, as I laid out last week.

    • Encryption Backdoors Will Always Turn Around And Bite You In The Ass

      As you may have heard, the law enforcement and intelligence communities have been pushing strongly for backdoors in encryption. They talk about ridiculous things like “golden keys,” pretending that it’s somehow possible to create something that only the good guys can use. Many in the security community have been pointing out that this is flat-out impossible. The second you introduce a backdoor, there is no way to say that only “the good guys” can use it.

      As if to prove that, an old “golden key” from the 90s came back to bite a whole bunch of the internet this week… including the NSA. Some researchers discovered a problem which is being called FREAK for “Factoring RSA Export Keys.” The background story is fairly involved and complex, but here’s a short version (that leaves out a lot of details): back during the first “cryptowars” when Netscape was creating SSL (mainly to protect the early e-commerce market), the US still considered exporting strong crypto to be a crime. To deal with this, RSA offered “export grade encryption” that was deliberately weak (very, very weak) that could be used abroad. As security researcher Matthew Green explains, in order to deal with the fact that SSL-enabled websites had to deal with both strong crypto and weak “export grade” crypto, — the “golden key” — there was a system that would try to determine which type of encryption to use on each connection. If you were in the US, it should go to strong encryption. Outside the US? Downgrade to “export grade.”

    • Snowden GCSB revelations: Leaked documents show New Zealand spies on its Pacific friends and sends data to US

      New Zealand’s spies are targeting the entire email, phone and social media communications of the country’s closest, friendliest and most vulnerable neighbours, according to documents supplied by United States fugitive and whistleblower Edward Snowden.

      Snowden’s files reveal a heavy focus on “full-take collection” from the Pacific with nearly two dozen countries around the world targeted by our Government Communications Security Bureau.

    • Why I’m Saying Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft
    • Online Privacy Is Worth The Extra Work

      This past week, Laura Poitras’s documentary, Citizen Four, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. When he provided the documents that revealed the details of universal spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the subject of the documentary, Edward Snowden, wrote an accompanying manifesto. His “sole motive”, he wrote, was “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes – the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge.” (1)

  • Civil Rights

    • 20% of Germans want revolution, majority say democracy ‘isn’t real’ – study
    • Ferguson cop won’t face civil rights charges in Michael Brown shooting
    • Daniel Ellsberg: Petraeus Case Shows Hypocrisy of Whistleblower Crackdown

      The U.S. government’s “hand-slap” treatment of former CIA director David Petraeus, who in 2012 leaked classified military information to his biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell, stands in stark contrast to the Obama administration’s aggressive crackdown on whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, and John Kiriakou—and should be the turning point away from such policies.

      So says renowned Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who was charged under the Espionage Act for disclosing secret U.S. military documents related to the Vietnam War in 1971. Snowden, who leaked a trove of classified NSA documents to journalists, now also faces prosecution under the Espionage Act.

      Speaking to Trevor Timm at the Guardian on Thursday, Ellsberg noted that the “actual charges against [Edward Snowden] are not more serious, as violations of the classification regulations and non-disclosure agreements, than those Petraeus has admitted to, which are actually quite spectacular.”

    • PETRAEUS PLEA DEAL REVEALS TWO-TIER JUSTICE SYSTEM FOR LEAKS

      David Petraeus, the former Army general and CIA director, admitted today that he gave highly-classified journals to his onetime lover and that he lied to the FBI about it. But he only has to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor that will not involve a jail sentence thanks to a deal with federal prosecutors. The deal is yet another example of a senior official treated leniently for the sorts of violations that lower-level officials are punished severely for.

      According to the plea deal, Petraeus, while leading American forces in Afghanistan, maintained eight notebooks that he filled with highly-sensitive information about the identities of covert officers, military strategy, intelligence capabilities and his discussions with senior government officials, including President Obama. Rather than handing over these “Black Books,” as the plea agreement calls them, to the Department of Defense when he retired from the military in 2011 to head the CIA, Petraeus retained them at his home and lent them, for several days, to Paula Broadwell, his authorized biographer and girlfriend.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Jeb Bush Is The Latest Politician To Demonstrate Absolutely No Understanding Of Net Neutrality

      Like many folks, I’m dreading the seeming inevitability of a Clinton-Bush presidential campaign next year involving Hillary Clinton against Jeb Bush. I’m 40-years-old and half of my life has involved a Clinton or a Bush in the Oval Office (and it’s even worse if you count Vice Presidency). Both seem completely out of touch with the real issues of today. Instead, both are so surrounded by political cronies and yes-men that it’s difficult to see either candidate as being willing to actually take on the real challenges facing the world today. Clinton is currently dealing with the fallout from her decision to expose her emails to spies while shielding them from the American public. And Jeb Bush is now spouting pure nonsense on net neutrality.

    • EU Digital Commissioner: Net Neutrality Is A ‘Taliban-Like’ Issue

      Until recently, most people probably assumed that real net neutrality was more likely to come to Europe than to the US. But in one of those ironic little twists, not only has the FCC voted in favor of net neutrality, but attacks on the idea in Europe have suddenly multiplied, leaving the final outcome there in doubt. Worryingly, one of the strongest verbal assaults on net neutrality comes from the very EU Commissioner who is in charge of the relevant legislation, Günther Oettinger.

    • Net Neutrality Clears Hurdle & Other Things

      Well, much of the focus for the week was on the Federal Communications Commission vote on increased net neutrality protections, and according to rational news sources reporting on the issue (e.g., just about everyone but Fox News and their wannabes), this is a good thing.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Hollywood’s Anti-Piracy Secrets Must Be Revealed, Court Rules

        All records that are part of the now-closed case between Hotfile and the MPAA will be unsealed in the interests of the public. In a decision that will be a disappointment to the industry group, U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams declined a request from the MPAA who wanted to keep sensitive court filings sealed indefinitely claiming they may benefit pirates.

      • Movie Group To “Kill Piracy” By Not Releasing Movies For Months

        There have been some radical solutions to online piracy in recent years but one coming out of India today is perhaps the most ‘ambitious’ so far. The Tamil Film Producer’s Council says it is in discussion to stop releasing all films for at least three months which means that pirates will have nothing to copy and will therefore go out of business.

      • Perceptions on piracy: Pirate Party evangelist Rick Falkvinge on a perennial problem

        We spoke to Pirate Party evangelist Rick Falkvinge to get his take on the current situation.

        He believes that the copyright cops, and the copyright mechanisms that they use, are a “preposterous” failure and that only a global change in perception will make a difference.

        Falkvinge, perhaps unsurprisingly, is low on sympathy for the copyright industry and its messages and solutions.

      • Aussie Anti-Piracy Plans Boost Demand for Anonymous VPNs

        Australians’ interest in VPN services has skyrocketed after local ISPs announced plans for a three-strikes anti-piracy system. With potential lawsuits against consumers on the table, many subscribers are now planning ahead to stay on the safe side.

Links 12/3/2015: Two-week Catchup

Posted in News Roundup at 5:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Apple’s watch is just another data-gathering device

    Whether Apple’s watch fails or not — and that is a relative question — it matters not one whit to the company. This is just another device which will help to boost the company’s data gathering.

  • Nine reasons only a tool would buy the Apple Watch
  • Apple Watch May Be DOA As Cook Admits Battery Life As Low As 3 Hours

    The Apple Watch may be pretty… but you are going to need up to 8 of them to make it through a full day. While Tim Cook proclaimed 18 hours of “all-day battery-life” – itself not particularly impressive compared to competing products, hidden deep in Apple Watch’s product page is a little admission that battery life (in use) could be as low as 3 hours…

  • Apple Watch battery lasts as little as three hours

    Using new device that costs up to £12,000 for phone conversations means it will die after three hours, Apple admits in post buried deep on its product page

  • Pioneering tech blog Gigaom shuts down after running out of money

    Gigaom, the influential technology website founded by Om Malik nearly a decade ago, is no more. Although Monday saw a lot of new content on the site, including a flood of news and analysis from Apple’s event, the site’s management ended the day at 5.57PM PT by posting a message notifying readers that “all operations have ceased” as a result of the company becoming unable to pay its creditors.

  • Gigaom shuts down as it runs out of money

    One of the oldest and most prominent technology blogs Gigaom has shut down after running out of money.

  • Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband

    If you want to imagine how the world will look in just a few years, once our cell phones become the keepers of both our money and identity, skip Silicon Valley and book a ticket to Orlando. Go to Disney World. Then, reserve a meal at a restaurant called Be Our Guest, using the Disney World app to order your food in advance.

  • Noam Chomsky on Life & Love: Still Going at 86, Renowned Dissident is Newly Married

    NOAM CHOMSKY: I’m a very private person. I’ve never talked about my own life much. But, you know, I’ve—personally, I’ve been very fortunate in my life, with—there have been tragedies. There have been wonderful things. And Valeria’s sudden appearance is one of those wonderful things.

    AARON MATÉ: You said, after your first wife, Carol, died, that life without love is empty—something along those lines. Can you talk about that?

    NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I could produce some clichés, which have the merit of being true. Life without love is a pretty empty affair.

    AARON MATÉ: And your own tireless schedule, keeping up with your lectures, writing extensive articles, and still tirelessly answering the emails, from correspondence from people around the world—when I was in college, I remember I wrote you several times and got back these long, detailed answers on complex questions. And there’s people across the globe who could attest to a similar experience. Do you feel a certain obligation to respond to people? Because nobody would fault you, at the age of 86 now, if you took more time for yourself.

    NOAM CHOMSKY: I don’t know if it’s an obligation exactly. It’s a privilege, really. These are the important people in the world. I remember a wonderful comment by Howard Zinn about the countless number of unknown people who are the driving force in history and in progress. And that’s people like—I didn’t know you, but people like you writing from college. These are people that deserve respect, encouragement. They’re the hope for the future. They’re an inspiration for me personally.

  • Hardware

    • How Intel and PC makers prevent you from modifying your laptop’s firmware

      Modern UEFI firmware is a closed-source, proprietary blob of software baked into your PC’s hardware. This binary blob even includes remote management and monitoring features, which make it a potential security and privacy threat.

    • Easy Way to Get Coreboot

      Replacing the proprietary BIOS firmware on most computers is a process that often can be frustrating. It’s possible that your computer could be rendered unuseable in the process. Back in 2010 I managed to get coreboot working on the Gigabyte GA-6BCX motherboard and although the process went fairly smoothly it did consume a fair bit of time. Fortunately we now have an inexpensive way of obtaining a ready to go coreboot computer.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Venezuelan Parliament Passes Law to Confront US Aggression

      President Nicolas Maduro said the country’s National Assembly elections must go on “whether the empire wants it or not.”

      The Venezuelan National Asembly passed the enabling law that allows the country’s president to act to protect the peace against recent threats made by the United States government of Barack Obama.

      The bill, which received 99 percent of votes from the Great Patriotic Pole alliance – the largest voting bloc in the assembly, will now move to a second reading for final approval. The move follows a statement by the United States government Monday that declared Venezuela a “threat to the national security” and calling a national emergency.

    • The Possibility of Escape

      During my four stints in U.S. federal prisons, I’ve witnessed long-term inmates’ unconquerably humane response when a newcomer arrives. An unscripted choreography occurs and the new prisoner finds that other women will help her through the trauma of adjustment to being locked up for many months or years. Halfway through a three-month sentence myself, I’m saddened to realize that I’ll very likely adapt to an outside world for which these women, and prisoners throughout the U.S. prison system, are often completely invisible.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Associated Press sues State Dept. over Hillary Clinton’s emails

      “The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the State Department to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.”

      Good for the AP. If only more news organizations would do more of this.

      “The legal action comes after repeated requests filed under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act have gone unfulfilled. They include one request AP made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.’

    • Trade Secrets: We Must Act To Protect Whistleblowers!

      In late April 2015, the “trade secrets” directive will be discussed in the European Parliament. Having already given in to the pressure of journalists to remove the article on trade secrets in the French Macron Bill, La Quadrature du Net, Pila and a number of other organisations now call on president François Hollande and European representatives to defend whistleblowers, to define and protect their status and to ensure the necessary means are provided for judiciary follow-up on the crimes and offences that are revealed. The situation of whistleblowers, such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, is often dramatic and they must be protected and their safety guaranteed in order to safeguard fundamental freedoms.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Romanian spy chief warns of ‘threat for EU from Hungary’

      Eduard Hellvig, currently a conservative MEP who has been chosen by President Klaus Iohannis to be the next chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence service, has published an article in which he warns of the “threat for the EU” from the rapprochement of Hungary with Moscow.

    • Can the NSA Break Microsoft’s BitLocker?

      The Intercept has a new story on the CIA’s — yes, the CIA, not the NSA — efforts to break encryption. These are from the Snowden documents, and talk about a conference called the Trusted Computing Base Jamboree. There are some interesting documents associated with the article, but not a lot of hard information.

    • The CIA Campaign to Steal Apple’s Secrets
    • Quebec resident Alain Philippon to fight charge for not giving up phone password at airport

      A Quebec man charged with obstructing border officials by refusing to give up his smartphone password says he will fight the charge.

      The case has raised a new legal question in Canada, a law professor says.

      Alain Philippon, 38, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Que., refused to divulge his cellphone password to Canada Border Services Agency during a customs search Monday night at Halifax Stanfield International Airport.

    • America’s real secret revealed: Clinton, Petraeus & how elites protect their legacies

      That’s one of the conclusions American citizens might draw from two stories that broke this week: that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had conducted official State Department business using emails run through her own server, and that former CIA Director David Petraeus had kept 8 notebooks of unbelievably sensitive secrets in a rucksack in his home and, when she asked, had shared them with his mistress, Paula Broadwell.

    • Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails in Secret Security Sweep

      Canada’s electronic surveillance agency is covertly monitoring vast amounts of Canadians’ emails as part of a sweeping domestic cybersecurity operation, according to top-secret documents.

    • Snowden Calls for Disobedience Against the U.S. Government
    • DOJ Inspector General Complains About FBI Foot-dragging

      Late last week, the Inspector General (IG) for the Justice Department sent a letter to Congress complaining of the FBI’s refusal to set a timeline for turning over documents related to an IG investigation of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s use of subpoenas to gain access to and use certain bulk data collections.

    • FBI Now Holding Up Michael Horowitz’ Investigation into the DEA

      Man, at some point Congress is going to have to declare the FBI legally contemptuous and throw them in jail.

      They continue to refuse to cooperate with DOJ’s Inspector General, as they have been for basically 5 years. But in Michael Horowitz’ latest complaint to Congress, he adds a new spin: FBI is not only obstructing his investigation of the FBI’s management impaired surveillance, now FBI is obstructing his investigation of DEA’s management impaired surveillance.

    • NZ Prime Minister: ‘I’ll Resign If GCSB Did Mass Surveillance’; GCSB: ‘We Did Mass Surveillance’; NZPM: ‘Uh…’

      Back in the summer of 2013 as the various “Five Eyes” countries were still reeling from the initial Snowden disclosures, New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key promised to resign if it was ever proven that the GCSB (New Zealand’s equivalent to the NSA) had engaged in mass surveillance of New Zealanders — but with some caveats. He later said that he meant if it was proven that there was illegal surveillance going on. But of course, what’s legal can vary based on who’s in charge. Either way, late last year there were Snowden documents that proved GCSB regularly scooped up data on New Zealanders, and Key reacted to it by calling Glenn Greenwald “a loser.” Not quite the resignation you might have expected.

    • UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond says it’s time to ‘move on’ from Snowden

      The documents revealed today show how New Zealand’s spy agencies hacked into government-linked mobile phones in Asia to install malicious software to route data to the NSA.

      The disclosure shows how an “Asean target”, or member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was targeted by the GCSB in March 2013.

    • U.K. Parliament says banning Tor is unacceptable and impossible

      Just months after U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said he wants to ban encryption and online anonymity, the country’s parliament today released a briefing saying that the such an act is neither acceptable nor technically feasible.

      The briefing, issued by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, specifically referenced the Tor anonymity network and its notorious ability to slide right around such censorship schemes.

    • Germany pushes for widespread end-to-end email encryption

      The De-Mail initiative dates back to 2011, when the German government decided to push for trusted email both as an e-government tool and as a way to cut down on official and corporate paper mail. De-Mail addresses are provided by the likes of Deutsche Telekom and United Internet’s Web.de, and those signing up for them need to show a form of official identification to do so. Receiving emails on a De-Mail address is free but sending them costs money.

    • Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales slams federal government data retention laws

      Wikipedia co-founder and influential technology entrepreneur Jimmy Wales has slammed the federal government’s plan to make telcos store the metadata of every phone and internet user as a “human rights violation” and is considering the launch of his new mobile service in Australia.

    • Photo’s from mass surveillance, liberty & activism talk
    • Privacy, digital rights and social equality.

      Something that doesn’t really get aired very often is that dragnet surveillance can – and should – be flagged as a social issue, with serious implications for social mobility. The tools that are available to circumvent this kind of surveillance are overwhelmingly out of reach of poor, marginalised groups; the ability to buy in to specialist encryption like PGP is, sadly, still overwhelmingly out of reach for many people. Reliable encryption remains firmly in the realm of the IT savvy: people with a certain level of education, money and, to use a hot-button word: privilege (sorry).

    • Wikipedia Sues NSA Over Dragnet Internet Surveillance

      The lawsuit argues that this broad surveillance, revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, violates the First Amendment by chilling speech and the open exchange of information, and that it also runs up against Fourth Amendment privacy protections.

    • CIA ‘tried to crack security of Apple devices’

      The CIA led sophisticated intelligence agency efforts to undermine the encryption used in Apple phones, as well as insert secret surveillance back doors into apps, top-secret documents published by the Intercept online news site have revealed.

    • You Can Watch ‘Citizenfour’ Online Right Now For Free
    • THE “SNOWDEN IS READY TO COME HOME!” STORY: A CASE STUDY IN TYPICAL MEDIA DECEIT

      Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!”

      Ever since Snowden revealed himself to the public 20 months ago, he has repeatedly said the same exact thing when asked about his returning to the U.S.: I would love to come home, and would do so if I could get a fair trial, but right now, I can’t.

      His primary rationale for this argument has long been that under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute under which he has been charged, he would be barred by U.S. courts from even raising his key defense: that the information he revealed to journalists should never have been concealed in the first place and he was thus justified in disclosing it to journalists. In other words, when U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should “man up,” come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with “espionage” are legally barred from even raising that defense.

      [...]

      CNN’s “expert” is apparently unaware that the DOJ very frequently — almost always, in fact — negotiates with people charged with very serious felonies over plea agreements. He’s also apparently unaware of this thing called “asylum,” which the U.S. routinely grants to people charged by other countries with crimes on the ground that they’d be persecuted with imprisonment if they returned home.

    • Edward Snowden archive aims to ‘piece together the bigger picture’

      A Canadian team has created a searchable database of all the publicly released classified documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in hopes it’ll help citizens better understand the complex files trickling out around the world.

      The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Politics of Surveillance Project at University of Toronto’s faculty of information revealed the archive on Wednesday before hosting a live Q&A with Snowden, the U.S. whistleblower and subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour.

      “What we’re hoping this database can do is start to piece together the bigger picture,” said Laura Tribe, CJFE’s national and digital programs lead.

    • EFF, ACLU, Other NGOs Urging U.N. to Create Privacy Watchdog

      A coalition of 63 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world are calling on national governments to support the establishment of a special rapporteur on the right to privacy within the United Nations.

  • Civil Rights

    • Michigan Attorney General Slaps Reporter With Bogus Subpoenas For Doing Her Job

      That makes no sense at all. Defending the state from lawsuits should never involve sending reporters subpoenas demanding all of their notes. It’s a clear intimidation technique that violates all basic concepts of a free and open press.

    • Porn and the patrol car—one cop’s 2 hour-a-day habit

      Pornography, though prevalent in the modern world, still isn’t the sort of thing one expects to see while waiting in traffic behind a cop car. That’s especially true at the busiest downtown intersection of a wealthy Chicago suburb like Wheaton, Illinois, best known for being the home of an evangelical Christian college once attended by Billy Graham.

      But pornography is exactly what an irate Wheaton resident named Robin said he witnessed. On the morning of September 18, 2013, while sitting in his conversion van and waiting for a stoplight to change, Robin found himself directly behind Wheaton Police squad car 359. The height of his seat gave him a perfect view through the rear windshield of the squad car, and he could see the car’s mobile data computer displaying “scrolling pictures of completely naked women.”

    • AG backs off subpoenas over inmates’ allegations

      Attorney General Bill Schuette’s office ordered and then withdrew three subpoenas of journalists reporting on a juvenile prisoner abuse lawsuit against the state, including one seeking a reporter’s notes from interviewing inmates inside two state prisons.

    • Michigan AG withdraws subpoenas against Michigan Radio, Huffington Post

      Michigan’s Attorney General’s office has decided to withdraw subpoenas it served on news media outlets, including Michigan Radio.

    • Man who posed for his driver’s licence with a PASTA STRAINER on his head is told he must have his photo retaken… but he claims it’s just discrimination against the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

      A follower of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster claims he was discriminated against when he was told he may no longer wear a colander on his head in a driver’s licence photo.

      Last year, Preshalin Moodley, 20, was issued a provisional driver’s licence by staff at Service NSW Parramatta, in Sydney’s west.

      He was photographed for the licence wearing the spaghetti strainer on his head after asking staff whether it was OK to wear a religious symbol.

    • Jeff Bezos relies on lowly grunts like me: Life as a cog in the Amazon machine

      In my father’s capitalism, employees were nurtured by their company and encouraged to learn new skills. Today’s major corporations hire disposable temp workers to do the work of a full-time employee, without the obligation of providing benefits. Temp workers are familiar with dead ends: They are hired with a predetermined exit date. The moment they feel comfortable in a role, the contract expires and it’s on to the next job.

    • Tony Robinson Killing Highlights Wisconsin’s Racial Inequities

      Soon after becoming governor in 2011, Scott Walker eliminated funding for the state’s first program to track and remedy Wisconsin’s worst-in-the-country rate of racial disparities. The program, aimed at monitoring racial profiling during traffic stops, had only taken effect one month earlier, and Walker declared that the repeal “allows law enforcement agencies to focus on doing their jobs.”

    • How Thatcher’s Government Covered Up a VIP Pedophile Ring

      A newspaper editor was handed startling evidence that Britain’s top law enforcement official knew there was a VIP pedophile network in Westminster, at the heart of the British government. What happened next in the summer of 1984 helps to explain how shocking allegations of rape and murder against some of the country’s most powerful men went unchecked for decades.

    • Atheist Group Blasts ‘Absurd’ Decision to Censor Its Easter Billboards

      The group American Atheists addressed the controversy surrounding its billboards in Nashville, Tennessee by pointing out that it’s hypocritical of the company to censor the group’s advertising when Christian groups routinely promote antigay, pro-religion messages in their own publicity materials.

      In an interview with Raw Story, American Atheists’ Danielle Muscato said, “This is just absurd. It’s just because we’re atheists. It’s discriminatory.”

    • Ferguson police report: Most shocking parts

      Summer of 2012. A 32-year-old African-American was cooling off in his car after a basketball game in a public park.

      What comes next is a series of civil rights violations described in the Justice Department report that resulted in the man losing his job as a federal contractor.

      A Ferguson police officer demands the man’s Social Security number and identification before accusing him of being a pedophile and ordering the man out of his car.

      When the officer asked to search the man’s car, the 32-year-old refused, invoking his constitutional right.

      The response? The officer arrested the man at gunpoint, slapped him with eight charges, including for not wearing a seat belt, despite the fact that he was sitting in a parked car. The officer also cited him for “making a false declaration” because he gave his name as ‘Mike’ instead of ‘Michael.’

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC approves net neutrality rules, reclassifies broadband as a utility

      It’s a good day for proponents of an open internet: The Federal Communications Commission just approved its long-awaited network neutrality plan, which reclassifies broadband internet as a Title II public utility and gives the agency more regulatory power in the process. And unlike the FCC’s last stab at net neutrality in 2010, today’s new rules also apply to mobile broadband. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler laid out the basic gist of the plan earlier this month — it’ll ban things like paid prioritization, a tactic some ISPs used to get additional fees from bandwidth-heavy companies like Netflix, as well as the slowdown of “lawful content.” But now Wheeler’s vision is more than just rhetoric; it’s something the FCC can actively enforce.

    • FCC votes to protect the internet with Title II regulation

      Net neutrality has won at the FCC. In a 3-to-2 vote, the Federal Communications Commission today established a new Open Internet Order that implements strict net neutrality rules, including prohibitions on site and app blocking, speed throttling, and paid fast lanes.

    • Net neutrality is only the beginning of an open internet

      Net neutrality is the principle of making sure that your internet service provider doesn’t make it easier for you to access one service over another – the Guardian over the Telegraph, say – or otherwise distorting your use of internet services just because someone dropped a few extra quid in their pocket.

    • Latest Net Neutrality proposal in the EU: a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • How Corporate Sovereignty In Trade Agreements Can Force National Laws To Be Changed

      As we noted recently, one of the most worrying aspects of corporate sovereignty chapters in trade agreements is the chilling effect that they can have on future legislation. That’s something that the supporters of this investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism never talk about. What they do say, though, is that corporate sovereignty cannot force governments to change existing laws.

    • TTIP Updates – The Glyn Moody blogs

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright In Brussels: Two Reports, More Than Meets the Eye

        Just as the Julia Reda report (GREEN/EFA – DE MEP) on copyright reform was being discussed this week in the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI), another report was examined today by the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT). The latter concerns the reinforcement of the “Intellectual Property” rights, and contains a number of disturbing points regarding repression and enforcement that bring back to mind highly contested provisions from the ACTA agreement, and encourages an extra-legislative approach to fighting “commercial scale counterfeiting”. Citizens should get ready to mobilise on a large scale, both to support the positive evolutions of the Reda report, and to denounce the dangerous proposals pushed by the European Commission and some Member States, among which France.

02.24.15

The EFF Back to Tackling Software Patents, Not Just Patent Trolls

Posted in America, Patents at 5:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyers start targeting large companies that exploit patents for intimidation and extortion, not just patent trolling

WE are gratified to learn that, based on numerous reports such as this or that, “EFF Questions Whether Software Patents Should Exist” and the “Electronic Frontier Foundation group claims that the US patent system undermines innovation by allowing big companies to intimidate and punish small start-up firms.”

They are not talking about patent trolls (as some do) but instead they are now talking about the big bullies that want to divert the debate so as to focus on the wrong culprit and merely pass a reform that helps megacorporations. Microsoft is basically a target of EFF activism, Apple too to a degree. We commend the Electronic Frontier Foundation for this change in strategy.

Here is a recent action from EFF’s Nazer: “Nazer and his fellow EFF lawyer Vera Ranieri filed court papers seeking to invalidate a patent on photo competitions. US Patent No. 8,209,618, owned by a little-known video website called Garfum.com, was used to sue four small photo websites last September that dared to ask people about their favorite photos.”

Another new piece by Sid Venkatesan from AOL uses a copyright sign as the leading image for an article about patents, showing a common misunderstanding of the vast disparity between copyrights and patents (they have almost nothing at all to do with each other). Putting aside this nitpicking, the article is titled “Software Patents Are Increasingly Coming Under Fire In Court” and it says: “Last summer, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision in Alice Corporation v. CLS Bank International in which it directed lower courts to scrutinize computer-implemented abstract methods very closely. Alice’s impact was unclear at the time the decision was issued, but lower courts have since relied on the Supreme Court’s opinion to invalidate a number of software patents in the eight months since the decision.

“This legal trend has altered the cost benefit analysis for companies that are seeking software patent protection, enforcing their existing patents, or defending themselves in litigation.”

Further down Venkatesan says: “Federal trial courts and the Federal Circuit (the court that handles patent appeals) decisions since Alice have invalidated many patents using the two-part Section 101 test applied in Alice. For example, the Federal Circuit invalidated a patent dealing with the storage of device-specific profiles, a patent on a system that provided online purchase guarantees, and a patent involving an online system of delivering content with embedded ads in quick succession.”

This is the kind of stuff that patent lawyers have been trying to hide from the public, choosing to pretend that nothing at all has changed.

In a publication called “Entrepreneur” we saw the other day more of that propaganda which equates patents to innovation — a subject we last covered some weeks ago. “They say imitation is the highest form of flattery,” says the propaganda. “That may be true in fashion, but if you are an inventor, imitation can be bad for business.”

Well, how about collaboration? “As of Dec. 1,” continues the article, “Big Blue had been issued almost 7,000 patents in 2014. After IBM, the company with the second highest number of patents issued was Korean-headquartered technology giant Samsung, with more than 5,000 patents filed. Canon, Sony and Microsoft round out the top five, according to the infographic generated with United States Patent Office data by SmartUp, a legal startup that is building an online platform connecting attorneys and clients.”

“It is abundantly clear who software patents are good for.”So what? This basically shows which companies spend the most time doing paperwork. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are innovative.

Several years ago (if not decades ago) Adobe complained about software patents but now that it is a bigger company it patents software any single day, as Steve Brachmann serves to remind us. Microsoft did the same thing when it was a small company. As Bill Gates famously said: “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”

It is abundantly clear who software patents are good for. Just watch who is hoarding software patents and creating cartels with them. Here is some nice propaganda which glorifies patents and even makes these cartels and armament with patents seem like a wonderful thing:

Whether they’re coming up with a bright idea themselves, or purchasing smaller companies that have had those bright ideas, all the big guns are active in these two key areas. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung – they’re all at it.

What do these companies have in common? Scale. But Google and Samsung (the two biggest Android players), unlike Apple and Microsoft, are not patent aggressors. They never sue rivals using software patents, they only react to lawsuits, the highest profile of which are from Apple, Microsoft, and their smaller proxies. The EFF will hopefully work to combat this. █

Microsoft Wants to Devour the Competition (Linux), Devour People’s Data

Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

–Henry David Thoreau

Summary: Refuting the “new Microsoft” propaganda and some ludicrous concept that Microsoft is now “playing nice”

THE company which kick-started PRISM and works most closely with the NSA pretends to have become “open”. How ridiculous a notion! SoylentNews covered our story [1] and many comments there show that the large majority agrees that Microsoft is just trying to harm openness from the inside. That’s just not what corruptible journalists would have us believe.

“The company which kick-started PRISM and works most closely with the NSA pretends to have become “open”.”Dan Kedmey reminded us the other day that “Microsoft’s New App Will Help You Stalk Your Friends”, right after he had covered this bit of news about Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” at work (recall what Microsoft is doing to infiltrate Android). As Kedmey put it in his own words:

It’s acquiring apps and quickly rebranding them as Microsoft products

[...]

Acompli is the best example of Microsoft’s new playbook: In a matter of weeks, Microsoft took Acompli’s popular email app and rebranded it as Outlook for iOS and Android, to rave reviews from the tech press. Before the Acompli move, Microsoft’s iOS and Android Outlook offering was nothing more than a clunky web portal disguised as an app. It’s a safe bet that Sunrise and similar acquisitions will reappear as Microsoft-branded offerings just as quickly.

For those who deem it “good news” for Android, bear in mind that Microsoft is a surveillance company much worse than Google in many ways, as we have demonstrated over the years. Simon Sharwood said a couple of days ago that “Microsoft [is] to store deleted Exchange Online mails FOREVER”. Is anyone surprised by that? Outlook has already been banned for use by European politicians (the “app” at least is verboten for security reasons), which really says a lot about how Microsoft is viewed by security professionals. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Microsoft Loves Linux – or So They Say

    Just when you thought Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was going away, the article explains the multi-prong attack that Microsoft is quietly working in the background. And they are relying heavily on their friends in the press. Microsoft has always had its share of shills in the press, but, with the focus on Google Android and Apple its quietly become less of a Journalist career killer to be openly Pro Microsoft. Schestowitz explains the attack as killing Linux Softly with APIs and the lock-ins they bring as more Microsoft packages and services are ported to Linux, and by getting appointments to key Linux Foundation subcommittees, by slinging dollars and software contributions.

“This anti-trust thing will blow over. We haven’t changed our business practices at all.”

–Bill Gates, 1995 (and still managing Microsoft)

Benoît Battistelli Thinks ‘President’ is Above the Law, Decides to Ignore the Court’s Ruling

Posted in Europe, Patents at 4:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Battistelli has a Napoleonic interpretation of the word “President”

Benoît Battistelli

Summary: Staff of the EPO is given yet more reasons to protest tomorrow at the British Consulate, for the so-called ‘President’ of the EPO reminds everyone of the very raison d’être for the protest — a vain disregard for the rule of law

“Mr Battistelli issued today a communique in which he states that the Dutch judgement is wrong and announcing that the EPO, i.e. The President, will not follow it.

“From bad to worse,” said this one comment. The context of this comment is a Merpel update that says “Mr Battstelli’s letter comes only 3 days after a judgment by a Dutch court that criticised the EPO for limiting staff’s right to strike and for refusing collective bargaining. Under point 5.3 the Dutch court stated: “It lies in the nature of the activities of a Staff Union like SUEPO that they are allowed to criticise the (representatives of) the employer, also via internal channels.””

Battistelli, or “Batty-man” as some people call him (Batman in his own mind, if not just batty, which means “insane; crazy; eccentric.”), deserves much ridicule because he actually threatens people for exercising their rights. He seems to forget that he is subjected to European rules.

Staff that actually fears these remarks and the general behaviour from Battistelli ought to read this latest flier [PDF]. Battistelli knows he is on his way out, hence the aggression. █

A dictator faces a trade-off between repression and building the support he needs. The problem is that the number of unhappy people increases as a function of the number of people being punished or killed, and, as Snyderwine puts it, “The ‘intimidation’ effect reduces the likelihood of a revolution while the ‘unhappiness’ effect increases it.”

”Severe censorship and the construction of firewalls is suggested as a countermeasure to avoid ‘unhappiness’ spreading via social media.”2 A further countermeasure is propaganda; dictators like to disseminate misinformation. They hope that “if censorship is strong and manipulative enough, people might not even know the things they are missing.” But this approach is doomed to fail. People talk to each other, read (foreign) newspapers and consult the internet. Sooner rather than later they will find out. And if people suffer severely enough under a dictator, they will revolt, as history has shown.

“When people lose faith in nearly everything … they are more likely to take the streets.” More [PDF]

Links 24/2/2015: Xfce 4.12 a Week Away, GNOME 3.16 Previewed

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source switches gain more vendor traction

    The open source movement is making waves in the networking space as more vendors are opting to build open switches and routers in favor of proprietary technology. HP is the latest vendor to join the open source networking movement, and some are speculating that open networking could give Cisco a run for its money.

  • Weather Company CIO: 5 reasons why I believe in open source

    Since The Weather Company has been a major adopter of open source software, I’m often asked why we have chosen this path. Where is the value in taking the open source route to solve your business challenges? I’m a big advocate of open source, so I’m always happy to oblige. Here are my top five reasons:

  • Distributors Play Growing Role In Open Source Space

    If tech distributors want to survive in the market, they’ll have to provide channel partners with more training and enablement on open source and cloud-based solutions. Here’s how distributors have responded.

  • Nginx Gearing Up for HTTP2

    The open-source Nginx web server has been steadily gaining in popularity in recent years to become one of the most widely deployed web servers. To date, Nginx has delivered its traffic over HTTP 1.1, but at some point in the near future it will also enable HTTP/2.

  • HP deal marks milestone for open source networking hardware

    If you still harbored any doubts that the web is now driving the future of IT, last week’s announcement that HP will offer disaggregated products for web-scale data centers via deals with Cumulus and Accton should be enough to convince you.

  • eBay’s new Pulsar framework will analyze your data in real time
  • eBay launches Pulsar, an open-source tool for quickly taming big data

    E-commerce giant eBay needs to deal with new usage data — to personalize content and detect fraud, among other things — within seconds. So engineers went and built something to perfectly meet the company’s needs: Pulsar.

    The company revealed details about the system for the first time today, and eBay is making it available for anyone to use under an open-source license.

  • New open source strategy revelations at IBM Interconnect 2015

    An opportunity for IBM’s individual businesses to come together and demonstrate how they best leverage each other’s technologies and capabilities, IBM InterConnect 2015 will touch on cloud, mobile, DevOps, security, asset management, Internet of Things, application integration, and smarter processes.

  • Getting started with Project Atomic

    I had some concerns about learning Middleman and HAML, but there was a solid ‘fork-and-go’ contribution mindset. I started lurking in the -devel list and the IRC channels to start, and picked a single piece of content that I thought could use an update. I got in touch with one of the project folks on IRC and asked about the best way to go about creating and submitting my first change.

  • Events

    • Protocol Plugfest: opening closed doors to interoperability together

      The “world wide web” has been such an amazing success in large part because it was based on open protocols and formats that anyone can implement and use on a level playing field. This opened the way for interoperability on a grand and global scale, and is why http and HTML succeeded where many others failed previously.

    • SCALE 13x, Day 3: The Finale

      First things first: It’s a safe bet that Ruth Suehle could read the Raleigh phone book and make it sound interesting, with or without accompanying Lowenbrau slides. So it would come as no surprise that of all the great keynotes that have been given at the Southern California Linux Expo, Ruth’s Sunday keynote makes anyone’s SCALE short list as an all-time great.

  • Web Browsers

  • Business

    • HP’s Marten Mickos: Open Source Is Not a Business Model

      “Open source is a production model. In some cases, it is a distribution model … . You need a business model for any business that you build, but open source in itself is not that business model. Just like if you have a manufacturing branch and you use robots or you don’t use robots. That is a production question, but it is not a business model for the business you are in.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • Reuse is key for Danish telemedicine project

      Reuse is one of the main reasons for the development as open source of OpenTele, a Danish e-health telemedicine project. The health sector is crying out for open source ICT solutions, says Mike Kristoffersen, a senior software architect at the Danish Alexandra Institute. “Doctors and hospitals are seriously locked into medical ICT systems, making it difficult to do research, even for small scale projects.”

  • Licensing

    • Samsung, OpenChain Aim to Build Trust With Open Source Compliance

      Samsung is a top-five contributor to the Linux kernel and contributes upstream to more than 25 other open source projects. Yet the public perception that the company doesn’t care about open source has persisted, despite its efforts, said Ibrahim Haddad, head of the Open Source Innovation Group at Samsung in a presentation at Collaboration Summit last week.

    • Buyer Beware: Demystifying Open Source Software Licenses

      Not too long ago, acquiring software was pretty easy: gather requirements, meet with vendors to evaluate products, select the winner. Legal review took place late in the process, and the final terms that both customer and vendor could live with were generally agreed to quickly.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 3D printers become viable tools in healthcare

      And with desktop 3D printers becoming increasingly affordable and reliable—and open source software such as Cura being versatile, easy to use, and free to update—barriers to further 3D printing innovation are quickly disappearing. What was once only available to well-funded practitioners has now become genuinely accessible to every patient, nurse, doctor, surgeon, hospital, and teaching facility.

    • OpenStack at Walmart, project reform status, and more
    • The Pi Tank – 3D Printed Open Source Smartphone Controlled Raspberry Pi Robot
    • How I upgraded my garden’s ugly drip system with a sexy OpenSprinkler

      After a few hours of work alongside an electrical engineering buddy this week, my home garden drip system became powered by a Raspberry Pi. I can control the entire thing locally from my iPhone and, to be frank, it’s pretty flippin’ cool.

      For some background, I’m a very lazy gardener. When my wife and I bought our house in 2012, our horticultural mission was Hippocratic (do no harm). In other words, we wanted—at the very least—to not kill the plants we inherited from the previous owners. So while some people relax when they do weeding or other green thumb-related activities, we find it tedious and uninspiring. I’m the guy who jumped at the chance to review the Estonian-made Click and Grow.

    • This guy is the Mark Zuckerberg of open-source genetics

      Three years ago, Bastian Greshake spit in a vial and sent it off to personal genomics company 23andMe for analysis. He’d spent years studying the genetics of other organisms, but didn’t know much about his own DNA. He was curious.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Purdue plans to expand open-source online coursework

        A plan to use online open-source curricula for more classes at Purdue University starting this fall could collectively save students up to $1 million.

        The Journal and Courier reports the plan would be an alternative to online programs that can cost students more than $100 per class to access.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • EZchip Announces 100 Core 64-bit ARM Chip

      An Israeli company known as EZchip has introduced their TILE-Mx processors that ship in up to 100-core 64-bit ARM configurations with up to 200 Gigabit Ethernet throughput.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • The End to Industrialized Farming

      In 2013 the United Nations released a report indicating that the world’s food needs could be met through organic, local farms. The United Nations report stated that food security, poverty, gender inequality, and climate change can be addressed with a significant shift towards organic, localized farming. In contrast with industrialized farming, organic and local farms cut down on the energy and pollution that transporting food requires. Another study revealed that organic farming utilized less water than industrialized farming, as well as a general reduction in pollution related to production.

  • Security

    • Lenovo Sued Over Superfish Adware
    • The Venture Capitalists Behind Superfish

      Lots of people are talking about the Superfish malware debacle. People are starting to understand just how bad this situation is.

      [...]

      I’d like to see the tech press dig into this. And the venture capitalists involved, particularly the board members, should talk about what they knew and didn’t know.

    • Laptop Buying Advice?

      My current Lenovo X201 laptop has been with me for over four years. I’ve been looking at new laptop models over the years thinking that I should upgrade. Every time, after checking performance numbers, I’ve always reached the conclusion that it is not worth it. The most performant Intel Broadwell processor is the the Core i7 5600U and it is only about 1.5 times the performance of my current Intel Core i7 620M. Meanwhile disk performance has increased more rapidly, but changing the disk on a laptop is usually simple. Two years ago I upgraded to the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB disk, and this year I swapped that for the Samsung 850 Pro 1TB, and both have been good investments.

    • How to delete Superfish from Lenovo computers permanently
    • Moving On From Superfish

      It’s true, RMS was right. The folks at LinuxBSDos.com are right. The world needs to use Free Software.

    • Lenovo’s Superfish spectacle: ‘Catastrophic’ security failures discovered

      Last week, reports surfaced which claimed that Lenovo Notebooks have been issued to consumers containing a preloaded security flaw. Originally, the Chinese tech giant said the Superfish adware was not a security concern — however, eventually the company realized and admitted that the software was able to install its own self-signing man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy service which has the potential to hijack SSL and TLS connections — a severe, nasty security vulnerability.

    • SSL-busting code that threatened Lenovo users found in a dozen more apps

      Richard went on to publish the SHA1 cryptographic hashes he used to identify software that contained the Komodia code libraries. He invited fellow researchers to use the hashes to identify still more potentially dangerous software circulating online.

      “We’re publishing this analysis to raise awareness about the scope of local SSL MITM software so that the community can also help protect people and their computers,” he wrote. “We think that shining the light on these practices will help the ecosystem better analyze and respond to similar situations as they occur.”

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Samba vulnerability (CVE-2015-0240)

      Samba is the most commonly used Windows interoperability suite of programs, used by Linux and Unix systems. It uses the SMB/CIFS protocol to provide a secure, stable, and fast file and print services. It can also seamlessly integrate with Active Directory environments and can function as a domain controller as well as a domain member (legacy NT4-style domain controller is supported, but the Active Directory domain controller feature of Samba 4 is not supported yet).

    • Samba 4.1.17 Security Release Now Available for Download

      The Samba development team has announced earlier today, February 23, the immediate availability for download of Samba 4.1.17, a security release that addresses the CVE-2015-0240 security vulnerability related to an unexpected code execution in Samba daemon (smbd).

    • Samb-AAAHH! Scary remote execution vuln spotted in Windows-Linux interop code

      Linux admins were sent scrambling to patch their boxes on Monday after a critical vulnerability was revealed in Samba, the open source Linux-and-Windows-compatibility software.

  • Finance

    • The Real Cost of Walmart’s Low Prices

      Like other large companies with globalized production chains, Walmart exploits workers outside of the United States, but the consequences of these exploitative practices impact everyone. In the U.S., social and economic pressures force Walmart employees to accept low wages.

    • 5 Insane Things You Believe About Money (Thanks to Movies)

      I bet every one of you can remember the first time financial reality smacked you in the face like a Hulk-thrown engine block. (“I work two jobs, shouldn’t I be able to afford to get this festering wisdom tooth taken out?”). That’s because unless your parents were wealthy, you left school knowing jack shit about how money worked. We have a trillion dollars in credit card debt to show for it, along with an upper class who just can’t figure out what the rest of us are bitching about.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • The Scary World That Is Arabic Twitter

      As an independent journalist who contributes to various organizations inside and outside the U.S., Twitter is my virtual newsroom. It is where I get story ideas, connect with sources and engage with my readers. On average I spend at least four hours daily on Twitter. As the Islamic State’s (ISIS) atrocities started to dominate the news cycle during the mid part of last year, most of my Tweets have become very ISIS-focused. I tweet about their latest actions, and the reactions that followed. As an native Arabic speaker, I spend a big chunk of my time following Arabic hashtags, Arabic-speaking influencers, and news organizations, and boy, let me tell you what I found. The world of Arabic Twitter is a scary one. I’m stunned by the amount of support that ISIS enjoys on Twitter, and mostly among Arabic speakers.

  • Privacy

    • Mark Zuckerberg ‘not sure’ about Internet.org advertising

      Advertising is not a “near term” priority for Facebook’s Internet.org initiative to get more people online in the developing world, according to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

      Facebook launched the scheme in 2013 with fellow technology firms including Samsung, Qualcomm, Ericsson and Nokia as its effort to connect “the next few billion people” to the internet.

      The social network has since worked with mobile operators in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Zambia and Kenya to provide free access to basic internet services from their mobile phones.

    • Mark Zuckerberg Q&A: The Full Interview on Connecting the World

      Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has a big, expensive goal: to connect the world to the Internet. He spoke with Emily Chang about his plans, after returning from a trip through Southeast Asia and India last year as part of his Internet.org initiative. The interview airs Feb. 19 on Bloomberg Television’s Studio 1.0. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

    • There’s a massive new leak of confidential spy files from MI6, Mossad and the FSB

      Al-Jazeera has obtained hundreds of confidential “spy cables” from some of the world’s top intelligence agencies, in what the news channel is calling “the largest intelligence leak since Snowden.”

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Here Comes the ACTA Attack – Again

      Three years ago I began a series of articles about ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA was originally about tackling counterfeit goods, but had a completely inappropriate digital chapter added, which tried to ride on the coat-tails of the initial plan by suggesting that digital copies were somehow as dangerous as fake medicines or aircraft parts. After a fierce battle that saw hundreds of thousands of Europeans writing to their MEPs, and even taking to the streets, ACTA was thrown out by the European Parliament.

    • Copyrights

      • The Australian Pirates Leave PPI

        The Pirate Party of Australia has been unhappy with the structure functioning of Pirate Parties International for some time and after the PPAU membership gave their board the power to potentially leave international organisation at their last national conference.

      • Draft copyright code published

        Rights holders and ISPs have published a draft of the Government mandated code intended to combat online copyright infringement.

      • Torrent Site Admin Can Pay Piracy Fine…in 227 Years

        After being chased down by a coalition of mainstream entertainment companies, a French court has just handed a former torrent site operator a six month suspended sentence. ‘Boris P’ must also pay two million euros in damages, an amount he predicts could be cleared in approximately 227 years.

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

Further Recent Posts

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts