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12.15.15

Links 15/12/2015: CentOS Linux 7 1511, Enlightenment DR 0.20.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Core Developer Jeff Garzik on the Similarities Between Bitcoin and Linux

    Before making any contributions to Bitcoin, Bloq Co-Founder and Bitcoin Core Developer Jeff Garzik was a longtime Linux developer who started working on the operating system in the early nineties — before the creation of Red Hat. As someone who was involved in the early development of both Linux and Bitcoin, Garzik has a unique perspective on the common themes found in the two respective development communities.

  • Person of Year, Podcasts, and Polls

    Today in Linux news, several reviews lead the pack today. Jesse Smith and Das U-Blogger Prashanth reviewed Chakra 2015.11, Swapnil Bhartiya tested newly released Mint 17.3, and a couple of quick openSUSE reports were posted. Elsewhere, Donald Stewart posted an update on Mageia Cauldron and Antonio Rojas said Arch is dropping KDE 4. A couple of interesting polls warrant a mention as well and more in tonight’s Linux news recap.

  • So you want a lean mean Linux machine?

    No matter what people say, efficiently utilising the resources of your computer is very important. Sure disk space is cheap they say, but one thing they never tell you is that no matter how big your hard disk is, a way will be found to fill it up. Especially for older machines, as operating systems are getting bigger and bigger, requiring more memory and disk space than ever before.

  • Desktop

    • Qubes OS will ship pre-installed on Purism’s security-focused Librem 13 laptop

      Qubes OS, the security-focused operating system that Edward Snowden said in November he was “really excited” about, announced this week that laptop maker Purism will ship their privacy-focused Librem 13 notebook with Qubes pre-installed.

    • Here a Chromebook, there a Chromebook, everywhere a Chromebook

      I used to carry ThinkPads, starting with the IBM models and then Lenovo’s versions, with me everywhere. They were, and still are, great laptops. Then I started using Chromebooks. I still have a couple of ThinkPads, but they never leave my office. Why? Because a Chromebook can do anything I want, typically deliver battery life that can see me through a whole day of work at a coffee shop, and are immune to almost all of Windows’ security woes. I’m not the only one who loves them.

    • Chromebookify Your Laptop Now!

      A few years ago there was a project designed to boot generic laptops so they functioned as Chromebooks. It was a cool project, but unfortunately, the compatibility wasn’t great, and it wasn’t reliable to use on a daily basis. Although Chromebooks are old news these days, it still would be quite useful to transform aging laptop computers into Chromebooks. Because they have such low system requirements, older laptops running the ChromeOS can become quite useful again.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • 7 Linux Podcasts You Need to Listen To

      If you’re a die-hard Linux user, or a command-line newbie, you’re going to find something worth listening to in this list of seven download-worthy Linux podcasts.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Eduardo Mayorga Téllez

      Eduardo Mayorga Téllez, a Teens in Training scholarship recipient, is 17 and lives in Nicaragua. He plans to become a Linux kernel developer and use his knowledge of device drivers to help Linux support the most hardware possible. He says he often hears classmates and colleagues argue that Linux is not suitable for them because they cannot make the most of their hardware. Eduardo says he will change that.

    • Newest Linux Foundation Video Highlights Open Source In Space

      Linux in space is the subject of the Linux Foundation’s latest “World without Linux” video, which highlights how open source software helps power the world we live in — or, in this case, the things orbiting around it.

    • Dell and Red Hat Deliver Easier Firmware Updates for Linux Users

      Dell — the first big company to sell Linux computers — is catering to open source fans again by announcing plans to make user-friendly firmware upgrades possible on Linux.

      In a blog post, Richard Hughes, who works for Red Hat (RHT) and contributes to the GNOME project, writes that Red Hat and Dell have been collaborating on a system that will allow users of Dell hardware to update firmware from Linux. If that doesn’t seem significant to you, it’s probably because you either do not use Linux or have not spent enough of your life geeking out to know what firmware is.

    • Linux Kernel 4.3.3 Is Now the Most Advanced Stable Version Available

      The latest iteration of the stable Linux kernel, 4.3.3, has been released by Greg Kroah-Hartman, making this the latest and best version available right now.

      The 4.3 branch of the Linux kernel is a really popular one and it’s been adopted by many distros. From the looks of it, the maintainers will continue to provide support for it, but it’s not clear for how long. There is already a 4.1.15 version that has been declared long-term, so it’s difficult to say if another branch will be tagged LTS as well, after such a short time.

    • Microsoft offers its first-ever Linux certification on Azure
    • Microsoft offers MCSA qualification for IT workers using Linux on Azure
    • Microsoft wants you to train using its rival, Linux operating system
    • New Certification Announced for Linux on Azure Cloud
    • Technology Sector Trend Analysis Report: Microsoft (MSFT), Sunedison (SUNE), Cisco Systems (CSCO), Corning (GLW)

      Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) on December 9, 2015 announced the creation of a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) Linux on Azure certification. Created in conjunction with the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, this certification represents one more important step in broadening the technology integration between Microsoft and the open source community.

    • Files Are Hard

      I haven’t used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even though my gmail account not only handles more email than I ever had on desktop clients, but also allows simultaneous access from multiple locations across the globe? Distributed systems have an unfair advantage, in that they can be robust against total disk failure in a way that desktop clients can’t, but none of the file corruption issues I’ve had have been from total disk failure. Why has my experience with desktop applications been so bad?

    • It’s okay, break your kernel

      The reality is much simpler: the kernel is a software project. There is nothing particularly special about being a kernel developer. Jumping into any code base is going to involve a learning curve. You don’t need to be the best programmer ever to make modifications. The core kernel is completely self-contained in one project which means fewer dependencies than a lot of userspace projects. (yes, there are modules out of tree but the most important parts are in a single project). The self-contained nature means that it’s easy to switch back to a stable kernel from an unstable one which makes testing easier.

    • The Nexus 4 & 7 Will Be Closer To Handling An Upstream Linux Kernel

      Rob Clark submitted his MSM-Next DRM driver changes today in preparation for the Linux 4.5 kernel cycle.

      He was quick to note that with this MSM DRM driver update from the Freedreno project there is now DSI support for Qualcomm’s MSM8960 and APQ8064 hardware. He explains the impact as, “should be helpful for getting an upstream kernel working on nexus7/nexus4/etc.” DSI is short for the Display Serial Interface and is a MIPI specification for communicating between the host and display device.

    • Exynos DRM In Linux 4.5 To Support Runtime Power Management
    • AppStream 0.9 Brings Many Changes, Breaks API/ABI

      Version 0.9 of AppStream is now available. As a refresher, AppStream is a FreeDesktop.org specification backed by multiple major Linux distributions as a cross-distribution effort of standardizing Linux component metadata.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • 7-Way Linux Laptop Comparison From Sandy Bridge To Broadwell

        For those curious about how Intel’s laptop/ultrabook CPUs have evolved over the past few generations and whether it’s worthwhile upgrading from one generation to the next, here’s a fresh Linux laptop comparison with seven different laptops being tested on Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64 and comparing these laptops from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell on a variety of workloads while also doing some performance-per-Watt measurements.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Enlightenment DR 0.20.1 Release

      This bugfix release improves on the 0.20.0 release and resolves a number of issues.

    • Enlightenment 0.20.1 Released With Fixes

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME: Shortcuts love

        Keyboard shortcuts can be a powerful feature, particularly for actions that are repeated often and are consistently available. In GNOME 2, shortcuts could be learned through menu bars, but we moved away from these with GNOME 3. There were a number of reasons why we did this, and it was a good thing, but it did leave users without an easy way to learn keyboard shortcuts. This is something that we’ve wanted to address for some time, and are now finally resolving.

      • Evolution Email and Calendar Client Updated for GNOME 3.20 with Over 40 Changes

        The GNOME 3.19.3 desktop environment is under heavy development these days, and many of its core components and applications are being updated by the hour.

      • GNOME Maps 3.20 Is Going to Be a Really Big Update

        GNOME Maps is one of the many components of the GNOME stack, and it looks like the upcoming 3.20 version will get some pretty cool features.

        Not all the packages get big improvements when they move from one version to another. In fact, for many packages in the GNOME stack, not a lot happens. GNOME Maps is not one of those apps, and it’s becoming more useful with each new release.

      • GNOME Maps App Now Lets Users Edit Locations in OpenStreetMap
      • Video Series

        I’m nearly a month down on a branch for Builder 3.20. It’s goal is to radically simplify the process of creating plugins, and prepare for external plugins. We really wanted to create a solid plugin story before doing that and things are progressing nicely.

  • Distributions

    • Best distro of 2015 poll

      Let’s do it again. Last year, in a first-of-its-kind Dedoimedo best distro vote poll, I asked you about your favorite operating system, and you responded in kind. With exactly 1,900 votes, you opined on the state of the Linux. It’s that time of the year once more.

      I am going to post an article reflecting my own view on how this year of distro testing went, but I would also very much like to hear from you. Like in 2014, I used the THP on Distrowatch and selected the top ten entries for the poll. But there’s also a free field for you to add any other distro you like, as well as comments. It ought to be interesting, and hopefully not too quiet. After me.

    • Reviews

      • Review: Chakra 2015.11 “Fermi”

        Not only has it been a while since I’ve done a Linux distribution review on this blog, but it has been an especially long time (over 2.5 years, in fact) since I’ve looked at Chakra. I figured that now that KDE 5 (technically incorrect terminology, I know, but please bear with me, as I’m using this for the sake of brevity) is being used in Chakra, it may be time to see how a distribution I’ve rather liked in the past has evolved. In case you don’t remember, Chakra was originally based on Arch Linux, but a few years ago, it branched off into its own independent distribution with its own repositories, though certain tools (like the package manager Pacman) are based on things found in Arch Linux. It focuses exclusively on KDE, and it uses a semi-rolling release model in which core system packages are updated less frequently in order to maintain stability, while front-end applications seen by users most often are updated more frequently to provide a competitive desktop experience.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Some news of what’s boiling in the Cauldron

        For those of you who are most familiar with Mageia and its development, you are starting to know the drill: Cauldron is the place where we break stuff by upgrading everything that we tried to keep stable during the previous release cycle, and then we work on making it stable again. We are now in this stabilization phase and we were aiming internally for a first development snapshot of Mageia 6 as a set of ISO images, but there are still a number of factors that make it difficult right now.

    • Arch Family

      • Dropping Plasma 4

        Since the KDE 4 desktop has been unmaintained for several months and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to support two versions of Plasma, we are removing it from our repositories. Plasma 5.5 has just been released and should be stable enough to replace it.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • OpenSUSE LEAP: A Great Free Linux Server Distribution

        So what exactly is LEAP? What’s it for? The easiest way to approach something like OpenSUSE LEAP is to think of it like a beefed-up, more stable Fedora-type thing. The main goal of this Linux distribution is to create an enterprise grade distribution designed for workstations and servers free of charge.

      • I accidentally openSUSE

        I am sorry for this silly article. But it is important. Just as important as my other failures over the years. They teach as much as image-rich guides and prosaic, finely worded reviews, albeit with much less beauty and style. The moral of the story is, as you may have guessed already, DON’T DO IT. Wait for openSUSE to gets its due major and minor version increment and come around with Plasma 5 natively and a suave, integrated Gecko or Chameleon theme, as it just recently did.

        At this point, thinking in retrospect, I probably should have used BTRFS, and this might have given me the necessary snapshot to go back in time and undo the damage. Maybe. Furthermore, I am disappointed with the SUSE team. They should protect their system a little more robustly from aesthetic escapades. All I did was install a bunch of packages and let the system remove some of the conflicting dependencies with the previously installed desktop environment. Not something we should let happen in 2015. Food for thought. As for Plasma on openSUSE, I owe you that one. Leap 42.1. Very soon. Take care.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Ordering mount points in Jessie (systemd < 220)

        In the previous post I had mentioned that I didn’t figure out how to add dependency on mount points so as to achieve correct ordering of mount points. After a lot of search today I finally figured it out thanks to the bug report and the patch which adds x-systemd.requires and other option to systemd.

      • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, November 2015
      • Reproducible builds: week 33 in Stretch cycle

        Exchanges have started with F-Droid developers to better understand what would be required to test F-Droid applications. (h01ger)

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” Gets Linux Kernel 4.1.13 LTS in Second Test Build

          Today, December 14, the Parsix GNU/Linux developers announced the release and immediate availability for download of the second TEST build of their upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” computer operating system.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Touch to Get FM Support for Aquaris e4.5 and E5 HD First

            A couple of developers have started to work on bringing FM support to the Ubuntu phones, and they already made some progress, but it’s more complicated than it sounds.

          • OnePlus One Ubuntu Touch Developer Is Helping Other Projects Do the Same

            The community is working on a OnePlus One Ubuntu Touch port, and the developer who’s doing the heavy lifting is also trying to help other people port the OS to their devices.

          • Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition Project Seems to Be Still Alive

            The Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition is the elephant in the room, and it looks like people don’t want to talk about it. It’s been pulled from sales, and it’s virtually invisible on social media, but all hope is not yet lost.

          • Mycroft Is Now an Official Ubuntu IoT Partner

            Mycroft is a home automation Linux-based device that promises to change the way we interact with our homes. The guys who are making this hardware decided to show us how it’s made.

          • Ubuntu Bugs That Won’t Go Away

            I grew up on a farm and ranch up until I was fourteen. It’s a tough life, best suited for tough people who can beat their environment into submission and produce the results needed to thrive. Should I ever have displayed the poor judgement to complain about something within earshot of my dad, I would get the same advice every time.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon Review

              Linux Mint is among the most popular GNU/Linux-based operating systems. Although DistroWatch is not a metric of popularity, Linux Mint has claimed the #1 ranking on the website, which means it’s the most sought after distro on the site.

            • Monthly News – November 2015

              Our apologies for posting these news so late. Since the website and forums went down, we’ve been hit by two new server issues. Two of our repository servers lost their hard drives. That’s a total of 3 servers going down in just a few weeks. This time around we had full backups though and we were able to minimize downtime (no downtime at all on the Mint and LMDE2 repositories, a few hours yesterday on the LMDE 1 repositories). We’re eager to resume work on Linux Mint but at the moment most of our focus is still on server administration, on recovery, on configuration but also on making sure we’re stronger and issues like these have less of an impact on us going forward.

            • Linux Mint 17.3 OEM images available

              Reminder: OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. After an OEM installation, the computer is set in such a way that the next reboot features a small setup screen where the new user/customer has the ability to choose his/her username, password, keyboard layout and locale.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Manchester City will be happy with draw but London clubs get rough ride

    For the three English clubs left in the Champions League there must be a sense of deja vu about the draw for the last 16 but not a great deal of satisfaction. Arsenal’s supporters could be forgiven for thinking the worst after drawing Barcelona, with the prospect of going out at this stage for the sixth year in a row. Manchester City, for the second season in succession, will not be allowed to take fans to a Champions League tie because of the racism of others and the bad news for travellers on the Paris Métro is that Chelsea are on their way back to the French capital.

  • Yahoo told: cut 9,000 of your 10,700 staff

    Yahoo is facing shareholder pressure to pursue other alternatives besides a complex spin-off of its internet operations while chief executive Marissa Mayer struggles to revive the company’s revenue growth.

  • Las Vegas Review-Journal Now Owned By… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    The last time we wrote about the Las Vegas Review-Journal — the largest newspaper in Nevada — it was owned by Stephens Media and was making headlines for using the LVRJ as a copyright troll, pretending to sell its copyrights to a company called Righthaven. That scam fell apart when it was discovered that Righthaven didn’t really own the copyrights it was suing over. Since then, the LVRJ has changed hands a couple times. Stephens Media sold the paper to New Media Investment Group earlier this year. And then, last week, it was announced that “New Media Investment Group” had sold the newspaper to News + Media Capital Group LLC, for $140 million. News + Media Capital Group LLC is a brand new Delaware-based company, and no one has the slightest clue who they are, including all the folks working for the LVRJ.

  • Practical guide for avoiding burnout and living a happier life

    As open source fans, we tend to spend a lot of time curled up in front of our computers. Many of us we work in front of computers during the day, and some of us even work on or with open source projects, too. If you are anything like me, spending an entire day in front of a screen and then spending most of the evening there, too, is not uncommon. Today is a good example: I started work at 8:00AM, and at 8:21PM I am starting to write this article…

  • Microsoft apologizes for riling OneDrive users, restores some free storage space on request

    Microsoft on Friday apologized for how it conveyed last month’s decision to slash OneDrive storage allotments, and restored the 15GB of free cloud storage space to current users who asked for it. But it did not back down from its determination to eliminate the unlimited allowance.

    “We are all genuinely sorry for the frustration this decision has caused and for the way it was communicated,” wrote Douglas Pearce, a group program manager for OneDrive, in a message that shut down a massive plea on Microsoft’s own website for the restoration of the allotments.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • United Nations agency gives EU a tobacco warning

      The United Nations public health agency in charge of tobacco control has warned EU policymakers to keep their distance from industry as they consider reforms to fight cigarette smuggling.

      The head of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control secretariat, Vera Da Costa e Silva, wrote senior European Commission officials earlier this month, saying the EU’s close working relationship with tobacco companies to fight cigarette smuggling may violate Europe’s international commitments.

    • ‘On the Back of a Cigarette Packet’ – Standardised Packaging Legislation and the Tobacco Industry’s Fundamental Right to (Intellectual) Property

      Standardised packaging (also known as plain packaging) legislation has recently been adopted in some states as a tobacco control measure. Under such laws, tobacco products must be sold in drab coloured packaging without branding other than a written indication of the name under which the product is sold. Its aim is to reduce the attraction of tobacco products, particularly to young smokers, and to prevent advertising imagery from interfering with prominent mandatory textual and visual health warnings. In March 2015, the Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015 received Parliamentary approval in the United Kingdom. The tobacco industry vigorously opposed their introduction. Amongst other objections, it claimed that the restrictions on branding introduced under the Regulations violate its fundamental right of property under Art 1 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights and Art. 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union because they deprive it of its ability to use marks, designs and inventions protected by intellectual property law. In this article, this argument is tested by reference to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU. It is demonstrated that the absolutist view of property rights promoted by the Industry is very different from that prevailing in European fundamental rights law and that, as a result, the Industry’s suggestion that the Regulations violate A1P1 and Art. 17 is seriously misleading.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Peter Dale Scott and David Talbot

      David Talbot’s latest book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, examines the post-WWII U.S. intelligence sector and the power it wields, by following the career of Wall Street lawyer, diplomat and spymaster Allen Dulles. Talbot discussed his new book with fellow author Peter Dale Scott, in a public event at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco on December 2, 2015. Talbot says he believes CIA assassins were responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy.

    • U.S. Visa Process Missed San Bernardino Wife’s Zealotry on Social Media

      Had the authorities found the posts years ago, they might have kept her out of the country. But immigration officials do not routinely review social media as part of their background checks, and there is a debate inside the Department of Homeland Security over whether it is even appropriate to do so.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Pumped beyond limits, many U.S. aquifers in decline

      Just before 3 a.m., Jay Garetson’s phone buzzed on the bedside table. He picked it up and read the text: “Low Pressure Alert.”

      He felt a jolt of stress and his chest tightened. He dreaded what that automated message probably meant: With the water table dropping, another well on his family’s farm was starting to suck air.

      The Garetson family has been farming in the plains of southwestern Kansas for four generations, since 1902. Now they face a hard reality. The groundwater they depend on is disappearing. Their fields could wither. Their farm might not survive for the next generation.

    • Rampant Indonesian fires causing havoc in Papua

      Greenpeace says the impact of rampant forest and peatland fires in Indonesia’s Papua region is having a devastating effect on West Papuan society.

      Fires from land clearance on drained peatland have caused rampant fires across the republic including in Papua, catapulting Indonesia to being one of the world’s largest emitter’s of greenhouse gasses.

      Greenpeace’s Indonesia forest campaigner Yuyun Indradi says the fires have belched carbon haze across the region which is a health hazard for many communities.

    • How Indonesian Fires Are Affecting Global Climate

      Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels, experts told IndiaSpend.

      Acrid smoke and haze have enveloped Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and have reached Thailand, choking people, reducing visibility and spiking respiratory illnesses, according to Susan Minnemeyer, Mapping and Data Manager for Washington-based World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch Fires initiative.

    • North Carolina citizenry defeat pernicious Big Solar plan to suck up the Sun

      The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don’t want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off the kids. “All the young people are going to move out,” warned Bobby Mann, a local resident concerned about the future of his burg. Worse, Mann said, the solar panels would suck up all the energy from the Sun.

      Another resident—a retired science teacher, no less—expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would block photosynthesis, and prevent nearby plants from growing. Jane Mann then went on to add that there seemed to have been a lot of cancer deaths in the area, and that no one could tell her solar panels didn’t cause cancer. “I want information,” Mann said. “Enough is enough.”

      These comments were reported not in The Onion, but rather by the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald. They came during a Woodland Town Council meeting in which Strata Solar Company sought to rezone an area northeast of the town, off of US Highway 258, to build a solar farm. The council not only rejected the proposal, it went a step further, voting for a complete moratorium on solar farms.

    • [Satire] Koch Brothers Get Each Other Same Election For Christmas

      Chuckling and shaking their heads as they described their annual family gift exchange to reporters, Koch Industries executives Charles and David Koch confirmed Wednesday they had unwittingly gotten each other the same election for Christmas this year.

      The two brothers and energy industry magnates, who for decades have gathered to share a holiday meal and open presents next to the Christmas tree in Charles’ Wichita home, admitted they were a bit embarrassed to learn they had each given the other U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin’s congressional seat, but said they ultimately shrugged off the coincidence.

  • Finance

    • Poorest areas have low student debt, highest defaults

      The study comes as student loan debt continues to grow nationwide. Outstanding student loan balances increased by $13 billion to $1.2 trillion as of Sept. 30. That’s more overall debt than consumers owe on credit cards or auto loans. Nearly 12% of the money owed on student loans is 90 days or more delinquent in the third quarter of 2015.

      In the federal loan portfolio, which makes up $896 billion of the $1.2-trillion overall student loan debt, 20% of all borrowers, owing 13% of the debt, are in default, or more than 90 days late on a payment.

    • Prof. Wolff on The David Pakman Show: “Will Automation End “Full Employment?”

      Professor Wolff joins David Pakman to discuss the the future of employment in the context of automation and technological unemployment.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • NRA Uses The San Bernardino Mass Shooting To Compare Liberals To Terrorists

      A commentary video from the National Rifle Association labeled those who called for more than thoughts and prayers following the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California the “Godless Left” and claimed that they “march hand-in-hand” with terrorists “toward the possible, purposeful destruction of us all.”

  • Censorship

    • UK ISPs Unleash 85+ New Blocks on ‘Pirate’ Domains

      Internet service providers in the UK have begun blocking around 85 new ‘pirate’ domains following demands from rightsholders. All six major ISPs will implement the ban which targets, among other things, various clones, proxies and mirrors associated with The Pirate Bay plus major torrent and MP3 download sites.

  • Privacy

    • Twitter Says Possible State Sponsored Hack

      There is no indication what “government” Twitter suspects is connected with the hack, but online news sources are speculating the usual suspects, China and North Korea. PCWorld reports that many of the account holders receiving the Twitter notices are “privacy advocates and security researchers, some of whom tweet under pseudonyms.” Reuters is also reporting that Google and Facebook have also started warning users of possible state-sponsored attacks, but offers no details.

    • Let’s encrypt — because we really ought to

      Last week, Let’s Encrypt came out of beta. Let’s Encrypt is a collaborative effort that provides free SSL/TLS certificates for use by anyone with a valid Internet domain. It’s also a trusted certificate authority, and it’s currently issuing 90-day certificates free of charge. The upside is free SSL/TLS certificates. The downside is that 90-day expiration, though there are methods to renew the certificates automatically as the expiration approaches.

      Further, the tools provided by Let’s Encrypt make it pretty much effortless to implement. The Let’s Encrypt Python tool available at GitHub runs on a Web server, requests a valid certificate, and even does the Apache configuration for you, all with a pretty ncurses UI. Basically, you run this on a host with a bunch of non-SSL domains, and when it’s done, they’re all secured with free valid certificates.

    • A Victory for Privacy and Transparency: HRW v. DEA

      In a victory for millions of people in the U.S. who have placed telephone calls to locations overseas, EFF and Human Rights Watch have confirmed that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s practice of collecting those records in bulk has stopped and that the only bulk database of those records has been destroyed.

  • Civil Rights

    • Blair and Straw face questions over complicity in Shaker Aamer’s treatment

      In his first interview since returning home to London in October after being detained without charge for 14 years in the US military facility in Cuba, British resident Aamer suggested the former prime minister and the former foreign secretary were aware that he was being tortured.

      “The not unreasonable allegation that Shaker Aamer makes is that both the [then] prime minister Tony Blair and … Jack Straw must have known not just about his illegal abduction, but also about his torture at the hands of the US authorities,” Salmond told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show.

      The SNP foreign affairs spokesman and former Scottish first minister said that “as with so many other things”, Blair and Straw had a great deal to answer for. “They have to be asked the straight question of how could they possibly not have known about the fate that had befallen a British citizen,” he said.

      “Governments have many responsibilities, but the primary responsibility of all governments is to keep their own citizens safe from harm, and governments aren’t meant to collaborate on the illegal abduction and the torture of one of their own citizens. So both the then prime minister and home secretary have to face up and tell us exactly what they knew and when they knew it.”

    • Teenagers under 16 face being banned from social media and email under EU laws

      Teenagers under the age of 16 could be banned from Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and email if they don’t have parental permission, under last-minute changes to EU laws.

      The European Union is on the verge of pushing through new regulations that would raise the age of consent for websites to use personal data from 13 to 16.

      Officials quitely amended proposed data protection laws last week to increase the age and put the EU out of step with rules in other parts of the world.

    • Publicity hound, coward, liar: Whistleblowers are inevitably demonized by their enemies — Edward Snowden is no exception

      The most powerful gun in the damage-control arsenal isn’t truth. It is demonization—a vicious assault on the character of the whistleblower in order to destroy credibility and distract from the message. The damage controller’s bag of tricks is as old as Machiavelli.

      Find anything that borders on illegal behavior in the whistleblower’s past, such as court convictions, messy divorces, arrest reports, domestic violence complaints, a history of alcohol, child support issues, or drug abuse. Attack the whistleblower’s motive by alleging that he or she was driven by malice, revenge, deceit, greed, or hunger for publicity. Dig up colleagues, neighbors, and fellow workers who are willing to say, true or untrue, that the whistleblower is vindictive, sneaky, dishonest, prone to exaggerate, not a team player, disruptive in the workplace. Allege that the whistleblower is incompetent at his or her job, cannot be trusted with responsibility, or lacks leadership skills. Accuse the whistleblower of being a thief who stole proprietary documents, illegally revealed company secrets, broke a confidentiality agreement. Label the whistleblower mentally unstable.

      Edward Snowden—“the world’s most wanted man by the world’s most powerful government”—wasn’t surprised that his enemies tried to assassinate his character. He expected as much. As he told Greenwald and the Guardian, “I know the government will demonize me. They’ll say I violated the Espionage Act. That I committed grave crimes. That I aided America’s enemies. That I endangered national security. I’m sure they’ll grab every incident they can find from my past and probably will exaggerate or even fabricate some to demonize me as much as possible. . . . What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions. . . . I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can’t live with is knowing that I did nothing.”

    • Another Trustworthy Confidential Informant Allegedly Tied To Multiple Bogus Drug Arrests

      The only thing as trustworthy as a cop’s testimony are statements made by confidential informants. These are used to secure warrants and, occasionally, as supporting evidence in prosecutions. Never mind the fact that confidential informants are often career criminals who carry with them the innate desire to stay out of jail.

    • Supreme Court Again Makes It Clear: Companies Can Erode Your Legal Rights Via Mouse Print

      For years, AT&T worked tirelessly to erode its customers’ legal rights, using mouse print in its terms of service preventing consumers from participating in lawsuits against the company. Instead, customers were forced into binding arbitration, where arbitrators employed by the company unsurprisingly rule in their employer’s favor a huge percentage of the time. Initially, the lower courts derided this greasy behavior for what it was: an attempt by AT&T to eliminate customer legal rights and save a buck. And with AT&T’s massive history of fraud, you can imagine AT&T was looking to save quite a bit.

    • New U.S. FAA rule requires drone owners to register by Feb 19

      The Federal Aviation Administration, responding to heightened concerns about rogue drone flights near airports, unveiled a pre-Christmas rule on Monday requiring drone hobbyists as young as 13 years old to register their unmanned aircraft.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Grumpy Cat Sues Coffee Maker For Copyright Infringement

        Grumpy Cat is not happy. Her owners have filed a lawsuit at a California federal court, accusing a coffee maker of exploiting the cat’s copyrights and trademarks without permission. In addition to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, Grumpy Cat’s owners also want control of the coffee maker’s grumpycat.com domain name.

12.14.15

Links 14/12/2015: KDE Frameworks 5.17.0, ‘Referendum’ on GPL Enforcement

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Hints For Successfully Managing an Open Source Project

    Today I want to change things a bit: instead of covering a technical subject, I want to share with you what it means to run an open source project

    For more than two years, my friend David Rousset and I have led Babylon.js. We started the project after hearing that IE11 would support WebGL and we wanted to make it easier for people to build 3D scenes and games. For the following two years I spent all of my spare time making Babylon.js a simple and powerful 3D engine for web developers.

  • Western Digital Labs and ownCloud
  • Person of The Year 2015 in the Linux/OpenSource Community: Open Voting

    Year 2015 ends. Taking time to honor those peoples who work in Linux and Open Source community and don’t have deserved popularity. Maybe you use everyday several products from these peoples – this is your personal chance to say “thank you”.

  • Why William Hill is betting on open source rather than traditional IT vendors for digital transformation

    William Hill is moving away from traditional IT vendor relationships as it seeks to modernise its business, choosing to build applications internally using open source technologies pioneered by internet giants such as Google and Facebook.

  • Staking a career on open source software’s success

    I have enjoyed reading the stories others have shared about how they got started with open source software, so I thought I’d add mine. It is different in that I came to open source purely for business reasons. While I later embraced the open source way for reasons such as personal freedom and community, my initial exposure to it came from trying to find the best solution to a business problem.

  • Events

    • Extension: FOSDEM 2016 Desktops DevRoom Call for Talks

      The FOSDEM Organization has graciously given devroom organizers a little extension. We are therefore extending our own deadline for the Desktops DevRoom: the new deadline is December 14th. There will be no further extensions.

    • TADHack Paris – 12-13 December 2015

      I’m currently in Paris for TADHack, an opportunity to collaborate on a range of telephony APIs and services. People can also win prizes by doing something innovative with the platforms promoted by the sponsors.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Google tries to spread the SQL cloud love

      Google has unveiled the next gen of its Cloud SQL service, a hosted version of the MySQL database.

      The second generation Beta Cloud SQL is more than seven times faster than the first generation of Cloud SQL. And it scales to 10TB of data, 15,000 IOPS and 104GB of RAM per instance.

      The first generation of Cloud SQL was launched in October 2011 .

  • Education

    • Dear parents: Let your kids use open source software

      A 16-year-old boy recently asked the r/Linux community for advice. When his parents discovered that he’d reloaded his laptop with Linux, they were horrified—after all, this “free” software must certainly be riddled with viruses and/or hackers. It didn’t help matters any that he’d “ruined” an expensive gift, and was no longer using some of the expensive software that had been purchased with it. He tried to talk to them about it, but it was tough—he was the teenager; they were the adults.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook’s custom AI hardware will be open-source, ready for Skynet

      While most artificial intelligence is powered by software, as the software gets more sophisticated, it relies on more powerful and sophisticated hardware to execute its needs. The social network will reportedly submit all the relevant design materials to the Open Compute Project, an organization that manages the sharing of datacenter infrastructure designs. “They’ve designed quite an elegant solution that can fully power and cool that number of GPUs and deliver maximum performance”.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A referendum on GPL enforcement

      One of the key provisions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is that derivative products must also be released under the GPL. A great many companies rigorously follow the terms of the license, while others avoid GPL-licensed software altogether because they are unwilling to follow those terms. Some companies, though, seem to feel that the terms of the GPL do not apply to them, presenting the copyright holder with two alternatives: find a way to get those companies to change their behavior, or allow the terms of the license to be flouted. In recent times, little effort has gone into the first option; depending on the results of an ongoing fundraising campaign, that effort may drop to nearly zero. We would appear to be at a decision point with regard to how (and whether) we would like to see GPL enforcement done within our community.

    • For the love of bits, stop using gzip!

      So, who *does* use xz? kernel.org. Also, the linux kernel itself optionally supports xz compression of initrd images. Vendors just need to pay attention and turn the flags on. Anyone else want to be part of the elite field of people who use xz? Please?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • ROS, the Robot Operating System, Is Growing Faster Than Ever, Celebrates 8 Years

      Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger, and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, “ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System” was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan. As of this month, the paper introducing ROS has been cited 2,020 times, an increase of more than 50 percent over last year.

    • The Cryptocurrency Open Source API Marketplace for Developers

      The API economy is the reality we live in and it’s an enormous one that, once the Internet of Things kicks into full gear, will feature an infinite number of API calls a day. But as we globalize, the world and the products—in this case APIs—we sell in it become more complicated and often more expensive as we factor in all the friction of exchange rates and credit card micropayments. It’s in everybody’s interest to smooth over that friction so developers can access our APIs or application programming interfaces more easily.

    • Open Hardware

      • OSWatch, an open source watch

        If you are a soldering ninja with a flair for working with tiny parts and modules, check out the Open Source Watch a.k.a. OSWatch built by [Jonathan Cook]. His goals when starting out the project were to make it Arduino compatible, have enough memory for future applications, last a full day on one charge, use BLE as Central or Peripheral and be small in size. With some ingenuity, 3d printing and hacker skills, he was able to accomplish all of that.

  • Programming

    • Git 2.6.3 A Lot Of New Features And Fixes
    • Django awarded MOSS Grant

      We’ve been awarded $150,000 to help fund the development of Channels, the initiative to rewrite the core of Django to support (among other things) WebSockets and background tasks, and to integrate key parts of the Django REST Framework request/response code into Django, such as content negotiation. Together, these projects will help considerably improve Django’s role of backing rich web experiences as well as native applications.

    • Go vs Node vs Rust vs Swift

      Some days ago ago Apple released Swift as open source language with instructions for Ubuntu Linux 15.10. So I decided to do a couple of simple benchmarks just to test some basic general purpose things like cpu, functions, read/write and not sequential access to arrays, concurrent parallel execution where possibile.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Auto-Generating Clickbait With Recurrent Neural Networks

    “F.D.R.’s War Plans!” reads a headline from a 1941 Chicago Daily Tribune. Had this article been written today, it might rather have said “21 War Plans F.D.R. Does Not Want You To Know About. Number 6 may shock you!”. Modern writers have become very good at squeezing out the maximum clickability out of every headline. But this sort of writing seems formulaic and unoriginal. What if we could automate the writing of these, thus freeing up clickbait writers to do useful work?

  • Twitter Aims to Show Advertising to Much Wider Audience

    Twitter has long argued that its reach and influence extends far beyond the 320 million people who log into its social media service at least once a month. Tweets are embedded on thousands of other websites and apps, emailed, displayed on television and published in newspapers.

  • Microsoft is in an apologetic mood right now — what next? ‘Sorry for Windows 10′?

    Sorry may be the hardest word, but it seems to be tripping off Microsoft’s tongue quite freely at the moment. Maybe it’s the holiday season making the company look at itself, but we’ve had two apologies in recent days — first, a semi-apology for stealing OneDrive storage from people, and now it’s sorry about the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4.

  • Science

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Meat industry ignores FDA, health experts, buys more antibiotics

      Despite recent efforts by health experts, doctors, and the Food and Drug Administration to pull the meat industry away from its heavy use of antimicrobials, livestock producers seem to have dug in their heels.

      From 2009 to 2014, the amount of antimicrobials sold and distributed for use in livestock increased by 22 percent, according to an FDA report released Thursday. Of the antimicrobials sold in 2014, 62 percent were related to drugs used in human health, also called medically important. From 2009 to 2014, sale and distribution of medically important antimicrobials used on farms also jumped—an increase of 23 percent.

      That brings the 2014 total of antimicrobials sold for US livestock to 15,358,210 kilograms, including 9,475,989 kilograms of medically important drugs, according to the report.

  • Security

    • The Joy of Getting Hacked

      Two weeks ago, the server I host all my personal projects on was hacked by some guy in Ukraine.

    • Microsoft Edge has inherited many of Internet Explorer’s security holes

      We’re all anxiously awaiting the day that Windows 10′s new Edge browser becomes usable. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will some day next year. Microsoft Edge should represent a huge improvement in browser security, particularly when compared with the ancient, creaking, and leaky Internet Explorer. Recent events, though, have me wondering if Edge really represents that big of a step forward.

    • DEF CON 23 – Runa Sandvik, Michael Auger – Hacking a Linux-Powered Rifle

      TrackingPoint is an Austin startup known for making precision-guided firearms. These firearms ship with a tightly integrated system coupling a rifle, an ARM-powered scope running a modified version of Linux, and a linked trigger mechanism. The scope can follow targets, calculate ballistics and drastically increase its user’s first shot accuracy. The scope can also record video and audio, as well as stream video to other devices using its own wireless network and mobile applications.

    • Supporting secure DNS in glibc
    • TLS in the kernel

      An RFC patch from Dave Watson at Facebook proposes moving the bulk of Transport Layer Security (TLS) processing into the kernel. There are a number of advantages he sees for doing so, but most of the commenters on the patch set seem a bit skeptical about the idea. TLS is, of course, the encryption layer that protects HTTPS and other internet protocols.

    • Let’s Encrypt Stats
    • December ’15 security fixes for Adobe Flash

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • How Indonesian fires are affecting global climate

      Raging fires in Indonesia’s forests and peat lands since July this year are precipitating a climate and public-health catastrophe with repercussions across local, regional and global levels, experts told IndiaSpend.

      Acrid smoke and haze have enveloped Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, and have reached Thailand, choking people, reducing visibility and spiking respiratory illnesses, according to Susan Minnemeyer, Mapping and Data Manager for Washington-based World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch Fires initiative.

    • Peat fires travel underground – the Indonesian disaster

      When I landed in Palangkaraya, the capital of the Indonesian province of central Borneo, in early September the smoke was already fairly thick. I was surprised they hadn’t cancelled the flight on seeing the ground suddenly come into view what seemed like a few seconds before landing.

      The smoky smell and thick warm air was something I recognised from 2011, the last El Niño year to hit the region (causing an extended dry season). There was definitely something of a “here we go again” sentiment from the locals I knew there too. My friend Yuyus texted: “selamat datang di kota asap” when I told him I’d arrived – welcome to smoke town. Within the next two days, all flights to and from the town had been grounded.

    • Fires Caused These Massive Plumes of Carbon Monoxide to Appear Over Indonesia

      Tens of thousands of wildfires ravaged Indonesia in September and October. A sizable portion of these blazes was smoldering subterranean peat fires, which sent toxic gas and particulate matter into the atmosphere. This new map shows the extensive spread of one particularly nasty gas: carbon monoxide.

      Wildfires in Indonesia are particularly troublesome. Unlike “conventional” forest fires, these fires smolder under the surface, making it extremely difficult to extinguish; it usually takes a good downpour during the rainy season to put them out. Making matters worse, these peat-fueled fires release far more smoke and air pollution than most other types of wildfires.

    • California in overdraft

      Two decades ago, the rolling hills of Paso Robles were mostly covered with golden grass and oak trees. Now the hills and valleys are blanketed with more than 32,000 acres of grapevines.

      Surging demand for wine has brought an explosion of vineyards, and along with it heavy pumping of groundwater. With the water table dropping, many people have had to cope as their taps have sputtered and their wells have gone dry.

    • Meteorologist Dr. Marshall Shepherd Explains How Historic Climate Agreement Will Have Positive Cascading Effects For Decades

  • Finance

    • Bill with passport and third-party tax collection provisions passes Congress

      The act creates a new Sec. 7345 that requires the secretary of State to deny, revoke, or limit the passport of any person who the IRS certifies has a seriously delinquent tax debt. “Seriously delinquent tax debt” is defined as an outstanding tax debt in excess of $50,000 (adjusted for inflation) for which a notice of lien or a levy has been filed, unless the individual is making timely payments under an agreement with the IRS or collection is suspended because a Collection Due Process hearing or innocent spouse relief has been requested or is pending. This provision is effective upon enactment.

    • Desperately seeking Satoshi Nakamoto

      In 2008, someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto posted a paper describing the workings of what would become the world’s most important digital cryptocurrency, bitcoin. Two months later, he posted the code for the first version of the software that would allow people to create and exchange the currency.

      The paper was revolutionary because it brought together ideas that people had been working on in the area of digital currencies. It solved the problem of exchanging money in a safe and secure way, without having to trust third parties or even the other person in the deal.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • What I told the kid who wanted to join the NSA
    • ‘I want to join the NSA. What do you think of that?’

      In September, I spent a day at the United States military academy at West Point, an elite, 213-year-old academic institution. I’d been invited to lecture by the Army Cyber Institute, a new academic department that focuses on cybersecurity and policies related to the military implications of attacking and defending electronic infrastructure.

      It’s not my usual speaking gig. I grew up as an organiser in the anti-nuclear-weapons movement; my experience of the military mostly revolves around protesting outside bases, not being invited inside them. West Point was the first military audience I’d ever addressed, yet I’d heard that they have used my young-adult novel Little Brother, which concerns net-savvy kids in San Francisco who form an underground movement to resist Homeland Security incursions on civil liberties following a terrorist attack.

      West Point is an American oddity: a leafy, ancient (by US standards) campus on a lazy river with academic standards to match any Big Ten or Ivy League university, but with a student body that is far more likely to come from racial minorities and poor people than any of America’s notoriously high-ticket educational institutions. I’ve done teaching stints at American universities where annual tuition ran to $50,000, and the contrasts between the student body at those schools and West Point could be the subject of a dissertation on American history, sociology, race relations or economics.

    • AP FACT CHECK: GOP hopefuls overstating on NSA phone records

      In the wake of the California shootings, Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham are complaining that U.S. intelligence agencies have lost their authority to collect phone records on Americans under a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program. They want the government to bring that program back.

    • Rubio Doubles Down on Repealing NSA Restrictions

      Florida Sen. Marco Rubio amped his criticism Friday of the Obama administration’s support for restrictions to a major National Security Agency surveillance program, and joined with fellow Republicans to call for increasing the agency’s powers in the wake of recent deadly shootings in Paris and California inspired by the Islamic State.

    • Cruz Defends Dictators, NSA Limits in Security Speech

      Taking on critics in his own party, Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz on Thursday defended Middle East dictators as useful allies against Islamic extremists during a Washington address decrying political correctness and stricter gun laws as an impediment to national security.

    • Ted Cruz rejects demands to revive NSA surveillance after San Bernardino

      Ted Cruz has launched a stinging attack on fellow Republicans who have demanded the return of mass telephone surveillance in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack.

    • Libertarian hero: ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, government funds, the NSA and the DHS

      It’s more than a little odd seeing the world hail their libertarian hero, mourn that he was “arrested for inventing Bitcoin”* (as is being claimed on Twitter), and find that he ate government money like a horse.

    • ‘Probable’ Bitcoin Creator Is A Garrulous Government Security Contractor And Is In Legal Trouble

      As the old adage has it, never meet your heroes. If Craig Steven Wright, an Australian serial entrepreneur, really is the creator of Bitcoin, then lovers of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency are going to be a little disappointed: Satoshi Nakamoto is not the man you thought he was.

      Reporters from Wired and Gizmodo have unmasked someone who has been a long-time purveyor of business cliches, someone who claims to be one of the most certified security professionals on the planet, and, rather than working against government, appears to have done plenty of work for the establishment. He even claimed to have relationships with employees at the NSA. As both publications admit, however, it could all be one elaborate ruse.

    • This Is What The NSA Told Their Employees About Digital Currencies, In 1995

      If news goes unnoticed for years, is it still new news, especially if the present brings new perspectives to light? While researching another article I came across an internal NSA document that was written in 1995 and declassified in 2008, not long before the invention of Bitcoin. The document, which is publicly available on the NSA website, is a weekly internal newsletter for NSA employees called Communicator and in it, they discuss the early iterations of digital currencies that were make headway at the time, specifically David Chaum’s Digicash.

    • James Clapper has found another reason why he lied about NSA spying

      Director of National Intelligence James Clapper now has a fifth reason for why he lied to the US Congress over the NSA’s spying program: he just plain forgot it existed.

      Speaking during a panel discussion last week, Clapper’s general counsel Robert Litt said that Clapper had not had time to prepare an answer to the question posed to him by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) about storing data on Americans.

    • Terrorist attacks don’t warrant return to mass NSA spying, McCaul says

      The terrorist attacks in California and Paris should not spur Congress to reinstate the mass surveillance of Americans’ phone records, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said Wednesday.

      But McCaul, R-Texas, said phone companies may need to keep customer data longer to help federal agents investigate terrorists such as the couple that carried out the mass shooting last week in San Bernardino. Federal agents have complained that a new law reining in the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone data limited how many years of phone records they could analyze in the San Bernardino case.

    • Researchers Found Windows’ Malware Similar To The One Used by NSA

      NSA’s one of the known snooping tactics is installing a malware into hard drive’s firmware which makes the deletion of the malware nearly impossible even the malware can avoid formatting of the hard drive.

      Nemesis is a malware that can be used for similar purposes as it can avoid clean-up software and can even avoid reinstalling of windows altogether by hiding behind boot records, according to FireEye.

    • Inside the NSA’s hunt for hackers

      When America’s premier federal security recruiters go fishing for new technical talent, they have plenty of lures to dangle. There’s the patriotic mission; the promise of a government salary; the thrill of working under the hood on the country’s classified cyber mechanics.

      And then there’s the pile of free purple and orange pens.

      At a recent job fair in this city’s cavernous convention center, the National Security Agency set up an eight-foot-long folding table and covered it with a black cloth and assorted pieces of schwag, trying to rope in coders and tech experts. “Push the limits of innovation,” read one of its posters. Brochures touted a mission producing results “that you might see on the nightly news,” like disrupting a terrorist attack, catching international drug traffickers or preventing a crippling cyberattack.

    • Original NSA Whistleblower Russ Tice: NSA Targeted Barack Obama

      Tice stated that the NSA is lying that they are only collecting the meta-data of USA citizens, and that the entire contents of every single form of communication in the United States is illegally and unconstitutionally spied upon and recorded by the NSA.

      Tice made the shocking allegations that the NSA is specifically targeting Congressmen, Supreme Court Justices, and that the NSA has targeted and wire-tapped President Obama while he was campaigning prior to being elected!

    • Join Us as We Dive with Trevor Paglen 70 Feet Underwater and See NSA-Tapped Cables

      I’m flopping in my fins toward my first scuba dive in the ocean, accompanying artist Trevor Paglen on a mission to the ocean floor. We’re heading 70 feet down off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The captain asks me how I’m feeling.

      “Scared,” I say with a shrug, as if to say, How else would I feel?

      “Remember,” he tells me, “Jacques Cousteau did not die from diving. He died an old man.”

      When I hit the water, though, the anxiety is gone, and I am going slowly into the deep, hand over hand along a yellow rope.

    • How the NYPD is using social media to put Harlem teens behind bars

      Asheem and Jelani, were born exactly one year apart to the day, in the warm Junes of 1991 and ‘92. “I always felt there was something special about that,” says their mother Alethia. “A little bit of magic.” The two grew up together in their mother’s small apartment on the corner of 129th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.

      As young children, the brothers were good friends with kids from all over Harlem. But as they matured into adolescent young men, a set of once-invisible rivalries began to surface. The True Money Gang from the Johnson Houses was at war with the Air It Out crew from the Taft Houses. Crews from Grant and Manhattanville projects exchanged gunfire in the streets. As he grew up, Jelani looked forward to leaving the neighborhood for school, “So I didn’t have to look behind my back every two seconds to see if someone about to bash me in the head,” he says.

    • Facebook offices in Hamburg vandalised

      Vandals have damaged the entrance to a building in Hamburg that houses the offices of social network Facebook, smashing glass, throwing paint and spraying “Facebook dislike” on a wall, according to police in the northern German city.

      Police said in a statement on Sunday that the overnight attack was carried out by a group of 15-20 people wearing black clothes and hoods. An investigation has been launched. Facebook was not immediately available to comment.

    • Privacy hawks turn to White House in encryption fight

      Privacy advocates are leaning on the White House to counter lawmakers’ renewed efforts to pass encryption-piercing legislation in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.

      Despite a lack of direct evidence the technology played a role in either incident, lawmakers continue to use both deadly plots to promote a bill that would force companies to decrypt data upon request.

      The tactic has left technologists and privacy advocates frustrated, even outraged.

      In a meeting with privacy and civil liberties groups on Thursday, the Obama administration said it was preparing to issue an updated stance on encryption policy in the coming weeks, giving the pro-encryption community hope it might have a new ally in its fight.

    • FBI director renews push for back doors, urging vendors to change business models

      The FBI still wants backdoors into encrypted communications, it just doesn’t want to call them backdoors and it doesn’t want to dictate what they should look like.

      FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’d been in talks with unspecified tech leaders about his need to crack encrypted communications in order to track down terrorists and that these leaders understood the need.

    • Congresswoman Asks Feds Why They Pressured a Library to Disable Its Tor Node

      A Congresswoman from California is questioning Department of Homeland Security officials who put pressure on a local public library to take down the relay node it had set up for the anonymity network Tor.

      You may recall back in September, when the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire briefly disabled its Tor relay after meeting with local police, who had received a tip from agents with Homeland Security’s investigations branch warning that the network can be used by criminals. Relay nodes act as the middle points of the Tor network, whose layers of encryption allow activists, journalists, human rights workers, and average citizens (and, yes, criminals) to access the Internet anonymously. The more nodes, the faster the network becomes.

      The fearmongering backfired spectacularly: the Lebanon library unanimously voted to restore its Tor relay and announced plans to convert it into a Tor exit node, one of the essential gateways which provides the last “hop” allowing Tor users to anonymously connect to Internet sites and services. More than a dozen other libraries around the U.S. also piled on, declaring their intention to run Tor nodes of their own in defiance.

      Now Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren is asking just what the hell compelled the DHS to intervene.

    • The Secrets of an Abandoned Microwave Tower in Kansas

      A mysterious AT&T relic reveals connections between telecommunications infrastructure and the Cold War.

    • Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley investors to open AI research center

      In an interview following the launch of OpenAI, Musk explained how his new nonprofit was designed to help.

    • Cyber bill’s final language likely to anger privacy advocates

      Digital rights advocates are in an uproar as the final text of a major cybersecurity bill appears to lack some of the privacy community’s favored clauses.

      In the last few weeks, House and Senate negotiators have been working unofficially to reach a compromise between multiple versions of a cyber bill that would encourage businesses to share more data on hacking threats with the government.

    • Obama calls on tech giants to fight ISIS

      President could be referring to encryption debate

    • Government can’t find big needle in small haystack

      Since Edward Snowden revealed the federal government’s unlawful and unconstitutional use of federal statutes to justify spying on all in America all the time, including the members of Congress who unwittingly wrote and passed the statutes, I have been arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits all domestic spying, except that which has been authorized by a search warrant issued by a judge. The same amendment also requires that warrants be issued only based on a serious level of individualized suspicion backed up by evidence — called probable cause — and the warrants must specifically identify the place and person to be spied upon.

    • AP’s Ted Bridis Fact Checks His Own Bogus Claims, Now Being Repeated By Others, Admitting They’re False

      Earlier this week, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous Associated Press story by reporter Ted Bridis, claiming that law enforcement investigating the San Bernardino shootings are being somehow held back because of the close of the NSA’s Section 215 phone records program. There were all sorts of problems with that story, so it’s great to see the Associated Press ask one of its enterprising young reporters — a guy who goes by the name Ted Bridis — to do a “fact check” piece on Republican Presidential candidates who are now repeating the very claims that Bridis himself made earlier in the week.

    • What the NSA Should Have Been
    • Edward Snowden to speak at CU via video chat

      Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist will moderate the February 16 event from the Macky Auditorium. Attendees will be able to ask Snowden questions, but details about that process have not been released.

    • Jesse Ventura: NSA Violates the Constitution

      The FBI has used a secretive authority to compel Internet and telecommunications firms to hand over customer data including an individual’s complete web browsing history and records of all online purchases, a court filing shows.

      The NSA is violating the Fourth Amendment: Reasonable search and seizure. They’re providing none. They have no reasonable warrant to do this.

    • The Online Habits That Trigger NSA Spying

      TOR is an encryption network developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the 1990s. The military’s hope was to enable government workers to search the web without exposing their locations and identities. The system today is widely available, runs on open-source code, and is popular among privacy advocates as a more secure alternative to open Internet surfing, particularly in countries with repressive regimes. It works by encrypting the user’s address and routing the traffic through servers that are located around the world (so-called “onion routing.”) How does the NSA access it? Through a computer system called XKeyscore, one of the various agency surveillance tools that NSA leaker Edward Snowden disclosed last summer.

    • * Obama Speech Translated * AP’s NSA “Propaganda”

      Wheeler writes widely about the legal aspects of the “war on terror” and its effects on civil liberties. She blogs at emptywheel.net. She just wrote the piece “6 Responses to Why the AP’s Call Record Article Is So Stupid,” about the NSA’s monitoring of San Bernardino shooting suspect Tashfeen Malik which states: “The AP engaged in willful propaganda yesterday, in what appears to be a planned cutout role for the Marco Rubio campaign. Rubio’s campaign immediately pointed to the article to make claims they know — or should, given that Rubio is on the Senate Intelligence Committee — to be false, relying on the AP article. That’s the A1 cutout method Dick Cheney used to make false claims about aluminum tubes to catastrophic effect back in 2002.

    • Edward Snowden Would Rather Play Fallout 4 Than Correct AP Journalists

      The takeaway from the AP story is that investigators lost out on the NSA’s phone record dragnet when one of the NSA’s bulk collection programs expired, which would have allowed them to access five years of phone records on shooters Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Now, the AP story implies, they’re stuck obtaining records directly from phone companies under the USA Freedom Act.

    • Paul: ‘If Rubio Were Doing His Job’ He’d Know NSA Program Was Active Last 6 Months

      Host Chuck Todd said, “Senator, respond to something Marco Rubio said. He said the following a week ago, ‘We were still able to see the phone records of a potential terrorist cause, we held them, now you have to hope the phone company still has them, you have to argue with their chief counsel by the time you get access to it and find out who they’ve been talking to before it’s too late.’ You were on the forefront of trying to change this law. Any second thoughts?”

    • Senator Rand Paul: NSA program failed to prevent terror

      Kentucky Senator Rand Paul says the US National Security Agency’s program of collecting US citizens’ phone metadata has failed to thwart terrorist attacks or help detain criminals as had been claimed by the United States authorities.

    • Paul: ‘Authoritarians’ like Christie want to reinstate data collection
    • Paul: Christie is an ‘authoritarian’
    • Paul slams ‘authoritarian’ Christie over bulk data collection
    • Christie to Congress: Attach Restoration of NSA Program to Spending Bill
    • Rand Paul on NSA Data Collection: Is There Any Limit To What “Authoritarians” Like Chris Christie Will Give Up?
    • Rand Paul: NSA phone-snooping program didn’t prevent any attacks
    • Paul’s Libertarian Support Siphoned Off by Cruz
    • 3 GOP presidential-candidate stooges
    • Christie hits Obama, Congress over NSA surveillance
    • NSA bulk collection of phone records ended, or did it?

      Nov. 29 was the deadline for the end of NSA bulk collection of telephone records as established by the USA Freedom Act six months ago. This ended the Patriot Act, revealed by Edward Snowden, to have been the authority used to collect the bulk phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans, a certain big government invasion of privacy, which incensed civil libertarians. Libertarians and Constitutionalists, on Fourth Amendment concerns, led by Sen. Rand Paul brought the demise of the hated Patriot Act. This ends government surveillance of its citizens. Or does it?

      The USA Freedom Act called for a six-month transition period allowing NSA to continue bulk collection as before, but at its end NSA must only access targeted data from telephone providers with judicial approval. Unfortunately for Constitutionalists it, like its predecessor the Patriot Act, nullifies the 4th Amendment requirement of “probable cause” and thus is as unconstitutional as the law it replaced.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay Founder: ‘I Have Given Up’

        “The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.”

      • UK to Lengthen Copyright on Works of Artistic Craftsmanship

        The United Kingdom is holding a consultation as to when a provision of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 should take effect. Copyright in works of artistic craftsmanship—utilitarian objects (even if mass-produced) which are deemed artistic—shall be extended. Currently, the copyright lasts for 25 years after an item is first offered for sale; the new term will be for the life of the creator, then another 70 years. This means that some works which are now in the public domain will become copyrighted. Publishers of derivative works of such items, for example a book or film in which a work of artistic craftsmanship was photographed, will be obliged to obtain permissions, except for uses which fall under fair dealing.

      • Pirate Gets a Million YouTube Views, Everybody Benefits

        A pirate ordered to get 200,000 YouTube views or risk getting sued by companies including Microsoft has smashed his target. Against the odds Jakub F’s anti-piracy video now has more than a million views. Could it be that everyone involved – from corporations to pirates – have benefited from this exercise?

12.12.15

Links 12/12/2015: Mozilla Funds for FOSS, Rust 1.5

Posted in News Roundup at 10:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Time has come for an ‘honorable retreat’ from Tokyo 2020 over Fukushima

    Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

    Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

    Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?Let me begin this message by offering you my sincerest condolences. Condolences for what? For the death of the belief that a trouble-free 2020 Tokyo Olympics would serve to showcase Japan’s economic revival.

    Up to this point, the exact opposite has been the case, due to the scrapping of plans for a very expensive new National Stadium, the scuttling of the Olympic logo amid charges of plagiarism and newspaper headlines alleging, for example, that “Japan’s Olympics fiascoes point to outmoded, opaque decision-making.” Even more recently, Japan sports minister Hakubun Shimomura offered to resign over the Olympic stadium row.

    Among these developments, the charge alleging “outmoded, opaque decision-making” is perhaps the most troubling of all, because it suggests that both of the major setbacks the 2020 Olympics has encountered are systemic in nature, not merely one-off phenomena. If correct, this indicates that similar setbacks are likely to occur in the future. But how many setbacks can the 2020 Olympics endure?

  • Typo in case-sensitive variable name cooked Google’s cloud

    Google has admitted that incorrectly typing the name of a case-sensitive variable cooked its cloud.

    Users of the Alphabet subsidiary’s Google Container Engine customers “could not create external load balancers for their services for a duration of 21 hours and 38 min” on December 8th and 9th.

  • On the unreasonable reality of “junior” developer interviews

    Let’s not torture our junior developers by forcing them to do the programming equivalent of making high school students studying the Catcher in the Rye and the Scarlet Letter. Let’s talk to them like humans who are writing software. Let’s find out whether or not they’re open to learning, good at communicating, and people we’d like to work with every day.

  • Cyberbullying: Chubb offers UK ‘troll’ insurance against digital threats

    Cyberbullying has been a long-standing problem in the online community. Wrapped under the guise of anonymity, some individuals will launch hate campaigns against others rather than confront them in the physical realm, whether it be Facebook messaging and posts, tweets or campaigns designed to smear their reputation.

  • Hardware

    • Virtually there: the hard reality of the Gear VR

      But when the holidays are over, what will happen to the Gear VR? Is the headset a novelty or, as many of its developers and fans suggest, the start of a new medium? Once you’ve given everyone you know five minutes of virtual reality, is there much left to do? I’m not sure there is yet — and I’m not sure when that will change.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • GMO Toxins Endanger Human Health

      GMOs’ toxins put your health at risk, according to plant biologist Jonathan Latham. As Latham reports, many genetically modified plants are engineered to contain their own insecticides. These GMOs, which include maize, cotton and soybeans, are called Bt plants. Bt plants get their name because they incorporate a transgene that makes a protein-based toxin (usually called the Cry toxin) from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. (The term “cry toxin” comes from the crystal proteins that form the toxin.) Many Bt crops are “stacked,” meaning they contain a multiplicity of these Cry toxins. Bacillus thuringiensis is all but indistinguishable from the well known anthrax bacterium

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Petraeus Recommends Using Al Qaeda Fighters to Defeat ISIS

      The United States’ relationship with Al Qaeda could be closer than corporate media might lead you to believe. In August 2015 retired CIA chief David Petraeus openly called for recruiting so-called moderate members of Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra to fight ISIS in Syria. Despite corporate media reiterating the message that Al Qaeda is an enemy terrorist group, the CIA and US military leadership continue to discuss using Al Qaeda as a tool for their own military objectives. As Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef report, Petraeus called for recruiting members of the Nusra Front, which opposes the Syrian government, to help the US combat ISIS.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Indonesia’s forest fires: everything you need to know

      As satellite data of the fire hotspots shows, forest fires have affected the length and breadth of Indonesia. Among the worst hit areas are southern Kalimantan (Borneo) and western Sumatra. The fires have been raging since July, with efforts to extinguish them hampered by seasonal dry conditions exacerbated by the El Nino effect. As well as Indonesia, the acrid haze from the fires is engulfing neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore and has reached as far as southern Thailand.

    • VIDEO: Here’s Why Fox News Is Wrong To Dismiss The Link Between Climate Change And Terrorism

      Fox News pundits have spent much of the past year mocking and dismissing comments by President Obama, Democratic presidential candidates and others who have described the connection that climate change has to terrorism and the rise of the jihadist group ISIS. But as world leaders strive for an ambitious agreement at the conclusion of the United Nations climate change conference in Paris — the site of horrific terrorist attacks by ISIS in November — it’s more important than ever that Americans and people around the world recognize the relationship between global warming and global security.

    • Fires in Indonesia: Perspective from the Ground

      I live in the Ketapang district of West Kalimantan. We had some serious fires here, but it wasn’t as bad as in Central Kalimantan, which was basically the epicenter of the disaster. Breathing the smoke wasn’t pleasant, and I didn’t dare open a window or a door in my house because it would just permeate everything.

      The smoke also seriously disrupted some of my travel plans. There were no flights into or out of my town for at least a month, so we had to rely on boats or long-distance travel by car.

      The smoke also disrupted my work. I do lot in the community and in schools, but September and October were quiet months for us because the schools were not in session. It was too dangerous for students. Adults were not available to participate in our conservation activities and meetings because they either had to stay in the field and guard their crops from fire, or didn’t want to be outside more then necessary.

    • 6 locations where groundwater is vanishing

      Groundwater is disappearing beneath cornfields in Kansas, rice paddies in India, asparagus farms in Peru and orange groves in Morocco. These are stories about people on four continents confronting questions of how to safeguard their aquifers for the future – and in some cases, how to cope as the water runs out.

  • Finance

    • Exposing One of the Largest Accounting Scandals in American History

      New Networks Institute just released two reports in a new series, “Fixing Telecommunications”. It is based on mostly public, but unexamined information that exposes one of the largest financial accounting scandals in American history. It impacts all wireline and wireless phone, broadband, Internet and even cable TV/video services, and it continues today with impunity.

      Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, and other large telephone companies have been able to manipulate their financial accounting to make the local phone networks and services look unprofitable and have used this ‘fact’ in many public policy and regulatory decisions that benefited the incumbent telecommunications utilities.

      But the core of this scandal, which we dubbed the “FCC’s Big Freeze”, is so bizarre that no one would believe it if it was detailed in some thriller about financial chicanery. I’ll get to this in a moment.

    • Satoshi’s PGP Keys Are Probably Backdated and Point to a Hoax

      On Tuesday, both Wired and Gizmodo dropped a big bombshell: According to “leaked” (Wired) or “hacked” (Gizmodo) documents, the real Satoshi Nakamoto is…. Craig Steven Wright.

      Uh, who? one might ask. It’s a good question. Until now, Wright hasn’t pinged very many people’s radars as a potential Satoshi Nakamoto. On the other hand, Wright is indeed considered an expert on Bitcoin—in fact, he appeared on a panel with other possible-Satoshi Nick Szabo this year at the Bitcoin Investor Conference.

      Both Wired and Gizmodo outline Wright’s qualifications and accomplishments in detail, aside from pointing to emails and other documents that seem to nail Wright as once-and-future Bitcoin king Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • CETA’s Festering Wound: Corporate Sovereignty

      Remember CETA, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between Canada and the EU? Even though the text was “celebrated” back in October 2014, it is still not ready to be presented for possible ratification. As Techdirt has been covering, it’s pretty clear that the problem area is the corporate sovereignty chapter, because of concerns about the huge power it grants to Canadian (and US) corporations. First there were hints that Angela Merkel wanted the so-called “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) mechanism changed. Then France said the same — twice. Most recently, the EU commissioner responsible for trade and trade agreements, Cecilia Malmström, indicated that it wouldn’t be possible re-open the corporate sovereignty chapter, or to move away from “classic” ISDS to the re-branded version known as the Investment Court System (ICS), which the European Commission is pushing in an attempt to head off growing opposition to the whole idea.

    • ‘A Woman’s Ability to Pay Her Bills Should Not Be Dependent on the Whims of Customers’

      Janine Jackson: “The truth of the matter is this is a big deal,” says Simon King, the general manager of The Modern, a high-end restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. He is referring to the decision by Danny Meyer, owner of The Modern and many other restaurants, to phase out what the New York Times called “the time-honored American practice” of tipping.

    • On-demand workers unite online to fight Uber and the gig economy

      IT WAS a strike, but not as we know it. At midnight on 1 December, about 100 workers in New York City logged out of the Uber app on their phones in protest over a pay cut at UberRUSH, a delivery service run by the ride-sharing giant. One post on the Facebook page they created to rally the strike and list their demands read: “All we are asking is that Uber treats us fairly.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • BBC Bias

      I am involved quite extensively in the making of what I believe to be a valuable independent documentary. It is based on George Ponsonby’s excellent book London Calling, and has the working title How the BBC Stole the Referendum. We have already done a few hours filming of my contribution.

    • Jon Stewart And Stephen Colbert Mock Media For Its Trump Coverage On The Late Show

      On the December 10 edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert reunited to lament the media’s extensive coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Colbert told Stewart that “the media won’t pay attention to anything … unless you are Donald Trump” and that if he wanted the media to pay attention to serious issues, he would have to “Trump it up.” Stewart appeared on the show to urge Congress to pass the Zadroga Act, which provides health care funding and compensation for the first responders to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Recently the media has been called out for its “wall-to-wall” Trump coverage, especially of his unconstitutional plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

    • After San Bernardino, Some Reporters ‘Poke Around’–While Others Follow the Money

      Some would say Columbia Journalism Review put it mildly, referring to the events of December 4 as an “unbecoming media frenzy in San Bernardino.” That was the sight of dozens of TV crew members from MSNBC and CNN trampling through the home of alleged killers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, rifling through whatever they came across, holding it up for the camera and guessing about its meaning.

      Sample commentary from MSNBC‘s Kerry Sanders: “Come over here, you can see the baby’s toys. We have really quite a number of toys.” Sanders proceeded to show millions of viewers various photographs, we don’t know of whom, and for good measure, the driver’s license of Farook’s mother, including identifying information like her address.

  • Censorship

    • Citizens triumph in Nigerian digital rights battle

      This week the will of Nigerian citizens triumphed over a threat to the free and open Web. The recently proposed “Bill for an Act to Prohibit Frivolous Petitions and Other Matters Connected there-with”, popularly known as the “Social Media Bill”, sought to restrict free expression by making it illegal to start any type of petition without swearing an affidavit that the content is true in a court of law.

    • YouTube blocks Japanese contributors’ content for refusing to use its paid version

      Not everyone was sold. ESPN has pulled all of its content from YouTube due to what a YouTube spokesperson called “rights and legal issues.” At least EPSN got to choose. YouTube has said that companies that do not sign off on YouTube RED will find their videos unavailable to viewers. And it’s keeping that promise, blocking a huge swath of Japanese artists from U.S. fans.

    • Lucasfilm Uses DMCA to Kill Star Wars Toy Picture

      Star Wars: The Force Awakens has gone into an early and bizarre anti-piracy overdrive. Earlier this week a fansite posted an image of a ‘Rey’ action figure legally bought in Walmart but it was taken down by Facebook and Twitter following a DMCA notice. Meanwhile, webhosts are facing threats of legal action.

    • Couple takes pics of Star Wars figure they bought, gets DMCA notice from Lucasfilm

      or the last decade, Marjorie Carvalho and her husband have produced Star Wars Action News, a podcast dedicated to Star Wars collectibles of all sorts. Predictably, they’ve had a lot to talk about, as waves of action figures and other collectibles have been launched in the run-up to the much-anticipated release of Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens next week.

      On Tuesday, a Star Wars Action News staffer saw something he shouldn’t have—and bought it. A 3 3/4″ action figure of “Rey,” a female character from The Force Awakens, was on display in a Walmart in Iowa, apparently earlier than it should have been. The staff member bought it for $6.94 plus tax, no questions asked. The following day, he posted pictures of the Rey figure on Star Wars Action News’ Facebook page.

    • Disney drops—then doubles down on—DMCA claim over Star Wars figure pic

      A Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent by the Walt Disney Company earlier this week seems to have truly awakened The Force, and now the company can’t seem to decide if it wants to be on the light side or the dark side.

      Marjorie and Arnie Carvalho run Star Wars Action News, a podcast about Star Wars collectibles. Earlier this week, SW Action News staffer Justin Kozisek purchased an action figure of “Rey” in an Iowa Walmart. The figure, which hasn’t been seen elsewhere, was presumably put on the shelves by accident ahead of its official release date. An image of the figure was posted on the SW Action News Facebook page—and promptly subjected to a wave of DMCA takedown demands by Lucasfilm. Many of those who had spread the image on social media were also subject to copyright claims.

    • Search Engines Need Regulating to Reduce Piracy, Russia Says

      Russian telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor says it will create a working group to look into the regulation of search engine results. The move is part of a package of initiatives designed to make pirated content harder to find. Also on the table are discussions on how to make anti-piracy techniques less prone to circumvention.

    • Resistance to Wyoming’s Unconstitutional Data Trespass Law

      In March 2015, Wyoming legislators passed a law that makes it illegal to report environmental hazards to the general public or to state officials. Senate Bill 12, “Trespassing to Collect Data,” makes it illegal to “collect resource data” from any “open land,” meaning any land outside of a city or town, whether the land is federal, state, or privately owned. As Justin Pidot and Deirdre Fulton reported, the controversial law protects the interests of private land owners by making it illegal for people to take photographs, sample soils, test water, or to take any kind of environmental data from any private, public or federal land outside of city limits.

  • Privacy

    • The Investigatory Powers Bill: PR myth list

      In the weeks since the Investigatory Powers Bill was officially released, we’ve seen a lot of Government PR. They are trying their best to assure us that we have nothing to be worried about, but we’re not convinced.

    • WaPo’s Excellent Explainer On Encryption Debunks WaPo’s Stupid Editorial In Favor Of Encryption Backdoors

      Washington Post reporter Andrea Peterson has put together a really excellent explainer piece on what you should know about encryption. Considering the source, it’s a good “general knowledge” explainer piece for people who really aren’t that aware of encryption or technically savvy. That’s important and useful, given how important this debate is and how many participants in it don’t seem to understand the first thing about encryption.

    • Driver Leaves Scene Of Accident, Gets Turned In By Her Car

      It’s no secret today’s vehicles collect tons of data. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be a secret. It certainly isn’t well-known, despite even some of the latest comers to the tech scene — legislators — having questioned automakers about their handling of driver data.

      More than one insurance company will offer you a discount if you allow them to track your driving habits. Employers have been known to utilize “black boxes” in company vehicles. These days, the tech is rarely even optional, although these “event data recorders” generally only report back to the manufacturers themselves. Consumer-oriented products like OnStar combine vehicle data with GPS location to contact law enforcement/medical personnel if something unexpected happens. Drivers can trigger this voluntarily to seek assistance when stranded on the road because of engine trouble, flat tires, etc.

    • FBI admits it uses stingrays, zero-day exploits

      The FBI’s secrecy surrounding stingrays has been well documented. And the controversy over the use of zero-days by governments has also generated its share of headlines. Both issues are controversial, in part because they have the potential to harm vast numbers of people who aren’t suspected of committing any crime. That’s because stingrays generally intercept all cell phone communications in a given area, not just those of a drug or kidnapping suspect. Paying large sums of money to buy zero-days, meanwhile, creates powerful incentives for governments to keep the underlying vulnerabilities secret. FBI officials have long attempted to distance themselves from such topics. Today, they inched slightly closer.

    • On the CCA (in)security of MTProto

      Telegram is a popular messaging app which supports end-to-end encrypted communication. In Spring 2015 we performed an audit of Telegram’s source code. This short paper summarizes our findings.

      Our main discovery is that the symmetric encryption scheme used in Telegram — known as MTProto — is not IND-CCA secure, since it is possible to turn any ciphertext into a different ciphertext that decrypts to the same message.

      We stress that this is a theoretical attack on the definition of security and we do not see any way of turning the attack into a full plaintext-recovery attack. At the same time, we see no reason why one should use a less secure encryption scheme when more secure (and at least as efficient) solutions exist.

      The take-home message (once again) is that well-studied, provably secure encryption schemes that achieve strong definitions of security (e.g., authenticated-encryption) are to be preferred to home-brewed encryption schemes.

    • FBI Admits To Using Zero Day Exploits To Hack Into Computers

      It’s been widely suspected for ages that both the NSA and the FBI made use of so-called “zero-day” exploits to hack into computers. Leaks from a few years ago (which may or may not have come from Snowden) exposed just how massive the NSA’s exploit operation was, and there have been plenty of stories of security companies selling exploits to the NSA, who would use them, rather than reveal them and get them patched — thereby putting the public at risk. Last year, the President told the NSA to get better at revealing these zero day exploits to companies to patch, rather than hoarding them for their own use. Just about a month ago, the NSA proudly announced that it now discloses vulnerabilities 90% of the time — but conveniently left out how long it uses them before disclosing them.

    • Lofgren questions DHS policy towards TOR Relays

      Today, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) released a letter expressing her concern with news reports indicating an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent enlisted local law enforcement to pressure a New Hampshire public library into disabling its Tor relay.

      The letter, addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, notes that the Tor network is used by journalists, activists, dissidents, intelligence sources, and other privacy concerned individuals to keep their web browsing private, and the network receives significant funding through government grants.

    • Comey Calls on Tech Companies Offering End-to-End Encryption to Reconsider “Their Business Model”

      FBI Director James Comey on Wednesday called for tech companies currently offering end-to-end encryption to reconsider their business model, and instead adopt encryption techniques that allow them to intercept and turn over communications to law enforcement when necessary.

      End-to-end encryption, which is the state of the art in providing secure communications on the internet, has become increasingly common and desirable in the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance by the government.

    • Obama to clarify his stance on encryption by the holidays

      The Obama administration plans to clarify its stance on strong encryption before Washington shuts down for the holidays.

      Administration officials met Thursday with the civil-society groups behind a petition urging the White House to back strong, end-to-end encryption over the objections of some law-enforcement and intelligence professionals.

    • Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users

      Documents reveal donor-funded US startup embedded in Republican’s campaign paid UK university academics to collect psychological profiles on potential voters

      Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal.

      A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.

    • Facebook for Work is almost upon us

      HUNGRY DATA HIPPO Facebook has promised to launch the work version of its time-wasting solution very soon.

      The firm reckons that the time blight will hit worker desktops in the next few months and will not be used for things like crushing candy or, presumably, assessing the global cat situation.

      Reuters is first with the news, hot from Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships at Facebook, who explained that the system is very much like the consumer version, except it is designed to make users more productive. This means no crap apps or gimmicky gewgaws but a lot of the other crap that you might have come to expect.

    • Tor Hires a New Leader to Help It Combat the War on Privacy

      The Tor Project is entering a crucial phase in its nearly 10-year existence. In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, it has assumed a higher profile in the world of privacy and security than ever before. But it’s also come under increased attack by governments out to demonize it, and by law enforcement and intelligence agencies out to crack it and unmask its anonymous users.

    • FBI on Encryption: ‘It’s A Business Model Question’

      Now that encryption has been elevated to a default technology on mobile devices, the government has heightened its “Going Dark” rhetoric, again on Wednesday insisting during a Senate Judicial Committee hearing that Silicon Valley figure out how to deliver plain-text communication between criminal and terror suspects to law enforcement.

    • Government, Can You Hear Me Now? Cell-site Simulators Aren’t Secret Anymore

      Digital analyzer. IMSI catcher. Stingray. Triggerfish. Dirt box. Cell-site simulator. The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But no matter what name cell-site simulators go by, whether they are in the hands of the government or malicious thieves, there’s no question that they’re a serious threat to privacy.

  • Civil Rights

    • NYT Rewrites Scalia to Make Him Sound Less Racist

      This is not a person talking about a subset of blacks with a particular kind of educational background; taking his words at face value, this is a person asserting that African-Americans as a whole belong in “lesser schools” that are not “too fast for them.” (Or that “there are those who contend” that that is the case, if you want to give Scalia credit for that circumlocution.)

      The fact that a Supreme Court justice justifies eliminating affirmative action on the basis of openly racist views ought to be big news. By sugarcoating what Scalia actually said, the New York Times disguises that news–making the ethnic cleansing of America’s top schools a more palatable possibility. Perhaps that shouldn’t make me gasp.

    • Global Refugee Crisis Reaches 60 Million

      According to the United Nations’ High Commission on Refugees Global Trends Report: World at War, published in June 2015, sixty million people worldwide are now refugees due to conflict in their home nations. One in every 122 people is considered a refugee, internally displaced, or an asylum seeker. Those individuals come from almost every continent. Parts of Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa all have massive numbers of people who are trying to flee. Millions of people are on the move or hiding in the fringes of society to keep from being persecuted and harmed.

    • Glenn Beck Compares Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban To Hitler
    • Is Donald Trump a 2016 Manchurian candidate?

      The Republican presidential hopeful’s views are getting more and more extreme. Perhaps, as Salman Rushdie suggested, there’s more going on than meets the eye

    • Court Says Constitutional Violations By Law Enforcement Are Perfectly Fine As Long As They Happen Quickly

      As long as the stop isn’t extended for too long (a wholly arbitrary length decided on a case-by-case basis during suppression hearings/civil rights lawsuits), cops are pretty much free to stop and search any driver for any reason. And even if they’re completely wrong every step of the way, there’s a good chance the “good faith exception” will excuse their misdeeds. (For everything else, there’s qualified immunity.)

    • Bassel Khartabil: fears for man who brought open internet to the Arab world

      Syria never had a hackerspace until Bassel Khartabil – known online as Bassel Safadi – started Aiki Lab in Damascus in 2010. The Palestinian-Syrian open-source software developer used it as a base from which to advance the free software and free culture movements in his country. Because of Khartabil’s work, people gained new tools to express themselves and communicate.

      Writing to the vice president of the European commission in 2013, MEPs Charles Tannock and Ana Gomes summed up Khartabil’s contributions as “opening up the internet in Syria – a country with a notorious record of online censorship” and “vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people”. Among his awards included the 2013 Index on Censorship Digital Freedom Award for using technology to promote an open and free internet.

    • Massive Sexting Case Shockingly Results In No Criminal Charges

      Given what we’ve seen in other (and much smaller) sexting cases — where sex offender laws have been twisted to cover consensual interactions between adolescents — the district attorney’s decision to put control of the situation back in parents’ hands is a surprise. It will no doubt be the exception that proves the rule.

      The instinctual reaction to bring law enforcement into the equation is understandable and, admittedly, there are aspects of sexting that may require this sort of scrutiny. The problem is that prosecutors often feel compelled to find something to charge sexting participants with, if only to justify the expenditure of law enforcement resources. This leads to preposterous (and potentially life-damaging) outcomes like teens being charged with exploiting themselves by taking photos of their own bodies and sharing them with others.

    • Twitter Told a Bunch of Users They May Be Targets of a ‘State Sponsored Attack’

      The attack is currently being investigated by Twitter. In their notice to users, Twitter said that the attack only impacted usernames, IP address, email addresses, and phone numbers if a phone number was associated with the account. Twitter did not say which state was implicated—it could have been China, Russia, or even the US.

      I spoke to a number of Twitter users who received the notice. A couple are engaged in activism and are connected to the Tor Project in some capacity. A few are located in Canada, and vaguely associated with the security community at large. However, I could not determine any common factors between all recipients. They all received the notice around the same time, between 5:15 and 5:16 PM EST.

    • Jamie Kalven on the Laquan McDonald Cover-Up

      This week on CounterSpin: There are calls for the resignation of Chicago Mayor (and former Obama chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel—stemming from the city’s 13-month cover-up of video that belied the official story of the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. That video, along with an autopsy that also showed police’s initial story to be false, eventually came to light through the work of journalists—but not mainstream journalists; it was independent reporters, including our guest, who stepped in to force the police department and the city to acknowledge not only what happened on the night of October 20, 2014—when officer Jason Van Dyke put 16 bullets into the body of a boy who posed him no harm—but what happened after, as institutional forces came together to keep the truth from the public.

    • Salvadoran Women Imprisoned for Miscarriages

      In El Salvador an unexpected pregnancy loss has been declared unconstitutional and criminal. The law that has been in place since 1998 prohibits abortions in the country regardless of the situation. The penal code does no take into account if the mother’s life or the baby’s life is in danger; it is all abortion. The purpose of this law is to give the embryonic human a right to life. If any expectant mother happens to break this law regardless of the situation, she can be sentenced to 2-8 years in prison, and the medical professionals assisting the women can serve 6-12 years in prison. In some more severe cases, a woman can be charged with aggravated homicide if it is believed that the fetus could have been able to reach life successfully.

    • Ingraham: “I’d Go Farther” Than Trump’s Plan To Ban Muslims From Entering The US And “Do A Pause On All Immigration”
    • New York Teens Often Isolated in Adult Prisons

      New York and North Carolina are the only two states in the US that prosecute sixteen and seventeen year old teenagers in the justice system as adults. This is a crucial issue because in other states these teens are sent to juvenile facilities where they are held in more appropriate environments, given their ages. Young teens in adult prisons are often forced into solitary confinement, which can be severely, psychologically and physically damaging.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • “The more bits you use, the more you pay”: Comcast CEO justifies data caps

      While Comcast doesn’t actually cut people off the Internet when they hit their 300GB-per-month data limits, customers do get charged an additional $10 for each 50GB used. Customers can also pay an extra $30 or $35 per month for unlimited data, depending on where they live. Comcast, the nation’s largest home Internet provider, has implemented the data caps in many cities but hasn’t rolled them out to its entire territory yet. “We’re just trialling ways to have a balanced relationship,” Roberts said. “You can watch hundreds of shows and movies and other things before you hit these levels, many devices, but I don’t think it’s illogical or something people should be paranoid about… it’s not that different than other industries.”

    • Comcast CEO Defends Caps: Claims Broadband’s Like Gasoline

      Comcast CEO Brian Roberts was forced to defend the company’s expansion of usage caps this week at an industry conference. As most of you know, Comcast has been imposing usage caps of 300 GB on the company’s customers. Users then have the option of either paying $10 per every 50 GB consumed, or paying $30 to $35 to enjoy the same unlimited service many of these users literally enjoyed only just yesterday.

  • DRM

    • Ecuador Likely To Legalize DRM Circumvention In The Exercise Of Fair Use Rights — Something TPP Will Block

      Eighteen months ago, Mike wrote about the DMCA being abused to censor stories in an Ecuadorian newspaper that someone in the government there apparently didn’t want out in the open. But Boing Boing points us to a post by Andrés Delgado from a few weeks back which offers hope that some good things could be happening in Ecuador in the field of copyright.

    • Thirteen Year Legacy: Last.fm Downfall?

      Last.fm is a web service for users to track and share their music tastes with friends in an easy, simple way. A single play of a song is known as a “Scrobble”. Listening to music and recording the listen with Last.fm is known as “Scrobbling”. This is a service that has existed since 2002, originally under the name of Audioscrobbler. In 2015, Last.fm rolled out their new website beta, originally optional, but later forced upon all users.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • UK Throws A Copyright Crumb: Confirms That Digitized Copies Of Public Domain Images Are In The Public Domain

        A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about a German museum suing Wikimedia over photos of public domain objects that were in its collection. We mentioned there was a related situation in the UK, where the National Portrait Gallery in London had threatened a Wikimedia developer for using photos of objects that were clearly in the public domain. Mike pointed out that in the US, the Bridgeman v. Corel case established that photographs of public domain images do not carry any copyright, since they do not add any new expression. In a rare bit of good news, noted by Communia, the UK Intelllectual Property Office has just announced officially that it takes the same view…

      • Canadian Govt Eyes VPN Pirates, Netflix Thieves and ISP Blocking

        New Government documents have shed some light on the future agenda points for online copyright enforcement. In a briefing for minister Mélanie Joly, officials from the Department of Canadian Heritage mention VPN pirates and website blocking as emerging issues and pressures.

      • On the Fringe: David Elston, Pirate Party UK

        Pirate Party UK is our first brave volunteer as we explore the fringe movements campaigning against the dominance of the Westminster parties in British politics.

        Speaking to the deputy leader David Elston, newly elected as part of a leadership change following the general election, we delve into what the Pirates stand for, why authenticity is a new force in campaigning, and what effect Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is having on smaller parties.

      • ‘Happy Birthday’ Copyright Case Reaches a Settlement

        After more than two years of litigation, “Happy Birthday to You” — often called the most popular song in the world, but one that has long been under copyright — is one step closer to joining the public domain.

      • Parties celebrate as ‘Happy Birthday’ copyright dispute settled

        A copyright lawsuit centring on the song “Happy Birthday to You” has been settled out of court.

        Music publisher Warner/Chappell and a group of documentary makers, who had been disputing ownership of the song for more than two years, settled the dispute yesterday, December 9.

        Details of the settlement have not been disclosed.

12.10.15

Links 10/12/2015: Many New Kernels, Mesa 11.0.7, elementary OS 0.3.2, PINE 64

Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 open source tools for making music

    Do you think music software is only the domain of expensive proprietary software? Think again. There are literally hundreds of applications out there designed by, and for, those with a musical bent. Music projects, including many projects specifically for the Linux operating system, flourish in the open source community as musicians take to coding to produce tools to make their lives easier.

  • World’s Fastest Password Cracking Tool Hashcat Is Now Open Source

    The world’s fastest cracking tool Hashcat is now open source. The company has called it a very important step and listed out the reasons that inspired them to take this step.

  • Hashcat advanced password recovery now open source

    Steube said that many of these researchers can’t reveal the exact changes they would need to make due to non-disclosure agreements (NDA) so making the software open source allows them to make the changes themselves.

  • Apache Advances Open Source Kylin for OLAP-on-Hadoop

    Just over a year after being open sourced by creator eBay Inc., the Kylin project — a Big Data distributed analytics engine — has been advanced by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to top-level status.

    Apache Kylin is designed to provide a SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Apache Hadoop, with support for extremely large datasets.

  • Act now to rebuild trust in the code controlling everyday stuff

    AMID the ongoing fallout over the software in some Volkswagen cars that was able to cheat emissions tests, the public may well be pondering a wider question: can we trust the software in the gadgets we use every day? If a car’s software can deceive, what might our devices be programmed to do that is not in our interests?

    Some TVs and fridges already stand accused of manipulating energy efficiency tests. But software can’t just be used to make beating such tests easier. It also makes it easier to lock consumers into proprietary systems and raises suspicions of planned obsolescence.

    Whenever devices go online, manufacturers (and others) gain the ability to invade privacy: recall Samsung’s TVs with voice recognition that also happened to gather private conversations.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS Pivot to Connected Devices

        Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us.

      • The Firefox OS smartphone is dead

        The Firefox OS smartphone has been discontinued by Mozilla. This comes as no real surprise, given the intense competition in the smartphone market and the domination of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android phones.

      • Mozilla Launches Free Ad Blocker for iOS 9

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • Licensing

    • Silly questions about telephony

      Question two. From a GNU/Linux PC, I want the capability to connect to a USA cell phone network and make a voice call to an old-school 9600 bps landline audio modem, and have serial comms with this landline audio modem.

    • Parallels Between Code of Conducts and Copyleft (and their objectors)

      The question is, is this an objection to copyleft, or is it an objection to code of conducts? I’ve seen objections raised to both that go along these lines. I think there’s little coincidence, since both of them are objections to added process which define (and provide enforcement mechanisms for) doing the right thing.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • bq Witbox 2 Open Source 3D Printer Launches For €1,690

        Being open source all the design files for the Witbox 2 3D Printer can be found over on GitHub via the link below, if you are interested. For more details and specifications on the Witbox 2 Jumbo to the official website via the link below where it is also now available to purchase priced at €1,690.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Symantec: iOS and OS X users face a surge of fresh security threats

      SECURITY FIRM Symantec has warned that the hacker threat to Apple users has reached unprecedented levels.

      The firm reckons that Apple is a victim of its success, becoming a bigger target as its user base grows. To be fair to Apple most of the problem relates to jailbroken devices, which is not a thing that the firm recommends. We have seen incidents recently that make the most of this. The threat applies to mobile software and the desktop.

    • DoS attack brings UK universities to a virtual standstill

      According to the Telegraph newspaper, universities across the country have been hit by DoS attacks. This means in some cases no internet access, and that means students will have to study like it’s 1980 something.

    • U.K. Cops Are Trying to Scare Teen Hackers With House Calls

      It was a summer morning, officer Paul Hastings recalls, when he arrived at a suspected hacker’s house in the northern English city of Hull. There, police had tracked one of the people who’d signed up online for a hacking service called Lizard Stresser that was used to attack companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Sony at the end of 2014. This particularly fearsome cybervigilante was asleep when Hastings knocked, so his dad answered the door.

      The visit was one of about 50 U.K. police made this year to people they say used the Lizard Stresser site, many of them children. The Hull suspect, a teenager, couldn’t have done anything wrong, his dad told Hastings. He spent all his time upstairs, on his computer.

      [...]

      Teen hackers have been pop culture figures since Matthew Broderick starred in WarGames, and the U.K. has a long history with juvenile black hats. In 1994, when U.S. Air Force researchers found an unauthorized user on their systems downloading data, they tracked the hacker to a North London suburb. Working with London police, they found their culprit: a 16-year-old boy in an attic bedroom, as journalist Gordon Corera recounts in Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks

      LE BOURGET, France—Monday began what’s supposed to be the final week of the climate talks, the one where top-level negotiators hammer out an accord to stop the deadly march of global warming. To troll this momentous event, the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute came all the way from Chicago to stage a “counter-conference” at a central Paris venue called, seriously, the Hotel California.

    • How haze-emitting fires have changed the way Indonesia engages with the world

      The recent fires in Indonesia were something of a lightbulb moment for Indonesia in the way it views its development model and the threats from climate change, a senior member of the country’s delegation to the Paris climate talks said on Tuesday.

      It also triggered a rethink of how the country should represent itself at the talks, said Mr Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, chairman of Indonesia’s Advisory Council for Climate Change, and a former environment minister.

      Indonesia has brought about 400 delegates to the talks, a large number by any measure.

      About 80 are directly paid for by the government. The delegation comprises business and opinion leaders, non-governmental organisations, members of local communities and interfaith networks, he told a press conference on the sidelines of the talks.

    • COP21: Indonesian forest fires hot issue for global climate summit

      As 190 nations grapple with the world’s future at the global climate summit in Paris, forest fires in Indonesia have been continuing to rage since July 2015.

      Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2, bumping Indonesia up from sixth largest to fourth largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter in the world, surpassing Russia in a matter of six weeks and the entire US economy in just 38 days. [1]

      Global Forest Watch Fires detected at least 127,000 fires across Indonesia this year, the worst since 1997. These fires were mostly caused by the clearing of forested peat lands to plant palms for oil.

    • Senate Science Committee hearing challenges “dogma” of climate science

      While the eyes of the world are on Paris, where nations are hammering out an agreement to do something about the reality of climate change, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is running for his party’s presidential nomination, convened the hearing titled “Data or dogma? Promoting open inquiry in the debate over the magnitude of human impact on Earth’s climate.”

  • Finance

    • 6 signs greed has destroyed American culture

      The love of money for money’s sake is the social disease of our time. We see it all around us: in the celebration of ill-gotten stock gains, public admiration for the heads of criminal banks, the words of Kanye West, in the commercialization of charity and even spirituality.

      This adoration of wealth isn’t a new thing, of course. When I was in elementary school I was sent to a school counselor for being moody, introspective – in other words, for being either a proto-goth or a writer in the making. I was asked to draw a picture of myself as a happy adult, and the resulting portrait showed a rich man standing beside a Rolls-Royce with an ascot around his neck.

    • 5 BS Myths About Being Poor You Believe Thanks To The Media

      Poor people, right? Visit the “news of the weird” section of a major media site and you’ll find a gauntlet of undesirables engaging in such wacky antics as getting into drunk fistfights at McDonald’s and whatnot. And, in basically all of these cases, what you’re reading barely qualifies as news. It’s Internet rubbernecking and — as far as most news outlets are concerned — anyone below the poverty line is fair game as a source of national amusement (and it’s not unlike similar stunts the news pulls on Asian people and the youths).

  • Privacy

    • Kazakhstan Decides To Break The Internet, Wage All Out War On Encryption

      Starting on January 1, the country of Kazakhstan has formally declared war on privacy, encryption, and a secure Internet. A new law takes effect in the new year that will require all citizens of the country to install a national, government-mandated security certificate allowing the interception of all encrypted citizen communications. In short, the country has decided that it would be a downright nifty idea to break HTTPS and SSL, essentially launching a “man in the middle” attack on every resident of the country.

    • FBI Chief Asks Tech Companies to Stop Offering End-to-End Encryption

      After the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, encryption has once again become a political target in Washington. Despite there still being no solid evidence the attackers benefited from or even used encryption (in at least one case, they coordinated via distinctly unencrypted text messages) law enforcement and national security hawks have used the tragedies to continue pressing tech companies to give the US government access to encrypted communications—even if that means rolling back security and changing the nature of their businesses.

      At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, FBI director James Comey went so far as to suggest that companies providing users with end-to-end encryption might need to simply, well, stop doing that.

      “It’s not a technical issue, it’s a business model question,” said Comey, referring to companies like Apple and WhatsApp which encrypt data so that it can’t be read by any third party, including the companies themselves. “Lots of good people have designed their systems and their devices so that judges’ orders can not be complied with, for reasons that I understand, I’m not questioning their motivations.”

    • How your private emails can spread all over the world

      SNAP. You press the shutter icon on your phone and capture a photo of your baby daughter. With a couple of swipes, you attach it to an email in your Gmail app and fire it off to your mother-in-law.

      As personal data goes, it doesn’t get much more innocuous. But the truth is that spraying around any private information is risky. You might think that’s overblown. As long as you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

      It’s not that simple. Just look at this summer’s hack that exposed the data from Ashley Madison, a site catering for people looking for an affair, and imagine if the same happened with all your emails stored by Google, or your photos on Facebook. Even if you’ve done nothing illegal or immoral, faced with a database of every photograph and comment you’ve ever shared privately, friendships and business deals could dissolve the world over.

    • Palantir Raises $125 Million in New Funding

      Data-analysis company Palantir Technologies has raised $125 million in new funding, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The financing increased the size of the company’s current funding round to about $680 million.

      Palantir, a secretive company co-founded by investor Peter Thiel in 2004, builds software for searching through and analyzing reams of data. Banks, police departments, and intelligence agencies are among the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s customers.

    • Why Yahoo Decided to Keep Its Alibaba Stake

      Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and chairman Maynard Webb appeared on CNBC today to explain why the company’s board of directors decided not to spin off its stake Alibaba.

    • Government and Corporations Are Responsible for Culture of Surveillance

      There is no liberty without privacy. As the culture of surveillance grows, liberty recedes. The New American has reported on many of the threats to privacy that are becoming more and more commonplace. Some Smart TVs are spying on users via their integrated cameras, microphones, and Internet connectivity and then reporting back to the manufacturers, who sell that data to advertisers. Other “Internet of Things” devices have surveillance capabilities that are marketed as features promising convenience to users. Facebook performs social/psychological experiments on its users and also harvests users’ data to sell to advertisers.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright case over “Happy Birthday” is done, trial canceled

        With less than a week to go before a trial, a class-action lawsuit over the copyright status of “Happy Birthday” has been resolved. Details of the settlement, including what kind of uses will be allowed going forward, are not clear.

      • EU Proposal Bans Netflix-Style Geo Blocking and Restrictions

        The European Commission has officially presented its plan to abolish geo-blocking and filtering restrictions across EU member states. The new proposal requires online services to allow users to access their accounts all across Europe, even in countries where it’s officially not available yet.

        [...]

        Ironically, the changes may not always be beneficial. In some cases people use a VPN to access a broader library of films and video in another EU country, which will no longer be possible under the new rules.

12.09.15

Links 9/12/2015: Linux Foundation Endorses PRISM, End for Firefox OS

Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Hardware

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Major Electric Utility Dumps ALEC over Clean Power Plan

      The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has suffered the loss of another major corporate sponsor, the Guardian reported Tuesday, with the electric utility American Electric Power (AEP) announcing it will no longer provide the climate change denial group with funding from 2016.

      AEP becomes the 107th identified corporation to have withdrawn funding since the Center for Media and Democracy launched the ALEC Exposed project in 2011, joining others such as Shell, BP, Google, Microsoft and Facebook.

      The loss of AEP will be particularly troubling for ALEC. AEP lobbyist Paul Loeffelman is still listed on the ALEC website as the private sector chairman for the group’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force. This task force is the arm of ALEC promoting climate change denial to state legislators and driving its anti-environmental agenda, which includes working to block President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and oppose the development of renewable energy in the United States.

    • ‘We’re overrunning the Planet’: Sir David Attenborough’s fears over what the swelling population is doing to his favourite holiday destination – The Great Barrier Reef

      But Sir David has warned that future generations of holidaymakers could soon be unable to enjoy the same experience because of the damage global warming is doing to the reef.

      Speaking at a screening of his new documentary on the reef at Australia House in London last week, he said: ‘The real danger is the rising temperatures and acidity and the effect that has – if the acidity grows to a certain limit it will damage the coral itself.

  • Finance

    • This Australian Says He and His Dead Friend Invented Bitcoin

      A monthlong Gizmodo investigation has uncovered compelling and perplexing new evidence in the search for Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. According to a cache of documents provided to Gizmodo which were corroborated in interviews, Craig Steven Wright, an Australian businessman based in Sydney, and Dave Kleiman, an American computer forensics expert who died in 2013, were involved in the development of the digital currency.

    • Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Is Probably This Unknown Australian Genius

      Even as his face towered 10 feet above the crowd at the Bitcoin Investor’s Conference in Las Vegas, Craig Steven Wright was, to most of the audience of crypto and finance geeks, a nobody.

      The 44-year-old Australian, Skyping into the D Hotel ballroom’s screen, wore the bitcoin enthusiast’s equivalent of camouflage: a black blazer and a tieless, rumpled shirt, his brown hair neatly parted. His name hadn’t made the conference’s list of “featured speakers.” Even the panel’s moderator, a bitcoin blogger named Michele Seven, seemed concerned the audience wouldn’t know why he was there. Wright had hardly begun to introduce himself as a “former academic who does research that no one ever hears about,” when she interrupted him.

    • Reported bitcoin ‘founder’ Craig Wright’s home raided by Australian police

      Police have raided the home of an Australian tech entrepreneur identified by two US publications as one of the early developers of the digital currency bitcoin.

      On Wednesday afternoon, police gained entry to a home belonging to Craig Wright, who had hours earlier been identified in investigations by Gizmodo and Wired, based on leaked transcripts of legal interviews and files. Both publications have indicated that they believe Wright to have been involved in the creation of the cryptocurrency.

    • UK TTIP Debate Tomorrow: Please Contact MPs Today

      It seems that there will be a rare UK debate about TTIP tomorrow. This is a great opportunity to contact your MPs and let them know what you think. Here’s what I’ve just sent – you can use WritetoThem to make things easier.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Trump Is Devouring The GOP, And Fox News Fed It To Him

      Back on September 17, as Donald Trump basked in the post-Labor Day glow of being the Republican Party’s undisputed frontrunner, he spoke to a boisterous crowd in New Hampshire and took a question from an especially boisterous fan. “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American,” said the Trump t-shirt-wearing man. “We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”

  • Privacy

    • Final Text Of CISA Apparently Removed What Little Privacy Protections Had Been In There

      Back in October, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which has nothing to with cybersecurity at all, and is almost entirely a surveillance bill in disguise. Want to know the proof: many of the most vocal supporters of CISA, who talked up how important “cybersecurity” is these days are the very same people now looking to undermine encryption.

    • Save Crypto: Tell the White House We Can’t Sacrifice Security

      The Obama administration just responded to the 104,109 people who asked the president to stand up for strong encryption. The response—penned by Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ed Felton [sic] and Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel—acknowledged the importance of the conversation but offered no conclusions. Instead, they asked us to share our thoughts on encryption.

    • Should Facebook turn in ISIS supporters?

      On Friday the FBI classified the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, as “an act of terrorism”. Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, don’t seem to have been in direct contact with ISIS, but the extremist militant group called the couple “supporters” on Saturday.

    • No phone, no problem: NSA will target the cloud instead

      As of last week, the National Security Agency can no longer cull through Americans’ phone records, but it can continue to eavesdrop on our emails, video chats, and documents. The NSA can keep metadata already collected until Feb. 29, 2016, and your phone data will continue to be collected by telecom companies.

      But the fact that phone records can no longer be easily searched is nearly meaningless to the world of cloud computing. If the data is still up for grabs — and it is — then we’re likely to have the same concerns we did before the USA Freedom Act that curtailed some of the NSA’s activities last week.

    • “Yeah, we ditched Google.”

      After we gave it some more thought, we realized we were hypocrites. Since inception, SpiderOak has been an advocate for online privacy. Unlike many others in our market, we strive to be very clear about how our product design truly delivers Zero Knowledge privacy for our users. We tell potential supporters, what matters most is who has the keys and how they are stored. But you can read more about how we solved those problems from our many other posts our site.

      For the past five years, we had been using Google Analytics for monitoring our web traffic. Innocent enough decision, right? Then we asked ourselves, “are we contributing to the mass surveillance of the web by using a feature-rich, yet free service that tracks web visitors?” Sadly. we didn’t like the answer to that question. “Yes, by using Google Analytics, we are furthering the erosion of privacy on the web.”

    • The NSA might be spying on Tor users

      Privacy and encryption have been two very hot topics for the last few years. The Tor browser can help protect your privacy while online, but it may come at the cost of being spied on by the NSA.

    • If You Do This, the NSA Will Spy on You

      Worried about the NSA monitoring you? If you take certain steps to mask your identity online, such as using the encryption service TOR, or even investigating an alternative to the buggy Windows operating system, you’re all but asking for “deep” monitoring by the NSA.

  • Civil Rights

    • Henry Jackson Society as Bad as Donald Trump

      The Henry Jackson Society seconds staff to the Quilliam Foundation. This extraordinary organisation is a career vehicle for “reformed jihadists” to milk huge salaries and luxury lifestyles from government money, in return for fronting an organisation run by the security services. Quilliam specialises in denouncement of Muslim organisations and talking up the Jihadi threat, offering “expert advice” on the government’s anti-free speech strategy. At the same time, it seeks to maximise the income of its directors. One interesting collaboration to make money was its collaboration with the current head of Pergida UK, and former head of the English Defence League, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Alias Tommy Robinson).

      Quilliam have received millions from the taxpayer for their dubious “work”. But their application for Home Office funding to split with Yaxley-Lennon remains an episode beyond belief. Several of Quilliam’s staff are “lent” by the CIA-funded Henry Jackson Society.

    • Jacob Appelbaum at Aaron Swartz Day 2015

      Jacob Appelbaum read a powerful statement at this year’s Aaron Swartz Day Celebration. I’m still processing everything he revealed to us that night.

    • How the TPP Will Affect You and Your Digital Rights

      The Internet is a diverse ecosystem of private and public stakeholders. By excluding a large sector of communities—like security researchers, artists, libraries, and user rights groups—trade negotiators skewed the priorities of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) towards major tech companies and copyright industries that have a strong interest in maintaining and expanding their monopolies of digital services and content. Negotiated in secret for several years with overwhelming influence from powerful multinational corporate interests, it’s no wonder that its provisions do little to nothing to protect our rights online or our autonomy over our own devices. For example, everything in the TPP that increases corporate rights and interests is binding, whereas every provision that is meant to protect the public interest is non-binding and is susceptible to get bulldozed by efforts to protect corporations.

    • Carmichael: An Extraordinary Lack of Humility

      Despite al this, I would not be tremendously concerned about the result if Alistair had the decency to be a bit chastened by it. It is only because of our ridiculously undemocratic electoral system that representation is so skewed. You didn’t ought to get over 95% of the seats on 52% of the votes, and I am not sure what is gained by magnifying that other wrong. But any mixed feelings I have on those grounds are dispelled by the utterly inappropriate triumphalism the Lib Dems are displaying, as though to be found a blatant liar by a court is something to be proud of. The brass neck of it all is sickening.

    • CNN’s Don Lemon Blasts Frank Gaffney And The Poll Trump Cited To Legitimize His Ban On Muslims Entering The US
    • After Trump Proposes Ban On Muslims, Rupert Murdoch Calls For “Refugee Pause”

      News Corporation and 21st Century Fox executive co-chairman Rupert Murdoch cited “radical Muslim dangers” to endorse a “complete refugee pause” one day after Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a total ban on Muslims immigrating to or visiting the United States.

      On December 7, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United states until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” citing a flawed poll from an Islamophobic organization to claim that Muslims are a danger to America.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Our ISPs Are Using Our Insatiable Need for Streaming Video Against Us

      All of our YouTube party playlists and Netlix-and-chill date nights are starting to add up: streaming video now accounts for 70 percent of broadband usage, according to data newly released by broadband services company Sandvine.

      This statistic might look pretty innocuous and simple on its face, but our dependence on massive amounts of data for our daily use has some dangerous implications. Because cable providers would rather you be watching actual cable programming versus streaming shows from Hulu and Netflix, they impose arbitrary data caps on your Internet usage, like the ones Comcast has been quietly implementing in markets across the country. You end up shelling out for something that costs the providers next to nothing.

      [...]

      And T-Mobile isn’t the only culprit: on the broadband side, Comcast is launching its own streaming service that—you guessed it—won’t count toward your household’s data cap. This practice, called “zero-rating,” is as much a threat to net neutrality as anything else has been, directing consumers to certain data channels and making the free market less free.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright in Europe: Minimal Reform to Avoid Crucial Questions

        Today, the European Commission has presented its proposal to reform copyright law in the European Union. This package includes a proposal for a regulation on portability of online services, as well as a communication to announcing future reforms to follow in 2016. The European Commission has thus confirmed that it does not wish to reopen the file on the InfoSoc directive 1, reflecting its reluctance and lack of ambition on this issue.

      • EU Commission unveils next steps for copyright reform, including draft content portability regulation
      • Copyfail: Why WIPO Can’t Fix Copyright

        It has been obvious for decades that copyright law is ill-matched for the opportunities and challenges created by the Internet. It’s been equally obvious, however, that sensible copyright policies face huge practical barriers, in large part because few are willing to challenge the default assumption of copyright law that every time a copy is made the rightsholder’s permission is required. That assumption makes no sense in the digital age, but it’s hugely difficult to dislodge, especially at the international stage.

      • Anti-Piracy Lawyer Milked Copyright Holders For Millions

        Leaks from a confidential auditor report into the activities of bankrupt anti-piracy law firm Johan Schlüter suggest that the company defrauded its entertainment industry clients out of $25m. One lawyer was singled out for most criticism after enriching both herself and family members.

      • Used eBook Sellers Receive Threats of Jail Time

        People selling unwanted eBooks online have been warned that their activities could result in six months imprisonment. However, anti-piracy group BREIN, the alleged sender of the threats, says it is not responsible. Nevertheless, given a legal case to be heard next week, the timing is certainly curious.

      • BitTorrent Still Dominates Internet’s Upstream Traffic

        New data published by Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that BitTorrent can be credited for a quarter of all upstream Internet traffic in North America, more than any other traffic source. With heavy competition from Netflix and other real-time entertainment, BitTorrent’s overall traffic share is falling.

12.08.15

Links 8/12/2015: Chromebooks Rising, KDE Plasma 5.5

Posted in News Roundup at 3:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Fujitsu Releases Its First Open Source Project: Open Service Catalog Manager

    Recently, the company announced its first open source project, called Open Service Catalog Manager, which is cloud management software created by Fujitsu. The software was internally developed by Fujitsu and has been on the market for a while. Wolfgang Ries, Chief Marketing Officer Fujitsu Enabling Software Technology, told me that it can be used in both enterprise and service provider scenarios.

  • Why We Are Open Source and Will Remain That Way

    I felt the need to write this opening paragraph due to a highly visible source code closing done by another company. We have no intentions, plans, thoughts or wavers in that direction. Furthermore, we consider contributions to be the least important benefits of Open Source Software.

  • The insecurity of platforms and how open source overcomes

    This is not to say that Linux and open source will always get off this easily. This time around, the creators of the ransomware made a crucial error. Who’s to say next go ’round they won’t make that error and find a vulnerability in an even more prevalent software to use. Say, for example, they find a vulnerability in Apache or BIND…that could spiral into a catastrophe. And considering some vendors (such as IBM) are so lazy that they cannot adequately get their software to function with SELinux (so much so, they advise users to disable the critical security layer), more and more vulnerabilities will be found. Linux is, in no way, immune to attacks. They will happen. But thanks to the very nature of the platform, overcoming such issues is far easier and expeditious than its proprietary counterpart.

  • Node.js Developer Fedor Indutny Weighs Performance and API Elegance

    The Node.js Foundation is a community-led, industry-backed consortium created to advance the development of the Node.js platform. Node.js itself is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side web applications. It is used by thousands of organizations, including PayPal, GoDaddy, Joyent, and IBM, and is the runtime of choice for high-performance, low-latency applications. Node.js can be found in everything from cloud stacks and enterprise applications to mobile websites and the IoT.

  • OpenFin Shares HTML5 Container Info and Creates Advisory Board
  • OpenFin open-sources HTML5 container technology
  • OpenFin to open-source its financial desktop HTML5 container technology
  • Hashcat Password Cracker Goes Open Source

    Jens Steube, the creator of the password cracking toolkit Hashcat, has announced that his tool and its derivates will from now on be made available under an open source license.

  • Kylin, Born at eBay, Graduates to Top-Level at Apache

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has just announced that Apache Kylin, an open source big data project born at eBay, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), “signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.”

  • 8 books to make you a more open leader

    Before The Open Organization by Jim Whitehurst was The Open Organization by Philip A. Foster. While Jim admits that his book isn’t management theory (“I’ll leave that to the academics,” he says), Foster’s is unabashedly so. Published in 2014, The Open Organization is quite frankly the textbook on what both authors call a “new management paradigm.”

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla retires Firefox’s sponsored tiles, hunts for new revenue streams

        Firefox’s targeted sponsored tiles always seemed a little out of place for a browser that is essentially predicated on free, libertarian ideals. You can’t exactly blame Mozilla for trying, though. Since its inception, Mozilla has been entirely reliant on revenues from search engines. For years, Google paid Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars to be Firefox’s default search engine. In recent years, Mozilla has diversified its search engine defaults

      • Mozilla’s Firefox Quits Sponsored Tiles

        Mozilla has announced that it’s dropping a program everyone but Mozilla seemed to realize was a bad idea from the start. In a blog posting on Friday, the organization’s vice president of content services, Darren Herman, wrote that Mozilla has “made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery.” The much disliked sponsored tiles won’t immediately disappear from users’ browsers, however. “Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months.”

        This was the second time last week that Mozilla announced it was dropping (or wants to drop) one project in order to “focus” on something else. Last Monday, executive chairperson Mitchell Baker wrote in a memo that the organization is seeking to drop support of the popular Thunderbird desktop email client in order “to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact.”

      • Mozilla has a revenue share agreement with Pocket

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Is Open Source Swift a good thing ? [Ed: Apple and Microsoft 'contribute' to Open Source like animal farms (for meat) contribute to bovine and fowl]

      On December 3 Apple has open sourced the Swift programming language on Swift.org. The language was first released (not Open Source yet) about the same time as iOS 8 and was created by Apple to make Mac and iOS app development an easier task. Swift is welcome as one more Open Source language and project but is too early to make a lot of noise about it.

      [...]

      For now Swift has no client-side (as Angular for JavaScript) or server-side (as Rail for Ruby, Django for Python) application frameworks. Exceptions are the proprietary Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks for Apple platforms only.

      For now Swift can only offer a very young set of core libraries.

      We have enough modern Open Source languages: Python, Ruby, Perl, JavaScript, PHP, Java just to mention the most recent ones. A lot of energy is required to create an ecosystem around a language.

      It is difficult to unbound Swift from Apple platforms since a lot of Open Source extensions for Swift still use proprietary Apple class libraries as NSString etc.

    • Apple retracts comment that it was first major open source company after criticism

      Last week Apple’s open sourcing of Swift naturally saw the spotlight thrown over Apple’s open source pages. This included a paragraph that claimed Apple was “the first major computer company to make Open Source a key part of its strategy”. Unsurprisingly, this riled some members of the developer community as being disingenuous and untrue.

    • Apple is proud of its open source software Swift. A bit too proud

      But it may be a bit too proud. On its page celebrating open-source software, Apple originally claimed it was “the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its ongoing software strategy”.

      That claim will have come as some surprise to most major computer companies. While Apple has a long history of adopting open-source code for its own releases, most notably with the Unix basis of Mac OS X in 1999, it isn’t exactly the first mover in the field. And as for releasing its own proprietary code as open source, that’s something that it has been even slower on – certainly compared to arch rival Google, whose Android operating system is and always has been freely licensed.

    • Was ​Apple the first major open-source company? Not even close

      Ah, I don’t think so.

      Many older open-source programmers think, with reason, that’s nonsense.

      True, Apple has used open-source software for years, but that’s not the same thing as making open-source development “a key part of its strategy.” It would be more correct to say that Apple was the first major company to take advantage of open source.

    • Dropbox urged by users to open-source soon-to-be shut Mailbox app

      Dropbox users are petitioning the cloud storage giant to consider open-sourcing its iOS email app Mailbox, after announcing plans to shut it down in 2016.

    • Apple mocked for playing Open Source card

      The famously proprietary and secretive cargo-cult Apple has been trying to copy Microsoft’s moves into the weirdy beardie world of Open Sauce. Needless to say, it has not quite got the hang of it.

      The Tame Apple Press trumpeted Apple’s move to make its Swift programming language available to the great unwashed claiming that it bought the company’s open source efforts to the forefront.

    • Microsoft to open source the Edge browser JavaScript engine [Ed: openwashing of “cancer on the Web” (rebranded, buggy, insecure IE) by Microsoft booster Andy Patrizio]
    • Microsoft Goes Open Source on Key Part of Edge Browser Engine
    • EMC extends open-source ambitions to the server side with new RackHD project
    • EMC Unveils RackHD, Open-Source Version of OnRack
    • Data Storage King EMC Finally Gets With the Times
    • Open Source Is The Future Of EMC Software

  • BSD

    • BSD for the desktop user: A review of PC-BSD

      To be clear, the BSDs are not Linux distributions. They are Unix-like, so they are similar to Linux, but they are their own family of open source operating systems with their own rich history. Unlike Linux with its multitude of distributions, the BSD family is much smaller; the big three distributions are FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. The small handful of other BSD distributions branch off from one of those projects, most frequency, from FreeBSD.

    • DragonFly BSD 4.4

      DragonFly version 4.4 bring further updates to accelerated video for both i915 and radeon users, a new locale system, and a new default linker. Significant behind-the-scenes work has also been done, with symbol versioning, Hammer1 improvements, and other changes. Version 4.4.1 was the first release due to the late inclusion of OpenSSL update 1.0.1q.

    • BSDs in Linuxland and Best Rolling Distros

      OpenBSD and PC-BSD got the review treatment today at Distrowatch.com and OpenSource.com, proving Linux isn’t the only game in town. Several rolling distribution topics arose as well with Dedoimedo fighting Netrunner 2015.11 from destroying a laptop and Jesse Afolabi looking at the best user-friendly distributions based on Arch. Elsewhere, the Mint 17.3 screenshots sprang up faster than a boot-up screen and Curtis Franklin Jr. put together a slideshow on 10 distros perfect for gifts.

    • Guarding the gates with OpenBSD 5.8

      The OpenBSD project has long held a reputation for producing a secure operating system. The project boasts just two remote security holes reported over a span of about twenty years. It’s an impressive accomplishment for the developers and a good indication of why OpenBSD is so often trusted for security oriented tasks like running firewalls. However, the OpenBSD team has been steadily working on other projects too. The team behind OpenBSD also creates the widely used OpenSSH software which is used around the world by system administrators to remotely work on servers and securely transfer files. The OpenBSD project also spawned the LibreSSL software (a replacement for OpenSSL) following the Heartbleed vulnerability. In the latest release of OpenBSD we also saw improvements to the project’s lightweight and secure web server (called httpd), the introduction of the doas command (a replace for sudo), a new implementation of the file command and W^X support for i386 processors. The latest version of the operating system, OpenBSD 5.8, also switched to denying root logins in the default installation.

    • Microsoft Wired Up Clang’s Parser To Their Own Code Generator
    • DragonFly BSD 4.4 Officially Announced, Already Gets Its First Point Release

      Today, December 7, 2015, Justin Sherrill from the DragonFly BSD project, a BSD-based computer operating system, has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of DragonFly BSD 4.4.

    • n2k15: sashan@ on PF mpsafe progess

      mpi@ came with patch (sent to priv. list only currently), which adds a new lock for PF. It’s called PF big lock. The big PF lock essentially establishes a safe playground for PF hackers. The lock currently covers all pf_test() function. The pf_test() function parts will be gradually unlocked as the work will progress.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNUstep Developers Consider Forking The Project, Moving Away From FSF

      The lead developer of GNUstep, a GPL-licensed implementation of Apple’s Cocoa frameworks and toolkit, is considering a fork of the project.

    • GCC Compiler Patches Implementing AMD HSA Revised For Merging

      Martin Jambor at SUSE has sent out the latest set of patches for implementing support for the AMD-backed Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) inside the GNU Compiler Collection.

    • By 12/15: Send us comments to rally the Dept. of Ed. toward free licensing

      These proposed regulations are meant to facilitate public reuse of works funded by Department of Education grants. Currently, as explained in the NPRM, grantees are allowed to make their federally-funded works proprietary. The Department of Education receives a special license to share the works with the public, but in practice it rarely does so. Worse, teachers and students absolutely cannot use them in freedom (except for those few that happen to be made free).

      Since the course materials are works of practical use, they should carry the four freedoms of free software, just as programs and manuals should.

      The proposal would require grantees to publish the works under an “open” license. In the case of software, they may be thinking of “open source”, which is not quite as strong as free; in the case of courseware, many “open” courses are not free. The flaw in the proposed specific rules is that they don’t require that the license permit redistribution of modified versions. Without that freedom, the works will be nonfree.

  • Project Releases

    • NetHack 3.6.0 released

      After a 10+ year hiatus, the NetHack DevTeam is happy to announce the release of NetHack 3.6, a combination of the old and the new.

      Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.

      Those of you expecting a huge raft of new features will probably be disappointed. Although we have included a number of new features, the focus of this release was to get the foundation established so that we can build on it going forward.

  • Licensing

    • FOSS projects and their legal structures

      Free Software has been growing pretty much everywhere around the world, and so much so that we now face challenges nobody would have thought possible even ten years ago. One of these unexpected issues is the need for proper legal structures. Traditionally, only a handful of entities used to exist. They could be dedicated to one, large project or act as a hub for a “forge” or a set of more or less related projects: that’s the case with the Eclipse or the Apache Software Foundation. Others were one of kind: Software In the Public interest, SPI, is handling funds for large and small projects and has been doing so for well over 15 years. The Free Software Foundation both directly and through the Free Software Conservancy has also hosted many FOSS projects developments, infrastructure and financial resources.

    • German court addresses GPLv3 section 8 termination provisions

      GPLv2, first published in 1991, provides for automatic termination of the license in the event of violation, with no stated opportunity for cure. By the time of the drafting of GPLv3, the Free Software Foundation, steward of the GPL license family, had come to consider automatic termination to be an unduly harsh policy. GPLv3, introduced in 2007, formally retained automatic termination in its section 8 but moderated it in certain ways, including by providing for automatic reinstatement of the license for first-time GPLv3 violators who cure the violation prior to 30 days after receiving notice from the copyright holder. The precise wording of section 8 was drafted with German preliminary injunction procedure in mind.

    • The Licensing and Compliance Lab interviews Michael Lissner and Brian Carver of RECAP The Law

      This is the latest instalment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab’s series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works. In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Michael Lissner and Brian Carver of RECAP The Law.

    • Leveraging Open Source? If So, Keep it Legal

      Famously, a few years ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst made the prediction that open source software would soon become nearly pervasive in organizations of all sizes. That has essentially become true, and many businesses now use open source components without even knowing that they are doing so. As businesses adopt open source platforms such as OpenStack and Hadoop, they are complementing them with their own open source projects.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Ionic Launches New Version of its HTML5 App Creator

      It’s been a little over a year since Ionic launched the alpha of its open source Ionic Creator platform which provides an HTML5 SDK to build cross platform, native-feeling mobile apps using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The company has recently released a number of updates to the platform adding new features, polishing existing ones, and fixing issues.

    • New 3D Software Tracks the Brain Development in an Embryo

      An Indian-origin scientist has developed new, open-source 3D software that can track the embryonic development and movement of neuronal cells throughout the body of the worm. Although scientists have identified a number of important proteins that determine how neurons navigate during brain formation, it is largely unknown how all of these proteins interact in a living organism.

    • Researchers develop open-source 3D software to track brain development of the embryo

      Now it will be possible for the medical fraternity to track the growth and development of the brain in an embryo. An Indian-origin scientist from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has developed an open-source 3D software that can track embryo’s brain activity.

    • Wio Link is an open-source IoT WiFi solution

      Wio Link is a new open source product that aims to make it easy to develop Internet of Things products and services. The Wio Link is an ESP8266 based WiFi development board that is made specifically for creating IoT applications using virtualized plug-n-play modules to RESTful APIs with mobile apps.

      Using the Wio Link developers are able to build IoT applications with no hardware programming, no breadboard, no jumper wires, and no soldering. The people behind Wio Link claim that users can build IoT applications in three steps in about five minutes.

  • Programming

    • A New Tool For Tracking ABI Changes Of Libraries

      Andrey Ponomarenko has announced his work on ABI-Tracker, a new open-source tool for tracking ABI changes of C/C++ software projects.

      Ponomarenko shared on the Fedora developer list this weekend about his aptly-named ABI-Tracker.

    • Day 7 — Unicode, Perl 6, and You

      Quick (rhetorical) question: how many of you either try your best to ignore Unicode, or groan at the thought of having to deal with it again?

Leftovers

  • Open Office Spaces and Cabal Rooms Suck

    In case it wasn’t clear: I really dislike large open office spaces. (Not 2-3 person offices, but large industrial scale 20-100 person open office spaces of doom.) Valve’s was absolutely the worst expression of the concept I’ve ever experienced. I can understand doing the open office thing for a while at a startup, where every dollar counts, but at an established company I just won’t tolerate this craziness anymore. (See the scientific research below if you think I feel too strongly about this trend.)

  • EU accuses Qualcomm of using market power to hinder rivals

    European Union antitrust regulators charged Qualcomm on Tuesday with abusing its market power to thwart rivals, putting the world’s number one mobile chipset maker at risk of a hefty fine.

    The accusations by the European Commission are the latest antitrust problems for the company as regulators in the United States, China, Japan and South Korea look into its licensing model and its dominant patents in mobile networks and devices.

  • Hardware

    • I said it was wired like a Christmas tree

      My main issue is that modern systems are just plain noisy, often with multiple small fans whining away. I have worked to reduce this noise by using quieter components as replacements but in the end it is simply better to be able to put these systems in a box out of the way.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • US Workers Sue Monsanto, Claiming Herbicide Caused Their Cancers

      One of the cases was filed in Los Angeles on September 22, 2015 by 58-year-old Enrique Rubio, who used to work on farms in California, Texas, and Oregon. His job used to consist of spraying fields with the herbicide Roundup, which he is alleging caused his bone cancer in 1995. 64-year-old Judi Fizgerald in New York filed the other lawsuit. She used to work at a horticultural products company and was exposed to Roundup in the 1990s. She is attributing her diagnosis of leukemia in 2012 to the herbicide.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Corporate News Sources Fail to Fully Report US Drone Strike Causalities

      Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have consistently underreported the number of fatalities resulting from US drone strikes. Research conducted by Jeff Bachman, co-director of the Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs Program at American University, compares fatality reports from both papers to more completely researched reports from City University London’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism. While the NYT reported only two civilian deaths out of 81 drone strikes covered, TBIJ found that there were actually 26 civilians killed. Likewise the Post had reported one civilian death out of 26 drone strikes covered. TBIJ documented seven.

      When both the NYT and the Post covered 33 drone strikes that they reported caused civilian causalities, both claimed only nine deaths over the course of three different stories. TBIJ had found between 180-302 civilian deaths.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Putting out Indonesia’s fires

      Every year, forest fires ravage Indonesia, causing massive environmental, social and economic devastation. This year’s fires are the largest in nearly 20 years, destroying three million hectares of land and causing an estimated $14 billion in losses related to agriculture, forest degradation, health, transportation, and tourism.

    • ‘How Do We Move Past a Fossil Fuel-Powered World?’ – CounterSpin interview with Janet Redman on climate conference activism

      Janine Jackson: Coverage of the upcoming UN conference on climate change has shifted to concerns about security in Paris and resulting clampdowns on activism. But before that, the conference itself was billed as pivotal on global action on the issue. Barack Obama recently declared the US global leaders in the fight against climate change–but is that really true, and what should we actually expect from the conference itself? Janet Redman is director of the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Janet Redman.

    • Jury Finds DuPont Responsible for Negligence in Chemical Spill

      The chemical known as perfluorooctanoic acid (also called C8, because of the eight-carbon chain that makes up its chemical backbone) has spread from the company DuPont’s plant into the drinking water of 80,000 people in West Virginia and Ohio. A 59-year old woman named Carla Bartlett has developed kidney cancer after drinking C8-contaminated water for over 10 years. Bartlett is the first of many personal injury and wrongful death claims stemming from the 2005 settlement of a class-action suit filed on behalf of the people who lived near this plant. DuPont’s attorneys presented their arguments stating that the company is not responsible for the tumor that Bartlett was treated for in 1997. Their defense is that the company’s employees did not realize that C8 was dangerous when Bartlett was exposed, even though there were internal documents indicating DuPont’s knowledge that the chemical posed risks to both animals and humans.

  • Finance

    • 6 dispiriting truths about America’s billionaires

      When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that he will give away 99 percent of his personal fortune—now estimated at $44 billion—during his lifetime, he was lauded in newspapers and TV broadcasts from coast to coast. But few people noted that giving away his billions will still leave Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan and newborn daughter Max, with at least $440 million to live on.

      Such vast sums of money are unimaginable to most of us. But according to a just-released report, “Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us,” by the Institute for Policy Studies, the Facebook founder is merely one of the 400 wealthiest Americans, whose net worth is growing while they evade taxation and drive economic inequality.

      “The Forbes 400 provides a useful snapshot of the nation’s wealthiest individuals, an insight into a world most people will never witness firsthand,” the report said, as it lists some incredible comparisons that contrast the vast wealth held by a select few compared to average Americans. “The Forbes 400 also provides an insight into just how lopsided our economy has become: Just 400 people hold as much wealth as over 190 million.”

      Consider the following six bullet points from the report. The authors state they “believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration,” because, “the growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Trump, The Press, And How To Treat A Liar

      Appearing on Face the Nation, Republican frontrunner Trump told host John Dickerson that prior to the attacks, the wives of the 9/11 hijackers “knew exactly what was going to happen” and were flown “back to Saudi Arabia” days before the hijacked plane strikes.

      This is complete nonsense. As The Washington Post explained, “There is no support for Trump’s claims … virtually all of the hijackers were unmarried.” And anyone who followed news of the attacks, and the subsequent years-long investigation, ought to know that. But on Face the Nation, Dickerson didn’t flinch when Trump floated his latest 9/11 lie; Dickerson didn’t question Trump’s absurd claim.

    • Seth Meyers Calls Out The Media For Stoking Fear In The Wake Of The San Bernardino Shooting
    • Fox News Tells Young Children To Run At Active Shooters

      A Fox & Friends demonstration where children neutralized a gunman during an active shooter situation offered dubious advice to parents, as experts emphasize that confronting the gunman should be “a last resort.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Why the AP’s Call Record Article Is So Stupid

      Notice how there’s no mention, in the headline or the lead, of the FBI? They’re the agency that will lead the investigation of the San Bernardino attack. That’s important because FBI has their own databases and the ability to obtain records from phone and Internet companies directly going forward (and already had, given reports from Facebook, before this article was written). The PCLOB report on the 215 phone dragnet showed that the FBI almost always accessed the information they otherwise might have gotten from the 215 dragnet via their own means. “[O]ur review suggests that the Section 215 program offers little unique value here, instead largely duplicating the FBI’s own information-gathering efforts.”

      But the real problem with this utterly erroneous article is that it suggests the “US government” can’t get any records from NSA, which in turn suggests the only records of interest the NSA might have came from the Section 215 dragnet, which is of course nonsense. Not only does the NSA get far more records than what they got under Section 215 — that dragnet was, according to Richard Clarke, just a fraction of what NSA got, and according to NSA’s training, it was significantly redundant with EO 12333 collection on international calls to the US, which the NSA can collect with fewer limits as to format and share more freely with the FBI — but there are plenty of other places where the FBI can get records.

    • [tor-relays] ANN: TCP injection attack detection tool – honeybadger

      I was inspired by the Snowden documents to write a TCP injection attack detection tool. Powerful entities world wide are stock piling zero-days. TCP injection attacks can be used to deliver many of these attacks.

    • Legislation requiring tech industry to report terrorist activity may be revived

      Legislation requiring tech companies to report on terrorist activity on their platforms is likely to be revived, following concerns about the widespread use of Internet communications by terrorists.

      Legislation requiring tech companies to report on terrorist activity on their platforms is likely to be revived in the U.S., following concerns about the widespread use of Internet communications by terrorists.

      A proposed rule that would require companies to report vaguely defined “terrorist activity” on their platforms had been included as section 603 in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016.

    • President Obama urges tech companies to join in the fight against terror

      US PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA went on television at the weekend to talk up his administration’s efforts to combat terrorism, and to urge tech firms to help the government to protect citizens.

      In what’s been seen as an unusual move, Obama decided to reach out to America’s TV-loving masses and beam his anti-terror/smash encryption message straight to their living rooms.

    • Software Can Now Identify Individuals by How They Type

      Computer programmers have developed software that can uniquely identify an individual by the way they type with a reported accuracy rate of 99.7%. This particular method of identification is the latest avenue of biometrics research and technology.

      This software works by analyzing minor variations in keyboard use. This is possible because every individual uses a keyboard slightly differently. These differences can be due to a number of reasons, ranging from the size of a person’s hands to the impaired use of a finger. All of these factors result in unique characteristics when typing, such as the length of time a key is pressed or the pause between hitting the “j” and the “o” keys. Each press of a key can be measured down to the millisecond. Taken together, an individual’s traits contribute to a unique typing signature that is virtually impossible to mimic without detection. Researchers have found that this signature also translates very similarly onto the use of touch-screen keyboards.

  • Civil Rights

    • French police want to ban Tor, public Wi-Fi

      French police have made their Christmas wish-list, and it includes banning Tor and public Wi-Fi.

      As legislators debate new antiterrorism laws, police and security services have been studying how technology hinders their enquiries, according to French newspaper Le Monde.

      In the hours following the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris the French government declared a state of emergency, granting police sweeping powers to impose curfews and conduct warrantless searches.

    • Are French civil liberties another victim of Paris attacks?

      In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, France has enacted a three-month state of emergency, widening the powers of police and security agencies. It has done so with relatively little public debate about the deterioration of civil liberties.

    • Army recommends no further punishment for Petraeus

      The Army has recommended that David H. Petraeus, the retired general and former CIA director who quit in a scandal three years ago, not face further punishment for having an affair with his biographer and providing her with top-secret materials, according to Pentagon officials.

      The final decision on whether to discipline Petraeus under military law rests with Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter. Although he could overrule the Army’s recommendation, such a move would be unusual.

    • My “Theory” of Codes of Conduct

      Oh, good lord, we’ve got a “thinker” on our hands. Seriously, that’s how he describes himself in the bio for his self-published book about psychopaths (based on his personal experiences rather than psychological research, natch). Only now he’s thinking about codes of conduct.

      Is there a problem with thinking? Nope. Is there a problem with this guy thinking? Not in particular. It sounds like he’s even pretty good at it when it comes to software. So what’s the problem?

      It’s the same problem that continually happens with people who define themselves as smart or as good thinkers: They forget about GIGO. They come to think of themselves as experts without having done any of the work.

    • Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt

      Peter and Mickey spend the hour in conversation with political author Chris Hedges; his latest book is “Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt.” The discussion covers issues from freedom of information to U.S. Middle East interventions, and the ideas of intellectuals from W.E.B. Dubois to Cornel West to Sheldon Wolin.

    • Fox Business Invites Gun Store Owner Who Banned All Muslims From Her Gun Range To Praise Trump For Adopting Her Idea

      Fox Business invited gun store owner Jan Morgan to respond to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims, including American citizens, from entering the United States. Morgan bragged that Donald Trump is “basically going to do what [she is] already doing at [her] gun range” by banning all Muslims from buying or renting guns.

    • New Polling Shows Americans Strongly Oppose Citizens United

      In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Citizens United. The landmark decision allowed for nearly unlimited funding of political campaigns by corporations. Arguably, the decision is one of the largest detriments to American democracy, as it essentially allows the “highest bidder” to buy members of office. American media have touched on the case in general. However, it has received minimal attention given the seriousness of its consequences.

      A recent Bloomberg poll revealed that 78% of Americans do not agree with the Citizens United decision and are in favor of the law being overturned. While a majority of Americans share this belief, corporate media failed to cover this story. The Huffington Post covered the story, however they were the only major news corporation to do so. This means that this poll was largely unshared with the general public.

    • New York Counties Push to Upgrade Public Defender System

      In New York state, citizens’ freedom is being put in jeopardy by part time, lack-luster public defenders. The right to an attorney is a basic right that should help people through the court system, however these lawyers are not giving their clients enough time or energy. Most people are showing up to their court dates without having seen their appointed public defender once. The five New York state counties that are fighting for better public defenders for the poor have finally won their argument with the state and are receiving “new funding and oversight to help the five counties upgrade the quality of legal representation” that people deserve.

    • Girls Who Code Makes Its Way Into A Mobile Game

      A major factor that deters girls from pursuing computer science is the perception that coders are mostly white and male, according to a recent Google-commissioned Gallup survey. That’s why non-profit organization Girls Who Code has partnered with mobile game-maker Pixelberry Studios to tell the story of a young girl coder in its flagship game, “High School Story.”

      The coder, named Gabriela, will be the first tech-related character featured in “High School Story,” a game that over 30% of high school girls in the U.S. have played, according to Pixelberry. The storyline is inspired by a group of Girls Who Code alumnae. In the game, Gabriela leads players on a mission that culminates at a hackathon, where the objective is to build a mobile app. Previous storylines on High School Story have addressed cyber-bullying and body image.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • The Internet isn’t ready for really big news

      One thing you can say for traditional broadcast media: They scale really well. If you put an analog signal on the air or on a wire with enough repeaters and amplifiers, it will serve every client that connects. That’s not the case with most of the network world, unfortunately. Sure we have multicast, but that’s not on an Internet scale — and the Internet is where the problems lie.

      First, let’s define multicast as used in IP networks. This is a method by which a single source stream can be accessed by multiple clients simultaneously, without increasing the load on the source itself. Thus, this functions much like an analog broadcast: You have a single source that a client can connect to at any time. The downside is that the client is a silent subscriber of the content and cannot control the stream; there’s no rewinding or restarting on a per-client basis. This is content broadcast over IP, and it’s what television networks use to distribute video streams through their networks, financial institutions to receive stock quotes, and so forth.

    • Donald Trump thinks he can call Bill Gates to ‘close up’ the internet

      Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just said the US should consider “closing up” the internet to curb radical extremism. Trump, a man that routinely claims everyone in charge of the US is stupid, believes that as president he could just call up Bill Gates to help him shut off the internet. Trump floated the idea at a campaign rally at the USS Yorktown in South Carolina tonight as a way to stop ISIS “jihadists” from recruiting Americans to commit acts of domestic terrorism. The idea is so dumb it almost has us, too, at a loss for words.

12.07.15

Links 7/12/2015: Linux 4.4 RC4, Steam GNU/Linux Gaming at Almost 1,700 Titles

Posted in News Roundup at 7:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Intel open-sources its Snap cloud visibility tool on GitHub

    Back in July, Intel launched its “Cloud for All” initiative aimed at foster inggreater enterprise adoption of public, private and hybrid clouds. Building on that effort, Intel last week said its open-sourcing a new tool called “Snap” that’s designed to help organizations gain better visibility into their cloud infrastructure.

  • Trusted Analytics Platform: Simplify Big Data Analytics with Open Source Software

    The Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP) is an open source project that Intel developed to make it easier for developers and data scientists to deploy custom big data analytics solutions in the cloud as well as reduce development costs and time to market. The company disclosed pilots with Penn Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU).

  • Implementing an Open Source Private Docker-based PaaS: A Q&A with Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang

    Rancher Labs have created RancherOS, a minimalist operating system (OS) built to explicitly run Docker, and also Rancher, an open source platform for building a private container service, much like Engine Yard’s Deis PaaS and VMware’s Photon platform. InfoQ sat down with Rancher Labs CEO, Sheng Liang, and asked about the Rancher platform, common container platform issues such as networking and storage, and how a container platform will fit into a standard development workflow.

  • It’s actually open source software that’s eating the world

    At Lightspeed we’ve been investing aggressively in open source software (OSS) businesses for the past 10 years. Recently, we’ve seen a significant increase in entrepreneurs pitching open source startups, and we’ve also seen greater competition for these deals. We pulled together some numbers in an attempt to measure the acceleration in interest in and funding for OSS businesses in the last few years. The results were staggering even to us.

  • Weather Company CIO says informed IT leaders are open to open source

    Just a few short years ago, there was a possibility you might lose credibility by bringing up open source as a possible solution for an IT problem. As 2015 draws to a close, it’s more likely that you will lose credibility for not bringing up open. This doesn’t mean the decisions or the outcomes are closer to being right, but at least there’s a respectable debate going on.

    I look at open source and take stock that we’ve come a long way as an industry, and I think that’s good. Apple has recently made some noise related to the platform they’re building out that is heavily open source-based. Google has just released a big part of its AI technology, and IBM is hard at work in the Spark community. As the consumerization of IT continues its march and as consumers begin to consume content from nontraditional sources as their new traditional means – the Netflixes of the world, the Hulus, the Amazon Instants, the HBO GOs – they’re starting to be more comfortable and familiar with less traditional and niche players as a part of their lives.

  • November: FOSS Activites

    This is the first time I have posted my monthly activities on my blog, but doing so serves two purposes. The first is that I hope to become a more active blogger. The second is that it will force me to review my activities monthly. The month of November marked the end of my term on the Ubuntu Community Council and a return to a focus on advocacy and local activity. I have included some activities that took place at the end of October since this is my first report.

  • CryptID open source identification system uses the blockchain to revolutionize ID

    Access control systems are an integral part of the security industry, which is vital across every campus, airport, corporate office, government building, and anywhere else the movement of people or their access to certain items or programs, is limited. Even the driver’s license in your wallet is a product of this industry, and it is likely laden with 45-year old magnetic stripe technology, and can be counterfeited by hundreds of different people around the world for an affordable fee on the dark web.

  • Robots not likely to take your job (at least not yet), says Open Source chief

    Stripped of its diplomacy and erudition, the message from Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), is simple:

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • Zapcc Is Showing Compile Times Even Faster Than LLVM Clang

      The Zapcc compiler stack is proving to be faster than LLVM/Clang at compiling C++ codes, which in turn is much faster already than GCC. The performance of the generated binaries from this LLVM-based compiler stack is on-par with what’s offered by Clang.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GIMP Versus Old Thin Clients

      Take GIMP, for instance, the ubiquitous image-editing software that’s “not as good as…”. It works fine from a thin client except when you select something for “cut and paste” operations. Then, it calls out the selection with “marching ants”, actual animation on your screen. Not good. There is a workaround, however. In the “View” menu item, you can turn off “Show selection” and the ants go away. You can still see the selection as a thin line, so you’re good, no longer having to redraw a screen over that slow connection. The ants return on subsequent images though. So, to keep them away, go to “Edit/Preferences/Appearance” and uncheck “Show selection” in two places, normal window and full-screen.

    • GNUnet News: YBTI @ 32c3

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Bye, bye, bananas

      Now, half a century later, a new strain of the disease is threatening the existence of the Cavendish, the banana that replaced the Gros Michel as the world’s top banana export, representing 99 percent of the market, along with a number of banana varieties produced and eaten locally around the world.

      And there is no known way to stop it—or even contain it.

      That’s the troubling conclusion of a new study published in PLOS Pathogens, which confirmed something many agricultural scientists have feared to be true: that dying banana plants in various parts of the world are suffering from the same exact thing: Tropical Race 4, a more potent mutation of the much feared Panama Disease.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • CIA-funded Afghan militia accused of killing civilians

      An Afghan militia paid and equipped by the CIA has been accused of killing civilians and torturing detainees in a secret war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

    • CIA-backed militias waging shadow war in Afghanistan

      Months after the Obama administration declared combat operations over in Afghanistan, the CIA continues to run a shadow war in the eastern part of the country, overseeing an Afghan proxy called the Khost Protection Force, according to local officials, former commanders of that militia and Western advisers.

    • ISIS 2.0: Meet the New Extremist Group the CIA is Paying to Kill Innocent Civilians in Afghanistan

      While American bureaucrats claim that heavy interventions in the Middle East are somehow beneficial for the increasingly volatile region, the US military continues its decades-old tradition of creating more terrorists than it kills.

    • Column: War on Terror is creating more terror

      The interventionists will do anything to prevent Americans from seeing that their foreign policies are perpetuating terrorism and inspiring others to seek to harm us. The neocons know that when it is understood that blowback is real – that people seek to attack us not because we are good and free but because we bomb and occupy their countries – their stranglehold over foreign policy will begin to slip.

      That is why each time there is an event like the killings in Paris earlier this month, they rush to the television stations to terrify Americans into agreeing to even more bombing, more occupation, more surveillance at home, and more curtailment of our civil liberties. They tell us we have to do it in order to fight terrorism, but their policies actually increase terrorism.

      If that sounds harsh, consider the recently-released 2015 Global Terrorism Index report. The report shows that deaths from terrorism have increased dramatically over the last 15 years – a period coinciding with the “war on terrorism” that was supposed to end terrorism.

    • Sadly, Terrorism Is Easy

      Because, sadly terrorism is easy. As I stated recently, if I were crazed enough to want to kill somebody tomorrow, and did not care how I did it, who I killed or if I died myself, I could kill a few people without too much effort or planning. That is why the continual propaganda about “seven foiled ISIS terrorist plots” or “4,000 active Islamic terrorists in the UK” is quite simply untrue. If all those terrorists existed, they would not be so entirely unproductive. What the authorities do catch continually are fantasists, often children, boasting and “plotting” online about being terrorists. That is quite a different thing. It is worth noting that nobody has been charged over any of these seven foiled ISIS plots. Strange that, isn’t it?

    • ‘Targets Have Very Different Values in the US Media System’ – CounterSpin interview with Jim Naureckas on ISIS Attacks

      Janine Jackson: The Paris attacks were barely over before people began using them for their own purposes. They were a reason to reject Syrian refugees, though no refugees appear to be implicated. They were a reason to increase government surveillance, although the suspects were already on the French government’s radar and there’s no indication more surveillance would have made any difference. Some even used the attacks as a cause to demean antiracism activists on college campuses.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Global Protests Demand Climate Action Ahead of Paris Summit

      More than half a million people took part in rallies around the world ahead of today’s opening of the 21st United Nations Climate Change Summit here in Paris, France. World leaders have arrived for two weeks of negotiations aimed at reaching an accord on global warming. In London, the musician and artist Peter Gabriel said citizens around the world are calling out for a binding and just agreement.

    • Indonesia’s fires need to be smothered for good

      Every year, forest fires ravage Indonesia, causing massive environmental, social and economic devastation. This year’s fires are the largest in nearly 20 years, destroying three million hectares of land and causing an estimated US$14 billion (about 500 billion baht) in losses related to agriculture, forest degradation, health, transportation, and tourism.

      Perhaps even more alarming is the climate impact. Indonesia is already among the world’s biggest carbon emitters. Thanks to the fires, its daily average emissions this September and October were 10 times higher than normal.

    • Climate and consumption come to a head in Indonesia forest fires

      As Western Washington settles into its rainy season, Indonesia is welcoming the rains as well, clearing the air after two months of forest fires that are the worst the country has seen in decades.

      In the most affected areas, the smoke was so bad that schools and offices were closed in Indonesia. The fires had a human toll: more than half a million people suffered respiratory problems and 21 died.

      “Even when it got rain, it was not enough to eradicate the fire smoke,” Wahyu Riawanti, a political science lecturer who lives in Jakarta, said in an email. “It needed a whole two days rain to completely clean the air.”

      When the fire was finally quenched, over 8,000 square miles of forests and other land had burned, according to reports from the Associated Press. Economic losses are estimated to be $9 billion. The fires have also taken the lives of endangered animals, like the orangutan, and devastated some of the earth’s most biodiverse forests.

    • Indonesia Burning

      As much as 79% of Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions result from the destruction of its carbon-rich tropical forests and peat bogs.

    • Everyone can be a target

      We are at the dawn of an environmental crisis that will end humanity. Every human on this planet is concerned. People get beaten up when they march to pressure governments to do something about it. We need to unite and resist. And yes, we are going to get hurt but freedom is not free.

  • Finance

    • Zuckerberg’s crafty donation

      This gives Zuckerberg more flexibility to invest in for-profit enterprises and to support political causes, something charities cannot easily do. He will not have to disclose details of the company’s financial affairs and can disburse a profit if he chooses.

    • Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us

      This report exposes the extreme wealth concentrated within the fortunes of the 400 wealthiest Americans and compares this wealth to the much more meager assets of several different segments of American society.

      The report proposes several solutions to close the growing gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of the country. These policies include closing offshore tax havens and billionaire loopholes in the tax code that the wealthy exploit to hide their wealth.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Calvin Cheng and Amos Yee: Where should we draw the line on freedom of speech?

      Cheng’s case is troubling as it further enables Islamophobia that we’ve seen come from the West. Amos’ case continues to entrench misogyny and the practice of objectifying women. And since both are seen as public figures in Singapore (even Amos seems to agree with this on his social media accounts), they are more likely to face scrutiny for such remarks. So there’s a consequence that they can’t run away from – public outcry.

    • Channel 4 axes Prince Charles interview over ‘censorship’

      Britain’s Channel Four News has reportedly axed a planned interview with Prince Charles after the heir to the throne demanded absolute control over the questions asked and subsequent editing of the program.

      The conditions are contained in a detailed 15-page contract, which reportedly even gave Charles – potentially the future King of Australia – the right to pull the program if he was unhappy with it.

    • Sign a 15-page contract if you want to interview me, says Charles: Prince in censorship row over demands to broadcasters
    • No One Is ‘Censoring’ Michael Moore

      Of my many pet peeves, the one that might annoy me the most is when a filmmaker claims that the MPAA is “censoring” him because it gives his work a rating he doesn’t like. Usually, this complaint is leveled by a director who receives the NC-17 rating because such a rating not only requires theaters to keep children out of theaters but also precludes the picture from being shown in certain chains or advertised on certain networks/in certain newspapers.

    • ‘Fefka to head protest against censorship’

      On Day 2 of IFFK, the larger cliques of 2013 festival seem to have been replaced by a smaller group of delegates. The crowd is slowly trickling in as the festivities are yet to begin.

      Be that as it may, the dignitaries are making their presence felt. Onmanorama caught up with director B. Unnikrishnan for a quick chat.

    • Watch Filmmaker Anand Patwardhan Talk About His 40-Year-Long Battle With Censorship

      Filmmaker Anand Patwardhan is widely known for raising issues through his films that can be seen as ‘testing the limits’ of freedom of expression. He is not afraid to focus on matters that might make anyone flinch, which can be seen in many of his films, starting from the very first ‘Waves Of Revolution‘ (1974), which followed the JP movement started in Bihar, to the last ‘Jai Bhim Comrade‘ (2012), that explores the lives and politics of Dalits in Mumbai.

      With his film ‘Father, Son And Holy War‘, released in 1994, Patwardhan engaged in a long drawn legal battle with Doordarshan. Despite winning several awards, the state-sponsored telecaster refused to broadcast the film that delved into the history and psychology of communalism in India in light of the Babri Masjid demolition.

      He recently returned his National Award to protest growing intolerance in India and penned a powerful open letter expressing his dismay and emphasising the need of eternal vigilance. 65-year-old Patwardhan has been at war with various forms of censorship, including the CBFC (central board for film certification) and right-wing groups. His website is blocked often and can then only be accessed via proxy servers. He believes that all governments are equally responsible for attacking freedom of expression, but censorship is worse in the BJP-led government.

    • Melizarani T.Selva on how spoken words is free of censorship, unlike journalism

      I have always seen spoken words as an instrumental freedom. As a journalist, I report about every issue in the society. Journalism has censorship which always prevents me from expressing myself freely, but the world of spoken words does not. It is a free platform and I feel very open and safe. There are no hurdles as such, but sometimes I feel tied down when I have to write about something very personal, as you need to keep in mind that you have to share your story without revealing too much about your life. There is a constant challenge in maintaining that balance.

    • ‘Safe space’ or censorship?
    • “Safe Space” The new word for blasphemy and censorship
    • Film Censorship at Its Darkest Under Leadership of Pehlaj Nihalani

      If there is one thing the politically divided industry is generally at a consensus about, it is the vagaries of the censors, a recurring sore for decades, that has seemingly reached the nadir in 2015 under the stewardship of producer Pehlaj Nihalani as chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification.

    • Saraki Defends Social Media Censorship Bill, Says People Must Be Held Responsible For Their Action

      In spite of criticism trailing the ongoing bill by the Senate to censor social media in the country, Senate President Bukola Saraki on Thursday vowed that the Red Chamber would not back down from passing the proposed law.

    • Social media censorship bill: ‘Senate can’t be intimidated’ to surrender’

      AS criticisms continue to trail the ongoing bill by the Senate to censor social media in the country, the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has said no amount of attacks arising from it would make the Red Chamber abandon the proposed law.

    • Social Media Censorship Bill Dangerous To Nigeria’s Democracy – Gani Adams
    • Nigeria’s lawmakers are about to pass a bill which could gag citizens on social media

      Nigeria’s senators and house representatives are not exactly a popular bunch. Widely criticized for their high salaries and luxurious lifestyles, Nigerians have a frosty relationship with their senators. That relationship could get even worse with the introduction of a bill which is seen as aiming to gag free speech on social media.

    • Self-Censorship Rampant in Albanian Media, Study Says

      Links between politics, business and media have undermined journalistic excellence in the Albanian media and generated censorship or self-censorship among journalists, said the BIRN Albania study published on Tuesday.

      The study, based on interviews with 121 journalists, media owners and media experts, concluded that owners’ economic interests, their political links and media outlets’ financial inadequacy are the key factors pushing journalists toward self-censorship.

    • Censorship costs should be grounds for refusing FoI requests says watchdog

      Public bodies should be able to refuse Freedom of Information requests on the basis it would take them too long to censor material, the MPs’ expenses watchdog has said.

      The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) has suggested the move to the Government’s controversial commission reviewing the Freedom of Information Act.

      Under existing rules, Whitehall departments can turn down FoI requests if they would cost more than £600 to answer. The limit for other public bodies is £450.

    • When Is Censorship Okay? Answer: never

      I predict that this strange new power dynamic emerging on college campuses, where students leverage mostly reasonable grievances for patently unreasonable ends, will weaken the university as the last remaining bastion of free speech—at risk of culturally appropriating a word from the activist community, the last remaining “safe space.” Unlike the office, the church, and even the Thanksgiving table, as last week’s episode of SNL pointed out, the campus has not been a place where we fear getting silenced. I pray it stays that way.

    • Racism a subject suppressed due to censorship

      Censors have disguised themselves as sincere reformers, and their success could produce disastrous consequences.

    • San Gabriel High School’s shameful censorship continues

      How quickly they are learning what professional journalists all around the world learn over time, in a hard school: The powers that be, even in our nation that theoretically treasures free speech, only truly value press freedom when it serves to bolster their authority.

    • Social media censorship in Bangladesh hints at long-term problems for publishers

      Two weeks have passed since the government in Bangladesh blocked access to Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, and other social media sites. In Dhaka, some people have crowded into hotel lobbies to access private networks, while others are gaining access through proxy servers. The reason for the ban, according to the government, has to do with security, in light of the recent terrorist attacks and local political violence, but there is concern that it’s part of a creeping pattern of censorship that’s having a negative impact on publishers, especially after the temporary block in January and reports of journalists being harassed.

    • Saudi Arabia’s Art Scene Is Horrified by the Death Sentence Given to Poet Ashraf Fayadh

      Ashraf Fayadh, a poet recently sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia by beheading, relayed a simple but grim message to the world from his prison cell.

      “I’m an artist and I want my freedom,” Fayadh, 35, said over the telephone last week as he spoke with colleagues from the art collective Edge of Arabia, who have been advocating for his release along with a number of other artistic and human rights groups.

      Fayadh is charged with blasphemy for penning a book of love poems allegedly containing atheistic writings and uttering religiously blasphemous comments in an Abha café in 2013.

    • Time to Speak Out Against Censorship

      Saudi Arabia has condemned Palestinian poet and artist Ashraf Fayadh to death, charging that, as an apostate, he has insulted Islam, the Custodian of the Two Holy Shrines (the Saudi monarchy) and the Wahhabi sect. Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi tenets have been stirring fanatical religious fervor from as far away as Bangladesh, across North and central Africa, and into central Asia and the Caucasus.

    • Venezuelan Elections: journalists face challenges such as censorship and lack of access to information

      Covering parliamentary elections occuring on Dec. 6 in Venezuela has become a major challenge for national and international journalists.

      Allegations of censorship, lack of access to public information, excessive rumors, fear of an Internet blackout, violence against reporters and confiscation of equipment are part of the environment in which journalists are working while covering the 6D, as this day has become known in social networks.

    • Measuring millennials’ support for censorship

      My Tuesday column, about the use of trigger warnings, mentions some other survey data suggesting that millennials may be more amenable to limits on speech than earlier generations were. Here are the sources I was referring to.

    • “I hate censorship”: Larry King on his journey from prime time TV to Russia Today

      The first celebrity interview Larry King did was by chance, in a Miami Beach restaurant. He was a 26-year-old local radio presenter, and had set up his mid-morning show to broadcast from the popular Pumpernik’s deli. In walked the singer Bobby Darin, famous for his hit version of “Mack the Knife” released that year, 1959, and gave the young journalist his first showbiz interview. King has been asking questions ever since.

    • Florida Cops Issue Secret Police Censorship Training Manual, Call Photography a Crime

      A free speech chilling memo by the general counsel for a Florida police department advises cops that they can choose when to arrest citizens who record them in public, if those officers happen to be working undercover.

      Lakeland Police Department‘s ironically named “Crime Analysis & Intelligence Center” disgorged the secret police censorship manual memo labeled “14-0193” during a recent public records request by a member of the PINAC Newsroom, as shown below.

      Lakeland PD‘s memo acknowledges the public’s right to record police in public, while performing their official duties in passing on page one, and then crafts a tortured, Rube Goldberg’s police manual with unclear powers to undercover police.

    • New York Times Runs with Blank Pages Due to Censorship

      The New York Times’ international edition ran with widespread blank holes on its front page on Tuesday following pressure from the Thai government, which objected to the paper’s critical coverage.

    • Thai printer replaces International New York Times article with blank space
    • RSF deplores Thailand’s censorship of New York Times
    • Thailand printer censors International New York Times article on sagging economy
    • Printer refuses to run International New York Times story (again)
    • International New York Times’ Thai Printer Refuses To Run Front-Page Story
    • NYT has front page story blanked out in Thailand
    • Thai Printer Refuses to Publish US Paper’s Article on Thailand
    • Thailand: “New York Times” appears with a white spot on the title
    • Anonymous Hacks Thailand Police Server Against Internet Censorship

      The server breach allowed Anonymous to leak private information regarding Thai officers and some evidence records.

    • New York Times censored again as Thailand marks birthday of fragile king
    • Living in a void of white wilderness
    • Thai printer removes NYT content, again
    • NYT decries curbs on press freedom in Thailand
    • NYT Decries Censorship in Thailand as Article Again Redacted
    • Thailand: “New York Times” appears again whitened
    • Israel requests Google to block Palestinian videos from YouTube
    • Google Denies Online Censorship Deal with Israel
    • Google Denies Israel’s Claims That It Will Allow Censorship Of Palestinian Videos
    • Five Years After Revolution, Internet Censorship Is Creeping Back into Tunisia

      Tunisia has made great improvements in promoting a culture of internet freedom in the five years since the Tunisian Revolution.

      Unfortunately, internet activists are saying that the climate of fear and self-censorship is starting to creep back—and unless the Tunisian Parliament passes new laws protecting free speech on the internet, the country’s internet freedom could regress in the coming years.

      Before the revolution in January 2011, the North African country of approximately 11 million was governed by a tightly controlled dictatorship led by President Zine El Abeddine Ben Ali.

    • Full text of SA’s censorship bill published: ISPA wants to know more

      When the South Africa’s Film & Publication Board (FPB) released a draft set of regulations designed to regulate online content in South Africa earlier this year, it was met with a hail of criticism, which included it being called unconstitutional and “the worst censorship law in Africa”.

    • South Africa: Call for More Transparency On Online Censorship Policy

      The policy, which was published on March 4, attracted controversy because it sought to regulate all online content in SA, including any “film, game or certain publication” that would include classification of material on international platforms such as Facebook and Google.

    • Censorship negates freedom of the press

      The Bill of Rights: the first 10 Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Amendments that protect the rights of everyone, including journalists. Freedom of speech is a part of the First Amendment, yet freedom of the press which is also a part of the First Amendment is rarely recognized as valid when one is in a debate.

    • Chicago Sheriff Tried To Censor Backpages By Threatening Visa, Court Rules

      Backpages.com won its fight with the Chicago sheriff over intimidating letters that led Visa V +2.50% and MasterCard MA +3.06% to cut ties with the adult-services website, a victory against censorship in a climate where government officials seem more inclined than ever to use the threat of financial ruin to change corporate behavior.

      The decision by a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was written by the always-entertaining Judge Richard Posner, a nominal conservative who last month angered Republicans by striking down Wisconsin’s anti-abortion law for masquerading as a women’s health measure.

    • MDA not officially classifying Eric Khoo’s sex drama does not help nanny state image

      “The film was classified R21 uncut for the SGIFF. More leeway is given to film festivals as they play to a niche audience and have limited screenings.”

    • Telstra Bans Swear Words From Text Messages Sent Through Its Network

      Carrier Telstra bars off sailor talk on voice-to-text messages from its network, replacing the F and C bombs of the English language with long dashes.

      Such censorship is not unprecedented, as Apple has been changing the F word to “duck” on preemptive text messages since the iPhones emerged. But the Australia-based carrier had bigger plans, completely blocking out expletives.

      Back in June 2012, Telstra banned certain words, and then in July 2013, the carrier added more to its growing list of naughty words, where more words are thrown in on a yearly basis.

      “A small number of offensive words are omitted from our voice to text translations. This practice has been in place for a number of years and is based on feedback from our customers,” a Telstra spokesperson says.

    • Christian College President Slams Speech Censorship: ‘College Is Not Day Care’

      The president of a Christian college in Oklahoma has condemned the rise of political correctness on college campuses and told students who seek to silence speech that offends them that they are “self-absorbed” and “need to grow up.”

    • University President Delivers Tough Message to PC Students: School ‘Is Not a Safe Space’
    • Comment: Legal victory will stop the censorship of non-religious views in schools

      This week the High Court ruled in favour of three parents and their children who challenged the government over the exclusion of non-religious worldviews from the school curriculum as a result of the new Religious Studies GCSE.

      The Religious Education Council (REC) has naturally followed the legal proceedings extremely closely, and we have been clear that we fully support the court’s ruling. Our efforts have always focused on the need to ensure the subject is as comprehensive, intellectually challenging, and as socially beneficial as possible, and we look forward to working with the Department for Education, as well as schools and teachers, to bring in the changes the ruling entails.

      For now though, I want to be very clear about why we support the judgement. With good religious education (RE) children can become skilled inter-cultural navigators, better able to understand and relate to their future neighbours, friends, work colleagues and fellow citizens. This means that a wide range of faiths and beliefs ought to be options for study within RE. Part of this means that young people should have the opportunity to learn about the large number of people who describe themselves as being of no religious belief.

    • Poland: Worrying implications of defamation through the criminal code

      The company, which is based in Warsaw, provides information and communication services to well-known clients, such as the major Polish bank Pekao. Jakimczyk’s questions pertained to discs of private client data that, according to his information, there was proof of a transaction of sale between the two parties. When Jakimczyk received a response from Qumak’s press office in late September, the denial of any wrongdoing on their part was followed swiftly by something rather unexpected: Qumak was now pressing charges against Jakimczyk for defamation under article 212 of the Polish penal code.

    • University ‘safe space’ policies stifle freedom of expression, warns human rights activist
    • The liberal racism faced by ex-Muslims
    • This article is guilty of spreading panic and disorder

      IN THE middle of August Zhao Shaolin, a retired Communist Party boss of Jiangsu province in eastern China, was carted away by the country’s anti-corruption commission. Nothing unusual there. Dozens of local party bosses have fallen foul of a national anti-bribery campaign. What was surprising were the charges levelled against him. These usually stress the vast wealth the accused is said to have squirrelled away by his or her nefarious activities. Mr Zhao’s crime, according to Beijing News, a party newspaper, was to flout party discipline by criticising government policies. Some people, Xie Chuntao of the Central Party School sniffed, think “they are cleverer than the Party, which cannot be allowed.”

      Mr Zhao was not the only one. In mid-October the anti-corruption commission arrested two serving provincial party chiefs, in Hebei near Beijing and Guangxi in the south. Their list of crimes also included criticising the party. On October 12th the Politburo approved a new edition of the party’s rules. It was, Xinhua, the state news agency, said, “the most complete and stringent code of conduct” in the history of the Communist Party. It bans party members from making “negative comments” or “irresponsible remarks” about policy. Members may debate issues—but only if they say nice things.

    • Top court to decide on CHP petition over Internet censorship

      Parliament on Feb. 5 of last year approved the government-backed Internet bill that has caused outrage in Turkey and has received heavy condemnation abroad, granting even more rights to the chief of the telecommunications body and raising the specter of censorship on the Internet as the government was trying to contain the fallout from a graft scandal that became public in 2013.

    • Battle Brewing in Quebec Over Online Gambling Censorship
    • Quebec Lottery’s Censorship Plan Receives More Legislative Support

      An Internet censorship plan championed by Québec’s government-run lottery agency, Loto-Québec, continues to be part of financial legislation providing the framework for the province’s 2016-17 fiscal budget. Language within Québec’s ongoing budget proposal includes a modification to the province’s existing Consumer Protection Act that would force most Canadian ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to block access to what would likely be a lengthy list of online-gambling websites.

    • Austrian Pirate Bay Blockade Censors Slovak Internet

      Many Slovak Internet subscribers have been unable to access The Pirate Bay in recent days due to an unintended consequence of an injunction handed down in an entirely different country. An Austrian blockade of The Pirate Bay spread to Slovakia because a local ISP uses a datacenter in Vienna for its DNS server.

    • Japanese government cancels visit from UN free speech representative

      The UN’s principal global monitor of freedom of expression, David Kaye, was due to visit Japan between 1 and 8 December. In mid-November, the Japanese government cancelled the trip.

      Kaye said of the cancellation: “The Japanese government indicated that relevant interlocutors would be preoccupied with the budget process. That was disappointing to hear, particularly since we had been organising a broad set of meetings with officials, civil society, academic experts, journalists and others.”

      During the visit, Kaye planned to address basic aspects of freedom of expression, including the public’s right to access information, the freedom and protection of independent media, online rights and restrictions on marginalised communities.

  • Privacy

    • New software watches for license plates, turning you into Little Brother

      We now live in a world where if you have an IP-enabled security camera, you can download some free, open-source software from GitHub and boom—you have a fully functional automated license plate reader (ALPR, or LPR).

      Welcome to the sousveillance state: the technology that was once was just the purview of government contractors a few years ago could now be on your own street soon.

    • NSA’s shuttered program was ‘a sacrificial lamb’ in U.S. mass surveillance

      The change is “not going to be a big blow” to the NSA, says David Murakami Wood, the Canadian Research Chair in surveillance studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

      “The fact that they’ve allowed it to be cancelled probably suggests it’s a bit of a sacrificial lamb.”

    • Senate NSA bill would expand requirements of phone companies

      A new Senate bill would require phone companies to notify the government if a change is made in how customer records are stored. This comes as the NSA’s bulk data collection expires but calls to increase surveillance intensify following recent attacks.

    • Senate bill adds new fuel to NSA debate
    • Republican unveils new bill to stall NSA reforms
    • New legislation aims at stalling NSA reform
    • No, NSA Phone Spying Has Not Ended

      Instead, telecom companies will retain and access the data on their customers. The NSA may then seek warrants from the secretive courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in order to compel these companies to hand over pertinent information on terrorism suspects and affiliates. The requests are not done in bulk, but rather require “specific selectors” such as the phone number of an individual. The NSA then has up to 180-days to query the telecom companies for more data—on socially connected persons of interest, so-called one-to-two degree “hops” on their networks—before seeking a renewed authority from a FISA court.

    • No, NSA HASN’T Stopped Mass Spying On American Citizens

      WILLIAM BINNEY: The only thing that ended was the general warrants issued by the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] for companies to give all their call records to NSA for processing.

    • WATCH: Despite What You’ve Read, NSA Hasn’t Stopped Spying on You
    • Surprise! The NSA Is Still Spying On You

      The bulk phone records collection program was banned in the USA Freedom Act, a law that curbed some domestic spying. This program allowed the NSA to collect metadata from American citizens’ calls en masse. Now, instead of collecting phone metadata in an expansive dragnet, the USA Freedom Act requires the NSA to first make a “specific query,” like a name, or a device number.

    • The end of NSA’s phone-record dragnet? That’s marginal change.

      By all accounts, these are pretty good times for advocates of privacy rights in the face of creeping government surveillance. Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing sent shockwaves across the international community about who knew what. Just last week, the NSA finally shut down its bulk telephone records collection, and it is no longer allowed to directly hold information about the phone calls of millions of U.S. citizens. Here in Canada, the Liberals took power, with promises to reform the previous government’s controversial Bill C-51.

    • NSA can still collect your phone records through legal loopholes

      Verizon and AT&T were both forced to hand over their records to the authorities on a rolling basis.

    • FBI won’t discuss how shuttered NSA program would have affected San Bernardino investigation

      “I won’t answer, because we don’t talk about the investigative techniques we use,” Comey said Friday, according to the Associated Press. “I’m not going to characterize it.”

    • NSA documents leaker Edward Snowden speaks in Park City

      The world’s most famous — or infamous — leaker made his way to Utah Saturday evening.

      Edward Snowden spoke in Park City from an undisclosed location, over the Internet. He is presumed to be in Russia as he was granted asylum there in 2013 after leaking sensitive documents shedding light on secret government surveillance programs.

      Hundreds turned out to the Park City Institute to hear Snowden speak.

    • The next version of the web has a message for the NSA

      The language of the web is the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and like a lot of really important technology it’s actually more than a little, um, unexciting.

      HTTP is maintained by the IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) and it’s so sensible and unexciting that it’s remained almost unchanged for about 25 years. In technology terms it’s a time capsule from the same era as Windows 3.1 (ask your Dad.)

    • Will the NSA Spy on COP21 Paris Climate Talks?

      The U.S. agency spied on foreign climate negotiators at the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks and funneled the information to U.S. delegates.

      As the Paris COP21 climate change talks begin Monday a question remains on the minds of many: Will the U.S. spy on its rivals and sabotage negotiations?

      This may seem farfetched, but it is exactly what National Security Agency documents, leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealed to have happened in 2009. The NSA spied on member states before and during the inconclusive Copenhagen talks, viewed as a failure by many for the member states’ inability to reach a meaningful and binding climate agreement.

    • Here’s how Larry Klayman celebrates victory — but then, maybe the NSA already knew?

      The photo is just another sign that Klayman is back in the game after a career of ups and downs since he first made a reputation suing the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Rather than declare victory in the NSA matter and move on, he’s doubling down. He says he’s going to ask Leon to award damages to the plaintiffs to compensate them for the constitutional violation. And — even as some politicians are calling for a return to the discarded NSA program in the wake of recent terrorist attacks — Klayman also plans to ask Leon to monitor the NSA to make sure the government follows the new, more restrictive law.

    • Google’s ‘Inbox’: Should Privacy Advocates Be Concerned?

      Google is getting ready to migrate all Gmail users to Inbox, which should be something of a concern for those worried about privacy, but no one seems to be noticing. The current efforts seem to be directed at users of the Gmail mobile app, but it’s my guess that desktop users of Gmail will be getting be getting the same treatment soon.

    • Let’s Encrypt free digital certificate project opens doors for public beta

      Let’s Encrypt, the project offering free digital certificates for websites, is now issuing them more broadly with the launch of a public beta on Thursday.

      The beta label will eventually be dropped as the software they’ve developed is refined, wrote Josh Aas, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), which runs Let’s Encrypt.

      “Automation is a cornerstone of our strategy, and we need to make sure that the client works smoothly and reliably on a wide range of platforms,” he wrote.

      Digital certificates use the SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) protocols to encrypt traffic exchanged between a user and a service, adding a higher level of privacy and security.

    • Will the Paris terror attacks push the French government to compromise data protection for security?

      On 13 November 2015, terrorists conducted simultaneous attacks at several locations in Paris, leaving more than 130 people dead. The French government responded by enacting a state of emergency, which allows the agencies of the government to search homes without warrants and block websites.

    • Millions of Internet Explorer users must update, or lose patches

      Millions of Internet Explorer users have just five weeks to upgrade to a newer browser before security patches dry up.

    • Talk: Mass surveillance and a crisis of social responsibility

      He will discuss ethical issues of mass surveillance activity carried out by the United States government as revealed by former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Professor Rogaway asks why computer scientists, who developed the technology for mass data-gathering, have not more strongly condemned it.

    • BlackBerry pulls out of Pakistan after refusing the governments demands for unrestricted data access

      Even though Pakistan remains an important mobile market, BlackBerry has announced that they will be formally withdrawing from the country. This development has come about as a result of Pakistan’s government insisting that BlackBerry grant them backdoor access to encrypted services earlier this year.

      BlackBerry is a company that touts the value of security pretty vocally. The CEO even said that the BlackBerry Priv was given its name in-part because it was short for “Privacy.” In an era in which companies seem more than willing to fold on their values for financial gain, it’s encouraging to see BlackBerry’s unconditional refusal. The company has taken a firm stance on the side of their users’ personal privacy, and the Pakistani government wasn’t thrilled.

    • HTTP/2 opens every new connection it makes with the word ‘PRISM’

      British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming has spotted something interesting in the opening protocol of any HTTP/2 connection: an array of explicitly formatted code which spells the word PRISM, in an apparent reference to the NSA’s primary program for mass-surveillance of the internet, as disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

    • Editorial: Sen. Wyden wins his long struggle with the NSA

      Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden played a leading role over 10 years to bring the NSA’s secret operation into the open. In the wake of the NSA announcement last week, Sen. Wyden brought the recent terrorist attacks on Paris and Mali into the discussion. “After every such attack, politicians who would play to Americans’ fears call for liberty to be sacrificed in the name of security. I reject those calls. And as long as Americans continue to demand that their government protect both their security and their liberty, I am confident that our country can deal with these threats without sacrificing our most cherished rights and values.”

    • Edward Snowden, Deep Throat and the NSA

      The more you study Edward Snowden—what he actually did and did not do, and his concerns for our country—you have to admire his bravery. If you saw the Oscar award-winning documentary, CitizenFour, you understand the enormous sacrifice and risk. When you understand his military family background and his own military service, you shift again. And when you see his Twitter feeds, you understand he also has a quick sense of humor. I think we will come to view Edward Snowden as we once did Deep Throat or Daniel Ellsberg. We will discover we initially misjudged him and come to understand him as a remarkable patriot. He deserves amnesty and a return to the United States and there are increasing calls for this to happen from New York Times editorials to former Attorney General Eric Holder suggesting we re-consider bringing him home and suggesting to make a deal to do so.

    • NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden to Headline Free State Project’s Liberty Forum

      Edward Snowden, the former CIA intelligence officer and NSA contractor who leaked information about illegal government surveillance in 2013, is coming to New Hampshire–live from Russia–during the Free State Project’s 9th annual Liberty Forum.

  • Civil Rights

    • [EFF] Join the 2015 Power Up Your Donation Campaign for 2× the Impact
    • WaPo Attacks Unions for Seeking Higher Wages for Their Members

      The piece starts out by acknowledging that the AFL-CIO opposes tax provisions and trade agreements (wrongly called free trade agreements — apparently Lane has not heard about the increases in patent and copyright protection in these pacts) that encourage outsourcing. He could have also noted that it has argued for measures against currency management and promoted labor rights elsewhere, also measures that work against outsourcing. And it would be appropriate to note in this context its support for measures that help the workforce as a whole, like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and the Affordable Care Act.

    • US must investigate Bush, aides in CIA torture, rights group says

      US President Barack Obama must investigate his predecessor George W. Bush and allies over the CIA’s torture of terror suspects, or stand complicit in a government “cover-up,” Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.

      In a scathing report, the international rights group decried the lack of prosecutions of those involved in the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret program to torture detainees in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

      “While the program officially ended in 2009, the cover-up of these crimes appears to be ongoing,” said the report, which argues there is enough evidence for the attorney general to order criminal probes.

    • Obama should probe Bush, others over CIA torture: rights group
    • In Pursuit of Investigation and Prosecution of CIA Torture Program Perpetrators

      President Barack Obama has walked away from pursuing those involved in the CIA’s torture program, but human rights advocates are demanding the administration take legal action against them.

      Obama and his top officials say there is not enough evidence to pursue prosecution of CIA agents and contractors or former members of the George W. Bush administration who authorized the secret renditions and torture of suspected terrorists.

      But Human Right Watch (HRW) argues “sufficient evidence exists” for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to carry out criminal investigations of “senior United States officials and others involved in the post-September 11 CIA program for torture, conspiracy to torture, and other crimes under U.S. law.” HRW says its new report provides evidence to support criminal charges against those responsible for state-sanctioned torture, and it discusses legal obligations to provide redress to victims of torture.

    • Interview: Torture and the CIA

      In the years after 9/11, the US basically abducted or were handed scores of men throughout the world, held them in secret locations, and tortured or otherwise mistreated them. Yet there’s been zero accountability for these crimes.

    • Cruz: ‘America Does Not Need Torture to Protect Ourselves’
    • Why the CIA torture techniques aren’t a reliable way of extracting information

      If Ant and Dec had read the “torture memos” released by Barack Obama in 2009, they might not find I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! quite so funny. Food and sleep deprivation are standard fare for the CIA but one of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” under consideration was to place a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist “in a cramped confinement box with an insect”. Abu Zubaydah was believed to have a fear of insects. Being at close quarters with one was supposed to be a route to “breaking” him.

      That CIA torture techniques are also employed as entertainment on prime-time television is ironic: many of the CIA’s best ideas come from watching TV. Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver has said that staff at Guantanamo Bay watched 24 on cable while at the base, for instance – and that its maverick hero, Jack Bauer, “gave people lots of ideas”.

    • George W. Bush and Dick Cheney should face prosecution over CIA’s secret torture program, group says
    • Outspoken Miss World Canada denied entry to China
    • Chinese newspaper says banned Miss World contestant is aligned with ‘hostile’ forces
    • Miss World Canada Says China’s Censorship is ‘An Assault on Humanity’
    • Turkey: Index condemns killing of lawyer during press conference

      Elci, was briefly detained and questioned last month for saying during a live news program that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, is not a terrorist organisation. According to The Guardian newspaper, he was charged soon after with making terrorist propaganda and was facing more than seven years in prison.

    • CIA torture, NSA spying will return

      The New York Times recently drew attention (Nov. 10) to the fact that Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has succeeded in locking up – unread – in government vaults across Washington, from the Justice Department to the Pentagon, the full, classified, U.S. Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention, interrogation, and torture program.

    • After Paris Attacks, Proposed French Law Would Block Tor and Forbid Free Wi-Fi

      After the recent Paris terror attacks, the French government is proposing to forbid and block the use of the Tor anonymity network, according to an internal document from the Ministry of Interior seen by French newspaper Le Monde.

      That document lays out two proposed pieces of legislation, one around the state of emergency, and the other concerning counter-terrorism.

      In the former, the French government is considering to “Forbid free and shared wi-fi connections” during a state of emergency. This comes from a police opinion included in the document: the reason being that it is apparently difficult to track individuals who use public wi-fi networks.

      The latter piece of legislation, meanwhile, says the government is considering “to block or forbid communications of the Tor network.” The legislation, according to Le Monde, could be presented as early as January 2016.

    • How Many Inmates Have Died in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Jails? Who Knows, But it’s a Big Number.

      Last week, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio concluded a contempt of court hearing that revealed what we’ve always known about the old coot: his office engages in racial profiling, he thinks he’s above the law enough to ignore court orders, and he’ll use the power of his office, and the taxpayer’s coin, to investigate and harass his enemies—in this case a judge and his wife!

    • Unarmed man who lost quarter of his skull after being shot in the head by cop while he was out for a walk sues LAPD

      An unarmed man who lost a quarter of his skull after being shot by a Los Angeles police officer notified the city and police department on Wednesday that he plans to sue, claiming the shooting was part of a broad, disturbing pattern in the police force of the nation’s second-largest city.

      Attorneys for Walter DeLeon, 49, filed the notice of claim in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

    • Lord Janner unfit to stand trial, judge rules

      Lord Janner is unfit to stand trial over allegations of child sexual abuse spanning three decades, a High Court judge has ruled.

      Mr Justice Openshaw told the Old Bailey the 87-year-old peer had “advanced and disabling dementia”.

      Both prosecution and defence barristers had agreed at a previous hearing that Greville Janner was not well enough to take part in a criminal trial.

      Lord Janner is accused of 22 counts of sex offences against boys.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality has its day in court – with lawyers, Christians and the Cheshire Cat

      Net neutrality is on trial, and everyone from white-shoe-firm lawyers to Christian internet activists showed up to watch oral arguments in the US Telecom Association v the FCC on Friday in a packed Washington DC courtroom, where an exasperated bailiff threatened to toss out reporters who wouldn’t stop using their phones to access the technology in question.

      From the moment in February when the FCC voted to reclassify internet providers as “common carriers”, paving the way for net neutrality protections, a bitter fight in the courtroom was inevitable.

12.05.15

Links 6/12/2015: New Linux Mint Releases, No Ads in Firefox

Posted in News Roundup at 6:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • From Closed Source to Open Source: A Journey

    Since joining GigaSpaces a few months ago, I thought it would be interesting to write down some thoughts about my experience on the journey from the closed-source, enterprise world to the open source, startup mentality of getting work done, both internally at the office as well as from a client-facing perspective.

  • Intel Open Sources Snap Cloud Telemetry Tool to Promote Cloud for All

    Intel’s latest move in its “Cloud for All” initiative — which it says will accelerate enterprise adoption of public, private and hybrid clouds — is an open source tool called snap, which helps organizations understand the telemetry of their clouds.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Thunderbird 38.4.0 Brings A Bunch Of FIxes Only
      • Advancing Content

        One of the many benefits of the Web is the ability to create unique, personalized experiences for individual users. We believe that this personalization needs to be done with respect for the user – with transparency, choice and control. When the user is at the center of product experiences everyone benefits.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • What’s the Intersection of Docker and OpenStack? [VIDEO]

      OpenStack and Docker are both open source technologies with a lot of excitement and momentum behind them. But where is the intersection between Docker and OpenStack? And why isn’t Docker Inc part of the OpenStack Foundation?

      In a video interview, Ben Golub, CEO of Docker Inc. the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Docker engine, explains where it all fits together.

      At a high-level, OpenStack is a popular widely deployed Infrastructure-as-a-Service open source platform, while Docker provide an open-source container technology to build, deploy and manage containers. Golub noted that organizations are using Docker together with various flavors of OpenStack from different vendors including HP, Red Hat and Mirantis.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Introducing the LibreOffice Online App for ownCloud

      While digging through the Internet, we’ve discovered that there’s now a LibreOffice application for the ownCloud open-source self-hosting cloud server, which lets users edit all sorts of LibreOffice documents online.

  • CMS

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Reproducible builds and standalone GNU systems with Guix 0.9

      Version 0.9 of the Guix package-management system was released on November 5. Since the previous major release in 2014, the Guix project has evolved to include not only the package manager itself, but the Guix Software Distribution (GuixSD) as well. With the large set of packages it supports, Guix already provides, in essence, a full operating-system layer that can be deployed and maintained on top of a minimal core Linux distribution. GuixSD goes one step further, and provides a Linux kernel and core OS components as well. Regardless of whether one uses GuixSD or simply installs individual packages with the Guix tools, the new release adds quite a bit of interesting new functionality, including automatic container provisioning, new tools for graphing package dependencies, and a mechanism for users to verify reproducible software packages.

    • GIMP 2.9.2 Released

      We are excited to announce the first development release of GIMP in the 2.9.x series. It is another major milestone towards making GIMP a state-of-the art image editing application for graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and scientists.

    • A CEO’s Guide to Emacs

      Years—no, decades—ago, I lived in Emacs. I wrote code and documents, managed email and calendar, and shelled all in the editor/OS. I was quite happy. Years went by and I moved to newer, shinier things. As a result, I forgot how to do tasks as basic as efficiently navigating files without a mouse. About three months ago, noticing just how much of my time was spent switching between applications and computers, I decided to give Emacs another try. It was a good decision for several reasons that will be covered in this post. Covered too are .emacs and Dropbox tips so that you can set up a good, movable environment.

    • Gimp 2.9.2 Released
    • Got a light? Help the FSF’s guiding light shine brighter

      For thirty years, the Free Software Foundation has been seen as a guiding light for the free software movement, fighting for computer user freedom worldwide — but we can’t continue this work without your support.

    • New GIMP, Ubuntu’s New Year’s Gift & More…

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • OpenHardware and code signing (update)

        I posted a few weeks ago about the difficulty of providing device-side verification of firmware updates, at the same time remaining OpenHardware and thus easily hackable. The general consensus was that allowing anyone to write any kind of firmware to the device without additional authentication was probably a bad idea, even for OpenHardware devices. I think I’ve come up with an acceptable compromise I can write up as a recommendation, as per usual using the ColorHug+ as an example. For some background, I’ve sold nearly 3,000 original ColorHug devices, and in the last 4 years just three people wanted help writing custom firmware, so I hope you can see the need to protect the majority is so much larger than making the power users happy.

  • Programming

    • How old were you when you started learning how to program?
    • So you think that you know what “hacker”means?

      Given the negative connotation of the term today, I recall my surprise when I first read (alas, the source has long been forgotten) that in the world of mainframe computer in the 1960′s, where the principal revenue stream were licensing fees for the hardware, “hacker” referred to a person who was encouraged to tinker with the software to improve its performance. After all, there was no or little money to be made in the software per se, so that any improvements in performance would only serve to enhance the value of the mainframe itself. Hacking appeared to be a beneficial activity in support of the hardware.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • This Scientist Uncovered Problems With Pesticides. Then the Government Started to Make His Life Miserable.

      Until fairly recently, Jonathan Lundgren enjoyed a stellar career as a government scientist. An entomologist who studies how agrichemicals affect the ecology of farm fields, he has published nearly 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals since starting at the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service laboratory in Brookings, South Dakota, in 2005. By 2012, he had won the ARS’s “Outstanding Early Career Research Scientist” award, and directorship of his own lab.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • A Missed Chance to Connect Paris Massacres, Past and Present

      It does no dishonor to those killed in Paris last month to acknowledge that at least 200 people were killed in that city on October 17, 1961. It was nearly seven years into the war for Algeria’s independence from French colonial rule, and some 30,000 Muslims demonstrated in central Paris against a curfew imposed solely on Muslims. They were met by a police force led by prefect Maurice Papon, who would later be charged with crimes against humanity for his collaborationist role in the World War II Vichy government.

    • Fox’s Megyn Kelly Attacks Attorney General For Promising To Address Violent Anti-Muslim Rhetoric
    • Yemen: Nine Wounded in Saudi-Led Coalition Airstrike on MSF Clinic in Taiz

      Airstrikes carried out yesterday by the Saudi-led coalition hit a clinic in southern Yemen run by the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and wounded nine people, including two MSF staff members.

      According to local sources, at 11:20 a.m. local time on December 2, three airstrikes targeted a park in Taiz city’s Al Houban district, about two kilometers from MSF’s tented clinic. The MSF team immediately evacuated the Al Houban clinic and informed the Saudi-led coalition that their jet planes were mounting an attack nearby. The clinic itself then came under attack.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Republicans’ Climate Change Denial Denial

      Future historians — if there are any future historians — will almost surely say that the most important thing happening in the world during December 2015 was the climate talks in Paris. True, nothing agreed to in Paris will be enough, by itself, to solve the problem of global warming. But the talks could mark a turning point, the beginning of the kind of international action needed to avert catastrophe.

      Then again, they might not; we may be doomed. And if we are, you know who will be responsible: the Republican Party.

      O.K., I know the reaction of many readers: How partisan! How over the top! But what I said is, in fact, the obvious truth. And the inability of our news media, our pundits and our political establishment in general to face up to that truth is an important contributing factor to the danger we face.

    • Is Indonesia underreporting its emissions at COP21?

      Official documentation submitted by Indonesia to the UN climate talks in Paris this week dramatically underestimates deforestation and emissions in the archipelago, according to an analysis by Greenpeace. However, not everyone agrees with Greenpeace’s assessment.

      The documentation’s omissions include 10 million hectares of deforestation, millions of hectares of peatland degradation and emissions from the annual farm and plantation fires, threatening to undermine Indonesia’s prospects for receiving international assistance for peatland protection and REDD+ schemes, according to the NGO.

      “The people of Indonesia deserve to know the truth about how much forest and peatland has been destroyed,” Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaigner Annisa Rahmawati said. “Only from a truthful foundation can we build a solid climate plan for Indonesia.”

    • Climate deniers agree their key messages for journalists (with a journalist in the room)

      This afternoon, I went along to a fringe event in central Paris put on by the UK climate denier brigade. There were about 15 people – all older white men but for one woman, me, and Brendan Montague, editor of DesmogUK, with whom I’d arrived.

      Among the small number at PCC15, as they called their event, were a number of prominent figures from the movement against the scientific consensus on climate change. Patrick Moore, the controversial former director of Greenpeace who has questioned both whether global warming is man-made, and whether it is dangerous, was leaving as we arrived. UKIP MEP Stuart Agnew was there, as were Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate change denier, and Canadian Tom Harris, executive director of the “International Climate Science Coalition” – and former operations director of the “High Park Group”, a Canadian lobbying company. I was told we’d missed the journalist James Delingpole and Piers Corbyn (MD of WeatherAction and brother of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn)..

  • Censorship

    • Feds Drop Case Against Torrent Site, ‘Return’ Domain After 5 Years

      After more than five years the Department of Justice has released the Torrent-Finder.com domain, which is now back in the hands of the original owner. The authorities had a very weak case and decided to accept the torrent site’s “offer in compromise.”

    • Sharing of television news clips hangs in the fair-use balance

      All of this begs the question of what is fair use. It’s complicated, and there is no bright-line rule. “In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and ‘transformative’ purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work, according to Stanford University. “Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an illegal infringement.”

  • Privacy

    • My fridge is listening to me

      There is no presumption of privacy riding in a tour bus, so it probably isn’t illegal to listen-in. Bus security cameras and their footage have been around for years now and appear regularly on TV news after bus crimes. But there’s something about this idea of not only our actions being recorded but also our words that I find disturbing. It’s especially so when we consider the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT). What other devices will soon be snitching on us?

    • Responding to “Nothing to hide, Nothing to fear”

      Every time we talk about mass surveillance, privacy or the security services’ powers we and our supporters find ourselves at the other end of that familiar phrase, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. It’s time to challenge that.

    • German Parliament Spy Oversight Board Sues German Government Over Data Sharing With NSA

      After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of spying being carried out around the world by the NSA and its Five Eyes friends, there have been a number of attempts in other countries to find out what has been going on. One of the most thoroughgoing of these is in Germany, where there is a major parliamentary inquiry into NSA activities in that country. As Techdirt reported back in May, a surprising piece of information to emerge from this is that Germany’s secret service has been carrying out spying on behalf of the NSA, which sent across various “selectors” — search terms — that it wanted investigated in the German spies’ surveillance databases.

    • A Journey Into the Heart of Facebook

      We are running late to the Facebook Data Center. I keep checking my watch, as if the seconds might start moving backwards if I stare hard enough. This is not a particularly safe way to drive. I am, apparently, more concerned with being late than I am with possibly totaling a car. Being late is far more heinous act.

    • Former Bush Press Secretary Says The Answer To Mass Shootings Is… More Domestic Surveillance

      The tragic shootings in San Bernadino earlier this week have created a political field day for the usual idiotic partisan arguments — which tend to have little to nothing to do with whatever actually happened. You have people on one side using it to call for gun control and folks on the other side using it to spark fears of “domestic terrorism.” And, of course, it didn’t take long for someone to pop up with using it as an excuse to call for greater surveillance. That was the argument that former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took on MSNBC yesterday when asked what should be done in response. MSNBC Kate Snow asked if this could lead to bipartisan support for gun control (ha ha!) and Fleischer turned it around to say the answer is more surveillance.

    • NSA ‘reform’: Fewer phone records, but data flow continues

      No sooner had the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records for millions of U.S. citizens come to an end, then members of Congress swung into action to dilute even that small step toward reform. Meanwhile, other programs that have much greater implications for privacy survive and thrive in the NSA’s sprawling surveillance system.

      The USA Freedom Act passed overwhelmingly in June, but its reform banning the NSA from scooping up more phone data only went into effect last weekend. Metadata already collected can be kept by the NSA until Feb. 29, and your phone data will continue to be collected by telecom companies, but the NSA must now go to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) court for permission to gain access. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed it was the secret FISA court that gave the NSA permission to indiscriminately collect Americans’ phone records in the first place.

  • Civil Rights

    • American Nightmare: the Depravity of Neoliberalism

      Deciphering the meaning of Neo-liberalism as a historical force and societal form requires the energies and know-how of a sagacious sleuth like Hercule Poirot. Wendy Brown, a philosophy professor at UCLA (Berkeley) and author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, has a Poirot intellectual sensibility and acuity that sees what most of us cannot.

      Those of us who have written on neo-conservative politics and neo-liberalism as an economic form have illuminated many dimensions of “something new” that has emerged out of the collapse of welfare state liberal democracy in the West over the last five decades.

    • The Completely Nonsensical Differences In Punishment For Revenge Porn Kings

      Earlier this week, Hunter Moore — the guy who basically invented the concept of revenge porn with his “Is Anyone Up” site — was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail along with a $2,000 fine… and he has to pay $145.70 in “restitution” to a single victim. Moore was arrested for violating the CFAA, and as we noted at the time, it may be one of the few legitimate uses of the CFAA. He didn’t just run a revenge porn site, he hired a guy, Charlie Evens, who got a similar sentence a week ago, to hack into the computers of unsuspecting women, and swipe naked photos of them to put on his site. The sickening bit: that “$145.70″ in “restitution”? That’s how much Moore paid Evens (also, Evens is jointly liable for that money, meaning that Moore might not even pay it). It’s difficult to understand why the $145.70 makes any sense at all as the “harm” caused to the anonymous woman “L.B.” whose computer got hacked into.

    • Sharia courts in Britain lock women into ‘marital captivity’, study says

      Sharia courts in Britain are locking women into “marital captivity” and doing nothing to officially report domestic violence, according to an academic who gained unprecedented access to Islamic divorce hearings.

    • Court: Breaking Your Employer’s Computer Policy Isn’t a Crime

      The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an opinion rejecting the government’s attempt to hold an employee criminally liable under the federal hacking statute—the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”)—for violating his employer-imposed computer use restrictions. The decision is important because it ensures that employers and website owners don’t have the power to criminalize a broad range of innocuous everyday behaviors, like checking personal email or the score of a baseball game, through simply adopting use restrictions in their corporate policies or terms of use.

      The court also ruled that the government cannot hold people criminally liable on the basis of purely fantastical statements they make online—i.e., thoughtcrime.

    • SJW attitude in science

      The arguments are quite easy to summarize: The meritocracy party proposes that “One’s contribution should only be evaluated based on the content and the quality”, while the SJW party asserts that in case the submitter as from a minority group, in particular everyone outside the white straight group, the contribution has to be accepted with higher probability (or without discussion) to ensure equality.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • If the FCC Loses in Court Today, It Could Be the End of Net Neutrality

      The US government’s landmark net neutrality policy faces a crucial test Friday when advocates and opponents of the new rules face off in federal court. The Federal Communications Commission, along with a coalition of public interest groups, is battling some of the biggest cable and telecom interests in the country over whether the agency has the authority to enforce a policy it says is necessary to protect internet openness.

    • Eight Questions About Friday’s Net Neutrality Hearing

      The Federal Communications Commission will head to court on Friday to defend its net neutrality rules against opponents who want to overturn the broadband regulations, a hearing that may help determine how consumers get access to content on the web.

      If this sounds familiar, it’s because the F.C.C. has twice appeared in front of the same federal court to argue over net neutrality policies, in particular a set of regulations aimed at preventing favoritism on the Internet. In both cases, the F.C.C. argued that it had the authority to regulate high-speed Internet providers, while opponents argued the agency was overstepping the mandates of Congress. Both times, the agency lost.

      Hoping that the third time will be the charm, the F.C.C.’s lawyers will tell a panel of judges at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that its most recent version of net neutrality rules is on firmer legal ground. With all the twists and turns of the F.C.C.’s yearslong net neutrality push, we offer this guide on the latest developments and what they may mean for you.

    • Appeals court weighs government’s rules requiring equal access to Internet content

      In this March 17, 2015 file photo, Federal Communications Commisison (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler testifies before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on net neutrality, on Capitol Hill in Washington. A long-running legal battle over government rules that require Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally is back for another round before a federal appeals court. Cable and telecom industry groups will urge a three-judge panel on Dec. 4 to throw out regulations that forbid online content from being blocked or channeled into fast and slow lanes

    • Net neutrality supporters optimistic after court arguments

      Internet providers suing the Federal Communications Commission to overturn net neutrality rules got their day in court today as oral arguments were heard by a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC.

      A decision might not come for months, but net neutrality supporters said the judges’ questions indicate that a ruling may defer to the FCC’s determination on the crucial question of whether Internet providers can be reclassified as common carriers. Opponents of the net neutrality rules believe the judges are skeptical about some of the FCC’s arguments, however.

      The FCC’s decision to impose common carriage restrictions on Internet providers hinges on whether they can be considered “telecommunications services,” as opposed to more lightly regulated “information services.” ISPs argue that Internet access is properly defined as an information service, but ultimately the FCC may have the discretion to make that decision.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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