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

01.23.16

Links 23/1/2016: New Kali Linux, Google Teams with Red Hat

Posted in News Roundup at 12:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Opinion: Open source for all mankind

    Thankfully there’s a better way. Whether in reference to technology or a political ideology, open source is about self-determination. It’s about individuals developing products and projects, taking responsibility and being open to criticism and change. It fosters a healthy, meritocratic ecosystem of shared, mutually improving ideas. Crucially, the open-source attitude manifests a level of respect and equality between developer and user, government and citizen.

  • Verizon Joins ONOS Open-Source SDN Project

    Verizon is the latest major service provider to join the ONOS open-source network virtualization initiative, joining other carriers like AT&T, NTT Communications, China Unicom and SK Telecom in the effort.

    Verizon officials said Jan. 21 that they joined the ONOS (Open Network Operating System) in hopes of accelerating the development of open-source software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) offerings that their company and other carriers can use.

  • How getting started in open source can help your career

    When contributing to open source projects and communities, one of the many benefits is that you can improve your tech skills. In this article, hear from three contributors on how their open source helped them get a job or improved their career.

  • Verizon Joins the ONOS Project Partnership
  • Verizon Looks to ONOS for Faster Transformation
  • NFV/SDN Reality Check: ONOS project updates open source SDN progress – Episode 44
  • Verizon Becomes Newest Telecom to Join ONOS Open Source SDN Project
  • Verizon Joins ONOS SDN Partnership
  • ONOS Delivers Astounding Adoption and Momentum among its Community of Service Providers and Innovators
  • Verizon joins ONOS project partnership
  • Verizon hooks up with ONOS project, joining AT&T, SK Telecom
  • Verizon signs up for ONOS Project
  • Verizon joins AT&T, others at ONOS project in boost to open source SDN
  • Verizon Joins ONOS
  • Telecom Providers Worldwide Are Flocking to NFV Plus OpenStack

    As this year began, we spotted a lot of action from telecom players and the open source community surrounding Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology. Red Hat and NEC Corporation said that they formed a partnership to develop NFV features in he OpenStack cloud computing platform, with the goal of delivering carrier-grade solutions based on Red Hat’s OpenStack build.

    Telecom companies have traditionally had a lot of proprietary tools in the middle and at the basis of their technology stacks. NFV is an effort to combat that, and to help the parallel trends of virtualization and cloud computing stay as open as possible. Now, The OpenStack Foundation has released a comprehensive report on the adoption and business cases driving NFV deployment among the world’s leading telecom providers. Titled “OpenStack Foundation Report: Accelerating NFV Delivery with OpenStack,” the report paints a bright future for NFV with close ties to the OpenStack cloud platform.

  • Google Open Sources Dataflow Analytics Code through Apache Incubator

    Google is open-sourcing more code by contributing Cloud Dataflow to the Apache Software Foundation. The move, a first for Google, opens new cloud-based data analytics options and integration opportunities for big data companies.

    Cloud Dataflow is a platform for processing large amounts of data in the cloud. It features an open source, Java-based SDK, which makes it easy to integrate with other cloud-centric analytics and Big Data tools.

  • ONOS project updates open source SDN progress on 1-year anniversary
  • Plerd: A Dropbox-friendly Markdown blog platform

    Jason McIntosh had a problem: He’d gotten out of the habit of writing long-form blog posts. A decade before, he’d been a regular on LiveJournal, but that platform is getting a little long in the tooth, and he wanted something that was more in line with his current writing habits. As a fan of Markdown, he wanted something where he could just drop Markdown files in a spot, and the blog would be built from those.

  • Events

    • 11 steps to running an online community meeting

      Open organizations explicitly invite participation from external communities, because these organizations know their products and programs are world class only if they include a variety of perspectives at all phases of development. Liaising with and assisting those communities is critical. And community calls are my favorite method for interacting with stakeholders both inside and outside an organization. In this article, I’ll share best practices for community calls and talk a little about how they can spur growth.

    • SCALE 14X Thursday: New Morning in Pasadena

      A SCALE staple is PostgreSQL Days, which have taken place for years at the Southern California event. This year it’s a two-day, two-track event of sessions designed for a general audience of web developers, sysadmins, DBAs and open source users. As usual, talks will have significant technical content. For those of you keeping score at home, PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system, with more than 30 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness.

      The cherry atop the SCALE 14X sundae on Thursday, as you might expect, comes in the evening when FOSS raconteur Bryan Lunduke brings his humorous “Linux Sucks” presentation, this time accompanied by a live broadcast and a book, to SCALE. Give him an hour, he says, and he’ll prove it.

    • IoT Summit: An Opportunity to Learn What Open Source Can Offer IoT

      The Eclipse IoT community has grown significantly over the last 1-2 years. There are now 20+ Eclipse IoT projects building open source technology for IoT solutions. We are well on our way to providing the key building blocks developers need to build IoT solutions.

    • Drupal Higher-Ed Summit

      We are pleased to announce that we are bringing the First Drupal Higher-Ed Summit to Mumbai this 18th Feb 2016. The event focuses on the Drupal and Open Source in Education.

    • Meet Guix at FOSDEM!

      One week to FOSDEM! This year, there will be no less than six Guix-related talks. This and the fact that we are addressing different communities is exciting.

    • SCaLE 14x, day 1: Shuttleworth delivers the grand vision for Ubuntu

      Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) 14x in kicked off yesterday, January 21. The highlight of the was a keynote by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth at UbuCon Summit, a co-hosted event at SCaLE 14x.

      Some technical issues with the projector at the beginning of Shuttleworth’s presentation led him to quip that Ubuntu is “moving so fast that we have warped the colors on the screen.”

    • SCALE 14X: Making the Mark and Getting Ready for Doctorow

      One of the drawbacks of having to work a show like SCALE is that I don’t get to go to enough sessions while I’m here. As the traffic cop at the intersection of old and new media, it’s my job to marshal the publicity team’s forces into taking the information happening at the show and then processing it for the wider public consumption.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS

        Firefox OS has demonstrated that it’s a very flexible platform. It has the potential to run on a wide range of devices, such as TVs and IoT gadgets. As long as Mozilla can find some persuasive use cases for manufacturers, it has a good chance of making an impact in these emerging fields.

      • Announcing Rust 1.6

        Hello 2016! We’re happy to announce the first Rust release of the year, 1.6. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

        As always, you can install Rust 1.6 from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.6 on GitHub. About 1100 patches were landed in this release.

      • Rust Lang 1.6 Stabilizes Libraries

        The Mozilla-backed crew working on the Rust programming language announced the release today of Rust v1.6 as their first new version of 2016.

      • Former Mozilla CEO reveals Brave, a browser that speeds up the Web by blocking all ads

        Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and for an 11-day stint, its CEO, yesterday announced a new browser called “Brave,” that blocks outside online ads and ad tracking.

        Brave, which was at version 0.7—denoting its under-construction and fit-for-developers-and-other-strong-hearts-only status—is for Windows and OS X on the desktop, iOS and Android on mobile. The browser does not have a final code launch date or one for a public preview. Users may sign up for notification when betas become available.

        In a post to the browser’s website, Eich, Brave’s CEO and president, touted the new browser’s model, which rests on blocking ads and all other tracking techniques used by websites to pinpoint their visitors and show them online advertisements.

      • WebGL Can Be Moved Off The Main Thread With Latest Firefox

        With Firefox 44 and newer it will be possible to move the WebGL rendering work off the main processing thread.

        With Firefox 44 when setting the gfx.offscreencanvas.enabled option, it’s possible to move the WebGL rendering work off the main thread and to allow for the alternative thread(s) to change what is displayed to the user. “This API is the first that allows a thread other than the main thread to change what is displayed to the user. This allows rendering to progress no matter what is going on in the main thread…Developers will now be able to render to the screen without blocking on the main thread, thanks to the new OffscreenCanvas API. There’s still more work to do with getting requestAnimationFrame on Workers. I was able to port existing WebGL code to run in a worker in a few minutes. For comparison, see animation.html vs. animation-worker.html and worker.js.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Why open source is the ‘new normal’ for big data

      As a provider of integration technologies for that platform, Talend has placed a significant bet of its own on Hadoop, Spark, and open source in general, so Tuchen’s enthusiasm isn’t exactly surprising. Talend offers products focused on big data, cloud and application integration, among others, and all are based on open-source software.

      Still, Talend’s bet seems to be paying off. The company will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, and it claims big-name customers like GE, Citi, Lufthansa, Orange and Virgin Mobile. It’s also in the middle of a major expansion. At the end of 2015, it was selling its products in five countries; by end of this year, it will be selling in 15, Tuchen said. Making that happen will mean hiring about 200 new people, he said, bringing the company’s total head count to about 750.

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • And So It Begins! Microsoft Asks Node.js to Allow ChakraCore (Edge) Alongside Google’s V8 Engine

      Microsoft has submitted an official “pull request” (term used on GitHub for merging two pieces of code) to the Node.js project, through which it’s asking the project’s maintainers to enable support for ChakraCore, the JavaScript engine packed inside Microsoft’s Edge browser.

    • EMC reinvigorated: Automation, open-source and versatile integration

      As the calendar rolls on into 2016, the buzz around the Dell-EMC merger has slightly diminished, but EMC’s activity behind the media relations has in no way cut its workload. With its presence in dozens of countries continuing to grow and a wide array of IT development opening up new avenues for it each day, the merger seems to have EMC’s activity reinvigorated.

    • Bloomberg releases API and online tools to boost open source FIGI [Ed: no source code AFAICT]

      Bloomberg is adding new features to increase the accessibility of its FIGI open source financial instrument identification system. The new online tools are intended to make it easier for instrument issuers to request identifiers and for exchanges, data providers, custodians and others to map other third-party identifiers to FIGI.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • No single license to success

      OSI (Open Source Initiative) has tracked many licenses and approved some as well, maintaining a list of the nine most widely used and popular. Each license has its unique requirements and benefits from the reciprocity of GPL (GNU General Public License) to the permissive MIT. Each has its strong proponents and opponents. Some feel that without GPL’s compulsion human greed will end open source as we know it. Others feel that freedom is the key to success and such compulsion hinders creative use.

      The reality is that the strength of open source is in its diversity, including a diversity of licenses. No single license has been nor will be the pivotal point to open source success. License diversity is very evident from the data gathered by the Black Duck Knowledgebase. A quick view of the top 20 licenses used in open source projects today shows an even spread.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Idealist: Aaron Swartz And The Rise Of Free Culture On The Internet

      Two weeks ago, our book of choice was a collection of Aaron Swartz’s writings. And this week, it’s a new book by Justin Peters not only about Swartz, but also about the rise of free culture online, putting Swartz’s ideas and actions into context, called The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet. I have to admit that I had no idea this book had even come out until I heard a wonderful interview with Peters over on On the Media (and, for what it’s worth, in a separate podcast, OTM’s Brooke Gladstone said that the interview was so good that they struggled to figure out how to edit it down — so I wonder if they’ll release an even longer version as a “podcast extra.”)

Leftovers

  • How this blogger became one of the most influential voices in tech policy

    In May 2003, the legal website The Smoking Gun posted a short item titled “Barbra Sues Over Aerial Photos.” Kenneth Adelman, an environmentalist who takes aerial photographs of California’s coastline for the benefit of scientists and researchers, had inadvertently captured an image of singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s home. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleged that by posting the image to his website, Adelman had provided a “road map into her residence” and “clearly [identified] those routes that could be used to enter her property.” On page 9 of the lawsuit it states that “there is no telling how many people have downloaded the photograph of [Streisand’s] property and residence on their computer.”

    In the coming weeks it would emerge that, up until the lawsuit was filed, the image of Streisand’s house had only been accessed six times, two of which were by her lawyers. And because of the engendered press from the lawsuit, it was then visited more than 420,000 times in just the first month after it was filed. Not only did Streisand later lose the lawsuit, but it had produced the very result her lawyers had set out to avoid: drawing attention to her property.

  • Call Of Duty Again Sued Over Another Historical Figure… Who Is A Good Guy In The Game

    You may recall that Activision’s Call of Duty games have already been the subject of a lawsuit by a historical figure. Previously, notorious figure Manuel Noriega brought a publicity rights case against the game company in the United States, claiming that the game depicted him without his permission. Pretty much everyone agreed that Activision was on solid First Amendment grounds in depicting a historical figure, including Rudy Giuliani, who galloped in to represent Activision and quickly got the case summarily dismissed.

  • Happy Bier-thday: German beer purity law celebrates 500yrs

    Raise a stein to Germany’s famous beer purity law known as “das Reinheitsgebot” as it celebrates its 500th birthday this year.

    What started out as an order in the duchy of Munich became Bavaria’s law of the land on April 23, 1516, after reunification.

    In 1871 Bavaria insisted on national acceptance before unification with Germany, ending the market for beer from Northern Germany which contained spices and cherries.

  • How new money has ruined Sesame Street

    Over on Showtime, a new show called Billions just got going in which Damian Lewis plays hedge-fund manager Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, with Paul Giamatti as the US attorney eyeing Axelrod for insider trading. The obvious characterisation would have been to make Axelrod a villain, the embodiment of the world’s intolerance for financiers. Instead, he is a sympathetic version of an Alan Sugar type, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks made good. Perhaps his psychopathy will emerge, but for now the show has pulled off a very tough feat and made one root for the billionaire.

  • How I ended up paying $150 for a single 60GB download from Amazon Glacier

    In late 2012, I decided that it was time for my last remaining music CDs to go. Between MacBook Airs and the just-introduced MacBook Pro with Retina Display, ours had suddenly become a CD-player-free household.

  • Science

    • BLOG: Embracing foreign investment in homegrown high-tech may help Japan build an IP value creation culture

      We learned yesterday that Taiwan’s Foxconn (otherwise known as Hon Hai) has offered to pay as much as $5.3 billion to take over Japan’s struggling Sharp, potentially trumping a possible rescue package being put together by public-private technology-focused investment fund Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ). This is the latest in a series of actual and rumoured attempts made by Foxconn to gain a foothold in the ailing Japanese company – underlining just how valuable Sharp’s IP assets and other intangibles are considered to be, not just to for the wellbeing of Japanese industry, but for foreign players too.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • They Tell Us Nothing But Lies — Paul Craig Roberts

      Litvinenko’s brother and father say that they “are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It’s all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government.” Maksim Litvinenko dismisses the British report as a smear on Putin.

    • Petraeus: ‘It’s Time to Unleash America’s Airpower in Afghanistan’

      To begin, Petraeus’ statement that airpower in 2001 “ousted the Taliban,” a statement made without apparent irony, would be hilarious if it was not utterly tragic. Petraeus seems to have missed a few meetings, at which he would have learned that since those victories in 2001 the Taliban has been doing just fine, thanks. The U.S. has remained inside the Afghan quagmire for more than 14 more years, and currently has no end game planned for the war. Air power, with or without “a motivated and competent ground force” (as if such a thing can ever exist in Afghanistan, we’ve been training and equipping there for 14 years), never is enough. There are examples to draw from going back into WWI.

    • Afghanistan Bans Toy Guns to Curb Culture of Violence

      This one’s so funny that it must be some kind of U.S.-led initiative; I can’t believe the Afghans have this kind of a sense of humor.

      But whatever the origin, Afghanistan banned the sale of imitation Kalashnikovs and other toy guns after they caused injuries to more than 100 people during the last Eid celebrations. Children toting toy guns that fire rubber or plastic pellets are a common sight in the country during Eid al-Fitr, with sales surging every year amid festivities marking the end of Ramadan.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • CMD Submits Evidence of ExxonMobil Funding ALEC’s Climate Change Denial to California Attorney General

      The Center for Media and Democracy, a national watchdog group exposing corporate influence on democracy, has submitted evidence to California Attorney General Kamala Harris showing how ExxonMobil has promoted climate change denial through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). CMD believes this information is relevant to her office’s investigation into whether ExxonMobil deceived its shareholders and the public about the impact that burning fossil fuels has on climate change.

      “ExxonMobil has bankrolled ALEC for decades and has a seat on ALEC’s corporate board, as ALEC has plied legislators with disinformation and denial about climate change and pushed legislation and resolutions to block crucial federal and state efforts to address the climate crisis,” said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice under both Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Janet Reno.

    • Haze crisis cost Indonesia almost 2% of GDP, World Bank says

      A
      Forest fires in Indonesia last year cost the country at least $16 billion in economic losses, equivalent to 1.9 percent of its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank.

    • Indonesia’s Fires Blamed For Potent Greenhouse Gases

      Indonesian fires that are expected to flare up again in the coming months may affect temperatures far away from the nation’s watery borders.

      Carbon dioxide and methane from the fires is already known to be accelerating global warming, and new research is linking high levels of another potent greenhouse gas with forest and peat fires in Indonesia and elsewhere.

    • Land-clearing fires cost Indonesia lives and $16 billion last year—and they’re starting again

      This week Indonesian president Joko Widodo warned that forest fires are once again starting to appear in the country, and called upon citizens to avoid a repeat of last year’s haze crisis, described by some as a “crime against humanity.” During that months-long disaster, large areas of Southeast Asia were smothered in toxic smoke, forcing school closures, flight cancellations, and respiratory problems (even deaths in some cases). The haze was caused by fires sparked to cheaply clear land for agricultural uses, especially palm oil.

  • Finance

    • Canada may “scrub” CETA rule allowing corporations to sue governments but we’ll keep it in the TPP?

      Remind us why this is supposed to be a good idea?

      The Government of Canada appears to be tiptoeing away from a controversial provision in a new trade deal with the European Union at the same time as they’re plowing ahead with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes a similarly controversial provision.

      According to CBC News, Canada and the EU are quietly discussing how to “scrub” a clause from CETA (the “Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement” between Canada and the EU) that would allow multinational corporations to sue governments for passing laws that get in the way of their business interests.

    • Dangerous Regulatory Duet

      How transatlantic regulatory cooperation under TTIP will allow bureaucrats and big business to attack the public interest

    • Graft allegations hit ally of Japan PM

      A Japanese minister who was the country’s top negotiator for a huge trans-Pacific trade deal was accused of corruption on Thursday, piling pressure on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ahead of parliamentary elections this year.

      Weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun claimed that Economy and Fiscal Policy Minister Akira Amari, who also serves as Japan’s chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and his staff accepted a 12 million yen ($102,000) “bribe” from a construction firm.

      The allegations against a key ally of the prime minister come ahead of upper house elections in July and as the government looks to ratify the TPP, a massive multi-nation deal of which Japan has been a key player.

    • 10 textbook firms rewarded 4,000 officials

      Ten textbook publishing companies showed a total of about 4,000 teachers and other officials textbooks under screening, and gave cash or book vouchers — or both — to each of them after fiscal 2009, with the cash worth ¥3,000 to ¥50,000, according to a survey by the education ministry, details of which were announced Friday.

    • Google to pay UK £130m in back taxes
    • Google agrees £130m UK tax deal with HMRC

      Google has agreed to pay £130m in back taxes after an “open audit” of its accounts by the UK tax authorities.

      The company had been accused of “not paying its fair share” of tax, and criticised for complex tax structures.

      Senior figures at the technology company have said that they want to draw a line under the issue.

    • Poverty may alter the wiring of kids’ brains

      Growing up poor is known to leave lasting impressions, from squashing IQ potential to increasing risks of depression. Now, as part of an effort to connect the dots between those outcomes and identify the developmental differences behind them, researchers have found that poverty actually seems to change the way the brain wires up.

      Compared to kids in higher socioeconomic brackets, impoverished little ones were more likely to have altered functional connections between parts of the brain. Specifically, the changes affected the connections from areas involved in memory and stress responses to those linked to emotional control. The finding, appearing in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that poor kids may have trouble regulating their own emotional responses, which may help explain poverty’s well-established link to depression and other negative mood disorders.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • US experts gird Finnish officials for information war

      Behind closed doors, about 100 Finnish state officials have this week been undergoing training in American-style management of public information. The most concrete advice they’ve received from US lecturers? Avoid repeating false claims.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Leaked Savile report: Paedophile ‘could be lurking undiscovered in the BBC’

      A PAEDOPHILE could still be lurking undiscovered at the BBC according to a leaked report which also claims the whistle blowing culture at the BBC is now “worse” than in sick Jimmy Savile’s time.

    • Another Lawmaker Is Trying To Create A Photography-Free Zone For Police Officers

      A former cop is trying to legislate some First Amendment-violating protection for his blue-clad brothers. Everyone’s carrying a camera these days and Arizona Senator John Kavanaugh wants them to be as far away as possible from police officers performing their public duties. Ken White (aka Popehat) summarizes the proposed legislation for FaultLines.

    • Body Cam Footage Leads To Federal Indictment Of Abusive Las Vegas Cop

      Body cameras are working as intended. Of course, this is a very limited sampling and the fact that anything happened at all to the abusive cop was reliant on him being either too stupid or too arrogant to shut his body-worn camera off.

    • How The UK’s Counter-Terrorism And Security Act Has Made Law Enforcement Into The Literal Grammar Police

      We’ve already talked a couple of times about the intersection with the UK’s disastrous Counter-Terrorism and Security Act and its intersection with the country’s educational system. As part of its effort to weed out terrorists, the UK tasked teachers with keeping a watchful eye on their students to try to identify those that would be radicalized in the future, a concept that sounds like something out of Airstrip One rather than England. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that a software package that teachers had been given to help with this was exploitable in the typically laughable ways. But the tech isn’t the only shortfall here. As one would expect when you take a group of people whose profession has in absolutely no way prepared them to act as counter-terrorism psychologists and ask them to be just that, it turns out that the human intelligence portion of this insane equation is off by several integers as well.

    • After FBI briefly ran Tor-hidden child-porn site, investigations went global

      In 2015, the FBI seized a Tor-hidden child-porn website known as Playpen and allowed it to run for 13 days so that the FBI could deploy malware in order to identify and prosecute the website’s users. That malware, known in FBI-speak as a “network investigative technique,” was authorized by a federal court in Virginia in February 2015.

      In a new revelation, Vice Motherboard has now determined that this operation had much wider berth. The FBI’s Playpen operation was effectively transformed into a global one, reaching Turkey, Colombia, and Greece, among others.

    • FBI “took over world’s biggest child porn website”

      The FBI took over the world biggest child pornography website in a sting operation intended to catch viewers of sexual images of children sometimes “barely old enough for kindergarten”, it has been revealed.

    • FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images

      For nearly two weeks last year, the FBI operated what it described as one of the Internet’s largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs.

      The operation — whose details remain largely secret — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site but left it online in an attempt to catch users who officials said would otherwise remain hidden behind an encrypted and anonymous computer network. In each case, the FBI infected the sites with software that punctured that security, allowing agents to identify hundreds of users.

    • FBI May Have Hacked Innocent TorMail Users

      Back in 2013, the FBI seized TorMail, one of the most popular dark web email services, and shortly after started to rifle through the server’s contents.

      At the time, researchers suspected the agency had also deployed a network investigative technique (NIT)—the FBI’s term for a hacking tool—to infect users of the site. Now, confirmation of that hacking campaign has come about buried in a Washington Post report on the FBI’s recent NIT usage.

      Even more questions have now been raised, however. In particular, it’s unclear whether the hacking was carried out on a much larger scale than the FBI is letting on, possibly sweeping up innocent users of the privacy-focused email service.

    • Administration Says Child Porn Provides A ‘Model’ For Hunting Terrorists Online

      The administration is trying to draft tech companies into the War on Terror. Encryption — despite being given an unofficial “hands-off” by President Obama — is still being debated, with FBI Director James Comey and a few law enforcement officials leading the charge up the hill they apparently want to die on.

      One of the aspects discussed was how to deter online communications involving terrorists. Trying to deputize tech companies is a non-starter, considering the potential for collateral damage. But that’s not stopping the administration from trying to do exactly that, and it’s willing to deploy the most terrible participant in its parade of horrors.

    • Australia’s day for secrets, flags and cowards

      On 26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in Australia. It will be “a day for families”, say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

      For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call “New Australians” often choose 26 January, “Australia Day”, to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.

    • UK Police Deny Misspelling Led To Investigation, Say It Was Other Schoolwork Instead

      We had just relayed a story via the BBC about an elementary school kid in the UK earning a visit to his home from the authorities after writing in an English assignment that he lived in a “terrorist house”, when he reportedly was trying to say he lived in a “terraced house.” The crux of this story was that the UK’s Anti-Terrorism law, which requires that school teachers act as surveillance agents for the state in an attempt to weed out future-radicalized will-be-terrorists is a policy built for unintended chaos, given that teachers are neither trained nor properly equipped to fulfill this role. The resulting visit to the boy’s home by the authorities from a misspelled word was billed as an example of this overreach by government.

    • Royal pair’s ‘scandalous’ Saudi Arabia plans slammed

      But controversy surrounding Saudi Arabia’s human rights record and recent political developments in the country, which applies a strict interpretation of Islamic law, has caused a number of participants to reconsider their involvement, according to the TV2 report.

      Spokesperson Nikolaj Villumsen of the left-wing Enhedslisten party was harshly critical of the proposed official visit.

      “I think it is completely scandalous, if it’s true that the royal family and industry representatives are on their way to Saudi Arabia,” Villumsen told TV2.

      “[Saudi Arabia] is a brutal dictatorship where supporters of democracy are whipped, dissidents are beheaded and princes throw millions at Isis and other extremists. This is not a country that should be receiving official visits from Denmark,” he continued.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Platform Loyalty

      The concept of “Neutrality of the platforms”, or “Loyalty of the platforms”, emerged among editors and web hosts that suffer or question the commanding position of major players of the Web, particularly in the USA and in other English speaking countries.

      These notions of “loyalty” and “neutrality” of the platforms may have been used to divert MPs from the debate on Net Neutrality.

      Platform loyalty should be envisaged in an environment where questions of the user’s control of its digital terminals (computer, tablet, mobile phone, other connected objects such as the ones referred to when talking about the “quantified self”, etc.), monopoly positions of some companies, problematics of tax system and revenue sharing are more and more intricate.

    • BT should be forced to sell Openreach service, report says

      BT should be forced to sell the country’s leading broadband provider because of poor performance, a report backed by 121 cross-party MPs has said.

      The report, commissioned by ex-Tory chairman Grant Shapps, said BT’s Openreach service had only partially extended superfast broadband despite £1.7bn of government money.

      It should be sold off to increase competition, the report added. BT should be forced to sell the country’s leading broadband provider because of poor performance, a report backed by 121 cross-party MPs has said.

      The report, commissioned by ex-Tory chairman Grant Shapps, said BT’s Openreach service had only partially extended superfast broadband despite £1.7bn of government money.

      It should be sold off to increase competition, the report added.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Pirate Party politics

      Each Pirate Party, whether in the UK or Sweden, operates independently rather than as one organisation and has seen varying degrees of success. Iceland’s Pirate Party is now the largest political party in the country, with high hopes for the 2017 general election. In the UK the Pirate Party is looking to increase its supporters and active members over the next year as well as contesting a number of seats in the May 2016 local elections.

    • WIPO Conference on IP and Development Provisional Programme Is Out

    • Copyrights

      • They put a Pirate Party MEP in charge of EU copyright reform: you won’t believe awesomesauce that followed

        Julia Reda, the sharp-as-a-tack Member of the European Parliament for the German Pirate Party, has just tendered her draft report on copyright reform in the EU. It is full of amazingly sensible suggestions.

        Among them: harmonizing EU exceptions to copyright (what would be called “fair use” in the USA), so that things that are permitted in one EU state are permitted in the others. This is very important because as it stands, a work that is legal in one EU country can be a copyright infringement next door, meaning that by crossing a border, you commit an offense, and meaning that artists who make transformative uses in one EU member state can be held liable for punishing fines next door.

        Another good ‘un: shortening the term of copyright to the term set out in the Berne Convention (life of the creator plus 50 years), ending the trend of extending EU copyright every time the Beatles and Elvis near the public domain.

      • EFF Warns Against Broad “Stay Down” Anti-Piracy Filters

        Copyright holders want websites to implement strict filters to guarantee that content stays down after a DMCA notice is received. The EFF warns against these demands, arguing that they will lead to a “filter everything” approach. According to the EFF this will result in more abuse and mistakes from often automated takedown bots.

      • UK Gov Opens Consultation on Netflix-Style Geo-Blocking

        The UK government has launched a public consultation on the EU’s proposals to ban Netflix-style geo-blocking. The government says it wants its citizens to be able to access legally purchased content wherever they travel in the European Union and is now seeking input from copyright owners, ISPs and consumers.

      • Piracy Can Boost Digital Music Sales, Research Shows

        A new academic paper published by the Economics Department of Queen’s University examines the link between BitTorrent downloads and music album sales. The study shows that depending on the circumstances, piracy can hurt sales or give it a boost through free promotion.

01.22.16

Benoît Battistelli es Repréndido por Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’, Quien Ha Iniciado Acciones Políticas en Su Contra

Posted in Europe, News Roundup at 8:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

English/Original

Publicado in Europe, Patents at 7:35 pm por el Dr. Roy Schestowitz

“La justicia, señor, es de gran interés para hombre en la tierra. Es el ligamento que une seres civilizados y naciones civilizadas juntos.”

–Daniel Webster

Pierre-Yves Le Borgn'
Photo via Wikipedia

Sumario: ¨He apelado al gobierno francés inmediatamente,¨ escribió Pierre-Yves Le Borgn´ ayer, habiendo sigo testigo del engaño de Pinocho Battistelli así como de la manera como ignoró las decisiones del comite disciplinario.

Días despues que Pierre-Yves Le Borgn´ arremetió contra el presidente de la OEP Benoit Battistelli (vealo en Ingles o Español) recibimos una traddución de otra carta del señor Le Borgn´. En ella a pesar de amenazantes cartas del tirano Battistelli, Pierre-Yves Le Borgn´ señala correctamente que el presidente Battistelli ¨impuso estas sanciones más allá de las recomendaciones dadas a él por el comite disciplinario de la OEP,¨ como cubrimos hace unos días. ¿Qué clase de TIRANO es Battistelli y porqué MINTIÓ a sus empleados (mentiras diseminadas por los ¨periodistas¨ quienes han probablemente difamado y acusado a favor de los chacales de Battistelli)? Aquí esta una traducción de lo que el señor Le Borgn´ escribió:

Me he enterado con asombro la decisión anunciada esta mañana por el presidente de la Oficina Europea de Patentes (OEP), Benoit Battistelli, al castigar 3 empleados de la OEP, lideres de la SUEPO en Munich. Estoy profundamente consternado. Dos de esos representantes, el primer la presidenta de la unión en Munich, la otra el anterior presidente, fueron despedidos. La presidenta incluso fue deprivada de parte de sus derechos de pensión. Un degradamiento de quince años de trabajo para el tercero.

Noté que el presidente Battistelli puso estas sanciones más allá de las recomendaciones que les fueron dadas por el comite disciplinario de la OEP. La VOLUNTAD DE HACER MALDAD, de ASUSTAR, para ERRADICAR TODO CRITICISMO asi como cualquier poder intermediario lo caracteriza. Incluso lo asume Noté que el presidente Battistelli puso estas sanciones más allá de las recomendaciones que les fueron dadas por el comite disciplinario de la OEP. La VOLUNTAD DE HACER MALDAD, de ASUSTAR, para ERRADICAR TODO CRITICISMO asi como cualquier poder intermediario lo caracteriza. Incluso lo asume.

He apelado al gobierno francés immediatamente. Lo que esta pasando es una VERGUENZA e INJUSTICIA TREMENDA. Espero que los estados miembros de la OEP, comenzando con Francia, intervengan urgentemente para poner punto final a la arbitrariedad y este movimento que arruina vidas, destruye familias y socava el trabajo de toda la organización. No puede ser aceptado que la immunidad que goza esta organización lleve a tantas desviaciones del gobierno de ley en que esta basado, entre otras cosas, con respecto por los derechos de los representantes de uniones y empleados, independencia de los comites disciplinarios en relación a la gerencia, y la proporcionalidad de las sanciones: estas son tantas preguntas que fueron completamente ignoradas aquí.

Una organización sólo tiene futuro cuando sus empleados son reconocidos en su projecto, en su gobernalidad y su gerencia. Esto no es el caso de la OEP. Es urgente por los estados miembros reflejar en las razones que llevaron a esto. Y claramente considerar la renovación de la gobernacia de la OEP asi como de su gerencia.

Nos gustaría citar algunos nuevos comentarios de IP Kat por que ayudan a mostrar como la gente se siente acerca del régimen de Battistelli, qu el señor Le Borgn´ debe haber estado estudiando recientemente.

George Brock-Nannestad, no se preocupa por anonimato (tiene huevos para sosterner sus palabras sin temer por futuras retribuciones), escribió: ¨parece como si todas las iniciativas de la OEP estan dirigidas a reducir su competencia al respecto de decidir a costo bajo quien tiene el mejor derecho a una innovación. La OEP esta dirigiendo majormente sus esfuerzos para aumentar la resolución de conflictos a costos altísimos, por instancia por realizar busquedas que resultan en listing de patentes que tienen que haber sido analizadas en privado. Los resultados de estos análisis son usados en evaluacion de ganar casos en corte, y los prospectos de costos se estan convirtiéndo prohibitivos que un arreglo es preferible. La parte de la industria que más la necesita es incapaz de predecir un resultado de una inversión en tecnologías nuevas. El propósito del sistema de patentes era incentivar la innovación, no crear estorbo y estancamiento.

¨Uno de los intentos de estimular las tecnicas y legales competencias de la OEP es la propuesta re-organización del Jurado de Apelaciones. La más directa y bien sustentada oposición a las propuestas oficiales ha venido de UNION-IP, a NGO que tiene muchos EPI miembros. Su propuesta fué publicada en epi-Information No. 4 of 2015, pp. 120-22 (available en http://patentepi.com/assets/uploads/documents/epi-information/epi_Information_4_2015.pdf — do your own copy-and-paste). La expresión ¨casi con las justas en linea con una independencia judicial¨ es usada en relación con la reposición de leyes como estan, incluso antes de una revisión. Es de gran crédito de EPI que hayan publicado texto tan incisivo.

¨En differente pero igualmente detrimente materia un contribuyente al jornal, Sr. A Hards, expresa sus puntos de vista en la reorganización de la EQE. (haciendo papeles A y B combinados por ambos mecánica y química; mismo número pp. 142-43). Leo su contribución como si el considera que la reorganización como una diluición de la profesión total. Exclama su sorpresa: ¨No puedo entender, porque el sistema candidato aleman apoy unos 6 meses de entrenamiento en la Corte Alemana de Patentes con lecturas, participacion en el juzgado, y cursos de experimentados jueces, mientras que la OEP no tiene nada comparable. ¿Donde están los miembros del Jurado de Apelaciónes? ¿Dónde están los expertos legales de la OEP y sus examinadores veteranos? Estos son los guardianes de la OEP caso de patentes leyes y juicios y como tales son las mejores fuentes de conocimiento para entrenamiento desde abajo.¨

¨Es mi impresión que el sistema de la OEP este desarrollándose hacia un menos interes en ´OEP caso de ley´.

¨La supresión de profesionalismo de los examinadores de la OEP que esta expuesto a luz contribuye al mismo fin: Una reducción de la capacidad oficial de evitar conflictos. Esos profesionales quienes han actuado como reporteros encubieros de la tendencia (que descubrieron antes que nadie) están considerados soplones en el estilo de las compañías farmáceuticas y tabacaleras. Las infracciones de los derechos humanos de estas personas son escandalosas pero no hay culpable ante ninguna ley aplicable.

¨Es incomprehensible que la UE es capaz de prohibir el etiquetamiento de productos del Banco Oeste ocupado por Israel originandose en Israel o instituir observaciones contra Polonia cada vez de cualquier supresión de la libertad por hablar, pero la UE es todavía capaz de contratar un subproveedor para patentes con efectos unitarios por una entidad que suprime los derechos humanos peormente. Considero que cualquier contrato hecho sea anulado y renegociado, tomando en consideración completo respeto a los derechos humanos dentro de la OEP. Cualquier violacion a los derechos humanos que hayan ocurrido deben ser revertidas con una compensación p or daños. El respeto por la UE esta viniéndose abajo por la compañía que tiene.¨

He mencionado en respuesta a George en una no halagadora manera, sin aludir lo dicho que considero espectaculativo o insuficientemente sustanciado/exacto. Otra persona (anonima) escribió: Sólo puedo estar de acuerdo con George que todo en la OEP esta en la pared. La pregunta es simplemente ¿por el benefico de quien? No me gustan las teorías conspiratorias del Sr. Schestowitz, pero a pesar de la exageración mostrada, hay algo verdadero en ellas.¨

He estado escribiendo acerca de patentes por más de una decada y a diferencia de aquellos que siguen la materia por que tienen ganancias de ella, soy voluntariamente crítico y expreso mis observaciones personales incluso cuando estas son negativas y potencialmente ofenvas. No hay ¨ẗeorías conspirativas¨ [sic] a menos que alguien de ejemplos de ellas. George me llamó ¨estidente¨ (o la palabra danesa por ella), pero eso no es un término desacreditador. El comentador sigue en: ¨me pregunto si BB tuvo una agenda escondida. Esta descubierta. Lo discernible es: YO SOY EL JEFE Y HAGO LO QUE QUIERO, IRRESPECTIVAMENTE DE CUALQUIER PROPOSICIÓN O DECISIÓN de cualquier comite, empleados/gerencia. Es PERVERSIÓN de la ley. La OEP necesita una reforma como fue sustentada en muchas maneras, no se puede negar, pero no por ser drástico como cayó. No simplemente para satisfacer el ego de such a persona despreciable como BB. Tal vez es tiempo de una unidad investigadora, pero nadie, sólo el y sus chacales, adivinó como podía ser malusada.

La presión de los examinadores se han convertido en tal que a pesar de su orgullo y profesionalismo no tienen alternativa pero tratar rapidamente con busquedas y la siguiente examinación. Incluso no tienen la elección de archivar lo que puedan. Tienen que seguir lo que el ordenador dice! Es entendible que sucede como en una cadena de fábrica, incluso no cuando proviene de un trabajo intelectual. La ente que dirige la OEP no son incluso gerentes, son IDIOTAS pensando que lo son. En cualquier organización privada hubieran sido despedidos hace tiempo, pero los miembros de la AC son inmovibles por lo menos la mayoría.¨

¨Podría aumentar la producción tratar casos fáciles, pero serán difíciles las que tendrán que ser tratadas.¨

¨Lo que esta pasando con el Jurado de Apelaciones es un escandalo. Hacer una propuesta en la que el Jurado no tenga que dictar sus propias reglas de procedimiento es increíble. Como un alumno de una de las ¨mejores¨ escuelas de Francia, BB debería saber lo que significa separación de poderes. Convenientemente lo ha olvidado. Por lo menos ha mostrado profundo desprecio que tiene hacia aquellos que no bailen con su música.¨

Aquí viene la parte acerca del rol/envolvimiento frances: ¨Ese BB esta en contra de las actuales autoridades francesas es para verse on otra situación. BB organizó en Lyon una reunión para celebrar 30 años de cooperacion con la SIPO. Las autoridades francesas no fueron invitadas, incluso informadas. Miren en http://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponot.nsf/0/7E1A61AB656965E2C1257E8F004CD6F8/$File/epo-sipo_symposium_programme_en.pdf

¨Esto tiene que ser analizado con las instrucciones dadas a los empleados de la OEP cuando visitan otros miembros estados para informar a la oficina de patentes nacionales. Haz lo que digo, pero no te atrevas a hacer lo que hago…¨

De nuevo otro ejemple de Battistelli ejerciendo autoridad sin supervisión.

¨Mejor paro ahora. Estoy hirviendo de rabia,¨ concluyo este comentador. █

01.21.16

Links 21/1/2016: Linux Foundation, Gates Foundation Under Fire; OpenStack Foundation Event Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 12:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • The State Of Meteor Part 1: Growing Pains

    The result of all this is that Meteor has ended up in an awkward place.

    New developers love how easy it is to get started with it, but can get discouraged when they start struggling with more complex apps. And purely from a financial standpoint, it’s hard to build a sustainable business on the back of new developers hacking on smaller apps.

  • Hardware

    • Can We Now Finally Agree that Smart Watches Were a Dumb Idea? – This is Apple’s Revenge on the Nerds

      Quick note to discuss the silly brief fad that was around smart watches. I said before they came that there was no real economy in it, and I said when the iToy sorry iWatch sorry Apple Watch was introduced, that it won’t set the world on fire, and that it will be a rare iFlop like the Newton and Lisa, not anything like total reinvention of tech such as the Mac was to PCs, iPod was to musicplayers and iPhone was to mobile phones (the last two, that I also predicted and discussed in my writing, including this, considered by many the best forecast about iPhone’s impact, by anyone who wrote about the iPhone before it launched). And when the Apple Watch was launched for sale, I wrote one more piece warning that there was nothing there. So now, the facts are slowly emerging. So lets take stock.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Michael Moore: Dear President Obama, please visit Flint

      I am writing this to you from the place where I was born—Flint, Michigan. Please consider this personal appeal from me and the 102,000 citizens of the city of Flint who have been poisoned, not by mistake or a natural disaster, but by a governor and his administration who, to cut costs, took over the city of Flint from its duly elected leaders, unhooked the city from its fresh water supply of Lake Huron, and then made the people drink toxic water from the Flint River. This was nearly two years ago.

      This week it was revealed that at least 10 people in Flint have been killed by these premeditated actions of the governor of Michigan. This governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the democratic election of this mostly African-American city—where 41% of the people live below the official poverty line—and replaced the elected mayor and city council with a crony who was instructed to take all his orders from the governor’s office.

    • Meet the Mom Who Helped Expose Flint’s Toxic Water Nightmare

      On a chilly evening last March in Flint, Michigan, LeeAnne Walters was getting ready for bed when she heard her daughter shriek from the bathroom of the family’s two-story clapboard house. She ran upstairs to find 18-year-old Kaylie standing in the shower, staring at a clump of long brown hair that had fallen from her head.

      Walters, a 37-year-old mother of four, was alarmed but not surprised—the entire family was losing hair. There had been other strange maladies over the previous few months: The twins, three-year-old Gavin and Garrett, kept breaking out in rashes. Gavin had stopped growing. On several occasions, 14-year-old JD had suffered abdominal pains so severe that Walters took him to the hospital. At one point, all of LeeAnne’s own eyelashes fell out.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why Won’t Iran Act Like Our Enemy?

      What a bad week for the war party. Darn you, Iran! The country that the armchair warriors most love to hate refuses to play the villain’s role assigned by the neoconservatives, “humanitarian” interventionists, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the establishment media.

    • The Story You Aren’t Being Told About Iran Capturing Two American Vessels

      The burning question now relates to whether or not Iran’s actions constitute an attack on the U.S. It’s not a simple question. Electronic warfare and cyber warfare have become common place. It is also worth noting the two US vessels were within just a few miles of Farsi Island. Farsi Island is the home of the Revolutionary Guards’ Navy (RGN). The RGN is Iran’s maritime unconventional warfare force. For comparison, imagine a scenario in which a nation that has attacked a US civilian airliner and whose political leaders have constantly threatened war sent two boats to pass extraordinarily close to the home base of a U.S. Seal Team. The reader can decide if Iran’s actions were appropriate.

      The most important takeaway from this incident is to remember the high-tech military of the United States has an exposed vulnerability. It’s a vulnerability that was exploited by Iran. Iran is not a nation many in military circles would see as technologically advanced. The drone warfare system has a fatal flaw. If Iran can exploit it, China and Russia certainly can. Even North Korea has been able to successfully disrupt the GPS system. Beyond simple navigation, the U.S. employs the GPS system to guide missiles. If the Iranians can jam and spoof their way into controlling a drone, it isn’t a huge leap to believe have the ability, or will soon have the ability, to do the same thing with guided missiles.

      It should be noted that GPS jammers are available on the civilian market and have been detected in use inside the United Kingdom. This revelation may also be the reasoning behind the U.S. decision to require drone operators to register their aircraft.

    • How Iraqis Remember The First Gulf War

      Twenty-five years after the first Iraq War, Operation Desert Storm is widely seen as a resounding American victory.

      “Desert Storm was probably the single most successful military campaign in the history of warfare,” retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey told Stars and Stripes. “It was an astonishing display by the country.”

      While the U.S. military successfully drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, the plight of Iraqi civilians — many of whom suffered under then-dictator Saddam Hussein before, during, and after Desert Storm — is often overlooked.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • What’s Being Done to Stop Palm Oil Plantations from Destroying Indonesia’s Rainforests?

      Palm oil is everywhere. The cheap substitute for trans fats can be found in products ranging from soap to processed foods, butter to lipstick to detergent. It’s primarily produced on plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, and that’s the problem—for years, the palm oil industry has been destroying the rainforests in the region, sometimes breaking Indonesian laws in the process and committing acts of violence against the indigenous people who live in these places.

    • Oil Rout Threatens to Scupper Demand for Palm Oil in Biofuel

      Crude oil’s slump has been so severe that it’s now threatening the government-aided biodiesel programs in the world’s top producers of palm oil.

      Indonesia may miss its target of raising blending to 20 percent if crude stays below $30 a barrel, according to Fadhil Hasan, executive director at the country’s palm oil association. The slump in crude will impact the implementation of the biodiesel program in Malaysia, the nation’s Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister Douglas Uggah Embas told an industry conference in Kuala Lumpur. The two nations account for 86 percent of the global palm oil supply.

      Oil is down about 21 percent this year amid volatility in Chinese markets and speculation the removal of restrictions that capped Iran’s crude sales will help to prolong a global glut. That’s sent the premium of crude palm oil over low sulphur gasoil futures to almost $290 a metric ton from the five-year average of a $13 discount. That’s clouded the outlook for palm oil prices, according to Thomas Mielke, executive director of Oil World, an industry researcher.

    • African elephants could be extinct ‘within a decade’

      African elephants could be extinct in the wild within the next decade, a major conservation conference in Botswana has been told.

      The Africa Elephant Summit, attended by delegates from around 20 countries including China – which is accused of fuelling the poaching trade – heard new figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature that showed the African elephant population fell from 550,000 to 470,000 between 2006 and 2013.

    • 2015 smashes record for hottest year, final figures confirm

      Experts warn that global warming is tipping climate into ‘uncharted territory’, as Met Office, Nasa and Noaa data all confirm record global temperatures for second year running

    • Pakistan turns to coal to keep factories running

      Till now, Pakistan has not used the bulk of its coal reserves – some of the largest in the world – for power generation. Not any more.

      Within the last month the government in Islamabad has signed a number of financial and technological agreements with China aimed at exploiting massive coal reserves at the Tharparkar mine in Sindh province, in the south of the country.

  • Finance

    • Domino’s delivery driver forced out for signing ‘minimum wage’ Change.org petition

      DOMINO’S is once again in hot water over its treatment of young employees after a delivery driver was forced to resign for sharing a link on Facebook.

      The 18-year-old driver, who did not wish to use his name, signed and shared a Change.org petition calling for better pay for Domino’s drivers.

      His regional manager, alerted to the post by a mutual friend, then shared the link to her own Facebook page, tagging the young driver.

      “What’s the go, mate?” she wrote, going on to single out another employee who had also signed the petition.

    • Gates Foundation accused of ‘dangerously skewing’ aid priorities by promoting ‘corporate globalisation’

      They are among the richest people on earth, have won plaudits for their fight to eradicate some of the world’s deadliest and prolific killers, and donated billions to better educate and feed the poorest on the planet.

      Despite this, Bill and Melinda Gates are facing calls for their philanthropic Foundation, through which they have donated billions worldwide, to be subject to an international investigation, according to a controversial new report.

      Far from a “neutral charitable strategy”, the Gates Foundation is about benefiting big business, especially in agriculture and health, through its “ideological commitment to promote neoliberal economic policies and corporate globalisation,” according to the report published by the campaign group Global Justice. Its influence is “dangerously skewing” aid priorities, the group says.

      [...]

      The group accuse the Gates Foundation of using its massive financial clout to silence international development experts and groups which would criticise its practices.

      Bill Gates, the report claims, “who has regular access to world leaders and is in effect personally bankrolling hundreds of universities, international organisations, NGOs and media outlets, has become the single most influential voice in international development.”

      [...]

      It accuses the Gates Foundation of promoting specific priorities through agriculture grants, some of which undermine the interests of small farmers. These include promoting industrial agriculture, use of chemical fertilisers and expensive, patented seeds, and a focus on genetically modified seeds. “Much of the Foundation’s work appears to bypass local knowledge,” the report claims.

      The criticism echoes the accusations made by the Indian scientist Vandana Shiva who called the Gates Foundation the “greatest threat to farmers in the developing world.”

    • TransCanada Corporation’s Arbitration Against the U.S. is Worrying for Democracy

      Each year companies lodge dozens of legal cases against governments under a little-known mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Few make headlines. But occasionally these cases do break through to the public’s attention, given the money at stake and the public interest involved.

      The latest case to fit that bill is by TransCanada Corporation—the Calgary-based energy firm—against the United States. The company seeks US$ 15 billion in damages over President Barack Obama’s decision to deny a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.

    • CK*wirtschaftsfacts in conversation with Michael Hudson

      It meant that if other governments do not pay the United States they are outcasts.

    • Martin Luther King — Paul Craig Roberts

      Martin Luther King, like John F. Kennedy, was a victim of the paranoia of the Washington national security establishment. Kennedy rejected General Lyman Lemnitzer’s Northwoods Project for regime change in Cuba, opposed the CIA’s invasion plan for Cuba, nixed Lemnitzer’s plans for conflict with the Soviet Union over the Cuban missile crisis, removed Lemnitzer as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and negotiated behind the scenes with Khrushchev to tone down the Cold War. Consequently, members of the military/security complex had it in for Kennedy and convinced themselves that Kennedy’s softness toward communism made him a security threat to the United States. The Secret Service itself was drawn into the plot. The films of the assassination show that the protective Secret Service personnel were ordered away from the President’s car just before the fatal shots.

    • An Oligarchy Has Broken Our Democracy. It Must Be Dislodged

      The concept of a ‘Deep State’ has been around for a while, but rarely to describe the United States.The term, used in Kemalist Turkey by the political class, referred to an informal grouping of oligarchs, senior military and intelligence operatives and organized crime, who ran the state along anti-democratic lines regardless of who was formally in power.

      I define the American Deep State as a hybrid association of elements of government and top-level finance and industry that is able, through campaign financing of elected officials, influence networks and co-option via the promise of lucrative post-government careers, to govern the United States in spite of elections and without reference to the consent of the governed.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Bowie and the Beeb [2016]

      To me this is his last great gift, he couldn’t give everything away but he did give us an idea of what it would mean to be popular, accessible and weird, angelic and liberated. The infrastructure of a public service broadcaster such as the BBC had a role in making David Bowie’s world, our world. This is the light by which it could navigate its future.

    • CMD Submits Testimony to U.S. Senate on Koch Self-Interest in Criminal Justice Reform

      The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has submitted testimony to the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee about the Koch-backed push to undermine corporate criminal accountability under the guise of “mens rea” reform. The testimony was submitted for the Committee’s January 20 hearing titled “The Adequacy of Criminal Intent Standards in Federal Prosecutions.”

      “Nobody should be above the law, no matter how rich, but the billionaire Koch Brothers have fueled a campaign through myriad groups they fund that would make it harder to prosecute corporate criminals for violating laws intended to protect American families from products or industrial practices that poison our water or air or that violate other environmental and financial laws,” said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director, who was previously served as the Chief Counsel for Nominations for Chairman Patrick Leahy of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice where she worked on criminal and civil justice policy.

    • VIDEO: Trevor Noah: British Debate on Barring Donald Trump Was Mostly an Excuse to Ridicule the Guy

      “The greatest part about this whole debate is that it actually wasn’t a debate,” says the “Daily Show” host about the U.K.’s recent discussion regarding a petition to bar Donald Trump from entering the U.K. “It turns out Parliament didn’t even hold a vote. They were all just there to sit around and make fun of Donald Trump.”

  • Censorship

    • After Auction House Censorship, Reporters Without Borders Cancels Benefit Art Sale

      An art auction intended to benefit the organization Reporters Without Borders (RWB) has been canceled after the Israeli embassy in Paris complained about one of the featured works. The piece in question, by French street artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest, included a drawing of the Palestinian politician Marwan Barghouti in handcuffs and a brief handwritten note comparing him to Nelson Mandela. (Barghouti, whom some have called “the Palestinian Mandela,” is currently serving five life sentences in Israel.)

    • Science and Censorship

      These acts represent an erosion of our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, inquiry and exchange of ideas. They create a “chilling effect” for scientists, textbook and other publishers who fear repercussions for producing data or advocating positions that are inconsistent with current political agendas or powerful corporate interests.

    • Fighting censorship with circumvention tools: Tor + Psiphon

      The censoring of information online is one of the greatest dangers to free speech on the Internet today. Many countries filter a wide variety of information of social and political significance, sometimes under the guise of ‘national security’. This problem is on the rise as the methods being used by governments have become more sophisticated and more resources are being allocated to the practice of censoring content.

      But activists and free expression advocates have not been sitting back. As the practice of Internet filtering spreads throughout the world, so does access to the “circumvention tools” that have been created, deployed and publicised by activists, programmers and volunteers The process of bypassing filtering and blocking websites is often called censorship circumvention, or simply circumvention. Some of these tools also allow users to share information securely and anonymously.

    • Censorship in the social media age

      Nearly half a million people had already seen the video before Dan Ilic tried to upload it to Facebook. A self-professed “investigative humorist,” Ilic manages the Facebook page for Hungry Beast, an Australian comedy show. The video—titled “The Labiaplasty Fad”—had been circulating on YouTube since the Hungry Beast released it in 2011, and Ilic wanted to repromote it after seeing mentions of labiaplasty in the news. But soon after clicking “Post,” he received a notice from the social site that the content had been removed and that he was banned from logging in for 24 hours. There was no additional explanation.

    • Disgraced Georgia Dentist Files Bogus Defamation Lawsuit To Go After Person Who Posted News Report To YouTube

      Years back, Georgia dentist Gordon Austin was indicted on 12 counts “with multiple counts of simple battery, aggravated assault, and cruelty to children.” The details of the case were pretty horrifying, involving claims of Medicare fraud, along with multiple claims that Austin hit his patients when they would complain loudly (apparently after the anesthesia did not work properly).

    • Facebook resorts to ‘like attacks’ on ISIS propaganda after losing censorship battle

      Facebook has resorted to pleading with its members to drown out hate filled propaganda messages from ISIS members with love after conceding defeat in its efforts to take offensive material offline.

      The switch in tactics will see people encouraged to mount ‘like attacks’ against pages professing support for the terror organisation after Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted losing a game of whack-a-mole with terrorist sympathisers who simply post new messages for every disabled page or account.

    • Facebook “Likes” Can Stop ISIS Recruiters, Says Sheryl Sandberg

      Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said “counter-speech” is best way to combat terrorist propaganda.

    • Sheryl Sandberg Thinks Facebook Likes Can Help Stop ISIS

      At the World Economic Forum and international billionaire side-hug exercise Davos, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg cited “like attacks” and positivity as ways to fight hate groups online. I know tech companies are struggling to meet the US government’s increasingly forceful pleas to eradicate terrorist activity on the internet, but this is getting ridiculous.

    • People can stop terrorists by liking their Facebook pages: Sheryl Sandberg
    • Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg claims the ‘like button’ could be used to defeat ISIS
    • Pakistan unblocks access to YouTube
    • Internet Censorship in Pakistan is Not Just About YouTube

      When rights groups and citizens took the state to court over the blocking of YouTube, the presiding judge, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah, shared their anguish over the state’s ambiguity. The right to information cannot be crippled in the garb of national security, morality or religion. And if it must be done, the restrictions imposed must be “reasonable”.

    • Facebook adds support for app that can bypass China’s censors
    • Facebook makes an app that tries to bypass China’s censors

      A tweak that Facebook made to its Android app could allow mobile customers in restricted places like China and Iran to connect to the social network.

      It’s a big step forward for human rights activists — and it could greatly expand Facebook’s reach into countries where its services are banned.

    • Facebook makes an app that can bypass China’s censors
    • Facebook Makes App that Can Bypass China’s Censors

  • Privacy

    • Adblock Plus just got uninvited from the internet-advertising industry’s big conference

      Popular ad blocker Adblock Plus claims that it was uninvited from the US Interactive Advertising Bureau’s big conference.

      The IAB represents the biggest names in the digital-advertising industry: Google, Facebook, Twitter, online publishers, and ad-tech companies.

      Each year it holds its annual leadership meeting in Palm Desert, California. It’s where the biggest names in the online-advertising industry network and thrash out their ideas on the issues and trends of the day.

      This year they’ve got Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, Yahoo’s global revenue chief Lisa Utzschneider, and Google ads boss Sridhar Ramaswamy speaking.

      Adblock Plus won’t be attending, though.

      Last week, Adblock Plus received an email saying that the company’s registration fee was being returned and its registration had been canceled.

    • EFF Pries More Information on Zero Days from the Government’s Grasp

      Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.1 In fact, in response to EFF’s FOIA suit to get access to the official U.S. policy on zero days, the government redacted every single reference to “offensive” use of vulnerabilities. To add insult to injury, the government’s claim was that even admitting to offensive use would cause damage to national security. Now, in the face of EFF’s brief marshaling overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the charade is over.

    • Chance for students to get feet in spy agency GCHQ door with £250-a-week summer job [Ed: Even today a free-of-charge job ad (recruitment) for GCHQ was published by corporate media]
    • Comparing Cell Phones To Houses Not Exactly Deterring Use Of Generalized Warrants, Court Finds

      Sometimes the courts realize today’s smartphones can’t be reasonably compared to anything else people have historically carried with them, like wallets, address books and the contents of their pockets. In the Supreme Court’s Riley decision, it noted that searching a smartphone is roughly analogous to searching someone’s house — people’s entire lives are contained in these devices. Hence, the warrant requirement, which turns phones from a “container” to the most sacrosanct domain under the Fourth Amendment.

    • GCHQ-developed phone security ‘open to surveillance’
    • Researcher warns of backdoor in GCHQ-developed encryption
    • UCL research says government-backed encryption has a big backdoor
    • The US Military Wants A Computer to Convert Your Brain Activity Into Binary Code

      As a part of DARPA’s programs to support President Obama’s brain initiative, this advanced research organization has announced a new program called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD). This program aims to create a new computer-brain interface (‘biocompatible’ device) that will support data transfer at super fast speed.

    • Thanks to our supporters, we can make our mass surveillance film

      Thanks to our supporters, we more than reached the target of our Indiegogo crowd-funder. With your help we raised £20,624, which we’re going to use to produce a high-quality campaign video to explain the implications of the Investigatory Powers Bill to people who may not be fully aware of it.

    • The White House Asked Social Media Companies to Look for Terrorists. Here’s Why They’d #Fail.

      An increasingly large proportion of terrorism investigations these days start with tweets or posts, generally flagged by family members or informants. Civil libertarians worry that the FBI is using protected speech to identify potential subjects of entrapment. But the FBI’s concern is that it’s not seeing everything it needs to see.

      And at the same time, there’s increased pressure for social media companies to deny radical groups an open platform for speech.

      No wonder the government wants an algorithm.

      But there are some major problems with trying to use computer code to find “terrorists” or “terrorist” content.

      First of all, it doesn’t work. Many experts, including people with law enforcement, academic, and scientific backgrounds, agree that it’s practically impossible to boil down the essential predictive markers that make up a terrorist who is willing and capable of carrying out an attack and then successfully pick him out of a crowd.

    • Does the government want to break encryption or not?

      As TechCrunch observes, however, this kind of threat of companies enabling internal backdoors is already displacing the technology used by ISIS to set ups that are not under the control of central platforms. So such an approach could end up with privacy for the criminals, but not for ordinary, law abiding ctiizens.

    • What Agency Is Claiming Hillary Received SAP Emails?

      Note, the letter makes clear that those reporting Hillary had two SAP emails may not be correct: Charles McCullough’s letter doesn’t say how many emails were SAP and how many were CONFIDENTIAL. And the letter is conveniently written in a form that can be shared with the press without key information that would allow us to test the claims made in it.

    • EFF Pries More Information on Zero Days from the Government’s Grasp

      Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.1 In fact, in response to EFF’s FOIA suit to get access to the official U.S. policy on zero days, the government redacted every single reference to “offensive” use of vulnerabilities. To add insult to injury, the government’s claim was that even admitting to offensive use would cause damage to national security. Now, in the face of EFF’s brief marshaling overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the charade is over.

    • Pkware aims to take pain out of crypto (and give IT the golden key)

      One of the reasons that most people don’t use public key encryption to protect their e-mails is that the process is simply too arduous for everyday communications. Open source projects like GNU Privacy Guard and GPGTools have made it easier for individuals to use PGP encryption, but managing the keys used in OpenPGP and other public-key encryption formats still requires effort. And it’s even more of a challenge when you want to read encrypted messages on your phone. If you’re a company that has concerns about things like compliance and data loss, doing crypto without having some sort of key management can also create all sorts of risks.

    • French say ‘Non, merci’ to encryption backdoors

      The French government has rejected an amendment to its forthcoming Digital Republic law that required backdoors in encryption systems.

      Axelle Lemaire, the Euro nation’s digital affairs minister, shot down the amendment during the committee stage of the forthcoming omnibus digital bill, saying it would be counterproductive and would leave personal data unprotected.

      “Recent events show how the fact of introducing faults deliberately at the request – sometimes even without knowing – the intelligence agencies has an effect that is harming the whole community,” she said according to Numerama.

    • France Rejects Backdoors in Encryption Products
    • Groups want U.S. to adopt strong broadband privacy rules

      A coalition of U.S. groups on Wednesday urged the Federal Communications Commission to write sweeping privacy protections for the nation’s broadband users.

      The groups want providers of broadband internet services including mobile and landline phone, cable and satellite TV firms to be subject to tough privacy regulations.

      Among the firms that would be affected are AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp, Verizon Communications Inc and Cablevision Systems Corp.

    • These emails show how upset NSA spies were with the ‘Enemy of the State’ film

      Employees at the secretive National Security Agency were not too happy about the 1998 blockbuster film “Enemy of the State” that starred Will Smith.

      That shouldn’t come as a surprise — the spy agency was portrayed as the villain — but now BuzzFeed News has obtained internal emails that prove it.

      “I saw a preview for the new movie ‘Enemy of the State’ and to my surprise found out that NSA were the ‘bad guys’ in it,” wrote one NSA employee in a question to the agency’s public affairs team.

    • NSA Tried P.R. Effort With Film “Enemy Of The State,” Was Massively Disappointed

      The National Security Agency attempted a public relations makeover in 1998 via the Jerry Bruckheimer produced spy-thriller, Enemy of the State, but the agency was disappointed it was portrayed as the “bad guys” in the film, internal emails between agency officials obtained by BuzzFeed News through the Freedom of Information Act show.

      One employe wrote in 1998, “Unfortunately, the truth isn’t always as riveting as fiction and creative license may mean that ‘the NSA,’ as portrayed in a given production, bears little resemblance to the place where we all work.”

      In the 1998 blockbuster film starring Will Smith, Congress, pressed by the NSA, attempts to pass a bill expanding the agency’s surveillance powers. At the start of the film, several NSA agents kill a congressman opposing their efforts. However, they do not realized they were secretly recorded by a bird watcher. The bird watcher, chased by the NSA, passes the information along to Will Smith’s character, who subsequently finds his phones tapped, clothing bugged, and house burglarized.

  • Civil Rights

    • Jimmy Savile: BBC staff say corporation has ‘ingrained’ culture of quashing dissent

      The BBC has an “ingrained” culture of quashing dissent, staff said, as a leaked official report expressed concerns that “a predatory child abuser could be lurking undiscovered in the BBC even today”.

      A draft of the Dame Janet Smith Review of practices at the BBC found that the fear of whistle-blowing at the organisation was “even worse” in the current era than at the time Jimmy Savile was abusing children while working for the broadcaster.

    • Jimmy Savile inquiry leak reveals scathing criticism of BBC

      A draft report into the BBC’s practices at the time of the Jimmy Savile scandal has been leaked by the investigative news website, Exaro.

      The review led by Dame Janet Smith is said to include “devastating detail” of the broadcaster’s “sheer scale of awareness” of the late TV and radio star’s activities.

      It will criticise the corporation’s culture, according to Exaro, which says it has seen a leaked draft.

      The report is said to point to a “deferential culture”, “untouchable stars” and “above the law” managers at the corporation. However, the BBC cannot be criticised for failing to uncover Savile’s “sexual deviancy”, it says.

      The retired judge’s report outlines multiple rapes and indecent assaults on children by Savile which she claims were all “in some way associated with the BBC”.

    • How a Young American Escaped the No-Fly List

      YASEEN KADURA ARRIVED at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport more than four hours early for his flight to New York on January 15, hoping to ensure that security delays wouldn’t stop him from making his flight on time. Kadura had not been allowed to board a plane for roughly three-and-a-half years, but in his hand was a laminated copy of a letter from the Department of Homeland Security, which stated in writing that “the U.S. government knows of no reason Mr. Kadura should be unable to fly.”

      Kadura, an American citizen, was placed on the federal government’s no-fly list in 2012. Since then, in addition to being prevented from boarding flights, he has been detained, interrogated, and harassed at border crossings and pressured by authorities to become a government informant.

    • Web Exclusive: Drone War Protester Mary Anne Grady Flores Speaks Out Ahead of Six-Month Jail Term

      Peace activist Mary Anne Grady Flores gives an extended web-only interview just hours before she reports to jail to begin a six-month sentence for photographing a protest at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in New York, where U.S. drones are piloted remotely. We also speak with Jonathan Wallace, an attorney who has worked extensively with the drone resistance movement.

    • Two Americans Detained in Iran Are Not Coming Home

      After retiring from the FBI in 1998, Levinson worked as a CIA contractor. Levinson was supposed to produce academic papers for the agency, but operated much like a case officer. Levinson traveled the globe to meet with potential sources, sometimes using a fake name. CIA station chiefs in those countries were allegedly never notified of Levinson’s activities overseas, even though the agency reimbursed him for his travel.

    • DOJ’s Double Standard on Osama Bin Laden Trophy Photos

      I don’t defend Bissonnette if his side deals were corrupt. But this is bullshit on several levels.

      Of course, many people, including me, have noted that Bissonnette’s book was an attempt to push back on the information asymmetry — and with it, propaganda — that the government uses classification to pull off.

      [...]

      Bissonnette’s problem, I guess, is he was allegedly both, someone who shared information that undercut official propaganda, and someone who traded on his position.

    • When resting is resistance

      Activists fixate on the future: impatient for the world we want to see.

    • Let’s Put Prison Sentences on Probation

      You may have heard there’s a growing political movement against mass incarceration. Someone should clue in the judges.

      In the past 30 years, federal judges have turned to imprisonment — as opposed to probation — as the punishment of choice for even minor crimes, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. During that same period, federal cases have tripled in number.

      The Pew study reports that “nine in 10 federal offenders received prison sentences in 2014, up from less than half in 1980, as the use of probation steadily declined.” Despite the ballooning number of cases in that time, 2014 saw 2,300 fewer probation sentences than 1980.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Numbers don’t lie—it’s time to build your own router

      I’ve noticed a trend lately. Rather than replacing a router when it literally stops working, I’ve needed to act earlier—swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area. (Note, I am duly thankful for this problem.) As the latest example, a whole bunch of Netgear ProSafe 318G routers failed me for the last time as small businesses have upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable).

      Yes, coax—not fiber. Even coax has proved too much for the old ProSafe series. These devices didn’t just fail to keep up, they fell flat on their faces. Frequently, the old routers dropped speed test results from 9mbps with the old connection to 3mbps or less with the 50mbps connection. Obviously, that doesn’t fly.

    • VPN providers mad about Netflix crackdown but say they can evade it

      With Netflix saying it intends to disable video when customers use VPN services, VPN providers are criticizing the online video company and vowing to evade any measures designed to prevent their use.

      Under pressure from content owners, Netflix said last week that it will step up enforcement against subscribers who use VPNs, proxies, and unblocking services to view content not available in their countries. But even Netflix acknowledges that it’s “trivial” for VPN providers to avoid blocks by switching IP addresses, and VPN providers say they’re ready.

    • Netflix Is About To Get More Expensive for Some Users

      The company reiterated in a note to shareholders Tuesday that those lower-paying users will soon face a choice: Keep paying $7.99 a month but get downgraded to standard-definition streaming only, or fork over the $9.99 a month that new customers pay and get full high-definition content.

    • Netflix Applauds T-Mobile’s Binge On, Forgets It Opposed Zero Rating Just Last Year

      But as the EFF has pointed out, the fact that users can opt out is irrelevant. T-Mobile’s been throttling every shred of video that touches its network to 1.5 Mbps (streamed or direct downloaded) by default, and then lying about it. Critics like YouTube and the EFF have, quite correctly, pointed out that such a program should be opt-in, for both consumers and content partners. The other problem is simply one of precedent; let T-Mobile dick about with how content gets treated, and that opens the door to every carrier modifying traffic to their own benefit.

      By refusing to ban zero rating outright, the FCC has opened the door to a flood of similar ideas that are even worse and, cumulatively and aggressively, are eroding the idea of an open Internet. Worse, it’s happening to the thunderous applause of some consumers, who think they’re being given a gift when an ISP imposes utterly arbitrary usage caps, then graciously allows select content to bypass said caps. Make no mistake though; the act of fucking about with traffic in this fashion is an assault on net neutrality. That many people don’t understand this yet (or are eager to ignore the fact when it benefits them) doesn’t magically make it less true.

      A few years ago, Netflix’s Hastings went on a Facebook rant about how Comcast was unfairly letting its own streaming services bypass the company’s usage caps. But now that Netflix is seeing benefits from zero rating, it’s apparently willing to throw its principles in the toilet. Netflix may want to be careful where it treads. As some companies have discovered, zero rating isn’t your friend — and the special treatment that benefits you today may come back to bite you tomorrow.

    • 8 reasons to make the switch to IPv6

      Owen DeLong is a Senior Manager of Network Architecture at Akamai Technologies, a leader in content delivery network (CDN) services that help to make the Internet “fast, reliable, and secure.” He will be speaking at SCaLE 14x about IPv6 adoption (because we’re out of IPv4!). Owen is also a member of the ARIN Advisory Council—an advisory group to the Board of Trustees on Internet number resource policy and related matters—and is an active member of the systems administration, operations, and Internet Protocol policy communities.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • GM’s Newly Acquired Patent Could Be a Problem for Uber

      Two weeks after announcing it’s working with Lyft on a network of self-driving cars, General Motors is snapping up employees and intellectual property from the recently defunct ride sharing company Sidecar.

      The move, reported by Bloomberg Business, will bring about 20 former Sidecar employees to GM, including CTO Jahan Khanna. GM has confirmed it’s scooping up employees and IP from Sidecar, but declined to specify details.

      GM hasn’t said anything about what kind of work its new employees will be doing or how it will use the newly acquired IP. A spokesman says the move has nothing to do with the Lyft deal, and that the automaker simply jumped on a good opportunity to pick up some expertise in an area it’s starting to explore.

    • UK IP Office Unveils 5-Year Strategy to Make Businesses More IP-Aware

      The United Kingdom has a vibrant creative sector but many businesses don’t take full advantage of their intellectual property, IP Minister Baroness (Lucy) Neville-Rolfe said in her introduction to an Intellectual Property Office five-year strategy report released today. IPO research shows that over 90 percent of firms haven’t valued their IP, and small to mid-sized companies often don’t understand or know how to protect it, she said. Even a modest boost in those figures could have a significant impact on the UK economy, she said.

    • Trademarks

      • Sony On A Rampage Trademarking Common Terms: Attempted Registrations For ‘Let’s Play’ And ‘VRPG’

        It’s no secret that Sony has never been shy about wielding trademark like a cudgel. That said, there seems to be something new brewing with the company in its recent attempts to trademark fairly common terms, worrying some that it would use those trademarks in the same heavy-handed way. The first of those attempts was the recent Sony filing for a trademark on the term “Let’s Play”, which any gamer will recognize as the term for popular YouTube videos showing games being played, often offered by well-known YouTube personalities. While the USPTO had already refused the trademark on the grounds that a prior mark for “Let’z Play” had already been registered, a law firm that specializes in gaming law jumped in to try and have the court instead declare that “Let’s Play” is now a generic term.

      • Arnold J rules that shape of KitKat chocolate bar cannot be registered as a trade mark

        Can the shape of the KitKat chocolate bar be registered as a trade mark on grounds that it has acquired distinctiveness through use? What is required to prove that a trade mark has acquired distinctiveness through use?

        As IPKat readers will remember, these were some of the very issues that Arnold J had to address in the context of litigation between Nestlé and Cadbury over the shape of the (in)famous chocolate bar that the former had already attempted in vain to register as a UK trade mark in Class 30.

    • Copyrights

      • Linking to unlawful content: what will the CJEU say?

        In the meantime, Katfriend and IP enthusiast Nedim Malovic (Stockholm University) has provided a recap of what has happened since Svensson [Katposts here] and ventured to anticipate what the CJEU might say in the near future. His conclusion? The CJEU will likely regard linking to unlawful content as an act of communication to the public.

      • REPORT: Copyright royalties for streaming music to increase
      • Federal Judge MAY Set Up Pro Bono Legal Assistance For Defendants Sued By Voltage Pictures/Carl Crowell [UPDATED]

        Now, it appears Crowell has made an enemy in the federal court system. Unfortunately for him, this enemy is presiding over most of his Doe lawsuits. Fight Copyright Trolls reports federal judge Michael W. Mosman has set up Default Judgment Roadblock, Esq. in response to Crowell’s tactics.

      • Copyright Week 2016: Making Copyright Work For The Public

        It’s hard to believe we’re almost three years into the U.S. copyright reform process kicked off with a call to Congress for the Next Great Copyright Act—and that we’re kicking off the third annual Copyright Week to boot. Once again, we’re working alongside great partners in the copyright space to make sure that the public—from technology users, to readers, to fans, to artists—get their voice heard in debates that are all too often limited to a few industry lobbies.

        We’re entering a critical stage, too. It’s been four years this week since Internet users staged the largest ever online protest of a bad copyright law, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that would’ve curtailed online speech and created a system of blacklists for sites and users. Four years ago, millions of us spoke up and derailed that proposal. But a lot can change in four years, and indeed we’ve started to see Hollywood and others try to sneak elements of SOPA back into the debate, through private agreements with intermediaries, influence on state officials, extraordinary injunctions in court, and more.

      • Pirate Site Trial in Norway Ends in Record Sentence

        Together the studios went tough by demanding six months in jail plus more than $93,000 in damages.

        But despite agreeing that the main had illegally made available at least 1,200 films and TV shows, downloaded around 700 from The Pirate Bay and then made them available to the public, the ruling from Tønsberg District Court falls far short of those demands.

        According to information distributed to its members yesterday, Rights Alliance said that the Court handed the now 21-year-old a six month suspended sentence and ordered him to pay around $28,000.

      • ‘Arr!’ Forget Icesave, Iceland’s Next Scare Is the Pirate Party

        From Spain’s Podemos to France’s National Front, anti-establishment parties are clamoring for power across Europe. Up north in Iceland, it’s Pirates who are making the biggest ahoys.

        With just over a year until parliamentary elections are due, the Icelandic Pirate Party has been consistently topping opinion polls.

        Should that support translate into real votes, it would win more than a third of the ballots, making it the biggest party in a country traditionally governed by coalitions.

        That could have a revolutionary effect on a country that’s only now returning to normal after the 2008 collapse of its biggest banks. While the Pirates’ main focus is on direct democracy and less stringent copyright laws, they also want to introduce a 35-hour work week and split the investment and commercial units of banks.

        The country’s prime minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, isn’t too concerned.

01.20.16

Links 20/1/2016: Brave Software’s New Browser, GitHub Under Fire

Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

01.19.16

Links 19/1/2016: qBittorrent 3.3.2, Manjaro Linux 15.12

Posted in News Roundup at 10:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What a Linux User Misses From Windows

    Recently I found myself thinking back to when I first started using Linux, roughly thirteen years ago. Back then, I was dual-booting with Windows because Linux was merely a curiosity for me and something interesting to explore. Today, I use Linux exclusively.

    It’s not only my go-to platform, I simply couldn’t imagine using anything else. In this article, I’ll explore some things I miss about using Windows. This isn’t to say I miss Windows, because I honestly don’t. But there are elements of the Windows experience, that I’ve found myself missing lately.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • GParted 0.25.0 Lands with Progress Bars for EXT4 and NTFS Operations, Bugfixes

      The GParted development team was happy to announce today, January 18, the release and immediate availability for download of the GParted 0.25.0 open-source partition editor software for GNU/Linux operating systems.

    • Reviews

      • Deepin Takes Linux to New Depths

        The latest release of the Linux distro now called “Depth OS” deserves serious consideration. It is fast, reliable and innovative, with an impressive homegrown desktop design dubbed “Deepin Desktop Environment,” or DDE.

        Depth OS has a bit of an identity problem. It’s not well known outside Asia and Europe, but that’s not the major cause of confusion.

    • New Releases

      • Rescatux 0.40 Beta 5 System Rescue Live CD Out Now with UEFI Boot Support

        Rescatux developer Adrian Raulete today (January 18) informs Softpedia about the immediate availability for download and testing of the fifth Beta build for the upcoming Rescatux 0.40 Debian-based Live CD targeted at system rescue operations.

      • Gorgeous Zorin OS 11 Linux Is Now in Beta, Based on Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf)

        A few minutes ago, on January 19, 2016, the Zorin OS developers were extremely happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the first Beta build of the upcoming Zorin OS 11 computer operating system.

        Being based on Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Zorin OS 11 will be released later this year with a completely revamped desktop environment. The fact of the matter is that the entire Zorin OS experience will be overhauled with a new look and feel, new tools, and much more.

      • SystemRescueCd 4.7.1 Free System Recovery Live CD Incorporates GParted 0.25.0

        Just a few moments ago, January 18, SystemRescueCd developer François Dupoux proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of SystemRescueCd 4.7.1.

        SystemRescueCd 4.7.1 comes right after the announcement of the GParted 0.25.0 free and open-source partition editor software, which is now integrated into the system recovery Live CD. Additionally, the first maintenance release in the SystemRescueCD 4.7 series updates the FSArchiver filesystem archiver tool for Linux to version 0.6.21, improving support for XFS file systems.

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Update 2016-01-18 (stable)

        We are happy to announce our fourth update for Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!

        With this update, we renewed our our manjaro-desktop-settings packages, added KDE Framework 5.18, KDE Apps 15.12.1 and some newer Deepin 12.15 packages to our repositories. As usual Mesa, SQLite, Hasekell and Python packages got updated, new configs for the 4.4 kernel series and a fix for Plasma Desktop. We also updated our printer-stack, fixed some issues in QT5 and espeak and added some needed firmware to our manjaro-firmware package.

      • Latest Manjaro Linux 15.12 Stable Update Adds New Configs for Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

        The Manjaro community, through project leader Philip Müller, proudly announced today, January 18, the general availability of the fourth stable update for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) series of operating systems.

    • Red Hat Family

      • DevOps tool Ansible gets a major overhaul

        If you’re going to really make use of a cloud to its full potential, you need DevOps tools. And one of the best of these tools has just gotten a serious makeover: Ansible 2.0.

        This is the first major release of Ansible since Red Hat bought the company in October 2015.

        Ansible brings to the Red Hat‘s OpenStack-based OpenShift cloud an agent-less cloud management approach. Ansible is not, however, OpenStack specific. It can work with, to name but a few, VMware, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

        Like most DevOps programs, e.g., Chef, Juju and Puppet, Ansible doesn’t require your IT crew to be coding samurai. It’s designed to make it easy to automate cloud deployment and configuration to rolling upgrades.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Hands-on with piCore 7.0: Tiny Core Linux for the Raspberry Pi

      This is going to be a tiny post (pun intended). The recent announcement of piCore Linux 7.0 caught my eye — I have been meaning to try Tiny Core on the Raspberry Pi. The fact that they now have one distribution which will run on both Pi 1 and P 2 hardware was just the impetus I needed to actually download it and give it a try.

      First, what is Tiny Core Linux? It is one part of The Core Project, which produces very, very small Linux distributions. Their smallest distribution is about 10MB, a size I haven’t seen since the days when I was loading 7th Edition Unix on a Motorola 68000-based system. The distribution is modular, so it is easy to add extensions.

    • LOHAN takes the stage at Oz Linux shindig

      Our Oz readers attending the forthcoming linux.conf.au 2016 shindig in Geelong might like to catch Andrew Tridgell’s presentation on “Helicopters and Rocket-Planes”, which will include a look at our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane.

      As regular readers know, Linux guru Tridge has been working on the custom ArduPilot parameters for the vehicle’s Pixhawk autopilot, seen below with our Raspberry Pi rig during an avionics rejig in 2014.

    • Pocket-sized Linux server doubles as a smartphone power pack

      iCracked’s “Ocean” is a tiny battery powered microserver and power pack that comes with Debian but also supports Android, Raspbian, and other Linux builds.

      You might call iCracked the “Uber” of the iOS device repair market. Founded in 2010, the company has since grown into a network over 4,000 “certified iTechs” located in a dozen countries, and claimed to be “the world’s largest on-demand repair and trade-in network for iOS devices.”

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Indus OS Raises $5M To Make Android Work For First-Time Smartphone Users In India

          If you want proof that Android is the operating system of emerging markets, look no further than Indus OS. The company, formerly known as Firstouch, is tweaking the Google-run operating system to the unique demands and culture of India. And it’s raised $5 million in fresh funding to push on with its lofty target of reaching one billion emerging market users.

        • Bluboo Xwatch claims to be a $99 Android Wear superwatch

          Bluboo is to release its Xwatch Android Wear smartwatch this February, according to its blog. What’s more, the Chinese-built smartwatch has been reported by GizChina to cost just $99.99.

          It’s claimed that the Bluboo Xwatch will pack a 1.2GHz processor with 4GB of storage and a 1.3-inch, 360 x 360 pixel display. That compares to the Moto 360′s 1.56 inch, 360 x 330 screen, and it doesn’t seem as if the Xwatch suffers the ignominy of the flat tyre. At 9.8mm the Xwatch also claims to be thinner than the likes of the Apple Watch (10.5mm), as well as the Moto 360 (11.4mm).

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source software powers NASA’s Mars VR project

    Parker Abercrombie is a software engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he builds software to support Mars science missions. He has a special interest in geographic information systems (GIS) and has worked with teams at NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy on systems for geographic visualization and data management.

    Parker holds an M.A. in geography from Boston University and a B.S. in creative studies with emphasis in computer science (which he swears is more technical than it sounds) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In his spare time, Parker enjoys baking bread and playing the Irish wooden flute.

  • A first-timer’s guide to getting started with open source code and communities

    Every package is a little different—some run on different operating systems than your home machine, some have different dependencies, some expect a certain minimum level of technical expertise. Some are crazy-easy, like LibreOffice or WordPress. Some are much more challenging due to factors like high complexity, lots of moving parts, lots of dependencies, or that the community’s developers haven’t yet gotten the installers built like they want to. But as someone who’s looked at a lot of different packages out there can tell you, there are some pretty common lessons learned that you can—if you’re wise—learn from the easy way (by reading them here) rather than the hard way (wrestling with that installation at midnight when you should be doing something else).

  • How Kubernetes is helping Docker blossom

    Kubernetes and Docker are the latest buzz words in the IT sector. Businesses and IT enthusiasts alike are clamoring to learn more about containerization.

  • Licensing

Leftovers

01.18.16

Links 18/1/2016: AsteroidOS With GNU, NetworkManager 1.2

Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 2016 Has Been Off To A Great Start For Open-Source & Linux

    We are only half-way through January yet there’s been so much exciting news already for open-source and Linux enthusiasts as well as when it comes to interesting computer hardware.

    Given the amount of news already in the first two weeks of the year, here’s a look at some of the most popular content on Phoronix already for 2016. Thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show, more Vulkan news, AMDGPU details, the start of the Linux 4.5 kernel cycle, and more, it’s been very busy so far.

  • Get new users…
  • Mycroft: Linux’s Own AI

    The future is artificially intelligent. We are already surrounded by devices that are continuously listening to every word that we speak. There is Siri, Google Now, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. The biggest problem with these AI “virtual assistants” is that users have no real control over them. They use closed source technologies to send every bit of information they collect from users back to their masters.

  • Three “Open Source” Investing Strategies to Start Using Today

    More and more tech companies are building their success by going “open source.”

    By that, I mean they’re using open-source tech platforms like Linux and Hadoop – which are free and open to the public to use – to write code, create cloud storage, and develop Big Data applications. With these platforms, they’re saving money, running their business more efficiently… and raking in the profits.

    I thought of open-source platforms recently – on New Year’s Eve.

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • High Performance computing and parallel computing amateur linux test lab

      I dabble in trying to build high performance applications, and parallel computing stuff. I don’t do a good job at it, but I would like more practice. I tried to conceive of the type of hardware I would like for my continued practice. These are their stories:

      I know from bitcoin mining that some instruction sets are better at somethings, so I’m pretty sure I want two servers, with dual graphics cards. One nvidia, and one ATI (or maybe I’m just an ATI guy but nvidia is kind of sort of blowing them out of the water). I also know I’m probably going to want two Parallella’s.

    • Ocean is an amazing Linux based battery-powered, pocket sized wireless server

      Ocean, a mobile server launched by Redwood-based hardware repair company iCracked, can run all Linux-based operating systems that is built on top of the Linux kernel. It can easily fit into your pocket but is capable of being a full-blown battery powered wireless web server.

  • Kernel Space

    • Coreboot Ported To The Librem 13 Laptop, Without Purism

      The controversial, crowd-funded Librem laptop that aimed to be fully open down to the firmware but ended up shipping with an AMI UEFI firmware for the initial release has now been ported to Coreboot for the Librem 13 model. The Coreboot support wasn’t done by Purism, the company behind the Librem, but rather a Coreboot developer at Google.

    • Features & Changes Merged So Far For The Linux 4.5 Kernel

      We are one week into the two week merge window for the Linux 4.5 kernel. There have been multiple Phoronix articles daily about changes and new features of Linux 4.5. If you’re looking at catching up on your reading this weekend, here is a look at the interesting changes that landed this week.

    • Linux 4.5 DRM Pull Has Initial Kabylake Support, Open-Source Vivante 3D

      David Airlie sent in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates today for targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window.

      As usual, the DRM updates for this next Linux kernel release are quite exciting.

    • Facebook Has Been Baking A New Space Cache System For Btrfs

      Btrfs lead developer Chris Mason explained that this forthcoming free space cache is tree-based and is faster with less overall work for updating as the commit progresses.

    • Karen Sandler: I’m Running for the Linux Foundation Board of Directors

      As we begin a new year, I’m super excited that Conservancy has almost reached our initial target of 750 Supporters (we’re just 4 Supporters away from this goal! If you haven’t signed up, you can push us past this first milestone!). We launched our Supporter program over a year ago and more recently, in November, we asked you all to become Supporters now so that Conservancy can survive. Conservancy is moving toward a funding model primarily from individuals rather than larger corporate sponsors. While we are about to reach our minimal target, we still have a long way to go to our final goal of 2,500 Supporters — which will allow us to continue all of Conservancy’s critical programs, including copyleft enforcement. Many individuals have come forward to donate, and we hope that many more of you do so too! I was really excited about the statement of support published last week by the GNOME Foundation, and in particular their point that enforcement is necessary and benefits GNOME and free software as a whole.

    • Security Updates For Linux 4.5 Brings Improvements For Smack, EVM & TPM

      Linus Torvalds pulled in the security subsystem updates this weekend for the Linux 4.5 kernel.

      Security updates for Linux 4.5 include TPM/TPM2 enhancements for the Trusted Platform Module, Smack now supports file-receive process-based permission checking for sockets, and EVM has support for loading an x509 certificate from the kernel into the EVM trusted kernel keyring. There are also bug-fixes and other minor improvements as part of these security updates for Linux 4.5.

    • Graphics Stack

      • 12 Years After Launch, The GeForce 6 Can Still Run On Modern Linux Distributions

        Originally I was going to include the GeForce 6 series too with still having some GeForce 6600GT graphics cards. However, I ended up leaving those out since the 6600GT couldn’t mode-set to 2560×1600 to match the other GPUs (and not testing at a lower resolution due to the newer GPUs then being very CPU bound). Additionally, with the 6600GTs having just 256MB of GDDR3 video memory, they aren’t good for running modern OpenGL tests. Lastly, these cards from NVIDIA’s “Nalu” days only support OpenGL 2.1 where at least ending with the GeForce 8 series still were able to run OpenGL 3.3 benchmarks.

      • Nvidia Linux Beta Driver Breaks Civilization V and KOTOR2, Causes Crashes

        Nvidia recently launched a new Beta driver, 361.18 , for the Linux platform, and it only brought support for a couple of new GPUs. It turns out that it also had a fix regression that affected KDE, and that’s it’s actually crashing people’s PC with at least a couple of games.

      • Yes, Mesa Is Working Towards GLVND Support
      • NVIDIA Publishes Nouveau Patches For Secure Boot, Unified Firmware Loading

        NVIDIA has released new patches today for helping the open-source Nouveau driver step towards properly supporting the GeForce GTX 900 “Maxwell” graphics cards as well as better supporting Tegra.

    • Benchmarks

      • Testing DDR3 and DDR4 RAM performance on Linux

        RAM is one of essential computer components. It holds executed program, its data and result. From RAM availability and performance depends how your computer will perform in general.

        With the launch of Intel Skylake CPUs a new generation of RAM was introduced to the mainstream – DDR4. So let us take a look on modern DDR3 and DDR4 performance.

      • Intel NUC Skylake NUC6i3SYK Linux Benchmarks

        These open-source benchmark results complement other recent Intel NUC Skylake Benchmarks On Linux and thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org they are all easily-reproducible and support side-by-side comparisons.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE PIM changes in openSUSE Tumbleweed

        As you may know, up to now the default PIM suite for Plasma 5 in openSUSE Tumbleweed was the KDE PIM 4.14, based on kdelibs 4.x. While upstream KDE has offered a KF5-based version since Applications 15.08, it has been originally marked as a technology preview, so we (the openSUSE community KDE team) thought it would be more prudent to stick with the 4.14 version (but offer the KF5 based PIM as an option for the daring).

      • Plasma 5.5.3, Applications 15.12.1 and Frameworks 5.18.0 by KDE on FreeBSD

        Thanks to the Chakra announcement, I could copy-and-paste the title of this blog post. Thanks, folks.

        The latest round of software releases by the KDE Community — Frameworks, Plasma, and Applications — can be found the KDE-on-FreeBSD community’s area51 repository. These are unofficial ports, not yet included in the official ports tree.

      • Zanshin 0.3 on FreeBSD

        When Zanshin 0.3 was released, it took just an hour or so to update the FreeBSD port for it. Since then, the real K-F folks Tobias and Rafael have put some polish on the port, made it compatible with FreeBSD 9-STABLE and 11-CURRENT, and pushed it into area51.

      • First Krita 3.0 pre-alpha!

        More than a year in the making… We proudly present the first pre-alpha version of Krita 3.0 you can actually try to run! So what is Krita 3.0 pre-alpha? It’s the Qt5 port, with animation, instant preview, a handful of new features and portable packages for everyone! When we feel everything is nice and stable we’ll release Krita 3.1, and we’ll keep on releasing new versions as and when we finish Kickstarter stretch goals. So keep in mind: Krita 3.0 is experimental.

      • A Week in the Life of a Krita Maintainer
      • Qt5-Ported Krita 3.0 Released In Pre-Alpha Form

        Krita 3.0 is the big release that ports this KDE-aligned, open-source digital painting software to Qt5 rather than Qt4. Krita 3.0 also has support for animations, instant preview, and other new features compared to Krita 2.x.

      • Pre-Alpha of Krita 3.0 Is Now Available for Download, Krita 3.1 Coming Later in 2016

        The awesome development team behind that most popular free digital painting app, Krita, were extremely proud to announce today, January 17, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Pre-Alpha build of Krita 3.0.

      • AsynQt framework: Making QFuture useful
      • KDE and Google Summer of Code 2015 Wrapup

        The combination of Google’s Summer of Code program and students working on numerous KDE projects during it has served as a long and successful tradition for KDE. KDE, being a big organization with a large community associated with it and hosting many projects of different facets provides a lot of opportunities for students to participate in this program and to contribute to an open-source project that they are interested in.

      • Chakra GNU/Linux Gets KDE Plasma 5.5.3, KDE Apps 15.12.1 and KDE Frameworks 5.18.0

        Once again, Neofytos Kolokotronis of the Chakra Project kindly informs all users of the Chakra GNU/Linux operating system about the latest KDE technologies added in the OS’ official software repositories.

      • KDE Made Much Progress In 2015 Thanks To Student Developers With GSoC

        While Google’s annual Summer of Code has been done for several months now, the KDE project published this weekend their final overview of all the progress that was made this past summer by these promising student developers.

        Among the work that came to KDE over the summer of 2015 thanks to GSoC was porting more software to KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5, a checker framework for KDevelop, Kdenlive improvements, handling of OpenStreetMap files within Marble, PDF tags/layers within Okular, a new configuration module for pointing devices, a GnuPGP-plugin for Kopete, and other improvements.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME 3 Is Soon Turning Five Years Old: How Are You Liking It?

        Come April it will be five years since the release of GNOME 3.0. The GNOME desktop has certainly evolved a lot since going back to GNOME 3.0, but what do you think of it?

        I was wary of GNOME 3 at first, but after several releases, it’s been running great and I’m back to using GNOME on many test systems at Phoronix. In fact, last year when switching from Ubuntu to Fedora on my most critical system, also marked the move back to using GNOME as my main desktop environment. Since GNOME 3.12 or so I’ve been quite happy with the experience and with GNOME 3.16~3.18 it feels really rock solid.

      • GNOME Devs Are Defining a Clear Set of Core Apps for the Desktop Environment

        We always bring our readers the latest news from the GNOME Project, and today we have some interesting story to share with you all, especially GNU/Linux operating system vendors.

  • Distributions

    • Solus Linux to Offer Faster Package Downloads, User Guide Updated

      Josh Strobl from the Solus Project has just published the eighteen installation of the weekly “This Week in Solus” newsletter, informing users about the latest updates and news for the GNU/Linux distribution.

      According to Josh Strobl, Solus Project has received a new server machine powered by an Intel Xeon E3 (8-core) processor and 32GB of RAM, and boasting a 2TB (RAID1) hard disk drive, where the distribution’s software repositories will be hosted. What this means for Solus Linux users is that they will be able to get faster downloads when installing or updating software in the OS.

    • This Week in Solus – Install #18

    • Reviews

      • Back to basics with Kwort 4.3

        I do not think I have ever installed the Kwort distribution before. It’s one of those projects I think about trying when a new release comes out, but something else has always come along to steal away my attention. Last month, during a quiet period, I decided to download the latest release of Kwort, version 4.3, and give it a try.

        According to the project’s website, “Kwort is a modern and fast Linux distribution that combines powerful and useful applications in order to create a simple system for advanced users who find a strong and effective desktop. Kwort is based on CRUX, so it’s robust, clean and easy to extend.”

        The project’s website had the following to say about Kwort 4.3: “As always we remain fast, stable, and simple and now we have grown up a little to include a lot of Linux firmwares available for tons of devices. As usual, everything has been built cleanly and from scratch.”

      • Review: Solus 1.0 “Shannon”

        To wrap up, the fact that I can’t use some key applications, in conjunction with the somewhat crippled nature of certain GNOME utilities nowadays, means that I probably won’t be able to use Solus on a regular basis, though I am sure there are users out there who would not need some of the applications that I find essential and who would work just fine with the standard current GNOME utilities. More broadly, though, given that (I think) Budgie might start making it to other distributions as well, then for a first official release, I think it’s doing decently, but I think there are too many small usability issues that are perhaps individually forgivable but together make it tough for me to use the DE regularly. Although this distribution and its DE aim to be easy to use and built for the desktop (according to the home page, with the latter point written perhaps in opposition to standard GNOME 3 or Unity), I think it may take another major release or two in order for me to seriously consider it again. In the meantime, I think it might be good not for total newbies but for Linux users who have gotten a bit more comfortable with Linux and may be willing to expand their horizons; in any case, I do intend to keep an eye on both Solus and Budgie in the future.

    • New Releases

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • A brief 360° overview of my first board turn

        You’ve certainly noticed that I didn’t run for a second turn, after my first 2 years. This doesn’t mean the election time and the actual campaign are boring :-)

        If you are an openSUSE Member, we really want to have your vote, so go to Board Election Wiki and make your own opinion.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Stock Target Price Update

        Sell-side analysts on Wall Street covering shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) have handed the stock a one year target price of $89.117. This is the average number according to the 17 brokerage firms weighing in on the name. The most bullish (highest) estimate is $97 while the lowest, most conservative, stands at $75. This and the following data is provided by Zack’s Research.

      • Analyst Coverage Updates – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)
      • Red Hat Inc Bullish Signal Price T Rowe Associates Inc Is In!

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) is a newly disclosed equity position for this institutional investor and the filing was required due to activity on December 31, 2015. This most probably shows Price T Rowe Associates Inc ’s confidence and optimism in the future of the company. As a institutional investor with $689.00 billion AUM and 2216+ professional employees, we have no reason to doubt they didn’t do their homework before buying such a stake.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Meetup Pune – January 2016

          On 15th January 2016, we had our first Fedora meetup at Pune. The venue was earlier decided to be Red Hat office, Pune but due to unavailability of space the meetup was moved to my apartment.

        • What is a Fedora “Year in Review”?

          The past year was a bustling year for Fedora. Fedora 22 and 23 were released, and with their releases, all of the different sub-projects of Fedora have been doing their share of contributing to the overall success of Fedora. However, in a project as large as Fedora, it can be hard to keep track of what everyone is doing! If you’re a developer, you likely know a bit about what’s happening inside the code of Fedora, but you may not know what’s happening with the Fedora Ambassadors. Or maybe you’re involved with Globalization (G11n) and translating and know what’s happening there, but you’re not as familiar with what the Fedora Design team is working on.

        • Fedora: Next generation configuration mgmt

          To that end, I’d like to formally present my idea (and code) for a next generation configuration management prototype. I’m calling my tool mgmt.

          Mgmt has three unique design elements which differentiate it from other tools. I’ll try to cover these three points, and explain why they’re important. The summary:

          Parallel execution, to run all the resources concurrently (where possible)
          Event driven, to monitor and react dynamically only to changes (when needed)
          Distributed topology, so that scale and centralization problems are replaced with a robust distributed system

          The code is available, but you may prefer to read on as I dive deeper into each of these elements first.

        • Add-on Metadata Initiative – Update 2

          After two weeks I’ve got another update on the add-on metadata initiative. The last update was not overly positive, but no one else participated during the Christmas break. After people returned from the holidays, there was a bit of breakthrough.

          First people updated information in the table and we identified add-ons that had been obsoleted and thus it doesn’t make sense to include them in the app catalog.

        • Fedora plans formal upgrade leapfrog scheme

          Red Hat senior quality assurance engineer Adam Williamson has revealed that the Fedora community is trying to deliver what it’s calling “N-1” upgrades whereby it becomes possible upgrade from version X of Fedora to version X+2 without having to first install version X+1.

          Williamson writes that Fedora’s release cadence makes the N-1 scheme a good idea.

          “The Fedora release process is expressly designed such that each release does not go EOL until a short time after the next-but-one release comes out (so Fedora 22 will not go EOL until a month after Fedora 24 comes out),” he writes.

    • Debian Family

      • Reproducible builds: week 38 in Stretch cycle

      • Derivatives

        • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) and 8.0 (Mumble) Receive the Latest Security Updates

          The development team behind the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux computer operating system announced this past weekend that new security updates are available in the default software repositories of the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 (Mumble) and Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) releases.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Touch Still Has the Best and Most Complete App Permissions

            App permissions is a feature that’s now present in pretty much all the major mobile operating systems, but Ubuntu has the best implementation available right now.

            The Ubuntu operating system is one of the first to have introduced incremental app permissions, but because it wasn’t made available worldwide like all the others, this particular feature has gone by unnoticed, even if it promised much better user control.

          • RockWork Project Provides Amazing Pebble Support on Ubuntu Touch

            The Ubuntu community is set on providing proper support for the Pebble smartwatch, and it looks like the RockWork project is going really well.

            The support for Pebble started with just a simple notification on the watch about an incoming call, but it turns out that there are a lot Ubuntu users out there that also have a Pebble smartwatch and they want to use them. Some developers are now working to provide much better Pebble support, in the absence of any kind of official support.

          • Goodbye Docker on CentOS. Hello Ubuntu!

            I have been a hardcore CentOS user for many years now. I enjoyed its minimal install to create a light environment, intuitive installation process, and it’s package manager. Docker is the most popular container format today and provides developers and enthusiasts with an easy way to run workloads in containerized environments. I started using Docker in production at home for about a year now for services such as Plex Media Server, Web Server for this blog, ZNC, MineCraft, and MySQL to name a few. A Dockerfile is a set of instructions used to create a Docker image. I invested many hours creating perfect Dockerfiles using CentOS and Fedora to make deployments simple on any operating system. However, a personal revolution was brewing.

          • AT&T Goes Open Source, Adopts Ubuntu For Both Internal And Customer-Facing Systems

            AT&T is moving away from proprietary systems and stepping toward Canonical Ltd.’s open-source operating system Ubuntu.

            Canonical announced the news in a blog post, saying it is joining forces with AT&T to provide its Ubuntu OS and engineering support for the carrier’s cloud, network and enterprise applications.

            The companies disclosed that the partnership is significant in coming up with Ubuntu-based apps across the internal and external systems of AT&T.

          • Ubuntu’s Amazon ‘adware’ feature to be made opt in

            Scopes, the controversial feature in Ubuntu, is being “gracefully retired”, says Canonical.

            The “commercial” search app, which combines product data from Amazon with data from your desktop and phone, is to be turned off by default in 16.04 LTS in April and in Unity 7 and 8.

            The Scopes in question are for Amazon and Skimlinks.

            The change will affect Ubuntu desktops and mobile phones running the GNU Linux distro. This means it’ll be down to individual users of Ubuntu phones and PCS to opt into the service, which marries up their search terms with Amazon product information.

            Canonical is also killing six plug-ins that integrated desktop-based apps with online shopping results.

          • ​Where would we be without Ubuntu

            For many in the Linux community, the topic of Ubuntu brings up ire and, in some cases, nothing short of rage. Why? On the surface it’s easy to point to the likes of Unity and Mir as the primary reasons for the criticism and hatred. If you look deeper, however, I think it’s much more complicated.

          • Ubuntu Linux beats IBM and Microsoft Azure to lucrative AT&T contract

            AT&T, which has been around in its current form since 2005, has selected Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, “to be part of an effort to drive innovation in the network and cloud”, beating rivals such as Microsoft Azure and IBM to the punch.

          • AT&T chooses Ubuntu Linux over Microsoft Windows

            Even though Linux may not be performing well in the desktop market, it however owns the two most important markets without any doubt, which are servers and smartphones. On one hand, where PC sales are going down, on the other, sales of Android phones are on the rise which it capturing a major share of the market. While everyone is spending less time on Windows computers, there are more than happy to be glued to their phones, which are likely powered by the Linux kernel.

          • Ubuntu Gets A New Clock Design For Their Suru Visual Language

            Ubuntu developers have been working on sending out some updated phone/convergence apps that take advantage of their new Suru visual language.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Contributing to Open Source Projects and Code

    Traditionally, IT ran off the shelf commercial software, while datacenters ran proprietary Unix hardware and x86 based Windows servers. But recently, the end user computing environment has been disrupted by the advent of smartphones and tablets, with Linux becoming increasingly a dominant force in the data center. Not to mention that there have been predictions from IDC analysts in August 2015 noting that there is already a shift to open source systems like Couchbase and Couchbase Mobile in the server and mobile market.

    Contributing to Open Source code is not as daunting as it seems. First off, the Open Source community is large and diverse with people working together on common problems. Stack Overflow is an example of how collective minds are able to solve related issues faster and share in everyday findings. The benefits are that you are able to get direct feedback from a vast community of experts with different skill levels while building out a support system of champions.

  • 4 questions to ask before open sourcing a project

    Who, outside the company, is excited to get their hands on this software? Nothing succeeds in open source without community involvement. If there is no interest from the outside, the odds are slim that you will be able to grow a meaningful community around what you have written. Once the employees who are currently being paid to maintain the project have moved on, someone will need to own the project or it will become just one more piece of abandonware.

  • 5 Key Aspects For a Successful Open-Source Project

    I love open-source: for me it is great way to develop any product, to acquire new skills, to have fun and to make something useful for the community. I am not an open-source rock-star (at least not yet :D) but I have created and contributed to tens of projects (take a look at my GitHub profile). Some of them got a bit of attention like WorldEngine, JavaParser or EffectiveJava. I am also an avid open-source user: almost daily I have to choose some open-source program or library to use or to contribute to. So I evaluate open-source projects regularly. I am also lucky enough to be in touch with many open-source developers, some of which I have interviewed for this blog.

  • Take care when reaping rewards of open source [Ed: this firm’s founder is attacking FOSS; never ever heard of them before. Who’s hiring (i.e. paying) them? “Quocirca, a research and analysis firm, released a comprehensive report sponsored by Microsoft,” said this page]
  • ETSI works to align NFV information models across SDOs and open source groups

    The workshop, which was hosted by CableLabs in Colorado, brought together the leading standards development organisations (SDOs) and Open Source communities in what it describes as an ‘NFV Village’. This was the first time the key SDOs and open source bodies have met together to accelerate alignment of their activities in relation to NFV. Participants read like a Who’s Who of NFV, and included 3GPP, ATIS, Broadband Forum, DMTF, ETSI NFV, IETF, ITU, MEF, OASIS/TOSCA, Open Cloud Connect, ONF, OpenDaylight, OPNFV and TM Forum. Furthermore, ETSI says the door is still open to organisations that did not participate in last week’s workshop.

  • A Higher Calling For Open-Source Software

    Open-source software–or at least the concept that drives it, a world where coding expertise and technology are furthered for the good of the public instead of corporate profit–is gaining traction in a big way. Some top names in tech have even announced their support for open-source, and whole crowdfunding campaigns have been dedicated to creating products and launching startups whose titles are available to everyone.

  • Events

    • The Penguicon Lucas Tech Track

      So if you’re in Detroit on the weekend of 29 April-1 May, come by and see me bloviate about:

      PAM: You’re Doing It Wrong
      the ZFS File System
      Networking for Systems Administrators
      Encrypted Backups with Tarsnap
      BSD Operating Systems in 2016
      Senior Sysadmin Panel

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • MongoDB/NoSQL Injection – Security

      A quick search on Shodan (the IoT search engine), will result in a ton of insecure Redis and MongoDB installations on the web. With IoT a lot of default device ports and settings are out there and a lot of connections to check. Be sure to pentest your server and devices before you put them on the public internet.

    • A Primer on Open-Source NoSQL Databases

      The idea of this article is to understand NoSQL databases, its properties, various types, data model, and how they differ from standard RDBMS.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • BSD

    • Doc like an Egyptian: Managing project documentation with Sphinx

      At the 14th annual Southern California Linux Expo (a.k.a., SCaLE 14x), Dru Lavigne will discuss common “gotchas” associated with creating and maintaining documentation, and she’ll talk about available open source tools. She’ll also provide an overview of Sphinx, an open source documentation generation system originally created for the new Python documentation.

      In this interview, she explains how Sphinx is different from other open source solutions, and what kinds of projects should consider migrating their docs.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A letter from Gabon to the GNU Health community

      Mr. Armand Mpassy-Nzoumbato has written this letter to the GNU Health community, that I proudly want share with all of you. It shows the importance of Free Software in real-life scenarios, delivering our motto : Freedom and Equity in Healthcare.

  • Licensing

    • All You Need to Make a Good Open Source License Decision

      The Free Software Foundation is the principal organizer of the GNU Project, and you can find the FSF’s guidelines on choosing an open source license in this post. The guidelines cover how to choose an overall license for a project, and also cover making decisions on licensing modified versions of an existing project.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Belgium overhauls it data portal

        Data.gov.be, Belgium’s federal open data portal, was relaunched last week. The new site merges two separate data portals managed by Fedict, Belgium’s federal IT service agency, and the country’s Agency for Administrative Simplification. The portal itself does not maintain data sets, but aggregates and updates links to several thousand datasets maintained by Belgium’s public agencies.

    • Open Access/Content

      • 10 Facts About Wikipedia That You Didn’t Know

        Wikipedia stats include more than 38 million articles in 289 different languages. Out of which, around 8 million articles are in English. English, German, and French have the most number of the articles.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open source, solar-powered RepRap 3D printer brings 3D printing to developing communities

        The open source 3D printing revolution is ongoing with full power, and has already made affordable making possible in the far corners of the world. Well, not quite the far corners, as even the most modest home-made 3D printer requires a stable power grid to work. But even that could be changing, as a team of researchers from the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Lab has just successfully tested and shared a very intriguing innovative machine: an open source, solar-powered RepRap 3D printer.

  • Programming

    • The Portable C Compiler (PCC) Continues To Be Developed In 2016

      When it comes to open-source C/C++ compilers, most of the coverage these days is about new features and functionality for GCC and LLVM Clang. However, the Portable C Compiler with its history originally dating back to the 1970s continues to be in-development.

      It’s been a while since last having anything to report on with the Portable C Compiler so I decided to do some Sunday night digging. Then again, PCC releases are far from frequent with PCC 1.0 coming in 2011 and PCC 1.1 having come at the end of 2014, after development on this compiler was restarted — and largely rewritten — beginning in 2007. PCC has been popular with the BSD distributions due to its BSD license and faster compile times than GCC, but in recent years much of the BSD developer interest appears to have shifted to Clang.

    • Perl SIG: Updating perl-Spreadsheet-ParseExcel on EPEL 5

Leftovers

  • Was Steve Jobs From Microsoft? Rahul Gandhi Thinks So And Gets Trolled Online

    At a recent public event, Rahul Gandhi, the Vice President of Indian National Congress was recorded associating Steve Jobs with Microsoft. Well, it could have just been a slip of the tongue, but then when has any explanation stopped internet users from trolling Mr. Gandhi.

  • Science

    • Is the ‘impact agenda’ stifling methodological innovation?

      Changes to the ways universities are financed and evaluated are impacting academic research practices and inhibiting innovative research into forced labour.

    • 3 Troubling Ways the Charter School Boom Is Like the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

      Once kids have enrolled, though, overly punitive policies create a hostile environment for those seen as difficult. In Chicago, Noble Network of Charter Schools demanded students follow a strict discipline policy or face fines. (That school phased out the imposition after years of public pressure.) Green also points to another instance: At Success Academy, the prominent charter school network in New York City led by Eva Moskowitz, one Brooklyn principal created a “Got to Go” list of difficult students. (The New York Times reported last week that the principal took a leave of absence.) Success Academy has long faced accusations that it has filtered out underperforming and difficult students.

    • Book Review: Sasha Sokolov’s ‘A School for Fools’

      In a school for fools, fighting conformity requires confronting the Soviet system—and our inner demons.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • From the shelf to the bin: food waste and the culture of rush

      Shortly after signing my contract as a store assistant for a well known low-cost German supermarket company, I came across a nasty reality that seemed not to bother the rest of my colleagues: every day, at a sleepy four o’clock in the morning, a random employee has to do the “waste inventory.”

      This consists of scanning all the products that can’t be sold anymore, one by one, and then throwing them out into a blue container. The resulting mountain of food is impressive—around seventy bakery items, a hundred pieces of fruit, and fifteen trays of meat. Over two hundred food items start the morning at the bottom of the garbage container, every single day.

      But that’s not the most surprising thing. The real scandal is that very few of these items need to be thrown away at all.

    • We Need a Mass Movement Demanding Real Social Security and Medicare for All

      The rising fortunes of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist US senator from Vermont, in the Democratic presidential primaries, provides a unique opportunity for organizing a new radical movement around key political goals including a national health care program for all Americans, not just the elderly and disabled, and a national retirement program that people can actually live on.

    • President Obama, Please Come to Flint

      I am writing this to you from the place where I was born — Flint, Michigan. Please consider this personal appeal from me and the 102,000 citizens of the city of Flint who have been poisoned — not by a mistake, not by a natural disaster, but by a governor and his administration who, to “cut costs,” took over the city of Flint from its duly elected leaders, unhooked the city from its fresh water supply of Lake Huron, and then made the people drink the toxic water from the Flint River. This was nearly two years ago.

      This week it was revealed that at least 10 people in Flint have now been killed by these premeditated actions of the Governor of Michigan. This governor, Rick Snyder, nullified the democratic election of this mostly African-American city — where 41% of the people live below the “official” poverty line — and replaced the elected Mayor and city council with a crony who was instructed to take all his orders from the governor’s office.

    • Anger and Scrutiny Grow Over Poisoned Water in Michigan City

      Jason White, vice president for medical affairs at a local hospital, McLaren Flint, said the water supply became so poor in 2014 “that we got reports from our sterile processing people, those who clean the surgical instruments, that they were seeing corrosion,” prompting the hospital to replace its water filters.

    • Budget Cuts and Negligence Poisoned the Drinking Water in Flint, Mich.

      Calls for the resignation of Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder are intensifying in the face of evidence that he allowed 100,000 residents of the city of Flint to continue cooking, drinking and bathing in water known to be contaminated with lead.

      Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is among those demanding that Snyder leave office.

      “There are no excuses,” Sanders said in a statement released Saturday. “The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign.”

      “[F]amilies will suffer from lead poisoning for the rest of their lives,” Sanders continued. “Children in Flint will be plagued with brain damage and other health problems.”

    • Anger and Scrutiny Grow Over Poisoned Water in Michigan City

      Michigan’s attorney general opened an investigation Friday into lead contamination in Flint’s drinking water, and the governor asked President Obama to declare a disaster as National Guard troops fanned out across this anxious city to help distribute bottled water, water filters and testing kits.

      The actions drew new scrutiny to an environmental crisis that poisoned the water supply for a year and a half before it was addressed. The contamination has left a city of 100,000 people unable to use tap water for drinking, cooking or bathing, and has caused mounting political woes for the governor, Rick Snyder.

      [...]

      In recent days, even as Mr. Snyder has declared a state of emergency, requested federal action and summoned the National Guard, he has continued to face intense criticism that the state has been slow to react, despite admitting that it bungled the problem.

    • Citizens Of Flint Fight Back

      Three residents of Flint, Michigan have filed a class action lawsuit against the state, Gov. Rick Snyder (R), and the city of Flint for negligence in the town’s deadly water crisis.

      This the the first legal action taken by residents of Flint — a town that’s recently discovered its tap water has been contaminated for years with dangerously elevated amounts of lead that could “irreversibly” damage child brain development in particular. And based on email records, Snyder’s administration may have known about the lead levels months ago and failed to act.

    • Sanders: Michigan Governor Must Resign over Flint Lead-Poisoning Crisis

      Democratic presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday called on Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to resign for his administration’s failure to deal with a lead-poisoning crisis that has sickened thousands of children in Flint, Michigan.

      “There are no excuses. The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign,” Sanders said.

    • Campbell’s Decision to Label GMOs Destroys Monsanto’s Main Argument Against Labeling

      Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have long defended their die-hard positions against mandatory GMO labeling laws, often by feigning concern about the financial impact labeling laws would have on consumers. Labeling will be costly for manufacturers, who will pass those costs on to consumers, they argue (despite studies suggesting otherwise). As if concern for consumers’ wallets had anything to do with Big Food’s determination to deceive.

  • Security

    • Talking on Searchable Encryption at 32C3 in Hamburg, Germany

      This year again, I attended the Chaos Communication Congress. It’s a fabulous event. It has become much more popular than a couple of years ago. In fact, it’s so popular, that the tickets (probably ~12000, certainly over 9000) have been sold out a week or so after the sales opened. It’s gotten huge.

    • Things I learned from OpenSSH about reading very sensitive files

      You may have heard that OpenSSH had an exploitable issue with some bad client code (which is actually two CVEs, CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778). The issue was reported by Qualys Security, who released a fascinating and very detailed writeup on the issues. While the direct problem is basically the same as in Heartbleed, namely trusting an attacker-supplied length parameter and then sending back whatever happened to be sitting in memory, Qualys Security identified several issues that allowed private keys to leak through this issue despite OpenSSH’s attempts to handle them securely. The specific issues are also fascinating in how they show just how hard it is to securely read sensitive files.

    • How To Patch and Protect OpenSSH Client Vulnerability CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778 [ 14/Jan/2016 ]

      The OpenSSH project released an ssh client bug info that can leak private keys to malicious servers. A man-in-the-middle kind of attack identified and fixed in OpenSSH are dubbed CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778. How do I fix OpenSSH’s client vulnerability on a Linux or Unix-like operating system?

    • WhatsApp virus affects iOS and Android – and maybe more

      WhatsApp’s popular messaging app has been targeted yet again by cybercriminals – the latest attack affects both iOS and Android users.

      As part of a random phishing campaign, cybercriminals send fake emails represented as official WhatsApp content to spread malware when the ‘message’ is clicked on.

      The emails are being sent from a rogue email address, disguised with an umbrella branding “WhatsApp,” but if users look at the actual FROM email address, they will see it is not from the company.

    • OpenSSH, security, and everyone else

      For the moment we will continue to operate just like we have been. Things aren’t great, but they’re not terrible. Part of our problem is things aren’t broken enough yet, we’re managing to squeak by in most situations.

      The next step will be developing some sort of tribal knowledge model. It will develop in a mostly organic way. Long term security will be a teachable and repeatable thing, but we can’t just jump to that point, we have to grow into it.

    • What Is A Web App Attack, How Does It Work — 5 Stages Of A Web App Attack

      A Web App Attack is one of the biggest threats faced by websites and online businesses. In this article, we are going to tell you about 5 stages of a Web App Attack — Reconnaissance, Scanning, Gaining Access, Maintaining Access, and Covering Tracks — and how this attack works.

    • Google Fixes Cryptographic Key Security Issue in Go Programming Language

      Google has published version 1.5.3 of the Go programming language to address a security issue (CVE-2015-8618) in the math/big package that leaked one of the RSA keys used in TLS-encrypted communications.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Did ISIS Mess With the Wrong Country By Attacking Istanbul?

      But the fact of the matter is that unlike the weak-kneed Saudi regime, Turkey has the military capacity – it commands the second largest NATO army after the United States — and the local knowledge to successfully take out ISIS. The issue to date has mainly been a lack of political will and real-politik concerns. On paper, Erdogan is a US ally in the fight against ISIS. In practice, he’s been playing a sly game of using ISIS to contain the Kurds and eliminate Syrian President Assad, his mortal enemies. That may end now.

    • On the Firing Line: Bullies in Stetsons

      Scanning the Sunday New York Times during the summer of 1990, President George Herbert Walker Bush read how an Idaho rancher had threatened to slit the throat of Forest Service ranger Don Oman, who had decided to reduce the number of cattle grazing on several allotments in the Twin Falls District of the Sawtooth National Forest. Bush ordered a Justice Department investigation. A White House aide called Oman and said the president wanted the ranger to know he wouldn’t tolerate harassment of federal workers.

    • On A Triumphant Day For American Diplomacy, Republicans Criticize Obama

      While many were undoubtedly praying for the return of those detained, the executive branch put in months of difficult work that helped secure their release through hard diplomacy. Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim confirms that the negotiations took place alongside those focused on the nuclear deal, and for a time it seemed as though the prisoner swap may not happen at all.

      For all the tough talk against the “Evil Empire” in the 80’s by the Reagan administration, it made a deal to return home journalist Nicholas Daniloff, who had been detained by the U.S.S.R. which was very similar to the deal the Obama administration made with Saturday’s swap.

    • Western Powers Protect Arms Markets Ignoring Civilian Killings

      The West continues its strong political and military support to one of its longstanding allies in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia –- despite withering criticism of the kingdom’s battlefield excesses in the ongoing war in neighboring Yemen.

      A Saudi-led coalition has been accused of using banned cluster bombs, bombing civilian targets and destroying hospitals – either by accident or by design—using weapons provided primarily by the US, UK and France.

      The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said last week the armed conflict in Yemen continues to take a terrible toll on civilians, with at least 81 civilians reportedly killed and 109 injured in December.

    • Reheating the Cold War

      The Cold War never really ended. In its imagined perfect world system, the US seeks to triumph not just over the residues of Communist rule but any manifestation of state resistance to the Empire. The difference between the earlier Cold War phase (1945-91) and now is that Russia no longer has a Warsaw Pact and Comecon as counterweights to NATO and the US/OECD world economic system. Vice President Biden in his usual well-thought-out declarations said bluntly that the US will oppose any effort on Russia’s part to recreate its own sphere of influence.

    • The US Tiger and the North Korean Mouse

      According to US intelligence services, North Korea is suspected of having perhaps two nuclear weapons and an annual military budget of $7.5 billion in 2014. The US’s roughly $600 billion Pentagon allotment includes 4,000 nuclear warheads on alert. Any one of the (eight) Trident subs that the US Navy keeps in the Pacific is capable of burning down the entire Korean landmass.

      Even if North Korea had a rocket that could aim straight, what could it expect to gain by attacking South Korea or Japan? This central question is never asked, much less answered, by the screamers on FOX, the Senators from Lockheed-Martin, or the Representatives from Northrop-Grumman.

    • Ike Had a Dream, and it Unfortunately Came True

      Today marks the 55th anniversary of a world-historical speech by the last war hero to occupy the White House: President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower. His last speech while in office holds crucial implications for the U.S. today, as well as the history we celebrate tomorrow, on Martin Luther King Day.

      Ike served in World War II as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe before becoming President. He helped encourage an industrial mobilization that enabled the U.S. to liberate Europe and defend democracy from the global threat of fascism, but he expressed concerns about its future consequences.

    • When Peace Breaks Out With Iran…

      This has been the most dramatic week in US/Iranian relations since 1979.

    • Implementation Day Fallout: Neocons Have Nuclear Meltdown Over Prisoner Exchange

      Remarkably, though, there were a couple of usually reliable voices in the anti-Iran rhetoric who did not come through. AP’s George Jahn seemed fresh out of “diplomatic sources” to smear Iran, as he co-authored a piece of straight up reporting on Implementation Day. Similarly, fear-monger Joby Warrick briefly returned from his Washington Post exile to environmental reporting this morning to write about the deal, but gave as much of his analysis to a likelihood of reformers forging ahead in Iran as hardliners bringing more peril. As with Jahn, David Sanger also wound up only writing straight reporting of Implementation Day without finding much smear material to leak against Iran.

    • Iran nuclear deal: ‘New chapter’ for Tehran as sanctions end

      Iran “has opened a new chapter” in its ties with the world, President Hassan Rouhani said, hours after international nuclear sanctions were lifted.

      The move came after the international nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, said Iran had complied with a deal designed to prevent it developing nuclear weapons.

    • So What Really Happened With Those U.S. Boats Captured by Iran?

      When news first broke of the detention of two U.S. ships in Iranian territorial waters, the U.S. media uncritically repeated the U.S. government’s explanation for what happened — one boat experienced “mechanical failure” and “inadvertently drifted” into Iranian waters. On CBS News, Joe Biden said, “One of the boats had engine failure, drifted into Iranian waters.”

      [...]

      And, according to The Intercept, the U.S. government itself now says this story was false. There was no engine failure, and the boats were never “in distress.” Once the sailors were released, the AP reported, “In Washington, a defense official said the Navy has ruled out engine or propulsion failure as the reason the boats entered Iranian waters.”

      Instead, said Defense Secretary Ashton Carter at a press conference, the sailors “made a navigational error that mistakenly took them into Iranian territorial waters.” He added that they “obviously had misnavigated” when, in the words of the New York Times, “they came within a few miles of Farsi Island, where Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has a naval base.”

    • Iran Frees Americans as Sanctions Are Lifted, Frustrating Warmongers Around the World

      Within hours of the release, devastating international sanctions on Iran were lifted after international inspectors verified its compliance with the terms of last year’s nuclear deal between Iran and Western powers.

      Taken together, the prisoner swap, Iran’s compliance with its nuclear-deal commitments, and the sanction relief mark what may be a historic thaw in relations between the U.S. and Iran. This, however, should not be exaggerated, as the U.S. continues many belligerent policies directed at Iran, especially in the realm of proxy warfare (see below).

      [...]

      Saudi Arabia, which also opposed the deal, has, with American support, been waging a long sectarian proxy war against Shia Iran and what the extremist Sunni Saudis perceive as an “axis” of Iran-allied Shia powers. This war has included Saudi support for jihadis fighting in the U.S.-sponsored insurgency to overthrow the Iran-allied regime in Syria, and a U.S.-supported Saudi air war and starvation blockade of the desperately poor country of Yemen.

    • ‘Diplomacy Works’: Peace Groups Hail Iran Deal; Clinton Talks Like a Hawk

      Meanwhile, Democrat Hillary Clinton struck a hawkish tone Sunday saying that if she were elected president in November, her approach to Iran would be “to distrust and verify.” Clinton added: “Iran is still violating UN Security Council resolutions with its ballistic missile program, which should be met with new sanctions designations and firm resolve.” “We’re going to watch Iran like the proverbial hawk,” Clinton said on Meet the Press.

      Peace groups, however, are applauding President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry for forging the agreement with Iran which successfully shrunk Iran’s nuclear program and led to the Iranian government releasing five US citizens.

    • The CIA Coup That Remade the Middle East

      Not so or not quite so, and this detail happens to be an important point. From its Cold War origins, the CIA had such purposes every bit as much as ”intelligence gathering.” Indeed, one of the chief reasons for intelligence to be gathered can be summarized in a phrase returned to the lexicon by Hillary Clinton in regard to Syria: the “regime change opportunity.” Leaping into the “Grand Game,” as the strategies of competing empires came be known in the nineteenth century, the CIA took over the older US role treating the Caribbean as the “American Lake” and all of Latin America as “protected” from other world powers and likewise from the citizens themselves, who now and then showed signs of dumping the supporters of US corporate interests. Close in time to the Iranian action, as the comic notes at its close, comes Guatemala, where a CIA plot overthrew another elected president, this time inaugurating a military campaign against indigenous peoples resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. But by 1953 the CIA had repeatedly dropped nationals into the Eastern Bloc, seeking to promote uprisings, with the same logic that it defended Greek royalists, erstwhile collaborators with the Axis, against the Communist-inclined successors to the Wartime partisans. For the same reasons, it had aided the scorched earth counterinsurgency in the Philippines against rebel uprisings by erstwhile anti-Japanese partisans, and purchased loyal European labor leaders for American use. Communism was the enemy, “neutralism” not much better, and direct or indirect control of the entire planet the constant purpose of US policies. Both former president Herbert Hoover and “Mister Republican” Robert Taft vainly warned Truman against creating a global, military empire and the security state that went with it. Harry left office the most unpopular president of the twentieth century, and for good reasons.

      [...]

      Operation Ajax rushes toward a conclusion with a stark revelation. The Shah, installed by the British and Americans against the will of ordinary Iranians, was considered in Washington to be proof of a great foreign policy. “History, however, has delivered another verdict.” Well said. Kinzer argues in the Afterword that a different US policy might have produced a starkly different Middle East. Yes, indeed, but judging from other experiences, not very likely. A side glance at Latin America, where the US has promoted formal democracy only when it seem to benefit investors and allies, and where the “Good Neighbor Policy,” mixing good with less-than-good, was transitory, we come to more grim conclusions. Empires act as they always did. And rarely act wisely or benevolently.

    • Netanyahu at War, Stuck in the Dominant Paradigm

      The documentary ends with violence “returning to Israel and Palestinian territories” as if it had ever magically disappeared. No one asked why is there violence? Who is violent? We end with the sense that this is a personal struggle between two equally guilty men. Unfortunately, Netanyahu may be right; the world may not give Israel another chance if it continues to move rightward, promoting a profoundly racist, expansionist, militaristic agenda with no sympathy or understanding of the oppression of Palestinians who only serve as a cause célèbre for repressive Arab regimes. Unfortunately the real tragedy may be that not only did Netanyahu go too far, but Obama never went far enough.

    • Why the GOP’s Fence Fantasy Is a Farce

      A long time ago, in a not-so-faraway land, a civilization existed that was governed through a fairly rational political system. Even conservative candidates for high office had to have a good idea or two — and be quasi-qualified.

      That land was the USA. It still exists as a place, but these days, Republican candidates don’t even have to be qualified — much less sane — to run for the highest office in the land. All they need is the backing of one or more billionaires, a hot fear-button issue to exploit and a talent for pandering without shame to the most fanatical clique of know-nothings in their party. Also, they must be able to wall themselves off from reality, erecting a wall of political goop around their heads so thick that even facts and obvious truth cannot get through to them.

    • Desert Storm at 25: a Grim Anniversary

      January 16th, 2016, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, an unsettling milestone in the yet unfinished history of the United States bombing Iraq. We ought to ask, what lies in the wake of this now failed policy?

      [...]

      But the problems are not merely “over there.” The United States is undergoing its own period of national soul searching that has centered on a common language of fear and violence. The buzzwords of terrorism, refugees, gun rights, and Black Lives Matter all fundamentally coalesce around concerns of acceptable forms of violence, social exclusion, and bodily containment within our country’s democratic project. Anyone who has seen the Republican debates will attest that much of the current political discourse lacks compassion, which is fundamental for a healthy democracy. Fear of refugees and immigrants, and searing concern that the federal government will prevent us from bearing arms fill the chambers of internal security with defense and bans alone rather than empathy. It is not that militarization and screening have no place in these uncertain times, but the risk is that this strategy becomes singular without much-needed emotional and political complements.

    • 25 Years Later: Photos From the First Time We Invaded Iraq

      Twenty-five years ago, former President George H.W. Bush took to the airwaves to announce the launch of what is now known as Operation Desert Storm, a US-led military operation to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. “Just two hours ago, allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait,” Bush said on the evening of January 16, 1991. “These attacks continue as I speak.” For five weeks, coalition forces bombarded Iraqi positions from the air and sea. When a ground invasion followed in February, it took only 100 hours to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

      Operation Desert Storm marked a shift in how Americans experience combat when the US military deploys in far-flung countries. For the first time, the beginning of a conflict played out on live TV, and viewers could “watch the war” from the comfort of home as it unfolded.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Police department charging TV news network $36,000 for body cam footage

      For its part, the police department said it is simply charging for the costs to review the footage and make whatever redactions are necessary to comply with legal and privacy concerns. The NYPD said it would take a police officer 190 hours to review the footage, at $120 per hour, plus an additional 114 hours to “copy the footage in a manner that will redact the exempt portions.” That brings to 304 hours the amount of time to comply with the network’s request, the NYPD said.

      The police department did not say how it came to the $120-hourly rate, other than noting that “the cost of compensating a police officer is $120 per hour.”

      In its lawsuit, NY1 said the NYPD “denied NY1′s request for unedited footage without specifying what material it plans to redact, how much material will be excluded from disclosure, or how the redaction will be performed. Instead, Respondents suggested that they may provide NY1 with edited footage, but only on the condition that NY1 remit $36,000.00, the alleged cost to the NYPD of performing its unidentified redactions.”

    • Assange ‘is free to go’ if Sweden does not charge him

      Ecuador said on Friday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can leave his hideout in its London embassy and go into exile in the South American country if Swedish prosecutors do not charge him after questioning him.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Number of England’s marine conservation zones nearly doubles

      Seahorses, stalked jellyfish, dolphins and seagrass meadows are among the marine wildlife gaining better protection with the announcement of 23 new marine conservation zones (MCZ) by the government on Sunday.

      However, a leading expert criticised the MCZs as useless “paper parks” that offer no real protection from the dredging and trawling that has devastated large areas of England’s seas for decades.

      The 23 new zones stretch from the coast of Northumberland down to Land’s End and include Europe’s longest chalk reef off Cromer in Norfolk. But, with the 27 MCZs designated in 2013, the total of 50 is far below the 127 sites proposed by an earlier £8m government consultation. The 50 MCZs, along with other types of protected areas, now cover 20% of all English waters, almost 8,000 sq miles (20,700 sq km).

    • Obama Ends New Coal Leases On Public Lands
    • ‘Nail in the Coffin’: Obama to Halt New Coal Mining Leases on Public Lands

      The White House on Friday will announce a halt to new coal mining leases on federal lands until the administration conducts a comprehensive review on coal companies’ royalty fees—a move that is expected to give new momentum to the environmental campaigns calling for a post-fossil fuel era.

    • Obama to “Halt” New Coal Leases

      Yesterday came the news that some $400 billion worth of oil and gas projects had been delayed since the oil price crash. The amount of deferred capital spending has almost doubled since last summer, according to a report by respected consultants Wood Mackenzie.

    • David Bowie Is a Hero to Activists Fighting the Dolphin Slaughter in Japan

      The rock star made sure his anthem ‘Heroes’ was licensed to the documentary ‘The Cove’ for a pittance so it could help stop the killing of dolphins and whales.

    • The EU Common Fisheries Policy has helped, not harmed, UK fisheries

      The EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), more commonly referred to as the EU’s “disastrous fishing policy”, the EU’s “most discredited and unpopular policy” or simply “the worst EU policy”, is without a doubt one of most maligned pieces of EU legislation. With a referendum on the UK’s EU membership on the horizon, it is important to take a step back and consider whether the CFP has helped or hurt UK fisheries.

    • California Fish Species Plummet To Record Lows
    • No Jail Time for Delta 5 in Historic Case That ‘Welcomes Jurors to Climate Movement’

      Activists who blockaded oil train in September 2014 will not face financial restitution claims or jail time

    • Climate and laws fan Brazil’s forest fires

      Almost a quarter of a million forest fires were detected in Brazil last year – and the main cause of a huge increase is being attributed to climate change that brought about a year-long drought in much of the country.

      Satellite data revealed a 27.5% increase in forest fires in 2015 compared with the previous year. The total number was 235,629, almost as high as the record of 249,291 in 2010.

    • Smog or smoke? Zhejiang factory fire burns for three hours before residents notice

      A furniture factory in China’s Zhejiang province became the latest victim to the heavy smog that has blanketed Beijing and several provinces and municipalities in northern and eastern China in the last few days.

      The fire that engulfed the 1,000 sq m factory around midnight on Monday went unnoticed for three hours. It was hard for residents to tell the smoke from the smog, reported Xinhua state agency on Monday.

      When the residents finally reported the fire three hours later, it was already out of control.

  • Finance

    • Revealed: the hidden web of big-business money backing Europe and America’s pro-TTIP “think tanks”

      The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is an EU-US “trade agreement” that will allow corporations to sue governments in secret tribunals to force them to repeal their safety, environmental and labor laws.

      TTIP’s most influential backers are supposedly neutral think tanks that publish papers, research and reports supporting the idea of TTIP as beneficial to Europeans and Americans.

      Bas van Beek, Jilles Mast and Sophia Beunder from the Dutch “Platform of Authentic Journalism” has published a detailed research report on the hidden funding behind these think tanks, and the way that they are used to launder policy recommendations from governments and corporations to give them the legitimacy an “objective” endorsement.

    • A Bitcoin Believer’s Crisis of Faith

      Mike Hearn, a British computer programmer, holed up in his two-bedroom apartment in Zurich over several days and nights last week, writing a cri de coeur.

      Two years ago, Mr. Hearn quit a cushy programming job at Google’s Swiss headquarters to devote himself full time to what was his great passion: the virtual currency Bitcoin. He was one of a handful of developers around the world dedicated to maintaining the basic software that governs both the creation of new Bitcoins and the network on which the financial transactions take place.

    • The Dangers of a Blockchain Monoculture

      Before bitcoin, the state-of-the-art in decentralized reconciliation over the Internet generally involved SCPing around GPG encrypted batch settlement files and processing them with zSeries mainframes. This is slow moving, not easily auditable, and clearly leaves a lot of room for improvement.

      Bitcoin was a great demonstration of what is possible. But as the entire bitcoin ecosystem approaches a gross payment volume size nearing that of single top 10 US retailer (and about 1/10,000th the transaction volume of VISA), the “publish all transactions to everybody” approach bitcoin uses is starting to show its limits.

    • Why America’s Next President Will Not Be a Socialist

      Sanders has often stated that he is a “democratic socialist” and, last November, he defined that term for the American people. Shortly afterwards, Forbes Magazine published an article that stated, “What he’s talking about, whatever the heck it is, isn’t socialism of any type or form.” And, for once, Forbes was right. Sanders is not a socialist in any shape or form. At least not according to the content of his public statements and campaign platform. But if Sanders is not a socialist, then what is he? He is a social democrat; which is radically different from being a democratic socialist.

    • Philanthropy: Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

      Private philanthropic mega-foundations are tax exempt which means 40 percent of their wealth has been siphoned off. The top seventy foundations have assets in excess of seven hundred billion dollars and in one recent year the tax subsidies amounted to a loss of $53.7 billion dollars to the U.S. treasury (Bob Reich, Boston Review, 2013). For example, as recounted in Mark Dowie’s book American Foundations, billionaire financier George Soros was conducting an executive session of his foundation when a spirited exchange occurred about grant-making priorities. Soros allegedly declared “This is my money. We will do it my way.” At that, a junior staffer pointed out that half the money didn’t belong to Soros because if not placed in the foundation “it would be in the Treasury.” The staffer’s employment was short-lived (Reich)

      Just to be clear, some Big Philanthropists have done some good work. However, as Peter Buffet (Warren Buffet’s son) has argued, philanthropy is largely about letting billionaires feel better about themselves, a form of “conscience laundering” that simultaneously functions to “keep the existing system of inequality in place…” by shaping the culture.

    • Ultra-Rich ‘Philanthrocapitalist’ Class Undermining Global Democracy: Report

      The risks of “philanthrocapitalism” are manifold, the researchers argue, including: “fragmentation and weakening of global governance”; “unstable financing”; and “lack of monitoring and accountability mechanisms.”

      “What is the impact of framing the problems and defining development solutions by applying the business logic of profit-making institutions to philanthropic activities, for instance by results-based management or the focus on technological quick-win solutions in the sectors of health and agriculture?” the report poses.

      A close look at the forces at work within the groups controlling the cash flow reveals numerous causes for concern.

      “Through their multiple channels of influence, the Rockefeller and Gates foundations have been very successful in promoting their market-based and bio-medical approaches towards global health challenges in the research and health policy community—and beyond,” the authors state.

      Moreover, the report continues, “there is a revolving door between the Gates Foundation and pharmaceutical corporations. Many of the Foundation’s staff had held positions at pharmaceutical companies such as Merck, GSK, Novartis, Bayer HealthCare Services and Sanofi Pasteur.”

    • Donald Trump is a Mediocre Businessman

      I know I’ve beaten this dead horse before, but I continue to be a little surprised that no one has seriously attacked Donald Trump on his business acumen. After all, it’s his big calling card: he knows how to negotiate great deals and he’s made a ton of money from them.

      But this doesn’t seem to be true.

      [...]

      But as a businessman, he’s so-so. He lets his decisions be guided by his gut, and his gut isn’t really very good. That’s where Trump Plaza, Trump Air, Trump football, Trump City, the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Steaks, and Trump University come from. That’s not much of a recommendation for the presidency.

    • The Chart That Explains Everything

      What the chart shows is that the vast increase in the monetary base didn’t impact lending or trigger the credit expansion the Fed had predicted. In other words, the Fed’s madcap pump-priming experiment (aka– QE) failed to stimulate growth or put the economy back on the path to recovery. For all practical purposes, the policy was a flop.

    • Big Crony CEO Pay Grab–Effects Beyond Greed!

      As the New Year gets underway, the highest-paid CEOs of many large corporations have already paid themselves more than the average worker will earn in the entire year! By the end of the first week of January, the highest-paid CEOs had already made as much as their average workers will earn over 8 years.

      An analysis by Equilar, a consulting firm specializing in executive pay, found that on average, the 200 highest-paid CEOs make approximately $22.6 million a year, or almost $10,800 an hour, a 9.1% increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau reports the average household earns approximately $53,000 a year.

    • Davos and Its Threat to Democracy

      This elite-led model of governance is proliferating globally like a virulent rash. The World Water Forum, the Marine Stewardship Council and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are just three of thousands of multi-stakeholder groups .They are becoming the default option for global governance, and there is nothing in international law to stop this. What WEF is trying to do is to turn these models into a multi-stakeholder governance system. As Harris Gleckman points out, “What is ingenious and disturbing is that the WEF multi-stakeholder governance proposal does not require approval or disapproval by any intergovernmental body. Absent any intergovernmental action the informal transition to multi-stakeholder governance as a partial replacement of multilateralism can just happen.”

    • Just 62 people now own the same wealth as half the world’s population, research finds

      Wealth inequality has grown to the stage where 62 of the world’s richest people own as much as the poorest half of humanity combined, according to a new report.

      The research, conducted by the charity Oxfam, found that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population – 3.6 billion people – has fallen by 41 per cent, or a trillion US dollars, since 2010.

      While this group has become poorer, the wealth of the richest 62 people on the planet has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76 trillion.

    • Patent term extensions in TPP likely to increase health-care costs for Canadians

      Problems? Oh, the Trans-Pacific Partnership has a few! Read about them all in the new series The Trouble with the TPP.

      The Trouble with the TPP series now shifts to patent law reforms and the likely costs to the health-care system. The TPP patent provision changes are very significant since they lock Canada into extending the term of patent protection, which will ultimately increase health-care costs.

      Moreover, global organizations such Doctors Without Borders has warned that the agreement will raise the price of medicines for millions of people, particularly in the developing world.

      The Conservative government tried to downplay the impact of patent law changes in the TPP, arguing that the agreement is consistent with current law or is “in line with outcomes secured in the Canada-EU Comprehensive Trade and Economic Agreement (CETA).” The reference to CETA, which comes from the government’s TPP IP summary, represents a neat of sleight of hand.

    • Charleston Workers March For Higher Wages Outside The Democratic Debate

      “Making $15 an hour would help me save money for my kids’ college education,” she told ThinkProgress. “It would allow me to stand on my own two feet and not depend on public assistance.”

    • TTIP’s regulatory cooperation has already begun attacking democracy

      The origins of EU-US proposals for “regulatory cooperation” show a process dominated by big business right from the start. The ongoing TTIP talks are seeking to enshrine and fortify a dangerous precedent, argue Kenneth Haar and Max Bank.

    • The 21st Century: An Era Of Fraud — Paul Craig Roberts

      In America today there are no free financial markets. All the markets are rigged by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. The regulatory agencies, controlled by those the agencies are supposed to regulate, turn a blind eye, and even if they did not, they are helpless to enforce any law, because private interests are more powerful than the law.

    • The Rise of Sanders Claus

      Well that didn’t take long. From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the Presidency in 5 years. Or so it might go. Bernie Sanders is the Occupy Wall Street candidate for President. In the approximate.

      [...]

      Regardless, candidates need to be more than popular and novel and potent and real, they need to be able to marshal funds and have campaign competence, and both Trump and Sanders seem real about that too.

      Especially indirectly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has contributed great rhetorical and social influence and credibility to Bernie Sanders’ campaign, which has become part of a reciprocating cycle to social change.

      Is the Sanders’ campaign currently draining precious resources and efforts from other social change efforts, and if so does the drain go beyond anything an ongoing or successful Sanders’ candidacy can offset? Or is the charge flowing in the other direction?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Bill Maher Explains How Trump Is Making It Easier for a Bernie Sanders Win

      When Putin was praising Trump and Joe Scarborough said to him, “You know, Putin murders journalists,” Trump’s response was, “Yeah, we kill people, too.” That’s the kind of thing Noam Chomsky says, you know? So look, Trump would be a disaster as president, don’t get me wrong, but I think he could actually be turned around on some issues.

    • Glenn Beck: I Predicted Donald Trump’s Rise As “A Great Showman … Who Will Say Nothing”
    • Bernie Sanders’ Run Is No Fairy Tale

      If you thought the political landscape couldn’t be more unsettled, think again. In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders is surging. Hillary Clinton now faces not a coronation, not a cakewalk, but a contest—one she could lose.

      Has there ever been a worse election to be an establishment candidate? Certainly not in my lifetime. When a pitchfork-populist billionaire is leading one party’s race and a self-described socialist is rapidly gaining ground in the other, I think it’s safe to say we’re somewhere we haven’t been before.

    • We Haven’t Scratched the Surface of What Bernie Is Capable Of

      Meanwhile, Sanders punches up at the elites that, frankly, have more power in our politics than he does, or than you do, or than any politician does. He tells his audiences that he can’t do it alone, that the money power has grown too great for any one person to combat. He needs them more than they need him. He is not Napoleon, he is a democratic politician. And that makes all the difference and that’s why the “populist anger” narrative is a shuck. Anyone who says they could vote for either Bernie Sanders or He, Trump has been living for the last nine months with their head in a laundry bag.

    • Battle Between Trump And Cruz Goes Nuclear

      The bromance between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump is officially over. The two leading candidates for the Republican nomination had previously pledged not to attack each other. Now, all bets are off.

    • British Parliament Will Formally Debate Banning Donald Trump

      On Monday, the British parliament will formally debate a proposal to ban Donald Trump. The debate comes after more than 500,000 Brits signed a petition in support of banning Trump from the UK.

    • Rupert Murdoch: Donald Trump Has “The Winning Strategy”
    • AUDIO: Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Defies the Two-Party System

      Stein, a physician, also talks about her departure from the Democratic Party, the hollowness of Hillary Clinton, her hopes for Bernie Sanders and how the political process functions to suppress independent voices.

    • Sanders surges in debate that gets at core of Democratic divide

      Bernie Sanders dominated Sunday night’s Democratic debate here, overpowering Hillary Clinton in a format she typically controls. With polls showing Clinton on the ropes in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders’ strong performance may have further imperiled Clinton’s once-inevitable path to her party’s presidential nomination.

      Touting his surging poll numbers in the two key early states, Sanders was prepared and in command throughout the two-hour debate sponsored by NBC News and YouTube. In previous appearances, Clinton has easily dominated the stage. But turning in his strongest debate performance yet, Sanders drove the conversation – brushing aside her attacks as he doggedly returned to his core message of political revolution.

    • Robert Reich: Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics

      America’s most successful and beloved government programs are social insurance – Social Security and Medicare. A highway is a shared social expenditure, as is the military and public parks and schools. The problem is we now have excessive socialism for the rich (bailouts of Wall Street, subsidies for Big Ag and Big Pharma, monopolization by cable companies and giant health insurers, giant tax-deductible CEO pay packages) – all of which Bernie wants to end or prevent.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • UK Intelligence Agency GCHQ Will Pay Student Hackers [Ed: here comes the PR!]
    • GCHQ to host summer schools for UK students
    • Places on offer at summer school
    • GCHQ summer schools to pay teenage hackers £250 a week
    • Senator Franken Concerned Over Google’s Treatment of Student Privacy

      After we filed our complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about Google’s unauthorized collection of personal information from school children using Chromebooks and the company’s educational apps, we heard from hundreds of parents around the country concerned about K-12 student privacy. This week, an important voice in Washington joined their growing chorus.

      On Wednesday, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking for information about the privacy practices of Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Several of his questions reflect concern over the issues we raised with the FTC. Sen. Franken is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.

    • Groups Sue Over North Carolina’s Ag Gag Law, Saying It Violates The Constitution

      Last year, North Carolina made it nearly impossible for citizens to legally gather evidence on and report instances of wrongdoing — animals being mistreated by farm workers, for instance, or pollution being dumped into a stream. Now, a group of organizations is suing over the law, saying it tramples on North Carolinians’ constitutional rights.

      In the lawsuit, filed this week against North Carolina’s attorney general, the groups allege that North Carolina’s House Bill 405 “attacks the core values embodied by the federal and state constitutional protections of speech and the press” and “should be declared unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.” The law in question allows business owners to sue people who take photos, video, or any other data from their property without their consent. That in and of itself presents constitutional questions, but it’s the law’s breadth that’s so concerning, said lead council for the case David Muraskin.

    • EU court rules Facebook’s Friend Finder illegal for ‘harassing’ non-members

      SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook has seen its Friend Finder feature ruled illegal in Germany after a court said that it “harassed” non-members of the website.

      The German High Court’s ruling confirms the rulings of two lower courts, according to Reuters. The court said that the promotional feature constituted “advertising harassment”, noting that Facebook also didn’t do enough to inform people how it was using their contacts’ data.

      “After six years of proceedings, the German Supreme Court confirms on all points that Facebook may not use personal information without consent for promotional purposes,” said chairman of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations Klaus Müller in a statement.

    • The Color of Surveillance

      The FBI has a lead. A prominent religious leader and community advocate is in contact with a suspected sleeper agent of foreign radicals. The attorney general is briefed and personally approves wiretaps of his home and offices. The man was born in the United States, the son of a popular cleric. Even though he’s an American citizen, he’s placed on a watchlist to be summarily detained in the event of a national emergency. Of all similar suspects, the head of FBI domestic intelligence thinks he’s “the most dangerous,” at least “from the standpoint of … national security.”

    • What’s missing in the new NSA report?

      Some experts argue that though it clarifies answers to some of the questions, it still leaves more open for debate.

      “It leaves more questions than it resolves,” Julian Sanchez told FCW. Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an expert on surveillance and privacy issues, analyzed the report for the Just Security blog.

      Sanchez noted that the bigger question is on what exactly is going on in the black box — the NSA’s architecture which describes how the agency can query telephonic metadata.

    • NSA maintains phone surveillance regime meets privacy standards

      The US National Security Agency (NSA) has released a transparency report claiming that its updated phone surveillance regime meets the civil liberty and privacy standards of the recently enacted USA Freedom Act.

      The Freedom Act, signed into law by president Barack Obama in June, replaced the much-criticised US Patriot Act and has since forced the NSA to rethink how it conducts surveillance.

    • Why Would Most Americans Give Up Privacy for Freebies and Security?

      Digital privacy is an issue that affects anyone who interacts with modern technology on a regular basis — that is, at the least, everyone reading this. While the concept of privacy in this age of electronic communication may appear to be a hopeless and impossibly complex matter, this is not the reality.

    • Man denies dangerous driving on A40 outside GCHQ, Cheltenham, and assaulting another motorist

      Alleged ‘road rage’ driver Danny Copeland, 36, told a judge he was so sure of his innocence that he planned to defend himself and not employ a lawyer.

      But, he said, his wife had prevailed on him to change his mind and he now did want to be legally represented at his trial.

    • Police in Colombia Accused of Spying on Journalist Investigating Prostitution Ring

      COLOMBIA’S NATIONAL POLICE IS facing allegations that it wiretapped a high-profile journalist investigating the force’s involvement in a prostitution ring.

      While the attorney general’s office and Colombia’s president have separately ordered investigations into the allegations, critics say the probes are being hindered by death threats and conflicts of interests. This is the third major wiretapping scandal in Colombia in less than a decade.

      The latest scandal broke when prominent radio host and former news anchor Vicky Dávila announced that she, her family, and her reporting team had been trailed and wiretapped by the national police.

  • Civil Rights

    • Finally, Police Misconduct Against an Unarmed Black Man Gets Bipartisan Attention

      “I normally incline to give the police the benefit of the doubt,” says Ian Tuttle over at National Review. And that’s true. In fact, it’s fair to say that pretty much everyone at National Review supports the police under almost all circumstances. Nobody at NR ever manages to mount much concern over charges of racism—except to ridicule and disparage them as products of liberal victimology, of course—and they have especially little patience for charges of racism in police conduct.

    • Chuck Norris vs. Communism

      “Chuck Norris vs. Communism” translates this mixture of buoyant community spirit with an ever-present fear of surveillance, but it is the humour and warmth that stops the film from being dull. We see teenage boys emulating Rocky’s training regime on grim Soviet-style housing estates. We get to know the translator, Irina, who replaces all swear words with her own prim versions, so the audiences are unwittingly innocent when confronted with Hollywood norms of sex and violence.

    • Bullying kids: G4S abuse of child prisoners exposed

      Billy is a troubled 14-year-old boy. He stands at the door of the classroom, shouting.
 Moments later, a burly officer storms into the room. He shouts in the boy’s face and then grabs him, pushing him on to a table, twisting his arms behind his back, and calling for others to help.

      As a second officer arrives, Billy cries in pain: “Aaarrgh, I can’t breathe… Aaarrgh, what are you doing?”

      The senior officer has his fingers on the boy’s throat.

      This was only one of several scenes of child cruelty revealed in footage recorded by an undercover reporter for last night’s BBC Panorama documentary on the G4S-run Medway Secure Training Centre in Kent.

      In other scenes a boy is goaded and attacked by an officer because of the football team he supports. Another boy, who has self-harmed, is subjected to unlawful violent restraint on the anniversary of his mother’s death.


    • Crime (?) and Punishment-A Comparative Study

      When we see how uncivilized the behavior of some of our closest allies in the world can be, it is good to reflect how fortunate we are to live where we live, the words of most of the Republican candidates for the presidency notwithstanding. It all came to mind when reading the descriptions of how Saudi Arabia, one of our closest allies in the Middle East, celebrated the advent of 2016 by conducting the mass execution of 47 people, including the popular Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimir al-Nimr. It was a good way for the Saudis to welcome in 2016 since 2015 had proved to be a banner year for the executioners in Saudi Arabia. In that year Saudi Arabia executed 158 people forcing the Saudi government to begin running ads seeking 8 additional executioners. The ads said applicants needed no special qualifications. For a country with a population of only 28.3 million the execution of 158 people was quite an achievement. (To put this in some context, the United States with a population of 320 million people only executed 27 people in 2015.)

    • Air Force Forced to Yank Ad for Martin Luther King Jr. Day “Fun Shoot” Target Practice

      King, of course, was shot dead by an assassin in Memphis in 1968.

      The flyer, which prominently featured King’s likeness, advertised a noon gathering on January 18 — a national holiday in observance of the late civil rights icon — for the Robins Air Force Base Trap and Skeet Club. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, an official at the military base’s Outdoor Recreation office said the flyer was created by a marketing team. The 78th Force Support Squadron at Robins scheduled the trap, reported the Air Force Times. For $20, the poster promised, attendees would get “two rounds and lunch.”

    • We’re Witnessing the Decline and Fall of White America as We Know It

      All bodies are created equal, but in the U.S. some bodies have historically been more equal than others.

    • Cambodian trials offer important lessons

      For years afterward, the US government and its allies, fighting Cold War battles in the wake of the Communist victory in neighbouring Vietnam, cynically backed the ousted Khmer Rouge at the United Nations.

    • Congressman: Obama ‘The Most Racially-Divisive President’ Since Slavery

      A congressman from Alabama who once joked about shooting undocumented immigrants criticized President Obama on Thursday as “the most racially-divisive president” of the United States since the Civil War.

      “There probably has not been a more racially-divisive, economic-divisive, president in the White House since we had presidents who supported slavery,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said during a radio interview on the Dale Jackson Show.

    • Police Unions Take Credit for Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight Doing ‘Poorly’ at Box Office

      The president of the New York Police Benevolent Association (PBA), Patrick Lynch, took credit for the Hateful Eight making “only” $43 million at the box office so far since its release on Christmas. The New York PBA was the first of several police unions around the country to call for a boycott of the Quentin Tarantino movie after the director appeared in an October police reform rally.

      I’m a human being with a conscience,” Tarantino said at that rally. “And if you believe there’s murder going on then you need to rise up and stand up against it. I’m here to say I’m on the side of the murdered.”

    • Top U.N. Rights Officer: Gang Rape And Mass Graves Point To Mounting Ethnic Conflict In Burundi

      Citing reports of mass graves and gang rapes, the top human rights’ officer for the United Nations warned that Burundi is teetering on the brink of renewed ethnic conflict.

      “All the alarm signals, including the increasing ethnic dimension of the crisis, are flashing red,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said on Friday.

      The central African nation has seen a wave of violence since President Pierre Nkurunziza said in April that he would run for a third term. Although opponents decried the move as illegal, he was re-elected in July in elections that were largely believed to have been unfair. Deadly crackdowns by government forces and retaliatory attacks by opposition groups have periodically shaken the country since then.

    • Woman Faces A Year In Jail For Tagging Former Sister-in-law On Facebook

      A New York woman, Maria Gonzalez, faces a year in prison for violating a restraining order by tagging her former sister-in-law on Facebook and calling her ‘stupid’. The woman has been charged with criminal contempt and a year in jail.

    • Lawsuit Over Wisconsin Ban on Selling Homemade Cookies

      Sell a cookie, go to jail.

      As preposterous as it may sound, in Wisconsin you can go to jail and face hefty fines for selling homemade baked goods.

      Wisconsin is one of only two states to ban entrepreneurs from selling cookies, muffins and breads simply because they are made in a home kitchen.

    • We Have Always Been Good Haters: Our Donald Trump Problem Goes All the Way Back to the Founding Fathers

      As historians, we’ll go so far as to suggest that the culture-warring drums that daily beat are but reverberations of the 18th-century Enlightenment and 19th-century struggles to define America’s moral position in the world. That’s how not far we’ve come in 2016. We are not independent of our cultural inheritance. Americans were always idealists. And always good haters.

      Historians are taught to see the present through a long lens. To take one hot-button issue of the here and now–perceptions of immigrants from Mexico and the Islamic world–a student of the past knows that the visceral language used to tar new arrivals as pollutants and regard them en masse as objects of suspicion is as old as our country. In colonial Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin had no patience for Germans who refused to abandon their native language. The Irish, across generations, were despised as simple-minded, argumentative drunks and rabble-rousers. Swarthy southern Europeans and Jews were “filthy”; Chinese were “loathsome” and legislatively prohibited from entering the country.

    • A Dream and a Plan — the Full Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

      Martin Luther King, Jr. day, 2016. This year, as in the past, we’ll hear excerpts from his 1963 speech, “I Have a Dream,” and references to his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize — but probably nothing about his 1967 plan to make the dream come true.

      Yet his plan is now imperative, more relevant than when he was alive. Americans must act to resolve extreme poverty, income inequality, global warming, racial and gender injustices, and other matters. Yet what are we hearing from the presidential candidates? Mainly the standard litany of conventional policies.

      King’s plan: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

    • [Thailand] Ban on relatives standing for House, Senate

      The Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) has included a provision to prohibit potential MP and Senate candidates whose parents and spouses have political positions from competing for seats.

      The charter writers agreed to add the ban as a provisional clause while they were deliberating the chapter concerning parliament, CDC spokesman Chartchai Na Chiangmai told a news conference at a hotel in Phetchaburi.

    • Controversial article to remain in new charter

      AN ARTICLE prohibiting the overthrow of the country’s constitutional monarchy and the grabbing of power through unconstitutional means, which almost got the Pheu Thai Party dissolved in 2013, will remain in the new constitution despite talk about it being the source of conflict.

    • We Just Heard the Dumbest Comment About Immigration of the Campaign

      Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum offered a spirited defense of mass deportations at Thursday’s Republican undercard debate in South Carolina. Only he didn’t call it deportation. Instead, he explained, immigration officials would “export America” back to Latin America.

    • Oregon Militia’s Behavior Increasingly Brazen as Public Property Destroyed

      Holm also said the fish and wildlife service had received reports that the occupiers were accessing federal records at the refuge, raising concerns about a possibly dangerous data breach. He said the government was now contracting with a data protection and credit monitoring service to safeguard refuge employees whose personal data may have been compromised.

    • Education, Junior High, Police, and Fixing Our Killing Problem

      Many are hoping in this new year that the killing of unarmed African Americans by police officers will stop, but the situation does not seem to be improving. For those of us in the Chicago area, for example, it seems to be getting worse, and so we must ask what can be done?

      There is a path forward. People are taught to be racist; they are not born that way. The same goes for people who are violent. Humans are naturally more cooperative than violent, despite the myth of our violent ancestors. Racism does not have to exist, and neither does endemic violence. The killing of black people could be stopped with specific additions to education and training. Police officers can be taught about the concept of “race” which is an invented social construct, not a biological reality. Police officers can also be taught conflict resolution strategies that allow them to “keep the peace” rather than add to the disruption of it. These changes could produce incredibly positive results if we simply decide to do what is necessary.

    • David Cameron: More Muslim women should ‘learn English’ to help tackle extremism

      The Prime Minister is expected to call on more Muslim mothers to learn English and help to prevent their sons from turning to extremism

    • Muslim women’s segregation in UK communities must end – Cameron

      A £20m fund to teach Muslim women in the UK to speak English will tackle segregation and help them resist the lure of extremism, David Cameron says.

      While there was no “causal connection” between poor English and extremism, language lessons would make communities “more resilient”, Mr Cameron said.

      But some Muslims have accused him of wrongly “conflating” the two issues.

      The PM also suggested failing to learn English could affect people on spousal visas who wanted to settle in the UK.

    • Norway imam: Muslim kids should shun birthday parties

      Imam Abdikadir Mahamed Yussuf in Kristiansand thinks that Muslims shouldn’t wish people happy birthday, attend birthday parties or say ‘Merry Christmas’.

    • For English cop, Detroit’s streets are a culture shock

      As a police officer in England, Michael Matthews doesn’t carry a gun — but while on a recent ride-along with Detroit cops, he says there were times he wished he was packing.

      Detroit’s rampant violence, “Third World poverty,” and the availability of firearms aren’t as prevalent in his homeland, said Matthews, a 41-year-old Scotland Yard cop who’s in Detroit researching a book he’s writing about the city’s police department.

      “In the U.K., officers don’t go to calls thinking they could be shot at any second,” the 21-year police veteran said. “The average cop in London deals with fights, domestic calls, and burglaries. In a year, they might never get called to a homicide scene.

    • The lack of access to justice is a national disgrace

      It’s a remarkable statement for the lord chief justice to make. But unfortunately it’s right. In Britain, in the 21st century, a growing number of people can’t afford to defend themselves and make sure their rights are respected. The facts are startling. In 2009-10, more than 470,000 people received advice or assistance for social welfare issues. By 2013-14, the year after the government’s reforms to legal aid came into force, that number had fallen to less than 53,000 – a drop of nearly 90%.

    • Ten Years After Last Execution, California’s Death Row Continues to Grow

      TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, on January 17, 2006, California executed Clarence Ray Allen, the oldest person ever put to death in the state. It was just after midnight — the day after Allen’s 76 birthday — and the execution was couched in controversy. Allen was legally blind, diabetic, and relied on a wheelchair. He had suffered a heart attack the previous fall. Later, when he asked that they just let him die if he were to have another heart attack before his execution date, prison officials said they could do no such thing.

      Yet when the press told the story of Allen’s death, the prevailing descriptions were of a man in fine health — not nearly as weak as described by the attorneys who had tried to save his life. “In final moments, killer didn’t seem so frail,” read the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle, which noted Allen’s “robust ability”: how he stood up on his own from his wheelchair before being helped to the gurney by four prison guards; how he “vigorously craned his head” toward his supporters in the viewing chamber. California Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, who witnessed the execution, called it “incredibly humane,” remarking, “For 76 years old, he looked to be in remarkably good shape.” When it was revealed that officials at San Quentin had to inject Allen with a second deadly dose of potassium chloride — raising potential questions about the efficacy of the state’s execution protocol — the Associated Press presented this as proof that the “barrel-chested prisoner’s heart was strong to the end.”

    • The Mirage of Justice

      If you are poor, you will almost never go to trial—instead you will be forced to accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are poor, and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify your innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will be invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded in assembly-line production from a town or city where there are no jobs through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into prison. And if you are poor, because you don’t have money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world.

      If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime. And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of our era.

    • Barrett Brown Named a Finalist for National Magazine Award

      This is a little crazy. And delightful. Here’s what has happened: in 2011, I wrote a story about Barrett Brown that won a National Magazine Award. (An NMA, for those not in the biz, is like a Pulitzer of magazine journalism. (Even though they recently began awarding Pulitzers for magazines, the NMAs are still the country’s highest magazine award.)) Then I spoke at Barrett’s sentencing hearing, and he still got sent to prison for 63 months. But prison, in some ways, has been good to Barrett. He started collecting stories and writing about his Kafkaesque life behind bars in a column for D Magazine called “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail.” It was a pretty dang good column. So good that last summer Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept stole it away from us. No hard feelings. We were happy that Barrett’s work had found a larger audience. Well, yesterday, Barrett’s column was named as a finalist in the NMA’s Columns and Commentary category. Some fun trivia about this development:

    • King for a Day – the Rest of the Year, Not So Much

      Since 1986, Americans have observed the third Monday of January as a federal holiday: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Schools and communities put on marches and commemorative events. Some workers (sadly not including most of the working poor of all races to whose advancement King dedicated his life) get the day off.

      It’s an election year, so we can expect bombardment by politicians’ pledges of allegiance to this or that subset of Dr. King’s values.

      Republicans will piously assure us that they hew to King’s dream of “a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Then they’ll get back to finding new ways to keep African-Americans from voting.

    • Martin Luther King Jr. Celebrations Overlook His Critiques of Capitalism and Militarism

      America’s celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr. typically focus on his civil rights activism: the nonviolent actions that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

      The last few years of King’s life, by contrast, are generally overlooked. When he was assassinated in 1968, King was in the midst of waging a radical campaign against economic inequality and poverty, while protesting vigorously against the Vietnam War.

    • I Wonder What Dr. King Would Say

      That our nation can be both vengeful and impersonal at the same time horrifies. I wonder what Dr. King would say.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • World Bank opposes Facebook’s Free Basics

      Mark Zuckerberg’s Free Basics, the free but restrictive internet service that has run into trouble with Indian authorities, has picked up yet another opponent, the World Bank.

      Its World Development Report released Wednesday called Free Basics, which is a part of Facebook’s internet.org initiative, the “antithesis of net neutrality and a distortion of markets”.

      The bank is not opposing Free Basics specifically, or its Indian rollout. It believes any attempt to throttle the net anywhere in the world, by any service, is a threat to fundamental human rights.

    • FAQ HTTP 2

      There’s an add-on for Firefox that will show you when you’re using an HTTP/2 or a SPDY connection (it’s the tiny green symbol in the location field).

    • Here’s Why US Government Will Be Losing Control Over The Internet This Year

      In the upcoming days, US government, which played a major role in deciding the fate of the internet, might be losing its grip of control. Now ICANN, the body which controls the internet, will comprise of 16 members with an equal stake on their names. While it may not change the way things work, it would help reassure users, businesses and governments about its integrity, according to ICANN chief Fadi Chehade.

  • DRM

    • Fighting DRM in the W3C

      The W3C added DRM to the web’s standards in 2013. This doesn’t reverse that terrible decision, but it’s a step in the right direction.

    • Happy 30th birthday, IETF: The engineers who made the ‘net happen

      Special report Thirty years ago today, 16 January 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force – IETF – was born at a meeting in San Diego.

      It was humble beginnings and the organization that is more responsible than any other for turning a research project into a viable global communications network boasted an initial attendance of just 21 people. Reflecting the internet’s beginnings, everyone in the room was tied in some way to the US government.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • An Update on the Yosemite Park Trademark Dispute

        I wrote a post yesterday about a New York company that claims it owns the trademark to various locations at Yosemite National Park. Based on the story I read, this seemed obviously outrageous, and that was the tone I took.

    • Copyrights

      • The Anatomy of Copyright Lawsuits – Number Of People Sued Drops By 84% Since 2010

        A report published by Mathew Sag claims that the number of people sued for illegal file sharing in the US has decreased by 84% since the year 2010. The report includes statistics from the year 1994 till 2015, featuring numerical data for trademark, patent and copyright lawsuits filed in the 20-year time span in various US District Courts. Most of the cases filed are John Doe lawsuits which are considered as a monetization strategy implemented by the Plaintiffs.

01.17.16

Links 17/1/2016: 4MLinux 16.0 Beta, Black Lab Linux 8 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 5:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • git outta here, GitHub

    What a relief! I just deleted my GitHub account. Life is already looking brighter. ’cause you know, GitHub is Facebook. And you don’t want a Facebook account.

  • Nobody is using your software project. Now what?

    Working with open source software is an amazing experience. The collaborative process around creation, refinement, and even maintenance, drives more developers to work on open source software more often. However, every developer finds themselves writing code that very few people actually use.

  • How I Stumbled Upon The Internet’s Biggest Blind Spot

    Open source infrastructure refers to all the tools that help developers build software. On a deep level, it includes physical things like servers, but closer to the surface, it also includes things like programming languages, frameworks, and libraries.

    If you’ve ever built an app before, maybe you used Rails, Django or Node.js. Maybe your app was written in Ruby or Python. Maybe it made use of something like jQuery or React. All of these projects are open source.

    There is no question that these developer tools are vital to startups and technology: we couldn’t build anything without them. There is also no business model in many cases. You couldn’t charge people to use Python, for example, any more than you could charge someone to speak English.

  • AI research lab releases code to help with speech recognition

    Yesterday, Baidu Research’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) released open-source code called Warp-CTC to GitHub. The goal is for this code to be used in the machine learning community.

    Warp-CTC is a tool that can plug into existing machine learning frameworks to speed up the development of artificial intelligence, and according to SVAIL, it will speed up development by 400x compared to previous versions.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Thunderbird 38.5.1 Brings Fixes Only

        As you may know, Thunderbird is an open-source e-mail client and chat client developed by Mozilla. Among others, it has support for email addresses, newsgroup, news feed and chat (XMPP, IRC, Twitter) Client, managing multiple accounts. Also, it has support for different themes and its power can be extended by plugins.

      • Firefox to convert old YouTube Flash code to HTML5 Video

        Mozilla has added a feature to Firefox 46 that will convert old YouTube Flash code to HTML5 Video automatically under certain circumstances.

        When YouTube started out, Flash was the dominating technology used to stream video on the Internet, and the first player that YouTube made available to webmasters to embed videos on third-party sites used Flash exclusively.

        YouTube changed the code later on to reflect changes in streaming technologies. From a technical perspective, YouTube started to offer embed codes as iframes instead of objects.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Startup takes on Dropbox, Box, using cloud and local storage

      Right now, access to Infinit Drive and Infinit Cloud, the small-business and enterprise versions of the product, are restricted to invitations only, but it’s possible to sign up for early access. The open source pieces haven’t all been released yet, but the first of them have started to show up on Infinit’s GitHub site.

    • An introduction to OpenStack clouds for beginners

      This year, SCaLE 14x attendees will have the opportunity to hear Anthony Chow speak on how to get started contributing to OpenStack.

      Anthony is network engineer with a passion for sharing and promoting technologies that enable community growth. He’s currently working on Docker and OpenStack Magnum.

      In this interview, Anthony explains what OpenStack is, how it works with containers, and how an enterprise might want to use it.

    • OpenStack Foundation 2016 Directors Announced

      The OpenStack Foundation election of Individual Directors to the Board of Directors has now completed and the winning candidates have been announced.

    • Lessons learned (the hard way) doing DevOps at scale

      I had the chance to talk to Ticketmaster’s Victor Gajendran who will be attending (and speaking) for the first time at SCaLE 14x this year, which is taking place on January 21 and 22 in Pasadena, California. He’ll speak to attendees about how his company uses open source and how to empower your small teams to be part of a large, effective whole.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Kiev tests open budget process

      Through this new initiative SocialBoost partnered with Open North, a Canadian company, which has developed a ready-to-use portal called Citizen Budget. This portal was adapted for the Kiev project.

    • Civil society plays a key role in policy shaping in Europe

      The main theme of this debate, organised by the NGO Support Centre, under the European U-Impact project (From Citizen Involvement to Policy Impact) was “Civil Society and the EU”. The U-Impact project basically gathers citizens’ views on EU policies and explores the relationship and engagement between civil society and EU.

    • Open Hardware

Leftovers

  • Mr Cameron, the renegotiation and evidence-based policy making

    The outcome of the British government’s attempt to renegotiate the UK’s terms of membership of the European Union and the referendum that will follow are highly uncertain but the renegotiation reveals quite a lot about David Cameron.

  • Celine Dion’s brother Daniel dies two days after her husband

    The older brother of Canadian singer Celine Dion has died of cancer, two days after her husband also died.

    Daniel Dion, 59, died on Saturday near Montreal, a statement by the singer’s spokeswoman said.

    Ms Dion’s family paid tribute to the father-of-two, calling him “a gentle and reserved man of many talents”.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • In 1993 Meeting, Hillary Clinton Acknowledged “Convincing Case” for Single-Payer

      Two doctors who met privately with Hillary Clinton during the 1993 health reform debate say she agreed that single-payer healthcare would be good for Americans. Their recollections raise questions about both the motive and the sincerity of Clinton’s recent assault on Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders for supporting such a system.

      Until Clinton’s pivot, the accepted Democratic view was that single-payer was the best solution in theory, but that it was politically unrealistic. Clinton’s new critiques, by contrast, are an attempt to make Sanders’s single-payer proposals sound costly and destructive.

    • Sanders’ Courageous Stand for Universal Coverage

      The Clinton campaign just made a serious mistake.

      They sent Hillary and Bill Clinton’s daughter Chelsea out on behalf of her mother to bash Senator Bernie Sanders on the issue of health care.

      What’s so wrong with that? Don’t all candidates use family surrogates when and where they can? The Kennedys, for example, deployed a horde of kinfolk for Jack’s campaign for president, then Bobby’s, then Teddy’s.

    • This is how toxic Flint’s water really is

      The city of Flint, Mich., is in the midst of a water crisis several years in the making. The city opted out of Detroit’s water supply and began drawing water from the Flint River in April 2014, part of a cost-saving move. Eighteen months later, in the fall of 2015, researchers discovered that the proportion of children with above-average lead levels in their blood had doubled.

    • This Bee-Killing Pesticide Is Terrible at Protecting Crops

      In 2011, agrichemical giants Monsanto and Bayer CropScience joined forces to sell soybean seeds coated with (among other things) an insecticide of the neonicotinoid family. Neonics are so-called systematic pesticides—when the coated seeds sprout and grow, the resulting plants take up the bug-killing chemical, making them poisonous to crop-chomping pests like aphids. Monsanto rivals Syngenta and DuPont also market neonic-treated soybean seeds.

      These products—buoyed by claims that the chemical protects soybean crops from early-season insect pests—have enjoyed great success in the marketplace. Soybeans are the second-most-planted US crop, covering about a quarter of US farmland—and at least a third of US soybean acres are grown with neonic-treated seeds. But two problems haunt this highly lucrative market: 1) The neonic soybean seeds might not do much at all to fight off pests, and 2) they appear to be harming bees and may also hurt other pollinators, birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates.

      Doubts about neonic-treated soybean seeds’ effectiveness aren’t new. In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency released a blunt preliminary report finding that “neonicotinoid seed treatments likely provide $0 in benefits” to soybean growers. But the agrichemical industry likes to portray the EPA as an overzealous regulator that relies on questionable data, and it quickly issued a report vigorously disagreeing with the EPA’s assessment.

    • All Flint’s children must be treated as exposed to lead

      In order to address the public health crisis in Flint, every Flint child under 6 years of age — 8,657 children, based on an analysis of Census data — should be considered exposed to lead.

      The direction came earlier this week from the doctor who forced the state to acknowledge Flint’s lead problem and the state itself.

      The exposure began in April 2014 after the city switched from using Detroit’s water system, which pumps water out of Lake Huron, to its own treatment plant, which drew water from the Flint River.

    • ‘Ludicrous’ as Flint Tells Residents: Pay for Poisoned Water or We’ll Cut You Off

      Amid a crisis that has poisoned the water supply of an entire city, authorities in Flint, Michigan are under renewed fire on Friday for sending out shut-off notices to residents who are behind on paying their water bills.

      Slammed as “ludicrous, the move comes as Republican Governor Rick Snyder finally asked President Obama to step in and declare a federal state of emergency.

      Following a short holiday reprieve, Finance Director Jody Lundquist announced Wednesday that officials will resume sending an unspecified amount of shut-off notices to past-due accounts. According to Lundquist, the city already sent out 1,800 notices in November.

    • Bernie Sanders Calls For Michigan Governor To Resign Over Poisoned Water Scandal

      Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders urged Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to step down in light of his state’s ongoing and fatal water crisis that has sickened thousands of residents and left more than 30,000 Flint, Michigan households with undrinkable tap water.

      “There are no excuses. The governor long ago knew about the lead in Flint’s water. He did nothing. As a result, hundreds of children were poisoned. Thousands may have been exposed to potential brain damage from lead. Gov. Snyder should resign,” Sanders said in a statement Saturday.

    • Russia’s ‘state sponsored doping’ endangered athletes lives

      Sessions also focused on organizational issues that are necessary to quickly consider doping cases, investigating problems mentioned in the report by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Independent Commission, collecting information about the location of athletes and comprehensive testing of Russian athletes before WADA restores the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), as well as educational and other measures necessary for introducing zero tolerance policy for doping in Russian athletics.

      Part one revealed state-sponsored doping in the country which resulted in them being suspended by the IAAF.

      Being generous, it seems officials weren’t ignoring Russian doping but rather were seeking expedient ways of dealing with the large number of cases thrown up by the IAAF’s “blood passport” anti-doping program before the 2012 London Games.

  • Security

    • Hacking Team’s Leak Helped Researchers Hunt Down a Zero-Day

      The vulnerability, which Microsoft called “critical” in a patch released to customers on Tuesday, would allow an attacker to infect your system after getting you to visit a malicious website where the exploit resides—usually through a phishing email that tricks you into clicking on a malicious link. The attack works with all of the top browsers except Chrome—but only because Google removed support for the Silverlight plug-in in its Chrome browser in 2014.

      [...]

      In July 2015, a hacker known only as “Phineas Fisher” targeted the Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team and stole some 400 GB of the company’s data, including internal emails, which he dumped online. The hack exposed the company’s business practices, but it also revealed the business of zero-day sellers who were trying to market their exploits to Hacking Team. The controversial surveillance firm, which sells its software to law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world—including to oppressive regimes like Sudan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia—uses zero-day exploits to help sneak its surveillance tools onto targeted systems.

    • Flexible, secure SSH with DNSSEC

      With version 6.2 of OpenSSH came a feature that allows the remote host to retrieve a public key in a customised way, instead of the typical authorized_keys file in the ~/.ssh/ directory. For example, you can gather the keys of a group of users that require access to a number of machines on a single server (for example, an LDAP server), and have all the hosts query that server when they need the public key of the user attempting to log in. This saves a lot of editing of authorized_keys files on each and every host. The downside is that it’s necessary to trust the source these hosts retrieve public keys from. An LDAP server on a private network is probably trustworthy (when looked after properly) but for hosts running in the cloud, that’s not really practical.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • They Make Cheney Look Like Chomsky: Cruz, Trump, Rubio and the Frightening Bellicosity of Today’s GOP

      They want to “carpet bomb,” “bomb the shit” out of them and make “sand glow.” The GOP field somehow makes Cheney seem moderate.

    • U.S. Radically Changes Its Story of the Boats in Iranian Waters: to an Even More Suspicious Version

      When news first broke of the detention of two U.S. ships in Iranian territorial waters, the U.S. media — aside from depicting it as an act of Iranian aggression — uncritically cited the U.S. government’s explanation for what happened. One of the boats, we were told, experienced “mechanical failure” and thus “inadvertently drifted” into Iranian waters. On CBS News, Joe Biden told Charlie Rose, “One of the boats had engine failure, drifted into Iranian waters.”

    • After Me, the Jihad

      The West was then gearing up to use unrest in Libya as a pretext for military intervention and regime change. Gaddafi desperately tried to convey through Blair the folly of such a war, pleading that he was trying to defend Libya from Al Qaeda, which had set up base in the country.

    • US Foreign Policy Discussions Need a Colossal Dose of Humility

      According to an apocryphal Russian proverb, it’s easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but much harder to turn fish soup into an aquarium. The US political class has served up plenty of fish soup over the past decade, and much of it was created in the belief that each aquarium just wasn’t good enough without our help.

      A prime example of US-created fish soup would be Iraq. It’s a steaming bowl of it, and no amount of firepower is going to change that. Societal cohesion was destroyed, it’s not something that can be put back together through force of arms.

    • Thanks to Donald Trump, Police Brutality and Guns, the United States’ Reputation Is Plummeting

      Donald Trump’s bewildering popularity in the presidential race has been exceedingly hard to bear for many Americans, particularly those who belong to one or more of the communities that he openly disparages, like African-Americans and Muslim Americans.

      Yet if even some citizens wrestle to make sense of Trump’s rise to power, how do non-Americans view the strange state of politics in the world’s most powerful nation?

      While on a recent visit to Dubai, United Arab Emirates—where I was born and raised and where my parents still live—Trump’s name cropped up as a topic of conversation within the first few minutes of nearly every interaction I had, so I decided to gather a group of my friends together to answer that question.

      Dubai is home to myriad immigrant communities, and while the city of more than 2.4 million struggles with its own unique social problems, the United States remains hugely influential there when it comes to both pop culture and politics.

    • Implementation Day: Full Description From JCPOA Text

      As can be seen from the incredibly long and detailed list of actions Iran has taken to dismantle much of its nuclear technology, Implementation Day represents a remarkable movement away from any capability to produce a nuclear weapon. A devastating array of economic sanctions has been put into place by the West, and many of these are dropped on this historic occasion.

      Diplomacy has won.

    • GOP Debates Are Pure Hawk Without a Paul

      Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul was not the perfect antiwar candidate sent down from above, but you would be forgiven for thinking so if you compare the 2008 and 2012 presidential races to the 2016 one.

      Ron Paul was not without fault (early immigration fearmongering, the vote for the Afghanistan Authorization for Use of Military Force) but he was the rare politician who got better and more interested in peace and freedom the longer he stayed in office. The 2012 election was basically a victory lap for him, but one that involved the vital message of peace and nonintervention. There’s a reason that he’s so beloved, and that YouTube videos with titles that call Paul a seer for predicting more terrorist attacks on the US back in 1998 are amusingly common.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Why is the Guardian letting Shell fill its pages with dubious spin?

      Oil sponsorship is pretty controversial. Where companies like BP and Shell have paid to have their logos displayed in museums, art galleries and theatres, they have been met with a torrent of protest performances and artistic antipathy.

      Groups like BP or not BP, Liberate Tate, BP out of Opera and Art Not Oil have found numerous high profile and creative ways to challenge oil company sponsorship of institutions including the Royal Shakespeare Company, The British Museum, the Tate and Tate Modern, the Science Museum, the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery, the Edinburgh Festival and the Louvre.

    • Things Just Got Even Worse For Coal

      About 40 percent of all US coal extraction takes place on federal land, much of that in Wyoming, the nation’s top coal producer. For years, environmentalists have complained that the coal industry enjoys royalty rates much lower than offshore oil or other publicly owned fossil fuels. Those low rates make it cheaper for coal companies to operate and may also be a raw deal for the public that has to deal with the impacts, from local environmental degradation to global climate change. While offshore oil companies typically pay a royalty rate of about 18 percent, Jewell said, the rate for coal is only 8-10 percent. A Government Accountability Office report in 2014 found that undervalued coal leases cost the US Treasury nearly $1 billion per year in lost revenue.

    • Coal Ash Wastewater Will Be Dumped Into Virginia Rivers

      Millions of gallons of treated wastewater from coal ash ponds can be disposed in two major Virginia rivers — one a tributary of the Potomac River — the Virginia Water Control Board ruled Thursday.

      The decision comes as some residents and environmentalists questioned the stringency of permits that allow Dominion Virginia Power to release wastewater with some levels of arsenic, lead, copper, and other substances into nearby waterways rich in wildlife. Wastewater will come from the Possum Point Power Plant located by Quantico Creek, and the Bremo Power Plant located by the James River.

    • 22 Mind-Blowing Catastrophes That Are Just A Matter Of Time
    • Asia is imperiled by COP21’s climate cop-out

      The nations of the world gathered at the Paris Climate Conference (COP21) last month to come to an agreement on the urgent mission of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, all they produced was an attractive vision statement that is more sham than solution.

      It is imperative that the world invests significantly and quickly in climate mitigation strategies to reduce the human and economic cost of climate change, which is where COP21 fell short. The vague wording of the final declaration gives too much wiggle room for nations to avoid painful choices.

      “This agreement is a great escape for the big polluters, and a poisoned chalice for the poor,” concludes Asad Rehman from the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice. “We’ve got some warm words about temperature levels, but no concrete action.”

      [...]

      Indonesia is also in the process of increasing harmful emissions and pollutants as it develops. Anyone visiting the main cities on the island of Java will come away convinced that Indonesia is zooming toward environmental disaster, while its destruction of rainforest through the deliberate setting of fires to clear land in Sumatra and Kalimantan for palm oil plantations is devastating the environment and subjecting citizens of Singapore and Malaysia to high levels of unhealthy smoke. Indonesia already emits more carbon dioxide per capita than India.

  • Finance

    • Whiny Ragequitting

      I characterized Mike Hearn’s farewell essay as a ‘whiny ragequit’. I did this because it is, well, a whiny ragequit. He attempted a hostile takeover of Bitcoin with Bitcoin-XT, and now that he’s predictably been made to feel like persona non grata in Bitcoin development he’s throwing a tantrum on his way out.

      There are of course real howlers in Hearn’s essay which I can explain, although truth be known I shouldn’t have to. There is overwhelming alignment among people doing Bitcoin development on the path forward. The popular perception of internal division is caused by having a camp consisting of Mike Hearn, Jeff Garzik, and Gavin Andresen who are doing a good job of whipping up popular support and talking to the press. They have a simplistic plan which appeals to people who don’t know any better or want to be told that technical problems can be made to magically go away with a simple fix. On the other side are the people doing actual development, who aren’t particularly good at talking to the press or whipping up support on reddit and have a plan which requires real engineering work moving forwards.

    • ‘Bitcoin Has Failed’, Says Lead Developer Who Just Quit

      Once again Bitcoin has been declared dead. This time, the announcement has come from a prominent developer Mike Hearn who just quit the project. In a long blog post on Medium, he called Bitcoin an ‘experiment’ that has now failed.

    • BTC dev: ‘Strangling’ the blockchain will kill Bitcoin

      The destiny of Bitcoin, like that of Apollo 13, shall never be realised, at least according to one of the cryptocurrency’s most well-known developers, who has announced that “the experiment has failed”.

      Mike Hearn was a senior software engineer at Google up until 2014, when he left to focus his full-time attention on Bitcoin development. In a blog post on Thursday, Hearn announced he would longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and had sold all of his coins.

    • Walmart to Close 269 Stores, Most of Them in the United States
    • Walmart to shutter 269 stores, with most located in the US

      The retail giant announced it is working to transfer 10,000 US employees to nearby stores, as CEO said closings are ‘necessary to keep the company strong’

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Hillary Clinton: Israel First

      Although the United States is still ten months from its next exercise in electoral futility, most polls do not indicate what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is most anxious to see: a runaway victory for her candidacy. It is a good sign that, despite the fact that she has no real contrasting opponent on the Democratic side, the coronation she expected isn’t going to happen.

    • The Good, Bad and Ugly in Oregon Standoff Coverage

      Unraveling the Gordian knot of media issues in the Oregon standoff between federal authorities and a Patriot/Militia alliance of building occupiers is a daunting task. Some journalists have written excellent, thoughtful articles, and some have wasted wood pulp and bandwidth. Most early reporting sat between those extremes.

    • Trump’s Muslim Ban is a Vile Joke That GOP Condenders Don’t Have the Guts to Take On

      You obviously can’t try and explain such intricacies to a nasty hare-brain who trucks in inflammatory bromides. So what do you do? Condemn him? Ignore him? The first would be the most honorable course and the second understandable. But what the GOP luminaries actually did – i.e. sing and dance to Trump’s tune – was neither. The only exception was Jeb Bush.

    • Review: Michael Bay’s 13 Hours Is A Coded Message To Benghazi Conspiracy Theorists

      Shortly before Michael Bay’s latest movie, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, hit theaters, The Hollywood Reporter published a long report on how the film had been carefully marketed to conservative pundits. In return, the film was praised as “riveting” and “extraordinary” by people the studio could use to validate the movie to their hoped-for audience.

    • How Corporations and Politicians Use Numbers to Lie — and How Not to Be Fooled

      Americans, as P.T. Barnum once noted, are not all that difficult to fool, and our nation’s somewhat weak math skills don’t help. A Pew Research Center report issued last year, which studied test results of 15-year-olds, ranked the United States 35th in the world in math. Not only has this weakness in understanding numbers created opportunities for mass exploitation by Big Pharma and other industries, it has led to needless and mostly unwarranted fear. While Americans don’t understand math, be assured that corporations do, and they happily use it to mislead and obfuscate in the name of selling their products.

  • Censorship

    • Letter: Censorship can deny all opinion

      Tears flow down my cheeks as I read of the torture some readers go through when they read Thomas Sowell’s weekly column. Their pleading for The Columbian to stop carrying his column tears at my heart. The anguish the writers go through detailing point by point of where they disagree with him is almost too much to bear.

    • Is The Internet Evolving Away From Freedom of Speech?

      Yesterday Motherboard published a fascinating look back at how Twitter’s rules have evolved over the past decade and how its own experiences as flag bearer of the social media revolution have influenced and changed the accepted wisdom of the juxtaposition of freedom of speech and commercial reality. From its founding principles that guided the site through the end of last year that enshrined “because of these principles, we do not actively monitor and will not censor user content except in limited circumstances” to its new rules, published last month that clarify “there are some limitations on the type of content and behavior that we allow,” Twitter has evolved along with the web itself.

    • How Twitter quietly banned hate speech last year

      But that wasn’t all. More links to outside documents appeared in the company rules. In August, Twitter clarified that it would include “indirect threats” under its definition of “hateful conduct.” It would also censor people who “incited” harassment, for example by urging their followers to send harassing messages to another user.

    • My Experience With the Great Firewall of China

      When I recently visited China for the first time, as an InfoSec professional I was very curious to finally be able to poke at the Great Firewall of China with my own hands to see how it works and how easy it is evade. In short I was surprised by:

      Its high level of sophistication such as its ability to exploit side-channel leaks in TLS (I have evidence it can detect the “TLS within TLS” characteristic of secure web proxies)

      How poorly simple Unix computer security tools fared to evade it

      1 of the top 3 commercial VPN providers uses RSA keys so short (1024 bits!) that the Chinese government could factor them

    • Censorship still works — just not the way you think

      But top-down approaches don’t work so well when anyone can get online and fight back. Then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was widely ridiculed for the heavy-handed YouTube ban. Similar backfires occurred in 2010 when WordPress was blocked in Venezuela, and in China the same year when a man with political connections tried to censor news of his hit-and-run killing of a college student. Egyptian authorities turned off the whole country’s internet during 2011 protests there, but it didn’t save President Mubarak. The old ways do not work as well anymore. Effective censorship is done not by deletion, but by confusion.

  • Privacy

    • Apple has patented a way to track your digital ‘skeleton’ using a camera

      Apple has been granted a patent for software that can work out information about a person’s “skeleton” by looking at it through Microsoft Kinect-style hardware.

      Microsoft Kinect is a hardware accessory for the Xbox that uses cameras to the track movements of people in the room, helping control a video game.

    • Why is Apple starting to patent light fittings?

      Apple has been granted a patent for the ceiling lighting system it has developed for its new-look stores in a move that has again raised the issue of the company’s intentions in the lighting market.

    • Theresa May’s snooping defence remains inherently contradictory

      The UK government doesn’t want backdoors to encrypted messages. But it wants companies to decrypt messages on demand anyway.

      That apparently contradictory policy remains at the heart of the Investigatory Powers Bill, Home Secretary Theresa May has told MPs.

      May, who is overseeing the creation of the IP Bill and saw similar plans blocked in 2012, told a group of MPs and Lords that companies will be required to remove electronic protection on messages and information when a warrant is issued.

    • No, the European Court of Human Rights did NOT just greenlight spying on employees

      Reports that say the European Court of Human Rights ruled bosses can peek into their employees’ personal communications are hogwash.

    • German data surveillance includes Finland

      According to leaked German intelligence documents, German intelligence agency BND monitored phone calls and possibly Internet traffic to and from Finland in the 2000s — possibly at the behest of the American security agency, the NSA.

    • FISC Still Sitting on Government Proposal for EFF Data

      When last we checked in with the new-and-improved post USA Freedom Act FISA Court, amicus Preston Burton had helped the Court finish off the Section 215 dragnet with a strong hand, in part by asking a bunch of questions that should have been asked 9 years earlier. And in a reply to the government (the reply was released belatedly), Burton made an argument that led first to a hearing on the issue and then a briefing order for ways the government might stipulate to something in the EFF lawsuits so as to permit the FISC to lift the protection order requiring all Americans’ phone records to be kept indefinitely.

  • Civil Rights

    • Laura Carlsen on the Arrest of ‘El Chapo,’ Omar Shakir on Closing Guantanamo
    • What’s Your Threat Score?

      Police have found a new way to legally incorporate surveillance and profiling into everyday life. Just when you thought we were making progress raising awareness surrounding police brutality, we have something new to contend with. The Police Threat Score isn’t calculated by a racist police officer or a barrel-rolling cop who thinks he’s on a TV drama; it’s a computer algorithm that steals your data and calculates your likelihood of risk and threat for the fuzz.

    • First Member Of Bundy Militia Arrested

      The first members of the militia illegally occupying a federal building in Oregon have been arrested. The occupation has gone on for nearly two weeks, costing the state more than $133,000 per day.

      Two members of the militia were finally arrested when they took federal vehicles stolen from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and drove them to a local Safeway.

    • America Is a Dystopian Hellhole and Don’t You Forget It

      And the surprise? There’s nothing on this list from Ted Cruz. He had plenty of criticisms of Obama, but I looked at everything he said last night and there was really no hint of America going to hell in a handbasket. I didn’t expect that, but I’ll bet it’s deliberate. Maybe he knows something the rest of field doesn’t?

    • Poor and Seeking Justice in Louisiana? Get in Line.

      Taking aim at Louisiana’s “chronic underfunding” of its public defender system—which has forced at least four parishes in the state to create “waiting lists” for appointed counsel—the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Louisiana filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday evening on behalf of criminal defendants in Orleans Parish who are unable to afford an attorney.

      “So long as you’re on the public defender waiting list in New Orleans, you’re helpless,” said Brandon Buskey, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. “Your legal defense erodes along with your constitutional rights.”

      What’s more, he added in an op-ed published Friday, “The people the public defender is making wait in line are most at risk in our justice system: usually poor, often a person of color, and facing severe sentences. [T]hese are the people who most need the public defender’s help investigating the state’s case against them and quickly uncovering favorable evidence before it is lost.”

    • Justice Has a Waiting List in New Orleans
    • Terrorism In Europe is Less Common and Less Deadly Than in the Recent Past — And Doesn’t Justify Expanded Repressive Surveillance

      International security researcher: “Western Europe is safer now than it has been for decades and is far safer than most other parts of the world.”

    • Dr. King’s legacy still relevant
    • Cock.li server seized again by German prosecutor, service moves to Romania

      cock.li’s Vincent Canfield said that he had initially chosen a German data host because the country has a reputation for “good data privacy laws.”

      “Of course, though the facts of the case are yet to be seen since no one in Germany is talking to us, I will definitely never host anything in Germany ever again,” he told Ars in an encrypted chat.

      The same Zwickau authorities previously seized one of cock.li’s hard drives in late December 2015. That first seizure came shortly after cock.li was reportedly used to send a bogus bomb threat e-mail from “madbomber@cock.li” to several school districts in the United States, which led to the closure of all schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The New York City Department of Education, however, dismissed the e-mail as an obvious hoax. (The LAUSD has refused to provide Ars a copy of this original message under the California Public Records Act, a decision that we have appealed.)

      “We live in an age where anonymous messages can be sent with extreme ease.”
      Because the novelty e-mail host was configured as a RAID1 (mirrored) setup, the e-mail service continued operating until Friday. It is unclear why there was a weeks-long delay between the first and second seizure.

    • The report which could destroy Britain’s immigration prisons

      Entrance to healthcare, The Verne Immigration Removal Centre (HMIP)

      The Home Office never wanted this report. It was only after a string of stories about abusive guards and sexual attacks that Stephen Shaw’s inquiry into Britain’s immigration detention centres was even commissioned.

      Even then, they tried to narrow its remit. It was limited to assessing detainees’ welfare and there was to be no discussion about the principle of detention itself.

      As if that weren’t restrictive enough, officials also didn’t want Shaw, a former prisons ombudsman, addressing the issue of how long detainees are held. Under the current system, they never know how long they’ll be imprisoned. It could be hours or it could be years. That uncertainty can sometimes drive them mad. It is a uniquely bureaucratic form of mental torture.

    • What Accounts for the Saudi Regime’s Hysterical Belligerence? The Agony of Death

      The Saudi rulers find themselves in a losing race against time, or history. Although in denial, they cannot but realize the historical reality that the days of ruling by birthright are long past, and that the House of Saud as the ruler of the kingdom by inheritance is obsolete.

      This is the main reason for the Saudi’s frantically belligerent behavior. The hysteria is tantamount to the frenzy of the proverbial agony of a prolonged death. It explains why they react so harshly to any social or geopolitical development at home or in the region that they perceive as a threat to their rule.

      It explains why, for example, they have been so intensely hostile to the Iranian revolution that terminated the rule of their dictatorial counterpart, the Shah of Iran, in that country. In the demise of the Shah they saw their own downfall.

    • 12-year-old girl suspended because she lent her inhaler to a gasping classmate

      A 12-year-old honor student from Texas got suspended from school for giving her asthama inhaler to another girl who was wheezing and gasping in gym class. She could also be tranferred to an “alternative school” for up to 30 days. The girl told Fox 4 News she feels the punishment is not fair. “I was just trying to save her life. I didn’t think I was trying to do anything bad,” she said.

    • Garland girl suspended, potential alternative school time for sharing inhaler
    • Apple Shrugs Off Diversity Push, Calling It ‘Unduly Burdensome’

      Apple’s board and senior management teams are dominated by white men. But its leadership still feels that speeding up efforts to change that makeup are “unduly burdensome and not necessary.”

      Antonio Avian Maldonado, II, one of the company’s shareholders, has put forward a proposal that would force the company’s board to adopt an “accelerated recruitment policy” for diverse senior management and board seat positions, “bodies that presently fails [sic] to adequately represent diversity (particularly Hispanic, African-American, Native-American and other people of colour).” By Apple’s own count, the company’s leadership team is 72 percent male and 63 percent white, while it’s just 6 percent Hispanic and 3 percent black. Of the eight people on its board, just two are women and only two are people of color.

    • The FBI’s Two-Pronged Investigation of Hillary Clinton

      Later, as a member of a secret Presidential committee to investigate the CIA’s view of the Soviet Union’s ability to withstand an arms race, I had very high clearances as the committee had subpoena power over the CIA. If the Kremlin had had access to the top secret documents, all the Kremlin would have learned is that the CIA had a much higher opinion of the capability of the Soviet economy than did the Kremlin.

      Distinguished law professors have concluded that the US government classifies documents primarily in order to hide its own mistakes and crimes. We see this over and over. The US government can escape accountability for the most incredible mistakes and the worse crimes against the US Constitution and humanity simply by saying “national security.”

    • Saudi Arabia’s foreign affairs minister Adel al-Jubeir urges Britain to ‘respect’ the kingdom’s use of the death penalty

      Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has urged Britain to “respect” his country’s use of the death penalty, two weeks after the oil-rich kingdom executed 47 people in one day.

      Adel al-Jubeir, responding to a question over the kingdom’s “terrible image problem”, put to him by Channel 4 News’ Jonathan Rugman, said: “Well on this issue we have a fundamental difference. In your country, you do no execute people, we respect it. In our country the death penalty is part of our laws and you have to respect this as it is the law, part of the law, in the United States and other countries.”

    • A Few Keystrokes Could Solve the Crime. Would You Press Enter?

      The discovery would surely help in the prosecution of the laptop’s owner, tying him to the crime. But a junior prosecutor has a further idea. The private document was likely shared among other conspirators, some of whom are still on the run or unknown entirely. Surely Google has the ability to run a search of all Gmail inboxes, outboxes, and message drafts folders, plus Google Drive cloud storage, to see if any of its 900 million users are currently in possession of that exact document. If Google could be persuaded or ordered to run the search, it could generate a list of only those Google accounts possessing the precise file — and all other Google users would remain undisturbed, except for the briefest of computerized “touches” on their accounts to see if the file reposed there.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Why Americans Should Pay Attention to What Facebook Is Doing in India

      If you live in India, or happen to have visited in the past month, you probably noticed the seemingly-ubiquitous advertising for something called Free Basics. It’s what you might call a full-court press: full-page ads in newspapers, billboards, and movie theater trailers. Also, if you were to log into Facebook, you’d be presented with an ad (and possibly if you were in the US, too).

      The first thing to understand is that Free Basics is Facebook, and Facebook is Free Basics, and they’re both basically Internet.org. Perhaps more accurately, if expressed in matryoshka dolls, Free Basics is inside Internet.org which is inside Facebook. First, Facebook launched the Internet.org initiative, which covers various projects aimed at spreading internet access to developing countries. One of the first projects was a free service that offers limited access to the internet, including ad-free Facebook and other sites. Then, in September, Facebook rebranded that service from Internet.org to Free Basics.

    • outrageous roaming fees

      Unexpected roaming fees are the worst. You’re just cruising along, having a jolly old time, and then boom. $20 per megabyte??? Should have read the fine print. Of course, if you had known to read the fine print, you probably would have already known about the roaming fees, and therefore not needed to read the fine print. And so it goes, in life and in ssh.

      What, ssh has roaming??? Should have read the fine print. The Qualys Security Advisory is more than thorough. Now that we’ve read the fine print, what can we do differently?

    • ‘Poor internet for poor people’: India’s activists fight Facebook connection plan

      India is having its internet uprising, and many western activists can’t figure out what to do about it.

      Since the spring of 2015, Indian activists have built ferocious momentum against Facebook’s bid to take charge of the nation’s internet through a program called Free Basics.

      Formerly called “Internet Zero,” Free Basics’s pitch has been: we’ll get “the next billion internet users” (that is, poor people in developing nations) connected by cutting deals with local phone companies. Under these deals, there will be no charge for accessing the services we hand-pick. We will define the internet experience for these technologically unsophisticated people, with our products at the centre and no competition. It’s philanthropy!

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Yosemite to Rename Several Iconic Places

        Can a private company trademark public property? That’s the question the feds are scrambling to answer after a longtime concessionaire in Yosemite claimed rights to the names of some of the park’s most iconic locations.

    • Copyrights

      • Summary of ‘Cinematic Bricoleurs’ Remix Conference, King’s College, London (Jan.2016)

        After tea, a panel was assembled for a Q&A session, featuring Prof. Charlotte Wealde, Julia Reda (Pirate Party MEP), Elizabeth Gibson (BBC), Richard Misek, Dan Herbert and myself, chaired by Helen Kennedy. The focus of the panel was ‘the currently shifting sands of territory specific intellectual property legislation, set against the wider backdrop of the global digital economy.’ Each panelist discussed their own position in relation to this issue, as well as suggesting where the leading edge is in terms of influencing changes to current IP legislation and what needs to happen to make those changes. From the floor, questions were fielded in relation to the identity and personality of the author with regard to moral rights and individual self-expression, as well as the challenge of identifying the most important issues and problems in this debate. Some of the answers yielded genuine insights, such as when Julia Reda described how recent attempts to change the EUCD to allow greater freedoms for transformative works were met with great resistance, on the grounds that such exemptions would only serve to benefit large US tech companies. It was suggested that the gathering of evidence and lots of different examples of remix should be prioritized to assist with the changing of copyright legislation and to support the case for such changes. A number of times during the discussion, reference was made to Christian Marclay and especially his found footage work ‘The Clock’ (2010), which was hailed as a superb example of the form.

      • Croatian cake pirates threatened with lawsuits

        As Harlan Ellison once said about Disney, “Nobody fucks with The Mouse.” Even if you live in Zagreb, Croatia, the long hand of The Mouse can reach in and change your birthday party plans. That’s what several bakers in Zagreb discovered when they received cease-and-desist letters warning them to stop making cakes featuring popular Disney characters from Star Wars, Frozen, and more.

        According to Croatian paper Jutarnji, the letters came from a law firm representing the Zagreb chain Fun Cake Factory, which has an exclusive license to make Disney-themed cakes via its partnership with British confectioner Finsbury Food Group. Ana Marcelić, a local Zagreb confectioner who received one of the cease-and-desist letters, told the paper it would be a “huge loss” for her financially and difficult to explain to customers requesting Disney-themed cakes.

      • Pastry Shops Targeted Over Copyright Infringing “Star Wars” and “Minion” Cakes

        Pastry shops in Croatia are receiving legal threats over their use of popular cartoon and movie characters on children’s birthday cakes. Baking cakes with a Star Wars or Minions theme is off-limits, as a local pastry chain has secured the rights from copyright owners.

      • Don’t Terrorize The Public Over Piracy, Putin’s Adviser Says

        The man just appointed as Vladimir Putin’s key adviser on Internet related affairs has suggested that copyright holders should consider the state of the economy before being aggressive with the public. Speaking on local TV, Herman Klimenko says the time is not right for “terrorizing” citizens over piracy.

01.16.16

Links 16/1/2016: Ocean, Fedora Delays, Moksha Desktop 0.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A new career in IT leads to Linux

    At work, I tried to teach my coworkers about open source software and Linux. Some welcome the subject with open arms, and others are very hesitant. I’ve shown them that everything we do can be done on Linux, except for one program that is vendor-specific and will be made available on iOS and Android soon, which would be great because the code could then be ported over to Linux.

  • 22 Years of Linux Journal on One DVD – Now Available

    In easy-to-use HTML format, this fully searchable archive offers immediate access to the essential resource for the Linux enthusiast: Linux Journal. The archive contains all 260 issues of the magazine, from the premiere March 1994 issue through the most recent issue, December 2015. That’s 260 issues of Linux Journal, with well over 4,100 articles!

  • Using strace to track system calls in Linux

    Strace is a tool used to intercept system calls from your application to the Linux kernel. I find strace is invaluable for system administrators for two main reasons.

    First off, we do not always have the source code of an application available, but we may still need to know what an application is doing. This can be anything from which files are opened, how much memory is being allocated or even why an application is crashing repeatedly.
    Secondly, even if we do have the code, being a system administrator doesn’t imply being a developer. We may not know how to follow the code. I find that looking at system calls as opposed to lines of code is a bit more descriptive

  • Server

    • Ocean is a phone-size Linux server that runs on batteries

      Servers are typically large machines that take up huge amounts of space on the floor or lots of space in a rack. A new Node.js Linux server has launched for developers who want to be able to write software for Internet of Things applications and other tasks that is very small. The server is called Ocean and it is about the size of a smartphone.

    • Ocean Wireless Server Is Pocket Sized And Powerful

      Ocean a new wireless pocket sized server has been launched this week, which has been designed to provide a mobile server that combines both the “portability of a mobile phone with the flexibility of a Linux web server” says its developers.

      Ocean is powered by a 1GHz ARM Dual-Core Cortex-A7 processor supported by 1GB DDR3 480MHz RAM and includes from 8 to 64GB of internal storage provided by a handy micro SD card slot.

    • Ocean is an amazing battery-powered wireless server that fits in your pocket

      Today the wraps came off Ocean, a full server that’s the size of a mobile phone, with a built-in battery, so it can fit in your pocket and go where you do.

      It’s a tiny computer that’s powerful enough to run a server — Node.js, to be precise — pre-loaded with Linux, a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, USB 3.0, a 4200mAh battery, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and WiFi.

      When I heard about Ocean it immediately struck me as a useful tool for my development side projects. If I could take my entire development server with me everywhere, including an external battery, there are so many cool things I could build.

    • Docker 1.10 Linux Container Engine Is a Massive Release, First RC Build Out Now

      The development team behind Docker, the number one open-source application container engine for GNU/Linux operating systems, have had the pleasure of announcing that they have been working hard on the next major release of the software, Docker 1.10, which should be out in the coming weeks.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Moksha Desktop 0.2.0 Released

      Today I am happy to announce the second snapshot release of the Moksha Desktop – 0.2.0. For those who prefer to play first and read release notes second you can find the release downloads on our GitHub repo here. Those who wish to try the latest Moksha desktop release on a live CD can download and update a Bodhi Linux Live CD.

    • Bodhi Linux Devs Announce Moksha Desktop 0.2.0, Still Based on Enlightenment E17

      Jeff Hoogland from the Bodhi Linux project, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and the Enlightenment desktop environment, was proud to announce the release of Moksha Desktop 0.2.0.

      For those of you who are not in the loop, we will take this opportunity to inform you that Moksha Desktop is a fork of the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, created especially for the Bodhi Linux operating system, just like the MATE desktop is forked from the old-school GNOME 2 interface.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Partition Manager 2.0.0

        I’m happy to announce KDE Partition Manager 2.0.0 and the first stable release of KPMcore. This release mostly focused on splitting user interface and partitioning library which will be used in the next release of Calamares. It also brings some bugfixes but unfortunately I wasn’t able to go through all reported bugs in bugzilla yet (but they don’t seem to be regressions).

      • Kdenlive 15.12.1 Video Editor Fixes More Than 20 Bugs, Kdenlive 16.04.0 Coming Soon

        The developers behind the Kdenlive open source and free video editor software, which is being designed for the KDE Plasma desktop environment, have announced the release of Kdenlive 15.12.1.

      • KDE Partition Manager 2.0 Released

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME 3.19.4 unstable tarballs due

        Hello all,

        Tarballs are due on 2016-01-18 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.19.4 unstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.19.4. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

      • GNOME Software Now Available in Ubuntu 16.04, with a PPA

        The Ubuntu developers have set up a PPA for anyone who wants to try GNOME Software in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and users have been asked to provide feedback.

      • Lots of small changes

        Last time I blogged, I had gotten a preliminary implementation for the UI aspect of loading custom layers in GNOME Maps. In the past 2 weeks of Outreachy I’ve refined the implementation many times and improved functionality along the way thanks to astute reviews by Damián Nohales and my mentor Jonas Danielsson.

      • EggSettingsFlagAction
      • EggSignalGroup and EggBindingGroup

        EggSignalGroup allows you to connect to a bunch of signals on a single target object as a group. You can connect and disconnect them simply by setting the EggSignalGroup:target property. I find this convenient because I can setup the EggSignalGroup in my instance init function, and simply set the target when it becomes available. You can even bind it using g_object_bind_property() for even less application code.

      • A little helping hand when adding OpenStreetMap POIs

        Since the last blog post I spent some time curing the ”amnesia“ of the POI type selection view. So, now it will show a list of (up to ten) most recently used types. And it will also save this list between runs.

  • Distributions

    • KaOS 2016.01

      It is with great pleasure to present to you a first KaOS ISO for 2016.

      As always with this rolling distribution you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.18.0, Plasma 5.5.3 and KDE Applications 15.12.1. Plasma 5.5 has brought new features in the Widget Explorer, expanded options in the Applications Launchers, new widgets including Color Picker & Disk Quota, restored support for legacy system tray icons, default font has moved to Noto and Desktop Tweaks for different handling of widgets plus option to disable the desktop toolbox.
      Among the new Applications in 15.12 are Spectacle, the new screenshot capture program.
      Many more are now fully ported to Frameworks 5 and are part of the stable tar release in their frameworks version.

    • Solus Project: No Longer Just A Chrome OS Alternative

      Months ago, I covered Solus Project as an alternative to Chrome OS. It made sense, as the Budgie desktop environment resembled the Chrome OS UI and the system integrated well with the user’s Google cloud account. Even at that early iteration, Solus was a solid distribution that made Linux incredibly easy to use.

      Fast forward to now and Solus no longer exists as a shadow of Chrome OS. Solus is a distribution that lives somewhere in the intersection of the GNOME, Chrome OS, and Xfce Venn diagram. It is simultaneously familiar and brand new. With that “brand new familiarity” comes an ease of introduction you won’t find with other 1.0 distributions sporting a new desktop environment.

    • First KaOS Linux ISO for 2016 Ships with KDE Plasma 5.5.3, KDE Applications 15.12

      Just a few moments ago, the KaOS developers were happy to announce the first update of their KaOS Linux rolling operating system in 2016, by releasing the new KaOS 2016.1 ISO images to users worldwide.

    • Reviews

      • Netrunner 17 Horizon – Event Plasma

        Tough is the life of a distro reviewer, at least has been in the last months of 2015. One bad distro after another. What is distro, baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more. That bad. Seriously, nothing good happened this autumn. Crazily, Fedora 23 with its GNOME desktop was the closest to being a sensible distro. A few others delivered okay, but when you expect mega wow, okay just isn’t good enough. Oh yes, Netrunner Rolling scored zero.

        So you can imagine my apprehension ere this review, wondering if I’m going to have another bad day fighting technology, regressions and retardation all combined. But let’s be optimistic. The glass is half-full, even if I like to drink from the bottle. To wit, Netrunner 17 Horizon, tested on my G50 machine, alongside Windows and many a Linux.

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro: Menda Icon Theme

        Manjaro folks use a beautiful icon theme called Menda-Circle in their distribution. The sources are public of course and is distributed under Creative Commons ShareAlike v4.0.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • Ubuntu, Microsoft, Tizen & More…

        These days, Microsoft doesn’t need SUSE anymore, partly because the once number two Linux distro has fallen way down on the list of popular Linux distros, partly due to the old Novell’s ineptitude and partly because of the deal with Microsoft, which as you might imagine, didn’t sit well in FOSS circles. These days, behind the practically-one-and-the-same one-two punch that RHEL/CentOS brings to the enterprise table, there’s a new number two in Unbutu, with Canonical seemingly intent on replacing the old Novell in the we’ll-sleep-with-Microsoft-if-it-keeps-the-rent-paid department.

        Actually, Ubuntu seems to be a cheaper date than SUSE ever was. We’re not hearing anything about millions upon millions of dollars being poured into the Isle of Man the way Microsoft poured money into Utah back when Novell was still hoping for a Netware comeback. Nor are we hearing about Redmond buying thousands of support contracts to sell give away to it’s customers. What we are hearing is partnership after partnership after partnership between the company that loves Linux and the distro that thinks it is Linux.

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2016/2

        Another week – some new snapshots: 5 to be precise (0108, 0110, 0111, 0112 and 0113 will hit the mirrors soon). Sadly, the automatic snapshot announcements did no go out since 0111, something we will be looking at next week and then resume to automatic announcements of new snapshots.

      • openSUSE expands outreach for Google Summer of Code

        The community of openSUSE is expanding its outreach efforts to get more involvement from students and mentors to participate in the Google Summer of Code.

        Members of the community have been working with University of Applied Science in Nuremberg to encourage interest Free Open Source Software, openSUSE and GSoC.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Survey: Open Source Tools Preferred for Mobile Development

        A new survey published by Red Hat Inc., seeking to measure the maturity of enterprise mobility efforts, reveals that a large majority of mobile developers prefer using open source software.

      • Top Stocks of the day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)
      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Director Sells $1,520,605.80 in Stock

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Director William S. Kaiser sold 18,972 shares of the business’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, January 8th. The stock was sold at an average price of $80.15, for a total value of $1,520,605.80. Following the completion of the transaction, the director now directly owns 129,879 shares in the company, valued at $10,409,801.85. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available at this link.

      • Fedora

        • OpenSSH vulnerability could expose private credentials

          So what exactly does this announcement mean? Since OpenSSH client version 5.4, there has been a feature called roaming that allows the client to resume a session that has been interrupted. Both the server and client would need to support roaming for this to work.

          Server support was never added, but the feature is on by default for OpenSSH clients up to version 7.1p2. There are two vulnerabilities that stem from this feature and could be exploited when a user connects to an “evil” SSH server.

        • Fedora 24 Release Schedule Has Been Updated

          After Fedora 23, all Fedora Linux lovers are waiting for the Fedora 24 to come with exciting features, changes and improvements. But due to the current changes proposed by the developers need more time to accommodate into the Fedora 24, so the release schedule has been updated by 2 weeks. But here is the benefit also to this schedule update.

        • New Fedora 24 Schedule, Privacy Concerns, Moksha 0.2.0

          The Fedora project today announced the revised released schedule for version 24 now in development. Jeff Hoogland posted of a new release of his home-brewed lightweight desktop and Ubuntu 15.04 nears EOL. Jack Wallen said Solus is “going places” and Dedoimedo wrote “Netrunner 17 Horizon redeems the Plasma desktop.” Today’s final food for thought comes from KDE’s Sebastian Kügler who discussed whether free software should protect users’ privacy too.

        • Fedora 24 schedule, DevConf.cz, looking back at 2015, and modularization

          The initial schedule for the Fedora 24 aimed for a release on May 17th. However, several of the changes proposed by developers are affect low level components, like the compiler and the C library (which is as fundamental as the kernel to what we think of as a “Linux distribution”). These changes involve rebuilding every package in the whole Fedora collection, and to accommodate that, FESCo (the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which oversees the schedule in coordination with the Fedora Program Manager (Jan Kuřík), added another two weeks.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Is Moving to PHP 7, and so are Numerous Other Linux Distributions

        The Debian developers have publicly announced their plans on migrating all of the PHP 5 to the brand-new and powerful PHP 7 release, as well as on changing the PHP packaging to allow co-installable versions.

      • APT 1.2 Pushed to Debian Unstable, Now Handles Packages Without Description

        A few hours ago, the APT devs announced the release of the APT (Advanced Package Tool) 1.2 into the unstable repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system.

      • Always download Debian packages using Tor – the simple recipe

        During his DebConf15 keynote, Jacob Appelbaum observed that those listening on the Internet lines would have good reason to believe a computer have a given security hole if it download a security fix from a Debian mirror. This is a good reason to always use encrypted connections to the Debian mirror, to make sure those listening do not know which IP address to attack. In August, Richard Hartmann observed that encryption was not enough, when it was possible to interfere download size to security patches or the fact that download took place shortly after a security fix was released, and proposed to always use Tor to download packages from the Debian mirror. He was not the first to propose this, as the apt-transport-tor package by Tim Retout already existed to make it easy to convince apt to use Tor, but I was not aware of that package when I read the blog post from Richard.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Patches Critical OpenSSH Vulnerabilities in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

            The Ubuntu developers working for Canonical to patch the latest security flaws in various core components and applications of all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems published today, January 14, 2016, a new security notice informing users about the availability of an update for the OpenSSH software.

          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Custom Tarballs Now Ready for Meizu MX4 and BQ Aquaris Phones

            Earlier today, we’ve been informed by Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-9 software update for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices.

            According to Mr. Zemczak, the day of January 14 was not quite exciting for landings, as the Ubuntu Touch devs only managed to release a new version of the powerd daemon, which promises to fix the annoying issue where that phone’s screen remained black after rejecting an outgoing call, as well as a new dbus-cpp version that fixes D-Bus bugs.

          • AT&T pursues open source with Canonical’s Ubuntu

            Canonical announced AT&T (NYSE: T) will use its open source Ubuntu OS in enterprise, cloud and networking applications across its businesses, marking a major win that could eventually help Canonical’s smartphone efforts.

          • Canonical Releases All-Snap Raspberry Pi 2 and 64-bit Images for Snappy Ubuntu 16.04

            Canonical, through Michael Vogt, proudly announced the availability of a new set of images for the all-snap architecture for the company’s Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system used in embedded and IoT devices.

          • Ubuntu Scopes Showdown 2016 Contest Could Get You Ubuntu Phone Convergence Packs, Steam Controllers

            Canonical today announced the second edition of the Ubuntu Scopes Showdown contest for mobile developers who want to create the most innovative Unity 8 Scopes and apps for Ubuntu Phone devices.

          • Canonical Gives Away a Dell XPS 13 Ubuntu Linux Laptop at UbuCon Summit 2016

            Immediately after informing us about the upcoming Ubuntu Scopes Showdown 2016 contests and its amazing prizes, Canonical proudly announced that they will be giving away a Dell laptop with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled at the UbuCon Summit 2016 event.

          • MJ Technology wants to crowdfund Ubuntu tablets with Atom x7 CPU

            A startup called MJ Technology wants to change that, and the company has announced that it will launch a crowdfunding campaign for two Ubuntu tablets on January 18th.

          • AT&T Deal is Evidence of How Ubuntu’s Path is Tied to the Cloud

            The upward trajectory of Ubuntu and cloud computing remain tied closely together. Canonical has released findings from numerous surveys showing that Ubuntu is the base platform that the largest group of OpenStack deployments use.

            Now, in an endorsement move from a very big player, AT&T has reached for Canonical to implement Ubuntu Linux in its cloud, network and enterprise infrastructure. As we covered here, some are saying that AT&T had closely evaluated Windows and chose Ubuntu instead.

            Canonical made a statement saying that AT&T wants to forge the “network of the future,” and likes the idea of building more modular solutions that can scale easily and leverage open source.

          • AT&T to replace some proprietary systems with open-source tech
          • Inside The Ubuntu Phone

            Almost as soon as the first version launched in 2004, Ubuntu permanently changed the Linux distribution landscape. 2004 was a time when the desktop was still important, and Ubuntu presented the Linux desktop not as alien territory, only to be ventured through with the right skills, but as a verdant pasture of adventure and possibility. As its 2004 tagline proudly proclaimed, this was Linux for Human Beings, and it enabled millions of people to use Linux who may not otherwise have done so.

            Under the aegis of its parent company Canonical, Ubuntu is still a huge success. It’s now the distribution that non-Linux users will most likely have heard about, or have even tried. It’s used when migrating offices and local councils to Linux, and it’s used in many servers and cloud instances. It’s also the basis for many other popular distributions, including Mint, gNewSense, Google’s own derivatives and the semi-official KDE, Xfce and Gnome versions. Its easy installation and no-nonsense approach to adding applications or upgrades has forced every other distribution to up their game, and it’s helped make the Linux desktop a viable alternative to OS X and Windows.

          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Enters Final Freeze, OTA-9.5 Hotfix Might be Out After Release

            Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak today informs us that the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices has entered final freeze stage, which means that it will not get any more features.

          • GNOME Software On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Available For Testing

            Canonical developers continue making progress in replacing the Ubuntu Software Center with GNOME Software.

            For months Canonical has basically admitted defeat with their Ubuntu Software Center “app store” on the Ubuntu desktop. They’ve been wanting a new software store/center for a few years now and they decided with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to transition to GNOME Software — GNOME’s software center.

          • Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) reaches End of Life on February 4 2016

            Ubuntu announced its 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) release almost 9 months ago, on April 23, 2015. As a non-LTS release, 15.04 has a 9-month month support cycle and, as such, the support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 15.04 will reach end of life on Thursday, February 4th. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 15.04.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Lubuntu Xenial Xerus (with LXQt) in a Raspberry Pi 2

              A nice experiment made by wxl from the Lubuntu QA Team: running Lubuntu Xenial Xerus on a Raspberry Pi 2, with LXQt desktop. Made with Ubuntu Pi Flavour Maker, and following simple instructions:

              Get the image from here
              Install the image
              do-release-upgrade to Xenial
              Install LXQt packages following the wiki guide

              And that’s all. Enjoy Lubuntu in your new Pi. Remember this is just an experiment, it may be unstable. But what are Raspberry Pi computers for, but testing and having fun?

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Baidu open-sources its WARP-CTC artificial intelligence software

    Chinese Web company Baidu is announcing today that it is releasing key artificial intelligence (AI) software under an open-source Apache license. The WARP-CTC C library and optional Torch bindings are now available on GitHub, by way of Baidu Research’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL).

  • How open-source software could save your life

    Despite the odds being somewhat stacked against SFC, Sandler remains optimistic. But she points out enforcement is necessary to get companies to give back to open-source communities and stop them from wresting control of open-source projects and code.

    “We think that compliance with the GPL is incredibly important. We think it’s important for society, important for business. We also have seen that companies are much, much less likely to comply if there aren’t consequences for not complying. It’s simple analysis, it’s not too hard to see.”

  • Accelerating Machine Learning with Open Source Warp-CTC
  • Baidu releases open source AI code

    Baidu, a massive Chinese web company along the lines of Google, has released artificial intelligence software WARP-CTC on GitHub. WARP-CTC, developed at Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI lab, was created to improve speech recognition in Baidu’s end-to-end speech recognition program Deep Speech 2.

  • China’s Google clone Baidu also open-sources its AI blueprints

    Chinese search-and-everything-else web giant Baidu has joined Google and Facebook in open-sourcing its artificial intelligence (AI) code in a bid to become a standard in an increasingly important market.

    The company’s Warp-CTC C library has been published on GitHub through its Silicon Valley lab, with an accompanying blog post encouraging developers to try it out.

    The CTC part stands for “connectionist temporal classification.” This combines different neural network designs to process data that is not perfectly aligned. In other words, making sense of complex patterns. The approach has proved invaluable in speech recognition.

  • Is privacy Free software’s next milestone?

    I am concerned. In the past years, it has become clear that real privacy has become harder to come by. Our society is quickly heading into a situation where an unknown number of entities and people can follow my every single step, and it’s not possible to keep to myself what I don’t want others to know. With every step into that direction, there’s less and less things about my life of which I don’t control who knows about it.

  • Events

    • Young maker talks software defined radio, open source, and mentors

      Schuyler St. Leger is one of the superheroes of the maker movement. He’s a speaker, young maker, and was featured in Make magazine. His famous presentation, Why I love my 3-D Printer has received over 300,000 views on YouTube.

      Schuyler is keynoting at SCaLE 14x, where he’ll talk about open source radio and how it’s impacting the world around us. We’re surrounded by radios in smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Wi-Fi access points, yet we often fail to realize their ubiquitous presence. The airwaves are a fantastic space for exploration, but where do we begin? Open source radio combined with open hardware is a rich space for exploration and experimentation.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • ScyllaDB: Cassandra compatibility at 1.8 million requests per node

      ScyllaDB is designed to be a resilient NoSQL database and is currently in beta testing. It is designed from the ground up to take advantage of multiple core systems and to provide very high performance.

      Don Marti, techical marketing manager for ScyllaDB, co-founded the Linux consulting firm Electric Lichen. He is a strategic advisor for Mozilla and has previously served as president and vice president of the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group and on the program committees for USENIX, CodeCon, and LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

  • BSD

    • Unscrewed; a Story About OpenBSD

      If you’re in the packet delivery business, and you’ve never tired OpenBSD, then you’re really missing out. Pretty much everything you care about as a network guy on production networks is configured via a virtual interface. This includes CARP, IPSEC, and all manner of encapsulation and tunneling protocols. This is awesome because all the tools designed to work on interfaces, like tcpdump, work on these virtual interfaces too. So if I want to get a look at my VPN traffic, I can tcpdump enc0.

      Which brings up another great point, with OpenBSD, your packet inspection and general network troubleshooting toolbox is way better. Nmap, Argus, sflow, tcpdump, snort, daemonlogger, and etc.. all the best tools are right there on your router if you want them. No need to use a packet tap, because your router is the packet tap.

      OpenBSD has myriad built-in daemons for OSPF, BGP, and every other router protocol, as well as application-layer protocol proxies. OpenBSD is by far the fastest, easiest way to setup an ftp proxy that I know of. It also has a kernel-space packet filter called PF, which is crazy feature-rich and and easy to use. If you can console configure an ASA, or are an iptables user, you’ll pick up PF’s syntax in about 15 minutes. All the normal stuff like NAT, redirection, and forwarding are there. Further, PF can do things like policy routing, where you tag packets based on criteria you choose, and then make routing decisions later based on those tags. PF has packet queuing and prioritization built-in, so you can make some classes of traffic more important than others.

    • The Pipe-Dream Persists About Pairing LLVMpipe With GPU Hardware/Drivers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Reaching people through Giving Guide Giveaways

      In December, the FSF and community members carried out our yearly holiday season tradition of Giving Guide Giveaways.

    • Status report on Emacs

      I don’t get to do all these at once every day, but still the majority of these tasks are performed on Emacs on a daily basis. I’m obviously getting more and more familiar with each tools and the general use of Emacs the more I use them. I would like to highlight a few thoughts about them:

  • Public Services/Government

    • Agencies look to public for digital work on open source

      There are other opportunities for private citizens to take part in building new technology for the government. Recently, 18F launched a micro-purchasing initiative in which it opens small projects to the public, who can bid to be paid for working on them. GSA also holds periodic hackathons, inviting the public to collaborate around some of the agency’s biggest problems, as do other agencies like the departments of Agriculture and the Interior. And of course, agencies that build their software in the open often allow outside citizens to contribute to a project.

    • Bringing Open Source to Government Agencies

      Open source increasingly is being accepted as the de facto standard within federal government agencies. For example, the October 2009 Department of Defense memorandum requested that federal agencies evaluate and implement these solutions whenever possible. Since that memorandum, the Federal Aviation Administration and a significant number of agencies within the Department of Defense, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the Defense Information Systems Agency have implemented open source.

    • Portugal’s open source move ‘slower than expected’

      Public administrations in Portugal are turning to open source ICT solutions slower than anticipated by ESOP, a trade association of Portuguese open source companies. The country’s ICT policies should spur the uptake of this kind of software, but ESOP says that the country lacks open source experts.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Why Wikipedia is in Trouble

      As the user-editing encyclopedia turns 15, dedicated editors are getting scarcer by the day

    • Jimmy Wales: I don’t regret not monetising Wikipedia

      As Wikipedia celebrates its 15th birthday, its co-founder has a vision: he wants every single person on the planet to have free access to knowledge

    • Open Hardware

      • 3D printed, open-source “pocket watch” with tourbillon

        Swiss engineer Christoph Laimer has built an open-source hardware, 3D printed watch with a tourbillon mechanism, uploading it to Thingiverse for you to print and assemble yourself.

        The pioneering work in the was done by Nicholas Manousos, whose 2014 Tourbillon 1000% was the prime inspiration for Laimer.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Why the lack of women in IT is bad for tech, bad for the economy

      At the end of 2016 fewer than 25 percent of IT jobs in developed countries will be held by women, roughly the same as last year and perhaps even down a bit.

      This lack of gender diversity in IT is both a social issue and an economic one as well, warns new research by consultants Deloitte.

      Given that the global cost of IT is in the tens of billions of dollars, “the gender gap in IT costs the UK alone about $4bn annually”, according to the report.”So with that cost, gender parity (roughly 50 percent women in IT jobs) seems a reasonable goal over the long term.”

  • Hardware

    • Real World SSD Performance

      Yes, SSDs tend to be faster than other storage. That is true, but unless you look deeper at the specs, you may end up with poor performance. Let me explain. This is a general knowledge article. Without a huge sample size, anything beyond generalizations don’t mean anything.

      Installed an Anker USB3 front-panel on one of the systems here a few months ago. It was purely for convenience since the system has USB3 internal headers and USB3 storage has been working fairly well from the rear ports. Did a few quick checks and everything was just a little slower than I expected. Didn’t have any hard data, just that things were slower than expected. Gave it 3-stars on the review site.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Presence of Radon Gas in Your Home

      Radon is an odorless, colorless gas that is formed from the natural breakdown of uranium in the earth. Though you can’t see it or smell it, radon can enter your home through cracks in your foundation, well water, building materials and other sources, where it can contaminate the air you breathe.

      Because radon is radioactive, it’s also carcinogenic; radon exposure is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States, second only to smoking.

      Testing your home for radon is simple, and if levels are elevated there are ways to reduce them to protect your health.

    • Campbell’s Will Label GMOs—and the Sky Will Not Fall

      Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have long defended their die-hard positions against mandatory GMO labeling laws, often by feigning concern about the financial impact labeling laws would have on consumers. Labeling will be costly for manufacturers, who will pass those costs on to consumers, they consistently argue (despite studies suggesting otherwise).

      As if concern for consumers’ wallets had anything to do with Big Food’s determination to deceive.

      So the first question we asked the Campbell Soup Co. (NYSE: CPB) last week, following the announcement that Campbell’s will label all of its products that contain GMOs, was this: Will you charge more for these products after you label them?

    • Report Details Extensive Cover-Up Of Russian Doping Scandal By Top Track Officials

      The report is a follow-up to one from November that detailed the state-sponsored doping program in Russia. The first report was the culmination of a nearly year-long investigation into Russia’s track-and-field industry that began after a German documentary, “Top Secret Doping: How Russia makes its winners” was released in December 2014. It provided an in-depth look at the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs and blood doping by Russian track and field athletes and the coaches, doctors, and state officials that encouraged it. After that report, the IAAF suspending the Russian track and field federation indefinitely — including, as of now, the Rio Olympics.

    • Bernie Sanders Is Tapping Into a Vein of Anger Over Health Care

      Obamacare is leaving millions in serious financial pain, pointing up the need for universal health care—Medicare for all. That’s Sen. Bernie Sanders’ position, and it is a crucial difference between him and Hillary Clinton, his chief rival for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

    • Hillary Clinton’s Absurd Bernie Smear: Why Attacking Him From the Left on Healthcare Makes Literally No Sense

      Sanders, she now insists, would do so from the left by instituting a program — single-payer healthcare — that would be more progressive than the Affordable Care Act. Yet this possibility is portrayed in the starkest of terms. It’s as if the Clinton campaign saw a house burning down and told the fire department to put it out by setting the house next door on fire to suck up all the oxygen feeding the flames.

    • Hillary Clinton’s fatal weakness exposed yet again: Why Bernie Sanders’ surge is exposing her biggest political shortcoming

      Clinton is a very wealthy former first lady, senator and secretary of state with expensive homes in Washington D.C. and Chappaqua, New York, who launched her campaign with an Uber-eque logo and a slogan—fighting for “everyday Americans”— that rendered actual humans into a plastic composite sketch. Clinton is unlikeable because she comes across as the end product of a poll-derived algorithm with a calculus that accounts for everything—well, almost. Asked what kind of ice cream she liked last year, she conceded a system malfunction, responding “I like nearly everything.”

    • Hillary Clinton’s Single-Payer Pivot Greased By Millions in Industry Speech Fees

      But in the ensuing years, both Clintons have taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from the health care industry. According to public disclosures, Hillary Clinton alone, from 2013 to 2015, made $2,847,000 from 13 paid speeches to the industry.

      This means that Clinton brought in almost as much in speech fees from the health care industry as she did from the banking industry. As a matter of perspective, recall that most Americans don’t earn $2.8 million over their lifetimes.

    • “Unfair competition will ruin European farmers. Quality-orientated small and medium-sized businesses are at risk.”

      “European farms are still mainly small and family run, and cannot compete financially with large American businesses,” says Reuter. European farmers and food manufacturers export very little to the USA. The vast majority can expect little other than additional competition from a free trade agreement with the United States.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • An intimate intifada

      Kitchen knives. Meat cleavers. Scissors. Stones. The current weapons of choice used by Palestinians in this latest wave of violence in Israel and the West Bank. At the time of writing, 22 Israelis, 150 Palestinians, an American and an Eritrean have been killed. In the past three months, there have been 105 stabbings – and many of the perpetrators have been women. With murmurings that this wave of violence constitutes a new uprising – a third intifada – I believe that if this is indeed a third intifada, it is very different than the two previous ones: it is less orchestrated – and more intimate. An Intimate Intifada.

    • Syria-Iraq: civilian deaths, British denials

      When the United Kingdom prime minister David Cameron argued in the House of Commons for approval to bomb Syria, he and his team made much of the accuracy of British bombing and the contribution it would make to the United States-led coalition’s war against ISIS. In the end, the vote on 2 December 2015 went in his favour, although the majority of Labour members of parliament and all those of the Scottish National Party were opposed.

      To counter this opposition, the Conservative government has consistently claimed that its strike-aircraft and armed-drones are meticulous in avoiding civilian casualties. It is an important part of the case, and the government’s whole strategy would be undermined if it was clear that many innocent people were being killed. That evidence is beginning to emerge. But it is resolutely denied by the ministry of defence, echoing a strategy that long predates the decision to extend Britain’s role to Syria.

    • Jeb Bush Slams Trump’s Proposal to Ban Muslims

      The subject was Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from coming to the US. “This policy is a policy that makes it impossible to build the coalition necessary to take out ISIS,” Bush said. “The Kurds are our strongest allies. They’re Muslim. You’re not going to even allow them to come to our country? The other Arab countries have a role to play in this.”

    • “Little Red Riding Hood (Has A Gun)”: The NRA Reinvents A Fairy Tale For Children

      A new series from “NRA Family” reimagines children’s fairy tales with a pro-gun message.

      In the January 14 series debut — Little Red Riding Hood — NRA Family’s editor asked, “Have you ever wondered what those same fairy tales might sound like if the hapless Red Riding Hoods, Hansels and Gretels had been taught about gun safety and how to use firearms?”

      What followed was a gun-heavy version of Little Red Riding Hood that culminates with the protagonist and her grandmother holding the wolf at gunpoint until he is taken away by a “huntsman.”

    • Countering Peter Tatchell’s pro-war anti-war arguments on Syria

      So, according to Tatchell, we should provide the Kurds with anti-aircraft missiles in the unlikely event ISIS capture and are able to run and pilot attack helicopters. Attack helicopters which Tatchell presumably thinks ISIS will be able to fly freely despite the US, Russian, UK and French aircraft dominating the airspace over significant part of Syria.

    • Arming the police isn’t a magic bullet solution to terrorism

      Yesterday’s horrific attacks in Jakarta serve as a reminder of the ambitions and reach of radical Islamists. The killers used suicide bombs and pistols, relatively primitive weaponry, to target a densely populated area. The same could happen in Britain. The UK has to be prepared for the worst. To that end, the Metropolitan Police is going to train 600 extra armed officers, and armed patrols will more than double.

    • David Vine, Enduring Bases, Enduring War in the Middle East

      Meet the hottest new commander in the increasingly secretive world of American warfare, Lieutenant General Raymond “Tony” Thomas. A rare portrait in the Washington Post paints him as a “shadowy figure” — an appropriate phrase for the general who has been leading the U.S. military’s “manhunters,” aka Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. They are considered the crème de la crème among America’s ever-larger crew of Special Operations forces, now at almost 70,000 and growing. Thomas is reportedly slated to take over Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, and so head up that now massive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military. To put its ranks in perspective, think of the active duty militaries of Argentina (73,000), Australia (56,000), Canada (66,000), Chile (61,000), or South Africa (62,000). In other words, our secret “warriors” now outnumber the military contingents of major nations.

    • US, Iran Step Back From the Brink

      In 2001, under George W. Bush, an EP-3 with 24 crew members was crashed by a Chinese fighter and forced to land on Hainan Island, where they were held for 11 days until we expressed “sorrow.”

    • Medea Benjamin: What Obama’s Foreign Policy Agenda Must be in 2016
    • Caught With Our Pants Down in the Gulf

      Your bullshit-ometer should be making an awful racket in response to the shifting explanations given for the twenty-four-hour Iranian hostage scare involving two US Navy boats intercepted in the Gulf.

      [...]

      Amid all the faux outrage coming from the neocons and their enablers in the media over the alleged “humiliation” of the US – Iran “paraded” the sailors in their media! They made one of the sailors apologize! The Geneva Conventions were violated! – hardly anyone in this country is asking the hard questions, first and foremost: what in heck were those two boats doing in Iranian waters?

      And if you believe they somehow “drifted” within a few miles of Farsi Island, where a highly sensitive Iranian military base is located, then you probably think there’s a lot of money just waiting for you in a Nigerian bank account.

    • Top General Warns of New ISIS Threat… in Jamaica?

      The number of ISIS devotees living in or coming from the Caribbean is on the rise, according to U.S. Southern Command chief General John Kelly, who oversees “security” (and paranoia) throughout South America.

    • John Kasich, in Rare Break From GOP Liturgy, Offers Mild Criticism of Saudi Arabia

      The Republican presidential debates have focused heavily on foreign policy, with candidates one-upping each other’s threatening talk about military action against Iran and escalation in Syria and Iraq. But there has been virtually no attention paid to Saudi Arabia, a longtime American ally with well-documented ties to anti-American terror groups, including ISIS and al Qaeda.

      That changed momentarily on Thursday night during the Fox Business Network debate in Charleston. Moderator Neil Cavuto asked John Kasich about Saudi Arabia’s recent execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, as well as the theory that the Saudi government is deliberately driving down oil prices in a bid to bankrupt American oil producers.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • UK Classifies Spending on Policing Wikileaks Founder After Scandal

      Following Freedom of Information Act requests, the UK has classified the expense budget to police Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of the controversial Wikileaks website, as he remains locked away in the Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom.

    • Send in Your FOIA Horror Stories for The Foilies 2016

      Last year, EFF launched our inaugural, tongue-in-cheek awards series for government agencies who thwarted, stymied, foot-dragged, and retaliated in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records requests. We called out secrecy over cell-site simulators, marveled at the $1.4 million fee estimate for the DEA’s “El Chapo” file, and panned Chicago Public Schools’ refusal to disclose what’s in its mystery meats.

    • Here’s How the Senate Should Fix the FOIA Reform Bill

      With the U.S. House of Representatives passing a bill this week to amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), EFF and a coalition of other groups are calling on members of the Senate [.pdf] to pass a law that meaningfully improves government transparency and accountability through access to federal records.

      It is becoming something of an annual tradition for Congress to introduce FOIA legislation with overwhelming bipartisan support. This year’s bill is the FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act (H.R. 653), and it contains many of the same amendments to FOIA found in recent bills, including narrowing some of the most-abused exemptions in the law.

      Even though members of both the House and Senate have strongly supported past FOIA bills, Congress has failed to pass a law after agencies subject to the bills’ heightened transparency requirements pushed back. For example, in 2014 the U.S. Department of Justice was instrumental in killing FOIA reform.

      Despite what is likely to be another fight against DOJ and other federal agencies, EFF remains optimistic that Congress will pass comprehensive FOIA legislation this year. As the bill waits to be heard in the Senate, below is a summary of the good and bad aspects of the legislation along with some proposals EFF would like lawmakers to consider adding.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Bigger Story Behind the Killing of Cecil the Lion That the Media Overlooked

      When Walter Palmer, a wealthy dentist from Minnesota, killed Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe last July, people all around the word were sickened and outraged.

      Action was quick. After the news broke, late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel used his monologue to read Palmer the riot act, then helped raise $150,000 in donations in less than 24 hours to support Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, the Oxford, U.K.-based nonprofit that had been tasked with tracking Cecil’s location and activities. Within a month, thanks to pressure from the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Humane Society of the U.S. and public demand, American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines announced bans in the transport of “trophies” (i.e., animal parts) from Africa’s so-called big five species: the African lion, African elephant, Cape buffalo, African leopard and white/black rhinoceros.

    • The Feds Just Approved Offshore Fish Farming

      Renowned food journalist Paul Greenberg isn’t convinced these ambitious aquaculture projects will solve America’s seafood dilemma. Americans often eschew native fish species and import exotic varieties instead, he told NPR’s The Salt. “Rather than trying to start up new and complicated ventures, first let’s try to eat the fish we’ve already got.”

    • How Climate Change Could Decimate Millenia of First Nations Tradition

      Climate change poses a significant threat to the fisheries that have sustained First Nations communities along Canada’s Pacific coast for thousands of years, according to a new study published Wednesday.

      The paper, published in PLOS ONE, projects that the First Nations fisheries’ catch could decline by nearly 50 percent by 2050, decimating a traditional food resource and leading to economic losses up to $12 million.

      “Climate change is likely to lead to declines in herring and salmon, which are among the most important species commercially, culturally, and nutritionally for First Nations,” said Lauren Weatherdon, who conducted the study when she was a University of British Columbia (UBC) graduate student. “This could have large implications for communities who have been harvesting these fish and shellfish for millennia.”

    • Humans’ indelible mark on new era

      The post-industrial impacts that humans have had on the Earth and its atmosphere may pinpoint the mid-20th century as the start of a new geological epoch.

  • Finance

    • The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

      I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of developers, and the talks I’ve given have led directly to the creation of several startups. I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.

    • Ted Cruz Hates “New York Values” But Sure Loves New York Money

      On Tuesday on the syndicated Howie Carr Show, Ted Cruz declared that Donald Trump “comes from New York and he embodies New York values.” That night on Fox, New York-born Megyn Kelly asked Cruz to explain exactly what “New York values” are. Cruz responded: “The rest of the country knows exactly what New York values are, and I gotta say, they’re not Iowa values and they’re not New Hampshire values.”

      Yesterday Kellyanne Conway, president of Keep the Promise I, one of four significant pro-Cruz Super PACs, endorsed Cruz’s anti-New York perspective: “New York is home to many wonderful people and places, but the emphasis is more on money than morality. The line to get into Abercrombie & Fitch is a mile longer than the line to get into St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

    • TTIP: what can we expect from 2016?

      2015 saw the campaign against TTIP grow into a mass movement of opposition across Europe. John Hilary asks whether 2016 could be the year we defeat TTIP and build a People’s Europe from below.

      2015 was an incredible year in the fight against TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated in secret between the European Commission and the US government. The pan-European campaign grew exponentially as more and more people learned about the threats posed by the deal, culminating in October’s staggering anti-TTIP demonstration in Berlin. In the space of one year, over 3.2 million people signed the European Citizens’ Initiative against TTIP and the EU-Canada deal CETA, far and away the largest number ever recorded for such a petition.

    • “Neoliberalism” is it?

      Long-term investment in public infrastructure is not, of course, an attractive proposition to the private sector, which is why successive UK governments have struggled to find investors for major projects. Distant returns are no return at all. It has taken years for a UK government to be brought kicking and screaming to the realisation that power stations will not be constructed without government involvement. The UK’s infamous Private Finance Initiative, initiated by John Major and enthusiastically adopted by the Blair/Brown government, has worked by dint of expensive income guarantees to the private sector. What these and many other examples have highlighted, emphatically so since the 2008 economic crisis, is that free markets are not free, that when they are poorly regulated they can and do lead to ruin, and that neoliberalism is sustained paradoxically by government intervention – though on a discretionary basis. The element of discretion is important because it tends to operate in favour of vested interests. Quantitative Easing didn’t go to the public but to banks and insurance companies.

    • Apple May Be on Hook for $8 Billion in Taxes in Europe Probe

      The world’s largest company could owe more than $8 billion in back taxes as a result of a European Commission investigation into its tax policies, according to an analysis by Matt Larson of Bloomberg Intelligence. Apple, which has said it will appeal an adverse ruling, is being scrutinized by regulators who have accused the iPhone maker of using subsidiaries in Ireland to avoid paying taxes on revenue generated outside the U.S.

    • Capitalism’s Biggest Enemies: Elites Who Advocate Free-Market Competition

      Theorists and principled souls on the Right are free-market advocates. They are convinced by Hayek and his followers that markets aggregate the will of the public better than governments do. This doesn’t mean that governments are unnecessary. As Rajan and Zingales put it in their very strong pro-free-market book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, “Markets cannot flourish without the very visible hand of the government, which is needed to set up and maintain the infrastructure that enables participants to trade freely and with confidence.” But it does mean that a society should try to protect free markets, within that essential infrastructure, and ensure that those who would achieve their wealth by corrupting free markets don’t.

    • NZ Newspaper: An ‘Honor’ To Welcome Small Pacific Rim Countries As They Sign Away Much Of Their Sovereignty

      As we’ve written recently, a report from the World Bank suggests that the economic benefits from TPP will be slight for the US, Australia and Canada. New Zealand is predicted to do better, but not much: the econometric modelling predicts a 3.1% boost to its GDP by 2030 — roughly 0.3% extra GDP per year. That’s a pretty poor payback given the price participant countries will have to pay in terms of copyright, biologics and corporate sovereignty.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Bernie has corporate democrats sweating: The Democratic race is suddenly wide open

      With just three weeks to go before the Iowa caucus, Bernie Sanders is now in a statistical dead heat with Hillary Clinton. According to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, he trails her by just 3 points in Iowa, well within the margin of error. In other words, it’s a tie. A dead heat.

      This is really, really, really big news.

      Sanders is already beating Clinton in New Hampshire, and if he can pull-off a two-state sweep of the early primaries, that would completely change the dynamic of the race. And I mean completely.

    • Obama Delivers More Pretty Words, Ugly Inaction on Money in Politics

      What Obama did not mention was this: he in fact can immediately “reduce the influence of hidden interests” on his own, without Congress or the Supreme Court, by issuing an executive order requiring federal contractors to disclose any “dark money” contributions to politically-active non-profits.

    • MoveOn Endorses Sanders After He Wins 79 Percent Support in Member Vote

      With polls suggesting that the Democratic race is getting tighter in the first-caucus state of Iowa and the first-primary state of New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders has won the support of one of the nation’s most prominent progressive networks.

      The activist group MoveOn endorsed the Vermont senator after 78.6 percent of its members backed him last week in an online “primary”—which drew 340,665 votes, a greater total than is likely to participate in the February contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

    • Did Bernie Sanders Just Go Negative on Hillary Clinton?

      This wouldn’t be the first time that Sanders has highlighted Clinton’s ties to Wall Street.

    • Bernie Sanders for President

      A year ago, concerned that ordinary citizens would be locked out of the presidential nominating process, The Nation argued that a vigorously contested primary would be good for the candidates, for the Democratic Party, and for democracy. Two months later, Senator Bernie Sanders formally launched a campaign that has already transformed the politics of the 2016 presidential race. Galvanized by his demands for economic and social justice, hundreds of thousands of Americans have packed his rallies, and over 1 million small donors have helped his campaign shatter fund-raising records while breaking the stranglehold of corporate money. Sanders’s clarion call for fundamental reform—single-payer healthcare, tuition-free college, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, the breaking up of the big banks, ensuring that the rich pay their fair share of taxes—have inspired working people across the country. His bold response to the climate crisis has attracted legions of young voters, and his foreign policy, which emphasizes diplomacy over regime change, speaks powerfully to war-weary citizens. Most important, Sanders has used his insurgent campaign to tell Americans the truth about the challenges that confront us. He has summoned the people to a “political revolution,” arguing that the changes our country so desperately needs can only happen when we wrest our democracy from the corrupt grip of Wall Street bankers and billionaires.

      We believe such a revolution is not only possible but necessary—and that’s why we’re endorsing Bernie Sanders for president. This magazine rarely makes endorsements in the Democratic primary (we’ve done so only twice: for Jesse Jackson in 1988, and for Barack Obama in 2008). We do so now impelled by the awareness that our rigged system works for the few and not for the many. Americans are waking up to this reality, and they are demanding change. This understanding animates both the Republican and Democratic primaries, though it has taken those two contests in fundamentally different directions.

    • Bernie Sanders Is Winning with the One Group His Rivals Can’t Sway: Voters

      Perhaps more important than Sanders’s gain in the polls is how it happened: by patiently hammering on his message, regardless of what other candidates said

    • “13 Hours” Splashes Blood Across the Screen and Misses Real Story of Benghazi

      I went into the screening with the distinct premonition that I would emerge in anger after seeing another maddeningly effective piece of Hollywood war propaganda. That’s how I felt last year after seeing American Sniper, a surprise blockbuster directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper in the role of Navy sniper Chris Kyle. In American Sniper, no one asked why Iraqis were shooting at Kyle and the rest of the U.S. military in the first place (hint: we invaded and occupied their country and tortured some of them at prisons like Abu Ghraib). Despite such errors of context, American Sniper was a formidable movie. It was really human and stuck with the audience. Much credit goes to Eastwood, a skilled director, and Cooper, a charismatic actor. His thespian counterpart in 13 Hours is John Krasinski, the nice guy from The Office. As it turns out, Krasinski wields a stapler and a pun far more convincingly than an M-4.

    • Donald Trump Sure Does Like People Who Make the Trains Run on Time

      What does Donald Trump think about dictators and autocrats?

  • Censorship

    • The Phony Debate About Political Correctness

      At its core, the P.C. debate is about something meaningful. It is a discussion about how people should treat each other. The language we use to define it may change, but the conversation will keep going. Still, after more than three decades of repeating the same arguments, perhaps it’s time to recognize that the current iteration of this discussion has run its course.

      A new debate could rely less on anecdote and more on actual data. It could be less about protecting rhetorical preferences and more about prohibiting actual censorship. It could dispense with political grandstanding and become more grounded in reality, without the apocalyptic and shallow narratives.

      The end of the phony debate about political correctness will not be the end of the debate about political correctness. But it could be the beginning of something better.

    • VIDEO: So You Aren’t Racist. Good, but It’s Not Enough.

      Most of us, says Marlon James in a brief video essay published at The Guardian, are nonracist. That leaves us with a clear conscience, he argues, but it does nothing to help fight injustice in the world. In fact, we can pull off being nonracist by being asleep in bed while black men are killed by police. We need to stop being nonracist, and start being anti-racist, he says.

    • Bernie Sanders’ Campaign DMCAs Wikimedia For Hosting His Logos

      And, then of course, there’s the inevitable backlash over this. Presidential campaigns trying to censor people — or worse, a site like Wikipedia — is always going to backfire. It makes the campaign look thin-skinned, foolish and short-sighted.

      I’m guessing that if this makes enough news, the Sanders campaign will back down on this, and say it was an overzealous lawyer or some other such thing, but there’s no reason such takedowns should ever be sent in the first place.

    • Lego Reverses Policy On Block Orders For Political Projects After Public Shaming

      Late last year, we relayed the story of Ai Weiwei, an artist who had previously used Legos to create political art in the form of portraits, being refused a bulk order of Lego blocks by the company. At issue was a long-standing company policy prohibiting its facilitation of blocks being used for political speech. As a result of Weiwei going public about the refusal, the story was Streisanded into the public consciousness, resulting in condemnation and shaming from more of the masses than would have ever been aware of the project otherwise.

    • Constant struggle to balance censorship, freedom of expression: Aditya Roy Kapur

      Actor Aditya Roy Kapur says that it is a constant struggle to maintain a balance between freedom of expression and censorship but the industry is endeavouring for it.

    • Ethiopian Protesters Endure Brutality and Censorship Amid Land Struggle

      Students in Ethiopia’s largest administrative region, Oromia, have been braving state-sponsored violence and censorship since November 2015 to protest a government development plan.

      Human Rights Watch has reported that at least 140 peaceful protesters have died since the demonstrations began. Those killed include university and secondary school students, farmers and school teachers.

      Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Ethiopian authorities and pro-government commentators say the number of dead is around five people.

    • Telegram CEO Rejects Iranian Government’s Claims of Censorship-on-Demand

      The head of Telegram, the most popular social media network in Iran, has again categorically denied making any concessions to Tehran regarding censorship.

      On January 13, 2016, the Iranian media widely reported a statement by Iran’s Communications and Information Technology Minister Mahmoud Vaezi that the instant messaging service Telegram “has agreed to block any channel reported by Iran’s Communications Ministry.”

      Pavel Durov, however, who is CEO of the widely used messaging service, said only “porn/ISIS” related content would be subject to censorship in Iran, as it is in other countries, but not any other content disapproved of by the Iranian government.

    • Companies Should Resist Government Pressure and Stand Up for Free Speech

      EFF has been steadfast in its criticism of officials like FBI Director James Comey, who have implored tech companies to provide a backdoor to their customers’ encrypted communications. Now it appears as though the White House would like a backdoor to the First Amendment’s free speech protections by requiring private tech companies to monitor, censor, and automatically report speech on topics related to ISIS and terrorism.

      EFF’s concerns come after White House officials held a high-level meeting with technology companies last week asking for help in addressing terrorists’ use of social media. The administration also announced a task force to fight terrorism online.

      If the government directly censored the content of online speech about ISIS and other terrorist groups, it would be clearly unconstitutional. Private companies that host communications online, however, are normally not subject to the First Amendment and can set their own rules on the types of content and even viewpoints expressed on their services. Government officials know this and are now both subtly and not-so-subtly pressuring companies to achieve a result that the First Amendment prevents them from doing themselves.

    • Facebook Nixes Picture Of Bronze Mermaid Statue For Showing Too Much ‘Skin’

      As they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Facebook, being a dominant force in the social media industry, certainly has a great deal of power, but how does it do in the responsibility department. It’s an important question, because as a platform essentially designed to facilitate speech and expression, it would seem necessary to treat with care how it collides with that speech when controversy arises. Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and time again how Facebook treats the question bureaucratically rather than with any kind of nuance. Between bending the knee to national interests, promising to censor speech deemed to be hateful, or just flat out hiding behind a wall of corporate speak in order to take down photos, the trend for Facebook is one of grip-tightening rather than free expression.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • FBI to Malheur Militia: You’re Free to Travel

      From a policing standpoint, how would a person or movement of color be treated? Do you think that if a Black, Indigenous People, or Muslim militant group were to engage in an armed takeover of a National Wildlife Refuge or other federal structure that an instigating member would be allowed to travel 20 hours home through multiple states to give a radio interview to proselytize and visit family? I don’t think so, my serendipitous meeting with LaVoy surely indicating further inconsistency of application of law and enforcement concerning the militants of the Malheur standoff.

    • Fearmongering Around Muslim Immigrants Echoes Anti-Asian Hysteria of Past

      ON MAY 6, 1882, U.S. President Chester Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first in a series of discriminatory legal measures aimed at curbing immigration from Asia. Speaking at the time of its passage, California Sen. John F. Miller, a leading proponent of the law, declared that the Chinese were “an inferior sort of men” and that “Chinese civilization in its pure essence appears as a rival to American civilization. It is a product of a people alien in every characteristic to our people, and it has never yet produced and can never evolve any form of government other than an imperial despotism. Free government is incompatible with it, and both cannot exist together.”

    • The State of the Union for Muslim Americans

      Obama bluntly called out Islamaphobia, condemned hateful crimes against mosques, and promised to close Guantanamo Bay prison. He drew a clear distinction between the Muslim religion and ISIS killers. He pointed to the tragedy of American children being mocked and deemed suspicious because of their faith at school.

    • Ten Detainees Transferred, Leaving Fewer Than 100 Prisoners Left at Guantánamo

      TEN GUANTÁNAMO PRISONERS arrived in Oman today, a move that leaves fewer than 100 men held in the island prison.

      The transfer follows President Obama’s pledge Tuesday night to “keep working to shut down the prison at Guantánamo,” a promise he has highlighted in the past three State of the Union addresses.

      The move means that 14 people have left the prison in 2016. On Monday, Mohamed al Rahman al Shumrani was sent to his native Saudi Arabia, almost exactly 14 years after he first arrived in Guantánamo. Last week, one Kuwaiti man was sent home and two Yemeni men were resettled in Ghana.

    • Another All-White Slate of Academy Award Acting Nominees
    • Oscar Nominations Put On Yet Another Show of Whiteness

      It’s not as though there weren’t plenty of options to mix up this year’s lineup of Oscar nominees. A quick glance over the list of artists and performers excluded from the 2016 Academy Awards nods confirms that once again, academy voters earned those widespread racial bias critiques and #OscarsSoWhite hashtags coming their way. Most important, though, is how they plainly missed the opportunity to give several vibrant talents their due.

      Let’s review. Absent from the 2016 nominees announced Thursday morning were the likes of Idris Elba, whose blistering turn as African warlord commandant in “Beasts of No Nation” drew nearly unanimous praise and accolades from the same cinematic circles that feed into the academy’s trophy-baiting machinery. Also absent from the nominees’ club was “Beasts” director, producer and writer, Cary Fukunaga.

    • The Pennsylvania Officer Who Shot A 12-Year-Old Girl Wasn’t Actually With The Police

      In 2008, the Associated Press discovered that constables had committed a slew of felonies: child molestation, having sex with prisoners, and murder. It wasn’t until 2013 that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court put in place standards of conduct for the state’s constables, in response to pressure to reign them in. President judges in district courts were tasked with creating Constable Review Boards to investigate complaints and dole out punishments.

      But even with stricter policies and procedures to follow, constables keep abusing their power.

      More recently, one threatened to arrest a prostitute if she didn’t sleep with him at the rate he set. Two convicted constables showed no remorse for handcuffing a woman who failed to pay a parking ticket and dragging her by her legs — in front of two children. One man was shot in the back and paralyzed when a constable tried to serve him papers for unpaid parking tickets. Three months ago, another constable was accused of strangling and beating his girlfriend.

    • Court Says Cops Who Protected a Mental Patient to Death Violated His Rights

      This week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that the police who protected Armstrong to death used excessive force during the 2011 incident—in particular, by shocking him with a stun gun five times in two minutes in a vain attempt to disengage him from a stop sign post to which he was clinging with his arms and legs. The cops ultimately pulled him off the post and pinned him to the ground facedown, one of them kneeling on his back and another standing on it, then handcuffed him and shackled his legs. “During the struggle,” the court noted, “Armstrong complained that he was being choked.” After the officers “stood up to collect themselves,” his sister noticed that he was motionless and unresponsive. When the cops rolled him over, they found that “his skin had turned a bluish color, and he did not appear to be breathing.”

    • Will the 2016 Presidential Election Be Decided by Voter Suppression Laws?

      An update on voter suppression as the presidential election draws nearer and nearer.

      In 2016, 10 states will be putting into place restrictive voting laws that they will be enforcing for the first time in a presidential election. These laws range from new hurdles to registration to cutbacks on early voting to strict voter identification requirements. Collectively, these ten states are home to over 80 million people and will wield 129 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the presidency.

    • Shocking Video Shows Cop Gun Down Unarmed Teen in the Back as He Ran Away

      Lawyers for the city of Chicago, Illinois have dropped objections to the release of surveillance footage that shows the police shooting a black teenager in 2013. Cedrick Chatman was killed as he fled officers who stopped him for car theft.

    • Chicago releases video of police shooting 17yo Cedrick Chatman (VIDEO)
    • Chicago Releases Another Video Of A Police Officer Killing An Unarmed Teenager

      The city of Chicago released a video of another police officer killing an unarmed black teenager three years ago, after giving up a lengthy legal battle to keep it from the public eye.

      [...]

      The city suddenly reversed its yearlong battle to suppress the video on Wednesday. As they did when fighting to bury video of Laquan McDonald’s death, members of Emanuel’s administration argued the video would inflame the public and jeopardize a fair trial in the Chatman family’s wrongful death lawsuit.

    • Bigot Cop Pulls Gun on Asian Man, Accuses Him of Being “an ISIS” and Beats Him

      According to court records, Clark began hitting C.F. before asking him to name the capital of Thailand and punched him in the groin, yelling “Bangkok.” The drunken bigot cop then walked away.

      As C.F.’s friend was telling him that it would probably be a good idea for him to leave, Clark became aggressive once again. He then pulled out his pistol, with his finger on the trigger, shoved it in C.F’s face and began referring to his non-Muslim Asian victim as “an ISIS.”

    • Two Smoking Guns: FBI on Hillary’s Case

      It also prosecuted Gen. David Petraeus for espionage for keeping secret and top-secret documents in an unlocked drawer in his desk inside his guarded home. It alleged that he shared those secrets with a friend who also had a security clearance, but it dropped those charges.

      The obligation of those to whom state secrets have been entrusted to safeguard them is a rare area in which federal criminal prosecutions can be based on the defendant’s negligence. Stated differently, to prosecute Clinton for espionage, the government need not prove that she intended to expose the secrets.

    • Marco Rubio Pushes Conspiracy Theory On Obama And Guns

      “Yes, that is a conspiracy,” the president said. “I’m only going to be here for another year. When would I have started on this enterprise?”

      After unsuccessfully pleading with Congress over the past few years — years marked by mass shootings at schools, movie theaters, and churches — to pass gun control reforms, President Obama issued an executive order in early January. The package of modest reforms include clarifying background check rules for online sales and gun shows, increasing the number of federal agents conducting background checks and investigating illegal gun trafficking, investing $500 million in mental health care, and developing new gun safety technology.

    • Feds Confirm Cardinals Accessed Astros System With Old Password, File Unauthorized Access Charges

      Sports fans in the city of St. Louis are having a rough go of it lately. Fresh on the heels of losing their football team to Los Angeles, now we are learning that the federal government has charged former Cardinals scouting director Christopher Correa with unauthorized access into the Houston Astros computer systems. While some had speculated that the government would go after the Cardinals under the Economic Espionage Act, it’s beginning to look like our original assumption that the CFAA would be the tool the government would wield has been proven correct. Also appearing to be correct were reports that the “hacking” that took place in this instance was of the less hack-y variety and more of the let’s-try-the-guy’s-old-password-y.

    • Why Is the Obama Admin Sending Refugees Back to Narco War Nightmare the U.S. Helped Create?

      With the New Year, the Obama administration has unleashed a new campaign of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeting Central American women and children who fled to the U.S. in 2014 to escape violence in their home countries. Some 17,000 are at immediate risk of being dragged from their homes and families and being detained and deported.

      “Our borders are not open to illegal migration; if you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values,” Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson said in a statement announcing the action.

    • Guatemala: first trial for systematic violations of indigenous women

      Guatemala’s recent history bears the mark of a 36 year long, painful internal armed conflict, during which the State systematically violated the rights of the Mayan population.

      According to the Report of the Commission for the Historical Clarification of Human Rights Violations in Guatemala, 83.3 percent of the human rights violations were committed against them.

      Indigenous women have particularly suffered from the conflict. They have been victims of rape, abuse and sexual slavery.

    • Worried about the return of fascism? Six things a dissenter can do in 2016

      2015 was the year that concerns about the return of fascism went mainstream, thanks to the popularity of the likes of Donald Trump, who leads the polls to be the Republican presidential candidate in the US, and Marine Le Pen, whose Front National topped the polls in the first round of the French regional elections (before defeat in the second).

    • Here’s Why A Guy Got 15 Years In Prison After Posting This Selfie On Facebook

      Little did Farrad know, when he posted a selfie with his .56-caliber handgun on Facebook, what problems he is going to face in near future. With a long time criminal history, he had two prior convictions for gun possession.

      Posting a selfie on Facebook might be a daily affair for you and your buddies, but things get a can little harsh if you are a longtime felon. The same happened with Malik First Born Allah Farrad, 42, who was sentenced for 188 months for posting a selfie in October 2013 on Facebook.

    • State Prosecutor Says Forfeiture Reform Is ‘Legislators Funding Drug Dealers’

      As asset forfeiture’s popularity continues to decline in the eyes of the public and certain legislators (but not in the eyes of its beneficiaries), arguments against reform efforts are becoming more desperate and strained. Hartford County state’s attorney Joseph I. Cassilly has been granted a pile of pixels at the Baltimore Sun to defend the “right” of Maryland’s law enforcement agencies to take money from people without charging them, much less convicting them.

    • Two Former Cops Lead Legislative Charge To Shield Body Camera Footage From Public Inspection

      Body cameras have become democratized, for lack of a better word. They’re relatively cheap, easy to use and can be deployed with minimal setup. They hold the promise of increased transparency and accountability, but legislators seem far more interested in ensuring the new technology will have zero net positive effects.

      Four Indiana legislators — two of them former law enforcement officers — have introduced a bill that will keep the public out of the loop as far as body camera footage is concerned.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • The epidemic of bloated web pages

      There’s no denying that web pages have gotten heavier and heavier over the years. Between advertising, widgets, images, scripts, trackers and everything else, the Web has become a ghetto of gigantic, bloated web pages. It’s really become something of an epidemic, and most sites don’t seem to be doing much if anything to slim down their pages.

    • How corporations killed the web

      I have read with fascination what we would have called before a blog post, except it was featured on The Guardian: Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web The “blogfather” is Hossein Derakshan or h0d3r, an author from Teheran that was jailed for almost a decade for his blogging. The article is very interesting both because it shows how fast things changed in the last few years, technology-wise, but more importantly, how content-free the web have become, where Facebook’s last acquisition, Instagram, is not even censored by Iran. Those platforms have stopped being censored, not because of democratic progress but because they have become totally inoffensive (in the case of Iran) or become a tool of surveillance for the government and targeted advertisement for companies (in the case of, well, most of the world).

    • Facebook Busted Trying To Fake Support For Its Net Neutrality Positions In India

      For much of the last year now, Facebook has been under fire in India for its “Free Basics” zero rating campaign, which exempts Facebook-approved content from carrier usage caps, purportedly to the benefit of the nation’s poor. Critics however have argued that Facebook’s just trying to corner developing ad markets under the banner of altruism, and giving one company so much control over what’s effectively a walled garden sets a horrible precedent for a truly open Internet. Indian regulator TRAI has agreed so far, arguing that what Facebook is doing is effectively glorified collusion, and it’s demanding that Facebook shut the program down until a public conversation about net neutrality can be had.

  • DRM

    • Netflix To Block Users Who Use VPN To Access Restricted Content
    • Netflix Pretends It Will Crackdown On VPNs Just Days After Admitting It’s Futile To Do So

      For a few years now, broadcasters have whined endlessly about the use of VPNs to access Netflix in markets where the streaming service had yet to launch. You’ll recall that Australian broadcasters in particular loved to throw hissy fits over the use of VPN technology, accusing customers (paying for both Netflix and a VPN) of being “pirates” for refusing to adhere to regional viewing restrictions. Of course, ignored amidst all this whining (and the futile attempts to ban VPNs) was the fact that these users wouldn’t be going to these lengths — if they liked the existing services being made available to them.

    • Netflix to crack down on VPN use
    • Netflix Announces Crackdown on VPN and Proxy Pirates

      For those utilizing VPNs, proxies and unblocking tools to access geo-restricted content on Netflix, the party may soon be over. According to an announcement by the company’s Vice President of Content Delivery Architecture, people using such services will face new roadblocks in the coming weeks.

    • Netflix to block proxy users – geo-blocking to be enforced

      Netflix services about 190 nations. It has announced that it will prevent VPN/proxy users from circumventing country-based content licencing restrictions.

      In a blog post titled ‘Evolving Proxy Detection as a Global service’ David Fullagar, Netflix’s VP of Content Delivery Architecture, said, “We are making progress in licensing content across the world… but we have a way to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere. For now, given the historic practice of licensing content by geographic territories, the TV shows and movies we offer differ, to varying degrees, by territory. In the meantime, we will continue to respect and enforce content licensing by geographic location.”

    • Netflix is Cracking Down on Viewers Spoofing Locations to Access Foreign Shows

      Netflix says technology is now being deployed to prevent proxies from being used

      Netflix is taking steps to thwart users who fake their location in order to get access to foreign shows and movies.

    • This NBC Exec Says Netflix Isn’t a Threat

      Netflix is seen by many as the future of television, or at the very least, a major player in whatever television is becoming. The company recently announced that it is now available in more than 130 countries, and it has a portfolio of popular shows like Jessica Jones and Narcos. But not everyone is impressed, apparently.

    • NBC Exec: Netflix Poses No Threat To Us, God Wants You To Watch Expensive, Legacy TV

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • No, The Internet Hasn’t Destroyed Quality Music Either

        And, of course, basically every other technological innovation was a threat of some sort. The radio was supposed to kill music. “Home taping is killing music” was a slogan! The RIAA undermined digital tapes and tried to limit CDs. It sued over the earliest MP3 players. It’s sued countless internet companies and even music fans.

        Through it all, the refrain is always the same: if we don’t do this, “music will go away.”

        But, of course, throughout it all, music only expanded. In the first decade of the 21st Century, more music was recorded than all of history combined, and it’s likely the pace has increased over the following five years as well.

        And because of that, we’ve started to hear a new refrain from the same folks who insisted before that music was at risk of “dying” because of new technologies: that maybe there’s more music, but it’s clearly worse in quality. Some of this can be chalked up to the ridiculous pretension of adults who insist that the music of their youth was always so much better than the music “the kids listen to nowadays.” But plenty of it seems to be just an attack on the fact that technology has allowed the riff raff in, and the big record labels no longer get to act as a gatekeeper to block them out.

      • God v. Copyright: Mike Huckabee Invokes Religion In Copyright Suit

        Strap in, folks, because we’ve got quite a battle brewing. You may recall that Mike Huckabee recently found himself the subject of a copyright dispute with Frank Sullivan, a member of Survivor, over the use of the band’s hit song Eye of the Tiger at a rally for the release of Kim Davis. Davis was the county clerk who asserted that her right to express her religion — in the form of denying same sex couples the right to marry — overrode the secular law of the land, which is about as bad a misunderstanding of how our secular government works as can be imagined. Sullivan’s filing indicated that the rally was conducted by the Huckabee campaign and that the use of the song had been without permission, therefore it was an infringing use. Left out of the filing was any indication of whether the Huckabee campaign had acquired the normal performance licenses.

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

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

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

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

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

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts