• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

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

• Intel P-State Is Faster Than ACPI CPUFreq Performance On Linux 4.4

• Graphics Stack

  • Gallium3D Gets Accelerated PBO Texture Uploads

  • OpenGL 3.3 Core Profile Support For GLAMOR

  • Are You Sure You Want X.Org To Die?

    Whenever posting news items about the X.Org Foundation, it’s common to routinely see a few comments about “let X.org die already!”, “Wayland is the future!”…

Applications

• qBittorrent 3.3.2 Free BitTorrent Client Supports Loading of Multiple Magnets, URLs

  Earlier today, January 19, the qBittorrent open-source and cross-platform BitTorrent client for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems has been updated to version 3.3.2.

• ownCloud to Offer Richer Notifications for the Web, Desktop and Mobile Clients

  Today, January 18, ownCloud Community Manager Jos Poortvliet informs us about the work that the ownCloud developers will do shortly for the Activities and Notifications apps of the self-hosting cloud server.

• NetworkManger 1.2 to Offer Tracking Protection in Wi-Fi Networks on Linux Systems

  Fedora contributor and NetworkManager developer Lubomir Rintel writes on his blog about an important feature that is currently missing from the NetworkManger network connection management software used in hundreds of GNU/Linux OSes.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to configure NFS Server and Client Configuration on Ubuntu 15.10

  • Installing jstock with Slackware 14.1

  • Learn Linux, 101: Customize or write simple scripts

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Enlightenment 0.20.3 Linux Desktop Environment Released with Over 30 Bugfixes

  It looks like January 18 was a good day for free software releases, and in this article, we would like to inform our readers about the availability of the third maintenance release for the Enlightenment 0.20 open-source desktop environment.

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

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Gets New Mir Update with Fix for Pinch-to-Zoom Reliability

        Today, January 19, Mr. Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical sent us his daily report to inform all Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu Phone users about the latest work done in preparation for the forthcoming OTA-9 software update.

      • Ubuntu Edge Could Finally Become Real in 2016, Sort Of

        The Ubuntu Edge was an incredible concept, and Canonical wanted to make something really unique. It didn’t happen, but the technology has progressed sufficiently to get to the level of what the company wanted to build in 2013.

      • AT&T chooses Ubuntu for cloud and network apps

        The second largest telecommunications firm in the US, AT&T, has chosen to move to Canonical, the maker of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, for its infrastructure needs.

        The company said in a media release on Monday that it was moving to Ubuntu “as part of its effort to drive innovation in the network and cloud”.

      • Users Will Start Noticing Things Looking More Different on Ubuntu, Says Canonical

        On January 18, Canonical’s Rae Shambrook has shared with us some examples and thoughts on the upcoming design that will be implemented in Ubuntu, based on the company’s new Suru visual language.

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).

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

• Did Remix OS violate the GPL and Apache licenses?

  Remix OS is an Android based desktop operating system. A recent post about Remix OS on the Linux Homefront Project blog charges that Remix OS has violated the GPL and Apache licenses.

Steve Jobs’ First Business Was Selling Blue Box That Allowed Users To Make Free Calls Illegaly

The Blue box was designed in 1972 by Jobs’ close friend and future co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. Marketing man Steve Jobs came up with the idea of selling those boxes to the public. They even made around $6000 but they had to give up the idea of Blue box venture eventually.

Security

• New Trojan Spies on Linux Users by Taking Screenshots and Recording Audio

  Dr.Web, a Russian antivirus maker, has detected a new threat against Linux users, the Linux.Ekocms.1 trojan, which includes special features that allow it to take screengrabs and record audio.

  Discovered four days ago, Linux.Ekocms is only the latest threat targeting Linux PCs, after the Linux.Encoder ransomware family and the Linux XOR DDoS malware had caused a large number of issues last autumn and put a dent in Linux’s status as impermeable when it comes to malware infections.

• Serious Linux Kernel Vulnerability Patched

• Linux zero-day affects most Androids, millions of Linux PCs

• Zero-Day Flaw Found in Linux

• Common Android and Linux Zero-Day Gives Attackers Root Access

  Security researchers from Perception Point have uncovered a new zero-day in the Linux kernel that affects both the Linux operating system and the Android mobile OS. Successful exploitation of this flaw (CVE-2016-0728) gives attackers root access to the impacted devices.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Can Iran Disrupt American Encrypted GPS Systems?

  Speculation, of course. There may be an explanation for the boats’ misnavigation as simple as a young sailor’s human error. But the science suggests at least one other reason, with significant repercussions for years to come.

• The Politics of the Prisoner Swap

  It’s not at all surprising that this nonsense is coming from a megalomaniacal lunatic like Trump. What’s disturbing, however – although not the least bit surprising – is that a more sophisticated version of this is coming from the frontrunner on the other side of the partisan divide. While paying lip service to the Obama administration’s “achievement” in securing the nuclear deal – and now the release of the five Americans held by Tehran – Hillary Clinton has proposed undoing all that by imposing new sanctions on Iran…

• Will Iran Nuclear Deal Change US’s Middle East Politics?

  The achievement of “implementation day” of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), when for both sides the central elements of the nuclear bargain went into operation on Saturday, means that it is going to be a fact of life in global and regional politics for many years. But will it have a profound impact on regional politics?

  That is the argument both the Barack Obama administration and US allies in the Middle East who have opposed it have made in the past.

  While Washington has said the agreement makes it more likely that Iran will eventually come to terms with its neighbors, Israel and Arab states have advanced precisely the opposite forecast, suggesting it will inevitably cause Iran to be far more aggressive and uncompromising.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Climate change slows onset of next ice age

  Human beings have not just started to leave a unique geological stratum that will announce their existence long after the species has been extinguished. They may have altered a climate cycle that has been stable for millions of years and even cancelled – or certainly postponed – the next Ice Age.

  Andrey Ganopolski and colleagues from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany report in Nature that they took a look at the conditions that determined the geologically recent cycle of Ice Ages.

Finance

• China fourth-quarter growth weakest since 2009 as policy misstep fears grow

  China’s economic growth in the fourth quarter slowed to the weakest since the financial crisis, adding pressure on a government that is struggling to restore the confidence of investors after perceived policy missteps jolted global markets.

  Concerns about China’s policy making ability have shot to

  the top of global investors’ risk lists for 2016 after a renewed plunge in its stock markets and yuan currency CNY=CFXS stoked worries that the economy may be rapidly deteriorating.

  After being a major locomotive of international growth for decades, China is locked in the midst of a protracted slowdown, leaving the United States as the only main driver of the global economy.

• Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world’s population, says Oxfam

  The vast and growing gap between rich and poor has been laid bare in a new Oxfam report showing that the 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population.

  Timed to coincide with this week’s gathering of many of the super-rich at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, the report calls for urgent action to deal with a trend showing that 1% of people own more wealth than the other 99% combined.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Hillary on the Ropes?

  The Sanders surge and the accompanying Clinton campaign angst has generated a slew of press reports pondering the prospect of yet another doomed presidential run by the former secretary of state. As a Friday Washington Post headline read, “Clinton’s lead is evaporating, and anxious Democrats see 2008 all over again.” A Saturday New York Times report similarly stated that the Clinton camp has become “unnerved by the possibility that Mr. Sanders will foment a large wave of first-time voters and liberals that will derail her in Iowa, not unlike Barack Obama’s success in 2008, which consigned Mrs. Clinton to a third-place finish.”

• Bernie mopped the floor with Hillary

  Mainstream Democrats breathed a sigh of relief in October when Hillary Clinton dominated the first debate with Bernie Sanders — but after Sunday night’s debate, they’re probably hyperventilating. Or ought to be.

  The Sanders surge in the Democratic primaries, which suggests he’s on the verge of beating her in the first two states and closing in on her nationwide, was mirrored in the way he ate her lunch Sunday night. And, for good measure, gobbled up her breakfast and dinner, too.

  Hillary Clinton’s goal was clear — to make the point that she’s the serious and sober candidate and Bernie Sanders is a pie-in-the-sky fantasist. Indeed, Sanders more than once said he wanted “revolutionary change.”

• Jeb Bush Tells Fox Hosts: “I Only Get My News From Fox & Friends”

Censorship

• Pornography: Soon, parental censorship to ensure kids safety online

  With pornography being easily accessible nowadays, telecom companies are mulling over the possibility to offer parents a censorship tool in order to keep check on their children’s online behaviour.

  As per the Economic Times report, telecom companies including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications, Telenor and Reliance Jio Infocomm are considering a plan that will give consumers options either to choose or bar access to porn sites.

• Parental firewall for porn in the works; telcos may offer parents with censorship tool

• PORN: Reliance Jio, Airtel, RCom, Vodafone, Telenor mull parental firewall for parents

  Telecom companies including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Communications, Telenor and Reliance Jio Infocomm are said to be considering a plan that will make consumers responsible for barring access to porn sites by offering them a censorship tool.

• Twitter and YouTube unblocked in Iran for some users after sanctions lifted

  Arthur MacMillan, Tehran deputy bureau chief of international news agency Agence France-Presse, told the Telegraph YouTube is working as normal over a Wi-Fi connection, although Twitter and Facebook are not.

• Facebook launches controversial censorship campaign aimed at silencing racism and extremism

• Facebook begins Europe-wide campaign against extremist posts

• Facebook launches initiative to counter hate speech in Europe

• Facebook Launches Europe-Wide Campaign To End Hate Speech Online, Following Refugee Migration

• Facebook begins campaign against extremist posts across Europe

• Facebook campaigns against extremist posts

• Facebook launches European campaign against extremist posts

• Facebook Launches Initiative to Stop Extremist Posts in Europe

• Facebook launches Euorpe-wide campaign against hate speech & extremist posts

• Facebook launches pan-Europe campaign to counter extremist posts

• Facebook ploughs $1m into marketing against hate speech in the EU

• Facebook to clamp down on hate speech posts in Europe

• Facebook starts Europe-Wide Campaign Against Racist and Extremist Posts

• Facebook takes on extremism and hate speech in Europe

• Facebook Begins Campaign to Purge Europe of Xenophobic, Extremist Posts

• Facebook Starts to Counter Extremist Posts

• Amid Refugee Crisis, Facebook Launches Campaign To Curb Racist Posts Across Europe

• Facebook’s censorship plans threaten to destroy free speech in Europe – and we should all ‘dislike’ them

• Facebook joins Europe-wide initiative to stop extremist content being posted online

• Facebook Inc Starts New Initiative To Counter Extremist Posts In Europe

• Facebook Hires Firm To Monitor and Delete Hate Speech, Racist Comments in Germany

• Facebook launches Europe-wide campaign to wipe out extremist posts

• Facebook launches anti-extremism initiative after backlash

• Can Facebook’s New Initiative Help Curb Hate Speech in Europe?

• Facebook launched Online Civil Courage Initiative to counter hate speech in Europe

• Facebook’s New Campaign Against Hate Ignores Its Own Internal Racism

  Muslim organizations in the United Kingdom told the paper that they have repeatedly alerted Facebook and Twitter to abusive content but the social media giants did nothing about it.

• Facebook launches new anti-hate speech initative in Europe

  It’s unclear what kind of speech Facebook will specifically be targeting with this new initiatives. Specifically, the recent rise in hate speech in Germany has been as a result of the Syrian refugee crisis, over a million of whom are set to be coming to the country in the coming year.

• Facebook to combat online extremism in Europe

  The venture is called the “Online Civil Courage Initiative” and although it is based in Berlin and supported by the German ministry of justice and consumer protection, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday that it will be the London-based think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue leading the initiative.

• Facebook Launches New Initiative Against Online Hate Speech In Europe (And Beyond)

• Claims of theatre censorship denied by Russian culture ministry

  Reports in the Russian media last week have sparked fears regarding censorship of theatre productions by the Ministry of Culture.

• Ukraine: Journalists face violence on all fronts

  Since October 2015, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project has recorded a total of 40 verified violations against press freedom in Ukraine, six of which took place in Crimea. Of these reports, 17 included a physical assault or an attack to property, showing just how unsafe the country is for many media workers. To break this number down further, seven violations were physical attacks on journalists only, six were solely damage to journalists’ property and four included a mix of both.

  “State and non-state actors alike are undermining the freedom of the press in Ukraine, including Crimea,” Hannah Machlin, Index’s Mapping Media Freedom project officer, said. “Clashes in the eastern region of the country, along with blocked access to local government meetings, frequently incite threats against media workers, including arrest, harassment, violence and even death, all of which set a disturbing precedent for the country as a whole.”

• Google Gives Pakistan Government YouTube Censorship Option

• Pakistan Lifts Three-Year YouTube Ban with Censor-Friendly Version

• Pakistan lifts 3-year ban on YouTube

• Pakistan’s YouTube ban lifted as government gets say over content

  Pakistan has removed a three-year ban on YouTube after the video-sharing website launched a local version that allows the government to demand removal of material it considers offensive.

• Pakistan Lifts Its Three-Year Ban On YouTube

• Pakistan lifts YouTube ban with launch of local version

  Pakistan has this week lifted a three-year ban on YouTube, days after customized versions of the video streaming site were launched across the region.

  The Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom said, in a statement to Reuters, that under the new version of YouTube the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority will be able to ask for offending material to be blocked.

• Restoring King

  There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr.

Privacy

• ITU Report On Internet Of Things: Great Potential For Development But Privacy, Interoperability Concerns

  Connected devices talking to each other and to humans could solve major global challenges and be a vector for global development, according to a new report by the UN International Telecommunication Union and Cisco Systems. However, issues remain, such as strategies to protect privacy, and interoperability between devices and systems.

• Martin Luther King Jr., Subversives, and the PATRIOT Dragnet

  But I’m particularly interested in Bedoya’s reminder that the government targeted African Americans for surveillance as subversives in the wake of World War I.

  The government’s practice of targeting specific kinds of people, often people of color, as subversives continued, after all. It’s something J. Edgar Hoover continued throughout his life, keeping a list of people to be rounded up if anything happened.

  I’ve been thinking about that practice as I’ve been trying to explain, even to civil liberties supporters, why the current 2-degree targeted dragnet is still too invasive of privacy. We’ve been having this discussion for 2.5 years, and yet still most people don’t care that completely innocent people 2 degrees — 3, until 2014 — away from someone the government has a traffic-stop level of suspicion over will be subjected to the NSA’s “full analytic tradecraft.”

• GCHQ Cyber Summer Schools open for applications [Ed: GCHQ thinks of the children (PR). Even when it illegally watches them naked]

• European Court Of Human Rights May Have Just Outlawed Mass Surveillance Without Most People Realizing It

  While much of the focus in the past few years has been on surveillance conducted by the NSA for the US, it should be noted that many European countries do a ton of surveillance too — often with fewer restrictions (though they may not be as good at it). And while there have been some high profile legal attacks on the surveillance done by the UK’s GCHQ (a close partner of the NSA), CDT is noting that some little-watched cases in the European Court of Human Rights may have technically outlawed mass surveillance without most people even realizing it. It’s two separate cases in particular, Roman Zakharov v. Russia and Szabo and Vissy v. Hungary…

• NSA Releases Surveillance Transparency Report [Ed: still in PR mode]

  The Freedom Act, which was signed into law in June and took effect on 29 November, restricted the NSA from indiscriminately collecting telephone metadata, instead requiring the agency to demand records from telecommunications companies on a case-by-case basis. Communications firms are, in turn, required to store the records for possible scrutiny by the NSA.

Civil Rights

• Grounds for (a little) optimism? Russian public opinion on human rights

  Since 2000, President Vladimir Putin’s regime has rolled back many of the civic freedoms Russians received in the 1990s after seven decades of Communist rule. The government has intimidated and demonized dissenters, and brought most of press under its control. The authorities have relentlessly pressured activists and NGOs that promote human rights, using both legislative and extra-legal measures.

  The Russian public appears at best indifferent toward human rights NGOs and their causes.

• 50 Republicans Who Tweeted Tributes To MLK But Don’t Support Restoring The Voting Rights Act

  Scores of Congressional Republicans took to Twitter on Monday to highlight their appreciation for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fight for civil rights for all. But since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling gutted much of the Voting Rights Act that King helped pass, their caucus has refused to move even bipartisan legislation to restore the law’s key provisions.

  Just 14 Republicans in the U.S. House have signed onto H.R.885, officially the Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015, even though its lead sponsor is Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

• Laurence Shoup

  Peter and Mickey spend the hour in conversation with historian Laurence Shoup. Shoup’s new book, Wall Street’s Think Tank, is a study of the Council on Foreign Relations; Shoup describes the CFR as “the most influential private organization in the country,” and traces how it connects major U.S. corporations with government, academia, and media.

• Listen to MLK’s 1964 Nobel Prize lecture

  For the first time since it was delivered 51 years ago, it is now possible to hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in its entirety.

  Nobelprize.org released the rare recording of King’s 1964 address today on Facebook. Its release coincides with the 30th anniversary of the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States.

  King delivered the lecture on Dec. 11, 1964, in Oslo, Norway. The Prize was awarded for King’s nonviolent protests against racial segregation and economic injustice in the American South during the early 1960s. King accepted the Prize on behalf of the civil rights movement as a whole.

• How Charles Koch Backed the John Birch Society at the Height of Its Attacks on Martin Luther King

  As noted in the new book, Dark Money, by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Charles and David Koch have spent millions on public relations in the past few years to try to re-make their image as many Americans have grown increasingly concerned about their efforts to distort democratic elections to serve their corporate and ideological agenda.

  This week’s issue of the magazine focuses on that campaign, which has generated positive press for the Kochs for supporting the bipartisan “criminal justice reform” movement.

  The Kochs’ interests in certain changes to the law was exposed by CMD (the Center for Media and Democracy) last month, when CMD documented the substantial Koch-backed effort to change criminal intent laws that would make it harder to prosecute corporations and CEOs, like Koch Industries and the Koch brothers, for any financial or environmental crimes. (The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on criminal intent this Wednesday.)

  As Mayer notes, the Kochs have also secured positive press for a major grant to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) in 2014.

• Navy SEAL Turns Over Picture of Bin Laden’s Body, Faces Investigation of Business Ties

  A FORMER NAVY SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden and wrote a bestselling book about the raid is now the subject of a widening federal criminal investigation into whether he used his position as an elite commando for personal profit while on active duty, according to two people familiar with the case.

  Matthew Bissonnette, the former SEAL and author of No Easy Day, a firsthand account of the 2011 bin Laden operation, had already been under investigation by both the Justice Department and the Navy for revealing classified information. The two people familiar with the probe said the current investigation, led by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, expanded after Bissonnette agreed to hand over a hard drive containing an unauthorized photo of the al Qaeda leader’s corpse. The government has fought to keep pictures of bin Laden’s body from being made public for what it claims are national security reasons.

  The retired SEAL voluntarily provided investigators with a copy of his hard drive as part of an agreement not to prosecute him for unlawfully possessing classified material, according to the two people familiar with the deal.

• Terrorism Act incompatible with human rights, court rules in David Miranda case

• Court of Appeal: Detention of David Miranda breached European law, new safeguards needed for journalistic material

• UK Court, in David Miranda Case, Rules Terrorism Act Violates Fundamental Rights of Free Press

• UK rules detaining partner of Snowden leaks reporter was lawful

• Airport stop of Snowden reporter’s partner David Miranda ‘lawful’

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • BREAKING: AG Szpunar says that fair compensation for private copying can be funded through state budget but amount cannot be established ex ante

    Private copying levies? Surely a sexy topic of conversation, but also a very contentious issue.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

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

• What is the best mouse for Linux (and everything else)?

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

• GIMP Gets A New Light Theme

  Alongside a lot of other exciting work for GIMP 2.10 is a new light theme for those wanting a brighter experience.

  Earlier this week The Light Side of GIMP was committed to the GIMP 2.9 Git code-base for GIMP 2.10 as the latest of a string of theme improvements for this next major release of this widely-used, cross-platform, open-source image editing/manipulation program.

• Obnam survey (January 2016)

• Announcing git-cinnabar 0.3.1

  This is a brown paper bag release. It turns out I managed to break the upgrade path only 10 commits before the release.

• podlators 4.05

  Getting all the details right in a highly portable Perl core module that tries to support very old versions of Perl is tricky! And I clearly didn’t do a good job of documenting previous decisions.

• News: jQuery 3.0 Beta Released.

  The team member of jQuery Core – Timmy Willison told us in a blog post about Query 3.0 Beta Released. Developers with jQuery 3.0 alpha had experimented with methods like an inline-display-none-remover (.show()) and inline-display-none-adder (.hide()) and removing inline display:none did not always show the element. Fix the custom selectors like :visible make is up to 17 times faster now.

• Xen Orchestra 4.12 Brings New VM Features

  Version 4.12 of Xen Orchestra is now available, the open-source project built around XenServer. The Xen Orchestra 4.12 release brings new features and is one of the few remaining before focusing on Xen Orchestra 5.

• GNU Datamash 1.1 Adds New Math Operations

  Datamash is a GNU program for performing numeric/textual/statistical operations in textual data files via the program’s CLI.

• wallet 1.3

  It’s been over a year since the last release of the wallet, a system for storing and retrieving secure credentials (currently relying on Kerberos authentication). There were a ton of pending changes, mostly thanks to work from Jon Robertson and Bill MacAllister.

• rra-c-util 5.10

  Despite the name of the package, most of the changes in this release are actually to the Perl test infrastructure.

• SMPlayer 16.1.0 Free Video Player Adds Better Support for VEVO Videos on YouTube

  SMPlayer, a free, open-source and cross-platform multimedia player software for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems, has been updated this weekend to version 16.1.0.

  SMPlayer 16.1.0 is here to replace the previous release of the software, version 15.11, and it is also the first build in 2016. SMPlayer remains one of the top rated video players on GNU/Linux systems, as most users find it full-featured and comfortable for their video playback needs, even better than VLC Media Player.

• Pitivi Lands Proxy Editing Support, Makes It Closer To Pitivi 1.0

  The Pitivi open-source non-linear video editor designed around GNOME components and making use of GStreamer just landed a big feature that also relieves another blocker in nearing the Pitivi 1.0 milestone.

  Landing today in Pitivi Git is proxy editing support. Proxy editing is implemented with the help of GStreamer’s GstTranscoder for transcoding the media content for proxy purposes. Pitivi proxy editing is described in detail via their requirements page and via this feature enhancement request.

• The top Linux commands for server administrators

• New Compression Codecs Risk Making Zlib Obsolete

  Zlib is likely the most widely-used data compression library on open-source systems, but it’s now at great risk of becoming obsoleted by more modern codecs for data compression.

• NetworkManager 1.2 Adds MAC Address Randomization

• NetworkManager 1.2 Improves WiFi Scanning

  Beyond NetworkManager 1.2 having a MAC address randomization feature, WiFi scanning has also been improved.

  NetworkManager developers have improved the behavior of wireless network scanning by using wpa_supplicant’s WiFi list and by setting the expiry age so no WiFi network seen in 4 minutes will be dropped or if not see nin in the past two scans.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HTTPS with Let’s Encrypt and nginx

  • Some notes C in 2016

  • Recording a screencast in Linux

  • How to install Pixie on Ubuntu 14.04

  • How to Upgrade MariaDB 5.5 to MariaDB 10.1 on CentOS/RHEL 7 and Debian Systems

  • Using Multiple Software Collections

  • QoS in Linux with TC and Filters

  • How to use curl command with proxy username and password on Linux or Unix

  • FreeBSD Snort IPS

  • Running 32-bit ARM virtual machine on AArch64 hardware

  • How to find out when Debian or Ubuntu package installed or updated

  • Linux VSFTPD Installation And Configuration

  • Ubuntu Linux check cron log file error or messages in /var/log/cron.log file

  • How to install Observium on Ubuntu 14.04

  • How To Connect To The Raspberry PI 2 Using SSH from Linux, Windows and Android

• Games

  • Linux gamers shouldn’t preorder the Oculus Rift with Linux development on hold

    Linux gamers, beware! The Oculus Rift is now available for preorder at the surprisingly high price of $599, but it won’t support Linux as originally planned. Oculus dropped support for Linux and Mac OS X in 2015, making the first consumer version of the Rift Windows-only.

  • Door Kickers 2 strategy game announced, Linux support confirmed too

    The sequel to the critic and public-acclaimed Door Kickers moves the action to the Middle East and puts the player in control of military Special Operations Teams fighting an elusive Terrorist Network.

    As with the original it will support Linux once again, which is fantastic news as Door Kickers is a really cool game. I’m really happy to see them expand on it, as it could have been so much more which they are now doing!

  • Hit indie game Undertale looks like it’s coming to Linux & SteamOS

    Undertale, a very popular 2D indie RPG looks like it’s coming to Linux. It has ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ reviews overall on Steam, so that’s something.

    A user on the Steam forum had an email chat with the developer, who asked for Linux testers (he has enough now). So hopefully the testing goes well and we get another popular game soon.

  • Medieval II: Total War Collection Now Available on SteamOS, Linux, and Mac OS X

    Feral Interactive was happy to announce at the end of last week that the Medieval II: Total War Collection has been successfully ported to GNU/Linux operating systems, including SteamOS, as well as Mac OS X.

  • Another great highlight video from our GRID Autosport tournament on Linux

    Another week and another session in our GRID Autosport tournament, it’s time for you to see more dirt driving from the Linux community.

  • Vendetta Online 1.8.367 3D Space Combat Game Has Better Joystick Support on Linux

    Guild Software has announced the release of yet another maintenance release of their Vendetta Online 3D space combat massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) for all supported platforms.

  • OmniBus Releasing for PC, Mac and Linux This Spring

    Buddy Cops and Devolver Digital have announced that OmniBus will release this spring for PC, Mac and Linux.

  • PS1-Style Driving Game OmniBus Will Let You Break Everything

  • SteamOS 2.0 “Brewmaster” 1080p Review – The First Update in 2016: OS For Gamers From Valve

  • Superpowers, a HTML5 development environment for 2D & 3D games now open source

    This is pretty awesome news, a very promising HTML5 development environment for 2D & 3D games has become open source!

  • Shakedown Hawaii, the follow up to Retro City Rampage should be on Linux

    Shakedown Hawaii is something that popped up in my twitter feed today, and I must say it looks really rather good. Reminds me of the original Grand Theft Auto games quite a lot.

  • Development On Valve’s VOGL Debugger Seems To Have Stalled

    Two years ago at this time all of the excitement was building up around Valve’s VOGL OpenGL debugger. While the VOGL source code hasn’t even been public for two years yet, there hasn’t been any new public activity to report on with the debugger in over a half-year.

    VOGL was getting much attention when it was talked about in early 2014 and then open-sourced in March of that year. The first few months were exciting with VOGL seeing plenty of commits, work on Voglperf, etc.

  • The new Master of Orion 4X strategy game might see a Linux release

    I’ve put millions of hours into Master of Orion 2 both on Windows and in later years in DosBox on Linux, so to hear about a brand new Master of Orion was quite exciting. I’ve been following it for a while, and it looks like it might get a Linux release.

    I noticed on SteamDB they added Linux to the supported “oslist”, that’s a great sign but remember this is completely unconfirmed right now. I have reached out to the developer to get confirmation, and will update you all if I get any.

  • Gaming: Portal Stories: Mel

    The last days, after about 20 hours of gameplay, I have finally finished Portal Stories: Mel, the single player mod for Portal 2. After having played Portal and Portal 2, I have to say this one mod took be by surprise. I remember very well that, after having played through Portal 2 and found it to easy, I was pointed to Portal Stories: Mel in several comments, I thought “Well, it cannot be that difficult!”. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

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

  • Black Lab Linux 9 “Diesel” to Be Based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, PlayStation 4 Port Is Coming

    We’ve been informed by Roberto J. Dohnert, CEO of Black Lab Software, about the roadmap for the development of the Black Lab Linux operating system during the entire year of 2016.

• 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

• AsteroidOS: Open source smartwatch operating system that can replace Android Wear (on some watches)

  But AsteroidOS is different… because it’s a community-driven free and open source operating system that you can install yourself, potentially giving you more control over the software that runs on your wearable devices.

  AsteroidOS is a community-driven project that’s still in the early stages of development. But you can already install it on the original LG G Watch.

• Ocean: The Linux web server that fits in your pocket

  Ocean may look like a smartphone, but it is in fact a fully functional Linux-powered web server that you can fit into your pocket.

• AsteroidOS can run on some Android Wear smartwatches

• AsteroidOS introduced as free and open source wearable OS

• AsteroidOS Open Source Smartwatch Operating System Under Development

  Android Smartwatch owners that are interested in installing a more open source operating system on their Android Wear smartwatch may be interested in a new operating system which is being developed called AsteroidOS.

  AsteroidOS has been specifically designed to replace your operating system on a range of different Android Wear smartwatches. AsteroidOS is a free and open-source smartwatch platform based on OpenEmbedded, libhybris and Qt5 and has been Created from the ground up with modular support in mind.

• Phones

  • Android

    • 7 more terrific Android apps you can’t get on the iPhone

    • 20 Essential Android Wear Tips, Tricks And Hidden Features

    • Best Hacking Apps For Android Phones

    • Announcing our Android developer competition winners

      Late last year The Register teamed up with Samsung SEAP to run a competition especially for Android developers. We think this was a resounding success, with several hundred entries and a proverbial sackful of fabulous apps for the perusal of the judges.

    • 5 tips to help you shoot better video on your Android phone

      In recent years, smartphones have become so good at recording video that they can successfully compete with standalone cameras, at least when it comes to shooting non-professional video.

    • Updated Android malware steals voice two factor authentication

    • Sony Xperia C4 starts to receive Android 5.1, not Marshmallow as first thought

    • How to find uninstalled Android apps and games and reinstall them

    • Get a free Chromecast after 10th tap with Android Pay Rewards

      How’s your Android Pay experience so far? If you haven’t tried it, maybe the news of Android Pay Rewards coming may finally make you sign up and start tapping to pay for purchases. Google has just introduced the Rewards program as part of the tap-and-pay mobile payment system This isn’t the first time Google has launched a promo because last December, the tech giant was generous to give away $20 Best Buy gift cards to every Android Pay user.

    • Best new icon packs for Android (January 2016) #2

    • The Elo Module accessory brings Android to large-format digital signage

      Elo has announced a new Android-powered Elo Computer Module accessory, which can be used with 32- to 70-inch digital signage displays as an all-in-one solution for both content delivery and hardware management. If you’re on the hunt for such a setup for your business or event, you’ll definitely want to check out Elo’s solution, which aims to provide a complete interactive platform.

    • BlackBerry to launch its first Android smartphone Priv in India on January 28

      The wait for BlackBerry’s first Android smartphone in India is over. The Canadian smartphone giant is all set to launch BlackBerry Priv smartphone in the Indian market this month.

    • Years before the BlackBerry Priv, the Motorola DROID PRO brought Android to the enterprise

    • Dramatically improve your Android experience with the Google Now Launcher

    • Android Authority this week – January 17, 2016

    • Android M 6.0 Marshmallow Release Date Update for Samsung Galaxy S5, Note 5, S6 Edge+, and Note 4 on AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint

    • Elo Announces Android™ Computer Module for Large-Format Touchscreen Signage

    • Now the Sony Xperia C5 Ultra is receiving Android 5.1 Lollipop update

    • The Popular Android-based Remix OS Violate GPL and Apache License

      After the previous review of Remix OS I received a comment with interested information about Remix OS USB Tool. My small personal research found that Remix OS developers have a zero tolerance for the code licenses and work of other peoples.

    • Google Play Store Now Has a Category for Android Wear

      Users having their first experience on wearables that are supported by Android Wear are affected even more. To foster its adoption and easy discovery of apps running on Android Wear, Google has added a category for the platform’s apps to the Play Store. The Android Wear category on Google Play Store is available on the web and also on mobile platforms.

    • Don’t expect battery life miracles in wearables anytime soon

    • Android users experiencing technical difficulties with MyNews4.com app

    • 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

    • Remix Mini by Jide Review – $70 of Android Desktop Experience

      The Remix Mini is the latest hardware option from Jide, the company that recently burst into the headlines when they released their own free build of android (Remix OS) featuring multi-window and the ability to be installed on most AMD or Intel devices.

    • Jupiter IO 3 Is The World’s First Smartphone You Can Smoke

      For the smoking community out there, it’s time you get over E-cigarettes. A tech company named Vaporcade is ready to launch world’s first 4G enabled e-cigarette phone with a 5.3-inch display that has a removable plastic cover that allows you to attach liquid vaping cartridges that you can smoke — and all this for just an affordable $ 499. The phone is like any other Android phone that comes with Android KitKat 4.4. Well, the day when all people will have to do in order to smoke is switching on their mobile phones does not look like a far reality.

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

• Application developer guide changes, new board members, and more OpenStack news

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

• The First Meeting of the LibreOffice Indian Community in 2016 Was a Success

  The Document Foundation, a non-profit organization that works to promote the LibreOffice open-source and cross-platform office suite amongst businesses and individuals, informed us about the first meeting of the LibreOffice Indian community in 2016.

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

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

• Charter to declare orbital satellite slots national assets

  The definition was aimed at preventing any operator from using an orbital slot or assigned spectrum to take advantage of the public, such as the collection of unreasonably high service fees or blocking people’s access to accurate information, Mr Chartchai said.

• Campus censorship: it’s worse than you think, but there is hope

  According to our data, 90 per cent of universities and students’ unions censor speech – rising from 80 per cent in our 2015 findings. Using our traffic-light system – ranking universities either Red, Amber or Green – we’ve seen a sharp, unmistakable increase in the most restrictive, Red universities. Today, 55 per cent of campuses are a hostile environment for free speech, explicitly banning speakers, outlawing particular ideas, and cleansing campus of anything that might rile, offend or upset.

• Computer Crime Act Has Issues, Google Tells Censorship Committee

  Internet search giant Google reportedly expressed concern that Thailand’s Computer Crime Act could interfere with its ability to operate in the kingdom.

  Following a Friday meeting said to have been attended by representatives from Google Asia Pacific, committee spokesman Apichart Jongsakul said the company will send a letter outlining concerns about the vague use of the Computer Crime Act to the Media Reform Committee, which is tasked with gaining cooperation from companies such as Google to further internet censorship.

• Google ‘concerned’ about Thai Computer Crime Act

  Google has said it’s concerned about the Thai Computer Crime Act hurting its operations in the country.

  Google reps attended a government meeting last Friday where they expressed their concerns about the ambiguity of the law, Khaosod English reported.

• Freedom and censorship go hand in hand

  Bollywood actor Aditya Roy Kapur says that maintaining a balance between censorship and freedom of expression is a constant struggle but the Indian film industry is endeavouring for it, IANS reported.

• What no-platforming really says about freedom of speech in the Digital Age

  WHEN it comes to campus politics the issue of our times often seems to be who is no-platforming who. Mostly this revolves around student unions or societies preventing people whose views they consider hurtful from speaking, though recently, the issue has been whether a statue of Cecil Rhodes should be de-platformed from its prominent position at Oriel College, Oxford University. Students there launched the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, an echo of a similar campaign over a statue in South Africa, calling for its removal and decrying his British supremacism and Imperialism. Their demands have ignited a debate on free speech.

• Censorship at Oxford University condemned

  Oxford University Chancellor Lord Patten has told students they must tolerate views and historical events or people they find offensive. He spoke in response to demands that the university remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

• Oxford Union to debate the future of controversial Rhodes statue

  The union’s president says the movement to topple a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the colonial politician, “has become something of a national fixation”

• Rhodes must stay, says Oxford chief

• Cecil Rhodes protest: Just who would benefit from the Oxford University benefactor’s statue being taken down?

• Don’t rewrite history, Oxford students told

• Oxford Chancellor: If You Want Safe Spaces, Move To China

• The Rhodes scholarship was never meant for blacks: historian

• What Cecil John Rhodes said in his will about who should get scholarships

• Anti-Rhodes students should study somewhere else: Oxford chancellor

• Universities are for thinking, not protesting

• Will ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ fail?

• The slander and falsehoods of Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh

• Statues Quo

  Rhodes saw the imperial project as a serendipitous by-blow of personal aggrandisement. An early practitioner of Lebensraum, he regarded Britain’s colonies in southern Africa as a repository for overspill in the metropolis. His strategy in negotiating mining concessions was to mobilise his British South Africa Company to bamboozle local chieftains, who’d discover too late that all the gems in their ground were legally his. When three African kings from the Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) went to London and managed to get the concession for the area cancelled, Rhodes proved magnanimous in defeat: ‘It is humiliating to be utterly beaten by these niggers.’

• Oxford’s thickos know no history

  These ignorant people have no understanding of history, and it is shocking they were considered able enough to be admitted to Oxford. Having got there, if they don’t like its history, they should feel free to leave. Freedom of thought is far more important than they are.

• Debates must always take place between people with opposing views or we are all left stupid

  I have been debating the meaning of the word “debate”, this last week. Dictionaries say “a formal discussion in which opposing arguments are put forward”, but many debates in the media are nothing of the sort. I hear the participants congratulating themselves on what an important debate they’re having, or complaining loudly that nobody is debating a particular topic, but, often, no opposing view is allowed. Am I missing something? Is it because I didn’t go to Oxford?

• The Free Speech University Rankings 2016 Have Been Released – And People Are Not Happy

  Nine in 10 universities in the UK censor or regulate free speech, with more than half of campuses deemed a “hostile environment” for free speech, it has emerged.

  Online magazine spiked released its free speech rankings for 2016 which revealed the problem of universities censoring speakers has worsened.

  Using a traffic light ratings system, 41% of universities were deemed “red” – meaning they actively censor speech – in 2015, compared to 55% this year. Only 10% of universities were rated “green” – meaning they have not restricted or regulated speech – a number which has halved since last year.

  Students’ unions are four times more likely to be ranked “red” than their universities, with Aberystwyth, Leeds, LSE, Swansea and Edinburgh rated the most “ban-happy”.

• Don’t blame the students. They’re a product of a Britain that’s losing its love of free speech

  In the past 12 months a curious thing has happened: student politics, for decades the most irrelevant, cut-off sphere of public life, has become headline news. The explosion of campus censorship – the primary means through which twentysomething politicos vent their political passions today – is followed, reported on and critiqued by greying commentators on a daily basis.

• Half of UK universities are curbing free speech

  Free speech is under growing threat at British universities, with serious restrictions on expression at more than half of campuses.

• Campus censorship ‘an epidemic’ at UK universities as Aberystwyth, Edinburgh and Leeds named among ‘most ban-happy’

  The stifling of free speech at the UK’s universities is now “an epidemic” as it is revealed students’ unions (SU) are four times more likely to put bans in place on campus than the universities themselves, according to new data.

  Launched by online magazine spiked, 2016’s Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) have shown 90 per cent of institutions are now censoring speech, up from 80 per cent in 2015, as Aberystwyth University and the universities of Edinburgh and Leeds are among those for being the most restrictive.

• Renowned pro-Kirchner journalist accuses President Macri of censorship

  Víctor Hugo Morales, best known for his work as a sports journalist, was dismissed from Argentina’s Radio Continental broadcasting station.

  According to an official statement released by the station, the Uruguayan journalist committed “repeated breaches that altered the normal development of emissions,” while recording the programs “La Mañana” and “Competencia”.

  During his last emission, Morales said that he “got sacked” amid what he called “a suffocating context for the Argentine democracy.” He later asseverated that Radio Continental, part of the Spanish Prisa Group, needed to preserve the Macri government’s advertising income, so that they “allign” with presidential interests.

• Pakistan lifts 3-year ban on YouTube, allows local version

• Pakistan Gets YouTube Back After Muslim Protests

• Pakistan ends 3-year-long ban on YouTube, imposed over anti-Islam film ‘Innocence of Muslims’

• Pakistan lifts ban on Youtube, launches own local version

• Pakistan unblocks YouTube after over three-years of ban

• Pakistan unblocks access to YouTube

• Pak unblocks YouTube after Google builds customised local website

• Govt allows access to localized version of YouTube in Pakistan

• YouTube unblocked across Pakistan, confirms PTA spokesman

• Pakistan lifts YouTube ban after Google launches local version

• ‘Deadpool’ Denied Release in China Due to Graphic Violence

• ‘Deadpool’ Banned: China’s Censors Won’t Let the Movie Play in Theaters

• Why Deadpool Has Been Banned In China

• Deadpool banned in China for nudity, violence, pwnage

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.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

We Support Linux! (Maybe)

To my surprise, I got a reply from a representative assuring me that they were different and that they preloaded nothing unless I told them to do so and that they fully supported Linux. This person even said that the warranty was not affected.

I inquired more only to find out that what the company actually does is to sell you a no-OS tablet and Linux can run on their hardware. They do not preload Linux (although they do preload several versions of windows) and they have drivers available. Oh, they can also save your “image” once you have succeeded installing and configuring Linux.

Desktop

• Finding the Perfect Linux Laptop

  It looks like a fairly capable device – but, as with lots of products from Shenzen, it’s hard to get a direct price quote for the exact Ubuntu model. It appears to be reasonably compatible with the latest version of Ubuntu – but there are a few tales of woe spread around the web.

Server

• Ocean is a Smartphone-Sized Powerful Linux Server thats Runs on Battery

  Usually servers are large machines that take up huge amounts of space on the floor or lots of space in a rack. But no more, a new Node.js Linux server has launched by iCracked 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. The small size means that you can slip the server in your pocket and carry your work with you wherever you go.

Kernel Space

• [GIT PULL] f2fs updates for v4.5

• Linux For Everyone! Goodwill Partnership Yields Exciting Scholarship To Teach You New Skills

  Adult students from underserved communities now have the unique opportunity to enroll in a new program launched by The Linux Foundation in partnership with Goodwill.

• It’s Elementary My Dear, Watson!

  Linux has been around as an open-source, free operating system for quite some time. But, in 2012, auto companies started to look to standardize it for their use. More companies announced support this week, including Ford. 7 car companies are now involved, with some notable exceptions, such as the European carmakers and GM. When will automotive grade Linux come to trucks? Will it make life for a service technician any easier if all the computers have the same operating system? What will a future tech need to be? A software guy or a hardware guy? I say a systems engineer. He won’t be just fixing leaks in radiators from rocks.

• Kabylake HDMI/DP Codec Support Comes With Sound Pull For Linux 4.5

  The sound changes are plentiful for Linux 4.5 and includes significant ALSA core improvements, ongoing Intel Skylake support work, HDMI/DP hotplug notifications for the HD-audio code, new Renesas driver features, new ASoC drivers, i915 DRM driver integration improvements for HDMI/DP audio, Kabylake HDMI/DP codec support, Firewire clean-ups and more, and a variety of other changes.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Is Planning To Support GLVND For Easier Linux Driver Setup & Maintenance

    The other follow-up question I received an answer to on Friday from AMD’s media liaison was whether the company is looking at supporting the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (GLVND) to make it easier to install and maintain their user-space GL driver on Linux systems.

  • Drag-n-Drop Gets Improved Within Wayland

    Support for Drag-n-Drop (DnD) actions have been added to the Wayland protocol.

    Carlos Garnacho of GNOME developed the protocol support for adding Drag and Drop actions to Wayland. This protocol addition is meant to make Wayland DnD support closer to what’s offered in the X.Org world with the XDND protocol.

• Benchmarks

  • Brainstorming Further Cooling Improvements To The Linux Benchmarking Room

Applications

• ‘TimeKpr’ A Parental Control Application for Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  Parental Control application for Linux is bit hard to find, if you encounter any then it may be outdated or just don’t work as per your wish, they just restrict internet access or sort of stuff. If someone uses your computer or you let your kids use your computer. You can restrict access for them as you want, from now you don’t have to say your kids to leave computer, Timekpr will do it better. You can call Timekpr restriction application or parental control application, whatever you like to call it.

• Why WondershareElement Stand Out from Many PDF Editors?

  PDF file is essential document by academic research and office environment used. To convert these documents into different files, PDF editor software should be the most practical tool. Wondershare PDFelement, that willbe a superb cost effective tool that has all it takes to solve all issues that has to do with PDF files .The Wondershare PDFelement is one of the few genuine “all in one” PDF editors that supports both Mac and Windows platforms. It allows you to create, convert and edit PDF easily. It also features an OCR plug-in which is useful for editing scanned images and PDF’s. With Wondershare PDFelement, you can digitally sign, verify, stamp, watermark and password protect your PDF files.There are a whole lot of reasons that makes PDFelement one of the best PDF editors available today.

• SMPlayer 16.1.0 Has Been Released, Bringing Fixes

• SMPlayer 16.1 Released, Adds Video Bookmarking

  SMPlayer, the awesome MPLayer (cli) based GUI capable of playing pretty much any multimedia file, has been updated to the version 16.1 which includes a couple of minor bug fixes and a new video bookmarking feature.

• GhostWriter 1.2.5 Is A Distraction Free Markdown Editor For Ubuntu

• Install Cutegram 2.7.1 On The Most Popular Linux Systems

  Cutegram is an open-source Telegram application, similar to Sigram. It is developed in Qt5 and QML and uses the libqtelegram and the libappindicator libraries.

  Like other Telegram clients for Linux, it has support for Emoji, allows the users to send data by dragging it in the message window and gets integrated with the system notifications.

• `Quod Libet` GTK Based Audio Player and Tag Editor for Linux

  Quod Libet is a GTK based audio player written in Python programming language, using Mutagen tagging library, it is cross-platform and available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Basically it is an audio management program, which offers several ways to manage and view your audio library and also support audio feeds. It can support libraries with tens of thousands of audio files. It also carries some additional features which should be in modern audio player: Unicode support, advanced tag editing, Replay Gain, podcasts & Internet radio, album art support and all major audio formats.

• Are you Struggling With Finding Text In Files Or Locating Files? Try ‘Recoll’ Program In Linux

• FFmpeg 2.8.5 Has Been Released

• GScan2PDF 1.3.7 Has Been Released, Bringing Changes

  As you know, GScan2PDF is an app for scanning pages and exporting them to PDFs. The user can export scans one by one, in separate PDF files, or export scans all together, in one PDF.

• MyPaint 1.2.0 Has Been Released

• Curlew Multi-Converter Returns Back To Support Latest Ubuntu Versions

  Curlew is a multi-converter program that depends on ffmpeg/avconv/mencoder to perform its functionality. It is free, open source and easy to use rich format multimedia converter written in GTK3 and Python programming language.

• Open Source Wealth Management

  This is a brief look at an Open Source wealth management platform. It is not an in depth review, merely a brief description of what I understand the scope of the project to be and pointers to more information.

• Steel, Password Managing the CLI Way

  One thing that’s probably obvious to anyone who’s read more than a few Linux Rain articles is that we appreciate the CLI (command-line interface). Graphical programs and utilities are great and there are some fantastic examples of those out there, not to mention new ones being created all the time. But the CLI will always have a place for those who feel comfortable using it and appreciate the power and lightweight nature of the interface. So if you’re looking for a password manager for the command-line, Steel is one such example we’re taking a look at today.

• MyPaint 1.2.0 Open Source Digital Painting Tool Is Out After Three Years of Development

  MyPaint developer Andrew Chadwick reports on January 15, 2016, that his MyPaint free, open-source and cross-platform digital painting software reached version 1.2.0 for all supported operating systems, including Linux, Mac and Windows.

• Proprietary

  • FlexiHub – Access and manage remote USB and Serial port devices from anywhere

    For our lab remote applications always were/are/will handy to manage our connection, I know there are many ways to manage your remote devices but some of them are complex and rest do not work well with all operating systems, once my professor said “Don’t reinvent the wheel if it is already invented, just use what is available that fits your requirements and save time”, well this debate could go long and I don’t want to go into this discussion.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Disassembling NWScript bytecode with the open source project ‘xoreos’

  • Installing sbopkg with Slackware 14.1

    One of the more frequently voiced complaints you will hear about Slackware is that it has a limited number of software packages available. There is a fair amount of truth in this claim, as my full install of Slackware 14.1 has just over 1200 packages installed.

  • How To Install Curlew 2.0 Beta On Ubuntu Systems

  • How to Find Out Top Directories and Files (Disk Space) in Linux

  • In full tinfoil hat mode: Using GPG with smartcards

  • Shadow Icons Looks Great With All Themes, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  • How to install and configure vsftpd with TLS on Debian 8 (Jessie)

  • How to paste password easily when pasting into password input fields disabled on Google Chrome

  • Install Snapcraft 1.0 On Ubuntu, Linux Mint And Elementary OS Systems

  • How To Install Calibre 2.49 on Ubuntu 15.10 via PPA

  • Sending & Receiving SMS on Linux

  • How to Start/Stop and Enable/Disable FirewallD and Iptables Firewall in Linux

  • How to Encrypt your Data with EncFS on Debian 8 (Jessie)

  • How to Track Business or Personal Expenses Using GnuCash (Accounting Software) in Linux

  • [Last month] 10 Free Online Resources for Learning Linux

  • How to search multiple pdf documents for words on Linux

  • Managing my books

  • SSH tunnelling for fun and profit: Tunnel options

  • How to Disable/Lock or Blacklist Package Updates using Apt Tool

  • ngrep Cheat Sheet with examples

  • Install and Configure Caching-Only DNS Server in RHEL/CentOS 7

  • Updating your server BIOS using FreeDOS and GRUB

  • Create & Restore VM Snapshot in VirtualBox on Ubuntu Linux

  • 4 Ways to Disable/Lock Certain Package Updates Using Yum Command

  • How To Install OpenLP 2.2.1 On Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

• Wine or Emulation

  • ReactOS 0.4 RC2 Released For The Latest Windows-Compatible OS Experience

    One month after releasing ReactOS 0.4.0 RC1, the second release candidate is now available of this next ReactOS update that continues marching towards a Windows ABI compatible operating system for applications and drivers.

  • PlayStation 2 Emulator ‘PCSX2′ New Version Released, Install In Ubuntu/Linux Mint Via PPA

    PCSX2 is a PlayStation 2 emulator for Windows and Linux. It was started by the team behind PCSX (an emulator for the original PlayStation) back in 2002, and as of early 2012 development is still active. The emulator achieved playable speeds only by mid-2007 and subsequent versions have improved speed and compatibility making it both the ultimate solution for PS2 emulation and the instrument to keep and preserve the PS2 legacy in the modern world. Though not yet perfect the program can successfully emulate most commercial PS2 games at playable speeds and good visuals (often better than the original PS2). The project is open source, and it is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3. Currently up to 3 cores are supported (2 cores and an additional one if the new MTVU speed hack is used). To make PCSX2 efficiently use 4 or more cores will require major code changes. PCSX2 only uses 2 cores,so if you have more the CPU usage will be way less 100%. Even if you have exactly 2 cores, the emulator will not cause 100% CPU usage because of the way threading works. This does NOT mean PCSX2 isn’t using the full power of your CPU, it is normal.

• Games

  • My Experiences with Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut On Linux

    Wasteland 2: DC is not a “new game”, its been available on Linux since October. But I wanted to call attention to it, partially due to problems I had running it, and partially due to my rather lackluster impression from Fallout 4.

    Testing was done on Fedora 23 with Linux kernel 4.2.8, Mesa 11.1, with both the Intel and RadeonSI Drivers, using the latest GOG version of the game.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Guest Blog: Dolphin Survey

  • Call for Testers for Plasma 5.5.3 on Kubuntu Wily (15.10)

  • OpenShot 2.0 Beta Released!

  • OpenShot 2.0 – Beta Released!

  • digiKam Recipes 4.9.9 Released

    A new release of digiKam Recipes is ready for your reading pleasure. This version adds two new recipes: Chroma Subsampling Explained (tucked under Configure digiKam) and Create Embeddable Maps with digiKam and uMap. That’s all there is to it this time around.

  • KDE Partition Manager 2.0.0

  • Plasma 5.5.3, Applications 15.12.1 and Frameworks 5.18.0 by KDE now available

    The latest updates for KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users.

    Plasma releases now follow a new schedule, with fast early bugfix releases that gradually become less frequent. Plasma 5.5.3 includes bugfixes and new translations with the changes being ‘typically small but important’.

  • Akregator

    Long time ago I worked on akregator2 (a akregator based on akonadi) but it was never released and there is no future for it.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Cruising Altitudes…

    Breaking up in pieces, First I divided the data into parts. Each part is associated with corresponding page which is to be printed. From that I get number of pages which will be required and then actual printing took place in draw-page call. The understanding of GTK Print API helped me. Begin-print signal is the one which is emitted when user is done with page setup ,but before rendering starts. All the calculations done to divide the data and get a count of pages are ensured in this one. In draw-page, actual rendering takes place using Cairo.

  • EggSlider

    Today we’ll cover a playful widget. You probably won’t find many great uses for this widget, but then again, maybe you will.

  • EggScrolledWindow

    A common pattern you see across software targeting a recent Gtk+ stack requires the use of GtkPopover. Choosing the right default-size for that popover is an exercise in futility.

Distributions

• This Week in Solus – Install #17

• New Releases

  • 4MLinux 16.0 BETA released.

    4MLinux 16.0 is ready for testing. Create your documents with LibreOffice 5.0.4.2 and share them using DropBox 3.12.6, surf the Internet with Firefox 43.0.4 and Chrome 47.0.2526.106, stay in touch with your friends via Skype 4.3.0.37 and Thunderbird 38.5.1, enjoy your music collection with Audacious 3.7 and aTunes 3.1.2, watch your favorite videos with MPlayer SVN-r37557 and VLC 2.2.1, play games with Xorg 1.18.0/Mesa 11.1.0 support enabled. You can also setup the 4MLinux LAMP Server (Linux 4.1.13, Apache 2.4.18, MariaDB 10.1.9, and PHP 5.6.16). Perl 5.22.0 and Python 2.7.11 are also available.

  • 4MLinux 16.0 Beta Has LibreOffice 5, Audacious 3.7, Skype 4.3 and Linux Kernel 4.1.13 LTS

    GNU/Linux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs Softpedia today about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta build of the upcoming 4MLinux 16.0 computer operating system.

  • Ubuntu-Based Black Lab Linux 8 “Onyx” Enters Alpha, to Feature Linux Kernel 4.3

    Today, January 16, Black Lab Software was proud to inform Softpedia about the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha build of the upcoming Black Lab Linux 8 computer operating system.

    Dubbed Onyx, Black Lab Linux 8 distribution is now in development, based on the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system and powered by Linux kernel 3.19.43, which will be upgraded to the Linux 4.3 kernel branch used in Wily later in the development cycle, for the Release Candidate and final builds.

  • Black Lab 8 “Onyx” is released!

    Today PC / Opensystem LLC is pleased to announce its latest release : Black Lab Linux 8 Alpha 1 “Onyx” – our latest FOSS offering. Since this is a consumer-focused release we focused on issues that end-users bring to our attention.

  • Bedrock Linux 1.0beta2 Nyla Major Features

    Bedrock Linux can utilize any of a large number of init systems as provided by other distributions: if there is a distro out there that provides an init system you like, you’re probably able to use it with Bedrock Linux. Openrc from Alpine or Gentoo, systemd from Centos or Debian or Arch, upstart from Ubuntu LTS (for now), runit from Void Linux, BSD-style from Slackware or Crux, etc.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • KaOS 2016.01 Screencast and Screenshots

  • Solus 1.0 Budgie Desktop

  • SolydXK 2015.12

• Arch Family

  • Arch Linux Gets Reader’s Choice ‘Best Distro’ Award

    The voting is all done for the second round of our poll to decide which GNU/Linux distro our readers would choose to receive our “Reader’s Choice Best Linux Distro” award for 2015. As in round one, Arch Linux won the day. The poll results are considered to be more a measure of a distro’s community support than any indication of a distro’s technical merits.

    The first round of our poll was a qualifying round, which Arch won as well, racking up 1,376 votes. The second round of voting was “winner take all,” and with the voting lighter than in the first round, Arch still managed to put together 592 votes. In all, 2,625 votes were cast in round two, which was active for seven days.

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • openSUSE Leap: LibVirt And NetworkManager

    I recently switched to Leap from 13.2. First time i have seen the next generation of kde and plasma. So far i like the experience. But i miss some stuff :(. If some dev out there needs an idea for his next little plasma widget project please consider porting service monitor. That widget alone could bring me back to kde4 :).

• Red Hat Family

  • Most enterprises plan to increase mobile app development this year, Red Hat finds

    A full 90 percent of enterprises plan to increase mobile app development this year, according to a survey of 200 IT decision makers from 200 enterprises in the United States and Europe conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Red Hat.

  • Behind-the-scenes: How the FCC migrated to the cloud (Part 2)

    All organizations are familiar with Murphy’s Law – the idea that if something can go wrong, it inevitably will. It’s a mantra in IT circles and all the motivation needed to ensure IT organizations are prepared for all possible scenarios. It’s likely this very idea was going through the mind of Dr. David Bray, CIO of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, in the early hours of the morning on September 4, 2015, as he watched a truck with 200 servers and 400 terabytes of data driving away from the FCC – and nearly getting stuck in the driveway.

  • Montrusco Bolton Investments Has $8,180,000 Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

  • On Analysts Radar: Red Hat, Inc.

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) has received a consensus one-year price recommendation of $90.50 by sell-side analysts. The price estimate shows the mean recommendations provided by the firms surveyed by Thomson Reuters’ First Call. The same set of brokerage firms have projected an earnings per share of $0.50 for the company during the upcoming quarter and an EPS of $1.86 for the current year.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 24 Linux Delayed, the Distribution Will Be Released on May 31, 2016

      Well, it didn’t take long for the Fedora developers to change the official release schedule for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system and delay it for two weeks.

      The initial release schedule of Fedora 24 suggested that the upcoming OS would see the light of day on May 17, 2016, but now it has been postponed for the last day of May, most probably due to some issues that will take a little bit longer to be resolved.

    • First January Fedora meetup in Pune

      Last Friday we had the first Fedora meetup in January here in Pune. This was the first of the many upcoming meetups/workshops. The venue for this meetup was moved to Sayan’s apartment as we never found a free meeting room in the local Red Hat office, and as it seems that we will continue to use the same venue for the future meetups.

    • Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades, Let Users Skip a Release

      Fedora developers are currently discussing the possibility of a new upgrade method for future versions of the operating system that might allow users to skip a certain Fedora release and upgrade to the most recent version available.

    • Fedora 24 Dropping i686 Server Support! | Release Schedule

    • The AWS tools are approaching Fedora

      In the last few weeks I’ve worked toward bringing the Amazon Web Services tools in Fedora. The three AWS tools that are coming in the next few days in Fedora are: botocore: a low level Python library to interact with Amazon Web Services APIs boto3: a high level Python library to interact with Amazon Web Services APIs awscli: a Command Line Interface to interact with Amazon Web Services APIs Botocore just landed in Fedora updates repositories while boto3 and awscli will be pushed to the updates repository tomorrow or Monday morning.

• Debian Family

  • The Fifth Alpha Version Of The Debian 9.0 Stretch Installer Has Been Released

    Cyril Brulebois, one of the Debian Installer developers has announced yesterday that Debian 9.0 Stretch Alpha 5 installer has been released, permitting the users to test Debian’s Testing system easily.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical’s Ubuntu Day Event Brings Ubuntu Linux to a City Near You

        Marcin Kierdelewicz of Canonical writes on January 15 about an upcoming event that promises to bring the Ubuntu Linux operating system in a city near you during the entire year of 2016.

      • Canonical Plans To Add Encryption To Ubuntu Touch

      • New Ubuntu Convergence Device To Be Announced Next Month?

        Canonical will demo at least one new Ubuntu convergence device at next month’s Mobile World Congress next month, we’ve learned.

      • AT&T selects Ubuntu for cloud and enterprise applications

      • How You Can Help Test the New Ubuntu Software Center

        Testing of the app store set to replace the Ubuntu Software Center in 16.04 LTS is getting underway.

        Last November we shared the news that developers plan to drop the current Ubuntu Software Center from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and replace it with GNOME Software, an upstream alternative.

      • New Dekko Email Client for Ubuntu Phones Looks Awesome, Here’s a Convergence Demo

        On the day of January 15, 2016, Ubuntu app developer Daniel Wood teases Ubuntu Phone users on his Google+ page with the latest development of the next major release of the Dekko email client.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Lubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) Has Been Ported to Raspberry Pi 2, with LXQt

        • Lubuntu 16.04 LTS will use kernel 4.4 LTS

          The Ubuntu Linux kernel team has announced that the Linux kernel in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS has been upgraded to version 4.4, the latest stable release made available.

        • Linux Mint: from Rafaela to Rosa

          You know I love Linux Mint. It is one of my favorite distros. Which made the Rosa disappointment all the more shocking. It was so bad it was almost a Rosawell Accident. See what I did there? Never mind, I have calmed down since, and now we’re trying Mint 17.3 once again. Only this time, in a slightly different fashion.

          Rather than booting from a live USB or whatnot, I am going to attempt an in-vivo upgrade, which is something that usually didn’t work quite that well in the past. Linux Mint abstained from this thorny path for many years. Its parent Ubuntu sucked for a while, with dodgy upgrades, and then eventually Ubuntu worked just fine. So this is going to be a rather interesting exercise. Shall we?

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung Z1 to get Tizen 2.4 FINAL as Soon as 22 January, according to Samsung MD

    • Apache Spark cluster on Tizen

  • Android

    • Now the Official Xiaomi Number (‘over 70M’) and apparently only 1M Windows 10 Lumia devices for Xmas

      First off, that Xiaomi number. So this is now the official number (I mistakenly reported on an old news story last time). Xiaomi said their full year 2015 sales were ‘more than 70 million’. Not more precise than that. Lets say its about 71 million. Their last official number was ‘slightly below 35 million’ for first half of 2015, so if we say thats 34 million, then their ‘year-halfs’ grew from 34 million to 37 million. I would hope the Chinese started to report actual unit sales to one decimal point of millions, in accuracy and every quarter. But still, this is better than nothing. 71 million would be 16% growth vs 2014 and give Xiaomi a rough market share of about 4.7%. For the Christmas quarter, Xiaomi’s sales would be roughly flat 18.5 million vs the estimated Q3 (and consistent with Chinese regulator data on new smartphone sales in China being flat QoQ) and the quarterly market share be about 4%. So Xiaomi is there in that crowded mid-field in the race for final rank of 2015 unit sales and market share.

    • My Time at Tox

      Then it came time to set up an F-Droid server to distribute Antox to those users without Google Play. I was first told that the project could set up an F-Droid server, but after a month of asking zero-one about it, it was clear that it was never going to happen. Various excuses were used to justify why it could not be done, something about how there would be no package server until there were other packages to host. This did not sound like a reasonable explanation to me, so I spent the six or so hours required to get F-Droid working that the project could not spare, paying for my own VPS, domain name, and HTTPS certificate. I was not okay with this situation, but if I wanted to continue working on Antox I saw no alternative. This situation worsened as time went on. zero-one flat-out refused to set up a ToxMe instance to replace toxme.se, asserting that a name resolution service was unnecessary for the project to succeed. I strongly disagreed with this, arguing that convenience and user-friendliness were Tox’s primary goals. I went so far as to go on strike in the process (see this commit), which lasted for two days before I, with great disappointment, realised that the leadership would rather see me leave than set up this service for Antox. I didn’t want to leave, I just wanted to work on Antox, so I caved in. I went off strike, bought another domain, HTTPS certificate and set up a ToxMe instance on my F-Droid VPS. Nobody had any great issue with promoting this service, in spite of the fact that it was run by someone clearly not capable with managing sensitive user data or competent with security.

    • Hyundai’s 2017 Elantra to start at $17,150, offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto

    • Casio Unveils First Android Smartwatch At CES 2016

      While one segment of the smartwatch market prefers the luxurious and the fashion-conscious kinds of wearable technology available, there is another segment that prefers a more rugged and sporty treatment of wearable technology. Casio, the Japanese watchmaker, unveiled the company’s first smartwatch called the WSD-F10 Smart Outdoor Watch during CES 2016, which brings to the market another smartwatch for the consumer who likes the outdoors but will not sacrifice functionality.

    • Google Play Store Finally Allows Android App Promo Codes

    • Introducing Phoenix OS, an Alternative to Remix OS and Android-x86 Made in China

      Today we have the pleasure of introducing you guys to an alternative computer operating system to the already popular Remix OS that everybody is talking about these days.

    • Mobile investments paying off

      The survey revealed that 74 per cent of respondents whose organisations use key performance indicators, or KPIs, to some extent to measure mobile application success are achieving positive return on investment. The survey also revealed that 85 per cent of organisations are using KPIs to measure mobile app success, while nine per cent use other means and the remainder are not measuring mobile success at all.

    • Good Deal: Get a free Chromecast for using Android Pay

      Google’s Chromecast media streaming dongle has always been cheap, but if $35 is too rich for your blood, you’ll want to pay attention to a new Android Pay promotion in the US. If you make ten purchases with Google’s contactless-payment app before the end of February, you’ll get a free Chromecast.

    • Android Pay rewards program ‘Tap 10′ allegedly spotted

    • Tap 10 offer gets you rewards for simply using Android Pay

    • Sony’s Xperia C4 And Xperia C5 Ultra Receive Their Android 5.1 Over-The-Air Updates

    • This is the hardest Android quiz you’ll ever take

    • Sprint HTC One M9 to receive Android Marshmallow update in the middle of next week

    • Android malware can hack your bank account through a phone call

    • U.S. bound honor 5X to receive Android 6.0

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

• First Meetup at University of Bamberg summons local Docker community

  This is the summary of the first Docker meetup that we organized in cooperation with University of Bamberg. As a supplement to this event yesterday, we share the pictures and the slides of the presentation.

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

• group test: BSD Distros

  On Test

  FreeBSD
  OpenBSD
  NetBSD
  DragonFly BSD
  GhostBSD
  PC-BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free/Libre/Vrije Software: The Goal and the Path

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

  • A20-OLinuXino OSHW Linux computer is doing hard 24/7 work at Mining industry

  • Open Source Hardware (OSHW), why it matters and what is pseudo OSHW

    Why all people love so much OSHW? Because every one love to learn something new for free and to see how other people did this or that and improve his own skills, this is why OSHW has many fans even among people who never released something as OSHW. This is how many people got infected with the Open Source virus, they watch, learn and at one point decide to give something back to the community.

  • Br-Print3D on Google Summer of Code

    After a few conversations with Guilherme Razgriz, the designer of Br-Print3D, we realize that the actual Ux is not good enough. Why? You may ask. Weel, the idea behind Br-Print3D, was to make things diferent, and, until now, the Ux is ordinary, looking like the others printers hosts on the market.

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

• Netflix’s VPN Ban Isn’t Good for Anyone—Especially Netflix

  After expanding to nearly ever country in the world, Netflix is already in danger of alienating its international audience.

• Why Netflix VPN ‘Pirates’ (Shouldn’t) Terrify Hollywood

  This week Netflix announced that it would ramp up its crackdown on VPN and proxy pirates. The decision is a response to increased demands from major Hollywood players, but is this fear of VPN pirates justified?

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.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

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

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Arch Linux and Slackware Now Testing Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

  If you’re reading the news lately, you probably know by now that Linux kernel 4.4 has been officially released and that it’s the new long-term support (LTS) branch of the Linux kernel, and also the latest stable and most advanced kernel.

• Linux Foundation Partners with Goodwill to Offer Free Training and Lucrative Career Opportunities to Underserved Communities

• Linux Foundation and Goodwill team up to provide free Linux training in Central Texas

• HID Driver Updates Land In The Linux 4.5 Kernel

  Besides the Logitech G920 support, other new handling in Linux 4.5 for HID devices include the Microchip Pick16F1454, new Wacom device support, and a quirk for the Lenovo Yoga 900 with ITE chips.

• Adult Charter School in Texas Receives Free Open Source Training

  The Linux Foundation’s latest training program aims to bring open source software expertise to a new demographic — people who are homeless, under-educated, single parents, have a criminal background or are disabled.

• Neil Brown Sends In His Final MD Pull Request

  Neil Brown has sent in his final MD subsystem pull request. Past this Linux 4.5 work, he’s stepping down.

  The MD update itself isn’t too exciting with just having some clustered RAID1 and RAID5 journal updates. There’s also a Year 2038 fix and other minor changes. The details on that can be found via the pull request.

• Many PowerPC Changes Line Up For Linux 4.5

  There’s a rather hefty pull request of PowerPC architecture updates pending for the Linux 4.5 kernel.

  Some of the PowerPC updates for Linux 4.5 include the ground support for a new Power9 MMU, optimized FP/VMX/VSX context switch, improved self tests, support for Nvlink NPUs, support for kexec on 476fpe, various other POWER9 updates, and a handful of other PowerPC updates.

• Graphics Stack

  • GPU Reset Patches Published For AMDGPU DRM Driver

  • AMD’s Vulkan Driver Will Only Work With The AMDGPU Kernel Driver

  • You Can Help Bring Vulkan Support To Older AMD GCN GPUs

  • The Allwinner A10 DRM Display Engine Support Revised

• Benchmarks

  • How Three BSD Operating Systems Compare To Ten Linux Distributions

    Earlier this week I posted the results of a 10-way Linux distribution battle on the same Intel Xeon system and using all of the popular and latest Linux distribution releases. Taking things further, the article today has those results complemented by results on the Xeon system for several BSD operating systems. For seeing how the BSD performance stacks up to Linux, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD were benchmarked.

Applications

• Obnam 1.19 released (backup software)

  I have just released version 1.19 of Obnam, the backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.

• Calibre 2.49 eBook Manager Software Arrives in 2016 with New Kobo Driver, Qt 5.5.1

  A few minutes ago, January 15, 2016, Kovid Goyal announced the release and immediate availability for download of the Calibre 2.49 ebook library management software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

• Announcing git-cinnabar 0.3.0

  Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.

  [...]

  Development had been stalled for a few months, with many improvements in the

• FFmpeg 2.8.5 Is Out, Patches the Vulnerability That Lets Attackers Steal Files Remotely

  Just a few minutes ago, the development team behind the well-known, cross-platform and open source FFmpeg multimedia backend have announced the release of FFmpeg 2.8.5, which is now available for download for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

• Excellent Music Player Clementine Is Getting a Massive Update, No Indication of Launch Date

  Clementine is one of the best music players out there and it looks like a new major update is in the works for it.

  Clementine doesn’t get the updates that the community wants, but it’s still nice to see that the developers are still working on it. Even if the latest stable version of Clementine was released almost two years ago, it’s still one of the best. It’s light, fast, and has a very clear and user-friendly interface.

• Lumail has IMAP .. almost

  A couple of years ago I was dissatisfied with mutt, mostly because the mutt-sidebar patch was dropped from the Debian package. That lead to me thinking “How hard can it be to write a modal, console-based mail-client?”

  It turns out writing a client is pretty simple if you limit yourself solely to Maildirs, and as I typically read my mail over SSH on the mailhost itself that suited me pretty well.

  Recently I restarted the mail-client. Putting it together from scratch to simplify the implementation, and unify a lot of the adhoc scripting which is provided by Lua. People seem to like the client, but the single largest complaint was “Can’t use it – no IMAP.”

• Ease eye strain and Sleep easier with Redshift

  Redshift has become popular enough to have spawned several side-projects. It is itself the open source equivalent of a proprietary utility called f.lux, and you’ll need to avoid these when installing these from your distribution’s package manager. We’re going to stick with the simple redshift package to get things started and to explain some of its options; you can then go back and explore some of the alternatives if you like what it does.

• MyPaint 1.2.0 Released

  It’s been a long time since the last stable release, but I’m really happy to announce that MyPaint version 1.2.0 is ready. Windows binaries will be available soon, and Ubuntu packages available for testing through the usual PPA. Expect releases for other operating systems and distros in due course.

• Proprietary

  • First Opera Web Browser Beta Update in 2016 Lets Linux Users Watch Netflix Movies

    On January 13, we’ve reported news on the first updated in 2016 for the Opera Developer channel of the proprietary web browser, but Opera Software today announced the release of the first Beta version of the Opera 35.0 web browser for 2016.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install Simple Invoices on CentOS 7

  • Australia, ipv6 and dd-wrt

  • Migrating to Devuan and configuring minimalism

  • Monkeying around on the bash command line in 2016

  • ABINIT for Chemists

  • Using CPU host-passthrough with virt-manager

  • CJK fonts and Ghostscript: cjk-gs-integrate release 20160115.0

    I have made a new release of cjk-gs-integrate, the script that searches for all kind of CJK fonts, and makes them available to Ghostscript (and if asked for also to TeX by linking). The update has been uploaded to CTAN (link) and it will land in TeX Live within the next days.

  • 3 smart GIMP tricks

  • Manage your Linux Box with htop

• Games

  • Papo & Yo finally has a Linux version on Steam, two years later

    Papo & Yo, a popular game that was ported to Linux with the Humble Indie Bundle X two years ago finally has the Linux version on Steam.

  • Valve Details Some Existing Problems with Steam Controller

  • SteamOS beta update adds bluetooth pairing support

  • SteamOS Brewmaster Has Been Brewing Some New Features

    For those that haven’t been following the SteamOS 2.0 “Brewmaster” updates, it’s been a rather exciting 2016 so far.

    Among the features that have landed in SteamOS 2 over the past week have included Xbox One Elite Controller support, updates to its packaged Linux kernel and other key packages, and then coming in today was Bluetooth support. The Bluetooth support allows for basic support for connecting to Bluetooth devices directly from the Steam UI on SteamOS for newer Bluetooth LE/Smart devices.

  • Steam Update Disables Steam Controller When Users Hit Control-Alt-Del

    A new Steam beta update has been released by Valve, and it brings a few fixes for the Steam Controller and some of the other components.

  • Papo & Yo Released on Mac and Linux

    Minority Media has announced that the Linux and Mac versions of Papo & Yo are available now on Steam. Based on Creative Director Vander Caballero’s childhood in South America, Papo & Yo follows a young boy, Quico, and his best friend Monster, a mostly-friendly beast with razor-sharp teeth. Monster loves Quico but has a serious problem: an addiction to poisonous frogs, which, when eaten, drive him into a murderous rage from which no one, even Quico, is safe. As Quico, players adventure through a mystical world, manipulating the environment to open up new paths and move forward on their quest to cure Monster of his addiction and save him from the greatest danger of all: himself.

  • Superpowers goes open source, Oculus Rift’s support for Linux, and more

    Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Superpowers goes open source, Oculus Rift VR headset support for Linux, Interesting talks at upcoming GDC conference, and more.

  • The Mean Greens – Plastic Warfare now in closed testing for Linux

    The Mean Greens – Plastic Warfare is a title I really want to try, but I didn’t have time to get into the closed-beta. I’ve been told by a few people now that the Linux beta is running really well.

  • Slime Rancher now on Steam Early Access, it’s so cute, watch out for killer rainbow slime

  • The Humble Store is having a winter sale, go grab cheap games

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

• Bijou Linux autopilot takes to the skies

  Those who believe that less is indeed more are directed to the PXFmini autopilot shield for the Raspberry Pi Zero – a seriously bijou bit of kit measuring just 31mm by 73mm and weighing in at 15g.

• Logic Supply Updates Its Line of Fanless and Ventless Industrial PCs for IoT Applications

  Logic Supply’s Darek Fanton informs Softpedia today, January 15, about the availability of a new line of PCs targeted at embedded and industrial users, the Logic Supply ML340 series.

  Logic Supply’s brand-new ML340 fanless and ventless computers are the next-generation version of the company’s best seller ML300 Series, providing their customers with a full 5-year lifecycle motherboards that are extremely essential when manufacturing sustainable hardware projects. The ML340 Series of PCs from Logic Supply is a great option for IoT (Internet of Things), automation, security, and digital signage applications.

• Dronecode Project Gets More Wind Beneath Its Wings

  The Linux Foundation this week announced an expansion of the Dronecode project with investments from new members and the creation of three technical working groups. The foundation launched the open source project in 2014 in an effort to create a unified platform for commercial drone technology. Twenty-seven companies have joined Dronecode since, bringing membership to 51, officials said. New technical working groups will focus on areas of development the community views as critical to advancing the project’s mission.

• My Payphone Runs Linux

  For the 20th anniversary of the Movie “Hackers” [Jamie Zawinski], owner of DNA Lounge in San Francisco, threw an epic party – screening the movie, setting up skating ramps and all that jazz. One of the props he put up was an old payphone, but he didn’t have time to bring it alive. The one thing he didn’t want this phone to do was to be able to make calls. A couple of weeks later, he threw another party, this time screening “Tank Girl” instead. For this gathering he had enough time to put a Linux computer inside the old payphone. When the handset is picked up, it “dials” a number which brings up a voice mail system that announces the schedule of events and other interactive stuff. As usual, this project looked simple enough to start with, but turned out way more complicated than he anticipated. Thankfully for us, he broke down his build in to bite sized chunks to make it easy for us to follow what he did.

• Mycroft Prototype Almost Ready, Developers Show Us the Insides

  With all the talk about the Mycroft AI, people might have forgotten about the fact that it’s only happening because it’s a powerful device designed to turn your home into a smart one. And now we get to see its insides.

• Wind River revs up its connected car software and services

  Wind River announced a “Helix Chassis” connected car software suite, featuring Linux-based “Cockpit,” VxWorks-based “Drive,” and cloud-based IoT functions.

  Intel software subsidiary Wind River has been busy developing its automotive oriented software for several years. The results of this process have ranged from safety critical, real-time control software based on its venerable VxWorks RTOS, to an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform based on its widely respected embedded Linux distribution, to a recently introduced Helix Cloud services platform for communication among Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This week, the company announced that this assortment of software, development tools, and services for the “connected car” market have become a new Wind River product suite, called “Wind River Helix Chassis.”

• Phones

  • Android

    • What Remix OS means for Android on PCs

      Remix OS is a modified version of Android that can run on practically any PC. It remixes Android into a desktop operating system, complete with applications running in windows, a Start menu, taskbar, desktop, and notification area.

    • PSA: Android Studio 2.0 Preview 5 is now out

      Google has been moving fast on iterating its IDE for developing Android apps. Announced two months ago, Android Studio 2.0 is on its fifth preview that makes further refinements to its marquee ‘Instant Run’ feature and fixes other bugs.

    • Hyundai Announces the 2017 Elantra with Android Auto

    • CES 2016 Brought Us Loads of Choices for Android Auto

      CES took place last week in Las Vegas, and we’re still digesting all of the goodness that was announced at the show. Auto was a pretty big topic in Vegas, a bit surprising considering the NAIAS took place this week in Detroit. CES seemed a bit more of an Auto Tech show, morphing the two shows together. For Android Auto, we saw quite a few announcements. HARMAN, Kenwood and Pioneer all announced new head units for Android Auto. While Ford and Chrysler both announced their plans for implementing Android Auto into their future models. Let’s break them all down and see what happened in Vegas.

    • How to Install Official Android 5.1.1 Lollipop Update on Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note 4

    • Perspective-Correcting Image Editor SKRWT Comes To Android

    • Barclaycard adds contactless payment support to its official Android app

    • Google Play Store adds support for Android app promo codes

    • Google Tests “What’s Hot” & “What’s Nearby” As Android Search Options

    • Android Pay Rewards “Tap 10” Could Land You a Free Chromecast, Songs on Google Play Music

    • Peach Gets An Unofficial Web And Android Version Called Nectarine

    • ISIS builds its own encrypted Android messaging app

    • ‘FNaF World’ Coming To Steam, PC, and Android on February 19th 2016

    • Xposed module and installer basics – Android customization

    • Year-old Android 5 Lollipop on 33% of Google Play users, but only 20% of devices in China

    • You’d say ‘no’ to your Android phone, if only you could, study finds

    • Creating an Android app with App Inventor 2

    • Barclaycard brings NFC payments to its Android app

    • Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop

    • Developer Version of Remix OS 2.0 Goes Live

    • Hands-On With Jide Remix 2.0 For PCs: A Promising Start For Android On The Desktop

    • Remix OS Custom Android OS Running On PC

    • Remix OS 2.0 for PC and Mac now available for download

    • Jide Technology

    • Ex-Googlers want to bring the Android ecosytem to PC

    • Jide Builds List Of User-Voted “Best Apps For Remix OS”

    • Google Offers Promo Code Options for Android App Developers

    • Android TV: Outlook For 2016 & CES Round Up

    • Sony Xperia C4 gets Android 5.1 update even if it was supposed to jump straight to 6.0

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

• Mozilla

  • IBM flexible mainframes with Golang, Mozilla keeps FireFox OS in play for IoT, and more news

    In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at IBM’s flexible mainframes with Golang, Mozilla keeps FireFox OS in play for IoT, and other news.

SaaS/Big Data

• 16 Open Source Big Data Databases

• 5 Open Source Big Data File Systems and Programming Languages

• 5 Open Source Big Data Tools: Transfer and Aggregate

• 5 Open Source Big Data Analysis Platforms and Tools

• 7 Open Source Big Data Business Intelligence Tools

• 8 Open Source Big Data Mining Tools

• Hortonworks Launches Ambitious Partner Program

  Hortonworks, focused on Hadoop, has just announced Hortonworks Partnerworks, a global program to support and enable partners selling and implementing Hortonworks solutions. The company claims to have over 1,500 partners involved today, and the new partner program will give partners increased access to Hortonworks staffers and expertise.

  Partnerworks will officially launch in early February, but details on its structure are out now.

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.

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

• OpenSSH Clients Struck By New Security Vulnerability

• ‘Serious’ security flaw in OpenSSH puts private keys at risk

• OpenSSH Flaw Exposes Linux Servers to Roaming Risk

• OpenSSH 7.1p2 fixes two flaws, one that leaks crypto keys

• OpenSSH Patches Flaw That Allowed Servers to Read the RAM of Connecting Clients

• OpenSSH update removes code that leaked private keys

• OpenSSH fixes client crypto key leak

• OpenSSH Patches Critical Flaw That Could Leak Private Crypto Keys

• Evil OpenSSH servers can steal your private login keys to other systems – patch now

• Bug that can leak crypto keys just fixed in widely used OpenSSH

• Friday’s security updates

• Server Hardening

  Server hardening. The very words conjure up images of tempering soft steel into an unbreakable blade, or taking soft clay and firing it in a kiln, producing a hardened vessel that will last many years. Indeed, server hardening is very much like that. Putting an unprotected server out on the Internet is like putting chum in the ocean water you are swimming in—it won’t be long and you’ll have a lot of excited sharks circling you, and the outcome is unlikely to be good. Everyone knows it, but sometimes under the pressure of deadlines, not to mention the inevitable push from the business interests to prioritize those things with more immediate visibility and that add to the bottom line, it can be difficult to keep up with even what threats you need to mitigate, much less the best techniques to use to do so. This is how corners get cut—corners that increase our risk of catastrophe.

• There are no secure smartphones.

• OpenSSH Flaw Could Leak Crypto Keys

• 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?

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

• The Intelligence Community Continues to Pretend Ignorance of Its Deliberate 702 Spying

  As I noted in an update to this post, over the last several months, the Brennan Center has led an effort among privacy organizations to get the Intelligence Community to provide the transparency over its Section 702 surveillance that it dodged under the USA Freedom Act.

• Your boss can read your personal emails. Here’s what you need to know

  Stop typing that jokey email immediately. Close your instant chat window. Don’t even think about logging into Facebook.

  Why? The European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that bosses have the right to spy on staff’s work emails and electronic messages.

• How You Can Help Make Tor Faster for $10 a Month

  Your computer’s IP addresses can be correlated to an online identity and even a physical location, typically accurate within a city block. In other words, any website you visit can know your physical location, even with every ad blocked and every social network logged out from. That is, unless you use Tor.

  Tor is an “onion routing” network that lets people browse the web with a high degree of anonymity by bouncing their web traffic across multiple servers, called Tor relays, in such a way that each link in the chain knows the previous and next link but never the whole chain.

• VICE News Investigation Finds Signs of Secret Phone Surveillance Across London

  A VICE News investigation has found evidence that sophisticated surveillance equipment that spies on people’s phones is being used across London, and uncovered a growing black market for the technology worldwide.

  Signs of IMSI catchers — also known as stingrays or cell-site simulators — were found at several locations in the British capital, including UK parliament, a peaceful anti-austerity protest, and the Ecuadorian embassy.

  A former senior surveillance insider also confirmed to VICE News that they have been used by UK police.

• Nothing to see here, move along: NSA praises itself for privacy, transparency

• NSA insists reformed data collection scheme meets privacy standards

• US agency says new phone spying program meets privacy safeguards

• NSA says its new phone surveillance program meets privacy standards

• NSA claims to meet privacy safeguards

  The National Security Agency is adequately protecting Americans’ civil liberties and privacy as it shifts to a new intelligence collection program, it claimed in a transparency report released on Friday.

  Two months after the NSA abandoned its controversial collection of phone records, the spy agency claimed to have satisfied eight separate principles to protect people’s privacy.

• NSA says it’s meeting privacy standards on phone surveillance

• USA Freedom: The Rubber Meets the Road

• NSA Drops First Transparency Report Under USA Freedom Act

• In US: Security agency says new phone spying program meets privacy safeguards

• US Agency Says New Phone Spying Program Meets Privacy Safeguards

• NSA Privacy Officer Rebecca Richards Explains What Connection Chaining Is!

  This approach seems to solve a problem the NSA appears to have been having since 2009, how to query entirely domestic records with identifiers that have been algorithmically determined to be used by the same person. Here, the NSA will be able to match connected selectors to an approved one, and then send all of them to providers to obtain entirely domestic records.

  But if I’m right in my reading of this, it leaves one hole in the privacy analysis of the this report.

  Richards measures USAF, as she has other programs, against the Fair Information Practice Principles, which include a measure of Data Quality and Integrity. But the report’s analysis of that in this program completely ignores how central NSA’s own data is in the process.

  [...]

  I absolutely assume NSA is confident in its analysis, but to just dismiss it as uninvolved when it precedes the provider query ignores the implementation architecture laid out in this report.

  In any case, I’m grateful we’ve got this report (I may have more to say on the minimization procedures, but they, like the report, are far clearer than the ones included in the old dragnet and for Section 702, perhaps because of the involvement of a Privacy Officer). I’m still thinking through the privacy implications of this. But really, this querying process should have been revealed from the start.

• Snooper’s charter: cafes and libraries face having to store Wi-Fi users’ data

  Theresa May gives first hint costs may far exceed £240m estimate as it emerges even small-scale providers could be targeted

• Jeb Bush: Put the NSA in charge of the civilian side of the Internet

• Bush calls for NSA to replace DHS in civilian cyber role

• GOP debaters nod to importance of cyber but offer nothing

• Do the Candidates Even Realize We Just Passed New Cybersurveillance Laws?

• Jeb Bush in favor of ordering tech firms to hand over encrypted data

• Jeb Bush says he would compel tech companies to hand over encrypted data if president

• Jeb Bush Proposes Putting NSA In Charge Of Civilian Data, Cybersecurity

• Jeb Bush supports putting NSA in charge of civilian data and cybersecurity

• Former NSA Boss Favors Encryption

  End-to-end encryption has gained an unexpected ally: former National Security Agency head General Michael Hayden.

• Shari Steele on online anonymity: Tor staff are ‘freedom fighters’

  At a secret location on New Year’s Eve 2015, a core team of Tor Project employees mingled with the Berlin cypherpunk underground. One person was missing: their new executive director, Shari Steele, who had been introduced publicly a few days earlier to much fanfare at the world’s oldest gathering of hackers: the annual Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg.

  Steele says it’s accurate to describe her as avoiding the spotlight. “That is the way I work, and how I will continue to work at Tor,” Steele told the Guardian. Former co-workers confirmed: she likes to work behind the scenes, and is extremely effective doing so.

  Steele comes to Tor after 15 years as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization she joined as a staff lawyer in 1992 shortly after it was founded. A trained lawyer, Steele advised, among other bodies, the US sentencing commission on suitable terms for computer security offences and the National Research Council on encryption policy.

• Bug displays Chrome user’s porn hours later on Apple computer

  From privacy protection and present buying to porn, incognito mode in Google’s Chrome is a popular way for the web browser’s more than a billion users to ensure that their surfing habits aren’t visible to other people with access to the device.

  Spare a thought, then, for Toronto student Evan Andersen, who was surprised to find his incognito browsing come back to haunt him.

  “When I launched Diablo III, I didn’t expect the pornography I had been looking at hours previously to be splashed on the screen. But that’s exactly what replaced the black loading screen,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this month.

• The NSA releases its first transparency report under the US Freedom Act

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

  • Yosemite Changing The Names Of Popular Park Landmarks Following The Most Ridiculous Trademark Dispute Ever

    Yosemite National Park is apparently changing the names of a bunch of famous sites and buildings in the park thanks to one of the most ridiculous trademark disputes you’ll ever hear about. Ever stayed at the famous historic Ahwahnee hotel? That’s not what it will be called next time you go. Camped in Curry Village? Not any more. All thanks to… trademark law.

• 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.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Is Everywhere. Now There’s A Plan to Make It for Everyone

Linux is everywhere these days. It runs our phones, the web servers that underpin everything from Facebook to Google, even our cars. That means there’s a bigger demand for people who know how to work with the operating system than ever before, and those jobs often pay good money.

The Airtop Is One Of The Coolest Linux-Friendly PCs Ever For Enthusiasts

Our friends at CompuLab have come out out with their most interesting design yet: the Airtop. CompuLab told be about the Airtop a few days ago and I’ve been very excited and can’t wait to try one out soon. They describe it as, “Airtop is a small and silent desktop with very high performance. The key word is silent. Not ‘with a specially designed fan that is very quiet’. Airtop has no fans at all, yet it can dissipate 200W – enough to cool a Xeon CPU and a professional (or gaming) graphics card. Airtop cools itself by generating airflow using no moving parts, just the waste heat from the CPU and the GPU.” Yes, a Xeon-powered system with a discrete graphics card and can be all cooled without any fans?!?

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 3.12.52 LTS Has Numerous IPv6 Improvements, Lots of Updated Drivers

  After being released for download at the end of last week, the long-term supported Linux 3.12.52 kernel has been officially announced by its maintainer, Jiri Slaby, on January 11, 2016.

• Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Vaishali Thakkar

  The Linux Foundation’s Training Scholarship Program has awarded 34 scholarships totaling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals during the past five years. In this series, we are featuring recent scholarship recipients with the hope of inspiring others.

  Vaishali Thakkar is a scholarship recipient in the Kernel Guru category. She lives in India and recently completed an Outreachy internship on project Coccinelle. The goal of her project was replacing out-of-date API uses and deprecated functions and macros in the Linux kernel with more modern equivalents. She began contributing to the Linux kernel almost a year ago, and her first contribution was running a Coccinelle semantic patch over staging directory files. She says the excitement of having that first patch accepted was amazing, and she hopes some day to have her dream job of “Linux Kernel Engineer.”

• Participate in the 2016 ODL User Survey

• Linux Update Improves Processor Support

  Linux 4.4 has dropped, and despite the usual humility of founder Linus Torvalds, its new features have won the kernel lots of accolades. “The changes since rc8 aren’t big,” wrote Torvalds in his release notes, “there’s about one third arch updates, one third drivers, and one third ‘misc’ (mainly some core kernel and networking), but it’s all small.” What the update does include, however, is some new support for processors like Intel’s new Skylake family, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820, and a handful of improved graphics processor support. The update also includes a beta driver to improve graphics support for Raspberry Pi.

• AMD Seattle Support In The Linux Kernel Still Getting Squared Away

  As expected, AMD today finally released the Opteron A1100 “Seattle” SoC but sadly the 96Boards HuskyBoard or other lower-cost A1100-powered products have yet to be announced.

• F2FS & XFS File-Systems Updated For Linux 4.5

  The F2FS file-system pull request is quite exciting while the XFS churn for the Linux 4.5 merge window isn’t as meaty.

  With the XFS file-system updates for Linux 4.5 there is now better CRC validation during log recovery, log recovery fixes, DAX support fixes, an AGFL size calculation fix, code cleanups, project quota ENOSPC notification via netlink, and tracing/debug improvements. Details on the XFS changes for Linux 4.5 can be found via this pull request.

• Reiser4 & ZFS Get Updated For The Linux 4.4 Kernel

  For those relying upon the out-of-tree ZFS or Reiser4 file-systems, they have each been updated now to work with this week’s release of the Linux 4.4 kernel.

  Last weekend ZFS On Linux 0.6.5.4 was released. ZOL v0.6.5.4 brought support for the Linux 4.4 kernel while continuing to support older kernel versions going all the way back to Linux 2.6.32. This ZFS On Linux update also brought a number of stability fixes, better support/stability for NFS-exported snapshots, and a variety of other fixes.

• Graphics Stack

  • Nvidia Releases New Beta Driver for Linux with Support for New GPUs

    Nvidia has released a new update for the Linux drivers, but it’s a small upgrade that only brings support for a couple of new GPUs.

  • NVIDIA 361.18 Beta Linux Driver Released

  • GeForce Experience Beta Updated, Supports Windowed Mode, Desktop Recording, Adds MIC controls

  • GeForce Experience Beta Adds New Streaming Features

  • Nvidia GeForce Experience Beta adds new capture, mic features

  • Mesa 11.1.1 available, has patches for GRID Autosport

    Good news open source GPU driver users, Mesa 11.1.1 has launched and it even includes some patches for GRID Autosport.

    If you use Mesa and play GRID Autosport, please let us know how it runs for you now.

  • Mesa 11.1.1 3D Graphics Library Released with GRID Autosport Patches, 50 Bugfixes

    Emil Velikov of Collabora has has announced earlier today, January 13, the general availability of the first maintenance release for the 11.1 stable series of the open-source Mesa 3D Graphics Library.

  • Some Video Acceleration Improvements Land In Gallium3D

    Christian König of AMD’s open-source driver team landed some improvements this week into Gallium3D’s video acceleration state tracker.

    For those using Gallium3D video acceleration via the VA-API or VDPAU acceleration APIs with the RadeonSI/R600g or NVC0, there are some state tracker additions and to the Gallium3D VL code to report on: BOB deinterlacing, NV12 post-processing, the code is now thread-safe to avoid potential crashes with MPV, improvements to the motion adaptive deinterlacer, and other improvements/fixes.

  • Wayland 1.10 Planned For Release Just After Valentine’s Day

    Bryce is planning for the 1.10 Alpha in one week on 19 January, the 1.10 Beta on 2 February, the first Wayland 1.10 release candidate on 9 February, and for the official Wayland / Weston 1.10 release on 16 February. The Wayland 1.10 feature freeze would be next week.

  • The OpenGL Speed & Perf-Per-Watt From The Radeon HD 2000/3000 Series Through The R9 Fury

Applications

• Scribus 1.4.6 Powerful Desktop Publishing Software Finally Supports SVG Blend Modes

  On January 13, 2016, the development team of the Scribus open source, free and cross-platform desktop publishing software was happy to announce the release of Scribus 1.4.6 for all supported operating systems.

• PacketFence v5.6 released

  The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.6.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.

• Proprietary

  • First Opera Web Browser Developer Update for 2016 Brings Some Nice Surprises

    Opera Software, through Aneta Reluga, has announced today, January 13, 2016, the availability of the first development build of the upcoming Opera 36.0 web browser in 2016.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Automatic Calendar Management — Notmuch + Calypso

  • Controlling Interactive Terminal Programs

  • How to Upgrade ownCloud: Don’t Skip Releases!

  • Learn to enjoy offline editing with Kdenlive

  • How to install Koel on Ubuntu 14.04

• Wine or Emulation

  • CrossOver 15.0.1 Ships with the Final Release of Wine 1.8, Adds CentOS 6.7 Support

    Just a few minutes ago, January 13, 2016, the CodeWeavers company announced the release of the first maintenance build for the CrossOver 15.0 series, proprietary software that lets Linux and Mac users run Windows software and games.

  • Codeweavers CrossOver 15.0.1 is now available

    For you Wine lovers who also support Codeweavers and Wine development, a new version 15.0.1 is now available.

    The major change is that this release brings in the actual final Wine 1.8 release.

• Games

  • OUYA is blocking a Linux version of That Dragon, Cancer being on Steam

    They do say they should be able to do it eventually, and they should be able to get a DRM free Linux build on their website. One of our editors ‘flesk’ also got clarification that they should have a Linux build up on some DRM free stores too like GOG, Humble Store and possibly Itch.

    We shouldn’t go with pitchforks to OUYA, as the developers are as much to blame for either not reading their agreement properly, or simply not caring enough to argue their case.

    Either way, I’m personally quite annoyed by Linux gamers getting treated like this. With no word before release that this was happening, I think the developers need to learn to communicate a lot better. I personally messaged them to no reply, but I imagine they have been pretty busy to message everyone back. Still, an official note to backers would have been the right thing to do, not make people wait.

  • Medieval II: Total War Collection released for Linux & SteamOS

    The good thing is that this game is no way near as complicated as some of the others, and that keeps my simpleton brain very happy. The tutorial is quite short and to the point, and sets you up nice and easy for the battles to come.

  • Valve Releases Full Steam Link SDK and Reveals the Hardware Powering It

    Valve has just launched the complete Steam Link SDK, making way for developers and the community to build native apps for this piece of hardware.

    The idea behind the Steam Link is a really good one. Users can connect their gaming machines to the TV, via the network. This means that you don’t need a new and shiny Steam Machine if you already have a powerful computer at home. Valve wants to dominate the living room, but it doesn’t care how it’s going to achieve that.

  • Valve Puts Out The Steam Link SDK With OpenGL ES, Qt & SDL Support

    Valve has finally released the SDK for their Steam Link device that began shipping late last year for playing Steam games on any TV in a house as long as there is a computer running Steam on your network.

    Valve’s release of the Steam Links SDK has support for the OpenGL ES 2.0, Qt 5.4, and SDL 2.0 APIs. Apps can be loaded onto the Steam Link via copying them to a USB drive in a steamlink/apps folder and then power cycling the hardware. Valve also revealed there is SSH support for the Steam Link if wishing to debug any apps on the device.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Kdenlive 15.12.1 released

    The latest release of Kdenlive brings many bugfixes to the 15.12.0 version. More than 20 issues were fixed and we encourage all users to upgrade. You can find more details about the fixed issues in our information page.

  • OpenDesktop.org Acquired By KDE-Loving Blue Systems

  • OwnCloud founder sells openDesktop.org

    As those in the Linux and open source communities know well, long before Apple’s App Store appeared on the scene, openDesktop.org offered applications, tools, wallpapers, sounds, icons, themes and other artwork and stuff for the Linux desktop.

    openDesktop.org was started ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek, and yesterday I learned that he has sold the network of sites. I interviewed Frank over Google Hangouts about the sale of openDesktop.org; following is an edited version of that interview.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core piCore 7.0 Raspberry Pi Edition Now Ships with Linux Kernel 4.1.13 LTS

    The Tiny Core developers were happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core piCore 7.0 operating system, a special edition of Tiny Core Linux designed for Raspberry Pi single-board computers.

  • TinyCore piCore 7.0 Available To Download With Most Interesting Changes Ever

• Ballnux/SUSE

  • Call for papers for openSUSE Conference starts tomorrow

    openSUSE is pleased to announce a call for papers for the openSUSE Conference 2016 (oSC16) taking place in Nuremberg, Germany.

• Slackware Family

  • PulseAudio comes to Slackware-current Beta

    Yup folks, thanks to the new bluetooth stack in slackware-current (brought to you by BlueZ 5.x) we have introduced a dependency on PulseAudio. Bluetooth audio no longer accepts ALSA as the output driver.

• Red Hat Family

  • Oversold Conditions For Red Hat (RHT)

    Legendary investor Warren Buffett advises to be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. One way we can try to measure the level of fear in a given stock is through a technical analysis indicator called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI, which measures momentum on a scale of zero to 100. A stock is considered to be oversold if the RSI reading falls below 30.

    In trading on Thursday, shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) entered into oversold territory, hitting an RSI reading of 28.8, after changing hands as low as $74.48 per share. By comparison, the current RSI reading of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is 32.4. A bullish investor could look at RHT’s 28.8 RSI reading today as a sign that the recent heavy selling is in the process of exhausting itself, and begin to look for entry point opportunities on the buy side.

  • Recent Investment Analysts’ Ratings Changes for Red Hat (RHT)

  • Red Hat ships Ansible 2.0 to boost support for hybrid cloud deployments with new automation capabilities

  • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Stock Rating Reaffirmed by SunTrust

    Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating reaffirmed by stock analysts at SunTrust in a report released on Monday, AnalystRatingsNetwork.com reports. They currently have a $73.00 price objective on the open-source software company’s stock. SunTrust’s price target would suggest a potential downside of 4.70% from the stock’s current price.

  • 74pc firms ‘use KPIs to measure mobile app success’

    Leading provider of open source solutions Red Hat’s mobile maturity survey, said that 85 per cent of organisations are using KPIs to measure mobile app success, while nine per cent use other means and the remainder are not measuring mobile success at all.

  • Stock in Momentum: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

  • HPC research cluster get Red Hat OpenStack private cloud

    Petabyte-scale eMedLab consortium opts for private cloud on Red Hat Linux OpenStack with hybrid Cinder and IBM Spectrum Scale storage, and rejects object and cloud storage

  • Montrusco Bolton Investments Buys $8,180,000 in Red Hat Inc (RHT) Shares

  • Fedora

    • Brian Proffitt: How do you Fedora?

      Brian has been involved with Linux for a long time. In the summer of 1999, he was asked to write a book about Sun StarOffice 5.1 for Linux. This was a challenge for Brian as he had never run Linux before. “I got a hold of a Caldera OpenLinux CD set and installed it on a friend’s spare PC.” He was hooked on Linux when he was able to play an in-memory game of Tetris while the operating system was being installed.

    • Future Fedora upgrades

      Most users are interested in Fedora upgrades. Each release brings improvements, and frequent releases are a hallmark of open source software. Releases of Fedora happen twice a year, and many users take advantage of improvements by upgrading to each new release. There are several methods to do this in Fedora, as outlined on the project wiki.

• Debian Family

  • Ian Murdock In His Own Words: What Made Debian Such A Community Project

    As you may have heard, there was some tragic news a few weeks back, when the founder of Debian Linux, Ian Murdock, passed away under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Without more details, we didn’t have much to report on concerning his passing, but Gabriella Coleman put together this wonderful look at how Murdock shaped the Debian community, and why it became such a strong and lasting group and product.

  • Reproducible builds: week 37 in Stretch cycle

    David Bremner uploaded dh-elpa/0.0.18 which adds a –fix-autoload-date option (on by default) to take autoload dates from changelog.

    Lunar updated and sent the patch adding the generation of .buildinfo to dpkg.

  • Working as a paid LTS contributor

    Even though Freexian is located in France and requires you to provide invoice in EUR, there are no conditions on your nationality or country of residence. For contributors outside of the Euro zone, Freexian is using Transferwise to pay them with minimal currency conversion costs (Paypal is also possible if nothing else works).

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Mozilla Thunderbird 38.5.1 Just Landed in Ubuntu with a Ton of Security Updates

        Details about quite a few Thunderbird vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems were revealed today by Canonical.

      • AT&T chooses Canonical

        Manx-based Canonical software says it’s signed a contract with an American telecoms giant to power its network using its Unbuntu Linux distro.

      • AT&T Embraces Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux

      • AT&T chooses Ubuntu Linux instead of Microsoft Windows

        While Linux’s share of the desktop pie is still virtually nonexistent, it owns two arguably more important markets — servers and smartphones. As PC sales decline dramatically, Android phones are continually a runaway market share leader. In other words, fewer people are buying Windows computers — and likely spending less time using them — while everyone and their mother are glued to their phones. And those phones are most likely powered by the Linux kernel.

        Speaking of smartphones, one of the largest cellular providers is the venerable AT&T. While it sells many Linux-powered Android devices, it is now embracing the open source kernel in a new way. You see, the company has partnered with Canonical to utilize Ubuntu for cloud, network, and enterprise applications. That’s right, AT&T did not choose Microsoft’s Windows when exploring options. Canonical will provide continued engineering support too.

      • Canonical to Ship Vagrant Cloud Images with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)

        Today, January 13, 2016, Ben Howard of Canonical’s Cloud Image team has been proud to announce that, starting with the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) release, they will provide Vagrant cloud images as well.

      • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Now Based on Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

      • Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) to Reach End of Life on February 4, 2016

        Just a few moments ago, January 14, 2016, Softpedia received an email from Canonical’s Adam Conrad, informing us that the Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) operating system would reach end of life in approximately three weeks from today, on February 4, 2016.

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Has Just Received a New Unity 8 Interface, Exciting Updates

        In the first minutes of January 14, 2016, Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical sent in his daily report to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-9 software update, due for release on January 27.

      • Ubuntu’s New Feather, MEPIS Extinct, Fedora N-1 Upgrades

        The top story in today’s Linux news must be Canonical’s announcement of a big AT&T contract. One headline said AT&T chose Ubuntu over Windows. Elsewhere, blogger Megatotoro today remembered MEPIS and Adam Williamson discussed Fedora’s upgrade process. Hackaday.com’s Brian Benchoff said Stallman messed up in the open hardware department and KDE-look.org and friends have a new owner.

      • Powerful Ubuntu Tablet Is Going on Sale, from MJ Technology

        A new Ubuntu-powered tablet from MJ Technology is going to be available for preorder really soon, and a new crowdfunding campaign will be started.

      • UbuCon Summit in California to Cover Convergence, Gaming, IoT, and Everything Else

        The UbuCon Summit is getting closer, and it will take place on January 21-22, 2016. Here is what’s going to happen on those two days.

      • AT&T selects Ubuntu for cloud and enterprise applications

      • Flavours and Variants

        • After-dinner Mint? Stylish desktop finale released as last of the 17 line

          Linux Mint 17.3, recently released, will be the last release of the Mint 17 line.

          It is the culmination of work that began two years ago, and the final edition of Mint based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS .

          With the stability of an Ubuntu LTS release as the base system, Linux Mint has had eighteen months of development time to focus on the things that make Mint, Mint.

Devices/Embedded

• CES 2016: Much ado about bots and drones

  CES 2016 reflected the hottest recent trends in gizmos and gadgetry: winged and wheeled drones and bots, with most running some form of embedded Linux.

  At last week’s CES show in Las Vegas, some of the most intriguing new gadgets were flying about within mesh fabric cages, crawling around robot pens, or ready to roll off their pedestals to cruise the Strip. And a growing number of these frenzied fiends run Linux.

• Compact, rugged PC packs Xeon heat, keeps cool fanlessly

  Compulab’s compact, rugged “Airtop” PC uses 5th Gen Xeon and Core CPUs, supports four simultaneous displays, has dual GbE ports, and accepts PCIe GPU cards.

  Yokneam, Israel-based CompuLab is well known for its rugged Linux-friendly computer-on-modules (COMs) and single-board computers (SBCs), as well as for several lines of rugged, fanless Intel and AMD based mini-PCs, including its Fitlet-PC, Fit-PC, Intense PC, and uSVR systems, plus a Mint Box created in collaboration with the Linux Mint project. Now, the company has added a higher-end, 7.5 liter, fanless PC called “Airtop,” aimed at workers, gamers, and servers, and based on Intel’s 5th Gen Xeon and Core processors of the Broadwell variety, running at turbo clock rates up to 3.8GHz.

• Zulu embedded inside the Internet of Things

  Java runtime solutions company Azul Systems has announced that Zulu Embedded is now available to download on the Wind River Marketplace.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Samsung to Launch Tizen Z3 in Russia and Other European Countries Early 2016

      According to a Digital Times Korean report, Samsung Electronics is still planning on expanding on the number of countries that the Samsung Z3 Tizen Smartphone will be offered in. We have previously reported on the Z3 being available in Russia for the business to business corporate and government customers, due to it attaining the Security Certification for Russian Government and Corporate use.

  • Android

    • Android Auto coming to 40 car models this year

      Google is positive about the road ahead for Android Auto, saying it will come to 40 car models and support more apps this year.

      Android Auto brings messaging, mapping, entertainment, media playback and other apps to cars, but via a smartphone. The apps run on an Android smartphone, which plugs into an in-car display via a USB port.

    • 5 ways IT leaders should prep for the mobile future

      As we move into the digital future, we’re experiencing a significant shift in what employees and customers expect from their mobile interactions. These days they expect a highly-engaging experience that’s immediate and always available. They want a responsive and attractive interface. And they want their mobile experience to be integrated into their work lives smoothly.

    • Smartphones Aren’t PC’s Only Nemesis

      There are lessons here for companies like Apple, Samsung and Google that have made hay from the smartphone boom. PCs were a great business until the world changed and once-successful companies had to scramble for new money-making ideas. Already some people are urging Apple to shift its business model to sell a collection of software, hardware and services, rather than trying to sell more and more iPhones every year. That is exactly what Microsoft is trying to do now with its Windows franchise. Let the present struggles in PCs be a guide to today’s tech winners: No empire is invincible forever, and new business models are inevitable.

    • Expect to See Large Companies Ramp Up Investment in Mobile Development for 2016

      Red Hat recently concluded a mobile development measurement survey which polled the views of IT decision makers from 200 private sector companies with at least 2,500 employees across the U.S. and Western Europe. The survey was completed in October 2015, and was carried out online.

    • Android N: Split screen, merged Chrome OS, RCS adoption and other expected features from Android 7.0

      Even as users remain excited about receiving the latest Android 6 Marshmallow updates on their smartphones and tablets, Google is gearing up for the launch of Android 7.0 or Android N version expected in the latter half of the year. With Google announcing the dates for the Google I/O address — from 18 to 20 May — it is one step closer to the latest Android OS as I/O is normally where the first look or the developer’s version is showcased. The full version will only be launched somewhere around September or October.

    • 5 Big Updates We Want From Android in 2016

      CEO Sundar Pichai took to Twitter this week to announce that Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, will be taking place in Mountain View on May 18-20. The only thing we know for certain is that we’ll get our first look at Android N, the mobile operating system’s next big update.

      Sure, part of the fun of I/O is hearing about all those far flung ideas, but before we get into autonomous cars, drone delivery, and other moonshots, here’s a modest, here-and-now wishlist for Android in 2016.

    • Add a to-do list to your notification shade on Android

    • Shopify brings its point-of-sale system to Android devices

    • Android Malware Hacks One-Time Codes

    • Android banking malware SlemBunk is part of a well-organized campaign

    • 2015 was the Year of the Linux Phone … Nah, we’re messing with you

      For the desktop Linux user, 2015 was a great year. There were major updates for nearly every single desktop available, launches of brand new desktops, even an impressive new distro that’s forging its own path.

      Popular software packages also saw impressive updates – like GIMP, Inkscape and LibreOffice to name just a few – and new applications continue to emerge seemingly everyday.

    • How to Put Android On Your Desktop with Remix OS

      Remix OS, which came out yesterday, is a killer Android variant that brings a slick desktop-style interface to Android. Now, you can install it on a USB stick and try it out on your computer.

      Android isn’t exactly built for a keyboard and mouse, but that hasn’t stopped some of us from trying. RemixOS, from developer Jide, wants to change that by adding a desktop, windowed apps, and more to Android. Here’s how to try out the very experimental alpha.

    • ZeroTurnaround Announces JRebel for Android 1.0

      ZeroTurnaround has announced the first stable release of JRebel for Android, the Android version of their popular plugin to modify running applications without having to redeploy or restart. JRebel for Android is available for Android Studio from the JetBrains plugin repository, and supports all phones and tablets running Android 4.0 or later. ZeroTurnaround offers a 21-day free trial, with prices beginning at $49/year.

    • Android launcher update adds auto-rotate, forces icon size consistency

      An update to the Google Now Launcher has brought some nifty new features to Android’s home screen. Google is reining in unruly app icons to make everything a consistent size and adding auto rotate support to the launcher.

      Google’s icon design guidelines give developers the tools to create a consistently sized icon in many different shapes. Many developers totally ignore the guidelines in favor of just creating the biggest icon possible, which often leaves Android’s app drawer and home screen an inconsistent mess. The recent launcher update fixes this problem by ignoring the app developer’s wishes and normalizing all the icon sizes—big icons get shrunken down.

    • Living with the Pixel C: The best and worst of Android in one device

    • The only small-screened Android phone worth buying is coming to the US

      If you long for the days of 2011, when 5.3-inch smartphones were enormous outliers rather than the norm, Sony has some news that may interest you: its flagship Xperia Z5 smartphone and its smaller-but-still-high-end sibling the Xperia Z5 Compact are coming to the US on February 7, 2016.

      As usual, Sony’s small footprint in the US smartphone market means that it doesn’t have any distribution deals with major carriers. You won’t be able to buy these phones on an installment plan from AT&T or T-Mobile—you’ll have to get them at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, or another retailer, and you’ll pay the full unlocked price of $599.99 for the Z5 or $499.99 for the Z5 Compact. Both phones support GSM networks, so Verizon and Sprint customers need not apply.

3 open source tools for supply chain management

Keeping track of physical items, suppliers, customers, and all of the many moving parts associated with each can greatly benefit from, and in some cases be totally dependent on specialized software to help you manage these workflows. In this article, we’ll take a look at some free and open source software options for supply chain management, and some of the features of each.

Zimbra Collaboration Suite (Open Source Edition) review

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is a Linux-based groupware system designed to provide your staff with unified email, calendar, contacts and basic file-sharing. Both commercial and open source versions are available. We’ve looked at the open source version as a cost-effective alternative to commercial server-based products such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems such as Google Apps for Work.

Events

• How conference organizers can create better attendee experiences

  At SCaLE 14x, we will give a talk focused on helping speakers provide a more positive experience for their audiences. But there are many different facets of conference organizing that could use improvements, each facet with its own audience. In this article, I will focus on just one of those: How conference organizers can make the event more positive for the attendees.

• FOSSASIA 2016

• DevConf 2016 schedule is out!

  First is Jen Krieger talking about DevOps engineer. This one will hopefully open eyes of those engineers who haven’t realized that the world of individuals hacking on their cool tool is not how to get work done on evolving projects where communication and open collaboration is a key to success.

• 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference Call for Microconferences

  The 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) has announced its Call for Microconferences. LPC will be held in Santa Fe, NM, USA on November 2-4, co-located with the Kernel Summit. “A microconference is a collection of collaborative sessions focused on problems in a particular area of the Linux plumbing, which includes the kernel, libraries, utilities, UI, and so forth, but can also focus on cross-cutting concerns such as security, scaling, energy efficiency, or a particular use case. Good microconferences result in solutions to these problems and concerns, while the best microconferences result in patches that implement those solutions.”

Web Browsers

• The best web browser to replace obsolete Internet Explorer is…

  On January 12, 2016, the support clock ran out for Internet Explorer (IE) 8, 9 and 10. True, there are a few exceptions, IE 9 on Vista and Windows Server 2008, and IE 10 on Windows Server 2012 still live. But for most Windows users the time has come to to switch to a new browser.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Thunderbird 38.5.1 Just Landed in Ubuntu with a Ton of Security Updates

    Details about quite a few Thunderbird vulnerabilities in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems were revealed today by Canonical.

  • Mozilla Discontinues Persona Password Security Service

    Two years after giving it up to be a community project, Mozilla is now shutting its Persona Web authentication operations down entirely, due to low adoption.

SaaS/Big Data

• Citrix Eschews Cloud Server Business, But CloudStack is Just Fine

Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

• WSO2 and Marlabs Partner to Deliver Open Source Middleware Solutions

• How Becoming Open Source Fuels Swift’s Ascendancy

  Designed as Apple’s replacement to Objective-C, Swift’s adoption has grown rapidly since its introduction in June 2014. Apple’s Swift programming language began as an exclusive to Apple platforms but was open sourced in December 2015, bringing with it support for Linux-based environments. This opening of the language has accelerated its rise and attracted new contributors to the language’s development.

Funding

• Why We Need FOSS Force

  FOSS Force is run by Christine Hall, a long-time journalist whose experience is not mainly in tech — or FOSS. Her lack of IT reporting experience in general is not as important, in the journalastic context, as a lack of FOSS reporting experience; Christine started using Linux in 2002 but didn’t start FOSS Force until 2010.

BSD

• BSD Is Ready for SCALE 14X

  First things first: Were I to give an award for Best Presentation Title for SCALE 14X, it would clearly go to iX Systems’ Community Manager (and all-around BSD documentation queen) Dru Lavigne for “Doc Like an Egyptian” — she wins hands down, without question. Dru speaks at SCALE on Saturday, Jan. 23, at 3 p.m.

• openbsd laptops

  OpenBSD 5.9 won’t be out for a little while, but it may be helpful to plan ahead, especially since there’s been some considerable progress on hardware support. Here are some notes about what works in general and a few particular models.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• AMD HSA Support Finally Appears Ready To Be Merged In GCC

  For months we have been covering the HSA patches for GCC and their hopes of getting the code merged for GCC 6. Feature development on GCC 6 is over, but there still is the possibility of release exceptions and this HSA support would be new functionality that can be optionally enabled.

• Denemo Release 2.0.2 is imminent

• From TPP to saving WiFi, the FSF fights for you

  Free software is built by a community of hackers and activists who care about freedom. But forces outside that community affect the work done within in it, for good or ill. While we at the FSF regularly deal with GNU General Public License (GPL) violators (who we always hope are just community members waiting for a proper introduction) , there is another force that can have a substantial effect on user freedom: governmental policy.

  Laws, regulations, and government actions can have a lasting impact on users. The GNU GPL is based in copyright but uses its power in a “copyleft” way to actually protect users from the negative impacts of copyright, patents, and proprietary license agreements. While we can sometimes turn a law on its head to make it work for users like this, other times we are forced to push back in order to guarantee their rights. In order to achieve our global mission of promoting computer user freedom and defending the rights of software users everywhere, we must often take action to petition and protest governing bodies and their regulations. For the Licensing and Compliance Lab this is particularly relevant to our work, as these rules can affect how the licenses published by the FSF protect users. 2015 was a year filled with such actions, and 2016 will see much of the same. While our work this past year often involved issues with the U.S. government, the scope of our work is global. As our worldwide actions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other international agreements demonstrate, bad laws in the U.S. have a tendency to spread around the globe. We work to educate the U.S public about problematic laws and regulations here, and we also work with supporters and partner organizations in countries around the world to achieve the same goals in their countries.

  We want to take a moment to look back on the work we’ve done on the licensing team pushing for policies that protect users, and fighting to stop laws and regulations that would harm them.

Licensing

• Palamida Named Sponsor at Knowledge Congress’ Event “Open Source Software: Mitigating the Legal and Security Risks Live Webcast,” on 2/23/2016

Openness/Sharing

• Economic Commons Sense

  Supply and demand. These two are always coupled in economics, the yin and yang of capitalism. Too much of one without enough of another disrupts industry. Every industry in the world is currently either on the brink of or in the midst of disruption. Why? Supply. Lots of supply. ‘Mountains’ of food being artificially held back and destroyed, plenty of clean, renewable energy giving oil firms a rush to sell off their reserves before the price of oil hits zero, and information that is in infinite supply as soon as it is created. Let me say that again:

• Open Access/Content

  • Alternative education can help close IT skills gap

    Though a four-year college degree is still the gold standard, it won’t necessarily guarantee success, especially in the IT industry, where new technologies and, thus, new skillsets, are needed to help drive innovation and growth. MOOCs, bootcamps, nanodegrees and other alternative education options are critical both for IT workers and IT companies, both of whom need to quickly and cost-effectively add new technology skillsets.

  • New York Public Library Releases 180,000 Free Images

    The New York Public Library (NYPL) has released 180,000 copyright-free images into the public domain.

    The high-resolution collections were uploaded to the NYPL website on January 6 and can be viewed, downloaded and shared for free.

The Dark Side of David Bowie

I believe Mattix when she says the sex with her rock star partners was consensual on her behalf, and I also believe David Bowie and the others committed acts that are exploitative, and illegal for good reason. Age 15 is young, no matter what, and they were the adults with all the power in this dynamic, and that is not what healthy, normal sexual relationships for teenagers look like. I also believe it’s important to say this is different from the horrific decades worth of rape allegations brought forth against Bill Cosby, and different from Roman Polanski’s rape of a drugged girl. It is not the same as the lawsuits against R. Kelly over his alleged sexual abuse of young girls, though the conditions that made all of these stories possible stem from the same terrible old root: powerful men, young women, and a whole lot of people who looked the other way — or in the case of these teen groupies, even romanticized the tales. Say, wasn’t “Almost Famous” great?

Downtown Boys: “America’s Most Exciting Punk Band” Performs & Discusses Making Change Through Music

Dubbed “America’s most exciting punk band” by Rolling Stone, Downtown Boys is a self-described “bilingual political dance sax punk party” from Providence, Rhode Island. They are known for their electric, politically charged performances. Downtown Boys joins us to perform four songs and discuss the political message behind tracks like “Wave of History.” The music video for that song takes viewers through history, from the theft of Native American land, to slavery and police brutality today.

How India Post And Customs Office Cheated fossBytes

After the packages are handed over to Indian custom offices, things are left in God’s hands. Researching more, I found that staff at the Indian customs offices opens the packages arbitrarily to ‘verify’ the contents. Due the same issues related to customs and security, we have refused to accept multiple products for reviews in the past.

Humour

• New North Korean Weapon Unleashed: Bad Video Editing

  We’ve had some fun with our North Korean friends around these parts in the past, mostly revolving around the Pyongyang regime’s adorable attempts to bolster its already nefarious reputation through its propaganda efforts. While the nation’s Orwellian policies are both stark and serious, and it certainly does have troubling weapons in its arsenal, so many of its threats have amounted to bad propaganda devised through the liberal use of video game footage, music and bad attempts at Photoshop. Well, the arms race doesn’t end, of course, which is why North Korea is pleased to display its latest weapon: bad attempts at video editing!

Hardware

• Seagate Launches Its First 10TB Helium-Filled Hard Drive

  The new HDD uses advanced caching algorithms to help cloud data centers manage the increasing volume of data more quickly.
  Seagate on Jan. 13 unveiled its highest-ever capacity enterprise hard drive, a 10TB helium-filled model that competes directly with similar drives manufactured by HGST and Samsung.

Health/Nutrition

• Howard Dean, Now Employed by Health Care Lobby Firm, Opposes Bernie Sanders on Single-Payer

  Dean, a longtime supporter of single-payer, seemed to be changing his tune, a point made by host Chris Hayes during the segment.

  This evolution of Dean, known within many circles for his spirited critique of the Iraq War during the 2004 Democratic primary, comes as he has settled into a corporate lobbying career.

  Dean, though he rarely discloses the title during his media appearances, now serves as senior advisor to the law firm Dentons, where he works with the firm’s Public Policy and Regulation practice, a euphemism for Dentons’ lobbying team. Dean is not a lawyer, but neither is Newt Gingrich, who is among the growing list of former government officials and politicians that work in the Public Policy and Regulation practice of Dentons.

  The Dentons Public Policy and Regulation practice lobbies on behalf of a variety of corporate health care interests, including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a powerful trade group for drugmakers like Pfizer and Merck.

• ‘Denmark is no longer the country I loved’

  There are 800,000 employees in the public sector. The same number of people live off of the system. There are 1.2 million retirees. But there are only 1.6 million people in the private sector to pay for it all.

  Public job activation programmes cost somewhere between 15 and 30 billion kroner a year, but create no jobs.

  Doctors and nurses use up to half of their time recording and reporting information – that hardly gets used. In return, there are waiting lists for treatment and patients sleeping in the hallways.

  The City of Copenhagen has a communications staff of several hundred, while there are waiting lists for daycare institutions and a shortage of teachers.

• EPA stayed silent on Flint’s tainted water

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s top Midwest official said her department knew as early as April about the lack of corrosion controls in Flint’s water supply — a situation that likely put residents at risk for lead contamination — but said her hands were tied in bringing the information to the public.

  Starting with inquiries made in February, the federal agency battled Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality behind the scenes for at least six months over whether Flint needed to use chemical treatments to keep lead lines and plumbing connections from leaching into drinking water. The EPA did not publicize its concern that Flint residents’ health was jeopardized by the state’s insistence that such controls were not required by law.

• IAAF: Lord Coe backed despite damning report of athletics body

  Lord Coe is the right man to lead the crisis-hit IAAF according to the author of a report that claims “corruption was embedded” within the organisation.

  Coe, 59, became boss of the body that governs world athletics last August after eight years as a vice-president.

• Lord Coe under intense pressure at IAAF after damning WADA doping report

  Lord Coe is facing renewed pressure on his position as IAAF president after a new report ruled that the IAAF Council and his right-hand man Nick Davies must have been aware of the scale of doping in athletics.

  The second report compiled by an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency into the Russian doping scandal said the IAAF Council – which included Coe at the time – “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics”.

  It adds that Davies, who stepped aside from his position as IAAF chief of staff last month, was “well aware of Russian ‘skeletons’ in the cupboard”.

• EPA Survey Shows $271 Billion Needed for Nation’s Wastewater Infrastructure

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today released a survey showing that $271 billion is needed to maintain and improve the nation’s wastewater infrastructure, including the pipes that carry wastewater to treatment plants, the technology that treats the water, and methods for managing stormwater runoff.

  The survey is a collaboration between EPA, states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other U.S. territories. To be included in the survey, projects must include a description and location of a water quality-related public health problem, a site-specific solution, and detailed information on project cost.

Security

• Security advisories for Thursday

• Important SSH patch coming soon

  Subject: Important SSH patch coming soon
  Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2016 07:05:36 -0700
  To: misc@openbsd.org, tech@openbsd.org

  Important SSH patch coming soon. For now, every on all operating systems, please do the following:

  Add undocumented “UseRoaming no” to ssh_config or use “-oUseRoaming=no” to prevent upcoming #openssh client bug CVE-2016-0777. More later.

• De Raadt: Important SSH patch coming soon

• OpenSSH: client bug CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778

• Pretty Nasty DHCP Vulnerabilty Closed in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

  Canonical has published details about a DHCP vulnerability that has been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04.

• Trend Micro: Internet scum grab Let’s Encrypt certs to shield malware

  It was inevitable. Trend Micro says it has spotted crooks abusing the free Let’s Encrypt certificate system to smuggle malware onto computers.

  The security biz’s fraud bod Joseph Chen noticed the caper on December 21. Folks in Japan visited a website that served up malware over encrypted HTTPS using a Let’s Encrypt-issued cert. The site used the Angler Exploit Kit to infect their machines with the software nasty, which is designed to raid their online bank accounts.

• GM Asks Friendly Hackers to Report Its Cars’ Security Flaws

  As automotive cybersecurity has become an increasingly heated concern, security researchers and auto giants have been locked in an uneasy standoff. Now one Detroit mega-carmaker has taken a first baby step toward cooperating with friendly car hackers, asking for their help in identifying and fixing its vehicles’ security bugs.

• The Mysterious Case of CVE-2016-0034: the hunt for a Microsoft Silverlight 0-day [Ed: back door?]

  Perhaps one of the most explosively discussed subjects of 2015 was the compromise and data dump of Hacking Team, the infamous Italian spyware company.

  For those who are not familiar with the subject, Hacking Team was founded in 2003 and specialized in selling spyware and surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies. On July 5, 2015, a large amount of data from the company was leaked to the Internet with a hacker known as “Phineas Fisher” claiming responsibility for the breach. Previously, “Phineas Fisher” did a similar attack against Gamma International, another company in the spyware/surveillance business.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Hillary Clinton: A Proven Warmonger

• Russia Is Preparing a Military Response to the Expansion of NATO

  In response to the creation of the mobile forces of NATO, Russia can dispatch heavy military equipment in a Western direction.

  The beginning of 2016 marked a new escalation in military tensions near the borders of Russia. Yesterday in Lithuania, as part of operation “Atlantic Resolve”, alongside the standard armaments, the main part of the American battalion of NATO troops from the 2nd cavalry regiment of the US army, stationed in Germany, arrived. The Northern Atlantic Alliance does not hide the fact that the military presence in the Baltic states will grow.

• Financial collapse leads to war

  The strenuous efforts to whip up Cold War-like hysteria in the face of an otherwise preoccupied and essentially passive Russia seems out of all proportion to the actual military threat Russia poses. (Yes, volunteers and ammo do filter into Ukraine across the Russian border, but that’s about it.) Further south, the efforts to topple the government of Syria by aiding and arming Islamist radicals seem to be backfiring nicely. But that’s the pattern, isn’t it? What US military involvement in recent memory hasn’t resulted in a fiasco? Maybe failure is not just an option, but more of a requirement?

• From Sarajevo to Madaya: Starvation as Propaganda

  For the past two weeks, first the Western-backed Syrian “activists” and then the mainstream media reporting their every rumor as gospel truth, began spreading stories about the “Assad regime” deliberately starving some 40,000 civilians inside Madaya, a former resort town 25 miles northwest of Damascus. Sordid stories splashed across the front pages of the Anglophone press and social media, claiming the government in Damascus was deliberately withholding food from innocent civilians “for months.”

• Their Headchoppers and Ours

  It may not be surprising to careful readers that the headchoppers described above are not the self-proclaimed Islamic State, a fiercely Wahhabi Sunni Muslim inspired nation, but rather the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As recently as News Years Day 2016 (Western Calendar) the Saudi Kingdom lopped off at least 47 heads in what was described as anti-terrorist punishments for the “guilty”, though public trials were not held in most instances. A prominent Saudi Shia cleric, who was never accused of any violent acts, was among the first to feel the blade, for angering the ruling Sunni royal family by complaining about discrimination against the large but minority Shia Saudi population, centered mostly in the eastern part of the country.

• Woman Files Ridiculous Lawsuit Against Twitter For ‘Providing Material Support’ To ISIS

  Over the past year or so, there has been some people questioning if merely tweeting could be considered “material support for terrorism.” Taking things to another level altogether, Tamara Fields, whose husband (a government contractor for DynCorp International) was tragically killed in an ISIS strike late last year, has now sued Twitter for providing “material support” for ISIS.

  Let’s be clear on a few things: I can’t even imagine the horrors of having your loved ones killed that way. It is horrible and tragic, and the pain must be unfathomable to those who have not gone through it. But, at the same time, that’s not Twitter’s fault no matter how you look at it. The full lawsuit, filed in California by lawyers who should know better, makes a number of ridiculous assertions, including the idea that the rise of ISIS would have never happened without Twitter.

Transparency Reporting

• Sweden asks to question Assange, waits for Ecuador answer

  Swedish prosecutors have requested permission to question Wikileaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London over rape allegations and are waiting for a response, the Prosecution Authority said on Wednesday.

  “It is not possible to estimate when we will receive an answer,” the prosecution authority said in a statement. It said the request was submitted recently, but did not specify when.

  Questioning will be carried out by Chief District Prosecutor Ingrid Isgren and a police investigator.

• Alexander Perepilichnyy: Surrey Police invoke secrecy laws to withhold documents relating to dead Russian whistleblower

  Police are to invoke secrecy laws to seek to withhold dozens of documents relating to the possible murder of a Russian whistleblower living in Britain, who may have been poisoned on Moscow’s orders, from the forthcoming inquest into his death.

  Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed and died outside his luxury home on a gated Surrey estate in November 2012 after he had given evidence to Swiss prosecutors implicating Russian officials and mafia figures in a $230m (£150m) tax fraud. His death was initially declared non-suspicious but traces of chemicals linked to a rare poison known to be used by Russian assassins were later found in his stomach.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• M56 chemical spill halts traffic in Greater Manchester

  A tanker crashed and shed part of its chemical load on the M56 in Greater Manchester, causing rush-hour delays.

• We Shouldn’t Take Their Oil

  Donald Trump’s slippery slogan is delusional.

  [...]

  He’d get around this inconvenience wrought by America’s capitalist system by giving ExxonMobil the job, and backing the corporation up with “a ring” of U.S. troops.

• We Might Have Finally Seen Peak Coal

  Chinese coal use peaked back in 2013, as Climate Progress first reported in May. Since China was responsible for some 80 percent of the growth in global demand since 2000 — and since the United States and most of the industrialized world have also started cutting coal use — the key remaining question for the dirtiest fossil fuel was, “Will a handful of developing countries, particularly India, see enough growth in coal consumption to overcome that drop?”

• What to make of COP21?

  Reflections on the Paris climate talks from members of the Corporate Watch collective.

• Romanian village blocks Canadian firm from mining for gold

  “If this mine opens, Romania would lose both a historic monument unique for the gold it contains while the site would have turned into a moonscape,” he said.

  “This is an important step, we must now make sure this classification is respected,” said Eugen David, head of the Alburnus Maior Association which has been fighting the project for years.

  Gabriel Resources, which holds an 80% stake in the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, declined to comment on the move.

  Last July, the company filed a request for international arbitration to obtain compensation from Bucharest over the delays to the project.

  Initially in favour of the mine, Romania’s former leftwing government abruptly changed its position in 2013 following a wave of unprecedented protest across the country.

Finance

• Winning the Fight for $15 in 2016

  Millions of low-paid Americans rang in 2016 with a raise, as a handful of state minimum wage increases went into effect on the first day of January.

  Many of those raises are a barely noticeable 15 or 20 cents an hour — little comfort to people struggling to make ends meet. But workers in the cities and states that voted for more robust wages last year saw much more significant gains.

• “We will not treat you like Africa”

  Four specialists discuss the social and environmental impact and the perspectives of the partnership between China and Latin America in 2016.

• From Google Payroll to Government and Back Again

  Joshua Wright, whose term as a Republican commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission ended in August, has joined the antitrust practice of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati — the law firm that represented Google before the FTC.

  Being on Google’s payroll is nothing new for Wright. Before he joined the FTC, Google helped fund his academic research at George Mason University, where he will continue to teach while working for Wilson Sonsini. George Mason received $762,000 in donations directly from Google from 2011 to 2013.

• World Bank Report: TPP Will Bring Negligible Economic Benefit To US, Canada And Australia

  Supporters of TPP generally insist it’s absolutely worth doing, despite any infelicities it might contain, because of the huge overall economic benefit it will bring to participants. But when challenged, they are unable to cite any credible evidence for that claim. That’s because there isn’t any: despite the impact that TPP’s measures will have on how the US and other countries do business, there are astonishingly few studies on whether it will indeed have a positive impact overall. Just over a year ago, we wrote about one of the rare attempts to model TPP, commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture, which came up with the following result for countries like the US and Australia…

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Requiem for a News Channel

  Al Jazeera America launched in the summer of 2013, a spin-off of the Doha-based channel’s English version to specifically target a United States audience. For the last decade, Al Jazeera had built what some might consider the one of the most coveted of journalistic reputations: It was considered anti-American and anti-Zionist in the US, while Arab governments saw its stories as pure Western propaganda. By the time of the Arab Spring, Al Jazeera English became indispensable for anyone in the United States who wanted to know what was going on.

• David Bowie, Media Critic

  In 1980, Bowie released Scary Monsters, after which every album he released was doomed to be described as his best since Scary Monsters. In the album opener “It’s No Game,” he alluded to the themes of charismatic dictatorship, martyrdom and the power of corporate media that obsessed him from the beginning of his career:

  Draw the blinds on yesterday,
  And it’s all so much scarier
  Put a bullet in my brain,
  And it makes all the papers

• Richard Prince: ‘Media Critics Registered Admiration’ for Bowie

  Media blogger Richard Prince (Journal-isms, 1/11/16) quoted from Jim Naureckas’ review of David Bowie’s media criticism (1/11/16) in his roundup of reactions to Bowie’s death…

• Clinton’s Lead Over Sanders Shrinking Nationwide: Poll

  New survey shows Clinton losing frontrunner status as Vermont senator gains among crucial voting blocs

• Revealed: how Jeremy Corbyn has reshaped the Labour party

  Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of remoulding Labour have been boosted by a detailed Guardian survey into the party at grassroots level that shows overwhelming support for him, a decisive shift to the left and unhappiness with squabbling among MPs.

• The Corbyn Effect: Survey Shows Huge Support in Labour Party for Its Leader

  Jeremy Corbyn appears to be reshaping the U.K. Labour Party, with a survey showing “overwhelming support for him [and] a decisive shift to the left.”

  The Guardian “interviewed Labour secretaries, chairs, other office holders and members from more than 100 of the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales,” and found that “almost every constituency party across the country we contacted reported doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling membership, and a revival of branches that had been moribund for years and close to folding.”

Censorship

• Al Jazeera America Terminates All TV and Digital Operations

  Executives of Al Jazeera America (AJAM) held a meeting at 2 p.m. Eastern Time to tell their employees that the company is terminating all news and digital operations in the U.S. as of April 2016, resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs. The announcement marks a stunning and rapid collapse of what, from the start, has been a towering failure.

• Twitter Sued For Ignoring DMCA Takedown Requests

  Photographer Jennifer Rondinelli Reilly has filed a lawsuit against Twitter, claiming that the social network failed to remove infringing copies of her work. In a complaint filed at a federal court in California, Reilly demands a permanent injunction against the social network and compensation for the damage she suffered.

• Pope Francis to join Google’s Eric Schmidt in rare tech industry meeting

  Pope Francis once described the internet as a “gift from God”. But on Friday he is due to meet with someone who may believe the internet has more to do with his own company than divine intervention: Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.

  The pope, who more than a billion Catholics believe is God’s representative on Earth, will meet with the powerful Silicon Valley executive and philanthropist for 15 minutes at the Vatican in Rome.

• Another US ag-gag law outlawing data collection is challenged in court

  The lawsuit follows challenges to similar anti-speech laws in Idaho and Wyoming.

  Laws in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, and Utah are backed by big agricultural entities and are designed to cover up unsafe or illegal farming practices. Activists said that the North Carolina measure, which was approved over the governor’s veto, is perhaps the most restrictive and could bar undercover investigations of all private entities, including nursing homes and daycare centers.

  “The Anti-Sunshine Law’s legislative history confirms that the statute’s aim is to keep whistleblowers from exposing employers’ and property owners’ hidden conduct to the public,” according to the lawsuit. “In the words of one of the bill’s supporters, the law’s goal is to allow employers and property owners to engage in activities of public concern without fear of an ‘expose.’”

• 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, as 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.

• Politicians should consider self-censorship

  SEEING your name inscribed on Islamic State’s hit list would be anybody’s worst nightmare, with heightening fears of terrorism.

  But that’s exactly what happened to one Victorian MP, who saw their name in black and white on the organisation’s hit list in August.

  The hit list named eight Australians and joining the MP on the list were defence officials and public servants.

  Former Melbourne man and IS fighter Neil Prakash urged his followers to attack those named.

• Control Over Internet Censorship, Pornography Unaffected Under TPP – Mustapa

• Gov’t will study all TPPA trade impacts, says MITI

• Miti says Putrajaya to look into studies on TPP trade impact

• Censorship of Internet, pornography unaffected under TPPA

• Opposition MP commends minister and ministry for public engagement

• Ministry should be praised for public engagements on TPPA

• In rare move, DAP MP praises international trade ministry’s TPP public outreach

• Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia might join TPP, says Miti

• Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia keen on TPPA, Miti tells Jomo

• Thailand, Philippines & Indonesia Might Join TPP, Says MITI

• ‘Internet censorship, pornography unaffected under TPPA’

  The government’s control over Internet censorship and import of pornographic films will not be affected under the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), International Trade and Industry Minister Mustapa Mohamed said.

• Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia might join TPP, says MITI

• Singapore Film Festival runs into censorship issues in KL

• Regulate Netflix In Canada? Cogeco CEO Says That Would Risk ‘Censorship’

  Although he shares the frustrations about video on demand services like Netflix, Cogeco’s chief executive says he’s opposed to government intervention that could open the door to tighter supervision of the Internet.

• Regulating Netflix would lead to censorship of the internet, Cogeco CEO Louis Audet says

  Although he shares the frustrations about video on demand services like Netflix, Cogeco’s chief executive says he’s opposed to government intervention that could open the door to tighter supervision of the Internet.

  Several cable companies have accused the U.S. company of reaping significant revenues in Canada without paying taxes and investing in telecommunications infrastructure.

• In Response to Censorship, Artists Incite Users to Flood Facebook with Nudity

  If you’ve ever experienced the frustration of having your Facebook account disabled after posting a nude work of art, mark January 14 as your new favorite holiday: Facebook Nudity Day. The event, organized by art historian Kathy Schnapper and artists Stephen Pusey and Grace Graupe-Pillard, calls for Facebook users to post an artwork depicting the naked body to protest the social media website’s “continuing censorship of artists, curators and critics who have been censored for posting art and images that depict the nude human body.” The flooding of Facebook with photographs, paintings, drawings, and all other forms of art represents an action of solidarity against an absurd form of censorship that pretty much occurs on a daily basis.

• #FBNudityDay Takes A Stand Against Censorship On Social Media…

Privacy

• Lords discusses identity cards

• The Internet of Things that Talk About You Behind Your Back

  SilverPush is an Indian startup that’s trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones pick up the signals, and then use cookies to transmit that information back to SilverPush. The result is that the company can track you across your different devices. It can correlate the television commercials you watch with the web searches you make. It can link the things you do on your tablet with the things you do on your work computer.

• Institute of Directors warns against ‘Stasi-style’ surveillance of employees

  Employers should not routinely snoop on their employees communications at work, after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that a company in Romania did not breach the privacy rights of an employee by monitoring their personal online communications, the Institute of Directors (IoD) has said.

  The ECHR ruled that a company in Romania didn’t breach the privacy rights of a worker after it monitored his Yahoo Messenger account. The man’s employer confronted him with 45 pages of messages that he had exchanged with his brother and fiancee using a work computer during work hours. He set up the Yahoo account at his employers’ request to talk to professional clients, according to the Financial Times.

• Cisco kills hardcoded password bug in Wi-Fi access points

  Along with fixes for a number of older vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS and IOS XE software, the Cisco IOS Software Common Industrial Protocol, and the OpenSSL package incorporated in multiple company products, Cisco Systems has pushed out security updates that plug unauthorized access and default account/static password vulnerabilities in some of its offerings.

  The most serious of these are CVE-2015-6323, a bug in the Admin portal of devices running Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) software, which could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to an affected device and effect complete compromise of it; and CVE-2015-6314, a same type of vulnerability affecting devices running Cisco Wireless LAN Controller (WLC) software.

• Uber Scales Up Its Data Centers to Support Growth [Ed: not a good thing]

  The fast-growing ride-sharing company leased large chunks of “plug-n-play” wholesale space in three major markets during 2015, according to a new report from a data center real estate specialist. The burst of leasing comes just six months after Uber purchased a small data center from Microsoft, along with other assets that supported its mapping infrastructure.

• Cyber: The War India Never Fought, But Lost

  As the year drew to a close, the cybersecurity industry was abuzz with a sensational disclosure whose geopolitical ramifications largely went ignored. With India so typically caught in the seasonal slumber, the global hacker community, which has never seen a dull day, tore into the networking hardware giant Juniper (its components power and protect the core of the Internet in many nations, facilitating the efficient routing of packets across networks).

• National Cybersecurity Institute at Excelsior College hosts NSA Day of Cyber on January 28 [Ed: NSA recruiting kids]

  The National Cybersecurity Institute (NCI) at Excelsior College today announced a collaboration with the NSA Day of Cyber, a nationwide effort to raise awareness of cyber issues and encourage students to pursue STEM-related careers.

• EFF Wants Cisco Held Responsible For Helping China Track, Torture Falun Gong Members

  Back in 2011 we noted how a group of Falun Gong members filed suit against Cisco in San Francisco, alleging that Cisco held some culpability for the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissidents, critics, and others. According to the lawsuit at the time, Cisco “competed aggressively” for the contracts to design China’s Golden Shield system, “with full knowledge that it was to be used for the suppression of the Falun Gong religion.” The full, amended complaint (pdf) accused Cisco CEO John Chambers and two other senior executives of working with the CCP to find, eavesdrop on and track Falun Gong members.

• U.S. official sees more cyber attacks on industrial control systems

• We keep too many hacks secret, says ex-NSA director

  In an interview with reporters this week, retired General Michael Hayden explained why he thinks companies and the government are ill-prepared to deal with cyberattacks: They both refuse to acknowledge hacks when they happen.

  “The government hideously over-classifies it,” Hayden said. “And the private sector, for fiduciary reasons, is reluctant to share it.”

• Ex-NSA Chief Defends End-to-End Encryption. Isn’t It Surprising?

  NSA talking about the data privacy? Does not look absurd? But this is how it was. Now you might want to stop accusing NSA for violating the data privacy. Or maybe not.

• Even the former boss of the NSA thinks encryption backdoors are a bad idea

  Debate is raging over tech companies’ use of encryption software to secure their users’ data – and the former head of the NSA isn’t on the side you might expect.

  Michael Hayden, who ran the secretive US spy agency between 1999 and 2005, told a panel on Tuesday that he doesn’t support efforts to force companies to include “backdoors” for law enforcement in their products.

• US Intelligence director’s personal e-mail, phone hacked

  Someone going by the moniker “Cracka,” claiming to be with a group of “teenage hackers” called “Crackas With Attitude,” told Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchiarai that he had gained access to Clapper’s Verizon FiOS account and changed the settings for his phone service to forward all calls to the Free Palestine Movement. Cracka also claimed to have gained access to Clapper’s personal e-mail account and his wife’s Yahoo account.

  In October, Crackas With Attitude claimed responsibility for hacking CIA Director Brennan’s personal e-mail account and gaining access to a number of work-related documents he had sent through it—including his application for a security clearance and credentials. The group also apparently gained access to a number of government Web portals and applications, including the Joint Automated Booking System (a portal that provides law enforcement with data on any person’s arrest records, regardless of whether the cases are ordered sealed by courts) and government employee personnel records. The group published a spreadsheet of personal contact details for over 2,000 government officials. The Twitter account used to post the information was suspended shortly afterward.

• ISIS Has Developed Its Own Secure Messaging App To Spread Terror

  The Islamic State is known to use messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp to communicate the messages to its followers. To avoid the surveillance of government agencies like FBI, ISIS has now developed its own messaging apps. These apps aren’t as sophisticated as WhatsApp or Telegram, but they have the advantage of being independent of any third-party organization that could be compromised by government agencies.

• AT&T Says Its Voluntary Sharing of Customer Data Is Classified

  Back in October, I wondered whether companies would be able to claim they had chosen not to participate in CISA’s voluntary data sharing in their transparency reports. While CISA prohibits the involuntary disclosure of such participation, I don’t know that anything prohibits the voluntary disclosure, particularly of non-participation.

  A related question is playing out right now over a shareholder resolution filed by Arjuna Capital asking AT&T to reveal its voluntary sharing with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

  The resolution asks only for a report on sharing that is not legally mandated, and exempts any information that is legally protected.

• White House Meets With Silicon Valley Execs to “Disrupt” ISIS Online

  This new strategy is based on the government’s firm belief that the real cause of radicalization is because some suburban kid reads a Tweet and then poof! skips Spring Break for jihad. The idea that the roots of radical actions lie deep and involve complex motivations, including being torqued off at bloodthirsty U.S. foreign policy, meh, let’s blame social media and that damn rock ‘n roll you kids like and use it all as a way to clamp down on political speech the government doesn’t like.

  [...]

  I especially love the bit in Item C about providing “metrics to help measure our efforts to counter radicalization to violence.” Exactly how does one gather metrics to prove a negative, i.e., how many people allegedly don’t join ISIS because of something they read online?

• Big Brother Watch sign letter calling on the Home Secretary to protect encryption

  The Don’t Spy On Us coalition, which Big Brother Watch are a member of, have written to the Home Secretary calling for any plans to weaken encryption in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to be scrapped.

  The indication that the draft Bill will require companies to hand over encrypted data have raised concerns amongst academics, industry experts and civil society groups. These proposals, it is believed, would undermine cyber-security in the UK, putting us at odds with a number of our allies, including the United States and the Netherlands, who have both declared their intentions to protect encryption.

• Protecting the Choice to Speak Anonymously Is Key to Fighting Online Harassment

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Department of Education today to protect university students’ right to speak anonymously online, warning that curtailing anonymous speech as part of anti-harassment regulations would not only violate the Constitution but also jeopardize important on-campus activism.

  “Battling gender and racial harassment and threats on college campuses is vitally important,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “But some are calling for blanket bans on the use of platforms that allow anonymous comments, and that’s a counterproductive strategy. Online anonymity is crucial for students who fear retaliation for their political and social commentary. It helps many people avoid being targets of harassment in the first place.”

  EFF’s letter to the Department of Education comes after a number of groups pressed for new federal guidelines for fighting online harassment. EFF agrees with the majority of the recommendations, including ensuring prompt reporting and investigation of all reports of harassment, and disciplining and/or prosecuting perpetrators. However, preemptively removing access to anonymous online speech platforms violates all students’ First Amendment rights—threatening projects like the USG Girl Mafia at the University of Southern California, where students anonymously map locations of assault reports on campus. Anonymity was also essential for student activists at Guilford College in North Carolina, who used an online form to collect anonymous testimonials about racial violence from those who felt unsafe revealing their identities.

• Investor to AT&T – give us a peek at your NSA data dealings

  An activist investor is pressing AT&T for more details about how it handles government data requests.

  Arjuna Capital said it will ask at the next shareholder meeting for investors to vote on a proposal [PDF] requiring AT&T to issue detailed reports of the company’s policy on providing customer information to the NSA in light of recent revelations of AT&T’s handover of information to the NSA.

  The Arujuna proposal calls on the company to provide shareholders with a one-time report detailing “to the fullest extent possible” its policies regarding NSA requests for user information.

• Pentagon to Inquire Into NSA Monitoring of Snowden Copycats

  The Defense Department inspector general is initiating an investigation into measures by the National Security Agency to control computer users with access to sensitive information.

• 12 NSA Patents That Prove the Future of National Security Will Be Bizarre

  Whether or not you care that the NSA has archived your personal information in a server farm somewhere and whether or not you live in America, the future of U.S. national security strategy will effect you. And that future will be governed to no small degree by the technologies employed by the NSA, which doubles as a skunkworks for out there monitoring projects and creates patents at an almost industrial pace.

• GCHQ is More Than Likely Secretly Monitoring Our Financial and Medical Records

• Ex-NSA chief defends end-to-end encryption, says ‘backdoors’ will make us less secure

  No one will ever accuse the National Security Agency of being champions of privacy. But General Michael Hayden, a former Director of the NSA, does see some value in preserving secure end-to-end encryption on the web without giving government agencies their own “backdoors” they can use to break it in the name of intelligence gathering. Per CNN, Hayden told a cybersecurity conference in Florida this week that breaking encryption would not make Americans safer even if encrypted communications do pose new challenges for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

• Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road appeal focuses on corrupt agents

  Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht’s lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.

  The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn’t do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”

  As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”

Civil Rights

• Ian Buruma: Wages of Guilt

  The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma’s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.

• Perry County DA: Investigation into Penn Township shooting of 12-year-old continues

  A 12-year-old Penn Township girl died Monday morning after a bullet fired at her father by a constable during an eviction went through her father’s arm and hit her, state police said today.

  The bullet was fired at Donald Meyer, 57, by Constable Clarke Steele, 46, after Meyer confronted Steele at the door of the Meyers’ apartment with a rifle.

• 12-year-old girl fatally shot by police in Pennsylvania

  A 12-year-old girl was fatally shot by police in Pennsylvania when an officer served an eviction warrant to her family.

  Ciara Meyer was accidentally killed in her home on Monday after Constable Clarke Steele fired a single shot at her father Donald Meyer, 57, who was allegedly armed with a rifle, Pennsylvania State Police said according to Penn Live.

  The bullet passed through Mr Meyer’s arm, striking Ciara, and the young girl was pronounced dead at the scene.

• Rebekah Brooks: New claims that phone hacking was rife at The Sun under former editor

  Rebekah Brooks is facing a legal battle over new allegations that phone hacking was “endemic” when she was editor of The Sun, a court has heard.

  Lawyers for News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s UK print business, told a High Court hearing that a “new flank” of hacking claims had been opened against Rupert Murdoch’s daily tabloid.

• Living the CES security farce

  Are you kidding me?

  I recently returned from the Consumer Electronics (CES) trade show in Las Vegas, and that question has been on my mind. The question doesn’t refer to any of the technologies vying to be the next big thing — although I do wonder how many Bluetooth controlled vibrators does one really need? No, what has me wondering is the big announcement ahead of CES about much tighter security restrictions. I wrote before the show that it would be a disaster with never-ending lines and disgruntled attendees, but that wasn’t exactly how it turned out. It was certainly chaotic, but it was a general surrender even before the event opened.

  CES is among the world’s biggest conferences, with 170,000 people shuffling into Las Vegas for a week. This year, attendees were warned that new security practices would be in place. Among the guidelines were: “Bags will be searched. We suggest you use clear bags (mesh, plastic, vinyl, etc.) to expedite this process”; “Bags and backpacks with many pockets are not helpful. Pockets slow search time”; and “Everyone will be subject to metal detector screening and body pat downs upon entering show premises.”

• ISIS Supporter Joins Ammon Bundy’s Armed Occupation as Resident Computer Expert

  David Fry told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he drove from Ohio to join the occupation because he knew that the other militants “were pretty good people.”

  “It was (a) miracle, that I got here,” Fry said. “I’ve had quarrels with the government myself, and I feel there has to be some point where people have to put their foot down against the problems.”

  Earlier this week, Fry recorded a video from one of the government buildings that militants are using as a computer and media center. He explained that he had created a website for the occupation.

• Outrage in Oregon

  Taking over a federal building at the point of a rifle gives protest a bad name.

• The Stateless and the State of the Union

  The raids have provoked protests across the country. Last Friday, seven people were arrested in New York City in front of the local ICE headquarters, chaining themselves together and blocking traffic. Among those arrested was Claudia Palacios. Her story is remarkable. She was born in Texas and served for five years in the U.S. Marines, with two years in Okinawa and several years around the world deployed with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Even though she served her country honorably, this U.S.-born military veteran has documentation issues of her own.

• The human search for a home

  Stories from the Macedonian refugee camps in Gevgelija bordering Greece, and Tabanovce bordering Serbia, tell of kindness, of the shock and powerlessness of being “othered”, and of loving Shakespeare.

• Hollywood Sure Loves Sequels: For The Second Year In A Row, Zero Actors Of Color Get Oscar Nominations

  This is frustrating, though not totally surprising: Industry insiders had been fretting about a repeat of an all-white acting slate for a while now. But it’s a bad look for an awards show already clinging to relevance like Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to hope that someday he’ll actually win an Oscar.

• Megyn Kelly Attacks DNC Chair For Inviting A Muslim Representative From CAIR To State Of The Union Address

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Zuckerberg Wants You To Celebrate 4th Feb As Friendship Day With Him – Here Is Why? [Ed: publicity stunt]

  Some say that the post has come at an interesting time when Facebook is trying hard to make a case for its Free Basics (internet.org) services in India and other developing countries. However, this initiative is facing a huge challenge from the advocates of net neutrality. Maybe, that’s why Mark is trying to befriend people with his emotional post.

DRM

• Netflix CEO ‘Loves’ Netflix Password Sharing

  For a few years now, HBO has turned a blind eye to users that decide to share their passwords for HBO Go (the streaming app for existing cable providers) and HBO Now (the standalone streaming app for cord cutters). Last year HBO CEO Richard Plepler said the company keeps a close eye on the company’s password sharing stats, but said the sharing isn’t a huge phenomenon.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Have your say on the enforcement of intellectual property rights

  Today the European Commission has published a public consultation on the evaluation and modernisation of the legal framework for the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR).

  With this consultation the Commission seeks views from all interested parties, in particular rightholders, the judiciary and legal profession, intermediaries, public authorities, consumers and civil society, on the question if the legal enforcement framework is still fit for purpose.

• A Look At The Marrakesh Treaty Ratification In Brazil

  The main goal of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled is to establish set mandatory limitations to ensure access to printed material for the benefit of the visually impaired.

• Copyrights

  • Copyright Blocking Security Research: Researchers Barred From Exploring Leaked Archive

    Two researchers for Kaspersky Lab, Costin Raiu and Anton Ivanov, have published an absolutely fascinating tale of how they successfully tracked down a zero day exploit in Microsoft Silverlight. The story is totally worth reading, and it stems from the researchers trying to find an exploit that was described in an Ars Technica article by Cyrus Farivar, concerning a hacker selling exploits to Hacking Team, which was revealed last summer when Hacking Team got hacked and had all its emails (among other things) released.

  • Metallica Sends 41 Page Legal Threat To Canadian Cover Band [Updated]

    Metallica, in some circles, will always be known as the band that sued Napster and promised to go after the band’s own fans that used the platform. For some former fans of the band, nothing the band has done since can redeem it. And I’m assuming the latest move probably won’t help much either: various reports note that a Canadian Metallica tribute/cover band called “Sandman” showed up at a gig recently, only to discover a 41 page cease and desist letter from the band’s lawyers, claiming that they were unfairly profiting off the Metallica name and logo.

    [...]

    No one’s getting confused. No one thinks that it’s actually Metallica. Everyone recognizes what a tribute band is. And the reason they go see and support tribute bands (hell, the reason people create tribute bands in the first place) is because they love and support the original band. None of this is done to be unfair to Metallica, but to celebrate the band, and how does the band react, but with a giant legal threat.

    That’s pretty messed up.

    Update: And… of course, now that the band is getting lots of bad publicity over this, it’s suddenly blaming “an overzealous attorney” and insisting that neither the band nor its management had any idea about this. Maybe time to find better lawyers.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

How Linux won without winning [Ed: clueless anti-Linux article from IDG's Apple booster]

You rarely see Linux when you boot your computer or turn on your smartphone, but the truth is Linux is everywhere

How Well Do You Know Your Linux History?

The most exciting Linux and open source Kickstarter projects of 2016 (so far)

Kickstarter has brought us many successful Linux and open source products, including Mycroft AI, Pebble Time, and Ouya, among others. Some of these raised millions of dollars in funding.

Who will be next?

Keep an eye on this slideshow as it evolves over the course of the year. We’ll keep you updated on new projects and let you know who met their funding goals.

A Brief Guide to Alternatives to Windows: 2016 Edition

Now the easiest and simplest route for people who are ready for a change is to buy the Google computer also known as a Chromebook. For folks that want a full Linux there is Crouton, which enables one to run ChromeOS and Linux at the same time.

Linux Quiz, Another Poll, and Win-ning

Today in Linux news, FOSS Force is running a Linux history quiz – fun for the whole family. OpenSource.com is running a poll wondering which Linux distribution you use and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols outlines “what’s new and nifty in Linux 4.4.” Infoworld.com’s Galen Gruman said today that “Linux won without winning” and the community should celebrate. Jack Wallen said Ubuntu messed up when they dropped UbuntuOne while Ubuntu 16.04 is said to be the best Ubuntu in years.

Into The Unknown – Sunday, 2016-01-10

You’d think “Unknown” would actually be known by someone somewhere with such popularity but I can’t find it. How is it more popular than Android/Linux in some places and StatCounter doesn’t know about it?

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!

Desktop

• Apple loses more ground to Google’s Chromebook in education market

  Apple is no longer the undisputed head of the K-12 class.

  For the first time, Chromebook sales surpassed 51% in the K-12 market nationwide in the third quarter, according to a recent report by market researcher Futuresource Consulting. The surge reflects a fundamental shift in how American schools are buying tech in bulk and assessing students online, placing an emphasis on low-cost, easy-to-manage machines.

• Configuring Linux for music recording and production

  If you’re a programmer, you’ll find GNU/Linux systems quite powerful and robust. When it comes to areas like visual arts, video, business, or gaming, you’ll find some tools with promising potential, but lots of bugs, quirks, and challenges. You can accomplish whatever you need in most cases, but the setup and learning curve may not be as smooth as proprietary options on proprietary systems.

  In this article, based on my talk at SCaLE 14x this year, we’ll cover the basics of configuring your Linux system for music making, highlighting what works best and acknowledging the challenges with recommendations on how to find help.

• Google Chrome Users Will Push Content to Chromecast Without Dedicated Extension

• Should you install Linux on a gaming laptop?

  Linux is everywhere these days, and Linux gamers have never had more games to play than they do right now. But is Linux really well suited for a gaming laptop? One redditor asked about it on the Linux subreddit and got some interesting answers from his fellow Linux users.

Server

• IBM targets flexible mainframes with open source golang on z Systems

  While IBM sees improved uptake for its mainframes, the HPC supercomputer market is also seeing interest with demand for new systems.

  The Go programming language is being brought onto IBM’s System z mainframes.

  In a post on GitHub, the popular code-sharing site, Big Blue made both its port available and its Linux on IBM z Systems project.

• All Systems z are Go: IBM ports Google language to mainframes

  IBM has been spotted bringing the open-source Go programming language to its System z mainframes.

  Big Blue made its port available via a GitHub repository and its Linux on IBM z Systems project – which is working on bringing across various other packages, too.

  Developed by Google and released in 2009, Go is designed with an emphasis on concurrency among other features, and is used in Google’s own applications as well as technology from Linux container biz Docker and anti-DDoS outfit CloudFlare.

• SGI to Build Supercomputer for Climate Research Center

  The “Cheyenne” system is based on SGI’s ICE XA, the latest example of the growing demand for more supercomputing power by weather researchers.

  Supercomputer maker SGI will build the next generation system for the work being done by the National Center for Atmospheric Research regarding climate change and a range of other atmospheric issues.

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 370: MuseScore

Kernel Space

• Next-Gen Media Controller Support Going Into Linux 4.5

  Landing with the Linux 4.5 kernel will be the next-generation media controller support. This “next-gen MC” work is the result of one year of development and enables media controller support at the DVB subsystem, improves the media controller to support other types of V4L devices like radio and TV devices and to extend the media controller functionality so it can be used by other subsystems (DVB / ALSA / IIO). A new ioctl is presented as part of this next-generation support for exposing it to user-space, but for the Linux 4.5 kernel that code is disabled until Linux 4.6 rolls around to ensure the ioctl is in good shape.

• ​What’s new and nifty in Linux 4.4

  2015 saw a lot of controversy about how Linus Torvalds directs the Linux project. But, that didn’t stop him from delivering the latest update of the Linux kernel: Linux 4.4 on time.

• KVM Changes Prepped For Linux 4.5

  Paolo Bonzini sent in the first pull request this morning for KVM (Kernel-Based Virtual Machine) changes for Linux 4.5.

• Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS Officially Released, with 3D Support in Virtual GPU Driver

• Linux 4.4 released

• Linux Kernel 4.4 Long-Term Support officially released

• What’s new in Linux 4.4

  Plus: Apple says it’s not creating software for users to switch to Android from iPhone, and Apple loses ground to Chromebooks in the education market

• Linux 4.5 Input Updates Bring Changes Even For PS/2 Mice

  If you still are relying upon a PS/2 mouse, it really is time to think about upgrading to a USB mouse, but keep reading as there are some changes with Linux 4.5.

  The PS/2 mouse change is that its module has been reworked in order to “limit number of protocols we try on pass-through ports to speed up their detection time.” Not too exciting but it’s an improvement nevertheless if stuck using this technology dating back to the late 80′s.

• Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS Is Unofficially Available for Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint

  GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs us today about the availability of a custom Linux 4.4 kernel package for 64-bit Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, and Linux Mint operating systems.

• ACPI & Power Management Updates For Linux 4.5

  Intel’s Rafael Wysocki has sent in the refreshed ACPI and power management code that’s targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window.

  Of interest with these updates is a debugfs interface for communicating with ACPICA’s new AML debugger so it can be accessed from a new user-space tool, more efficient handling of CPUfreq governors, many CPUfreq driver changes (including Intel’s P-state driver), and updates to the device properties framework.

• LZ4 Compression Support Is Unlikely For Btrfs

  Patches have been posted several times now, but the Btrfs file-system is unlikely to offer support for LZ4 transparent file-system compression.

• The Staging Update Is Modestly Sized For Linux 4.5

  Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in his pull requests today for the various kernel subsystems he maintains, including the kernel’s staging area.

  About this cycle’s staging pull, Greg KH wrote in the pull request, “Lots of cleanups and fixes here, not as many as some releases, but 800+ isn’t that bad.”

• Will Blockchain Technology Transform Transactions?

• The Dronecode Project Taps Open Source for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Platform

  When the next generation of unmanned “drone” aerial vehicles starts buzzing around above you, don’t be surprised if an open source platform is make it possible. Dronecode, a nonprofit organization developing a common, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), has announced major milestones that include investments from 27 new member organizations and the formation of technical working groups to advance the Dronecode open source platform for UAVs.

• ADLINK Releases Mac and Linux Drivers for USB DAQ Series

• ADLINK Releases Mac and Linux Drivers for USB DAQ Series

• Graphics Stack

  • A High Performance, OpenCL-Based VP9 Encoder

    Ittiam has announced an OpenCL-based VP9 encoder for high performance, power efficient HD video encoding.

    Targeting mobile and consumer hardware where there may not be dedicated VP9 hardware, Ittiam has developed an OpenCL-based encoder that will work with the likes of ARM Mali graphics hardware. Obviously doing this encoding on the GPU in software is more efficient and performant than a CPU-based software encoder. The Samsung S6 was demonstrated with this OpenCL-based encoder for efficient VP9 usage.

  • It Looks Like X.Org Might Be Safe For A Few More Years

    As a follow-up to last week’s X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name, where it looked like the X.Org Foundation would lose their single-letter domain unless getting very lucky, they managed to get their domain renewed today. The X.Org Foundation has yet to issue a statement, but perhaps thanks to all the public pressure the past few days had a helping hand in getting the domain situation sorted out in a timely manner.

  • Partial Fermi Re-Clocking Being Talked About For Nouveau

    Karol Herbst, the independent open-source developer who has been focusing upon Nouveau re-clocking support in recent months, has made a new proposal and patch series concerning NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400/500 “Fermi” re-clocking on this open-source driver.

• Benchmarks

  • A 10-Way Linux Distribution Battle To Kick Off 2016

    As our first multi-way Linux distribution comparison of 2016, I took ten different modern Linux distribution releases and benchmarked them on the same Intel Haswell system. Being benchmarked were various releases of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Debian, Clear Linux, Fedora, Antergos, and CentOS.

  • 8-Way ARM Board Linux Benchmark Comparison From The Pi Zero & ODROID To Tegra

    The kind folks at LoverPi.com sent over many of the ARM boards seen in this comparison today. They provided the ODROID C1 Plus, Raspberry Pi 2, Orange Pi Plus, Orange Pi PC, and Banana Pi M2. They will also be allowing some other ARM board Linux tests on Phoronix in the future. Beyond those various ARM SBCs, for this performance comparison I also included a Raspberry Pi Zero, NVIDIA Jetson TK1, and NVIDIA Jetson TX1.

Applications

• Telegram 0.9.18 Released With Some Improvements And Bug Fixes

  Telegram is free and open source messaging app available for all major platforms including Linux. Telegram Desktop which is a desktop client of Telegram recently released newer version Telegram 0.9.18 with some improvements and bug fixes. You can easily install Telegram Desktop on your Linux machine.

• Snapper: SUSE’s Ultimate Btrfs Snapshot Manager

  Snapper, the excellent Btrfs management tool, is yet another of SUSE Linux’s best-kept secrets.

  I call SUSE the secret Linux, because it’s the most advanced Linux distribution, but hardly anyone seems to know about it. SUSE has officially supported Btrfs, the next-generation Linux filesystem, since SLES 11 SP2, and supplies the excellent Snapper tool to manage Btrfs. Grab yourself a free openSUSE download, or a free 60-day SUSE Enterprise Linux evaluation and follow along as we learn how to create and manage snapshots with Snapper.

• OpenSolaris-Derived OpenIndiana For A Media PC? You Can Now Run Kodi

  While the OpenSolaris-derived OpenIndiana operating system doesn’t come to mind as a HTPC/multimedia operating system, the Kodi software was just ported to it.

  Phoronix reader Harley pointed out that XBMC/Kodi has been ported to OpenIndiana, one of the few open-source projects left around OpenSolaris and powered by the Illumos kernel.

• GnuCash 2.6.11 Free Accounting Software Fixes a QIF Import Regression, More Bugs

  The development team behind the GnuCash free, open-source and cross-platform accounting software, have announced today, January 12, 2016, the release of the GnuCash 2.6.11 update for all supported platforms.

• Cutegram 2.7.1 Out Now, Work Starts for Cutegram 3, the Best Telegram Client for Linux

  Aseman released today, January 12, 2016, the first maintenance release for the 2.7 series of his powerful, free, open-source and cross-platform Telegram client for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, Cutegram.

• Samba 4.3.4 Has Been Released for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, Fixes 14 Bugs

  The development team behind the popular, open-source and cross-platform Samba software, have had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance for the Samba 4.3 series.

• 5 ways to use the Telegram messenger on your Linux computer

  Mobile technology develops rapidly nowadays. Do you remember that just 5-8 years ago the most you could get from your mobile device was phone calls and text messages?

• Recoll 1.21.4 Has Been Released

  The latest version available is Recoll 1.21.4, which has been recently released, coming with changes and fixes.

• [Scribus] 1.4.6 Release

  The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.4.6.

• Avidemux 2.6.11 Beta Has Been Released

  Avidemux is an open-source, cross-platform tool for video editing, written in C++ and using Qt for its GUI. It allows the user to cut, filter and encode videos easily, having support for the most popular file types, including: AVI, DVD, MPEG, MP4 and others.

• 21 Best Free Linux Productivity Tools

  With so many different distributions and a huge collection of open source software available, it can be difficult to finding the best application for getting things done.

  We previously published an article on excellent open source productivity tools in 2008. Many of the tools featured in that article have fallen by the wayside. Many of the projects were developed by one or a few developers. They ceased working on the projects, in part because better alternatives sprung forward. Given the length of time that has elapsed, we thought it best to update the article.

• Tools for Managing OpenStack

  OpenStack is not small. Although you can control it programmatically from a browser or using HTTP calls within your own programming language of choice, you can also greatly simplify your life by embracing either Puppet or Chef. Which one should you choose? I suggest trying out both to see what works for you. Be forewarned that, in either case, you’ll need to learn some syntax of the files — especially in the case of Chef, if you’re not already familiar with Ruby. Take some time to work through the examples. Install OpenStack on your own virtual machine, and go for it. You’ll be up to speed in no time.

• Ardour 4.6 released

  Ardour 4.6, our first release of 2016, is now available. 4.6 includes some notable new features – deep support for the Presonus FaderPort control surface, Track/Bus duplication, a new Plugin sidebar for the Mixer window – as well as the usual dozens of fixes and improvements to all aspects of the application, particularly automation editing.

• Proprietary

  • First Opera Stable Update for 2016 Brings Netflix and Linux Renderer Fixes

    The Opera developers have issued their first stable update for their Internet browser. It’s not as big as we hoped for, but at least, it comes with an important fix for a Linux-only issue.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • github ‘hub’ command line tool

  • ELF, libelf, compressed sections and elfutils

  • Analyze Linux network connectivity issues with the ping utility

  • Unlocking the Secrets of the Open Cloud

  • How To: Install/Upgrade to Linux Kernel 4.4 in Ubuntu/Linux Mint Systems

  • How to change boot splash screen on Ubuntu or Linux Mint

  • Learn Linux, 101: File editing with vi

  • Addendum to 11th installment: Lynx; scraping credentialed web pages

  • How To Install Aegisub Unstable on Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How To Install Bikeshed 1.61 on Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 14.04 And Derivative Systems

  • How to Install Drupal 8 with Apache, MySQL and SSL on Ubuntu 15.10

  • How to Install OpenCart 2 with Nginx and SSL on Ubuntu 15.10

  • [Howto] Adopting Ansible Galaxy roles for Solaris

  • How To Install KeePass2 2.0.0 On Ubuntu Systems

  • How To Edit Ubuntu Menu Icons with Alacarte

  • [Short Tip] Debug Spamassassin within Amavisd

  • How to Transfer Files Between Two Computers using nc and pv Commands

  • How To Install And Configure Arno Iptables On OpenSUSE 42.1

  • How to set up and use Nylas N1 Email Client on Linux

  • How to access Amazon Cloud Drive from the command line on Linux

  • Keras for Binary Classification

  • FreeBSD 10.1 x64 WiFi Captive Portal

  • Audio Devices and Configuration

  • Sysadmin: Save time with webmin

  • How to customise your Linux desktop: More experiments with i3

  • Transform Your Ubuntu Into Windows 10 Look With These GTK Themes

• Games

  • SteamOS Brewmaster 2.60 Stable Update Ships with a New Linux Kernel, Security Fixes

    Earlier today, January 13, 2016, Valve had the pleasure of announcing the release of a new stable update for the SteamOS Brewmaster 2.0 series, which brings many improvements and patches security issues.

    According to the release notes, the most important thing that was implemented in the new stable update for the SteamOS 2.0 Brewmaster branch is a new Linux kernel package, which promises to fix the issues reported by users about the udeb packaging.

  • Hypercharge looks like an amazing UE4 shooter that will support Linux

    Fancy becoming a child’s action figure? Hypercharge will let you do this, and destroy your friends in this multiplayer shooter.

    After seeing a quick video and some screenshots from it, I am very interested in this one and will be keeping an eye on it.

  • Indie marketplace Game Jolt releases open source desktop client

    Indie game marketplace and community Game Jolt has released its long-awaited desktop client.

    Currently available as a pre-release download, the open source client lets users browse, install, and play games without ever having to open a web browser.

  • PlayStation 4’s Linux Hack

    At present the full hack isn’t publicly available, nor is fail0verflow interested in releasing it, telling users to look elsewhere. Among the primary reasons for the decision are fear their work will be misused, possible legal issues, and that releasing the exploit would reveal information that could potentially enable piracy. Their prior exploits on the Wii and Wii U were released primarily to drive the homebrew community, but their release ended up resulting in piracy. They hope to redirect future users to reverse engineering instead of focusing on running Linux. which would be of little help to pirates but a bonus for the community.

    As “marcan” of fail0verflow put it: ”[W]e really think this is the way to go for the PS4. Write an exploit, point it to our loader, and you’ll get Linux (we’ll help you get it hooked up/debugged if needed). And if you want piracy, as usual, go away.”

  • Homefront: The Revolution aiming for a day-1 Linux & SteamOS release on May 20th

    I didn’t expect Deep Silver to reply to me so quickly, but it seems the Linux & SteamOS release of Homefront: The Revolution will come out alongside Windows on May 20th!

  • The 2015 GamingOnLinux GOTY award is now over, here’s the results!

  • Space Grunts, a really rather great turn-based action roguelike now fully released

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Applications 15.12.1 Lands with More Than 30 Bugfixes Across All Apps

    Just a few minutes ago, January 12, 2016, the KDE developers have had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of the KDE Applications 15.12.1 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment.

  • Seasons of KDE

    Before I started working on my Seasons of KDE project, I already did some Junior Jobs. I reviewed Bugs and fixed a few of them. This helped me a lot to get a little deeper into KDE. Especially in getting to know all the tools, which are being used when developing KDE software.

  • KDE: Kubuntu: Status Update, Patreon and Donations notifications.

  • openDesktop.org changes

    Today I have very exiting news to share. Effectively January 1 2016, my company hive01 GmbH has been bought by Blue Systems GmbH. hive01 GmbH runs the network of opendesktop.org sites like KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, GNOME-Look.org, Qt-apps.org and all the other 30 websites

  • openDesktop.org. 15 years in review

    I launched KDE-Look.org, the first website in the openDesktop.org network nearly 15 years ago. This is a long time and I announced today that I sold the network to Blue Systems. So I think it is time for a look back at how everything started and where we are today.

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • GNOME supports the work of Software Freedom Conservancy

    The GNOME community has dedicated the last 18 years to building great software for our users. We have created a library of work that is found not only in our desktop but also in various other important software and hardware. As a proud part of the GNU Project, GNOME licenses its software freely to ensure that the work will continue to be free for everyone to use and build on. To do this, we use the GPL (GNU General Public License) and the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License).

  • Manjaro Gnome 15.12 released

    The Manjaro community is proud to present another update to the Gnome Edition installation media.

    This release keeps to the style of the 15.12 release being that it is highly vanilla, but of course is up-to-date at the time of build and includes the latest Manjaro back-end infrastructure. Note this means a very vanilla Gnome configuration, it doesn’t mean ‘minimal’, the full set of Gnome software and other apps are provided out-of-the-box.

  • GNOME Calendar Just Landed in Ubuntu 16.04 Daily Build

    A new package has just landed in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and it’s the promised GNOME Calendar.

    The development of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is still far from being completed, and the Ubuntu Team has started to add some of the packages that have been promised. One of the apps that haven been announced for Ubuntu 16.04 is the GNOME Calendar, and it’s now implemented by default.

  • Manjaro Linux GNOME 15.12 Distribution Officially Released, Includes GNOME 3.18.2

    On January 12, the Manjaro community had the great pleasure of making an official announcement regarding the Manjaro Linux GNOME 15.12 computer operating system, which was made available for download a few days ago.

  • GNOME Control Center to Get a Completely New Design in Future GNOME Releases

    GNOME developer Allan Day wrote a full-length article on January 13, 2016, explaining the last work done by the GNOME Project for the new design of GNOME’s Settings application.

  • A settings design update

    Over recent months, a fair amount of work has been done on the design of GNOME’s settings. Quite a lot of this work is experimental, but I wanted to share the work in progress and explain some of the reasoning behind it.

    A major feature of the latest settings designs is a rethink of the GNOME Settings “shell” (that is, the overall framework of the settings application). We want to move from the current model, that uses an icon grid and fixed window size, to one that uses a list sidebar for navigation, and has a resizeable window.

  • GNOME Settings Is Getting Improved

    Allan Day has written a blog post today about some of the improvements that are being worked on for GNOME’s settings area.

  • GNOME Project Announces Its Support for Software Freedom Conservancy

    The GNOME Project, a non-profit organization that delivers the open-source GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, announced on January 12, 2016, that they are supporting the work of Software Freedom Conservancy.

    GNOME has been building open-source and free software distributed under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) and GPL (GNU General Public License) licenses for almost two decades, and they’re proud members of the GNU Project.

    But to ensure that their work will continue to be free for everyone to use or redistribute, they make an appeal for the community to follow the rules of the open-source licenses before attempting to “borrow” their code and make it proprietary.

Distributions

• Linux Lite 2.8 Beta Arrives with Btrfs Support and New Linux Kernel

  Linux Lite, a distribution created with the purpose of showing users just how easy it is for non-technical folks to use a Linux distribution, has advanced to version 2.8 and is now ready for download and testing.

• The Best Linux Distros of 2016

  2015 was a very important year for Linux, both in the enterprise as well as in the consumer space. As a Linux user since 2005, I can see that the operating system has come a long way in the past 10 years. And, 2016 is going to be even more exciting. In this article, I have picked some of the best distros that will shine in 2016.

• 9 Linux distros to watch in 2016

  Last year, right about this time, I listed my top Linux distributions to watch during 2015. Not which ones would be the best. Nor which would be the worst. Simply which ones I believed would be the most interesting, the most fascinating, to watch over the course of the year. I’ve done so again this year. Because it sounded like fun and I wanted to. Enjoy.

• Solus Devs Working to Fix Boot Problem, People Warned Not to Use Unstable Repo

  The Solus developers have started to implement some of the promised fixes, and they have warned users not to use the unstable repo.

• Solus Operating System 1.0 Provides New Linux Desktop Experience

  In the Linux desktop world, there is now another viable option for a stable desktop environment, thanks to the Solus Project’s Budgie Linux desktop environment. After following a somewhat meandering path toward its final release, the Solus Project debuted version 1.0 of its Solus Operating System Linux distribution on Dec. 27, providing users with an alternative take to the more common GNOME- and KDE- based Linux distributions. The Solus Operating System’s most distinguishing feature is Budgie, which provides a unique graphical interface for the Linux desktop. A core part of Budgie is the Raven applet technology that provides a simplified notification center for desktop users. While Budgie is the flagship technology of the Solus Operating System, it also will work with other Linux distributions, including Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and openSUSE, providing an alternative Linux desktop environment choice. Alongside the new desktop are common applications to many Linux distributions, including the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, the Rhythmbox music player, the VLC media player, the Transmission bittorret client and the HEX Internet Relay Chat client. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key highlights of Solus Operating System 1.0.

• Arch Family

  • Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) Gets Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS with the Latest Stable Update

    Just a few moments ago, the Manjaro community proudly announced the release of the third stable update for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) series of computer operating systems.

• Slackware Family

  • Slackware Linux 14.2 Beta 1 Brings Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS and Pulse Audio

    Slackware Linux, a complete 32-bit and 64-bit multitasking “UNIX-like” system that is currently based around the 4.4 Linux kernel series, has been upgraded to version 14.2 Beta 1 and is now ready for download.

    Slackware Linux is probably the oldest Linux distribution that’s still being maintained, and it managed to keep the same kind of development model for a very long time. There are no official repos and most of the changes, fixes, and new features are added by its creator, Patrick Volkerding.

  • Slackware 14.2 Beta Released, Now Uses PulseAudio

    First off, Slackware 14.2 has finally begun using PulseAudio. Years after other Linux distributions switched to PulseAudio, the day has come for Slackware since they upgraded to BlueZ 5. With BlueZ 5, the ALSA support has been dropped and now presents a hard dependency on PulseAudio. From there, the project basically had to make the switch.

  • Current (pre-release) ChangeLog for x86_64

• Red Hat Family

  • Top Stocks of the day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

  • Red Hat’s Ansible 2.0 brings new power to devops

    Ansible, the Python-powered IT automation and configuration framework that recently became a Red Hat property, officially released its 2.0 version today. Its new features satisfy two needs that are sometimes deeply contradictory: Make the product more powerful and useful, but don’t break compatibility with the already large and growing culture of Ansible scripts and modules.

    The Ansible scripts known as Playbooks have long lacked a mechanism to group together tasks in logical units or elegantly perform error handling. Version 2.0 can do so thanks to blocks. Actions described within a block only take place if a given set of conditions are met.

  • Ansible 2.0 Has Arrived

    After a year of work, we are extremely proud to announce that Ansible 2.0 (“Over the Hills and Far Away”) has been released and is now generally available. This is by far one of the most ambitious Ansible releases to date, and it reflects an enormous amount of work by the community, which continues to amaze me. Approximately 300 users have contributed code to what has been known as “v2” for some time, and 500 users have contributed code to modules since the last major Ansible release.

  • Red Hat JBoss Fuse – Switchyard in OSGi

    So what exactly is SwitchYard? If you have ever played with JBoss Fuse Service Work, then you will probably know this already.

    SwitchYard is a structured framework for developing integration applications using the design principles and best practices of Service Oriented Architecture.

  • Why Red Hat heaps praise on naysayers

    Outspoken employees who complain about problems often get branded as malcontents. Even if they call attention to important failings in their organization, they tend to lose their stature with senior leaders.

  • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Receives “Buy” Rating from SunTrust

    SunTrust reissued their buy rating on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research note published on Monday, MarketBeat reports. SunTrust currently has a $73.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock.

  • BMO Capital Markets Begins Coverage on Red Hat Inc (RHT)

    BMO Capital Markets began coverage on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research note published on Thursday, The Fly reports. The brokerage issued an outperform rating and a $97.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock.

  • Why CIOs should change their minds (and their organizations) once a year

    Flexibility is paramount. That is our mantra and our discipline throughout the Red Hat IT organization. It has to be, because it allows us to change rapidly when needed. And with the pace of technology change, we run into that need quite often.

    At Red Hat, we’ve committed to changing our IT organization annually to ensure that our focus remains on the biggest business opportunities at the time. Each year, we review our priorities, centralize some functions, disperse some functions, add new organizations, remove organizations, and adjust elsewhere. And by setting that expectation with everyone on the team, they know that their responsibilities and the services they are accountable for may change over time.

  • Red Hat Ansible 2.0: a ‘playbook’ for agentless automation

    We know that Red Hat is a major player in the open source enterprise space (on many levels) and Ansible was (and still is) a company (now an internal Red Hat brand) that makes “agentless” orchestration and configuration management tools.

  • Insider Selling: Red Hat Inc (RHT) Director Sells 18,972 Shares of Stock

  • Red Hat Survey: Mobile Investments Are Paying Off

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced results from a recent mobile measurement survey, which revealed that 74 percent of respondents whose organizations use key performance indicators (KPIs) to some extent to measure mobile application success are achieving positive return on investment (ROI), demonstrating that prior investments in mobile have paid off. Red Hat’s mobile measurement survey revealed that 85 percent of organizations are using KPIs to measure mobile app success, while nine percent use other means and the remainder are not measuring mobile success at all.

  • The SLOTH attack and IKE/IPsec

    The SLOTH attack released today is a new transcript collision attack against some security protocols that use weak or broken hashes such as MD5 or SHA1. While it mostly focuses on the issues found in TLS, it also mentions weaknesses in the “Internet Key Exchange” (IKE) protocol used for IPsec VPNs. While the TLS findings are very interesting and have been assigned CVE-2015-7575, the described attacks against IKE/IPsec got close but did not result in any vulnerabilities. In the paper, the authors describe a Chosen Prefix collision attack against IKEv2 using RSA-MD5 and RSA-SHA1 to perform a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack and a Generic collision attack against IKEv1 HMAC-MD5.

    We looked at libreswan and openswan-2.6.32 compiled with NSS as that is what we ship in RHEL7 and RHEL6. Upstream openswan with its custom crypto code was not evaluated. While no vulnerability was found, there was some hardening that could be done to make this attack less dangerous that will be added in the next upstream version of libreswan.

  • Fedora

    • Project Fi and replacement phones: Android could learn from Fedora…

      I’ve had really good luck with smartphones (/me knocks on wood) over the years. I’ve dropped phones a number of times, but other than a few scuffs and scratches, no permanent damage. (My first-generation iPhone did have an unfortunate encounter with a softball years ago, but since then – smooth sailing.) This weekend, though, I biffed the Nexus 6 just wrong on the tile floor and the screen got the worst of it.

      This is one of the big downsides for Project Fi, in my opinion. With normal carriers, I can saunter into a physical store and have a replacement same-day. Or next morning if it happens to be 11 p.m. when the phone has its unfortunate incident. Project Fi? No such luck.

    • First Fedora 23 Updated Lives Available!

      Back on Dec 3rd, the latest iteration of Fedora, Fedora 23, came to being and now the first Updated Lives for 23 are available in torrent and raw iso download format from: (Includes GNOME,KDE,LXDE,MATE,CINNAMON,SOAS,XFCE)

      Fedora 23 Updated Lives

      Additional Spins available from:

      Fedora Spins

      All Versions also available via Official Torrent from:

      All Official Fedora Torrents

      If you are unfamiliar with upgrading between versions please take a read of either the Release Article over at:

      Fedora Magazine

    • Upgrading from the previous stable Fedora release

      One of the big topics we’re working on in Fedora QA right now is what we sometimes refer to as ‘N-1 upgrades’. 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). This has a couple of benefits which are generally agreed to be valuable: you always have at least a couple of Fedora stable releases to choose from at any given time (so you have the previous one to fall back on if the current one turns out to be a complete lemon for your purposes), and – theoretically at least – if you maintain long-lived Fedora systems, you don’t have to upgrade to each new release if you don’t want to; you can always skip one.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Developers Preparing For PHP 7.0 In Stretch

    Debian’s PHP package maintainers are preparing for PHP 7.0 packages for Debian Stretch that will also contain some changes compared to how they packaged PHP5.

  • New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2015)

    The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

    Stein Magnus Jodal (jodal)
    Prach Pongpanich (prach)
    Markus Koschany (apo)
    Bernhard Schmidt (berni)
    Uwe Kleine-König (ukleinek)
    Timo Weingärtner (tiwe)
    Sebastian Andrzej Siewior (bigeasy)
    Mattia Rizzolo (mattia)
    Alexandre Viau (aviau)
    Lev Lamberov (dogsleg)
    Adam Borowski (kilobyte)
    Chris Boot (bootc)

  • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2015

    A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

  • 2016 Resolutions

    People these days often do think about what worked well in the last year that they are proud of, what didn’t work so well and what they plan to change the coming year. For me a fair amount of the resolutions were about my name. One of them was getting rid of my old name from the Debian—Project Participants page.

  • Debian Domination, Unstable Fedora, Simple Elementary

  • Derivatives

    • Call for testing: 2.0~rc1

      You can help Tails! The first release candidate for the upcoming version 2.0 is out. We are very excited and cannot wait to hear what you think about it

    • Tor-Based Tails 2.0 Anonymous Live CD Gets Closer to Release, RC1 Is Ready for Testing

      The development cycle of the upcoming Tails 2.0 amnesic incognito live system continues today, January 13, 2016, with the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) build, which is now available for download and testing.

      Tails 2.0 RC1 brings a great number of changes since the Beta build, among which we can mention support for the passphrase strength indicator in the GNOME Disk Utility (Disks) software, the Tor Browser 5.5 Alpha 6 anonymous web browser based on the Tor project, and the replacement of the Claws Mail app with the Icedove email client.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • What’s New in Ubuntu Touch OTA-9

        A new OTA update is in the works for Ubuntu Touch and developers have already implemented a large number of features and various changes.

      • Why Are We Calling Ubuntu 16.04 LTS The Best Ubuntu Release In Years?

        Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, codenamed Xenial Xerus, will be the 6th iteration of the world’s most popular Linux distribution. The release date of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is set for April 21, 2016. With this release, Canonical is making some key changes to the OS.

        At fossBytes, we are calling its the best Ubuntu release in years — thanks to the disabled Ubuntu ‘Spyware’ in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Before we dive deep into the details of this change, let me remind you how Canonical was bashed by Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman long ago in December 2012. The FOSS stalwart called Ubuntu Linux “spyware” because the operating system’s search feature sent data to Canonical when a user searched the desktop.

      • 10 Reasons Why Ubuntu Is Killing It In The Cloud

        But one OS that is doing wonders in the cloud, desktop, mobile, and IoT segment is Ubuntu. This Debian-based open source OS has been on a roll ever since IaaS has become mainstream to run server workloads in the cloud. From AWS to OpenStack, Ubuntu is most preferred OS by system administrators and DevOps professionals.

      • Snapcraft 1.0 Ubuntu Snappy Creator Tool Officially Released, Here’s What’s New

        Canonical’s Snappy team had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the Snapcraft 1.0 Snappy creator tool for Ubuntu Linux.

        Snapcraft 1.0 is the product of many months of hard work, during which the software has had six development builds, bringing as many new features as possible and fixing bugs reported by users during the entire development cycle (see the what’s new section below for details).

      • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 to Receive a Big QtMir Update, New Trust Store, More

        Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak informs us today, January 12, 2016, about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch team in preparation for the forthcoming OTA-9 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices.

      • The one glitch in Canonical’s convergence plan

        Canonical has, once again, made the promise of delivering on the convergent desktop. With Unity 8/Mir eminent in the 16.10 (although we’ve heard that story before) release, Canonical is finally bringing that oft-broken promise of delivering the convergence of smartphone, tablet, and desktop to life.

      • Cordova Ubuntu 4.3.2 Brings the Apache Cordova Project to Ubuntu Linux

        David Barth has had the great pleasure of announcing a few days ago the release of the Cordova Ubuntu 4.3.2 software for all supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.

      • Ubuntu Devs Need Feedback to Fix Screen Tearing with Full Video in Compiz

        A bug that causes tearing on full-screen video playback with Google Chrome and Chromium is causing some problems for Ubuntu developers, and they have asked for feedback from the community.

      • AT&T Will Deploy Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux for Cloud and Networking

        Canonical has received a significant endorsement from AT&T, which has enlisted Canonical for implementing Ubuntu Linux in AT&T’s cloud, network and enterprise infrastructure.

      • AT&T Chooses Ubuntu and Canonical for Its Network and Cloud Operations

        AT&T chose Canonical and Ubuntu to power its network and cloud, making this one of the most important collaborations for the creators of the Linux distribution.

      • AT&T Adopts Canonical’s Ubuntu in Push to Replace Proprietary Systems with Open-Source Tech

Devices/Embedded

• Rugged wireless-ready box-PC runs Linux on Cortex-A9

  Axoimtek’s rugged, fanless, wireless-ready “rBOX630” box-PC runs Linux on a dual-core i.MX6 SoC and targets mobile, IoT, and light industrial apps.

  The rBOX630 is based on the NXP (formerly Freescale) i.MX6 dual-core 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 SoC and comes with 1GB of DDR3 RAM. It boots its OS from 4GB of eMMC flash, and supports one SDHC card for additional storage. With its multiple wireless options and support for dual external antennas, Axiomtek is positioning the DIN-rail-mountable system as a platform for in-vehicle surveillance, retail, building automation, factory automation, energy metering, and mobile Internet of Things deployments.

• Open Source Dronecode Project Gains New Members and Focus

  Dronecode is a Linux Foundation collaborative project that involves the collaboration and financial backing of a number of industry partners. On Tuesday, the project’s industry backing increased with the announcement of investments from twenty-seven new member organizations.

• Dronecode advances its open-source platform for unmanned aerial vehicles

• Dronecode project announces working groups, new members

• Linux Foundation Moves Dronecode Project Forward

  In just a year after the open-source Dronecode effort launched, its membership has taken off, and code and product are available.

• Dronecode Project Advances Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Commercial Applications

• SODIMM-style COM runs Linux on Atmel SAMA5D4x

  MYIR announced a tiny COM that runs Linux on Atmel’s low power, Cortex-A5 SAMA5 SoCs, and offers display, networking, USB, serial, GPIO, ADC, and more.

  MYIR’s 68 x 45mm “MYC-JA5D4X” computer-on-module is available on its own, as part of an “MYD-JA5D4X” development board that adds a ready-to-use carrier board. The COM is based on Atmel’s single-core, 600MHz SAMA5D4 series system-on-chips in October of 2014. MYIR is offering the COM with a choice of either the SAMA5D42 or SAMA5D44 SoC, which differ primarily in the D44 chip’s inclusion of a hardware support for 720p30 video playback of H264, VP8, or MPEG4 formats.

• Raspberry Picademy USA Accepting Applications

  Are you an enthusiastic individual that is interested in using the Raspberry Pi in the classroom and in community education programs? Then get ready to fill out your application for Raspberry Picademy USA! This will be the first time ever that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will be offering a Picademy in the United States. If you haven’t ever heard of Picademy, or have and are looking to participate, then I’ll answer some basic questions for you on the ins and outs of Raspberry Picademy USA.

• Wintel Is Sick

  There isn’t any end in sight. As ARM and particularly ARM on mobile devices grows Wintel is being squeezed out of personal IT. Long ago, I and many others cut out That Other OS. Now many millions, billions even, are cutting out Intel. Both heads of the Wintel monopoly are diversifying as fast as they can and cutting prices or moving “profit centers” to avoid being trapped under the weight of their own handiwork. The world just doesn’t need either any longer but it does take a few years to switch over so much installed base of IT. It’s a process, not an event, just like sickness. It remains to be seen whether this is a mortal wounding or just an injury both can survive. I expect that both will survive but both will be cut down to size and only get a normal share of the pie instead of the whole thing.

• Opportunities And Challenges That The Internet Of Things Creates

  Internet of Things is targeting not only devices, but also sensors. It’s incredible how they can be attached everywhere and record necessary data. For example, wearables are collecting data about fitness habits of their owners and this helps to update the devices with more attention paid to the functionality in high demand. Or, for example, network-connected sensors are used to inform farmers about the pregnancy and sickness of animals. Just imagine if your coffee cup could know how hot you want your coffee to be and how much sugar or milk you add. Collected data would allow businesses to get more specific information on how their products are used, how they break down and what is expected from them in the future.

• Phones

  • Tizen

    • Video: Samsung KS9500 SUHD TV Hands on, the new Tizen Smart Hub

      Samsung is certainly taking the lead with the Smart TV category with all the innovations that they have announced at CES 2016. The companies upcoming 2016 range will feature a newly designed Tizen Smart TV user Interface and the ability to connect to SmartThings devices, such as Locks, lights, thermostats etc. You can do things like select cinema mode, that will make your TV enter the cinema mode color setting and then dim the lights in the room, ready for an evening of movie viewing.

  • Android

    • Android Marshmallow: 14 new KILLER features

      Every year we’re used to Google releasing a slightly tweaked version of Android – but this time it’s pulled out all the stops. With new features like the battery-saving Doze mode – or the brand new Google Now on Tap, Android Marshmallow is the biggest update we’ve seen to Google’s mobile OS in a while. Here are 14 reasons we think Android Marshmallow is the best version of Android we’ve seen.

    • Remix OS EULA Asks to Waive Rights to All User Content

      Remix OS, a new desktop OS based on Android-x86 landed yesterday, but it comes with a pretty nasty EULA that should definitely be read by its users.

      Many people don’t bother to read the EULA for a new operating system or application, but that is always a good idea. Unfortunately, the EULA is a huge document and most of the time you need to be a lawyer to get the finer points.

    • Android.Bankosy Trojan Learns To Steal Your One-Time Passwords Sent Through Calls

    • The best Android weather apps

    • Google Maps For Android Gets Predictive With Driving Mode

    • Google Maps for Android’s new Driving Mode guesses where you want to go

    • Android Auto architect Brenner sees a ‘virtuous cycle’ in common car software

      In the days before Google launched the Android operating system in 2008, engineers had to rewrite the code for Google Maps dozens of times for different smartphones from makers such as Nokia, Motorola and BlackBerry.

      It was a hassle, but Android changed all that.

      Andy Brenner, product manager for Android Auto, now sees the Silicon Valley giant’s smartphone interface having the same effect on cars. By helping customers use hot new apps in their cars without forcing developers to rewrite their code, he said, automakers can deliver a seamless experience that helps them sell cars.

    • Whatever Android-ChromeOS mashup looks like, it’s gotta be better looking than this

      If you’ve ever wondered what Android would look like as a desktop PC OS, then try this for size: Remix OS from China.

      It’s a very rough-around-the-edges build of Android-x86 – an ongoing port of Google’s open-source OS from ARM gadgets to x86 PCs – with some closed-source stuff to create a multitasking desktop with moving windows, an application bar, and so on, but with Android’s look-and-feel. It tries its best to map keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements to the normally fingertip-driven user interface.

    • Remix OS’s desktop-friendly flavor of Android hits PCs with mouse support and windows

      The former Googlers behind Jide Technology have always insisted that they’re a software company. Now they’re making good on those claims with a work-centric version of Android that runs on any desktop PC.

      The software, known as Remix OS, is a highly-modified Android ROM with features you’d expect on a laptop or desktop computer. Users can run apps in full screen or smaller windows, and all open programs appear in a taskbar on the bottom of the screen. Remix is also optimized for a mouse or trackpad, so users can right-click in certain apps to see contextual pop-up menus.

    • Android N UK release date, name and feature rumours: Android N Developer Preview expected on 18 May

      Android 7.0 Nectar, Neopolitan, Nacho or Nougat (not Nugget)? We round up the rumours on the next version of Android, which we should see our first glimpse of in May, including the Android 7.0 N UK release date, name and new features.

    • This is when you’ll get a first look at Android N

      GOOGLE’S biggest event of the year is scheduled from May 18th to the 20th 2016, CEO Sundar Pichai has confirmed.

    • Android malware steals one-time passcodes

      The malware, called Android.Bankosy, has been updated to intercept the codes, which are part of so-called two-factor authentication systems.

    • Blackphone2 review (2)

      Not Private By Design

    • Android M, 6.0 Marshmallow Update Release Date: Update Rollout for Moto X Play OTA in Brazil and India

    • RemixOS Brings Desktop-Style Android to Intel-Based PCs

      Android is a pretty versatile operating system, but it’s not really ready for desktop-style uses just yet. RemixOS shows that it could be, with windowed Android apps, running on Intel-based PCs.

      RemixOS is a custom variant of Android with a custom desktop interface that displays Android apps in resizeable windows. RemixOS is available as an alpha that can be installed on Intel-based PCs, which includes a few Macs, according to the developer. Of course, Android apps are generally designed for a touchscreen interface, and most PCs don’t have touchscreens, so some hardware configurations might have some minor issues. Fortunately, RemixOS allows dual-booting, or booting from a USB key, so if you’ve wanted to try out Android on a desktop, you can do so with minimal risk.

    • How To Install And Set Up Remix OS To Run Android On Your PC

    • Apple denied a report that it’s building an app to help iPhone users switch to Android

      Sorry, unhappy iPhone customers: Apple isn’t going to help you switch over to Android any time soon.

      The Cupertino company has denied reports that it is secretly working on an app that will help users transfer their data over from iOS to an Android smartphone.

    • Netflix For Android TV Gets Smart Lock Update To Make Logins Easier

    • BlackBerry Android Affair Spelling Death For BB10? ‘Far From It,’ Says The Company

    • Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 Edge Getting Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow Beta As Galaxy

    • Remix OS—a multitasking, windowed Android OS—can now run on your PC

      Jide’s Remix OS—a… well, remixed version of Android that is more suitable for a PC’s mouse and keyboard—is now available for download. The OS turns Android into a windowed desktop environment with the ability to multitask, just like Windows, Mac OS, and desktop Linux.

      The OS is available today as a 700MB “alpha” version, which you should be able to run on your own hardware. The project’s webpage says it is compatible with “most computers in the world powered by x86 chipsets,” and it seems to require a 64-bit CPU. Remix OS is based on the long-running Android-x86 project, which has a crowdsourced hardware support list here, but the bottom line seems to be “try it and see what happens.” You’ll need at least an 8GB USB 3.0 flash drive with a recommended write speed of 20MB/s along with a PC with a “USB legacy” boot option.

    • How Remix OS Is Bringing Android To Old x86 PC (And Mac) For Free

      Remix OS based on Android UI can run just using USB stick — eliminating the need of a hardware. This means you can take your computer with you anywhere you go. Read more about how Remix OS is going to take all by surprise with its upcoming release.

    • Remix OS Brings Android as a Linux Desktop, Now Ready for Download – Screenshot Tour

      The Android-x86-based Remix OS has arrived and is now ready for download and testing. It’s an Alpha version, so don’t expect it to be stable.

      Remix OS was first introduced with the a crowdfunding campaign for Remix Mini, a small mini PC. The campaign was successful and it shipped to customers. It’s now even available on various online outlets, including Amazon and you can buy one almost anywhere in the world.

    • Apple iOS 9.3 — download to your iPhone (also mysterious Android migration whisper)

      Apple is/isn’t/is/isn’t making a tool to move users to Android: Cupertino denies it, but “a senior industry source” says Euro carriers are forcing the issue

    • Apple Denies It’s Working On iPhone-To-Android Migration Tool

    • No, Apple Is Not Working to Make It Easier to Switch From iPhone to Android

      Apple is flat-out denying a report it is working on software to make it easier for iPhone owners to transfer their data to an Android device.

    • Google announces I/O 2016, and it’s high time to fix Android tablet apps

    • Got Marshmallow? 6 cool things to try with Android 6.0

      By now, you’ve no doubt heard all about Google’s Android 6.0 Marshmallow release. Maybe you already have it on your phone or tablet — or maybe you’re hoping this’ll be the month your device’s manufacturer gets a rollout your way.

      No matter: Whether you’re already enjoying Marshmallow’s sweet flavors or merely anticipating its arrival, now’s a fine time to bone up on your Android 6.0 know-how and add some of the software’s less obvious abilities onto your mental to-try list.

    • Android Candy: Quality Time, or Not?

    • Sioux Falls app company expands to Android

    • Amazingly Intricate Puzzler ‘The Room Three’ Is Finally Available On Android

    • Remix OS – Android-based OS For Desktop: Extended Review, Video Demonstration and Installation Instruction

      After first look the Remix OS interface remembers modern Windows or Linux desktop : panel with icons in footer, left launcher; traditional clock, calendar and network connection at right bottom.

Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions

The biggest task was focused on codebase cleanup. As Microsoft is ending support for old Internet Explorer version, we’ve decided to do same thing for next major release. This allowed us to remove some compatibility code and also upgrade jQuery to 2.x branch, which removes support for older browsers as well.

What are the best tools for open source web development?

Apache: This is the most important web server without which no developer can do anything.

ownCloud Developers Are Planning on Making the Upgrades More Robust

The ownCloud devs have announced earlier that they are planning on making the upgrades for their powerful and open-source ownCloud Server more robust.

Open source communities need mentors

To me it seems a natural pairing because they are two things I am passionate about and things that I do and use every single day. So many of the principles of open source correlate with the positive outcomes most desired for children: collaboration, participation, and transparency (honesty, integrity, openness). For children who are interested in how things work, open source software can give them that behind-the-scenes peek. I love teaching children about open source because there are so many ways they can get their hands dirty and get involved in communities and meet people who share their particular interests. There are many projects that were developed with children in mind, like the great work done by Sugar Labs.

Opening your mind to open source

As we embark on another new year it’s always worth casting our minds back over the previous twelve months. And what a bumpy 12 months they were for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (Meta) region.

Declining oil prices, currency fluctuations, and political instability all played their role in fuelling the turbulence, with IDC taking the prevailing macroeconomic and political situation into account when we revised our forecast for META ICT spending in 2015 down from $270 billion to $250 billion.

A new year of opportunities and risks for the open web

Looking forward to 2016, one thing we can be sure of is that there is much opportunity—and, at the same time, risk—for the open web. I believe efforts like Let’s Encrypt, which started and really heated up last year, will play a big role in making encryption everywhere more of a reality.

Events

• Schedule of DevConf.cz 2016 is out!

  A couple of days ago, DevConf.cz 2016 schedule has been published. It’s bigger than ever before. This year, we have over 200 talks and workshops! There aren’t many bigger events devoted to open source in Europe. And I can finally enjoy it more because after 4 editions (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) I’m no longer the main organizer.

• Google I/O 2016 event dates and location revealed

  Pichai tweeted out the news Tuesday, noting that the event will take place in the “neighborhood where it all started 10 ys ago: Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View.” Details about conference sessions, ticket sales, etc., have not been updated yet on the Google I/O website.

• Jos Poortvliet: I’ll be at SCALE and FOSDEM, how about you?

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Shutting down persona.org in November 2016

    Hi Everyone,

    When the Mozilla Identity team transitioned Persona to community ownership, we committed resources to operational and security support throughout 2014 [1], and renewed that commitment for 2015 [2]. Due to low, declining usage, we are reallocating the project’s dedicated, ongoing resources and will shut down the persona.org services that we run.

    Persona.org and related domains will be taken offline on November 30th, 2016.

SaaS/Big Data

• Apache Spark 1.6: Strong Typing, Faster Throughput

  The release of Spark 1.6 continues the evolution of the data analysis platform toward greater performance and usability, according to Reynold Xin, co-founder of Spark sponsoring company Databricks. He noted that the number of project contributors has topped 1,000, a 50 percent increase in the past year.

  He points to automatic memory management among the ways the new release makes life simpler for users.

  “Now, instead of users having to tune memory settings, it figures it out for you. Most users don’t understand tuning,” he said.

• Citrix Exits Cloud Server Business

  The CloudPlatform technology is based on the Apache CloudStack open-source project that Citrix helped to start. Citrix contributed the CloudStack code to the Apache Software Foundation in April of 2012. The CloudStack technology itself came to Citrix by way of the acquisition of cloud.com in July 2011.

• Apache Apex Joins a Slew of Free Tools for Next-Gen Big Data

  As I’ve noted in some recent posts, the Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, squarely turned its focus to Big Data tools in 2015. There are also clear signs that it is continuing to do so as 2016 launches. One of the more interesting tools on this front is Kudu, which Cloudera has offered to the Apache Software Foundation for open source stewardship. Cloudera has a whole whitepaper on Kudu here, but its far from the only big data tool that is attracting TLC from Apache.

CMS

• Drupal Hardens Its Security in Response to Criticism

  The open-source Drupal content-management system (CMS) is talking steps to help protect against multiple potential risks that have been publicly revealed. On Jan. 6, security research vendor IOactive first disclosed the issues, which are focused on the Drupal update process. The Drupal project’s security team is aware of the concerns and is fixing all the issues, though it is also downplaying the overall risk.

• Kicking the Tires on a CMS Solution? Start Here.

LLVM

• The Radeon Machine Scheduler Will Soon Come To AMDGPU LLVM

  Months after Axel Davy originally posted his patch-set for the SI machine scheduler to enhance the performance of AMD GCN GPUs on the open-source driver, it looks like the code will soon land in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end.

  Axel posted his work on this Southern Islands machine scheduler months ago for AMD’s LLVM GPU back-end. As tests showed back in August, this scheduler helps significantly boost the performance for certain workloads. One of the Phoronix readers that tested out this scheduler at the time exclaimed, “The si scheduler is such a huge performance boost! Not only it is faster, but now radeonsi is faster than Catalyst in *all* tests, sometimes by a wide margin!”

• LLVM / Clang 3.9 Is Now Under Development

  LLVM Clang 3.8 has been branched from trunk, thus making LLVM Clang 3.9 the new version under development.

  LLVM developers were right on time for branching LLVM 3.8.0 and they are now preparing for the LLVM 3.8 release candidate. A LLVM 3.8 RC2 release is planned meanwhile for 27 January while the official release of LLVM 3.8.0 is expected around mid-February.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Stallman’s One Mistake

  We all owe [Richard Stallman] a large debt for his contributions to computing. With a career that began in MIT’s AI lab, [Stallman] was there for the creation of some of the most cutting edge technology of the time. He was there for some of the earliest Lisp machines, the birth of the Internet, and was a necessary contributor for Emacs, GCC, and was foundational in the creation of GPL, the license that made a toy OS from a Finnish CS student the most popular operating system on the planet. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without [Stallman], open source software wouldn’t exist.

• The Future of the Free Software Foundation: Your Input Requested

  Addressing questions about the Free Software Foundation (FSF)’s future direction seems long overdue. For that reason, the FSF’s current online survey seems a step in the right direction.

  In many ways, the survey is a necessity. Although the FSF regularly tackles too many major issues to count, its entire operating budget for 2013 was $1,250,498, approximately five percent of the budget for the more corporate-oriented Linux Foundation during the same year. Under such budget restraints, some selection seems inevitable if the FSF is to avoid spreading itself too thin.

• Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: January 15th

Public Services/Government

• France Parliament: source code should be made public

  The French Parliament wants to make it mandatory for the country’s public administrations to make public the source code of its custom-built software solutions. An amendment to France’s upcoming law for the Digital Republic was adopted by France’s lower house on Wednesday.

• ‘France should give priority to free software’

  The French government should make the use of free software a priority in its Law for the Digital Republic (La République numérique), says April. The French free software advocacy group is asking Members of Parliament to reintroduce such a requirement into the draft law. The French government has ignored April’s proposal; the 3rd most-popular suggestion resulting from last year’s online public consultation.

Licensing

• Qt open source licensing changed and product structure updated to strengthen community and extend adoption

  The Qt Company has announced changes to the open source licensing and product structure of the Qt cross-platform application development framework that will further strengthen the Qt community and make additional functionality available to software developers using the open source license. A new “start-up” license has also been announced that will help small businesses that want to utilize Qt in commercial desktop and mobile applications.

• Qt Does Some Licensing Changes

  Qt will be introducing a “start-up license” to help small companies make use of the Qt tool-kit for commercial desktop and mobile applications. The Qt open-source licenses have also now been updated.

• Qt is Guaranteed to Stay Free and Open – Legal Update

  The KDE Free Qt Foundation already played an important role when Nokia bought Trolltech, the original company behind Qt, and later sold Qt to Digia, which then founded The Qt Company. The contracts are carefully worded to stay valid in cases of acquisitions, mergers or bankruptcy. The history of the past 17 years has shown how well the legal set-up protects the freedom of Qt – and will continue to protect it in the future.

Openness/Sharing

• Carmakers Open IP Vaults To Boost Electric Car Demand

  Several carmakers are aggressively sharing intellectual property and patents in a collective bid to help the fledging vehicle type catch on in the marketplace as a mainstream alternative.

• Open Data

  • UK Minister wants a more ‘data-driven government’

    The UK government wants to become more data-driven by using its own data and maintaining high-quality published data, Matthew Hancock, Minister of the Cabinet Office, said during the ODI (Open Data Initiative) Summit in November.

  • Open data in Austria: a strategy also shared with the private sector

    Companies, NGOs, industries, research centres, scientists and citizens in Austria can now publish their own data under an open license though a dedicated portal, Martin Kaltenböck, from Austrian-based Semantic Web Company, said during the ODI Summit 2015 last November.

• Open Hardware

  • Google, HP, Oracle Join RISC-V To Make Open Source Processor Core

    RISC, which was only available on commercial platforms in the forms of ARM and MIPS, will soon be open source. Big tech giants including Google, Oracle, HP have agreed to it and its open source version is set to roll out this year in form of RISC-V.

Programming

• libxml++ 3.0 soon

  Kjell Ahlstedt has done some work on a new parallel-installable version of the libxml++ API, to fix some mostly-minor but annoying things that needed ABI breaks. You can see the code in libxml++’s git master.

• Go language expands to IBM mainframes

  IBM hopes that Google’s language, already in use by Docker and Kubernates, will stretch the open source ecosystem for its mainframes

Alton Towers announces first VR rollercoaster

UK theme park Alton Towers has announced a new rollercoaster passengers ride while wearing virtual reality headsets.

Google X, Alphabet’s Secret Research Division, Just Got A New Logo And A New Plan

When Google founders decided to restructure the company under Alphabet’s umbrella, everyone’s eyes were set upon the future of Google X. This secretive division of Google works on turning the moonshot ideas into reality. In a related development, the company has now renamed Google X as X and revealed its new logo and a better future plan.

Dumb Criminal Agrees To Take SnapChat Selfie With Robbery Victim, Is Caught Quickly

We used to do cover a certain type of story around here, where we informed our readers about some truly dumb criminals doing truly dumb things with technology. We stopped doing those posts more recently, in part because they were starting to feel stale and in part because we didn’t want to force our readers to confront the true levels of stupidity that exist on this planet. But, like a member of the Corleone family, they just keep pulling me back in.

Victor Almanza-Martinez is just an armed robber looking for love in all the wrong places apparently, as he and two others decided to rob four people of their belongings in California, but took a break from the robbery to exchange SnapChat information and take a selfie with one of the female victims.

Man Arrested for Armed Robbery After Taking Snapchat Selfie with Victim

Science

• Against School

  In this previously unpublished essay, Aaron Swartz sought an explanation for the persistent—and possible deliberate—failures in our school system.

Hardware

• AMD Finally Set For Opteron A1100 “Seattle” ARM Launch

  AMD appears poised to announce their long-awaited A1100 “Seattle” ARMv8 processor tomorrow.

• Intel Confirms Skylake Bug Causes Freezing

• Intel Skylake Processors Affected By Bug That Can Freeze PCs During Complex Work

• Intel Broadwell and Skylake release dates, price and specs: Skylake chip bug makes it freeze under heavy workloads

• Intel confirms bug with Skylake CPUs

• Working an Intel Skylake processor too hard may cause it to crash

• How to test your PC for the Skylake bug

• Intel admits to Skylake bug that freezes Windows and Linux systems

• Huge prime numbers lock up Intel’s latest processors

• Intel Skylake chips cause system freeze at high workloads

• Intel Admits Skylake Bug Can Cause PCs To Freeze

• Bug Affecting Intel Skylake Processors Can Freeze Computers Running Complex Workloads

• Intel Skylake-based PCs freeze during complex workloads

  According to the Mersenne community, they experienced system freezes while running GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) Prime95 software. By employing tens of thousands of machines to run hand-coded assembly language 24 hours a day, this group has found all of the record prime numbers during the last 20 years.

• Sharks swim in Intel’s Skylake

  It is still not clear why the bug occurs, but it’s confirmed to affect both Linux and Windows-based systems. Prime95 has been used to benchmark and stress-test computers, uses Fast Fourier Transforms to multiply extremely large numbers. A particular exponent size, 14,942,209, has been found to cause the system crashes.

• Intel Skylake processors crash at specific Prime number calculations

  The big was detected by users of Prime95, a program developped by the Mersenne Research group. If Prime is used to test the number 14942209 then the system will simply crash.

• Mathematicians Discover Bug That Causes Skylake Chips To Freeze In The Middle

Health/Nutrition

• Venezuela’s Food Revolution Has Fought Off Big Agribusiness and Promoted Agroecology

  Just days before the progressive National Assembly of Venezuela was dissolved, deputies passed a law which lays the foundation for a truly democratic food system. The country has not only banned genetically modified seeds, but set up democratic structures to ensure that seeds cannot be privatized and indigenous knowledge cannot be sold off to corporations. President Maduro signed the proposal into law before New Year, when a new anti-Maduro Assembly was sworn in.

• The Barbarism of Rick Snyder: a Statement and Curse

  Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, aided by craven functionaries, cut public spending by replacing the clean Lake Huron water that had been the domestic water source for Flint, Michigan with the Dupont- and GM- poisoned water of the Flint River. Doubling down on the racist, class-oppressive carelessness of making the people of Flint consume this toxic waste, an act unimaginable for wealthier, whiter communities, Snyder allowed the water be treated with ferric chloride, a coagulating agent that would somehow magically make the meandering channel of old waste water that is the Flint River potable. Instead, it greatly accelerated the leaching of lead into the supply; hence, Snyder’s austerity-driven actions have resulted in exposing all of the children of Flint, not to mention the adults, to the dangers of massive lead poisoning.

• My Right to Die

  Every story has a beginning. This one starts in late 2001, when my father-in-law fractured three of his ribs. Harry was a retired physician, and after a thorough workup that he insisted on, it turned out that his bone density was severely compromised for no immediately apparent reason. Further tests eventually revealed the cause: He had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.

  Harry’s cancer was caught early, and it progressed slowly. By 2007, however, it had taken over his body. When my wife saw him in early 2008, she remarked that he looked like someone in a lot of pain but trying not to show it—despite the fact that he was taking oxycodone, a powerful opiate.

• Hillary Clinton in 2008: “Since When Do Other Democrats Attack Each Other on Universal Healthcare?”

  Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been excoriating fast-rising rival Bernie Sanders for his proposal to adopt a single-payer universal health care plan. But in 2008, she decried the notion that a fellow Democrat would attack another for proposing universal coverage.

  While Clinton was campaigning against then-Senator Barack Obama, his campaign sent out a mailer criticizing her plan to mandate health insurance coverage. In response, Clinton called a press conference.

  “Since when do Democrats attack each other on universal healthcare?” Clinton asked. “I thought we were trying to achieve Harry Truman’s dream.”

Security

• Tuesday’s security advisories

• Zero-Day FFmpeg Vulnerability Lets Anyone Steal Files from Remote Machines

  A zero-day vulnerability in the FFmpeg open-source multimedia framework, which is currently used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems and software applications, also for the Mac OS X and Windows platforms, has been discovered recently.

• Trend Micro password manager had remote command execution holes and dumped data to anyone: Project Zero

  Google’s Project Zero discovered multiple trivial remote code execution vulnerabilities sitting within a password manager installed by Trend Micro as default alongside its AntiVirus product.

• ‘Ridiculous’ Bug in Popular Antivirus Allows Hackers to Steal all Your Passwords

  If you have installed Trend Micro’s Antivirus on your Windows computer, then Beware.

  Your computer can be remotely hijacked, or infected with any malware by even through a website – Thanks to a critical vulnerability in Trend Micro Security Software.

  The Popular antivirus maker and security firm Trend Micro has released an emergency patch to fix critical flaws in its anti-virus product that allow hackers to execute arbitrary commands remotely as well as steal your saved password from Password Manager built into its AntiVirus program.

• SSH Backdoor for FortiGate OS Version 4.x up to 5.0.7

• Microsemi builds better security into network time appliance

  Keeping accurate time has never been more important. Inaccurate time can cause servers and applications to go awry, causing service disruptions.

  For example: As fighter Manny Pacquiao was ready to square off against Floyd Mayweather in May 2015, the fight was delayed due to a technical problem with pay-per-view orders.

  More than 4.4 million U.S. customers shelled out $100 to watch the fight but had trouble accessing it. The fight was delayed 45 minutes.

• Open Web Application Security Project issues new secure coding bible

  The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has published the third version of its developer security bible trimming the fat and offering peer-reviewed and tested means of building more secure apps.

  The Application Security Verification Standard Project (ASVS) is the carrot to OWASP’s much-cited stick that is the Top 10 web app security flaws.

• Security advisories for Wednesday

• Dutch police claim to have cracked BlackBerry encryption

  THE DUTCH POLICE-ENABLING Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) has claimed that it has cracked PGP on BlackBerry devices and rendered any claims from the Canadian company redundant.

  BlackBerry has a lump on sale called the Priv that boasts unrivalled privacy capabilities, but the crack team of crackers at the NFI said that it ain’t a very tough nut to crack, according to a report on Motherboard.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Moammar Gadhafi Warned U.K.’s Tony Blair That Ousting Him Would Open the Door to Jihadis

  Transcripts of two fraught telephone conversations between the U.K.’s Tony Blair and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 show Gadhafi warning that his removal from power would enable jihadi groups to seize control of Libya and use it as a staging ground to attack Europe.

  Blair, who was not Britain’s prime minister at the time, reportedly decided to act as an intermediary between Gadhafi and the West because of the contact the two men had while Blair was in office. Blair confirmed that both London and Washington, D.C.—presumably meaning Hillary Clinton, then-secretary of state and current Democratic presidential candidate—were aware of the calls.

• Hellfire Missile Shipped to Cuba Targets U.S./Cuban Relations

  On Thursday, January 7, 2016, the date known in Latin culture as the one when the three Kings of the traditional Christian nativity story drop in on children, bearing gifts, the Wall Street Journal published the news that a very special gift had been dropped in Cuba: a made-in-the-USA air-to-ground Hellfire missile. Presumably, the offering would have delighted Cuba’s president, as he might finally having a look inside yet another one of the instruments that the U.S. had prepared for doing away with Cuba’s Castros.

  But what really lies beneath this extraordinary journalistic scoop brought to light by Devlin Barrett and Gordon Lubold more than 19 months after it actually took place?

  After closely reading the article and the comments it has engendered, including those from well-known politicians like John McCain, a number of questions surface that must be evaluated as part of any meaningful analysis.

• America Has Grown Cowardly: ISIS is No Threat to Our Existence Whatsoever

  ISIL is no joke, but its potential for destruction pales in comparison to the danger once posed by the Soviet Union.

• The Biggest Threat

  Why do we have over 7,000 nukes in our arsenal – enough to destroy the world several times over? Why are the contracts for “modernization” speeding through the procedural hoops faster than anyone can keep track of them?

• Home Office, Saudi Arabia and the need for a ‘safe space’

• Saudi Arabia and Israel: An Axis of Convenience

  Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows. Take Israel and Saudi Arabia for instance. The two Middle Eastern powers might be expected to have zero common ground. Israel is the arch-colonizer of Arabs and Muslims, while Saudi Arabia governs the motherland of the Arabs and the two capitals of Islam, Mecca and Medina. The two do not even have formal diplomatic relations.

  Yet since 2006, and especially since the 2011 Arab Spring, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been close de facto allies in what might be called the Crescent Wars: a sustained assault against the “Shia Crescent” (Iran, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah, and to some extent Iraq) by a US-led coalition (including both Western and Sunni Muslim forces).

• U.S. Media Condemns Iran’s “Aggression” in Intercepting U.S. Naval Ships — in Iranian Waters

  It goes without saying that every country has the right to patrol and defend its territorial waters and to intercept other nations’ military boats that enter without permission. Indeed, the White House itself last night was clear that, in its view, this was “not a hostile act by Iran” and that Iran had given assurances that the sailors would be promptly released. And this morning they were released, exactly as Iran promised they would be, after Iran said it determined the trespassing was accidental and the U.S. apologized and promised no future transgressions.

• The reckless power behind the throne

  In the past year, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has abandoned the cautious fence-sitting that long characterised its diplomatic style in favour of an unprecedented, hawkish antagonism. That this transformation coincides with the meteoric rise of a previously little known prince – 30 year-old Mohammad bin Salman – is no accident; it seems that the prince is now the power behind the throne.

  Since the death of the first king of modern Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz, in 1953, the kingdom has been ruled by an increasingly elderly succession of six of his 45 sons; the last incumbent, Abdullah, died last January aged 90 and was replaced by the present king, Salman, who is 81 and rumoured to be suffering from dementia. The youthful, sabre-rattling Prince Mohammad, insiders say, is Salman’s favourite son by his third and favourite wife, Fahda.

  Salman has one remaining brother – 75 year-old Muqrin – who would normally have been next in line for the throne. Whether alone, or at the instigation of others, Salman removed Muqrin from the succession three months after he became king. Prince Mohammad now moved up the line of succession to become ‘deputy Crown Prince’, with only his 56 year-old cousin, Mohammad bin Nayef between him and the throne.

Transparency Reporting

• Reporter Sues Gitmo Over Audio Censorship at Military Trials

  In 2012, New Yorker reporter Mattathias Schwartz covered the tribunal of suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on two occasions at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Schwartz was allowed to sit in a separate room behind three panes of soundproof glass and watch the tribunal in real time, but a 40-second delayed audio feed inside the room ensured that no classified information was inadvertently leaked.

  But Schwartz noticed a problem. What Schwartz saw from behind the glass didn’t jibe with what he heard over the audio. That’s why the reporter is now suing the Department of Defense and several other agencies to get some answers.

• Judge Calls Out Prosecutors For Bogus Subpoena Gag Orders

  At long last, it appears some prosecutors will no longer be putting BS gag orders on their subpoenas. Eastern District of New York judge Raymond J. Dearie has expressed his displeasure with the language found on nearly all subpoenas issued by the Brooklyn, New York US Attorney’s Office.

  With the exception of National Security Letters, recipients of subpoenas are free to inform the targets of the documents as well as discuss them publicly. (The exception is financial institutions served in grand jury investigations related to fraud or drug trafficking.) But that doesn’t stop prosecutors and investigators from adding misleading statements to their subpoenas. They can only ask recipients not to disclose anything. They can’t demand it. That’s called “prior restraint” — something the government should be taking great care to avoid. But some still make it appear as though the recipient has no choice but to comply and shut up.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Looking back at the corporate circus inside COP21

  The “sponsors” board at the entrance to COP21/Adam Ramsay

  The world finally has a climate deal. But however triumphant our leaders and the mainstream media may be, let there be no doubt – the Paris climate agreement fails justice, it fails our future, and leaves so many behind.

  Rich countries have been excluded from liability for loss and damage in the poorest, most vulnerable and least responsible nations. Human rights have been removed from the text. The 1.5°C goal is only aspirational. A peak date for emissions is absent. The concept of “emissions neutrality” has been inserted, implying pollution can continue, but with dodgy offsetting, technofixes and geoengineering. Numerous other loopholes and injustices have been allowed through.

  With this in mind, lets take a look back at the environment in which this deal was hashed out.

• Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Look of a Badly Oiled Planet

  When it comes to news about Saudi Arabia, the execution of an oppositional Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, has topped the headlines recently — and small wonder. Aging King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud and his 30-year-old son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the new defense minister who has already involved his country in a classic quagmire war in Yemen, clearly intended that death as a regional provocation. The new Saudi leadership even refused to return the cleric’s body to his family for burial, but interred it with the many al-Qaeda terror suspects killed at the same time, some beheaded. After death, in other words, al-Nimr was left in uncomfortable company. Think of it as the ultimate beyond-the-grave insult. The provocative message embedded in the announcement of his execution was so obvious that, in Shia Iran, crowds supporting that country’s religious hardliners (with their own hideous execution policies) promptly torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran. In the following days, as the Saudis broke diplomatic relations with Iran, ended a failing truce in Yemen (promptly bombing a home for the blind and also hitting the Iranian embassy in Sana’a), and rallied Sunni neighboring states to similarly break ties or at least downgrade relations, the whole, roiling region hit the news as war fears rose.

• Huge U.S. coal company declares bankruptcy

  One of the nation’s largest coal companies, Arch Coal, filed for bankruptcy Monday, making it the second company with large Western mines to seek Chapter 11 restructuring in recent months.

  The St. Louis-based company announced that it expects to continue to operate its mines and pay its 4,600 employees while it seeks a bankruptcy court’s approval for its debt restructuring. Arch said its lenders had agreed to reduce its debt by more than $4.5 billion, but that deal would have to be approved by the court.

  Responding to its employees’ and retirees’ fears, Arch said it does not anticipate major layoffs or disruptions to its pensions due to the bankruptcy. But it conceded that market conditions may impact staffing. The company operates two surface mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin as well as the underground West Elk mine in Somerset, Colorado. It has proposed opening a surface mine in southeastern Montana, the Otter Creek project. It also has mines in Appalachia and Illinois.

• Anonymous Takes Down Nissan’s Website Against Illegal Whale Hunting In Japan

  With changing times, the international community has banned the whale hunting practice. However, it’s a common knowledge that Japanese people call whale meat their “nostalgia food” as it connects them to their culture and heritage. As a protest against Japan’s stance on whale hunting, Anonymous hacking collective has taken down Nissan’s website to put indirect pressure on the government.

Finance

• The Chapo Secrets the Press Should Be Squealing About

  If Penn is sincere in his stated desire to end the war on drugs, ending the profits for American banks tied to illicit trafficking would need to be one of the first steps.

  But he doesn’t name those companies that are laundering Chapo’s money, which will continue to be laundering Sinaloa cartel money even as Guzmán gets removed from the network.

  Of course, Spiny and El Alto probably share Chapo’s desire to keep those names out of print, in part because they’re part of the power structure that the banks bolster, in part because banks sometimes narc on their customers to save their own hides.

• The Secret of El Chapo’s Success: Diversification

  By some estimates, the just-nabbed billionaire drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, supplies more than half of the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana that comes into the United States. But not all of those drugs were created equal in his eyes. While pot undoubtedly helped El Chapo get his start, it’s no longer the key to his dominion.

• How Years Of Welfare Politics Is Leaving Thousands To Freeze This Winter

  As winter sets in around the country, thousands of the nation’s poor are struggling to keep the heat on thanks to intentional underfunding of a key federal progam.

  Pennsylvania saw an 11 percent increase in applications for heating assistance but granted benefits to just 1 percent more households than last season. There are more than 24,000 households in the state going without normal utility service at the start of the coldest months, a 14-year high.

  And in Idaho, state officials expect to assist at least 2,000 fewer households than last year after a streamlined process and more generous per-household benefits drained the state’s allotment of funds. The state “still has crisis funding available for individuals who have a crisis situation” later in the year, program administrator Kristin Matthews said in an email. But in the meantime, the state is encouraging low-income households left out in the cold to seek help from charities.

• Caputalism: will capitalism die?

  Reduced growth is, for various reasons, a systemic problem. To understand this we must examine a decisive factor in capitalism. What made it so successful and prosperous was investment credit. In other words, it needs debt. Firms take out credit, run up debt in order to invest, but these investments only pay back if there’s adequate growth; if not, there’s a wave of bankruptcy.

• Hillary Clinton Whiffs on Reforming Wall Street’s Rating Agencies

  Hillary Clinton’s response to Bernie Sanders’s plan to aggressively break up the big banks responsible for the financial crisis is to suggest that he is naive.

  “My plan also goes beyond the biggest banks to include the whole financial sector,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed in December. “My plan is more comprehensive,” she said at the first Democratic debate in October — and for that reason, “frankly, it’s tougher.”

  But Clinton’s vision of financial reform neglects one part of the industry everyone agrees was an essential factor in the 2008 crisis: the credit rating agencies, which assess the worthiness of Wall Street securities for investors.

  Sanders’s plan, released last week, would no longer allow the companies that issue securities to pick which rating agency they use – a simple but outrageous practice that creates an enormous conflict of interest and helps facilitate fraud.

  The heart of Clinton’s pitch on Wall Street is that she recognizes all potential hazards. But there is not one word in her big reform plan about the rating agencies.

• Govt confirms plans to sign TPP in Auckland

  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said New Zealand had offered to host the signing in early February.

  It said arrangements were still being finalised as TPP partner countries completed their domestic procedures to sign it.

  Last week the Chilean government announced the signing would be taking place in New Zealand on about 4 February, but duty minister Simon Bridges said at that time arrangements had still to be confirmed.

  The 12 countries which are signing the agreement are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam.

• Obama Calls For TPP Approval On Eve Of ITC Hearing

  The three-day hearing starting today at the ITC starts the legislative process to adopt the TPP and the general feedback of most large business associations can be roughly summarized as “in favor with concerns.”

• Chinese Official: Bets Against Yuan Are ‘Ridiculous and Impossible’

  Wagers that the yuan will slump 10% or more against the dollar are “ridiculous and impossible,” a senior Chinese economic official said Monday, warning that China had a sufficient tool kit to defeat attacks on its currency.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• The Miami Herald Exposes How The GOP Tried To Sell Two Different SOTU Responses

• Bakery Owned By Anti-Immigrant Texas Politician Hired Undocumented Immigrants

  Thomas McNutt, who’s currently running to be a state representative in Texas, is relying on a stringently anti-immigrant platform. He’s criticized “politicians in Austin” for refusing “to address the problem of illegal immigration,” and his campaign website proclaims the country needs to “turn off the magnets that drive further illegal immigration.”

  However, McNutt hasn’t necessarily put those policies into practice at his company, Collin Street Bakery — a Corsicana, TX business that’s known for its fruitcakes. At least two undocumented immigrants say they were once employed by the Collin Street Bakery, with one going so far as to call McNutt a “hypocrite.”

• Is Britain’s media biased against the left?

  It is difficult to be a pacifist and love terrorists, but then logic and accuracy are not required in media attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. While some political leaders can simply re–order their front bench to improve competence or coherence, for Corbyn the motive is said to be ‘revenge’. Some commentators, from the Guardian to the Telegraph saw the New Year reshuffle as effective in establishing his authority, but the BBC which shouldn’t be taking sides, dismissed it as, “a political pantomime”, which, “has again exposed his team’s lack of know–how in just getting things done”, with “days of concern and chaos” (BBC Radio 4 News, 6th January 2016). The concern has very largely been with the BBC and the right–wing media, but as Martin Kettle in the Guardian notes, Corbyn has actually stabilised his position, “His project… is about control of the Labour party and by that yardstick… this has been a good week” (6th January 2016).

• Six Years Of Right-Wing Media Attacks On Obama’s State Of The Union Addresses

  Right-wing media personalities have incessantly attacked President Obama’s six previous State of the Union addresses — from calling the speeches “boring” to questioning his decision to invite a wounded veteran to the event — and have even frequently waged the attacks before the addresses even occurred. Ahead of Obama’s January 12 State of the Union address, Media Matters looks back at conservative media’s long history of attacking annual addresses.

• Why the BBC needs Hoggart’s vision now

  We need a vision of public service broadcasting that extends intellectual and imaginative freedom, and is as relevant to today’s battles as the Pilkington Report was fifty years ago.

• Fox News Has Given Donald Trump Nearly $30 Million In Free Airtime During The Presidential Campaign

  According to a previous Media Matters analysis, Trump far outpaced the other Republican presidential candidates in Fox News interview airtime in the second half of 2015. From May through December 15, Trump appeared on the network for nearly 23 hours — no other candidate had more than 10 hours on the network during that time period.

• Bernie Has More Supporters Than Trump, Gets 4% of Coverage

  Everyone knows it. The RNC knows it. The MSM knows it. Everyone who can do basic math knows it.

  That’s not me saying it, either. That’s the finding from the RNC’s 2012 “autopsy report”. The GOP needs 40% of the Latino vote to win. Romney didn’t come close. The current GOP crop is doing worse. And then there is Trump. See this super long line? That is Trump’s unfavorability among Latinos: a record 51% . Yes, it was back in August but if anything, it has gotten worse.

• Ayn Rand’s Perverted Worldview Will Destroy the GOP in the End

  Ryan, like many politicians on both sides of the aisle, is being cynical. True, it’s particularly disconcerting when someone exercises that kind of cynicism in response to a president crying for the dead—the dead schoolchildren, the dead churchgoers, the dead on the streets of Chicago—and all other varieties of gun-murdered citizens—but Ryan and the Republicans are hardly our only detached cynics. They are, however, our most open and brazen ones, particularly on the issue of modest gun-control measures of the sort that—it’s a cliché at this point to state—a vast majority of Americans and Republicans support.

Censorship

• Argentines Protest Government Censorship

  Argentines descended upon the Plaza de Mayo to defend freedom of expression in support of recently dismissed journalist Victor Hugo Morales.

  Thousands of Argentines gathered in the Plaza de Mayo on Buenos Aires Tuesday to protest repression and censorship under President Mauricio Macri.

  The protesters defended freedom of expression and expressed support for respected journalist and sports commentator Victor Hugo Morales, who was dismissed from his post at Radio Continental Monday.

• Cuban artists still condemned to silence

  Dissident artists are no better off post-Fidel, and renewed relations with the US haven’t helped as many hoped or claimed they would

• Charlie Hebdo caricature by Israeli artist removed from Tel Aviv exhibit

• Israeli teens pay homage to Charlie Hebdo in cartoon contest

• Muhammad cartoons censored at Charlie Hebdo exhibit in Tel Aviv

• Uproar Over Censored Cartoons at Charlie Hebdo Tribute Exhibition in Tel Aviv

• Indonesia’s film censorship agency has eyes on Netflix

• NOOOO!: Indonesian Censorship Board wants IT Ministry to block Netflix

  As soon as the unexpected and glorious news that Netflix had become available in Indonesia (and pretty much the rest of the world) broke last Thursday, there were rumors that the government was going to screw it all up for us by finding some BS reason for censoring the service. And now it looks like those rumors may come to pass.

• State OKs $475K settlement in prison censorship case

  State officials Tuesday approved $475,000 to settle a complaint over censorship of inmate publications that was initially addressed in a lawsuit filed 15 years ago.

  The state Board of Examiners chaired by Gov. Brian Sandoval authorized the payment to cover damages to Prison Legal News and attorney fees. The Nevada attorney general’s office said had the case gone to trial, attorney fees alone could have reached $1.3 million.

  In 2000, U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben granted an injunction against the Nevada Department of Corrections, prohibiting prison officials from blocking inmate access to Prison Legal News, a monthly magazine on criminal justice issues. The state paid about $44,000 to settle that case and signed a stipulation saying prisoners are permitted to subscribe to publications of their choice, with some limitations and censorship depending on content.

• EXCLUSIVE M.I.A. Responds to French Soccer Team Demanding Takedown of “Borders” Video About Refugees

  M.I.A.’s video for her new song “Borders” has caused some controversy in the professional soccer world. The French team Paris Saint-Germain has requested the video be taken offline because M.I.A. is seen in the video wearing a modified version of the club’s shirt. The shirt has the words “Fly Pirates” across the middle instead of “Fly Emirates.” In this excerpt from a forthcoming interview on Democracy Now!, M.I.A. responds to the controversy.

• Netflix availability marred by censorship issues

• IT Ministry says it will regulate, not block, Netflix in Indonesia

• Indonesian Censorship Board Binge-Watched Netflix, Now Wants to Ban It

  The Indonesia Film Censorship Board (LSF) has held an emergency meeting regarding Netflix’s recent global expansion and may ban the service from the country entirely.

  “Last Saturday we watched the movies [available on Netflix]… there are some movies that we have forbid from being screened in the cinemas,” Ahmad Yani Basuki, the chairman of the LSF, said of the meeting. He noted that these films are not allowed in Indonesia and that, if Netflix does not submit its entire service to review by the censorship board, “we will recommend the Communication and Informatics Ministry to block the service.”

• Draft to authorise media censorship during emergency situations

• Charter to declare orbital satellite slots national assets

• Constitution Drafting Commission to keep parts of 2007 Constitution in new charter

• CDC drops media censorship provision from draft constitution

• New Thai charter provision to prevent government from wasteful spendings

• CDC drops plan for additional media-censorship powers

• Censorship Is Not the Way To Win Against Terrorism

• Bus lane plan for A40 alongside GCHQ would lead to ‘mayhem’

  The work included a combination of CCTV, ground penetrating radar, trial holes and duct surveys.

• Legislator Wants To Ban People From Posting Pictures Of Accidents To Social Media… For At Least One Hour

  Would posting video of a football game to Facebook violate this law? (“An event that could reasonably result in a serious physical injury.”) How about a traffic stop? (Risk for physical injury again, obviously.) For that matter, is the law only violated IF a “serious physical injury” occurs or just when it could be the potential end result? Example: an automobile accident looks horrendous but everyone involved suffers only cuts and bruises. Does this fall on the right side of Carney’s proposal?

  And that’s before you get to the costs involved in tracking down a person who posted the illicit footage to hit them up for $20-100. If nothing else, a guaranteed money-loser like this should be tossed on P&L merits alone.

  The “one hour” blackout also poses a problem. Who determines when the countdown starts? Those issuing the tickets? The EMS crew (if any)? The victims (if any)? An official clock located at Carney’s office?

• Lego caves in after Ai Weiwei ‘censorship’ campaign

• Lego updates bulk buy policy following Ai Weiwei political ‘censorship’ row

• Lego changes bulk-buying policy after Ai Weiwei ‘censorship’ backlash

• Lego changes bulk buy policy after Ai Weiwei backlash

• Lego scraps ban on ‘political’ bulk orders after Ai Weiwei storm

• MIA tells PSG football club to see the ‘bigger picture’ over Borders dispute

• M.I.A. in video row with Paris Saint-Germain F.C.

• MIA flies in the face of PSG’s wishes

• Paris Saint-Germain asks rap artist MIA to stop using its brand and sponsors in video clip

• MIA: ‘I have people in higher places who hate me’

• M.I.A. Resists Censorship of Refugee Crisis-Themed ‘Borders’ Video

• M.I.A. Reacts to Paris Saint-Germain Threats to Censor Her ‘Borders’ Video

• “It’s gone over their heads” M.I.A says in response to Paris Saint-Germain criticism

• M.I.A responds to the ‘Borders’ video PSG football shirt fiasco

• M.I.A responds to PSG’s order to remove her video ‘Borders’ from the internet

• British singer MIA vs Qatar-owned French football club

• M.I.A. Responds to Paris Saint-Germain Criticism: “It’s Gone Over Their Head”

• Paris-Saint Germain Football Club Demands M.I.A To Stop Wearing Its Jersey

• M.I.A. Talks About the “Borders” Video and Why She’s Getting Legal Threats for a Soccer Jersey

• Sex censorship breeds a fetish-focused social network

  As it turns out, Instagram was a touchy subject.

Privacy

• Open letter to the world’s governments: protect encryption!

  La Quadrature du Net joins other organisations and individuals around the world by signing the open letter to governments in order to encourage them to promote encryption techniques for communications and IT systems. The original letter and its signatories can be found on the website “SecureTheInternet.org”.

• How to Chat Anonymously Online

  Chatting anonymously on the Internet isn’t used solely for shadowy criminal hackers and government operatives. From journalists to congressmen, learning how to adjust the privacy of our digital communication is becoming an ever more important skill.

• EFF To Court: Cisco Must Be Held Accountable For Aiding China’s Human Rights Abuses

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal appeals court to reinstate a lawsuit seeking to hold Cisco Systems accountable for aiding in human rights abuses by building the Chinese government a system that Cisco officials knew was intended to identify—and facilitate the capture and torture of—members of the Falun Gong religious minority.

  In an amicus brief filed Monday with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, EFF and the groups ARTICLE 19 and Privacy International argue that the plaintiffs sufficiently alleged that Cisco understood that the “Golden Shield” system (also known as The Great Firewall) it custom-built for China was an essential component of the government’s program of persecution against the Falun Gong—persecution that included online spying and tracking, detention, and torture.

  In Doe v. Cisco Systems Inc., Falun Gong victims and their families sued Cisco under a law known as the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to bring claims in U.S. federal court for violations of human rights laws. A federal judge dismissed the case, saying the plaintiffs didn’t offer enough support for their claim that Cisco knew the customized features of the Golden Shield enabling the identification and apprehension of Falun Gong practitioners specifically would ultimately lead to torture.

• Pentagon Will Investigate NSA Crackdown on Would-Be Snowdens

  A Defense Department inspector general is initiating a review of a National Security Agency crackdown on computer users who have access to too much information.

• What Sean Penn Teaches Us About How Not to Chat With a Fugitive

  INTERVIEWING THE MOST WANTED MAN in the hemisphere is not something any sane person undertakes lightly. Aside from weighing the risk to one’s personal safety, a journalist must also protect his or her source by taking careful precautions — some reporters have gone so far as to risk or actually receive jail time rather than break the confidence of their sources. As the Snowden revelations have brought ubiquitous mass surveillance into sharp relief, these considerations have become far more complex and personal fortitude isn’t always enough.

  On Saturday, Rolling Stone published a major scoop: Actor Sean Penn traveled to northwestern Mexico to speak with Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera — “El Chapo” — the notorious leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. It was El Chapo’s first (and perhaps last) press interview as a free man. At the time of the visit, El Chapo was a fugitive in hiding, but the day before the article went live, Mexican marines, with support from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals, captured him after “a fierce gun battle.”

• Ex-spy chief: Ukrainian cyberattack a warning sign for US utilities

  Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA, says the US faces ‘darkening skies’ after malware linked power outages in Ukraine.

• NSA is world’s best hacker thief, says former director

• NY State Senator Proposes Ban On Sale Of Encrypted Smartphones

  It appears someone’s listening to local crackpot New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s demands that encryption be outlawed to make law enforcement easier. His “white paper” didn’t have the guts to make this demand, instead couching it in language stating he would be completely unopposed to a legislative ban on encryption, but that he wasn’t going to be the bad guy asking for it.

• Maj. Gen. Westergren tapped to run NSA codebreaker unit

  Maj. Gen. Mark Westergren will be the next deputy chief of the National Security Agency’s Central Security Service, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

• Air Force general tapped to run NSA codebreaker unit

• Former Director: NSA Are the Best Thieving Hackers in the World

  The former director of the NSA made no qualms while speaking about cyberespionage operations at a recent cybersecurity conference in Miami Beach. Hayden delivered the keynote address at the S4X16 conference, with the night’s topic of focus on hackers targeting critical infrastructure such as power plants and utilities like water and gas.

• Social Media Companies Should Decline the Government’s Invitation to Join the National Security State

  The pressure on social media companies to limit or take down content in the name of national security has never been greater. Resolving any ambiguity about how much the Obama administration values the companies’ cooperation, the White House on Friday dispatched the highest echelon of its national security team — including the attorney general, the FBI director, the director of national intelligence, and the NSA director — to Silicon Valley for a meeting with technology executives chaired by the White House chief of staff himself. The agenda for the meeting tried to convey a locked-arms sense of camaraderie, asking, “How can we make it harder for terrorists to leveraging [sic] the internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?”

  Congress, too, has been turning up the heat. On December 16, the House passed the Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act, which would require the president to submit a report on “United States strategy to combat terrorists’ and terrorist organizations’ use of social media.” The Senate is considering a far more aggressive measure, which would require providers of Internet communications services to report to government authorities when they have “actual knowledge” of “apparent” terrorist activity (a requirement that, because of its vagueness and breadth, would likely harm user privacy and lead to over-reporting).

• House Grills State Department Over Wassenaar Arrangement

  Congressional Representatives grilled the parties responsible for the U.S. implementation of controversial changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement in a joint hearing before subcommittees of the House Oversight and Homeland Security Committees today. Witnesses included officials from the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of State, as well as representatives of the tech industry, including Symantec, Microsoft, VMWare, and the Information Technology Industry Council.

• Will James Clapper Be the First Known Victim of OmniCISA’s Regulatory Immunity?

  Viscerally, I’m laughing my ass off that Verizon (among others) has shared Clapper’s metadata without his authority. “Not wittingly,” they might say if he asks them about that. But I recognize that it’s actually not a good thing for someone in such a sensitive position to have his metadata exposed (I mean, to the extent that it wasn’t already exposed in the OPM hack).

• Teen Who Hacked CIA Email Is Back to Prank US Spy Chief

  One of the “teenage hackers” who broke into the CIA director’s AOL email account last year hasn’t given up targeting government intelligence officials. His latest victim is the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Motherboard has learned.

  A group of hackers calling themselves “Crackas With Attitude” or CWA made headlines in October, hacking into CIA Director John Brennan’s email account and apparently getting access to several online tools and portals used by US law enforcement agencies.The hackers’ exploits prompted the FBI to issue an alert warning government officials of their attacks.

• The FBI Is Using NSLs to Target “Facilities” Now

  The Freedom of the Press Foundation has been looking for more details about when the FBI can use NSLs to obtain records including the communication records of journalists, and they just obtained initial response to a FOIA on the subject. There is abundant reason to believe the government does this in leak cases, though as Trevor Timm noted in his piece on this, “a ‘broad reading’ of the media guidelines [was] allegedly hindering leak investigations” in the summer of 2015.

  As part of DOJ’s response to FPF’s FOIA, the provided a section of the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide for the FBI that covers NSLs generally. While I don’t think the FOIA response provides the date of the DIOG (it was declassified on November 6, 2015), it appears to post-date last June’s passage of USA Freedom Act, because it incorporates the language on disclosure from that bill (see the last section).

• Illumio Taps Former NSA Guru as Strategy Chief

  Illumio, the hot cybersecurity startup that aims to protect corporate infrastructure in internal data centers and outside clouds, has hired Nathaniel Gleicher, former director for cybersecurity for the National Security Council.

• The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’

  While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

  The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

  The man had a firearm conviction and gang associations, so out of caution police called a negotiator. The suspect surrendered, and police said the intelligence helped them make the right call — it turned out he had a gun.

• CES 2016 takeaways: IoT could be the death of your security

  For the most part, the CES 2016 show was largely a yawner—maturation rather than innovation. Yes, there was a lot of interesting stuff outside of IT gear—and the IT gear could be as fun as a 200-node Raspberry Pi cluster running hadoop or wicked-fast IEEE 802.11ac wireless hubs that do endless if secure tricks.

  The damage, the damnation, the truculent total churl of the event was this: all of the new Interent of Thingies/IoT/KewlGear has no cohesive security strategy. It’s a mosh pit of certificates, easy-auth, Oh! Let’s Connect Our Gear Together! (add breathy sigh!) meaninglessness.

• Cell-site data analysis nabs robber who used mobile phone during heists

  A woman charged in connection to a string of armed jewelry store heists was arrested after the authorities analyzed cell-site data of telephone calls made during the nine-month robbery spree across the US Southeast, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.

  The bureau said in court documents that the 24-year-old suspect, Abigail Kemp, wore an earpiece and was talking into it during several of the robberies. Store employees were tied up and shoppers were held at gunpoint during the robberies. At one incident in Florida in August, in which the Georgia woman allegedly netted $400,000 in jewelry, the FBI said (PDF) that the suspect “was observed with a cellular telephone and wearing a cellular telephone earpiece during the robbery and was heard speaking to someone. At one point during the robbery, the earpiece fell out of the white female’s ear and she promptly put it back in.”

• The hostile use of civilian drones in the UK, and what to do about it

  Remote Control, a project hosted by Oxford Research Group, has issued a report exploring the designs and capabilities of over 200 current and upcoming unmanned aerial, ground, and marine drones in order to understand the threats these platforms pose to potential targets. The report, entitled “Hostile drones: the hostile use of drones by non-state actors against British targets,” also outlines the strategies available to mitigate the threats.

  The report notes that: “There are particular concerns that drones will be used as simple, affordable and effective airborne Improvised Explosive Devices.” It says that “Governments are also concerned by the decentralisation and democratisation of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities made possible by the widespread availability of drones,” but points out that activists working to hold governments and corporations to account regard them as powerful new tools for that reason.

• Ex-NSA boss says FBI director is wrong on encryption

• Ex-NSA boss says FBI’s plan for ending encryption is a terrible idea

• Former Director Of NSA And CIA Says US Cybersecurity Policy MIA

• Former Director says NSA is world’s best hacker thief

• Latest Email Dump Shows Hillary Clinton Telling Aide To Send Classified Documents Over Unsecure Fax Line

  In the latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails — forced out of the State Department’s gnarled fists by an FOIA lawsuit and a recently-released Inspector General’s report showing the agency flat out sucks at responding to FOIA requests — there’s a conversational thread suggesting the presidential candidate considers her access to classified information more important than the security of that information.

• We know this isn’t about PRISM, Matt Warman MP. But do you?

  The MP offered distracting and irrelevant counter-statements to former NSA man Bill Binney during an oral evidence session last week before the Parliamentary committee scrutinising the draft Investigatory Powers Bill.

  The Register understands that Binney may seek to resubmit his evidence after the committee’s poor hearing.

  Warman incorrectly stated that GCHQ’s upstream data acquisition program (which he misidentified as PRISM) wasn’t covered by the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, and that even if it was, he wrongly stated the program would be prevented by the draft legislation’s “request filters”.

• [Old] NSA Whistleblower Tells UK Parliament: “Snooper’s Charter” Is Deadly

• The State of the Union, Ignoring the Elephant in the Room

  But even after the Snowden revelations, mass surveillance by the National Security Agency remains largely unchecked. With a year remaining in its final term, the Obama administration has failed to implement the wide-ranging reforms necessary, as the President eight years ago promised in writing, “to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

• Et tu, Fortinet? Hard-coded password raises new backdoor eavesdropping fears

  Less than a month after Juniper Network officials disclosed an unauthorized backdoor in the company’s NetScreen line of firewalls, researchers have uncovered highly suspicious code in older software from Juniper competitor Fortinet.

  The suspicious code contains a challenge-and-response authentication routine for logging into servers with the secure shell (SSH) protocol. Researchers were able to unearth a hard-coded password of “FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27″ (not including the quotation marks) after reviewing this exploit code posted online on Saturday. On Tuesday, a researcher posted this screenshot purporting to show someone using the exploit to gain remote access to a server running Fortinet’s FortiOS software.

• Companies can monitor workers’ private online chats, European court rules

  Privacy concerns dismissed by European court of human rights after Romanian engineer fired for using Yahoo Messenger to communicate with fiancee

• EFA gets behind global call for strong encryption

  Non-profit, digital freedom and rights group, Electronic Frontiers Australia, has joined experts and organisations in more than 35 countries in asking world leaders to support strong encryption and to reject any law, policy, or mandate that would undermine digital security.

  EFA Executive Officer Jon Lawrence said today that calls to undermine encryption in the name of ‘national security’ are “fundamentally misguided and dangerous”.

  According to Lawrence, encryption is a “necessary and critical tool enabling individual privacy, a free media, online commerce and the operations of organisations of all types, including of course government agencies”.