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12.03.14

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Openwashing: adopter beware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Cisco Goes Open-Source for Big Data Security Analytics

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

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

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 34.0.5 Lands in All Supported Ubuntu Distros

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

      • New tablet UI for Firefox on Android

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

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Selling a Non-Product: The Multifaceted OpenStack

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

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

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

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

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • Nzega’s Digital Library Becomes a Reality

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

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

    • BSDCan 2015 call for papers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Announcing netdev 0.1

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

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

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

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

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

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

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

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

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

  • Science

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

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

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

  • Health/Nutrition

    • How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

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

    • Ebola Story Puts Old Fears in New Virus

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

  • Security

    • there are no good constant-time data structures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Latest ISIS attack on Kobanê implicates Turkey once more

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

      [...]

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

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

  • Censorship

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

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

  • Civil Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality essential to our democracy

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

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

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

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

    • Net Neutrality: France Is Playing The Telcos’ Game

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

12.02.14

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux holiday shopping guide

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

  • December 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Readers’ Choice

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

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

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

  • Desktop

    • Now crowdfunding: A laptop that protects your digital rights

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

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

    • The impact of the Linux philosophy

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

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

    • Google Chromebooks Outsell iPads in U.S. Schools

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

  • Server

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

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

    • Cavium Debuts 48-Core ARM Server Chip

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

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE (in) Austria
      • Interview with Esfir Kanievska

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

      • The QML State Machine

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

      • Google Code-In 2014 is ON!

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

  • Distributions

    • Best distro of 2014 poll

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

    • Reviews

      • Living free with Trisquel GNU/Linux 7.0

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

    • New Releases

      • Q4OS: Debian Stable with the Trinity Desktop Environment

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

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

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

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

      • CoreOS is building a container runtime, Rocket

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

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

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

      • CONTAINER WARS: CoreOS blasts Rocket rival at Docker

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

      • Fedora

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

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

    • Debian Family

      • SSD adventures and fun times!

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

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

      • Debian Gets Forked

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

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch for Mobile Devices Almost Ready

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

          • Unity 8 Has Received Improvements For Desktop Usage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          • UbuTab: An Ubuntu Tablet With A Terabyte Hard Drive

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

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Hands-on with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE

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

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

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

            • Setting up Linux Mint 17.1 for the first time

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

            • Linux Mint 17.1 released

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

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

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

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

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

            • Linux Mint Project Releases Mint 17.1

  • Devices/Embedded

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

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

    • New FUZE Tribute Special Edition

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

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Introduction to Tizen IVI Webinar

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

      • Android

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

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

        • Android’s Material Design reaches into Linux

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

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

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

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

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

        • The Android 5.0 Lollipop Review

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

        • More Android Apps Arriving for Chrome OS and Chromebooks

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

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

        • Android Devices Driving Shipment Volumes, iOS Drives Revenues

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

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Open Leadership Has Become Essential

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Why change is hard for any open source community

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

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

  • Gngr Begins Open-Sourcing Their Web Browser Code

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

  • 8 ways to contribute to open source without writing code

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

  • Nginx 1.7.8 Updates Open-Source Web Server

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

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

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

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

  • Events

    • Zenoss Survey Shows the Momentum of Open Source Clouds

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

    • Defining Software Defined Networking: Part 1

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

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • 5 Open Source Business Intelligence Tools

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

  • Funding

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

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

  • BSD

    • Is It Time to Give BSD a Try?

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

    • How did you get into BSD?

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

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Tin Whiskers Brewery bucks the trend of secret recipes

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

    • Nature makes all articles free to view

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

    • Bill Gates and the True Nature of Open Access

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

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

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

  • Programming

    • Network clock examples

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

    • Why developers love and hate PHP

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

    • Google’s Go 1.5 To Feature Many Improvements

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

    • New features in Git 2.2.0

  • Standards/Consortia

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

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

Leftovers

  • Science

    • That Takeout Coffee Cup May Be Messing With Your Hormones

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

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Black Friday Now Just Another Opportunity to Mock the Poor

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

    • Full Show: The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

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

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

  • Privacy

    • MegaSync Your Cloud Data for True Internet Privacy

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

      Mega with MegaSync client changes all that.

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

    • Privacy as Innovation Interview

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

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

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

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

      It really has grown to a fever pitch lately.

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

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

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

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

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

  • Civil Rights

    • Iranian Opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Police arrest 2 teens for prostitution ring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

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

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

      • Kim Dotcom Announces United States Political Party

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

      • US Efforts to Jail Dotcom Fail as Kim Walks Free

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

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

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

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

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

      • Eagles Sue Concert Footage Archivist Over Bootleg Performances

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

12.01.14

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

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

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

    • Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Nigeria: Kano mosque blasts death toll above 102

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

    • Intervention feeds terrorism

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • We may never have another coldest year in history

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

  • Finance

    • The Meaning of Black Friday

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

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

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

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

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

  • Privacy

    • The Snowden Effect, Quantified

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

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

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

    • Deconstructing the Jeremy Becker troll network

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

    • The Pando Tor conspiracy troll

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

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

      [...]

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

    • New Facebook Rules Will Sting Entrepreneurs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

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

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

  • Civil Rights

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

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

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

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

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

    • UN Report Documents Torture, Police Violence in US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Britain’s GCHQ monitored Irish internet traffic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

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

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

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

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

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

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

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

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

      • Torrent Site Admin Sentenced to Five Months Prison

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

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

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

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

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

11.30.14

Links 30/11/2014: Debian Fork, New Mint Linux Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 3:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Issue 10 Out Now!

    Once we’ve finished boasting about the prowess of Linux, we search out the best light-weight distro, look into the murky world of patent litigation, uncover the secrets of systemd, play with Google Cardboard, add more forms of input to a Raspberry Pi and program autonomous battle droids.

  • Server

    • Docker: Sorry, you’re just going to have to learn about it. Today we begin

      Containers aren’t a new idea, and Docker isn’t remotely the only company working on productising containers. It is, however, the one that has captured hearts and minds.

      Docker started out with the standard LXC containers that are part of virtually every Linux distribution out there, but eventually transitioned to libcontainer, its own creation. Normally, nobody would have cared about libcontainer, but as we’ll dig into later, it was exactly the right move at the right time.

  • Kernel Space

    • Nasty Lockup Issue Still Being Investigated For Linux 3.18

      When Linux 3.18-rc6 was released last Sunday, Linus Torvalds noted in the release announcement that a “a big unknown worry in a regression” remained. Nearly one week later, kernel developers are still figuring out what’s going on with this regression that can cause frequent lockups. Worse off, it looks like it might affect the Linux 3.17 kernel too.

    • Generic TrustZone Driver Proposed For Linux Kernel

      ARM’s security extensions are in the process of being bettered on Linux.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa Git Yields Performance Improvements For Newer AMD GPUs

        Earlier this week I published some benchmark results showing Mesa 10.5-devel delivering Intel performance changes compared to Mesa 10.3 as found in Ubuntu 14.10. The next logical step to this testing is looking at the AMD Radeon graphics results for the R600g and RadeonSI drivers using multiple graphics cards while seeing what the open-source Radeon Linux driver has to offer if upgrading past what’s shipped in Ubuntu 14.10 and other recent Linux distribution releases.

    • Benchmarks

      • OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Fedora 21 vs. openSUSE Factory

        This week I posted some OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 performance results that were quite interesting and showed Ubuntu Linux largely dominating over OS X Yosemite with a Haswell-based MacBook Air. For those curious how other Linux distributions compare in this performance showdown, here are some results when also testing Fedora 21 in its near-final state and also openSUSE in its rolling-release form.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Google Code In 2014 : Call for Participation

        The Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. The contest runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015. For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development.

      • KDE at LISA 2014 conference

        KDE was one of about 50 exhibitors at the LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference November 12th and 13th in Seattle. The expo was part of the week-long conference for system administrators that has been held annually since 1986. Expo participants included big name tech companies and smaller niche organizations offering products and services to this audience of professional technical people. As we discovered, KDE is well known among this audience.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Material Design Adorns Desktop Thanks to a Custom Linux OS

      Google introduced the clean new design language this year naming it Material Design. The design ideology of Material Design was loved by many thanks to its clean and simple UI. If you too are one of those in love with Lollipop’s Material Design, chances are you will soon be able to get the design for your desktop. Currently being developed by Michael Spencer, this upcoming Linux distribution is being called Quantum OS (previously Quartz OS).

    • Red Hat Family

      • [Red Hat JBoss Unified Push] Now Available on Openshift

        The Unified Push Server allows developers to send native push messages to Apple’s Push Notification Service (APNS) and Google’s Cloud Messaging (GCM). It features a built-in administration console that makes it easy for developers to create and manage push related aspects of their applications for any mobile development environment. Includes client SDKs (iOS, Android, & Cordova), and a REST based sender service with an available Java sender library.

      • Fedora

        • To Do

          OK, there are endless to-do list applications, each with its own plusses and deltas. I tried the emacs todo without a lot of joy. I more or less settled on using bugzilla since it allowed me to not only capture relationships and estimates, but also to keep notes on various projects or bits of projects. I tend to have lots of things that I need to do “right now”, but even more things that I would like to do if I ever get one of them round tuit thingies. BZ works well for this in terms of capturing things, and especially capturing thoughts on those things I want to get around to some day.

        • It’s a good thing they pay me to break stuff

          Yesterday’s was triggered by me messing up the Fedora kernel package git repository – whoops. I keep Fedlet’s kernel as a branch that only exists in my checkout; it’s not pushed anywhere (I should just push it out on my git server now I have one, but I keep forgetting). I accidentally ran git push from that branch yesterday, and it promptly pushed all the changes on it to master, effectively turning Fedora’s kernel into the Fedlet kernel for a few glorious hours until Josh reverted it.

        • [Test-Announce] Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 1 (RC1) Available Now!

    • Debian Family

      • Systemd fallout: Debian fork Devuan set up

        A group styling itself as veteran UNIX administrators has announced that it has set up a fork of the Debian GNU/Linux project.

      • Fork Debian Project Announces the Systemd-less OS Devuan

        A group of unknown developers have proposed a while ago to fork Debian in an effort to create a parallel project that would go on without Systemd. It seemed ridiculous at the time and many have thought that it was just just some kind of pressure, but it looks like the project is real enough.

      • Debian Forked, Ubuntu MATE Fabulous, and Fedora 21 RC1

        Everybody went back to work today and there is so much news I hardly know where to start. The top story tonight is bound to be the official forking of Debian. In other news, Dediomedio.com says Ubuntu 14.10 MATE is “almost fabulous” and the Free Software Foundation released their 2014 gift buying guide. Mint 17.1 is almost here and a Fedora 21 release candidate has been released. Carla Schroder has an exclusive on Linux.com about being a maker instead of a user and, finally, a bunch of too-good-to-resist tidbits.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Meizu’s first Ubuntu phones coming in early 2015
          • Ubuntu powered Meizu smartphones could arrive in early 2015
          • A Ubuntu Phone will finally go on sale next year

            Fans of Ubuntu have been waiting patiently for a phone running Canonical’s mobile OS to make its way to retail shelves. Thanks to Chinese OEM Meizu, they may only have a few more months to wait.

          • Ubuntu 14.10 MATE edition – Almost fabulous

            Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn with the MATE desktop environment is a very cool distro. It suffers from two big problems, one of which has been inherited from its Unity parent, and that would be the inability to format old partitions, created by previous versions of Ubuntu. This is somewhat worrying. Samba printing is another disappointment. There was no screenshot problem like with some other distros, though.

            Besides these issues, everything else was perfect. Familiar, friendly, extremely productive. Super fast and super stable, too. There was nothing out of ordinary, no problems. Suspend and resume worked without any issues, the system blazed at the speed of light, and with maybe ten minutes of work, you can transform it into anything you want. Docks, menus, new fonts, new themes, all there, just waiting for you. Total freedom and fun.

            There can’t be a perfect score, because the associated problems do not allow it. But assuming you had this distro given to you, and someone bothered to install the needed Samba package that normal people require, it would be an excellent alternative to many other mainstream releases. Highly polished, slick, and almost overwhelmingly simple and easy to use. The grade is something like 9.0/10, but it can do better. I demand it. For you, this is an excellent test bed. Go for it.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.1 `Rebecca` Available For Download

              Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” has been released and is available as usual in two main editions: MATE and Cinnamon. Let’s take a look at what’s new!

            • Just a few more days before 17.1

              The ISO images for the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” just passed QA testing and were approved for a stable release. This release should go public in the coming days.

              If you are running Linux Mint 17.1 RC, you do not need to wait for the stable release, and you do not need to reinstall. You can simply use the Update Manager to install any level 1 update you haven’t installed already.

            • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon released!
            • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” MATE released!
            • Do you smell the minty goodness? Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ is finally here!

              Christmas is coming, which means lots of festivities are about to happen. For me, however, the holiday is all about one thing — smells. No, I’m not crazy, although many will disagree. What I mean to say is, the smells of Christmas resonate with me more than any other aspect. Of course, the smell of pine trees conjure images of decorated trees with gifts underneath, but don’t forget the smells of cookies baking and grandma’s perfume. All of these scents comes together to culminate Christmastime.

            • Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Is Out and the Best So Far – Screenshot Tour

              Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon has been released and is now available for download. The new version of the operating system features a major update for the desktop environment, along with a multitude of other upgrades.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Imagination brings virtualised Linux security to the Internet of Things

      IMAGINATION TECHNOLOGIES has announced the creation of a tiny hypervisor rig to power its MIPS-based CPUs.

      The joint venture with Japanese firm Seltech saw the Fexerox hypervisor embedded firmware from Seltech paired with an Imagination MIPSM5150 CPU to create a virtualised environment, allowing multiple operating systems to run independently off a single unit packed into a tiny space.

    • Rugged box-PC runs Linux on quad-core 2.1GHz Core i7

      An MPL spokesperson confirmed in an email that the “PIP39 as well as all other MPL CPU products are fully Linux supported.” Although a specific version was not mentioned, the PIP39 presumably is supported with the same Debian Linux distribution that’s available with the company’s CEC10 system.

    • Hands-on with the Raspberry Pi Model B+

      There have been a several interesting new hardware announcements from the Raspberry Pi Foundation this year. Sometimes I wonder how they do it all – with so much involvement in education, development of new hardware and software, and the many Pi user groups and events. It really is quite impressive.

    • Raspberry Pi and Coder by Google for beginners and kids

      Coder is an experiment for Raspberry Pi, built by a small team of Googlers in New York. It converts a Raspberry Pi into a friendly environment for learning web programming. It is ideal for beginners and requires absolutely no experience with coding.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

      • Android

        • Preview: Office for Android tablets is like Office for iPad, but on Android

          Google’s Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps are a lot of things—they’re fast, they’re convenient, and they’re available on both iOS and Android—but you couldn’t call them “powerful.” Even the Web versions of Google’s productivity software are pretty basic compared with the feature-stuffed behemoth that is Microsoft Office, and the mobile apps are minimalist by comparison.

        • CuBox-i4Pro: A whole lotta Linux or Android for not a whole lotta cash

          I recently reviewed the Hummingboard, an excellent, low-priced single board computer that competes in the same market as the the Raspberry Pi. Recently the manufacturer of the Hummingboard, SolidRun, sent me one of their new products to check out: The CuBox-i4Pro.

        • 35 Android Apps for Pure Fun

          Why, yes, of course you have apps on your Android phone and tablet. But most of these Android apps are for work or purely practical reasons, right? All work and no play not only makes you dull but it’s actually bad for your health. (Isn’t there a study somewhere that supports that?) So, in the interest of health and the joy of nonsense, here are 35 Android apps that have only one purpose: fun!

Free Software/Open Source

  • Robocoin Bitcoin ATMs Can Now Run Lamassu Open Source Software

    Robocoin Bitcoin ATM operators now have a new attractive alternative to abiding by Robocoin’s new compliance standards. In response to Robocoin’s move to enforce AML/KYC compliance for all of its ATM operators (even non-American ones), some Bitcoin enthusiasts have banded together to port Lamassu’s open source Bitcoin ATM software to run on Robocoin’s hardware.

  • Enjoy the New ReactOS Explorer

    The new ReactOS Explorer is much more compatible, stable, and comes with more features than the current (and now old) explorer. We expect it to be a big quality jump in terms of usability, and the rockstar feature of the upcoming 0.4 release. Just keep reading to discover more about it!

  • India’s offline mobile internet is going open source

    “By giving away the source code, we can ignite the creative energies of the entire developer community and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the SMS market. Customers can benefit from world-class technology advancements, the development community gains access to a whole new market opportunity and Innoz core businesses benefit from licensing it with telecom operators.”

  • Events

    • LinuxDay 2014 Dornbirn

      Again the Fedora Project was present at the LinuxDay at Dornbirn (a small linux event near the German, Swiss, and Austrian border beside the Lake Constance). I arrived some minutes before the event started. Matthias Summer was already there and prepared the booth. Well, there was not much to prepare.

    • Learn about open source software in Bernardsville

  • Web Browsers

    • 4 Cutting Edge Web Browsers

      The usage share of web browsers is dominated by a few mature applications. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera account for around 95% of all desktop web browsing activity. However, there are a myriad of other web browsers that are worth investigating.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open Cloud Alliance Rallies Open Source Community

      To assist with maintaining the interoperability of open source software, IBM and Univention have formed the Open Cloud Alliance (OCA), a consortium that is dedicated to reducing the cost of open source interoperability of open source software deployed in cloud computing environments.

  • BSD

    • Failed attempts to dual-boot PC-BSD 10.1 with Windows 8

      So it appears that the installation attempt failed at that point because the correct gpart option was not specified. The -i option is used to run gpart interactively, but why it’s necessary to use it in the graphical application? In any case, I’ll be logging a bug report.

    • FreeBSD Plans For The Next Ten Years

      Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and CTO of iXsystems, gave a talk at this month’s MeetBSD California 2014 conference about the next ten years of FreeBSD.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The 2014 Giving Guide is here!

      Today, we’re launching the 2014 Giving Guide, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) guide to smarter gifts, compared with their restrictive counterparts.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Pigs can’t fly: Passenger escorted off US flight after 80-pound ‘emotional support’ hog is disruptive

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Letter: US military’s drone policy worth fighting

      “(My husband Michael Pike died in September of Agent Orange related cancer.) My husband was Special Forces in Vietnam and came to regret his role in the war and what the U.S. government did. I am here today in loving memory of that fine man to ask you to stop your role in the kill chain which uses the Northrup Grumman Global Hawk drone to identify human targets for extrajudicial execution. This is neither lawful (international and higher law) nor moral and you must know that. Horrible acts, like drone strikes, lead to the atrocities we see now. Inhumanity engenders inhumanity.

    • Egyptian Judges Dismiss Charges Against Mubarak
    • Obama’s dangerous embrace of war

      The fact that the U.S. today is increasing its military action in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, after a decade of intense warfare in the region, should be a reason for American officials and the public alike to ask some serious questions about how they use their military power around the world. The biggest problem that we see confirmed again this week is that American military action in distant lands usually only turns those lands into chaotic, dysfunctional, ungoverned and violent places. In the chaos that follows such warfare a new danger now steps in – militant Islamist killers such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

    • In Congo, peacekeepers at war

      Since Congo’s civil war broke out in 1994, it has become the world’s deadliest conflict, pitting neighboring governments and dozens of local warlords in a free-for-all over the prodigious profits to be made in eastern Congo’s mines. According to demographers, 5.4 million Congolese died during just one stretch from 1998 to 2006.

    • New Australian terrorism bill to facilitate targeted military killings

      …Australian Senate has signed off another “counter-terrorism” bill that grants unprecedented powers to the intelligence and military apparatus.

    • £120m deal to promote a form of terror

      The International Business Times reported this month that British and French governments have signed a £120 million pound deal to develop a military drone – aka unmanned combat air system – following a two-year feasibility study. The combat drone could be deployed from 2030.

    • “Global” Terrorism

      Sure enough, there are now half a dozen Canadian planes bombing ISIS jihadis in Iraq (although it’s unlikely that either of the Canadian attackers, both converts to radical Islam, had any contact with foreign terrorist organizations). But Harper has got the logic completely backwards.

      The purpose of major terrorist activities directed at the West, from the 9/11 attacks to ISIS videos, is not to “cow” or “intimidate” Western countries. It is to get those countries to bomb Muslim countries or, better yet, invade them. The terrorists want to come to power in Muslim countries, not in Canada or Britain or the US. And the best way to establish your revolutionary credentials and recruit local supporters is to get the West to attack you.

    • Terrorists actually welcome attacks from the West
    • Giving terrorists what they want
    • Why terrorists love Western intervention

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Icelandic hacker says guilty of stealing money from Wikileaks

      An Icelandic computer hacker and former associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange unexpectedly pleaded guilty on Wednesday to embezzling 30 million Icelandic crowns ($240,000) from the organization.

    • Siggi “The Hacker” ad­mits guilty to all charges

      The case against Siggi “The Hacker” has un­der­gone a sharp turn-around. Siggi has de­cided to change his plea to “Guilty”. Charges against him amount to thirty pages of em­bez­zle­ment and fraud amount­ing to thirty mil­lion kro­nas.

      Orig­i­nally Siggi pleaded “Not Guilty” and the main trial was to take place in Reyk­janes dis­trict court next week. His lawyer, Vil­hjál­mur H.Vil­hjálms­son said at court to­day that “Af­ter go­ing over the charges thor­oughly and speak­ing with my client he has de­cided to plead guilty to all charges.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Oil Price Fall: Saudi Arabia Targets U.S. Shale Oil, Iran, Iraq, Russia

      It is clear that among the major losers in the fall in the price of Brent crude petroleum from $115 a barrel last summer to about $75 a barrel today are Russia, Iraq and Iran. Petroleum sales are 50% of Russia’s income, and are also central for Iran and Iraq.

      But the big loser will likely be shale oil producers and prospectors in the US, who probably cannot make a profit if the price falls into the 60s.

      The cause of the fall, by $40 a barrel, in petroleum prices since last summer is almost completely on the demand side. Asian economies, especially China, are dramatically slowing, and won’t be requiring as much petroleum to fuel trucks, trains and cars to deliver people and goods around the country. Most petroleum is used to fuel transport. Some is used for heating or cooling, as in Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, but that practice is relatively rare. US journalists seem to feel it obligatory to mention US shale oil production as a contributor to the price fall, since prices are a matter of supply and demand, and US supply has increased by a couple million barrels a day. But frankly that is a minor increase in world terms– global production is roughly 90 million barrels a day. Between Iran, Iraq (Kirkuk), Libya and Syria, enough oil has gone out of production to more than offset the additional American oil. It isn’t that there is more oil being pumped, it is that the world doesn’t want it as much because of cooling economies.

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • China writer goes on trial for media censorship protest after long delay

      The long-awaited trial of a prominent Chinese writer and activist resumed in southern China on Friday, more than two months after his lawyers boycotted an earlier hearing with Beijing showing little sign of easing its clampdown against rights campaigners.

    • Chinese Activists Go on Trial for Protesting Media Censorship; Lawyers Claim Human Rights Violation

      Feixiong, whose original name is Yang Maodong, was charged for ‘gathering crowds to disturb public order’ after he organized protests outside the office of the Southern Weekly newspaper last January. Activist Sun Desheng, who was part of the protest, was also arrested.

    • Censorship distortion of ‘comfort women’

      The U.S. Occupation censored Taijiro Tamura’s 1947 story “The Life of an Alluring Woman” (Shunpu den) for describing Korean prostitutes in a war zone. The Civil Information and Education Section with censorship power decided that identifying the nationality of the prostitutes constituted “criticism” of that nation.

    • Lessons On Censorship From Syria’s Internet Filter Machines

      Organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, or the Open Net Initiative periodically report on the extent of censorship worldwide. But as countries that are fond of censorship are not particularly keen to share details, we must resort to probing filtered networks, that is, generating requests from within them to see what gets blocked and what gets through. We cannot hope to record all the possible censorship-triggering events, so our understanding of what is or isn’t acceptable to the censor will only ever be partial. And of course it’s risky, even outright illegal, to probe the censor’s limits within countries with strict censorship and surveillance programs.

      This is why the leak of 600GB of logs from hardware appliances used to filter internet traffic in and out of Syria is a unique opportunity to examine the workings of a real-world internet censorship apparatus.

    • Council member objects to museum’s “pornographic” photo

      A nude photo of a pregnant woman at a local art museum has drawn the ire of a Jacksonville council member.

      Emails obtained by First Coast News shed light on the nude photo that has city council member Clay Yarborough calling for the City of Jacksonville to pull nearly $233,000 worth of funding designated for the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art.

    • The Story Behind Iran’s Censorship Redirect Page
    • Morehshin Allahyari’s Art on Iranian Censorship Will Soon Be Out of This World
    • Europe wants Google to expand ‘right to be forgotten’ censorship to global search

      Google should start applying the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” to its global, .com domain, European privacy regulators say.

      European data protection authorities in the so-called Article 29 Working Party (WP29) have compiled a set of guidelines detailing how search engines should apply a court ruling that gave Europeans the right to be forgotten by search engines. As of the May decision, EU citizens have the right to compel search engines to remove search results in Europe for queries that include their names if the results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.”

    • EU demands “right to be forgotten” goes international
    • EU wants ‘right to be forgotten’ applied globally

      Privacy watchdogs in Europe say the controversial ruling, which affects only local European versions of Google’s search engine, should be applied more broadly.

    • When (if ever) is media censorship justifiable?

      How does one measure the degree to which content is ‘inappropriate’ or ‘harmful’? Are there cases where media censorship is justifiable?

    • Russia’s Freest Website Now Lives in Latvia

      Moscow-based Editor in Chief Galina Timchenko was fired for ‘extremism’ after running an article on Ukraine. So she and her staff packed up shop and moved west.

  • Privacy

    • Germany Signs No-Spy Deal with BlackBerry

      Germany has approved BlackBerry’s purchase of encryption firm Secusmart after signing a “no-spy” agreement with the Canadian smartphone maker.

      Duesseldorf-based Secusmart provides special smartphones to German government officials that are meant to be safe from eavesdropping.

    • Big Data Ethics and Your Privacy [INFOGRAPHIC]

      But access to data is not the only important aspect of Big Data ethics. The fact that our privacy is not for granted any more became quite clear after the NSA files were made public in the summer of 2013. All of a sudden it was public knowledge that the governments basically had unlimited acces to all of your data. But not only governments have access to your data. Many of the largest organisations that you interact with every day know probably more about you than you do yourself. Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn know a lot about you, because you provide that information to them. Although Facebook just released a new, simpeler, privacy policy that does not mean that they collect less data about you. On the contrary; they want to collect a lot more data about you.

    • UK spy base GCHQ tapped Irish internet cables

      New documents released this week via the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden outline how Irish subsea telecommunications cables have been targeted by British intelligence.

      The documents detail a whole series of underwater cables – essentially the backbone that connects Ireland to the globe – that are being tapped.

    • Europe’s next privacy war is with websites silently tracking users

      The pan-European data regulator group Article 29 has issued new opinion on how websites and advertisers can track users and the permissions they require.

      The new opinion dictates that “device fingerprinting” – a process of silently collecting information about a user – requires the same level of consent as cookies that are used to track users across the internet.

    • The UK’s Real Intelligence Failure

      That is, the Home Office wants CSPs based outside the UK (Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to co-operate with the UK government in the same way as UK-based ones by handing over any requested information. But the Home Office itself admits that any US company doing so would breach the US Wiretap Act. Which means that the Home Office seriously expects US companies and their officers to risk punishment by the US government just because the UK wants easy access to information.

    • No Halt to the Sharing of Medical Records

      Despite uncovering thousands of cases of patient information being wrongly disclosed to third parties a recent review into the sharing of medical records with private sector companies endorses the practice.

    • NHS to carry on selling patient records to insurers

      The National Health Service will continue to sell medical data to insurers and other third parties despite an investigation that has discovered tens of thousands of patient records were unlawfully sold.

      Fears were raised earlier this year that patient records were being misused and sold to insurers, and the Government amended the law to restrict access to data.

      The report from an eight-month inquiry has found tens of thousands of records were wrongly passed to third parties.

    • Germans end investigation into Merkel phone tapping
    • How to stop NSA from snooping on you

      The first thing to know about securing your phone is that you can’t secure your phone.

    • Panel probing NSA surveillance finds legal loophole that lets German intel spy on own citizens

      German lawmakers probing the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency have uncovered a legal loophole that allows the country’s foreign intelligence agency to spy on its own citizens.

      The agency, known by its German acronym BND, is normally forbidden from eavesdropping on Germans or German companies.

      But a former BND lawyer told Parliament this week that Germans aren’t protected while working abroad for foreign companies.

      The government confirmed Saturday to The Associated Press that work-related calls or emails are attributed to the employer. If the employer is foreign, the BND can intercept them.

    • Edward Snowden Revelations Not Having Much Impact on Internet Users

      Despite the shocking revelations by Edward Snowden about the degree of surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA), most internet users across the world do not appear to be taking proper measures to be safe online.

    • The bigger the haystack, the harder the terrorist is to find

      The UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee report this week into the murder of Lee Rigby described British intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ multiple failures to prevent the terrible crime.

      Rigby’s killers together had figured in seven prior surveillance operations during the course of which officials learned that one of them had travelled to Kenya in an attempt to join the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab.

      The shocking failures and bungling that ensued in the years the two men were tracked is, tellingly, chalked up to the “extreme pressure” brought on by the fact that at any one time, MI5 is investigating several thousand individuals suspected of links to Islamic extremist activities in Britain.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Global net neutrality pact hopes to silence European malcontents

      THE ELECTRONIC FREEDOM FOUNDATION has announced a worldwide coalition of organisations dedicated to the fight for net neutrality.

      The Global Net Neutrality Coalition defines the term thus: “Net neutrality requires that the internet be maintained as an open platform, on which network providers treat all content, applications and services equally, without discrimination.”

      Comprising 25 organisations from 19 countries, the coalition will use its site as a repository for information regarding net neutrality laws and legislation in given territories, along with advice on petitioning the relevant authorities to preserve an equal internet for all.

  • DRM

    • Buy from Amazon and Apple and it’s you that ends up owned

      Readers of Nick Hornby’s debut novel High Fidelity will remember that much of it takes place in a record shop on Holloway Road called Championship Vinyl. Not surprisingly, Hollywood deemed Holloway a postcode too far when it adapted the 1995 book. The studio installed John Cusack and his music-buff sidekick in a sunny gaff in Chicago. At least, in 2000, Hornby’s obsessive blokes still sold rotating plastic discs. A decade later, the film business would have treated any story set in a music or bookshop as an antique period piece to feature (if at all) alongside samurai yarns or Roman sword-and-sandal epics.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Music publishers finally pull the trigger, sue an ISP over piracy

        BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have sued Cox Communications for copyright infringement, arguing that the Internet service provider doesn’t do enough to punish those who download music illegally.

        Both BMG and Round Hill are clients of Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement agent whose business is based on threatening ISPs with a high-stakes lawsuit if they don’t forward settlement notices to users that Rightscorp believes are “repeat infringers” of copyright.

      • Cox Communications Sued For Not Disconnecting Pirates

        Cox Communications, one of the largest telecoms companies in the U.S., is being sued by a pair of music publishers for refusing to disconnect persistent music pirates. Evidence in the case is being provided by Rightscorp, who say that ISPs lose their safe harbor protections if they fail to take action against repeat infringers.

11.28.14

Links 28/11/2014: Debian Fork, Fedora 21 RC, Git 2.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Meet Feminist Hacker Barbie, avenger of girl nerds

    So great: Feminist Hacker Barbie, a viral response to the total sexist disaster that was the Barbie “computer engineer” book. Follow the hashtag.

  • get GNU/Linux!

    Well, the site would be just about perfect if they recommended Debian GNU/Linux but they recommend Ubuntu GNU/Linux. I think a site emphasizing freedom should mention that Debian gives the users more control of everything than Ubuntu. Debian has a few defaults I don’t like but at least I have the option of changing them at installation. Good luck doing that with Ubuntu’s installer. You may get one or two options Debian doesn’t have but you don’t get to choose desktops at all. It’s disUnity or nothing. Ubuntu hides choices from the newbie just like M$. Of course, newbies may not know much about desktop choices but an installer could give some hints.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 22nd June 2014
      • Qt 5.4 Release Candidate Available

        I am happy to announce that Qt 5.4 Release Candidate is now available.

      • KWayland Server Component Coming For KDE Plasma 5.2

        KWayland was introduced last month with the KDE Plasma 5.1 release but it lacked the server-side code. With the upcoming release of Plasma 5.2, that will change with the server component to KWayland having been merged.

      • Season of KDE

        This is my first SoK and hence I am equally excited and motivated to make a niche for myself with my work. The task allotted to me was to finish test.kubuntu.co.uk . My task was to use a WordPress theme and finish the site but I am not a big fan of WordPress themes. So I decided to make my own theme and thankfully my mentor , Jonathan Riddell was on the same page with me. Thus began the first lap , thinking and coming up with a new design.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK+ Inspector Gains More Features Ahead Of GNOME 3.16

        For those doing much development in GTK+, the GtkInspector integrated debugger continues making much progress and will offer a wealth of more development and debug capabilities with GNOME 3.16.

        GtkInspector officially premiered in GNOME 3.14 while Matthias Clasen of Red Hat and other GNOME developers continue making this interactive debugger even better for the GNOME 3.16 release due out in March.

      • GNOME 3.15.2 Released

        GNOME 3.15.2 incorporates GTK+ Inspector improvements, more GTK+ OpenGL support (including GTK+ OpenGL support for the Mir back-end), support for Epiphany to open web page sources in the default text editor, improved thumbnail handling for the GNOME Desktop, updated themes, numerous improvements to GNOME Boxes, various enhancements to GNOME Maps, many bug fixes, and the usual assortment of translation updates.

      • Python 3 Support Added To The GNOME Shell

        The GNOME Shell 3.15.2 release fixes some visual glitching, improves the layout of the extension installation dialog, supports the CSS margin property, and offers other bug fixes and minor enhancements. Most notable to GNOME Shell 3.15.2 though is there’s finally Python 3 support.

  • Distributions

    • 5 Distros, 11 Tools, 800 Games, and 32 Bits

      Today in Linux news, Swapnil Bhartiya features five distributions you might like. OMG!Ubuntu! found eleven utilities to beef up your Ubuntu experience and Steam now has over 800 Linux games. Larry Cafiero says he’s “a 32-bit guy in a 64-bit world” and Docker users are urged to upgrade due to new found vulnerability.

    • Q4OS Is the Perfect Distro for People Who Want a Windows OS, Only Safer – Gallery

      Q4OS is a Linux distribution built to offer a similar experience to Windows XP. It’s been around for a long time and now the developers have released yet another update for the operating system.

    • Quantum OS Promises a Prettier Linux, Based on Google’s Material Design

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Let’s say goodbye to Mageia 3

        It’s been a great run, but all good things must end. Or at least, upgrade to a greater thing.

        Since Mageia 3 was released in May 2013 our packaging and security teams have provided hundreds of updates (actually 1136 source packages in the Core repository, that accounts for almost 9000 binary packages), all of them tested and validated by our QA team.

    • Red Hat Family

      • ClearOS Community 6.6.0 Beta 2 Released

        ClearOS Community 6.6.0 Beta 2 has been released! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, the 6.6.0 Beta 2 release introduces WPAD, QoS, YouTube School ID support, and an upgrade to the Intrusion Detection engine. Some of the server-based apps introduced in beta 1 have been added to the ClearOS 7 roadmap. The PHP/MySQL/Web Server stack is more modern in ClearOS 7 and these server-based apps will run better on the new platform.

      • Server temp error

        I’m running windows 2012 hyper-v on the server, and it’s only since I’ve been running this that I’ve been getting the error. When I was using CentOS/KVM everything was ok. It could just be coincidence but I’m going to try an experiment. I’ve moving back to CentOS/KVM to see if it makes any difference. Perhaps MS is just over working the server and CentOS doesn’t? If it makes no difference that’s fine, it’s just an experiment and seeing as I backup my servers, converting from vhdx to qcow2 isn’t going to be much of a problem.

        Any one else had similar issues? Can it be that MS does cause the system to work harder than CentOS?

      • How packages are added to EPEL-7

        I’ve seen a number of people ask things like: “Foo is in EPEL-6, why isn’t it in EPEL-7?” so I thought I would share a detailed answer:

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Council election results

          The votes are in! Two seats were open on the newly formed Fedora Council, and we had five candidates to fill them. The new Fedora Council members are Rex Dieter and Langdon White.

          Matthew Miller sent out the election results quickly after the election ended on 26 November at 00:00 UTC.

          The election was held from 18 November to 26 November, and 192 Fedora contributors voted. (The June 2013 Fedora Board election had 157 voters, and the December 2012 election had 202 voters.)

        • FAD Phnom Penh 2014 Report

          Over one week ago, I attended FAD Phnom Penh 2014 in Cambodia. This Fedora Activitiy Day event was for APAC ambassadors to discuss budget planning, event planning, swag production and so on. Below is my full report of the two-day event.

        • Join Fedora Workshop Phnom Penh II
        • Fedora 21 RC Is Out and Ready for Testing

          The Fedora project has announced that Fedora 21 RC is now available for download and testing, for all the new flavors, Workstation, Server, and Cloud.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • IMP Launches As Another Open-Source Computer Attempt

      “Open-source computers” seem to be the latest promoted concept up for funding on popular crowd-funding sites.

    • Make Your Mark on the World With Linux

      Linux and FOSS have already changed the world, and we’re just at the beginning. This is a great time to learn to be a maker, in contrast to being a mere consumer. Clicking buttons on a smartphone is not being tech-savvy; hacking and building the phone is.

      Some people give Make Magazine the credit for launching the Maker Movement. Whether they launched it or just gave it a name, it is a real phenomenon, a natural evolution of do-it-yourselfers, inventors, and hackers in every generation. Remember Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Hands-On (for Shopsmith projects), photography magazines, woodworking magazines, electronics…remember Heathkit? Remember when Radio Shack was still an electronics store? How about Edmund Scientific? That is still a wonderful playground of anatomical models, microscopes, telescopes, dinosaurs, prisms, lenses, chemistry sets, lasers, geology stuff, and tons more. All of these still exist, and have moved online like everything else. It’s a feast of riches, plus we have all the cool new stuff that Make Magazine covers. This is absolutely the best time to be a curious tech adventurer.

    • Raspberry Pi and Coder by Google for beginners and kids

      Coder is a fantastic resource for learning programming. It simplifies the process of getting started, requires very inexpensive components, and provides fun and engaging activities. If you are planning on gettting a Raspberry Pi for the holidays, (or already have one), Coder is a great addition to get extra fun and learning from that little board.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android 5.0 Lollipop Test Firmware Leaks For The Sprint Galaxy S5

          If you’re willing to throw caution to the wind and void your warranty, you can have Android 5.0 on your Sprint Galaxy S5 right now. An early build of Lollipop for this device has leaked on XDA, and it’s flashable with Odin. Expect bugs, but hey, it’s Lollipop.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mokotów real estate dept.: ‘Open source encourages innovation’

    The Department of Real Estate Management of Mokotów, a district of the city of Warsaw (Poland), is increasingly turning to free and open source software solutions to providing flexible, innovative new ICT services. “Our management values innovations, and so supports the use of open source software,” says Jacek Wolski, the IT department’s team manager, “this encourages the IT department to implement new solutions and tools.”

  • Open source projects that warrant data center managers’ attention

    When you’re making the case to a data center manager about tech that is worthy of her consideration, make sure these three open source options are on your list.

  • GenodeOS 14.11 Now Supports Intel’s Wireless Hardware

    Released today was version 14.11 of the Genode OS Framework, an interesting open-source OS research project we’ve been following for a few years now.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Getting OpenStack Ready for the Enterprise

      OpenStack is gaining popularity as the cloud platform of choice for IT organizations. This was reflected in a 2013 IDG survey that found as much as 64 percent of IT managers including OpenStack in their technology roadmap. In the current fast-paced IT market, the massive scalability and flexible, modular architecture of OpenStack can help give organizations the agility they need.

    • OpenStack Has Its Issues but it’s Worth a Fortune

      The OpenStack user survey published earlier this month shows the frailties of the project and why customers using it become reliant on vendors. These issues stretch across different aspects of OpenStack, discussed in detail at the Kilo Design Summit at the OpenStack Summit in Paris. Full details of the user pain points can be found here.

    • Inside Cisco’s OpenStack Cloud Strategy

      Cisco first got involved with the open-source OpenStack cloud platform in 2011 with the Bexar release and initially was focused mostly on networking. Over the last several years, Cisco’s OpenStack involvement and product portfolio have grown beyond just networking.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • ‘Where is the nearest?’: Spain shares code for web map-tool

      The government of Spain is making available as open source the code for Ciudadania Europea, a web site that pointed citizens to the nearest embassies and consular services in European countries. That service was closed this summer, but the code is now freely available for other similar projects.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Docker Security Flaw Found

      The Docker Linux container format has a major exposure that could allow malicious code to assume unassigned privileges with the host server and order the extraction of files that are not intended to be accessible to the container’s code.

    • Thanksgiving security updates
    • CBC, NHL websites briefly affected by Syrian Electronic Army hack

      In the past, the Syrian Electronic Army has claimed responsibility for hacking into Twitter accounts and posting pro-Assad messages, has redirected popular websites to their own pages, and defaced some sites with their own text and images.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell Lied to Dutch Court About Oil Spills in Nigeria

      The significance of the Newsweek article is therefore threefold: firstly Shell appears to have misled the court in the Hague which from a reputational perspective is extremely damaging (hence the headline of the article), secondly the case will now return to court for a retrial, and thirdly the lawyers and witnesses in the original case may be subject to legal action by the Dutch authorities.

    • Shell Lied to Dutch Court About Oil Spills in Nigeria, Say Friends of the Earth

      The oil company Shell lied to a Dutch court about steps taken to minimize the risk of oil spills during a court case brought against the multinational oil and gas company by four Nigerian farmers and Friends of the Earth, lawyers acting for the claimants alleged today.

  • Finance

    • Why You Never Need to Shop on Black Friday Again

      The erosion of Black Friday started several years ago, when major retailers started opening their doors to shoppers on Thanksgiving Day. That meant the big sales started early, giving less importance to Friday. This year, many stores, including Toys R Us, Best Buy and JCPenney, will open for business at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving.

    • The Odious Smith Commission

      No, this was the very worst kind of deal-making by callous political operatives, where party interests came first, second and last. I do not give a fig for the result. Income tax devolution is of minimal use if other major taxes are set from London and most income still comes from a Westminster “grant”. Revenue from oil and whisky will still be treated in government accounts as “UK” rather than arising in Scotland. It is far short of the quasi Federal powers which No voters were promised and the Lib Dems pretend to believe in.

    • ‘Wild west’ taxi drivers face tough new rules

      Stockholm taxis have a reputation for being among the most expensive in the world, but new regulations designed to make costs more transparent have been agreed on by Stockholm’s Traffic Committee.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • On Israel/Palestine, NYT’s Public Editor Seems Reluctant to Heed Own Advice

      This is what you call “working the refs”: The Times had gotten so much criticism that “they show the suffering of Palestinians only” that it was afraid to accurately report that Palestinians were, in fact, enduring far more suffering. So they added the false “symmetry” of a rocket count–false not only because Israeli weapons were far more lethal, but also because when Israel “struck” a “target” in Gaza, it often did so with far more than a single weapon. One could have as accurately conveyed the “symmetry” of a massacre of a Native American tribe by comparing the number of arrows fired with number of US Army cannon.

    • Vloggers must clearly tell fans when they’re getting paid by advertisers, ASA rules

      Advertising Standards Authority rules that video paid for by Oreos brand that featured YouTube stars broke advertising code

    • Legislation Targets Advertisers That Deploy ‘Weapons of Mass Perfection’

      In March 2014, Rep. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) introduced the Truth in Advertising Act of 2014, which calls on the Federal Trade Commission to regulate and reduce altered images of bodies in advertising. As Elizabeth Zwerling reports for Women’s E-News, the bill (HR 4341) has the potential to positively impact the self-perceptions of women and men everywhere. “We need to give young people the tools they need to distinguish fact from fiction,” said U.S. Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) who is cosponsoring the bill with Rep. Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL). “This bill is a first step.”

  • Censorship

    • UK Piracy Blocklist Expands With Demonoid, Isohunt, IPTorrents and More

      The UK website blocking bonanza continues with the High Court adding 32 “pirate” sites to the country’s unofficial ban list. The new order requires six major ISPs to block access to public and private torrent sites, warez sites and streaming portals.

    • Censoring the Web Isn’t the Solution to Terrorism or Counterfeiting. It’s the Problem.

      In politics, as with Internet memes, ideas don’t spread because they are good—they spread because they are good at spreading. One of the most virulent ideas in Internet regulation in recent years has been the idea that if a social problem manifests on the Web, the best thing that you can do to address that problem is to censor the Web.

      It’s an attractive idea because if you don’t think too hard, it appears to be a political no-brainer. It allows governments to avoid addressing the underlying social problem—a long and costly process—and instead simply pass the buck to Internet providers, who can quickly make whatever content has raised rankles “go away.” Problem solved! Except, of course, that it isn’t.

  • Privacy

    • Let’s Encrypt Partnership Promises Open, Better Web Security

      There’s a good chance the software that runs your cloud, stores your data and serves your websites is open source. Soon, the SSL/TSL certificate that encrypts it can be, too — or something close to it, at least, if Let’s Encrypt, an initiative back by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai and others to build an open certificate authority, succeeds.

    • Reaction to the Home Secretary’s speech to RUSI on the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

      Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The Home Secretary’s speech today highlights that the “snoopers charter” is anything but dead and buried.

    • BRIEFING NOTE: Counter Terrorism and Security Bill and IP address matching

      The Government has announced that it will bring forward proposals to enable IP address matching. The measures would require internet firms to keep records of customer information, to enable law enforcement bodies to decipher who was using a device, such as a smart phone or computer, at a given time.

    • Counter Terrorism and Security Bill

      The Counter Terrorism and Security Bill is due to be published today, making it the seventh major counter terrorism law introduced in Britain since 9/11. The Bill can be accessed here.

    • Reaction to the Intelligence and Security Committee Report

      Renate Samson, Chief Executive of Big Brother Watch, said: “The conclusion that a failing of an unnamed technology company should determine future legislation, whilst the catalogue of errors by the intelligence agencies is all but excused, is of grave concern.

    • Murder-for-hire suspect gets new ACLU ally in battle against phone spying

      In a new court filing, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has jumped into the criminal case of a man who federal prosecutors allege orchestrated a murder-for-hire earlier this year in Baltimore, Maryland.

      Specifically, in its 29-page amicus (friend of the court) brief filed on Tuesday, the ACLU supports the defendant’s earlier motion that the government be required to disclose information about how it used a stingray, or cell-site simulator, without a warrant, and therefore the court should suppress evidence gathered as a result of its use.

    • Social network Twitter has revealed it will make a list of every app on a user’s phone or tablet

      In a post on its help centre web page, Twitter said it would target people who use its app on all mobile devices that run Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems.

      “To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in,” the company said.

    • Facebook can gain direct access to your mobile and take pictures or make videos at any time, MPs warn

      The MPs on the Science and Technology select committee called for the Government to draw up new guidelines for websites and apps explaining clearly how they use personal data, warning that laws will be needed if companies fail to comply.

    • The Internet of Things Is Far Bigger Than Anyone Realizes (Part 2)

      Last week I talked about how people are thinking too small when they think about the Internet of Things (See Part 1). When we truly consider the ramifications of connecting a vast array of data-gathering sensors, devices, and machines together, what’s important to realize is that information will be translated into action at a rate that we have never seen before. We are closing in on a world with infinitesimal reaction times, immediate responses to changing conditions, and unparalleled control in managing assets and resources.

    • GCHQ’s ‘jihad on tech firms’ can only fail

      Some will have assumed this week’s headlines blaming Facebook for Lee Rigby’s murder were just the usual spin, diverting the attention from the agencies’ own incompetence. Yet it is part of a growing pattern.

    • ISC report on Woolwich attack gets its maths wrong

      We have reviewed the whole report by the Intelligence Security Committee on the killing of Fusilier Rigby, and found the conclusion that only Facebook is to blame very difficult to justify.

    • Guest Post: NSA Reform — The Consequences of Failure

      In the absence of real reform, people and institutions at home and abroad are taking matters into their own hands. In America, the NSA’s overreach is changing the way we communicate with and relate to each other. In order to evade government surveillance, more and more Americans are employing encryption technology.

    • Obama facing uphill battle in curbing NSA snooping

      With the lame-duck Congress failing to advance bipartisan surveillance-reform legislation, President Obama faces an uphill climb next year with his plans to end the National Security Agency’s mass collection of phone records.

    • LAWMAKERS SEEKING NSA REFORM COULD USE THE PATRIOT ACT AS LEVERAGE

      Privacy advocates, facing an uphill battle in a Republican-controlled Congress next year, will have to make a difficult choice.

    • BND spied on Germans living abroad

      The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, spied on some citizens living abroad, a former lawyer for the spies told MPs on Thursday.

    • Book review: Australia Under Surveillance, by Frank Moorhouse

      ASIO has for long had a negative reputation among Australians old enough to remember the Cold War, to have seen their file, and to know if they lost a job, a promotion, or a government grant because of its contents, accurate or not. Younger Australians, however, may approach Moorhouse with reasonable, contemporary questions: if I have nothing to hide, why should I fear ASIO surveillance? If others plan acts of violence, shouldn’t ASIO intercept them by whatever means? If national security is endangered, isn’t it appropriate to reverse the onus of proof onto the suspect? Doesn’t ASIO need to operate in secrecy?

    • Briefing on Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

      The legislation is being rushed through on a fast-track timetable, as the government similarly rushed through the DRIPA legislation on an emergency timetable. The subject matter of this legislation deserves comprehensive parliamentary scrutiny.

    • Europe passes vote to break up Google to stop search monopoly

      THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT has voted in favour of breaking Google into separate companies to put an end to the online firm’s dominance.

      In a vote on Thursday, 384 members of the European Parliament voted in favour of taking drastic measures to stop Google’s dominance in online search results and enforcing a split between its search business and other services. Around half that number, 174, voted against the measures.

    • Police Brutality Towards Black People Has Historically Gone Unchecked

      Professor Gerald Horne and civil rights organizer Kevin Alexander Gray say the Ferguson grand jury decision is in line with U.S. history, and discuss whether a Department of Justice investigation would yield different results

    • How the West plays good cop, bad cop

      The West is trying to split the BRICS while also trying to weaken individual members.

    • GCHQ Former Boss Issues Smartphone Data Warning

      “I don’t know what happens to my personal data when I use it on a smartphone,” Sir John was reported by the BBC as telling MPs. “If you go to an ATM and put in your credit or debit card, that system is supervised by the bank in some way,” he said in evidence to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, which is examining the use of biometric technology.

    • THE SNOWDEN EFFECT CONTINUES

      NSA reform died in the U.S. Senate two weeks after the 2014 midterm election. The lame duck Democratic majority and Libertarian minded Republicans produced 58 of the 60 votes needed, agonizingly close to collaring an agency that has clearly run amuck. This seeming ideological dividing line is a bit puzzling, given the broader effects Snowden‘s revelations have had on the U.S. defense industry.

    • Study finds those aware of leaker-at-large harden up and surf smarter

      A good deal of folk aware of NSA leaker Edward Snowden have improved the security of their online activity after learning of his exploits, a large survey has found.

      Researchers from think tank The Centre for International Governance Innovation collected responses from 23,376 users between October and November and found 60 percent had heard of Snowden.

  • Civil Rights

    • Obama’s Record on Defending Civil and Constitutional Rights Abysmal

      Michael Ratner and Paul Jay discuss Obama administration’s policy towards Ferguson, Guantanamo, the NSA and torture

    • DC Police Department Budgets Its Asset Forfeiture Proceeds Years In Advance

      Asset forfeiture may be the greatest scam perpetuated on the American people by their government — and it’s all legal. For the most part, assets seized translate directly to monetary or physical gains for the agencies doing the seizing, an act often wholly separated from any American ideals of due process.

    • Man arrested for pointing a banana at deputies

      A man is facing a felony charge of menacing for allegedly pointing a banana at two sheriff’s deputies in western Colorado.

    • ‘Has the “Libertarian Moment” Finally Arrived?’

      “Gillespie likes to point out that unlike the words ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican,’ ‘libertarian’ should be seen as a modifier rather than a noun-an attitude, not a fixed object. A cynic might assert that this is exactly the kind of semantic cop-out that relegates Gillespie’s too-cool-for-school sect to the margins. Not surprisingly, he begged to differ. ‘It’s wedded to an epistemological humility,’ he told me, ‘that proceeds from the assumption that we don’t know as much as we think we do, and so you have to be really cautious about policies that seek to completely reshape the world. It’s better to run trials and experiments, as John Stuart Mill talked about. The whole point of America-and this is an admixture of Saul Bellow and Heidegger and Jim Morrison lyrics-is that it’s in a constant state of becoming, constantly changing and mongrelizing. We’re doing exactly what free minds and free markets allow you to do. Part of why I’m a libertarian is that if you restrict people less, interesting stuff happens.’”

    • Cornel West: The Age of Obama Is Over

      On CNN Wednesday, leftist Professor Cornel West, given the chance to bloviate about the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown, decided to impart his perspective with a vengeance, even targeting President Barack Obama and blurting that the Ferguson affair signaled the “end of the age of Obama.”

    • Coming soon: Murder by Internet

      Security experts believe the Internet of Things will be used to kill someone

    • The Decline of the CIA

      CIA director John Brennan is promoting a reorganization scheme at the Central Intelligence Agency that will make it more likely that intelligence analysis will be politicized to support the interests of the White House and senior policymakers. The organizational change that he favors would abolish the directorates of intelligence and operations, which were designed to maintain a bureaucratic wall between intelligence analysis and clandestine actions, in order to create regional and functional “centers” that would place analysts and operatives side-by-side. There is no doubt that such centers would do great harm to the production of strategic intelligence and would increase the likelihood of politicizing all intelligence production.

    • Karl Wagner, CIA officer who questioned Watergate-related spy activities, dies at 90

      The mission was later revealed to be the staged break-in of the office of Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a former Pentagon official who had angered the Nixon administration by leaking the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War, to the media.

    • UN rights experts urge US President Obama to release report on CIA torture allegations

      The United States must rise to meet the high human rights standards it has set for itself and others around the world, a group of United Nations human rights experts urged on Wednesday, as they called on President Obama to support “the fullest possible release” of a report detailing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogation practices.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Torrent Site ‘Hijacks’ MPAA’s Movie Search Engine

        The MPAA’s search engine for movies and TV-shows “WhereToWatch” can now be upgraded with torrents, thanks to PopcornCab. The deviant torrent site, run by former U.S. Pirate Party leader Travis McCrea, decided to add torrent support so it can reach a wider audience.

      • Kim Dotcom Leaves Bail Hearing a Free Man, For Now

        Following an all day hearing in the Auckland District Court, Kim Dotcom left the building a free man today. Officially broke and unable to comment on his case due to a news blackout, the Megaupload founder will have to wait until tomorrow to discover if he’ll be put back behind bars.

11.26.14

Links 26/11/2014: Docker Patched, New DragonFlyBSD

Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • About Linux Weekly News – 24th November 2014

  • Desktop

    • Expensive “Free/Libre Software Laptop” Uses A NVIDIA GPU

      While there’s been an ongoing discussion this week about delivering a $500 “open to the core” laptop that runs Ubuntu Linux and would be comprised of open-source software down to the firmware and Coreboot, announced last week was a high-end laptop that also aims to promote free/libre software. Though don’t get out your wallets quite yet.

  • Server

    • Docker Update Fixes Pair of Critical Security flaws

      The open-source Docker container virtualization technology has emerged as one of the hottest and most hyped technologies of the year. Docker, however, isn’t immune from security vulnerabilities, as a pair of recent updates illustrate.

    • AMD & PathScale Join OpenACC Group

      Up to now the OpenACC parallel programming standard has mostly been perceived as a NVIDIA affair along with backing from the likes of Cray and PGI. Now, however, AMD and PathScale are joining the OpenACC Standards Group so hopefully we’ll see greater, multi-vendor adoption of it going forward.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • PowerVR SGX Driver Code Gets Leaked
      • Valve’s VOGL Is Finally Back To Having New Commits, OS X Support

        While Valve’s VOGL open-source OpenGL debugger was off to a great start when announced at the start of the year, recently it fell into a bit of a dry period when it didn’t see any new work for more than a month. Fortunately, that dry spell is over and there’s new commits flowing back into VOGL.

      • Nouveau Might Have A Logo

        A designer, Valeria Aguilera, has been working to make a Nouveau logo. Last night she posted her first draft of the proposed Nouveau logo, “I would like to highlight that the logo incorporates a penguin corresponding to the linux kernel components used to create this open source driver. The 3D cube/shape represents the 2D and 3D acceleration capability. The ‘n’ simply stands for the first letter in Nouveau and the green colour was chosen because the driver is for NVIDIA video cards.”

      • Mesa 10.4 RC1 Is Here, Lands Direct3D 9 State Tracker

        Emil Velikov has announced the first release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 10.4 release.

      • Freedreno MSM Driver Has Big Changes For Linux 3.19 Kernel

        Most notable for this MSM DRM driver that’s associated with the Freedreno driver project is the support for the Qualcomm Adreno A4xx series. The Qualcomm Innovation Center added the A4xx hardware support to the open-source DRM/KMS driver as a surprise move. Meanwhile, Rob Clark of Red Hat took to writing the Gallium3D support that’s now in Mesa Git master following the recent Mesa 10.4 branching.

      • NEMO-UX Shell Is A Futuristic, Multi-User Wayland Experience

        Demonstrated at the ACM Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ACM ITS) event in Dresden, Germany the past few deays was the “NEMOSHELL” that looks like a futuristic user experience supported by Wayland.

    • Benchmarks

      • Apple OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 Performance

        While I delivered some OS X 10.10 Yosemite preview benchmarks back in August, here’s my first tests of the official release of Apple OS X 10.10.1 compared to Ubuntu 14.10 Linux. Tests were done of OS X 10.9.5 and OS X 10.10.1 against Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn when running the benchmarks under both GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.

      • AMD Radeon Gallium3D Is Catching Up & Sometimes Beating Catalyst On Linux

        Last week I shared some preview benchmarks from Steam on Linux showing Radeon Gallium3D starting to beat Catalyst. In this article are the full results from comparing the open and closed-source AMD Linux graphics cards with sixteen Radeon graphics cards while testing Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux. The results yield a very close race!

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Colorpick

        Colorpick is a color picker and contrast checker. I originally wrote it to help me check and fix the background and foreground colors of the Oxygen palette to ensure text was readable. Since then I have been using it to steal colors from various places and as a magnifier to inspect tiny details.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Rescatux Is a Useful Tool to Fix Grub and Promote Windows Users to Admin

      Rescatux, a Linux distribution that allows users to perform all kinds of rescue operations with the help of an easy-to-use wizard called Rescapp, has been upgraded to version 0.32 Beta 3, and the developer has made a number of important fixes.

    • Ready to give Linux a try? These are the 5 distros you need to consider

      There are so many Linux distributions that choosing one can be overwhelming for a new user. One might be too intimidating for a user to even try, while another might be too simplified, blocking that user from knowing how Linux systems actually function.

      I have been using Linux as my primary OS since 2005 and have tried all major (and quite a lot of minor) distributions. I have learned that not every distribution is for everyone. Since I also assist people in migrating to Linux, I have chosen the 5 distros that I recommend to new users based on their level of comfort and desire to learn (or not learn) more about Linux.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Linux: The Safest Operating System on the Planet
        • Open Seat on the Fedora Server Working Group

          This past week, David Strauss chose to step down from his position on the Fedora Server Working Group, citing a lack of alignment with his current work usage. The Fedora Server SIG would like to thank David for his contributions up to this point and wish him well.

          This means that there is currently a vacancy in the Fedora Server Working Group. The Working Group is the nine-person volunteer body that oversees the development, testing, release, documentation, marketing and evangelism of the Fedora Server. Membership on this Working Group is a moderate commitment requiring a participation of a minimum of two hours a week, one hour of which being the (usually) weekly meeting.

        • Fedora Good, Bad, & Ugly and Debian’s Rise

          Pádraig Brady today offered up his assessment of Fedora 21 in comparison to Fedora 16 from which he upgraded. Bruce Byfield is back with a look at the “rise of Debian technology” and Softpedia is reporting that CentOS was used to make the black hole in hit movie Interstellar. Gunnar Hellekson refutes the assertions in a recent GCN article declaring Open Source poorly designed and, finally today, Linux powered submersible says polar caps thicker than estimated.

        • Fedora 21 Innovates in Docker Cloud Virtualization with Project Atomic

          Docker, OpenStack, EC2 and “Project Atomic” are among the leading buzzwords for Fedora Linux 21, the upcoming release of the community-developed open source operating system that serves as the basis for Red Hat’s enterprise Linux platforms. Due out next month, the release is now receiving its final tweaks from developers, who have revealed further details on the cloud and virtualization innovations in the new version.

        • Important Fedora vote concludes today!
        • Fedora Council Election Results
        • Fedora Will Begin Upgrading The X.Org Server As A Distribution Update

          While Fedora is working to migrate over to Wayland by default, the X.Org Server won’t disappear anytime soon for legacy X11 application support and other purposes. With Fedora 21 and going forward, Fedora is likely to be getting in-place X.Org Server updates upon new releases.

    • Debian Family

      • The rise of Debian technology

        Out of 285 active distributions on Distrowatch, 132 are based on Debian and 67 on Ubuntu. This predominance is not only unrivalled in a field as diverse as Linux distros, but has been true now for several years. I’ve cited it several times, but until now, I haven’t addressed the question this observation also raises: how did this state of affairs come about?

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Bq Introduces More Android Devices, But Still No Ubuntu Phones

            Bq held a media event today where many were hoping the first Ubuntu Phone would be officially unveiled, but that was not the case with Ubuntu receiving no mentions during the event.

            Bq is one of Canonical’s first two Ubuntu Phone partners and they had plans to ship the first Ubuntu Phone by the end of 2014. The other phone partner, Meizu, has previously said the MX4 with Ubuntu Touch would come in December.

          • Canonical Is Still Considering Turning the Phone into a Mini-PC

            Canonical is working to complete their idea of convergence with the launch of Ubuntu Touch, a new operating system for mobile devices. The desktop flavor of Ubuntu will eventually share the same code with the mobile one, and their plans go even further than that.

          • Tiny quad-core ARM mini-PC runs Ubuntu with Cinnamon

            A startup is pitching a $129-$199 “Imp” mini-PC on Indiegogo based on a quad-core Odroid-U3 SBC, with HDMI streaming and an Ubuntu/Cinnamon Linux desktop.

            A day after reporting on one Israeli-based, non-Android ARM mini-PC — SolidRun’s $100 CuBoxTV with OpenElec Linux — here comes another. Aside from the usual hyperbole found on crowdfunding pages — are we really “democratizing the digital home experience” or just buying an embedded ARM computer? — the Ubuntu-based Imp mini-PC looks like a pretty good deal.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Quad-core media player runs Kodi/XBMC on OpenElec Linux

      SolidRun’s tiny, $100 “CuBoxTV” media player runs OpenElec Linux and Kodi (formerly XBMC) on a quad-core i.MX6 SoC, and offers 100Mbps+ video decoding.

      The CuBoxTV is the first Freescale i.MX6 based media player to run the Kodi (formerly XBMC) multimedia distribution, says Israel-based SolidRun. CuBoxTV is closely based on the company’s latest i.MX6 based CuBox mini-PC, which now sells for $80 to $140, depending on the number of Cortex-A9 i.MX6 cores and other features. The CuBoxTV, which is available only with the quad-core i.MX6 SoC, goes for a sale price of $100.

    • CuBoxTV: Tiny $100 Linux-based XBMC media center

      SolidRun’s CuBox line of tiny desktop computers are cubes that measure just 2 inches across. But the little boxes sport Ethernet jacks, optical audio output, 2 USB ports and a micro USB port.

    • Linux-based AUV maps Antarctic sea ice thickness

      Woods Hole Oceanographic used a Linux-based “SeaBED” AUV to build the first 3D map of Antarctic sea ice — and found it’s thicker than had been estimated.

      Every now and then we see some good news about climate change sprinkled in with all the increasingly dire warnings. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that solar and wind energy are starting to become competitive with natural gas. On the same day, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), based in Massachusetts, announced it had published a paper in Nature Geoscience on experiments run by an autonomous, Linux-based submarine called the SeaBED. The underwater survey indicated that Antarctic sea ice was thicker than had been previously estimated.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Hey, here’s some face-tracking tech from Samsung you probably won’t find creepy at all

    Samsung says it’ll release the source code to software that allows physically disabled people to move a mouse pointer with their eyes.

  • Samsung ‘eye mouse’ helps the paralyzed use PCs, will be made open-source

    From his adjustable bed, Shin made the words appear on the computer screen using Eyecan+, an eye-tracking device developed by Samsung Electronics.

    “I’m happy that eye mouse is developed in Korea,” he continued. “The eye mouse is not just an IT product, but limbs for the disabled. Hope this kind of research will continue.”

  • Assembly Helps Developers Find, Monetize Open Source Contributions
  • An open source Christmas with Kano

    So this season, what every open sourc-erer wants might just be Kano, a computer kit that comes will all the functions needed to build it and learn to code afterwards.

  • Mapping the world with open source

    In the world of geospatial technology, closed source solutions have been the norm for decades. But the tides are slowly turning as open source GIS software is gaining increasing prominence. Paul Ramsey, senior strategist at the open source company Boundless, is one of the people trying to change that.

    Ramsey has been working with geospatial software for over ten years, as programmer and consultant. He founded the PostGIS spatial database project in 2001, and is currently an active developer and member of the project steering committee. Ramsey serves as an evangelist for OpenGeo Suite, works with the Boundless business development team to share about their collection of offerigns, and speaks and teaches regularly at conferences around the world.

  • Google Brings Open Source Security Gifts

    ‘Tis the season for giving, and search giant Google wants to give security researchers and end-users some new tools. Over the past few weeks Google has released multiple security tools and open source efforts to help end-users and organizations defend themselves from modern threats.

  • OPNFV Does Telecom/Open Source ‘Mind Meld’

    The Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. is growing rapidly — ZTE joined just last week and more new members will be announced in December — while trying to meet an aggressive schedule of new software releases every six months, beginning in the first half of 2015. (See Open NFV Group Uncloaks Its Platform Plan and Will Carriers Step Up to Open Challenge?)

  • Particulate sensor developed using open source approach

    A New York based start up company has used an open source approach, as well as funding from Kickstarter, to develop AirBeam – a handheld sensor which determines the concentration of particles in the air measuring 2.5µm or less.

    [...]

    The AirCasting app and website code is available on GitHub as open source, along with the AirBeam firmware and electronic schematics. The STL files for 3D printing the AirBeam and LiteBeam enclosures can be downloaded from www.shapeways.com.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google will kill Microsoft Silverlight in Chrome by disabling NPAPI plug-in

        GOOGLE IS MOVING ahead with plans to kill off support for Microsoft Silverlight in its Chrome browser.

        The Microsoft runtime depends on an ageing plug-in protocol called Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI), for which Google is currently phasing out support in its browser.

      • What’s the Difference Between Chromium and Chrome?

        Chromium is the open-source project that forms the basis for Google Chrome. Because it’s completely open source, Chromium is available in many Linux distributions’ software repositories for easier installation.

    • Mozilla

      • Review of the new Firefox browser built for developers

        Mozilla recently announced a new browser version for developers on the 10th anniversary of the Firefox browser. The Usersnap team and I took a look at whether it works well for the web development process, offers developers a variety of possible applications, and if it keeps up with the Google Chrome dev tools.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • First Beta Version of LibreOffice 4.4 Is Now Ready for Testing

      The work for LibreOffice never stops and this is actually one of the perks of being open source software. The application is constantly improved and the users can easily see what is being done in this regard. Usually, new major updates for a new branch will have several devel versions before the stable one is released, and that means we are still pretty far away from that milestone.

    • VirtualBox 4.3.20 Arrives, Still No Sign Of VirtualBox 4.4

      VirtualBox 4.3 was released in October of 2013 and since then VirtualBox from an external look appears to be largely in maintenance mode. The 20th point release was put out today with just stability and regression fixes. There’s not yet any public development releases of VirtualBox 4.4 or any other next-generation series to this virtualization software born during the Sun Microsystems days. Thankfully, during this time, KVM and Xen along with components like Virt-Manager and QEMU continue advancing in a steadfast manner for those interested in open-source virtualization.

  • CMS

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Open-Source Chat Platform Scrollback Raises $400,000 Seed Round

      Scrollback, a free open-source chat platform for online communities, has raised $500,000 Singaporean dollars (about $400,000) led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Singapore’s National Research Foundation, Crystal Horse Investments, Singapore Angel Network, Roland Turner, and other angel investors.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD 4.0 Drops i386 Support, Improves Graphics

      The much anticipated release of DragonFlyBSD 4.0 is now available.

      The biggest “big ticket item” of DragonFlyBSD 4.0 include improving graphics support with the Linux-ported Intel DRM driver now handling Intel “Haswell” graphics complete with OpenGL support, well more than one year after it’s been optimized for Linux users. DragonFlyBSD 4.0 is also significant in that it drops 32-bit i386 support in making it 64-bit only for x86 systems. While the DRM driver porting takes a while across all BSD distributions right now, at least DragonFlyBSD developers can take a stand for pushing forward and focusing on 64-bit support rather than 32-bit.

    • DragonFly 4.0.1 released

      Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices. Check the full release notes for details, and visit the mirrors page for download links.

    • 64-bit ARM FreeBSD Support Is Taking Shape

      While Linux/Android on AArch64 is what’s usually talked about, FreeBSD developers continue making progress on porting their kernel to 64-bit ARM.

    • A review of PC-BSD 10.1
    • Google Now Uses Clang As Their Production Compiler For Chrome Linux Builds

      For just over one month Google’s Chrome/Chromium team has been using Clang as their production compiler on Linux in place of GCC.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The FSF is hiring: Seeking a full-time outreach and communication coordinator

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a world wide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a motivated and organized tech-friendly Boston-based individual to be its full-time outreach and communication coordinator.

    • GNU Guix 0.8 Has A New Visual UI In Emacs

      The GNU Guix functional package manager has been updated to version 0.8 and incorporates four months of changes.

      GNU Guix 0.8 features a new visual user interface in Emacs, a variety of new Guix sub-commands, improved reporting of package upgrades, and various improvements to the Linux-libre distribution portion of Guix.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Finland’s Innovillage spurs open development of e-gov services

      Finlands Innovillage – an online collaborative platform for the development and implementation of new government service models and practices – shows that innovation demands an open process that involves users, professionals, managers, experts and policy-makers. “Fundamentally, e-government innovation needs to be open and allow participation”, says Pasi Pohjola, coordinator of Finland’s Development Programme for Social Welfare and Healthcare.

    • Glitch takes down DOD’s open source IT collaboration environment

      “On Sunday, 23 Nov, our hosting provider executed an automated script that inadvertently corrupted all Forge.mil systems,” DISA said in an email notification obtained by FedScoop. “We’ve been working with their SysAdmins since then to bring Forge.mil back into service. We were expecting all systems back up Monday afternoon but problems with recovering from our backup systems have prevented that. We continue to work with our hosting provider to escalate issues and apply necessary resources to achieve resolution until all systems are back up and available.”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Free the Seed – The Open Source Seed Initiative

      With the slogan, “Free the Seed”, a group of plant breeders, academics, among others, have formed an Open Source Seeds Initiative to prevent the down stream restrictions to germ plasm, genetic material, breeding and seeds in general. Based in the open software philosophy, the initiative seeks to create a common pool of seeds. Like open source software, these seeds are expected to be free for all kinds of use and distribution.

    • Dinner can be like open source too
    • Startup to Open Source Parallel CPU

      A startup founded by two teenagers is designing a parallel processor that it hopes delivers a 10x leap in performance per watt for high-end systems. Rex Computing will make open source its instruction set architecture in hopes of rallying supporters around it.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Berners-Lee: new HTML5 ‘open web’ milestones

      The Computer Weekly Open Source Insider blog noted on January 1 2013 that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) made note that a stable specification of the HTML5 web markup language has been laid down for web application developers to now focus on.

    • ZigBee Announces New Internet of Things Standard

      The ZigBee Alliance, has announced the unification of its wireless standards to a single standard named ZigBee 3.0, which will provide interoperability among the widest range of smart devices, providing consumers and businesses access to innovative products and services.

    • OpenCL & SYCL Updated For Heterogeneous Parallel Programming

      The Khronos Group has released updated versions of the OpenCL and SYCL specifications from the Super Computing 2014 conference in New Orleans.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • US Department of Defense Militarizes Social Science

      In 2008, the US Department of Defense founded the Minerva Initiative, a “social science research initiative” which focused on regions of “strategic importance to US national security policy.” The initiative focuses on results that can be used in the field (that are “warfighter relevant,” in the words of the Minerva Initiative website). The DoD is issuing $17 million to fund twelve new projects for 2014-17. As Nafeez Ahmed reports in the Guardian, the DoD funding social science is a conflict of interest and certain proposed projects raise questions about how the social science might be used in warzones.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Video Analysis of Fatal West Bank Shooting Said to Implicate Israeli Officer

      One day after Israel charged an officer from its border police force with manslaughter in the shooting of a Palestinian teenager at a protest in the West Bank last May, the boy’s father and an Israeli architect who helped reconstruct the killing based on video evidence argued that the officer should be indicted on a murder charge instead.

  • Finance

    • HOTEL 22: The Dark Side Of Silicon Valley

      Jimmy hands $2 worth of dimes to the conductor and finds a seat at the back of the bus.

      He settles himself in for what is going to be a long night – taking off his scuffed leather shoes and resting his head against a window opaque with condensation.

      Jimmy, 47, has had the same routine for the last three years since losing his job as a chef at Microsoft.

    • Save the Fatcats

      CEO Justin Forsyth £139,950
      COO Anabel Hoult £139,950
      COO / CFO & Strategic Initiatives Rachel Parr £131,970
      Global Programmes Director Fergus Drake £113,300
      Fundraising Director Tanya Steele £112,2001

      [...]

      StC has just given Tony Blair its “Global Legacy” award. What kind of people like Tony Blair? People who earn over 100,000. I am not sure that if you put money in a tin, or bought from their charity shop, you thought you were paying that many fat salaries. There are also gold plated pensions and other benefits. Justin Forsyth, the CEO, of course worked in Tony Blair’s neo-con policy unit.

    • NYT Columnist’s Faulty Attack on Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Rage’

      New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin has earned a reputation over the years for being friendly with the Wall Street giants he covers. If you read his bizarre rant against Senator Elizabeth Warren, it’s not hard to see why.

    • Millions in Poverty Get Less Media Coverage than 482 Billionaires

      In June 2014, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published a study showing that ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News give more media coverage to the 482 billionaires in the U.S. than to the 50 million people in poverty, airing almost four times as many stories that include the term “billionaire” as stories including terms such as “homeless” or “welfare.” According to the report, an average of only 2.7 seconds per 22-minute nightly news program were devoted to covering stories where poverty was mentioned.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • Google Asked to Censor Three Million Pirate Bay URLs

      The Pirate Bay reached a questionable milestone today when copyright holders asked Google to remove the three millionth Pirate Bay URL from search results. While most requests are valid, Google also removed several non-infringing pages.

  • Privacy

    • Want to avoid government malware? Ask a former NSA hacker

      A young British company called Darktrace, whose technology was spawned in the classrooms and bedrooms of Cambridge University, can now boast a covey of former spies among their executive ranks. Jim Penrose, who spent 17 years at the NSA and was involved in the much-feared Tailored Access Operations group (TAO), is one of Darktrace’s latest hires.

    • UK Pirate Party slams government plans for IP address identification

      THE UK PIRATE PARTY has slammed government plans which could see IP addresses linked to individuals in the same way as phone numbers.

      Loz Kaye, outspoken leader of the party, said: “It’s extraordinary that the Home Office did not consult [the] industry about these plans.

      “To me it shows they don’t care whether they will work or not. They are just interested in headlines.”

      He went on to criticise the Liberal Democrats, which had earlier welcomed the move, saying it provides proof that there will be no return to snooping in this Parliament.

    • Slack now letting employers tap workers’ private chats

      Slack, whose chat app aims to help workers get stuff done, might now have them running scared, knowing the boss could access their chats.

      The company’s upcoming paid Plus plan will include an optional feature called Compliance Exports, announced Monday, which will let administrators access their team’s communications, encompassing public and private messages.

    • Most people have heard of Snowden, few have changed habits as a result

      New worldwide survey results conducted by a Canadian think tank show that most people around the world (60 percent) have heard of Edward Snowden, but just over a third “have taken steps to protect their online privacy and security as a result of his revelations.”

    • Thinking of buying a security camera? Read this first

      Most security cameras and their software aren’t built with computer security in mind. None of the vendors could provide me with a clear understanding of code reviews and penetration testing. In fact, most of my security inquiries were met with befuddlement. Often I was called back by someone days later who either did not know the answers to my questions or said yes to everything I asked so often, you knew they were not telling the truth.

    • Truly private surfing

      In my previous post i recommended to use two firefox plugins to truly surf through Internet whoes pages are “infected” with social network embedded widgets that only report about our presense in those pages and if we are lucky, only that, but i also identifies us because the propagation of cookies.

      In this post i will give some recommendations about how to stop Firefox from surfing the web without us knowing it, yes, in the background. The other day i was analyzing what happens in the background in the network with Firefox open, and i was worried for a minute or two because i saw connections going out of my computer but i was not surfing anything… i had one page open, so i closed it incase that that page had some javascript with a loop doing some connections without me knowing…. but the connections kept being done.

    • Report On UK Terrorist Murder: MI5 Absolved, Facebook Guilty

      Of course, that would mean finding some way to win support for an intrusive Communications Data Bill, which provoked such a strong reaction the last time it was discussed. So it’s interesting coincidence that the day after that place-marker by the Home Secretary, a new report (pdf, and embedded below) has been published on a particularly brutal terrorist attack that took place on the streets of London last year. The report comes from the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which was roundly condemned by a Parliamentary committee earlier this year for being out of touch and ineffectual. It was asked to examine what lessons could be learned from the failure to stop the attack, given that both the two men convicted of murdering the British soldier Fusilier Rigby were known to the UK intelligence service.

      [...]

      Well, that’s because they are communications companies: they provide ways to communicate, just like phone companies or the post system. There’s no more reason they should be monitoring every piece of content on their systems than telephone companies should monitor the content of calls, or post offices the content of letters. It’s not their job, and would in any case be an extraordinary invasion of privacy.

      [...]

      That the ISC’s report into the attack turns out to be a whitewash is no surprise. Earlier this month, the UK’s leading human rights groups decided to boycott another inquiry that it would be conducting, since they had “lost all trust in the committee’s ability to uncover the truth.” And just before the ISC report was published, it was claimed that the committee had “failed to speak to witnesses who say the plot’s leader was repeatedly contacted by the security services before the attack”…

      [...]

      So who gave that information to GCHQ? The statement above makes it clear it wasn’t Facebook itself but a “third party”. Who else had access to such private messages? Someone at the company? Maybe, although that seems very unlikely given the company’s awareness of how big an issue this would be.

      Another obvious candidate is the NSA. Snowden has told us that it accesses and stores vast quantities of messages as they flow across the Internet; given the nature of the conversation, and the keywords it contains, it seems quite likely that it was added to a database somewhere, “just in case”. Perhaps it was dug out at the request of GCHQ, which then passed it on to the company concerned — in order to land it in hot water, and get MI5 off the hook. Just another benefit of being part of the Five Eyes club.

    • Lee Rigby: inquiry into murder of fusilier ‘failed to seek out witnesses’

      The official inquiry into the jihadi-inspired murder of Lee Rigby in 2013 is poised to clear the security services of major criticisms but is facing claims that it failed to speak to witnesses who say the plot’s leader was repeatedly contacted by the security services before the attack.

    • Survey: Public Clouds, File Syncing and Data Privacy Dangers

      Lots of employees use public cloud services, like Dropbox and Box, to sync and share files even if they contain sensitive data. That’s not too surprising, but what is is the finding that more than half of organizations don’t have policies in place to keep important data out of the public cloud, at least according to their employees. So says M-Files, which has released interesting survey results on this topic.

    • The Coming War on Encryption, Tor, and VPNs

      And that, of course, will not go down well with the world’s spy agencies. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, there is a clear move to demonise strong encryption using a crude “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”-type argument: only bad people could possibly want to hide their communications. I predict that things will only get worse – not just because of Let’s Encrypt, but also following the Home Secretary’s announcement this week of yet more counter-terrorism measures.

      One of them claims to address the fictional “capabilities gap the authorities face when it comes to communications data.” There is no such gap, because the volume of communications data has grown so hugely that any *percentage* loss of capabilities is more than made up for by the greater total quantity of information now available. For example, even if the authorities were only able to access a half of all communications data, say, that would still represent hundreds of times more raw information than previously because overall traffic has probably increased many thousands of times thanks to the rise of the Internet (those figures are plucked from the air, but the point remains valid.)

      [...]

      But it is, of course, trivial to avoid this surveillance using Tor or a VPN. And so inevitably the next stage of this assault on online digital liberties will be to attack those too, even though both have perfectly legitimate uses, especially the latter. Indeed, now would be a good time for businesses to make it known to the UK government that they require VPNs to function properly in the online world, just as they require strong encryption; and that trying to outlaw any of these, or to restrict or weaken them in the name of “counter-terrorism” would be yet another deeply disproportionate response with serious adverse consequences for the economy and society.

    • How to Encrypt the Entire Web for Free
    • Secret Malware in European Union Attack Linked to U.S. and British Intelligence

      Complex malware known as Regin is the suspected technology behind sophisticated cyberattacks conducted by U.S. and British intelligence agencies on the European Union and a Belgian telecommunications company, according to security industry sources and technical analysis conducted by The Intercept.

    • NSA privacy director defends agency’s surveillance

      The U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance programs are legal and under close scrutiny by other parts of the government, the agency’s internal privacy watchdog said Monday in an online Q&A.

    • EC-Council President Warns Global Leaders of Cyber Pandemic at World Internet Conference

      In a rousing speech made to a packed audience at the World Internet Conference held November 19th – 21st in the historic city of Wuzhen in Zhejiang Province, Jay Bavisi, President and Founder of EC-Council, pushed for emphasis on solving cybersecurity threats by focusing on secure coding, the creation of a global legal framework, and better education initiatives. The theme of the event, “Interconnected World, Shared and Governed By All” resonates on the information security industry as cyber crime is a global problem in need of global solutions. Top executives from Chinese tech firms, including Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, as well as representatives from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, LinkedIn, and non-profit organization ICANN attended the conference.

    • Regin Spyware Likely Made by NSA, UK
    • NSA, GCHQ or both behind Stuxnet-like Regin malware?
    • Sophisticated Regin Malware Could be the Child of GCHQ or NSA
    • NSA, GCHQ or both behind Stuxnet-like Regin malware?
    • Sophisticated Malware Regin Linked To NSA, British Intelligence
    • ‘Elegant’ Regin Malware Linked to Brits, NSA

      A sophisticated malware program called “Regin” has been used in systematic spying campaigns against a range of international targets since at least 2008, Symantec reported on Sunday.

    • Patriot Act Deadline Threatens to Splinter NSA Reformers

      Privacy advocates, facing an uphill battle in a Republican-controlled Congress next year, will have to make a difficult choice.

      Some argue that their best shot to curb the National Security Agency’s powers will be to kill core provisions of the USA Patriot Act altogether. But other reformers aren’t ready to take the post-9/11 law hostage.

    • NSA Reform Could Pit GOP Hawks Against Party’s Libertarian Wing

      Efforts to curb the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of American phone metadata were dealt a blow with the defeat of the USA Freedom Act on Nov. 18. With a 58-42 vote, the bill failed to attract the 60 votes necessary to clear the Senate filibuster.

    • Cryptocurrency News: NSA ‘Outlined Bitcoin-Like System’ and 70% of Bitcoins Unspent

      Most other major cryptocurrencies have seen a similar upturn in fortunes, with litecoin, dogecoin, peercoin and darkcoin all rising in price by between 3% and 6%.

    • “Big Data Ethics” Sound Great, But They Won’t Stop The NSA—Or Facebook

      It was worth a shot. At the recent Strata Conference in Barcelona, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting took to the stage to argue for a new era of Big Data ethics.

      “It’s time for us to reflect as we enter this new data age on how we want it to work,” Cutting declared. “This is the time when the practices and policies we want will be set for the coming decades.”

    • Edward Snowden Receives Stuttgart Peace Prize 2014

      Edward Snowden has been awarded Stuttgart Peace Prize 2014, but could not attend the ceremony and sent a message via a video, urging to fight for the observation of human rights.

    • NSA leaker Snowden feted in Stuttgart

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden accepted the Stuttgart Peace Prize and called on the public to keep fighting for peace in a speech via video uplink on Sunday.

    • Utah is considering shutting off water to the NSA

      What happens when a US state government directly opposes the operations of one of the most powerful agencies in the country? Utah might be about to find out, with a bill going forward early next year proposing Utah shuts off water to the NSA’s massive data collection center in Bluffdale.

      Republican Marc Roberts proposed the bill, which states municipalities in Utah must “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.”

    • NSA Spies Recruit Teenage Kids: We Can Stop It

      As if the creepy spy-guy wandering around your kid’s college campus trying to recruit her into the NSA wasn’t bad enough, now you can find him wandering the halls of your local high school and middle school as well.

      According to a recent article in the Intercept, the NSA recently established cybersecurity camps for middle school and high school students, and hopes to eventually have a presence in schools in all 50 states.

    • NSA ‘privacy director’ went on Tumblr to convince people ‘this is a real job’

      The NSA’s “Civil Liberties and Privacy Director” Rebecca Richards did a Tumblr Q&A Monday, answering a number of questions about her job and the agency’s privacy practices.

      Someone cut right to the chase and asked what we were all thinking: “Is ‘NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Director’ a real position or is this all a joke?”

    • Memo to NSA: Stop Saying You Apply the FIPPs

      The intelligence community has no set of general principles for judging the privacy impact of their programs. Some privacy scholars believe that the Fair Information Protection Principles (FIPPs) serve this purpose and can apply to intelligence programs as they do to myriad other government programs. The NSA itself said in a recent report on collection under Executive Order 12333 that it was applying the FIPPs for the first time. But however appealing it may seem to apply generally applicable privacy principles to intelligence programs, it is simply impossible for the intelligence community to apply the FIPPs literally.

    • Ex-NSA and GCHQ spooks showcase Intel platform

      Darktrace, a cybersecurity company comprised of ex-spooks from NSA and GCHQ, has revealed details of its new behavioural analytics software.

    • Insight into the mind of a former NSA programmer/hacker

      Many cybersecurity specialists working for the NSA and GCHQ tend to get burned out, and then head to the private sector. It provides a unique opportunity to hear more about some of the efforts the US government have employed to conduct organized cyberespionage against foreign governments.

    • Wyden pledges to pursue NSA reform

      Legislation that would have ended the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program stalled in the Senate last week, falling two votes short of the 60 needed to advance.

      Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a proponent of reining in what he views as the NSA’s overly broad surveillance powers, was undeterred by the setback. He was disappointed that senators were unable to debate the bill’s merits, because Republicans filibustered a motion to proceed, but pledged to return to the issue.

    • Viewpoint: Silicon Valley must step up privacy fight

      It’s unlikely the valley will be able to innovate itself out of this mess. The right to privacy is one of the nation’s most treasured principles. Silicon Valley needs to take a more active role in protecting Americans’ privacy and restoring public trust in its products.

    • UN calls digital spying ‘highly intrusive’ and a violation of human rights

      The UN has expressed deep concerns about online spying – particularly on a mass scale – as it violates people’s rights to privacy

    • Massive surveillance operations possible with explicit help from telecom companies

      U.S. and U.K. spy agencies including the NSA and GCHQ, respectively, have performed a variety of sophisticated spy operations, collecting massive amounts of personal data, as many Edward Snowden leaks revealed in the past year. German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung has published a new report that reveals that as far back as 2009 the GCHQ, and thus also the NSA, had massive access to submarine cable links around the globe with help from now Vodafone-owned Cable & Wireless.

    • GCHQ Paid Millions to Spy on UK Submarine Data Cables, Edward Snowden Reveals

      New documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal Cable & Wireless, a UK company which is now part of Vodafone, was paid millions of pounds by the British government’s spy agency GCHQ to tap into its undersea communications cables.

    • Five-eyes partners dilute UN resolution criticising metadata collection

      The “five eyes” surveillance partners – the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – have joined forces to nobble a UN General Assembly committee’s statements on digital privacy.

      While the General Assembly’s human rights committee has adopted a non-binding resolution saying that “unlawful or arbitrary” mass surveillance, interception and data collection are “highly intrusive acts” and a violation of the right to privacy.

    • UN human rights panel passes resolution to protect privacy

      A landmark resolution demanding privacy protection in the digital age and urging governments to offer redress to citizens targeted by mass surveillance has been approved by the UN general assembly’s human rights committee, the Guardian reports.

      The resolution, which was adopted Tuesday, Nov 25, in the face of attempts by the U.S. and others to water it down and which comes at a time when the UK government is calling for increased surveillance powers, had been put forward by Brazil and Germany in the wake of revelations by U.S. intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden about large-scale U.S. surveillance.

    • Should Schools Monitor Students’ Social Media Use?

      The electronic devices that give students instant access to the world for educational purposes are also their conduit to social media, and that presents a host of problems for school administrators.

    • Lee Rigby report expected Facebook to break US law

      Yesterday saw the publication of the Intelligence and Security Committee report into the events leading up to the murder of Lee Rigby. On reading it, one gets a sense of naivety from the members of the committee on how the Internet works, particularly when it comes to international jurisdictions. (Communications data is p139 onwards)

    • The US should not be allowed to run the internet

      A VACUUM HAS emerged over exactly who should manage and maintain the internet.

      A poll by CIGI and Ipsos showed that only 57 percent of respondents would be happy with ‘a combined body of technology companies, engineers, non-governmental organisations and institutions that represent the interests and will of ordinary citizens and governments to play an important role in running the internet’.

      Even fewer are willing to let the geeks inherit the Earth, as only 54 percent approved of ‘an international body of engineers and technical experts’.

      But the worst score of all was for the US government. Just 36 percent liked the idea of letting the nation run the show unilaterally.

    • UN Resolution Warns of ‘Intrusive’ Digital Spying

      Privacy concerns highlighted by UN Committee in wake of mass surveillance and data interception revelations

      A committee at the United Nations has expressed its deep concern over digital spying and surveillance, in the wake of the NSA revelations by Edward Snowden.

    • Lee Rigby murder should not be used as excuse for an increase in state power

      Yesterday, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) issued its report into the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich. Despite cataloguing a number of failures, the report claims that the security services couldn’t have prevented Lee Rigby’s killing, while appearing to claim that Facebook could have.

    • Open Rights Group response to the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

      ORG has also pointed out that parts of the legislation aimed at preventing extremism in educational and other institutions, “are so open-ended that they could easily lead to work-place surveillance, where employers would be obliged by guidelines to check their employees’ email and web history.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Amnesty International USA: Ferguson, the World is Watching

      Nearly 24 hours after the grand jury decision was announced, and after an initial night which included peaceful protests as well as widespread incidents of looting, arson and vandalism, Amnesty International USA Executive Director Steven W. Hawkins issued the following statement:

      “This has to be made clear – the burden to keep protests peaceful is shared. Armored vehicles, tear gas and smoke bombs used large-scale against largely peaceful protesters in order to quell acts of violence by a minority only serves to escalate and exacerbate an already incredibly tense environment.

      “Law enforcement officers have a right to defend themselves and a duty to protect the safety of the public, but this role should be carried out in a way that ensures full respect for the right to life, liberty and security of all persons, including those suspected of crime. Even when confronting violence, they must work within the law and in conformity with international standards governing the use of force.

      “The eyes of the world continue to watch the events in Ferguson as a measure of the United States’ capacity to respect the fundamental human right to assemble. Our right to protest peacefully should be bolstered by law enforcement, not inhibited through intimidation.”

    • Two More ‘Police Incidents,’ Shrouded in Media Euphemism

      The policies, practices and attitudes that lead to so many black people being killed by law enforcement have to be confronted. There are some things euphemism can’t cover up.

    • Mexico: Revolution Day Protests End in Violent Police Repression; Protesters Charged with Terrorism

      Día de la Revolución 2014 (Revolution Day) was a national holiday that Mexican citizens will not soon forget. People in more than 16 Mexican states protested on November 20th including Campeche, Chiapas, Morelos, Michoacán, Sonora, Veracruz, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Nayarit and Jalisco. Activists in Mexico tell us they estimate half a million people participated in peaceful protests on November 20 demanding justice for the 43 missing normalista students from Ayotzinapa. The largest protests in Mexico City ended in a very violent police repression and arbitrary arrests by granaderos and 11 protesters are now charged with terrorism.

    • Oops: After Threatening Hacker With 440 Years, Prosecutors Settle for a Misdemeanor

      Thanks in part to America’s ill-defined hacking laws, prosecutors have enormous discretion to determine a hacker defendant’s fate. But in one young Texan’s case in particular, the Department of Justice stretched prosecutorial overreach to a new extreme: about 440 years too far.

    • New Security Bill will force online service providers to keep log of users’ activity

      Major online service providers, such as Google, will be legally obliged to retain a log of users and the mobile phones or computers they have accessed in case police and security agencies later need the information to help them locate criminals. This measure will be included in the Counter-terrorism and Security Bill that is being introduced in the wake of Isis’s beheadings of prisoners, including British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, this year

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Global coalition from 19 countries launches Thisisnetneutrality.org website

      Anyone who thinks that net neutrality is a boring technical issue for computer geeks needs to look outside the U.S. Netizens around the world aren’t fooled by the confusing misdirection of industry lobbyists—they’re championing the cause of an open internet by pushing for laws and policies that protect the features that made the internet what it is today. And they are just as fired up as President Obama himself was just this month, when he gave his full support for the open net. Net neutrality is not an American issue, or a European issue, or an African issue. It is increasingly a global human rights issue.

    • Letter to the Council of the European Union: “Don’t Turn Your Backs on Net Neutrality!”

      Tomorrow on Thursday November 27th, the “Transport, Telecommunications and Energy” (TTE) Council will meet in Brussels to discuss the general approach on Telecom Single Market the Italian Presidency sent to the delegations of the Member States on November 14th. This text, which aims at protecting Net Neutrality and therefore the freedom of our communications, unfortunately lost the innovative and revolutionary features of the resolution voted by the European Parliament on April 3rd. The Italian Presidency, in fact, gives way to the industrial lobbies’ interests and ignores the massive citizen mobilization which has taken place in the spring of 2014. Jeopardizing Net Neutrality means infringing the fundamental rights and freedoms of every single European citizen; for this reason and to remind our representatives their responsibilities, La Quadrature du Net and its European partners sent a letter to the Council of the European Union in order to call its ministers to reject the text under discussion and come back to a real protection of everyone’s indicidual rights and freedoms.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Senator Uses Piracy Report to Pressure Visa, Mastercard

        Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has sent letters to Visa and MasterCard on the topic of online piracy. Citing a report from Netnames detailing the activities of the world’s top cyberlockers, Leahy urges the services to stop doing business with all ‘pirate’ sites.

      • How an eBay bookseller defeated a publishing giant at the Supreme Court

        Sometimes all it takes to alter the course of history is one pissed-off person. Supap Kirtsaeng wasn’t a crusader or lone nut; he was just an eBay trader who got backed into a legal corner and refused to give up.

        To help pay for grad school at USC, he sold textbooks online—legitimate copies that he’d purchased overseas. But academic publishing behemoth John Wiley & Sons sued Supap, claiming that his trade in Wiley’s foreign-market textbooks constituted copyright infringement.

        The implications were enormous. If publishers had the right to control resale of books that they printed and sold overseas, then it stood to reason that manufacturers could restrain trade in countless products—especially tech goods, most of which are made in Asia and contain copyrightable elements such as embedded software.

      • UK music industry seeks review of law allowing fans to copy music

        The UK music industry is seeking a judicial review of new legislation allowing music fans to make copies of legally-purchased music, arguing that musicians must be compensated as a result of lost sales.

        The Musicians’ Union, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and industry body UK Music are taking legal action over the government’s new copyright legislation, which came into force on 1 October.

      • BT Starts Blocking Private Torrent Sites

        UK Internet provider BT blocked two dozen torrent sites this past weekend, including IPTorrents and TorrentDay, two of the largest private trackers. This is the first time that a UK ISP has blocked private torrent sites, and there doesn’t appear to be a court order underlying their decision.

      • White House Admits That It Still Supports Parts Of SOPA: Wants To Make Streaming A Felony

        Last week, we wrote that Senator (and still for the next few weeks, Majority Leader) Harry Reid was looking for ways to push for a piece of SOPA, making streaming a felony, into law. The story we’d heard from multiple sources was that he was looking to attach it to the USA Freedom Act. His office came out and denied that claim vehemently. Still, multiple sources insisted not only that it was true, but that Reid was still looking for other vehicles to push that through. And… just days later, the White House responded to some (somewhat pointless) White House “We The People” petitions by… announcing that it, too, wanted to turn unauthorized streaming into a felony. This was in response to two separate petitions, Stop SOPA 2013 and Stop SOPA 2014. Neither petition made much sense, as SOPA has been long dead since early 2012. There was never any specific bill in either 2013 or 2014. And yet, Alex Niejelow, the chief of staff to the IP Czar (a position that is in limbo, as the new czar has been nominated, but not yet approved), used those petitions as an opportunity to reiterate that the White House, like Reid, supports making unauthorized streaming a felony.

      • Kim Dotcom: I Regret Not Taking Threat of Copyright Law and MPAA More Seriously

        Kim Dotcom has spoken out about his long battle over copyright with the US government and his regrets about the events that have led to his arrest ahead of his bail breach hearing on Thursday that could see him return to jail in New Zealand.

        “Would I have done things differently? Of course. My biggest regret is I didn’t take the threat of the copyright law and the MPAA seriously enough,” Dotcom said via live video link from his mansion in Auckland, New Zealand at the Unbound Digital conference in London on Tuesday.

11.25.14

Links 25/11/2014: Tizen News, Jolla Tablet Past Million

Posted in News Roundup at 5:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Wormhole in Interstellar Movie Designed with a Linux OS – Gallery

    The Interstellar movie has been released not long ago and it was an instant success, despite some of the criticism that has been expressed by a number of physicists. To make thinks even more interesting, at least for Linux users, it looks like the production team used Linux to built the black hole in the movie.

  • ‘Less’ means more to malware authors targeting Linux users

    Using the “less” Linux command to view the contents of files downloaded from the Internet is a dangerous operation that can lead to remote code execution, according to a security researcher.

    At first glance, less appears to be a harmless command that outputs a file’s content to a terminal window and allows the users to navigate forward and backward through it. Less does not allow file editing, which is a job for file editors like the widely used vi, but has the benefit of displaying data on the fly without needing to load an entire file into memory. This is useful when dealing with large files.

  • Antarctic ice might be thicker than previously thought, reveals Linux powered underwater robot seaBED

    SeaBED, a submersible robot powered by Linux, was recently used to scan the huge frozen ice sheets across Antarctica. That has helped scientists get detailed and high-resolution 3-D maps of the frozen continent for the first time. Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey will now be able to know more regions which had earlier been difficult to access because of the hostile conditions prevailing in the area.

  • Desktop

    • Dirt-cheap laptops might be this year’s stocking stuffer

      Chromebooks, the low-cost compute devices that run Google’s Chrome OS, haven’t necessarily been showcased in Black Friday circulars, but they’re making an impression nonetheless. Although prices vary, Chromebooks generally range from $200 to $350 or so, and now come loaded with up to 1TB of Google Drive storage, too.

    • System76 Sable Touch: The state of touch support in Linux

      Based on specs alone, this is a pretty sweet rig. The all-in-one form factor makes for a sexy package. And like every System76 machine I’ve ever used, the performance and aesthetic element seriously impress. Having Linux with touch screen support is like a child at Christmas. Sure, we’ve had touch screens for a long, long time — but the first time you use Linux with such a machine of this caliber, you feel something akin to that first time you used Linux. And Ubuntu Unity really shines in the touch screen environment. Out of nowhere, you realize just what Canonical was going for when they re-invented that wheel.

    • Black Friday deals from Acer: Laptops and Chromebook

      Chromebook 11 — This Chromebook is normally priced modestly at $199, but on 11/28 Best Buy will make it even lower at $149. That’s a good deal for a laptop with 11.6-inch screen, Intel Celeron processor, and 2GB of memory.

    • DisplaySearch: Global notebook PC market grew 10 percent

      Chromebooks, which are forecast to reach 5 percent (8 million units) of total global notebook PC shipments…

  • Server

    • Linux admins: It’s time to relearn the art of compiling apps

      It used to be that open source software was released only as source code and had to be compiled wherever it was needed. Obviously, that’s changed. Today, some will even tell you that compiling source is an improper and problematic way to install software. Tomorrow, it may become more standard than they think.

      While compiling source is still the basis of many BSDs (though you can get binary packages easily enough), package management came to Linux early on with RPM and branched out everywhere ever since. Package support on Debian and Ubuntu is simply massive. Fedora has a huge number of packages, as do RHEL and CentOS, though the packages available for the latter are generally far older for legacy and stability reasons.

    • Cray to Evaluate ARM Chips in Its Supercomputers

      ARM partners Cavium, Applied Micro and PathScale also make news at SC14 as ARM continues its push into the HPC space.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Top 10 Linux Holiday Gifts for 2014 (Slideshow)

      In 2012, the Top 10 Linux Gift Guide set the upper limit at $500, and last year it dropped to $400. This year, the cut-off dips to $350, reflecting the ongoing price reductions in consumer electronics, as well as my not entirely successful attempt to live up to Mr. Money Moustache’s guidelines for living on the cheap. (Click the Gallery link below to see a slide show and descriptions of the Top 10 Linux gifts.)

    • How the Linux Foundation’s CII Is Securing the Internet

      The Heartbleed flaw that was first publicly disclosed in April of this year, was in some respects a black eye on the open-source community. Heartbleed is a flaw in the open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library that had wide ranging impact across the infrastructure of the Internet. In the aftermath of Heartbleed, a new effort emerged called the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) to help fund developers wanting to improve security across critical open-source infrastructure technologies.

    • Four ways Linux is headed for no-downtime kernel patching

      Nobody loves a reboot, especially not if it involves a late-breaking patch for a kernel-level issue that has to be applied stat.

      To that end, three projects are in the works to provide a mechanism for upgrading the kernel in a running Linux instance without having to reboot anything.

    • Unikernels and Immutable Infrastructure

      I believe Docker is 2 steps forward for the world of DevOps and that the principles it promotes are forward-thinking and largely on-target for the future of a more secure, performant, and easy-to-manage cloud future. However, an alternative approach leveraging unikernels and immutable servers will result in smaller, easier to manage, more secure containers that will be simpler to adopt by existing enterprises.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • In memory of Razor-qt

      The most parts of LXQt are actually built on top of razor-qt, a lightweight Qt-based DE with the same philosophy as LXDE. We reorganized the source code of razor-qt and removed unused pieces. Then we ported several LXDE components to Qt and also developed some new ones. Hence it’s more the merge of developers than the merge of the actual source code. That’s why they have slightly different feature sets. Without the work of razor-qt project, we can’t have LXQt now. Its developers deserved the credit. Since the story is too long for the tiny “About” dialog, I wrote the blog post here to thank their contributions.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • SoK : UPnP Support in PMC progress report

        Well, it’s been a great experience working on an awesome project Plasma Media Center. Till now I have learnt a lot

        As PMC is being ported to Plasma 5, it would be worthless merging it in qt4 based branch of PMC. So, I am making standalone app based on Qt5 and would merge it later on once it gets ported completely.

      • Cutelyst 0.5.0

        A bit more than one year after the initial commit, Cutelyst makes it’s 5th release.

        It’s now powering 3 commercial applications, the last one recently got into production and is the most complex of them, making heavy use of Grantlee and Cutelyst capabilities.

      • Qt on Android Episode 5

        In this article we’ve learned the basics of the JNI, in the next article(s) we’re going to learn how to use this knowledge to correctly extend Qt on Android apps. We’ll talk more about Qt on Android apps architecture, how to extend the Java part of your application and we’ll take a real life example to show how to correctly do safe calls from Qt thread to Android UI thread and vice-versa.

      • There’s New In-Fighting Over The Future Of Compiz

        Unless you’re a user of Ubuntu with Unity 7, you probably haven’t heard much about Compiz in quite some time. However, some developers are looking to further revive its development but not everyone is in agreement.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Cinnamon 2.4.4 Arrives with Various Refinements

        Cinnamon, a Linux desktop environment developed by the same team that is also building Linux Mint, has been updated yet again, although this time it’s a rather small progression.

      • GTK+ INSPECTOR UPDATE

        GTK+ Inspector is a debugging tool that is built directly into GTK+ and is available in every GTK+ application by using of the shortcuts Ctrl-Shift-d or Ctrl-Shift-i.

  • Distributions

    • New Linux OS That Respects Google’s Material Design Is in the Works

      Google’s new Material Design approach proved to be a real success and now Linux developers are looking to make a new distribution that is capable of adhering to those guidelines, which is actually something new in the ecosystem.

    • Reviews

      • We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

        Linux Mint 17.1 is the first example of what the Mint project team can do when they’re focused on their own system rather than on making the latest Ubuntu work with Mint.

        That’s because Mint 17.1 sticks with the Ubuntu released earlier this year – the first time this desktop Linux has not gone with the more recent Ubuntu.

      • Mint’s the Best, Less Malware, and Debian vs Ubuntu

        The Register’s Scott Gilbertson today said that Linux Mint 17.1 was the best distribution “hands down.” Elsewhere, Bruce Byfield compares and contrasts Debian and Ubuntu to see which is right for you and Lucian Constantin reports on a new vulnerability found in less programs. There were several reviews in the feeds and Katherine Noyes tallies FOSS Thanksgivings. Linux.com has Linux gift ideas and Serdar Yegulalp summarizes rebootless kernel patching.

      • Observing Scientific Linux 7.0

        Scientific Linux is an operating system sponsored by Fermilab and built using the source code from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The distribution is lightly customized, making it similar to RHEL in most respects, but with different artwork. The current release of Scientific is available for the 64-bit x86 CPU architecture only. There are several editions to choose from, including a regular installation DVD (3.9 GB), an “Everything” double-sided installation DVD (6.2 GB), a net-install minimal CD (394 MB), a live CD (690 MB), a GNOME-flavoured live DVD (1.1 GB) and a KDE-flavoured live DVD (1.2 GB). I opted to download the live KDE disc.

      • Netrunner Rolling 2014.04 – This time, we need the goats

        Netrunner Rolling distro release is a very interesting concepts, on many level. It’s a KDE desktop, based on Arch and Manjaro, the latter also being partially based on Arch itself, plus it comes with a rolling update model. A far cry from the typical asterisk-buntu philosophy that pervades most of the market.

        In the canonical notation, Netrunner Rolling is actually an Arch-Arch-Manjaro distro, and this actually sounds like Ice Ice Baby, only geekier. Arch, Arch, Manjaro. Tam dam dam da da dam dam. Sort of. Anyhow, we have a new edition out there. 2014.09. So let’s see if it’s any good. The previous one surprised, immensely.

      • Ubuntu Mate 14.10 Review: For GNOME 2 lovers and offers awesome performance

        I am not sure if Ubuntu Mate 14.10 is an official release from Canonical yet. It is still to be listed in distrowatch. But, never-the-less I came across this distro as a reference from a couple of readers from my blog. I used the distro for a week and I am writing down my experience with the distro. It has the same specifics as Ubuntu 14.10 – the desktop environment is different here: Mate 1.8.1, with it’s typical GNOME 2 looks.

    • New Releases

      • Pear OS Linux Concept Revived as Pearl Linux 1.0 – Screenshot Tour

        Pear OS Linux was a very successful Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that wanted to provide an experience similar to Mac OS X. That operating system is gone now, but Pearl Linux wants to replace it.
        Pear OS Linux managed to have quite an impact on the community, despite the fact that it was offering an almost identical experience to the Mac OS X desktop.

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Call for Proposals Now Open for Red Hat Summit 2015
      • Red Hat, Chilean government hold talks on open source initiative

        The head of Chilean regulator Pedro Huichalaf agreed to pass information regarding the benefits of open source software to the ministerial committee for digital development

      • Red Hat spiffs up FeedHenry with better collaboration tools

        The new FeedHenry 3 promises to let distributed teams — both those inside a company and outside contractors — work together simultaneously on client apps, cloud apps and services. And it has applied role-based access for developers that applies from the beginning of app design and throughout the coding and testing and deployment process. Authorized admins can look into all projects and stages. And, more granular access controls let the project manager lock down aspects of the app to a select individual developer or developers.

      • Not just token: Red Hat’s Women in Open Source Awards

        DeLisa Alexander would like to make one thing clear about Red Hat’s Women in Open Source Awards (WIOSA): They’re not just a token gesture towards diversity. Instead, she describes them as one step in a larger, more varied strategy to increase women’s participation in open source.

        “It’s one key,” says Alexander, executive vice-president and chief people officer at Red Hat. “But it’s an important part of the puzzle to help tech and open source attract more talent.” According to Alexander, the idea was first generated several years ago, but the company “waited until we had a larger sense of the puzzle.”

      • Fedora

        • Upgrading to Fedora 21

          Upgrade from Fedora 20 to Fedora 21 via ‘fedup‘ was fast on my SSD disk, and there were no blockers after the reboot – minimal downtime!

        • Paratype PT Serif and PT Mono fonts are now available in Fedora

          Paratype has a set of nice Latin/pan-Cyrillic typefaces including sans-serif, serif and monospace fonts. The sans-serif typeface, PT Sans, released in 2010 has been part of Fedora for a long time and it is the default font for Cyrillic/Russian. It is a nice font for display in desktop, documents and web.

        • Fedora 21 weekend upgrading

          So, at least for me, Fedora 21 upgrades were as easy as they have always been.

        • Fedora 21 review

          It’s been a while since my last upgrade and there has also been a gap to the latest Fedora 21 release, so now seemed like a good time. I upgraded my laptop by installing over the existing root partition but leaving the /home partition in place to maintain all my settings and files. I wasn’t able to even attempt this in the Fedora 16 installer, but it was easy enough in the Fedora 21 installer and it worked surprisingly well. Downtime was only 20 minutes or so for the installation, though a couple of hours was needed to investigate various new settings etc.

        • Tuesday’s security updates

    • Debian Family

      • I GIve Up On Systemd

        After many hours of reading/fiddling/reconfiguring I’ve given up on Systemd.

      • Some Debris In The Systemd Debate

        GNU/Linux shipped on more than 5% of PCs in the last year. Whole governments are preferring GNU/Linux or adopting it or introducing it to students on national scales. That kind of movement is still growing, in Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and USA.

      • Debian vs Ubuntu: Which is Best for You?

        Debian and Ubuntu are the most influential Linux distributions ever. Of the 285 active distributions listed on Distrowatch, 132 are derived from Debian, including Ubuntu, and another 67 are derived directly from Ubuntu — just under 70%. Yet the experience of using them differs in just about every aspect. Consequently, choosing between them is no easy matter.

        Asked to explain the difference between the two distributions, most users would describe Debian as an expert’s distribution, and Ubuntu as a beginner’s. These characterizations are partly true, but exaggerated. Debian’s reputation rests on its state over a decade ago, and today allows as much hands-on control as each user chooses.

        Similarly, Ubuntu is really its design team’s conception of easy. Should your work habits not be compatible with that concept, you may disagree strongly that it is easy to use.

      • Derivatives

        • Release notes for siduction 2014.1

          We are very happy to present to you the final release of siduction 2014.1 – Indian Summer. siduction is a distribution based on Debian’s unstable branch and we try to release a few new snapshots over the course of each year. For 2014 it will be just this final release. We did a lot of stabilizing work in the past year, besides working on further integrating systemd and working on dev releases. We know it is not ideal to have an install medium that is older than six months, so please accept our apologies for that, we will try to release more often.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Governance Reboot: Five Proposals

            A little while back I wrote a blog post that seemed to inspire some people and ruffle the feathers of some others. It was designed as a conversation-starter for how we can re-energize leadership in Ubuntu.

            When I kicked off the blog post, Elizabeth quite rightly gave me a bit of a kick in the spuds about not providing a place to have a discussion, so I amended the blog post to a link to this thread where I encourage your feedback and participation.

            Rather unsurprisingly, there was some good feedback, before much of it started wandering off the point a little bit.

          • FFmpeg Will Be Added (Again) To The Default Repositories Of Ubuntu, Starting With Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet

            Hello Linunx Geeksters. Starting with Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu has stopped shipping with the FFmpeg libraries and used Libav for handling multimedia content, but the developers have announced that FFmpeg will be available by default again, starting with Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.

          • Imp ARM-based Ubuntu Mini PC Unveiled for $150

            A new Ubuntu Mini PC has been unveiled this week in the form of the Imp, a small form factor desktop PC, that is equipped with an ARM-based processor supported by 2GB of RAM and comes complete with open source software.

          • Meizu and Canonical Reach Agreement to Release Ubuntu-Powered Meizu Handsets

            Meizu is on a roll lately. The company has announced their newest flagship handset, Meizu MX4 Pro only two and a half months after they released the original MX4. This upgrade wasn’t actually needed, but Meizu saw an opportunity and decided to take it, they released a beastly handset and made it available at a rather affordable price point, which is a great thing. This handset improves upon MX4 in many aspects, bigger and higher-res screen is here, as well as more RAM, a more powerful processor and even a fingerprint scanner below the display. Meizu won’t stop there, rumors have been pointing towards further Meizu launches before the end of the years. According to reports, this Chinese manufacturer will launch 2 additional devices before the end of 2014.

          • Ubuntu powered Meizu MX4 to hit market early 2015

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Weaved Hauls Your Raspberry Pi Projects Online

      Playing with Raspberry Pi is a lot of fun, but what happens when you want to get some real work done? While it’s not difficult to make a RaspPi board do cool stuff, getting it to communicate with the wider world is a bit of a challenge. That’s why Ryo Koyama, Mike Johnson, and Doug Olekin made Weaved.

    • Is the ASRock Q1900DC-ITX Intel Motherboard a Good ARM SBC Alternative?

      In the recent series on ARM single board computers I have covered the BeagleBone Black, MaRS, TI’s OMAP5432 Board, the Radxa, a few of the ODroid ARM machines, and many more. On the Intel desktop side I’ve covered the NUC and MinnowBoard. I’ve learned that outright performance is faster on the Intel NUC than any ARM machine reviewed so far — the tradeoff, of course, is cost. This time around we’ll see whether the ASRock Q1900DC-ITX motherboard retains the high performance characteristic of an Intel board but also dips down to the low cost and lower power draw of the ARM world.

    • Tizen India Portathon Challenge 2014

    • Phones

      • Tizen

      • Android

        • Android drone tracks you by computer vision

          Kickstarter is showing an $899, Android-based “Mind4″ follow-me drone that tracks you entirely by computer vision, and interprets full-body gestures.

        • Android game console runs on quad-core Cortex-A17

          Ugoos announced a “micro game console” spin-off of its Android-based quad-core Cortex-A17 UT3 media player, and released an Ubuntu 14.10 build for the UT3.

        • Five Android 5.0 Lollipop annoyances Google should fix immediately

          In Android 4.4 and earlier, the menu you got when holding the power menu had a few options including toggling airplane mode, ringer modes, and of course, turning the device off. Some manufacturers even added reboot commands and additional settings. In Android 5.0 Google has gone backward and this menu now only includes “Power Off.”

        • Android 5.0 Lollipop embraces the enterprise

          Finally, Google has included EMM/MDM APIs to allow a standard approach to the management and security of Android mobile devices. No longer will EMM vendors like MobileIron have to make different versions for the devices of different OEMs. (Of course they will need to continue to do so for as long as they support pre-Lollipop Android devices.)

          Google has also moved to harden the base operating system, strengthen data security by default, improve the security update process and authentication and much more. There are thousands of new APIs, many of which help enterprises.

          Of course there are Lollipop features, such as Material Design, which is intended to make user interfaces more consistent, and Battery Saver, which benefit enterprises as much as anyone, but they are not enterprise-specific.

        • You Can Get Android Lollipop’s Best Feature on Older Android Phones
        • Get Android 5.0′s trusted places feature on any Android phone

          Locking your phone with a password or PIN code is a necessity when you’re out and about, but when you’re in the safety of your own home or office, it can be a real pain to unlock the thing every time you look at it. As noted by my colleague Vlad, Android 5.0 Lollipop has a super useful feature to address this: you can set your home or office as a “trusted place” and Android will automatically disable your lock screen when you are there, reactivating it when you leave.

        • Android Auto is great, but automakers are holding it back

          At the LA Auto Show this week, I spent time with a recent pre-release build of Android Auto using a Nexus 5 connected to a 2015 Hyundai Sonata. It’s mostly the same as the version we were shown at Google I/O in June, apart from some minor refinements. For instance, the green, circular “a” logo that appears on the phone when it’s jacked into the car now reads “Android Auto,” and voice-based searches no longer cause a full-screen “listening” window to pop up — you just get a little pulsing “g” in the corner. The underlying concept, though, is unchanged: it’s Material Design-infused Android for your dashboard, boiled down to the basics with copious use of speech output and voice recognition so that driver distraction is kept to a bare minimum. You’re also locked out of using your actual phone when Android Auto is in use, another stab at limiting distraction by keeping eyes off screens and on the road.

        • Fire OS 4.1.1 rolls out: Solid update (hands on)

          I should emphasize how much faster the system feels overall. There are no lags, no delays, and even third-party apps that haven’t been optimized run fast and smoothly.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • [Older] Jolla enters tablet market with instant crowdfunded hit
      • Jolla’s open-source tablet might actually stay the course

        The Jolla Tablet, an open-source device that promises privacy, ease of use and comparable hardware to late-model Android tablets and iPads, has demolished its funding goals on IndieGoGo in just the first few days of its campaign.

        The project page shows a little over $1.2 million raised as of noon on Monday – well over triple Jolla’s initial goal of $380,000.

      • Jolla Tablet Runs Android Apps, Gathers Crowdfunds

        A Finnish mobile technology startup company with an open source operating system called Sailfish OS has gathered more than $1.1 million in crowdsourced funding in an Indiegogo campaign.

      • Jolla Sailfish 2.0 Tablet: ‘Open-Source iPad’ Crowdfunded Within Hours

        Finnish designer and mobile device developer Jolla is using crowdfunding site Indiegogo to develop its Jolla Tablet, the world’s “first people powered tablet,” which will run Sailfish OS 2.0. The campaign launched on Wednesday and reached its goal of $380,000 within hours. The project had raised more than $740,000 as of mid-afternoon.

      • Jolla’s Open Source iPad Alternative Raises More Than $1M In Two Days’ Crowdfunding

        Late last week Finnish mobile startup Jolla launched a crowdfunding campaign for a tablet running its open source Sailfish OS, smashing past its initial funding goal of $380,000 in a couple of hours. It has since pushed past the $1 million mark, with around $1.18M now pledged from more than 7,370 backers of the Indiegogo campaign.

        Speaking in an interview with TechCrunch prior to the campaign kicking off Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon was bullish. “I think we’re going to sell out,” he said. “I believe that we will quickly see the small initial targets, we will put up some stretch goals. I think that we’re going to sell a lot of tablets.”

      • Intel decides to keep tablet subsidies, say sources

        Intel has reportedly decided to continue subsidizing its mobile device processor platform after a series of evaluations recently and will even expand the product coverage from 10-inch and below devices to 12-inch and below ones, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

      • wIntel Decides to Keep Tablet Subsidies

Free Software/Open Source

  • Thoughts of Thanksgiving for All That Is FOSS

    Well Thanksgiving week is upon us here in the land of stars and stripes, and in anticipation of all the social events soon to besiege us, more than a few Linux bloggers have been practicing keeping their favorite barstools warm down at the blogosphere’s Punchy Penguin Saloon.

    How chilly would those stools get if we were all flitting here and there from this party to that? It would be truly unkind. Much better to stay put and keep to ourselves in a comfortable place where inane small talk is frowned upon.

  • How Google Inbox shares 70% of its code across Android, iOS, and the Web

    Launching a new app in the mobile age is hard. If you want to reach a wide audience, you usually have to make your client three times at minimum: once for Android, once for iOS, and once more for the Web. Building an app on three different platforms means three times the work, with three times as many bugs to squish. To make matters more complicated, these clients all use different programming languages: Objective-C and/or Swift for iOS, Java for Android, and JavaScript/CSS/HTML5 for the Web.

  • 6 tips for adopting open source

    Open source code drives collaborative innovation from a larger pool of developers at a lower cost, which is why federal agencies are adopting the “open source first” model. In fact Sonny Hashmi, CIO of the General Services Administration, recently announced that implementing open source software is among his top priorities this year.

  • Network Functions Virtualization Tries Its Hand at Open Source

    To save money, accelerate time to market and provide flexibility, many businesses are deciding to embrace network functions virtualization (NFV), the process in which server-based network operations—like intrusion detection, firewalls, Domain Name Service (DNS) and others—are virtualized.

  • The Netflix cloud team loves OSS — and would love to stop building it

    Netflix is in known in some (albeit geeky) circles as much for its advanced Amazon Web Services architecture and open source software as for its streaming video service. But some members of cloud team would love the company to stop building its own tools and start using commercially available services from AWS.

  • Netflix Open Sources Sophisticated Messaging Tool

    Open cloud computing platforms are on all kinds of radars these days, including leading open source platforms such as OpenStack, but if you ask many folks which companies have top-notch expertise in the open cloud, you won’t often hear Netflix mentioned. The company actually has an admirable history of open sourcing many of its most useful cloud tools and accompanying security tools–and it is a sophisticated user of cloud services.

  • PayrollHero to release code publicly to help build open source culture in Singapore

    In line with this, PayrollHero is marking their official launch in Singapore with a gift for the local Ruby community – going open source with their Singapore Payroll Gems. The startup has a history of giving back to its local community in the Philippines. They’re now bringing that practice to the island-state – starting with their CPF calculator. Not surprisingly, this was suggested by their engineers, according to co-founder Stephen Jagger.

  • How AAP is shaping an open source newsroom system

    Australian Associated Press (AAP) is collaborating with open source software developer Sourcefabric to test and build a newsroom management system better suited to the digital age.

    One of Superdesk’s main aims is to remove repetitive technical tasks such as tagging stories and multimedia elements from a journalist’s workload.

  • 7 great open source monitoring tools

    Network and system monitoring is a broad category. There are solutions that monitor for the proper operation of servers, network gear, and applications, and there are solutions that track the performance of those systems and devices, providing trends and analysis.

  • Cisco hands over security analytics framework to open source development

    Cisco is opening up development of the OpenSOC framework by making the tool open source.

  • Cisco Releases Security Analytics Framework to Open Source
  • Google embraces open source with free Android game

    Google has embraced open source in an effort to highlight multiplayer-gaming on Android TV. How? Well, the search giant has released a free open source game called “Pie Noon,” which is available now in the Google Play Store.

  • Google releases free open source game to highlight Android TV multiplayer gaming
  • Google Releases Open Source Tool for Testing Web App Security Scanners
  • ZTE Joins Open-Source NFV Effort

    The Chinese tech company is the latest member of the OPNFV project, which wants to build an open-source reference architecture for NFV deployments.

  • Open source beats proprietary software in control and continuity
  • IT Pros Warm Up to Open Source Collaboration Software

    Respondents in a Ponemon Institute study released this week are generally positive about commercial open source applications, especially because of the assurance of continuity. However, despite those benefits, companies are slow to adopt, Ponemon found.

  • Surveys Show Continuing Interest in the Cloud, Confidence in Open Source
  • Survey: 70 percent of IT pros prefer open source to proprietary software

    An overwhelming majority of IT professionals favor open source software over proprietary alternatives, according to a new study from the Ponemon Institute conducted on behalf of Zimbra Inc., the enterprise collaboration provider. That mirrors a similar pattern among enterprise developers, over 80 percent of whom share that sentiment according to an earlier Forrester Research report.

  • Survey: Control, not cost savings, drives IT’s love for open source

    The Ponemon Institute polled nearly 1,400 IT professionals in the U.S. and in 18 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa about their perceptions of open source software versus proprietary programs. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. respondents (74 percent) said open source applications allow for better control and continuity with an organization’s overall IT practices.

  • IT Pros Prefer Open Source for Continuity, Control
  • Most IT pros prefer open source to proprietary software
  • IT teams are choosing open source – but not just for the cost savings

    IT decision makers are increasingly turning to open source over proprietary software because they believe it offers them better business continuity and control

  • NSA partners with Apache to release open-source data traffic program

    In partnership with the Apache Software Foundation, the NSA announced on Tuesday it is releasing the source code for Niagarafiles (Nifi). The spy agency said Nifi “automates data flows among multiple computer networks, even when data formats and protocols differ.”

  • Why open source runs the world

    GNU/Linux as an operating system and open source as a movement have become phenomenal driving forces in the technology world. Without it the internet wouldn’t exist as the free and open resource we enjoy today.

  • EOFS and OpenSFS Obtain Lustre Assets from Seagate

    This news follows Seagate’s recent announcement to make its Ethernet Drive interface specification and T-Card development adapter available to the Open Compute Project in January of this year.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google’s Chrome to pull plug on plugins next September

        Google is moving ahead with its plan to end support for Netscape plugins in its Chrome browser – and has set next September as the date for when they will stop working altogether.

      • The Final Countdown for NPAPI

        Last September we announced our plan to remove NPAPI support from Chrome, a change that will improve Chrome’s security, speed, and stability as well as reduce complexity in the code base. Since our last update, NPAPI usage has continued its decline. Given this usage data, we will continue with our deprecation plan.

      • Fair Warning: Chrome Team Starts Final Countdown for NPAPI Extensions

        As we’ve reported several times, Google is introducing big changes in its Chrome browser, especially when it comes to how the browser handles extensions. If you’ve regularly used either or both of the most popular open source Internet browsers–Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox–then you’re probably familiar with the performance and security problems that some extensions for them can cause.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Four-year-old comment security bug affects 86 percent of WordPress sites

      A Finnish IT company has uncovered a bug in WordPress 3 sites that could be used to launch a wide variety of malicious script-based attacks on site visitors’ browsers. Based on current WordPress usage statistics, the vulnerability could affect up to 86 percent of existing WordPress-powered sites.

  • Business

    • Facebook’s Open Source Virtual Machine HHVM Stabilized

      Open source virtual machine project HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) has made a breakthrough. Facebook and WP Engine, which provides a WordPress-based content management platform, have enabled HHVM and PHP to run side by side, making HHVM more feasible for production. While the news will be of interest to developers, HHVM’s maturity is something the industry at large should take into account.

  • Funding

    • It Ain’t Easy Making Money in Open Source: Thoughts on the Hortonworks S-1

      While Hadoop and big data are unarguably huge trends driving the industry and while the future of Hadoop looks very bright indeed, on reading the Hortonworks S-1, the reader is drawn to the inexorable conclusion that it’s hard to make money in open source, or more crassly, it’s hard to make money when you give the shit away.

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 10.1 review

      The last PC-BSD release I reviewed was the 9.1 edition, and that was back in December 2012 (see PC-BSD 9.1 preview). That’s almost two years ago, But that’s because I’ve been very disappointed with subsequent releases after that, so I never bothered to write another review, though I was each testing each release privately.

    • A Go Front-End Could Soon Be Landing In LLVM

      The “llgo” Go front-end to LLVM could soon be accepted as a new sub-project. This Go front-end is written in the Go language itself.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Purism hopes to crowdfund a high-end, open source laptop

      Want a laptop that runs free and open source software, and only open source software? The folks behind the Purism Librem 15 want to build one… and sell it to you.

    • Librem 15 High End Open Source Laptop Launches On Crowd Supply (video)

      Anyone in the market for an open source laptop might be interested in giving the new Librem 15 more investigation over on the Crowd Supply crowd funding website with pledges starting from $1,449.

    • Librem 15 wants to be a free, open source laptop that doesn’t suck

      Supporters of software freedom and open source have plenty of choices when it comes to apps. When it comes to hardware? Not so much. The Librem 15 laptop is hoping to change that.

    • Problems with Emacs 24.4

      This is, essentially, a call for help, as I don’t really know which program is at a fault here.

      Given that Emacs’s upstream converted their repository from bzr to git, all the commits in mirror repositories became “invalid” in relation to the official repository.

      What does this mean in practical terms, in my case? Well, bear with me while I try to report my steps.

  • Public Services/Government

    • NGA’s belief in open source, crowdsourcing heating up

      The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is in many ways taking a leap of faith that many in the intelligence community wouldn’t dare to endeavor.

      NGA is taking advantage of open source and crowdsourcing through the GitHub platform to help it develop apps across 16 different topics ranging from an anti-piracy to a request for information generator for geospatial analysts. GitHub is an open source platform that provides registered users the opportunity to suggest changes to software in a collaborative process.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 vs native: Harry Coder and the mudblood mobile app princes

      HTML5 has offered salvation from the tyranny of apps for years, yet most mobile developers resolutely refuse to embrace the web. Despite HTML’s familiarity and promise of cross-device compatibility, native’s superior tooling and performance have convinced a generation of developers to go all in on native.

    • Samsung, LG Forge IoT Standard Alliance to Lead Global Market

      The competition between IT companies at home and abroad for Internet of Things (IoT) standards to dominate the global market is swinging into high gear. In this environment, Samsung and LG Electronics have agreed to unify IoT standards. The deal is expected to become a bridgehead for local companies to set IoT standards.

    • ODFAutoTests gearing up towards the 10th ODF Plugfest in London

      In two weeks time, users and developers of OpenDocument Format software will meet up for a two day ODF plugfest in London. In preparation of the plugfest, I have spent last weekend, refreshing ODFAutoTests. ODFAutoTests is a tool for creating test documents for ODF software and running these documents through the different implementations. If you want to help out with improving OpenDocument Format, please come to the plugfest, or participate online. Writing tests with ODFAutoTests is a great way to help make the 10th ODF Plugfest a success.

Leftovers

  • Study: US attracting fewer educated, highly skilled migrants

    But a new study of the worldwide migration of professionals to the U.S. shows a sharp drop-off in its proportional share of those workers – raising the question of whether the nation will remain competitive in attracting top talent in an increasingly globalized economy.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Monsanto Sues Maui for Direct Democracy, Launches New PR Campaign

      Residents of Maui County, Hawai’i voted on November 4 to ban the growing of genetically modified (GMO) crops on the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai until scientific studies are conducted on their safety and benefits. Monsanto and Dow Chemical’s unit Mycogen Seeds have sued the county in federal court to stop the law passed by the people.

      In Vermont, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA, of which Monsanto and Dow were recently listed as members) has sued the state over its law requiring GMO labels. And Monsanto has a history of suing to prevent consumer labeling regarding its products. The company sued a number of dairies in the 1990s and 2000s for labeling milk free from recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which Monsanto developed and marketed as Posilac® (sold to Eli Lilly in 2008), the only commercially approved form. Vermont itself is no stranger to such suits. The International Dairy Foods Association sued Vermont for passing a law requiring labeling of milk containing rBGH (Monsanto wrote an amicus brief in support of the plaintiff, and GMA was a plaintiff-appellant) — and it won in federal court.

  • Security

    • Tuesday’s security updates
    • 183 Million Accounts Compromised In Q3 2014

      Large scale attacks against financial firms, retail companies, and consumers’ personal identities and online accounts are dominant trends

    • 2014: Year of open source miracles

      We open with the recent unpleasantness at the Drupal project. The SQL injection vulnerability, while serious, isn’t unusual. It’s actually the most common vulnerability in the world. What made the exploit newsworthy was the very short amount of time between disclosure and widespread exploitation: “if timely patches weren’t applied, then the Drupal security team outlined a lengthy process required to restore a website to health.” Basically, you had seven hours to fix it before evil robots descended on your servers.

      This isn’t an open source problem, it’s a software management problem.

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Sony Pictures computer system hacked in online attack

      Sony Pictures Entertainment has been targeted by computer hackers in an attack which reports say forced it shut down its systems on Monday.

    • Encrypt Everything: How to encrypt the disk to protect the data

      Recently, at BrowserStack.com, some of our services got compromised. We use Amazon Web Services extensively. The person (or group) who attacked us mounted one of our backups and managed to steal some of the data. We could have prevented this simply by ensuring that we use encrypted disks which would have made this attack useless. Learning from our mistakes, we have recently started encrypting everything and I am going to show you how to do that. One point worth noting here is that Amazon AWS does provide encryption support for the EBS volumes but that is transparent and would not help in case of the account getting compromised. I am going to use dm-crypt which is supported by Linux kernel so the steps are quite generic and would work on any kind of disk, on any kind of environment, including Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, physical disks in your datacenter.

    • How secure is Docker? If you’re not running version 1.3.2, NOT VERY

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • NBC’s Energy Debate: Oil Exec Vs. Oil Industry Adviser

      Well, that’s certainly a broad debate: a guy who advises energy companies (that’s Yergin’s day job) and a former Shell CEO? On the question of oversight, both agreed there was plenty of it. Yergin explained that “the oil and gas industry is pretty highly regulated,” while Hofmeister declared that “the industry wants regulation.”

  • Finance

    • Black Friday Strike, Greens Join Labor to Take on Walmart

      With Black Friday now days away, Walmart workers and their allies are gearing up for what they predict will be the largest strike in the retailer’s history.

      Among the tens of thousands of people and hundreds of organizations that have vowed to support Walmart’s low-wage workers are a growing number of voices from the climate justice movement, calling for broad resistance to the corporation’s violations of workers’ rights and the environment.

  • Privacy

    • ‘Snoopers’ Charter IS DEAD’, Lib Dems claim as party waves through IP address-matching

      IP address-matching powers for police and spooks are to be pushed through Parliament with the blessing of the junior member of the UK’s Coalition government, after the Liberal Democrats claimed today that the Snoopers’ Charter was “dead”.

    • iPhone ban during Russian military service claim false – Defense Ministry

      The Russian Defense Ministry says it doesn’t ban iPhones during mandatory military service. Izvestia newspaper reported that the devices are not allowed in the army over concerns its closed operating system might contain spying backdoors.

    • Researchers Uncover Government Spy Tool Used to Hack Telecoms and Belgian Cryptographer

      It was the spring of 2011 when the European Commission discovered it had been hacked. The intrusion into the EU’s legislative body was sophisticated and widespread and used a zero-day exploit to get in. Once the attackers established a stronghold on the network, they were in for the long haul. They scouted the network architecture for additional victims and covered their tracks well. Eventually, they infected numerous systems belonging to the European Commission and the European Council before being discovered.

    • EFF Spearheads Safer Web Initiative

      Let’s Encrypt is an ambitious plan to convert the Internet to HTTPS, a protocol that uses encryption to secure websites. Internet-wide encryption is necessary, because otherwise “all of our browsing is vulnerable to account hijacking, surveillance by companies and governments, hackers on the network, content modification, malware injection and targeted censorship,” said the EFF’s Peter Eckersley.

    • Lollipop’s Encryption Takes a Hefty Toll

      The new full-disk encryption feature that’s enabled by default in Android 5.0 Lollipop comes at a hefty price in terms of performance, according to a recent benchmark report.

      In fact, when full-disk encryption is enabled, random read performance drops by 62.9 percent, while random write performance falls by 50.5 percent, AnandTech reported late last week. Sequential read performance, meanwhile, drops by a whopping 80.7 percent.

    • Facebook info sharing created Zoosk.com dating profile for married woman

      Online privacy advocates say current legislation fails to protect Canadians’ privacy online

    • Thanks To Namecheap For Sponsoring Techdirt’s Switch To SSL

      As some of you know, Techdirt recently completed the process of protecting all Techdirt traffic with full SSL encryption — something we believe every internet company should do. Part of this process involved seeking a sponsor to help us offset the money and time spent getting everything switched over, and today we’re happy to announce that Namecheap has stepped up to that role.

    • Click Here to See If You’re Under Surveillance

      The free, downloadable software, called Detekt, searches computers for the presence of malicious programs that have been built to evade detection. The spyware ranges from government-grade products used by intelligence and police agencies to hacker staples known as RATs—remote administration tools. Detekt, which was developed by security researcher Claudio Guarnieri, is being released in a partnership with advocacy groups Amnesty International, Digitale Gesellschaft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Privacy International.

    • WhatsApp rolls out end-to-end encryption using TextSecure code

      The most recent update to WhatsApp’s Android app includes a surprising feature: strong end-to-end encryption, enabled by default. It’s the strongest security any major texting app has offered, even compared with similar tools from giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple. WhatsApp partnered with Open Whisper Systems for the launch, using open source code to build in the new features. It’s unclear when the features will come to iOS, but just reaching WhatsApp’s Android users represents a huge step forward for everyday encryption use.

    • EFF: Let’s Encrypt
    • Blanket data retention does not come in “good” and “bad” forms

      Yesterday’s announcement that mobile phone providers will be obliged to keep records of their customers IP addresses (and port numbers) came as no surprise. But what we need to remember is that all data retention should be subject to the same principles, conveniently outlined by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

  • Civil Rights

    • New high school course: ‘How to deal with cops’

      The principal of East Side Community HS invited the New York Civil Liberties Union to give a two-day training session last week on interacting with police.

      The 450 kids were coached on staying calm during NYPD encounters and given a “What To Do If You’re Stopped By The Police” pamphlet.

      NYCLU representatives told kids to be polite and to keep their hands out of their pockets. But they also told students they don’t have to show ID or consent to searches, that it’s best to remain silent, and how to file a complaint against an officer.

    • Woman claims officer offered to fix ticket for sex

      A city parking enforcement officer has been arrested and suspended without pay after police said he offered to “fix” a parking ticket in exchange for sexual favors.

      Mario Carpenito Jr., 61, of Thornwood, was arrested Friday after an investigation. He’s charged with third-degree receiving a bribery, a felony, and official misconduct, a misdemeanor.

    • Craig Murray, Criminal

      I was witness to an extraordinary example of the use of “anti-terrorist” laws to deny democracy. The whole of Parliament Square, College Green and Canning Green were closed off with high Harris fencing, as were other spaces nearby. These were protected by a huge police presence. I counted 37 police vans. All this to counter eighty “Occupy Democracy” protestors wishing to highlight the alienation of the political class from the rest of us. That MPs feel the need to make Westminster look like the Somme 1917, to defend themselves against a few ordinary people, is proof that the concept of “democracy” is now alien to the Westminster system.

    • CBS Finds Ferguson ‘Pipe Bombs’

      But the more dramatic bombing angle seemed to vanish; the CBS story changed from “explosives” to “firearms.” Reports can resonate, especially when they are repeated by other outlets; on NBC’s Today show (11/22/14), viewers heard this: “Now there’s word that two men arrested with weapons charges are also suspected of trying to bring pipe bombs, possibly, here to Ferguson.”

      Media have been known to stoke panic about violent and disorderly protests. Ahead of the 2004 protests at the Republican National Convention in New York City, media hyped the threat of protester violence.

    • No charges for officer in Ferguson shooting

      A Missouri grand jury has decided not to charge police officer Darren Wilson in the racially charged shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

      Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announced Monday night that the jury had found no probable cause to file a cause of indictment against Wilson.

      The jury had considered five charges against Wilson, ranging up to first-degree murder.

      McCulloch said that the grand jury met for 25 sessions over the course of three months, and that their deliberations took two days.

    • ABC and Darren Wilson’s ‘Serious Injury’

      Will ABC tell viewers that it spread an unfounded rumor that there was photographic evidence that Darren Wilson was seriously hurt? Or do they consider the photo above as confirmation of what they reported?

    • NRA’s Ted Nugent Goes On Racially Charged Ferguson Rant Targeting “Black Klansmen”

      National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent reacted to the decision of a Missouri grand jury to not indict police officer Darren Wilson by attacking “black klansmen” and claiming “millions” of African-Americans “slaughter” each other “every day.”

    • City Of Baltimore To Create Publicly-Accessible Police Brutality Lawsuit Database

      There’s not much information symmetry when it comes to the public and their public servants. The public is routinely required to turn over all sorts of personal information, but their governments are rarely willing to return the favor. In particular, police departments tend to be very tight-lipped when it comes to details of officer misconduct or abuse. Most departments are more than willing to provide in-depth crime stats detailing wrongdoing by citizens, but when asked to turn the magnifying glass on themselves, the details provided are, at best, questionable.

    • May hem

      Now Theresa May is going to make doubly sure no student ever hears anything interesting or inspirational…

    • ISC report into Lee Rigby’s murder is misleading

      Reacting to today’s ISC report, the Open Rights Group said that their report into Lee Rigby’s murder is misleading. Executive Director Jim Killock said:

      “When the intelligence services are gathering data about every one of us but failing to act on intelligence about individuals, they need to get back to basics, and look at the way they conduct targeted investigations.

      “The committee should not use the appalling murder of Fusilier Rigby as an excuse to justify the further surveillance and monitoring of the entire UK population. To pass the blame to internet companies is to use Fusilier Rigby’s murder to make cheap political points.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The sharks move in; lobbyists pushing forward on TPP agreements

      The latest leaked draft of the TPP reveals that the countries involved in the negotiations are coming closer to acceptance of a whole host of problematic agreements.

      On October 16th, WikiLeaks released an updated draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Strategic Partnership Agreement chapter on copyright, patent and other proprietary interests. A previous draft had been released last year. If you aren’t familiar with TPP, it is a multinational trade-agreement that is being developed through a series of secret negotiations that when enacted will have a vast effect on civil liberties, including the ability of users all around the world to enjoy software freedom.

    • Trademarks

      • Small Open Source Nonprofit Defeats Groupon in Trademark Fight

        In May, Groupon created a tablet to help merchants process and serve Groupon customers. They called it Gnome. The hitch? GNOME was already trademarked as a worldwide, open source computer operating system. The GNOME foundation and its thousands of supporters mobilized to protect its name. Thanks to crowdfunding and social media, Groupon backed down and will develop a new name.

    • Copyrights

11.24.14

Links 24/11/2014: Linux 3.18-rc6, Qualcomm Eyes GNU/Linux Servers

Posted in News Roundup at 5:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Code Contains Fewer Defects, But There’s a Catch

    Research suggests that software developed using open source code contains fewer defects than that built with proprietary code. The catch is that open source code rarely benefits from security teams specifically tasked with looking for bugs.

  • With Assembly, anyone can contribute to open-source software and actually get paid

    The open-source movement has produced some of the most widely utilized software in the world, a huge economic value driven by a widely dispersed community who believe contributing good work is often its own reward. Outside of the world of computer science, however, these strategies are still relatively niche. A San Francisco startup called Assembly is trying to change all that, by evolving the open-source model to easily incorporate disciplines outside coding and to include a shared profit motive as well. Today the company is announcing a $2.9 million round of funding it will use to help expand its platform.

  • Events

    • Next improved release of Lohit Devanagari 2.95.0 with Latin and ttfautohinted.

      Last release of Lohit Devanagari we did in Feb 19, 2014. During the time number of improvements happened in Lohit Devanagari. Today releasing its next version with all the improvements. [1]

    • NetSurf Developer workshop IV

      Over the weekend the NetSurf developers met to make a concentrated effort on improving the browser. This time we were kindly hosted by Codethink in their Manchester office in a pleasant environment with plenty of refreshments.

    • Awesome BSP in München

      An awesome BSP just took place in München where teams from Kubuntu, Kolab, KDE PIM, Debian and LibreOffice came and planned the future and fixed bugs.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Norway phases out Java for tax, school and business eID

      The new BankID uses HTML5, CSS and Javascript, supported by all modern web browsers. For the time being, DIFI will support the use of older web browsers that cannot handle the new version of BankID.

    • Another Racket Run By M$

      The folly? Instead of beating a path to LibreOffice ASAP, they meekly paid for a new set of licences thus increasing their lock-in and delaying progress. This still exposes them to further audits, further rounds of licence-upgrading, and the longer they use M$’s stuff the harder it will become to escape. Already it’s tough because many of their other applications depend on M$’s office suite. You don’t solve a problem you created by continuing to make the same mistakes. They do have the future possibility of migrating to FLOSS like LibreOffice in the future but this is a missed opportunity and will raise the cost of future migrations to FLOSS.

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Clearing up muddied waters in the ‘Data Lakes’

        Four years ago when Pentaho first released Hadoop support, Dixon coined the term ‘Data Lake’ to describe a vessel for holding data from a single source. When selecting it, he thought very carefully about its suitability as both an analogy and a metaphor.

  • Funding

    • A price to pay – the Free Software column

      Open source is everywhere, but the term is often applied loosely. Free and open source software is attractive to hardware and software companies because it seems to be the cheap and efficient option and gives access to communities of users and developers who bring cost reductions and opportunities for high quality input from a variety of sources. Corporate involvement in open source software development works for developers as it pays their wages and, if properly managed, allows them the freedom to work on the code. But open source’s success is not without its drawbacks.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Upcoming Pulp Releases

      Since the version 2.4.0 release, Pulp is working to adhere to semantic versioning. Semantic versioning is important so that users can upgrade to a given version and have a correct expectation about what is in that new version ie: bugfix, features, or backwards incompatible changes. There are new features that are ready to be included in a release, so the next release planned will be 2.6.0.

    • HandBrake 0.10 Brings H.265 & VP8 Encoders

      Version 0.10 of the HandBrake open-source video transcoder has been released.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Introducing AcousticBrainz

      MusicBrainz, the not-for-profit project that maintains an assortment of “open content” music metadata databases, has announced a new effort named AcousticBrainz. AcousticBrainz is designed to be an open, crowd-sourced database cataloging various “audio features” of music, including “low-level spectral information such as tempo, and additional high level descriptors for genres, moods, keys, scales and much more.”

  • Standards/Consortia

    • EU Boosts Open Data; Open Contracting Data Standard Out

      As you will probably have noticed, open data is pretty hot these days. The EU has noticed, too, and is making some serious funds available for this area, as announced by the UK’s Open Data Institute:

    • Europe Commission approves Tradeshift data format for goverment purchasing

      A product of OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, UBL was developed in a transparent standards-setting process over a period of 13 years by hundreds of leading business experts. OASIS is the same organization that created ODF, the Open Document Format (ISO/IEC 26300), a widely used International Standard for word processing.

    • French, German, Dutch and Italian hackathons fuel UK ODF plugfest

      Hackathons in Toulouse (France), Munich (Germany), Woerden (the Netherlands) and Bologna (Italy) involving software developers and public administrations, are providing input for the ODF Plugfest taking place in London on 8 and 9 December. The first four meetings involve developers working on the Open Document Format ODF and the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools. The ODF Plugfest brings together multiple implementers and stakeholders of this document standard. The plugfest is aimed at increasing interoperability, tests implementations and discuss new features.

Leftovers

  • Apple stops calling free apps ‘Free’

    SOFTWARE AND DESIGN COMPANY Apple has made a change to the way it displays applications on the App Store and is no longer labelling items as Free.

  • Immigration target unlikely to be met, says Theresa May

    The UK is “unlikely” to meet its target for reducing immigration, Home Secretary Theresa May has said.

    EU migration has “blown us off course” from cutting net migration to the tens of thousands before the general election, Mrs May told the Andrew Marr show.

    Mrs May said Britain’s strengthening economy had continued to attract people from across Europe.

  • My boys love 1986 computing

    Yesterday, Jacob (age 8) asked to help me put together a 30-year-old computer from parts in my basement. Meanwhile, Oliver (age 5) asked Laura to help him learn cursive. Somehow, this doesn’t seem odd for a Saturday at our place.

  • Hardware

    • Supercharge your PC’s storage with a RAID setup: Everything you need to know

      First off, storage performance tends to be one of the main bottlenecks in a typical PC, although the situation has vastly improved with the advent of solid state drives. (Yes, it’s probably your hard drive holding back your high-end PC from even greater glory.) Second, drive failure can lead to the loss of valuable data, and no one wants that.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Plague kills 40 people in Madagascar

      An outbreak of the plague has killed 40 people out of 119 confirmed cases in Madagascar since late August and there is a risk of the disease spreading rapidly in the capital, the World Health Organisation has said.

    • Rick Ross, the Ex-Drug Kingpin, Says CIA Behind Hip Hop’s Love Affair With Drugs

      The CIA is behind rap’s obsession with drugs. Rick Ross says so. No, not the rapper, but the actual cocaine kingpin whose artist name and persona was hijacked by Rick Ross the rapper. He should know.

      “They were the guys who were behind me when I was selling drugs,” Ross said of the CIA. “And now they’re behind hip hop and rock ‘n’ roll.”

      The CIA has been documented making enormous profits from the international drug trade, including the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.

      Take the trade of opium for instance. The drug that is used to make heroin was almost nonexistent in Afghanistan before the U.S. invaded it in 2001. By 2006 the country’s opium trade had increased 3200% and was supplying 92% of the world’s supply according to www.globalresearch.ca.

    • Monsanto Is Using Big Data to Take Over the World

      That’s right: Monsanto is making a big move into big data. At stake is an opportunity to adapt to climate change by using computer science alongside the controversial genetic science that has been the company’s signature for a generation. Data stands to benefit Monsanto’s bottom line, too: In its 2013 annual report, the company blamed lost profits on knowledge gaps about both the climate and its customers’ farming practices. And information services could even help Monsanto get its foot (and its seeds) in the door of untapped global markets from Africa to South America.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns

      Still, this is a report endorsed by top Republicans that basically rebuts practically every Republican bit of hysteria over Benghazi spanning the past two years. Is it really good news judgment for editors to treat this the same way they would a dull study on the aging of America from the Brookings Institution?

    • Cops Decide Running Surprise School Shooter Drill During Class At A Middle School Is A Great Idea

      We’re going to have to go over this again: if your drills to prevent school tragedy actually leave school children traumatized, then don’t do those damned drills. What began with terrorism drills on school buses and then devolved into unannounced school-shooting drills is getting to be so full-on crazy that I sort of can’t believe that anyone thinks any of this is a good idea. The latest story involves police running an unannounced “active shooter drill” at a local middle school while classes were in session. As a part of this insane exercise, police officers went around bursting into classrooms filled with terrified students, weapons out, as they acted out their fun little thespian experience of horror. And, to add insult to injury, school officials notified parents of the drill long after unknowing students were informing their parents that an actual shooting was taking place at the school.

    • CIA Should Send Lethal Military Aid to Ukraine: Former Bush Advisor

      Former US President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley said stated that US should provide lethal military assistance to the Ukrainian government.

    • Drone Strikes Never Kill ‘Humans’

      News organizations should stop reporting that “militants” were killed when they can confirm no such thing.

    • ON MEDIA OUTLETS THAT CONTINUE TO DESCRIBE UNKNOWN DRONE VICTIMS AS “MILITANTS”

      But what bothered even some intelligence officials at the agency carrying out the strikes seemed of no concern whatsoever to most major media outlets. As I documented days after the Times article, most large western media outlets continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as “militants”—even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware by that point that the term had been “re-defined” by the Obama administration into Alice in Wonderland-level nonsense.

    • We don’t need a more efficient killing machine

      A number of ideas have been put forward to mediate the amount of innocent victims. Technology philosopher Christine Boshuijzen cites technologically impaired military officials as a reason for civilian deaths. Doctoral student Dieuwertje Kuijpers calls for more democratic accountability for the CIA. Artificial intelligence professor Gustzi Eiben wants to improve drones’ face recognition and tracking software. Computer scientist Arnoud Visser claims the remedy is to fully automate the whole killing process by programming drones with algorithms governing the acceptable margins of error. These changes might very well reduce innocent deaths. Drone warfare would be far more efficient. But is efficiency really the goal?

    • US Airstrikes Kill 18 in Afghanistan

      Washington says the targets of the drones are “terrorists,” however locals and some international agencies report that civilians are the main victims of these raids.

    • Op-Ed: U.S. launches 500th drone strike in over a decade of the Third War
    • America Just Launched Its 500th Drone Strike
    • America’s 500th Drone Strike
    • Post 9/11 Stat You Should Know: America has now Conducted 500 Targeted Killings

      The most consistent and era-defining tactic of America’s post-9/11 counterterrorism strategies has been the targeted killing of suspected terrorists and militants outside of defined battlefields. As one senior Bush administration official explained in October 2001, “The president has given the [CIA] the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway.” Shortly thereafter, a former CIA official told the New Yorker, “There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill.” It is quaint to recall that such a position was considered extremist and even morally unthinkable. Today, these strikes are broadly popular with the public and totally uncontroversial in Washington, both within the executive branch and on Capitol Hill. Therefore, it is easy to forget that this tactic, envisioned to be rare and used exclusively for senior al-Qaeda leaders thirteen years ago, has become a completely accepted and routine foreign policy activity.

    • America’s 500th Drone Strike
    • Redefining “Imminent”

      How the U.S. Department of Justice Makes Murder Respectable, Kills the Innocent and Jails their Defenders

    • ‘Western policy of destroying ISIS completely unsuccessful’

      The US anti-ISIS policy only helps them recruit more people, while the only way to fight ISIS is to secure borders and re-examine immigration policies both in America and Europe, retired US Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor told RT.

    • Red Mist Rising: Inside the World’s Most Powerful Terrorist Organization

      Glenn Greenwald notes the blizzard of bellicose propaganda pieces pouring from the High Media lately concerning the Peace Laureate’s latest flurry of drone killings. In story after story, headline after headline, we hear of “militants” slaughtered by the dead-eyed machinery that floats above the distant villages of the “recalcitrant tribes” who bedevil the Empire with their disobedience — or, in the case of the drone campaign, which overwhelmingly kills innocent civilians, with their mere existence.

      [...]

      That’s nice, isn’t it? Noble, worthy, honorable, isn’t it? Again, these are the mafia thug values being embraced, lauded, supported and reinforced at every turn by the most respectable figures throughout American politics and media, including of course the popular media, where TV shows and movies abound with tough guys “doing whatever it takes” to kill the dehumanized “enemy” and “keep us safe.” …

    • Author takes issue with assumption that religions cause war

      In modern Western society, says Karen Armstrong, “the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted.” As a writer and speaker on religion, she says that she constantly hears from a wide swath of society that “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.”

    • CIA Director John Brennan considering sweeping organizational changes
    • US Used Al-Qaeda in Yemen to Blackmail Sanaa: President’s Adviser

      Yemeni president’s adviser Saleh Samad stated that US used the presence of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist cells in Yemen to blackmail the government in Sanaa.

    • Rescue reunion: Cuban-American CIA team meets Congo hostages in Kendall

      The hostage rescue was just one chapter, albeit the most dramatic, of a little-known five-year CIA effort to shore up the pro-Western government of the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was under attack by guerrilla movements backed by China and the Soviet Union.

    • Israeli drone pilot admits to making some ‘wrong calls’ when dropping bombs in Gaza, but says: ‘You’ll see no smiling faces where kids are killed’

      A spy drone commander from Israel has admitted he had made some ‘wrong calls’ when it came to dropping bombs on targets in Gaza.

      Major Yair, one of the country’s most experienced unmanned drones commanders, said he had made mistakes but had ‘learnt to live’ with them.

    • Early Predator Drone Pilot: I Had Bin Laden in My Crosshairs

      A year before he was the first pilot to ever unleash a Hellfire missile from a Predator drone in combat, airman Scott Swanson said he was at the controls of another Predator back in 2000 when a man believed to be Osama bin Laden was directly in his crosshairs.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Julian Assange: Swedish court rejects appeal to lift arrest warrant

      Stockholm’s appeal court has rejected a demand by Julian Assange’s lawyers to lift the arrest warrant against him, leaving the WikiLeaks founder still facing extradition to Sweden should he renounce his asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.

      “In making this assessment, account must be taken of the fact that Julian Assange is suspected of crimes of a relatively serious nature,” the court said in a statement on Thursday. A Swedish prosecutor first sought Assange’s arrest four years ago following sexual assault and rape allegations, which he denies.

    • Swedish Court Upholds Order for Arrest of Julian Assange
    • Court rejects Assange arrest warrant appeal

      A Stockholm court has upheld an arrest order for Julian Assange who is wanted for questioning over alleged sex crimes in Sweden. His lawyer has told The Local that he now plans to take the case to Sweden’s Supreme Court.

    • The siege of Julian Assange is a farce – an investigation by John Pilger

      The siege of Knightsbridge is a farce. For two years, an exaggerated, costly police presence around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state.

      Their quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee from gross injustice whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His true crime is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Handbook for fighting climate-denialism

      From 2011, Skeptical Science’s excellent Debunking Handbook, a short guide for having discussions about climate change denial that tries to signpost the common errors that advocates of the reality of anthropogenic global warming make when talking to people who disbelieve.

    • On Fox, Pundit From Oil-Funded Group Says Climate Scientists Are The Profiteers

      Fox News provided American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Jonah Goldberg a platform to attack climate scientists as profiteers who are “financially incentivized” to advocate climate change action, without disclosing AEI’s own financial incentive to undercut action on climate change. AEI has taken over $3 million from ExxonMobil, and once offered money to scientists to write articles criticizing a UN climate change report.

  • Finance

    • Swarmops Approaching Launch. Want To Be Part Of It? Fund It Maybe?

      Swarmops is approaching launch. This is the back-end software that allowed the Swedish Pirate Party to beat its competition using less than one percent of their budget, but now generalized for any organization’s use – business or nonprofit. It’s also the only software in existence to do bitcoin-native automated accounting and cashflow.

    • Banking turns people into rotten cheats

      They are among the least trusted professions in the world and with good reason, according to new research. It seems people working for banks are more dishonest than employees from other sectors – though, to be fair, only when they are reminded whom they working for. The findings lend weight to arguments that the culture at the heart of the financial industry is rotten and needs to be drastically overhauled.

    • RBS prepares to be fined tens of millions pounds over IT breakdown

      Royal Bank of Scotland faces a fine of tens of millions of pounds as early as this week over the collapse of its IT systems that locked millions of customers out of their accounts for days.

    • System Change, or There and Back Again: Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism

      In the United States, a new kind of socialism may also be emerging. It is based on an insistence that the macro-dimensions of traditional socialism – an emphasis on ownership of the means of production and economic planning – be grounded on and interdependent with a micro-level reorganization of enterprises. Enterprises are to be democratized, ending the typical top-down hierarchical capitalist organization (major shareholders select the board of directors that hires the managers and mass of laborers and makes all the key enterprise decisions). Workers self-directed enterprises (WSDEs) would become the mass social and economic base where wealth is generated and revenues are provided to the state. Conjointly with democratically organized residential communities that are interdependent with the WSDEs, local decisions would be co-determined and all state actions held accountable. The state would facilitate economic, political and cultural coordination among WSDEs and residential communities, but the state power arising from that facilitation function would be ultimately determined by, accountable to and balanced by the economic and political power organized horizontally at the base of society.

  • Censorship

    • Lessons on censorship from Syria’s internet filter machines

      Norwegian writer Mette Newth once wrote that: “censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history.” As we develop new means to gather and create information, new means to control, erase and censor that information evolve alongside it. Today that means access to information through the internet, which motivates us to study internet censorship.

    • What 600 gigs of Syrian censorship logs can teach us about digital freedom

      Norwegian writer Mette Newth once wrote that: “censorship has followed the free expressions of men and women like a shadow throughout history.” As we develop new means to gather and create information, new means to control, erase and censor that information evolve alongside it. Today that means access to information through the internet, which motivates us to study internet censorship.

    • China steps up web censorship and blocks HSBC

      China has blocked access to HSBC’s banking portal and possibly thousands of other websites in what appears to be a new censorship campaign days before it hosts a major internet industry conference.

    • Hashtag hate campaigns are leading us into the trap of censorship

      Last week, Jessica Ennis-Hill took the brave step of saying she would have her name removed from a stand at Bramall Lane if Sheffield United re-signed convicted rapist Ched Evans. The inevitable consequence was a blurt of rape threats from members of Evans’ fanbase. One prize specimen, @RickieLambert07, replied to criticism by saying: “Freedom of speech mate… I’ll say what I want when I want!” I cannot say for sure that @RickieLambert07 isn’t a lawyer but he certainly has a shaky grasp of Article 10 of the Human Rights Act.

    • Peter Sellars: ‘The United States is coming close to censorship’
    • Tony Abbott leads ‘a government of censorship’, Bill Shorten tells ABC rally

      The Coalition’s cuts to the ABC and SBS are “ripping at the heart” of vital public institutions, federal opposition leader, Bill Shorten, says.

      He also told a Save Our ABC rally at Melbourne’s Federation Square on Sunday that Australians are rightly angered by the budget cuts in breach of Tony Abbott’s pre-election promise.

    • China Says Internet Censorship Is Necessary to Fight Terrorism

      China laid out its reasons for controlling online content at the first government-sponsored Internet conference, saying it is crucial to thwart terrorist attacks in the country.

    • World Internet Conference: Has China overcome paranoia?
    • Not Fit to Print: An Insider Account of Pakistani Censorship

      The senior editorial staff, myself included, reluctantly agreed to the orders, which came from the CEO, because our jobs were on the line. Media groups in Pakistan are family-owned and make all decisions unilaterally — regardless of whether they concern marketing and finance or editorial content and policy — advancing their personal agendas through the influential mainstream outlets at their disposal. A majority of the CEOs and media house owners are businessmen, with no background (or interest) in the ethics of journalism. The owners and publishers make it very clear to their newsrooms and staff — including the editor — that any tilt or gloss they proscribe is non-negotiable. As a result, serious concerns persist about violence against and the intimidation of members of the media. In fact, Pakistan ranks 158 out of 180 countries in the 2014 World Press Freedom Index.

    • Dartmouth student: America must ‘fix free speech’ with censorship

      An Ivy League student says that America “has gone too far in allowing people to say whatever they want,” and asserts that the country needs to censor free speech.

    • Ecuador: Why are critics being shutdown on Twitter?

      A Spanish company — Ares Rights — has been targeting the social media accounts of critics of the Ecuadorean government.

  • Privacy

    • Meet OneRNG: a fully-open entropy generator for a paranoid age

      One of the many bits of technology that attracts paranoia in a post-Snowden era is random number generation, and a New Zealand developer hopes to help solve that with an all-open entropy generator.

    • Glenn Greenwald: NSA-proofing your product is good for business

      Just because Congress can’t even pass minimal NSA reform, it doesn’t mean that privacy is dead: American tech companies are NSA-proofing their services because customers are demanding it.

      Glenn Greenwald’s editorial in The Intercept cites Whatsapp’s integration of Textsecure’s end-to-end crypto, Apple’s move to encrypt Ios devices by default, and Google’s similar moves for Android as a counter to the farcical deference of Congress to America’s spy-services, and the absurd “debate” that Congress engages in on the subject, in which elected officials basically just repeat “ISIS” and “terrorism” and “9/11″ until they run out of time.

    • Republicans block overhaul of NSA surveillance reform

      A bill to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone records failed on a procedural vote in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday after senior Republicans said it would benefit enemies of the United States, including Islamic State militants.

    • DID THE NSA OUTLINE BITCOIN IN 1996?

      The NSA was one of the first organizations to describe a Bitcoin-like system. About twelve years before Satoshi Nakamoto published his legendary white paper to the Metzdowd.com cryptography mailing list, a group of NSA information security researchers published a paper entitled How to Make a Mint: the Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash in two prominent places, the first being an MIT mailing list and the second being much more prominent, The American Law Review (Vol. 46, Issue 4 ).

    • Utah Considers Cutting Off Water to the NSA’s Monster Data Center

      Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

    • Utah may cut off NSA’s water in protest of mass surveillance
    • Utah lawmaker concerned over NSA spying on American citizens proposes cutting off the water supply to agency facility

      A Utah lawmaker concerned about government spying on its citizens wants to cut the water supply to a National Security Agency data storage facility outside Salt Lake City.

    • Utah Lawmakers Consider Bill That Would Cut Water To NSA Data Collection Center

      Utah lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water supply to the National Security Agency’s data collection center in Bluffdale, Utah.

    • NSA reform advocates vow to fight on after Senate rejects USA Freedom Act

      Stunned and dejected by the death of a bill to restrain National Security Agency surveillance, civil libertarian groups vowed to return to the daunting effort in the next Congress.

    • NSA director: No changes in telephone record collection coming
    • On Keystone and the N.S.A., Clinton Remains Quiet

      On Friday, Ready for Hillary, a super PAC that has been described as “a make-work program for former Clinton hands,” and that is busy building a database of donors and volunteers that the group will eventually sell or rent to an official Clinton campaign, held an all-day meeting at the Sheraton on Fifty-third Street, in New York.

    • Automakers Like TOTALLY Promise Not To Abuse The Ocean Of Location Data Their Cars Now Collect

      Hoping to assuage growing fears that vehicle data won’t be abused, nineteen automakers recently got together and agreed to a set of voluntary principles they insist will protect consumer privacy in the new smart car age. Automakers promise that the principles, delivered in a letter to the FTC (pdf), require that they “implement reasonable measures” to protect collected consumer data, both now and as the industry works toward car-to-car communications. The principles “demonstrate the industry’s commitment to its customers” and “reflect a major step in protecting consumer information” insists the industry.

    • Snowden Docs.: UK Telecom Conspired to Turn over millions of our Emails to British Intelligence
    • Who’s watching your webcam?

      The Daily Mail has revealed that people could be being watched in their own homes or at work as hackers are targeting webcams and uploading the live footage to the internet. The warning comes from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is urging people to upgrade their passwords from the default setting.

    • EFF Joins the Call for a NIST We Can Trust

      It’s looking like we might be on the brink of another crypto war. The first one, in the 90s, was a misguided attempt to limit the public’s access to strong, secure cryptography. And since then, the reasons we need the good security provided by strong crypto have only multiplied. That’s why EFF has joined 20 civil society organizations and companies in sending a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “re-emphasize the importance of creating a process for establishing secure and resilient encryption standards, free from back doors or other known vulnerabilities.”

    • Reaction to the Home Secretary’s Proposals to introduce IP address matching powers

      Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “It is perfectly reasonable that powers to provide the police with the ability to match an IP address to the person using that service is investigated. However, if such a power is required, then it should be subject to the widespread consultation and comprehensive scrutiny that has been sorely lacking to date with industry, civil society and the wider public when it comes to introducing new surveillance powers.

    • Home Secretary announces plans to introduce IP address matching powers

      When the Communications Data Bill was scrapped in 2013, one of the issues that appeared to have full political consensus was the ‘resolution of IP addresses’ – particularly where mobile phone operators may have millions of customers using just a few hundred IP addresses.

    • NSA Reform Blocked by Paranoid Republican Senators

      “God forbid we wake up tomorrow and [Islamic State] is in the United States,” Sen. Marco Rubio said as the USA Freedom Act, considered a “gift to terrorists” by critics, was rejected by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. Despite the fact that the mass collection of Americans’ phone data that the bill attempted to restrict has likely not prevented a single terrorist attack, somehow terrorism is still being used as a justification for the National Security Agency’s violation of U.S. citizens’ privacy rights.

    • Ejecting the NSA from our private space

      The National Security Agency (NSA) has destroyed the right to be let alone —the most cherished right among civilized people.

    • Rand Paul takes heat for NSA vote

      Civil liberties advocates who usually view Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as an ally are frustrated with his vote Tuesday against an intelligence reform bill.

      Paul voted against a procedural motion for the USA Freedom Act, which would have enacted the most sweeping changes to American intelligence agencies in more than a decade, on the grounds that it reauthorized some portions of the Patriot Act.

    • Keeping the Backdoor open… how the NSA’s collection of 0-day exploits hurts us all

      The world lives in fear of zero-day exploits although the average person does not even know it. A zero-day exploit is a bug or a flaw that has not been discovered by the developers yet, but is known to someone outside. This can be good guys, bad guys or other, but it is still a flaw that can be used to do harm to a computer system and no one has a patch for it yet. When the good guys (security researchers) know about them they work with companies to patch them. When the bad guys know about these things get very ugly indeed. But what happens if someone knows about one (or a bunch of them) and does not tell anyone at all?

    • AT&T wants the NSA to have a warrant when asking for location data
    • NSA scandals caused rift with U.S. allies

      No single issue has caused greater damage to the trust between the United States and its allies than the sweeping revelations of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs. This story continues to fuel the perception that we no longer care to uphold our values at home or abroad. Our credibility has suffered by failing to sufficiently justify our actions even to ourselves. It is finally time to undo the damage.

      Recent presidential and congressional measures concerning espionage and data privacy have the potential to bolster our credibility, counter these misperceptions and restore trust with our allies. Congress failed to vote on the USA Freedom Act last week, but the bill itself demonstrates our resolve to protect the privacy of all U.S. citizens and end bulk data collection. The NSA is also taking unprecedented steps to protect the rights of those at home and abroad. It is imperative that we explain and advance these evolving norms, particularly with our allies across the Atlantic.

    • Some NSA Officials Warned Agency of Surveillance Backlash in 2009

      In 2009, a major debate was going on behind the scenes at the NSA. A number of officials, including an unnamed top member of the agency, were warning that if the truth about their mass surveillance went public, it could cause a major backlash.

    • Senate shamefully gives NSA green light on phone records spying

      The Senate charade this week allowing the National Security Agency to continue spying on Americans’ phone records would be laughable if it didn’t have such dangerous implications for both the tech industry and consumer privacy.

    • Why did NSA reform and the Keystone pipeline fail in the Senate?

      It has been a week since the lame duck Congress reconvened in Washington, and two major bills have already seen defeat.

      Senate Republicans flexed their muscles Tuesday, voting not to advance the USA Freedom Act, which would have scaled back the reach of surveillance by the National Security Agency and the FBI.

    • EX-NSA AND GCHQ SPOOKS SHOWCASE INTEL PLATFORM

      Darktrace, a cybersecurity company comprised of ex-spooks from NSA and GCHQ, has revealed details of its new behavioural analytics software.

    • A Terrified Nation Gets the NSA Debate It Deserves

      The worst, most specious, most dishonest piece of poorly constructed propaganda in this particular bill’s debate, though, came in the form of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by twin terror titans Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey entitled—prepare yourself for this—”NSA Reform That Only ISIS Could Love.” How indicative of the sober, journalistic quality of discussion surrounding this issue!

    • Wish You Had NSA’s Cool Spying Toys? Now You Can — As Low-Cost Open Hardware

      Alongside the disturbing revelations of indiscriminate, global surveillance carried out by the NSA and its Five Eyes friends, leaked documents have shown another side of modern spying: the high-tech gadgets created for the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations group, discussed by Techdirt at the end of last year. As its name suggests, these are targeted operations, and with many of the serious concerns about the use of blanket surveillance removed, it is hard not to be impressed by the ingenuity of the devices. Of course, a natural question is: could the rest of us have them too? According to a detailed and fascinating article in Vice’s Motherboard, the answer turns out to be “yes”.

    • This Legal Loophole Could Let NSA Spy On Americans Long After The Patriot Act Expires

      After the defeat of NSA reform in the Senate Tuesday, expectation for a change in government surveillance powers shifted to next year when the PATRIOT Act expires, taking bulk spying authority with it unless the Obama administration exploits a legal loophole that could expand the collection of Americans’ phone records far into the future.

    • NSA Phone Data Collection Could Go On, Even if a Law Expires
    • The Failed NSA Reform Bill Was a Sham Anyway

      “Data handshakes,” call records, and the NSA’s back door into telecom companies reveal that the Senate’s plan to protect Americans’ privacy would have done no such thing.

    • NSA reform: Not dead yet

      What happened on the Senate floor On Tuesday night is what often happens on the Senate floor: Senate surveillance hawks rounded up just enough votes to procedurally kill a bill that should have been brought up under a genuinely open process. As my Cato colleague Julian Sanchez noted, the bill–if it had been enacted in its current form–really wouldn’t have changed much as far as how the National Security Agency (NSA) operates its signals intelligence (SIGINT) programs. Therein lies both the problem and the opportunity.

    • Uber scandal: Worried about NSA spying? It’s Silicon Valley billionaires you need to watch

      Have you complained about Uber? Ever done anything shady? Then there’s a good chance that an Uber executive thinks it’s a good idea to go after you and your family, with “fair game” practices straight out of the Scientology playbook.

    • Rival steps into Uber row with ‘NSA’ accusation
    • Flywheel raises $12 million to take on Uber’s ‘army of mini assh*les’
    • What Does The NSA Think Of Cryptographers?

      A recently declassified NSA house magazine, CryptoLog, reveals some interesting attitudes between the redactions. What is the NSA take on cryptography?

      The fact that a 1994 issue of CryptoLog, an NSA internal newsletter, existed as a declassified document has come to light. Intially it reached the attnetion of specialists Shtetl-Optimized, the blog of everyone’s favourite quantum computer expert, Scott Aaronson. But it is too good not to publicise more widely.

    • AP Exclusive: Some in NSA warned of a backlash

      Dissenters within the National Security Agency, led by a senior agency executive, warned in 2009 that the program to secretly collect American phone records wasn’t providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed, current and former intelligence officials say.

      The NSA took the concerns seriously, and many senior officials shared them. But after an internal debate that has not been previously reported, NSA leaders, White House officials and key lawmakers opted to continue the collection and storage of American calling records, a domestic surveillance program without parallel in the agency’s recent history.

    • Yet more NSA officials whisper of an internal revolt over US spying. And yet it still goes on

      The NSA’s snooping programs aren’t just controversial to the public, it seems: we’re reminded other staff at the US agency also objected to prying into Americans’ phone records.

    • The good news about the ‘death’ of NSA reform: surveillance supporters may have dug their own grave

      Snowden haters may have blocked the USA Freedom Act, but the clock is ticking before the law that justifies vacuuming your phone records blows up in the face of newly conservative Washington

    • American Surveillance Now Threatens American Business

      A new study finds that a vast majority of Americans trust neither the government nor tech companies with their personal data.

    • Local judge unseals hundreds of highly secret cell tracking court records

      Stingray docs unsealed by North Carolina judge could prompt wave of new appeals.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Dear Senator Ted Cruz
    • 4 Stupid Conservative Arguments Against Net Neutrality, Debunked

      The comparison, so stupid on so many levels that it isn’t worth debunking, is not just an isolated example of partisan idiocy. In recent weeks, Republican operatives have trotted out a steaming heap of similar malarkey in an effort to ward off a popular revolt against the cable industry, which wants to charge big companies such as Google or Netflix for faster internet service while slowing it down for the rest of us. Here are four other ludicrous conservative arguments for why the Federal Communications Commission shouldn’t prevent this from happening:

    • FCC chief proposes hiking schools’ Internet subsidy by 62 percent

      U.S. communications regulators are expected to vote Dec. 11 on whether to boost funding for the largest U.S. educational technology subsidy program, E-Rate, by 62 percent to help connect more schools and libraries to high-speed Internet.

    • EU to water down net neutrality rules

      European Union governments are considering less stringent rules on how internet service providers manage traffic on their networks, according to a draft seen by Reuters, a move that could be welcomed by Europe’s large telecoms operators.

    • Leaked documents show net neutrality may be in danger!

      On 14 November 2014, the Italian Presidency presented amendments to the Telecommunications package for comment by the Member State delegations. We are hereby making the document and its annexes publicly available (Note and addendum). These documents show that the Italian Presidency is now back-pedalling on meaningful net neutrality protections – having previously made some much more meaningful and positive suggestions. It presented a “principles-based approach” to the Member States “in order not to inhibit innovation and to avoid” having an outdated regulation in the future. In reality, all the text would do is add confusion for freedom of communication and online innovation.

    • This Infographic Shows The Enemies Of An Open And Free Internet

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • When the Time Comes We’ll Need to Step Up the Fight Against TPP’s Secret, Anti-User Agenda

      If you missed our live teach-in yesterday on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and its restrictive, anti-user provisions, you can still check out the video of our discussion. It’s embedded below. We invited experts from digital rights groups from several TPP countries—all members of the Fair Deal Coalition—and we discussed the various ways this massive, secret trade deal threatens our rights on the Internet and over our digital devices.

    • TTIP Update XLIII

      The problem of data flows, and why CETA’s ISDS is a disaster

    • Copyrights

      • The creative class is not screwed: Here’s how the Internet helps artists make a living

        The fundamental problem that “traditional media” is having is that its business was structured around expensive, resource-intensive undertakings and paying large dividends to investors. Newspapers bought purpose-built buildings in central New York and Tokyo; radio networks took over enormous towers next door to them; record labels built multimillion-dollar studios and employed titanic numbers of administrators, talent scouts, managers, and so forth.

        The net makes it possible to do things more cheaply. For one thing, the actual production costs for media have fallen drastically. It’s not easy to do professional typesetting, but if you know how to do it, you can make it happen with the computer under your arm, and you can pocket the difference between the cost of a computer you already own and the cost of a huge typesetting shop full of specialized equipment that cost a million dollars twenty years ago. The hyperexpensive shots that George Lucas stuck into “Star Wars” in 1977 can be rendered cheerfully and without complaint by a used PC that your local high school is throwing away. That doesn’t mean you, personally, know how to make it produce something as cool or lucrative as Lucas did, of course—but if you can, you have a lot more options than Lucas did back then for making money from it, because the cost is so low.

      • U.S. Government Seeks to Keep Megaupload Money Because Kim Dotcom Is a ‘Fugitive’

        On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice told a Virginia federal judge that Kim Dotcom and cohorts have no business challenging the seizure of an estimated $67 million in assets because the Megaupload founder is evading prosecution.

      • U.S. Brands Kim Dotcom a Fugitive, ‘Spies’ on Others

        The U.S. Government is trying to get its hands on the assets of Kim Dotcom and his fellow defendants through a civil lawsuit, with the DoJ branding them fugitives and asking the court to dismiss their claims . The new filing further reveals that law enforcement continued to tap conversations of some defendants months after the raids.

      • U.S. Copyright Alert System Security Could Be Improved, Review Finds

        This week the Center for Copyright Information released a new external review of its evidence gathering procedures. Overall the six-strikes Copyright Alert System gets a positive evaluation. However, more can be done to prevent false positives and protect the collected evidence from internal threats such as rogue employees.

      • Swedes Prepare Record File-Sharing Prosecution

        Swedish authorities say a case they are preparing against a so-called piracy ‘scene’ member will be their biggest prosecution to date. The man is accused of infringing copyright on more than 2,200 mainly Hollywood movies, with each carrying potential damages of up to $2.69m per movie.

      • Torrents Good For a Third of all Internet Traffic in Asia-Pacific

        New data published by the Canadian broadband management company Sandvine reveals that BitTorrent can be credited for one-third of all Internet traffic in the Asia-Pacific region during peak hours. That’s an increase of more than 50% compared to the previous year.

      • Artists and Labels Now Sue Chrysler Over CD-Ripping Cars

        The Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies has launched a new lawsuit targeting Chrysler for allowing car owners to rip CDs without paying royalties. The lawsuit follows a similar class action suit against Ford and General Motors, which is still ongoing.

      • If Illegal Sites Get Blocked Accidentally, Hard Luck Says Court

        In a case before the High Court, UK ISPs have raised concerns that ‘innocent’ sites might be taken offline due to them sharing IP addresses with other sites detailed in blocking orders. While sites will get a chance to complain, those operating illegally will get no sympathy from the High Court.

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