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02.26.16

Links 26/2/2016: Open-O Partnership, GPL Violations in ZFS/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Does Linux Still Need Windows Support?

      As an alternative operating system, Linux has always found ways to co-exist with Windows. However, I realized recently that I had gone four years without any installation of Windows in the house. I had to wonder: is Windows support even necessary in 2016?

    • Hands-On: Using Bluetooth on Linux

      I haven’t written about using my Bluetooth devices on Linux in quite some time. That is good, because it means that they are all just working so there is not a lot to write about. But there have been some interesting and useful developments in Bluetooth support for various Linux distributions recently, so I think it will be useful to run through a survey of Bluetooth devices and Linux distributions.

    • Review: System 76 Wild Dog Pro

      I got an order confirmation almost immediately with an estimate of 2 to 6 days to ship. Soon after that I got a note stating that the Wild Dog was running toward the latter end of that range. I figured I could just use my laptop until the new machine arrived if necessary, and I waited.

      While I was waiting, I still continued to use my old desktop. I noticed the rebooting issue happened toward the end of the day. It finally dawned on me (I’m a little thick) that it might be heat related. I crawled under the desk to find that the power supply fan wasn’t working. I ordered a new one of those to see if it would help.

  • Server

    • New platform offers endpoint protection for Linux servers

      Most of the internet is powered by Linux servers, so it’s not surprising that they’re increasingly a target for attack. In particular recent attacks have focussed on using compromised systems to distribute malware to other systems.

      Many Linux systems rely on traditional signature-based threat detection which leaves them vulnerable to zero-day attacks. Endpoint security company SentinelOne is announcing a new solution aimed at protecting enterprise data centers and cloud providers from emerging threats that target Linux servers.

    • Docker Datacenter: A New Enterprise Product for Open Source Containers

      If there was ever a question about how Docker, the open source container virtualization company, planned to generate revenue from the enterprise market, it was answered this week. The company has rolled out a new platform, Docker Datacenter, as a commercial product for on-premise or private cloud container deployment.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK+ 3.18.8 & 3.19.10 Out with RandR 1.5 Fixes, Wayland Startup Notifications

        The GTK+ development team has been quite busy this week, and they have recently published two new releases of the cross-platform and open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.

      • Nautilus 3.20 to Have a New Small Zoom Level

        Nautilus developers have pushed a final major update for the 3.20 branch of the application, and they are preparing for the launch of the stable version.

      • Nautilus 3.20 Beta 1 Removes the Bookmark Manager, Adds a More Robust Search

        The popular Nautilus file manager has just received its first Beta build towards the major 3.20 milestone that will be unveiled this Spring as part of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

      • GNOME 3.19.91 beta tarballs due (and more)

        Hello all,

        We would like to inform you about the following:
        * GNOME 3.19.91 beta tarballs due
        * String Freeze

        Tarballs are due on 2016-02-29 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.19.91
        beta 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 3.19.91. 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!

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Miniscule i.MX7 module is also offered in SBC format

      Phytec has spun a Linux-supported, 50 x 41mm PhyCore-i.MX7 COM with -40 to 85°C support, also available as part of a sandwich-style PhyBoard-i.MX7 Zeta SBC.

      NXP’s low-power, Cortex-A7 based i.MX7 system-on-chip, which includes a Cortex-M4 MCU for real-time processing and motor control, appears to be heading for the same popularity as the i.MX6. Size matters with an IoT-focused chip like the i.MX, and Phytec has announced the smallest i.MX7 computer-on-module yet.

    • ARM Linux IoT gateway offers cloud services support

      Eurotech’s rugged “ReliaGate 10-11” IoT gateway runs Linux on a TI AM3352, offers numerous options, and is supported with an updated ESF 3.3 framework.

      Eurotech, which is known here mostly for its Intel Atom-based Catalyst computer-on modules, has announced a new version of its ReliaGate Internet of Things gateway. The ReliaGate 10-11 runs on a Linux stack based on Yocto Project 1.6 and Linux Kernel 3.14, and is supported by a newly updated, Java-based Everyware Software Framework (ESF) 3.3 for remote IoT device management.

    • OpenWRT router SBC mixes Cortex-A5 and FPGA

      DAB-Embedded’s wireless enabled “DAB-OWRT-SAMA5” router SBC runs OpenWrt Linux on an Atmel SAMA5D36 SoC linked to an Altera MAX 10 FPGA.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Samsung’s three most innovative Tizen products gets some artistic recognition

          With an established R&D, there is no stopping from innovations from happening at firms like Samsung. The fact that three of these recent innovations from Samsung had been built on the slowly growing Tizen platform however, gives it a special amount of attention in the Tech community. The three products from Samsung we are talking about here are the Gear S2 smartwatch, SUHD TVs and the unconventional new Family Hub Smart Refrigerator. Samsung have decided to rejoice this moment by working closely with an Artist, Kim Seung-Bae in showing the world what the company means by its innovations and Samsung’s design language in its most recent Tizen based innovations.

      • Android

        • Acecard: One Of The Most Advanced Android Trojans Of Our Time
        • Turing Robotics Drops Android And Sets Up Shop In Finland Amid Global Security Concerns

          Accompanying the announcement, TRI is switching its OS from Android to Jolla’s Sailfish.

          “We can now confirm that TRI has chosen to drop Android and use Jolla’s Sailfish OS. Sailfish is now running perfectly on the Turing Phone and we have started the final OS software testing phase,” the company announced on its Facebook page.

          Surveillance and privacy concerns have become central themes among mobile users around the world, highlighted by the ongoing spat between Apple and FBI.

          Indeed, TRI’s decision to both use Jolla OS and manufacture in Finland is about the primacy of privacy. Considering Android’s intimate relationship with Google growing security concerns around mobile security, the move speaks volumes.

        • Moto 360 Sport review: The best Android Wear fitness solution so far [Video]

          Still, I would say that — from what we’ve seen so far — the Moto 360 Sport is the best fitness option so far to run Google’s watch operating system. And that brings us to the price. Amazon is currently offering the device at around $280, which is $20 less than its retail $300. That’s too much, in my opinion, for any Android Wear watch. But it’s not terrible. It’s the same price as the 2nd generation Moto 360, and right around the same price as the Huawei Watch and other 2015 offerings. At this price I would probably just hold off for a while, but even if you don’t the Moto 360 Sport is a solid watch. At the very least, it’s not worse than the regular Moto 360.

Free Software/Open Source

  • NASA Takes Open Source to Mars

    NASA software engineer Parker Abercrombie is using open source to create a virtual workspace. The benefit of this open source project is that scientists and engineers can visit Mars in a virtual reality environment. While NASA hasn’t yet sent a manned mission to Mars, the virtual environment Abercrombie has made possible using open source is the next best thing.

    The project, called OnSight, enables scientists and engineers to work on Mars using what is known as “mixed reality.” Special headsets equipped with the OnSight software download the latest 3D maps of Mars’ terrain, giving the user a first-person view of the planet, much as if they had landed in a spaceship and were exploring on the ground.

    Read more

  • Top 5 sources for open source fonts

    When selecting a font, the decision process involves more than choosing between serif and sans serif: understanding how the font is licensed matters too. Though typographers need to be concerned with their rights to modify and extend a given font, even you as an end user should be asking yourself some questions. Do you have permission to use a font in commercial work, or in a public work at all? Can you even share that font with another person?

    If you’re creating a work you wish to share, then licensing matters to you, and you should understand how open source applies to the world of fonts.

  • How to add open source experience to your resume

    In this article, I’ll share my technique for leveraging open source contributions to stand out as a great candidate for a job in the technology field.

    No goal can be accomplished without first being set. Before jumping into a new commitment or spending the evening overhauling your resume, it pays to clearly define the traits of the job you’re seeking. Your resume is a piece of persuasive writing, so you have to know your audience for it to reach its full potential. Your resume’s audience is anyone with the need for your skills and the budget to hire you. When editing, read your resume while imagining what it’s like to be in their position. Do you look like a candidate that you would hire?

  • 50 Open Source Tools Tech Companies Love

    Over the last decade or so, many technology companies have begun embracing open source. Many use open source tools to run their own IT infrastructure and websites, some offers products and services related to or built on open source tools, and some are contributing to or supporting open source projects.

  • The U.S. Copyright Office requiring proprietary software in DMCA anti-circumvention study

    In Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention study, the U.S. Copyright Office extends comment period and asserts that proprietary software is required for comment submission.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Introduces Surveillance Principles for a Secure, Trusted Internet

        Security is paramount to a trusted Internet. Encryption is a critical part of how that trust is made real. The recent events around Apple and the FBI set a dangerous precedent. Our position on these issues is simple: the FBI should not be able to require a technology company to create code that “undoes” years of security enhancements by creating additional vulnerabilities.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hadoop, Spark, Deep Learning Mesh on Single GPU Cluster

      When it comes to leveraging existing Hadoop infrastructure to extend what is possible with large volumes of data and various applications, Yahoo is in a unique position–it has the data and just as important, it has the long history with Hadoop, MapReduce and other key tools in the open source big data stack close at hand and manned with seasoned experts.

    • Yahoo brings deep learning framework to Spark

      Yahoo has released CaffeOnSpark, which brings the fruits of two University of California, Berkeley projects together: vision-focused deep learning framework Caffe, and Big Data processing engine Apache Spark.

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook Pushes Open Source Wireless with Telecom Infra Project

      A new initiative by Facebook aims to speed the development of wireless networks by promoting more open source network components. The social network announced the launch of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) at Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona this week. Several hardware companies such as Nokia and Intel, as well as wireless providers like Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom have signed on to the project.

  • BSD

    • Speaking on BSD: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

      After answering various calls for presentations to a few upcoming shows, it stands to reason that Tom Petty is right: The waiting is the hardest part.

      Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similiarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

      This post discusses an atypical GPL violation. Unlike most GPL violations Conservancy faces, in this case, a third-party entity holds a magic wand that can instantly resolve the situation. Oracle is the primary copyright holder of ZFS, and, despite nearly eight years (going back to the days of Sun’s control of the code) of the anti-license-proliferation community’s urging, Oracle continues to license their code under their own, GPL-incompatible license. While this violation has many facets, and Oracle did not themselves violate GPL in this specific case, they hold the keys to this particular kingdom and they forbid the Linux community to enter. While there are complexities that we must address, in this context, Oracle could make everyone’s life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand. Nevertheless, until they do, since GPL-incompatible licenses are the root of all GPL violations, combinations of GPL’d code with Oracle’s GPL-incompatible code yield GPL violations, such as the ongoing violation by Canonical, Ltd.

    • Canonical accused of violating GPL with ZFS-in-Ubuntu 16.04 plan

      The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) thinks Canonical, the curator of Ubuntu, has breached the Gnu Public Licence (GPL).

      As the Conservancy explains, Canonical recently announced that Ubuntu 16.04 will “make OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system. Canonical reckons that adding OpenZFS represents “one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time.”

    • Software Freedom Conservancy Says ZFS Ubuntu Implementation Is Not Legal

      Software Freedom Conservancy group has issued a statement saying that the recent implementation of ZFS in Ubuntu is actually a GPS violation. The truth seems to be a matter of perspective.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Why Sci-Hub is the true solution for Open Access: reply to criticism

        This article is to reply to some points made by publishers as well as some librarians who don’t like what Sci-Hub is doing to their job now.

        I will start with an article published last wekk by Ernesto Priego Signal, Not Solution: Notes on Why Sci-Hub Is Not Opening Access

        The title is misleading by itself, if not funny. Sci-Hub is not a signal: for many researchers out there in the world, Sci-Hub is the only solution available to access articles. I can support my words by providing letters I received as well as some statistics, but I will do this in future posts. The problem are paywalls, and Sci-Hub is a tool that solves this problem. A signal is when someone talks about the problem of paywalls, like many OA advocates do. What differentiates Sci-Hub from this talk, is that Sci-Hub not talking, but actually solving this problem, providing access to those researchers who need it, including myself.

    • Open Hardware

      • Matt Adereth’s open source 3D printed ergonomic Dactyl Keyboard is truly amazing

        Without being noticed, keyboards have actually become one of the most important tools in our society and economy. There’s at least one in very home, office, store and school: a keyboard is truly universal. That reliance on this clever tool has already led to the development of various forms of ergonomic keyboards: keyboards that decrease the likelihood of developing wrist or hand related injuries, such as RSI. You’ve probably seen them or even worked on one: they tend to have a curve in the middle to more naturally accommodate the wrists. However, Matt Adereth has been working on a far more original model with the help of 3D printing: the Dactyl keyboard, that actually consists of two completely separate, curved keyboard segments.

      • A Slew of Open-Source Synthesizers

        To install on an Arduino UNO, fetch the zip file from this GitHub repository, and move each subfolder to your Arduino sketch directory. You’re ready to play along.

Leftovers

  • Windows 10 lock screen ads begin with Rise of the Tomb Raider push

    With more than 200 million systems running Windows 10—many of them having upgraded from an earlier version for free—Microsoft has decided it’s time to monetize the lock screen.

    Over the past few days, Windows 10 users have reported having their lock screens taken over by advertisements for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Microsoft started selling the game through the Windows Store last month, in what might be the start of a much bigger push into PC gaming.

    Microsoft hasn’t hid its intentions to use the Windows 10 lock screen as a commercial billboard, having first discussed its plans during last year’s Build developers conference. Now, Microsoft appears to be making good on those promises, with How-To Geek’s Chris Stobing and at least one Reddit user having seen the Rise of the Tomb Raider ads themselves.

  • It’s Official: ‘Idiocracy’ Writer Says His Satire of a Brain-Dead America Has Become Reality

    Idiocracy has been a long-cherished sci-fi satire in cult circles, telling the tale of two people who wake up from a cryogenic sleep to find that the country has become a wasteland of anti-intellectualism.

    Now, ten years later, the co-writer of the cult comedy classic, Etan Cohen, thinks that the movie is satire no longer, marveling that his movie has gone from fiction to non-fiction. On Twitter today, Cohen used his movie to perfectly sum up our current political climate.

  • The demise of FIFA’s empire

    The FIFA empire has been slowly crumbling since last May following a string of allegations, investigations and scandals.

    The governing body’s former president Sepp Baltter was handed an eight year ban- reduced to six this week – from all football activities in December, just over a year after Michael Garcia’s initial investigation.

  • Science

    • Online Tool Serves Up Ocean Science Studies

      Updates to BOEM’s Environmental Studies Program Information System (ESPIS) tool, hosted by NOAA Digital Coast, now enable users to search, filter, map, discover, and download more than 40 years of studies and related data that can provide critical information for ocean plans and decisions.

  • Hardware

    • EU Projects Unite on Heterogeneous ARM-based Exascale Prototype

      A trio of partner projects based in Europe – Exanest, Exanode and Ecoscale – are working in close collaboration to develop the building blocks for an exascale architecture prototype that will, as they describe, put the power of ten million computers into a single supercomputer. The effort is unique in seeking to advance the ARM64 + FPGA architecture as a foundational “general-purpose” exascale platform.

    • ARM, Open Source Feed Buzz Around HPC File System

      There is but a small cadre of scalable parallel file systems and while the list might be small, weighing the relative benefits of each option against the available resources can be a challenge, as Sven Breuner and his HPC admin colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute realized in 2004.

      They were certainly not the first or last organization to labor over the inevitable question of which of these scalable parallel file systems to choose, but they did take an interesting route. Notably, the limited choices have not changed over those years, either—nor have the list complaints about each.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • GUEST POST: The #FlintWaterCrisis didn’t just happen

      The Flint water crisis didn’t just happen. It’s been a story decades in the making.

      Cities in America have been on the downswing for many years — deliberate policy on the federal and state level has favored suburbs, and also the preferences of the Boomer generation was to go in that direction too. So, people and money has slowly (or quickly in some cases) filtered out of the cities into suburbia. Also the shift of manufacturing out of America has hit the Midwest very hard (aka the “Rust Belt”). When your city is built for a certain amount of people and then you lose big chunks of your population, it’s hard to make the math work to maintain that infrastructure.

      Anyway, that’s the story on the national level. In Michigan, too, cities and schools have been starved by a “Tea Party” mentality — before the Tea Party even existed. The state has balanced its budget every year, for decades, based on mathematical trickery and from taking funds away from local governments and schools. Proposal A shifted funding from a local level to a pool managed by the state, and that was just too much temptation not to raid. Proposal A also capped the amount of property taxes charged, which puts established cities at an advantage, and helps locations that are not yet built out — because the cap cuts deeper the longer that a house or condo stays within the same ownership.

      So, federal policies and state policies have made it harder and harder for cities to function in Michigan. Flint, especially, after having lost much of its manufacturing base and then many of its people, was struggling.

      Enter the Emergency Manager idea. These problems are systemic and have been building up for many years, and raising taxes is anathema to Republicans, so what do they do? It’s so much easier to fault local government, and come up with an end-around solution to put somebody else in charge who can “make the hard decisions”. Also you want an easy answer and term limits limit who will even be around to see the effects.

    • Google’s DeepMind AI group working with NHS to develop patient care software

      DeepMind, a London-based “neuroscience-inspired AI company” bought by Google in January 2014, has launched DeepMind Health. Its first project is a collaboration with the NHS. The company says: “We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care.”

      Working with leading kidney experts at the Royal Free Hospital in London, DeepMind Health has produced a mobile phone app called “Streams.” It is designed to present “timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury” (AKI). DeepMind says that “AKI is a contributing factor in up to 20% of emergency hospital admissions as well as 40,000 deaths in the UK every year. Yet NHS England estimate that around 25% of cases are preventable.”

  • Security

    • The Downside of Linux Popularity

      Popularity is becoming a two-edged sword for Linux.

      The open source operating system has become a key component of the Internet’s infrastructure, and it’s also the foundation for the world’s largest mobile OS, Google’s Android.

      Widespread use of the OS, though, has attracted the attention of hackers looking to transfer the dirty tricks previously aimed at Windows to Linux.

      Last year, for example, ransomware purveyors targeted Linux. Granted, it wasn’t a very virulent strain of ransomware, but more potent versions likely will be on the way.

    • Baidu is badforu – web browser and thousands of apps transmit personal data home

      Researchers have found that the Chinese Baidu browser and apps based on its SDK transmit user’s search terms, GPS coordinates, the addresses of websites visited and device’s MAC or IMEI address to Baidu’s servers without using SSL/TLS encryption or gaining the users permission.

    • Baidu Browser Acts like a Mildly Tempered Infostealer Virus

      The Baidu Web browser for Windows and Android exhibits behavior that could easily allow a security researcher to categorize it as an infostealer virus because it collects information on its users and then sends it to Baidu’s home servers.

    • Malware déjà vu – why we’re still falling for the same old threats

      In second place was Conficker – first discovered in 2008 – which again allows remote control and malware downloads. Together, these two families were responsible for nearly 40% of all malware attacks detected in 2015.

    • Conficker, AndroRAT Continue Malware Reigns of Terror

      Conficker meanwhile continued in its position as King of the Worms, remaining the most prevalent malware type and accounting for 25% of all known attacks during the period. Conficker is popular with criminals thanks to its focus on disabling security services to create more vulnerabilities in the network, enabling them to be compromised further and used for launching DDoS and spam attacks.

    • Child-Monitoring Company Responds To Notification Of Security Breach By Publicly Disparaging Researcher Who Reported It

      “Thanks for letting us know about this! We’ll get it fixed immediately!” said almost no company ever.

      There’s a long, but definitely not proud, tradition of companies shooting the messenger when informed of security flaws or possible breaches. The tradition continues.

      uKnowKids is monitoring software parents can install on their children’s cell phones that allows them to track their child’s location, as well as social media activity, text messages and created media. As such, it collects quite a bit of info.

    • Nissan Forgets Security Exists, Opens Leaf Owners To Remote Attack

      You can add Nissan to the laundry list of companies that aren’t making security a priority in the Internet of Things era. A hacker this week revealed that vulnerabilities in the Nissan Leaf companion app allows an attacker to not only track a driver’s driving behavior, but to physically control the Leaf’s heating and cooling systems. Not quite as severe some other car vulnerabilities that open vehicles to total control, the vulnerability still allows a hacker to cause some notable trouble by running down the Leaf’s batteries, potentially leaving an owner stranded.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The U.S. Extends Its Drone War Deeper Into Africa With Secretive Base

      GAROUA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, proclaimed the sign on the concrete and glass terminal building. The designation was something of a misnomer, because only three or four planes land each week in this sleepy outpost in northern Cameroon, near the Nigerian border, all of them domestic flights. The schedule of the flights tends to be unpredictable. The aging jet that had just flown me to Garoua from Douala, for example, had made an unscheduled stop in N’Djamena, the capital of neighboring Chad, so that a government minister could attend a funeral nearby. As a result, the plane had touched down in Garoua five hours late.

    • Badass Attorney Shoots Down the Case for Drones

      Last Sunday, General Michael V. Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times called “To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare.” After an opening scene of a drone operator double-checking for nearby civilians before taking out two enemy targets, General Hayden makes the case that America’s program of remote targeted killings, while not perfect, is achieving results. It has disrupted terrorist plots and weakened Al Qaida, he wrote. Furthermore, according to intelligence that Hayden himself claims to have seen, public concerns of massive civilian casualties are overblown.

    • Michael Hayden’s Pro-Drone Propaganda

      I have long been disturbed by the New York Times’ coverage of the drone campaigns. I was particularly appalled by the ghastly President-as-Godfather feature published on May 29, 2012. Many conservative pundits have complained that the so-called “liberal” newspaper serves as a mouthpiece for the current administration, which is shameful in and of itself. But how and why did the New York Times become an organ of state-funded propaganda? Whatever happened to fact-based, interest-free, objective journalism?

    • The Absurd Timing of Michael Hayden’s Drone Campaign

      MICHAEL HAYDEN, the former director of the CIA and the NSA, has been making the media rounds over the last few days, discussing and defending some of the most emblematic policies of the post-9/11 era in an effort to promote his new book.

      According to its Amazon description, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror delivers “an unprecedented high-level master narrative of America’s intelligence wars.” The title is a reference to Hayden’s philosophy of pushing national security policies to their limits — what he envisions as the edge.

    • People Die (from Drone Strikes) While Hayden Lies

      In a New York Times op-ed published on February 21, former CIA director, Air Force general, and “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror” author Michael Hayden advocated for the continuing use of drone warfare. He urges the public and implicitly, the next U.S. president, to “embrace” this policy for the desired result of “keeping America safe.” After over a decade of the CIA’s and USAF’s unilateral use of this sinister weapons system, a well-documented record of their unintended consequences confronts us, if we have the courage to face it.

    • Do US Drones Really Make Us Safer?
    • European Parliament calls for Saudi arms embargo

      The European Parliament called on the European Union to impose an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia on Thursday, saying Britain, France and other EU governments should no longer sell weapons to a country accused of targeting civilians in Yemen.

      EU lawmakers voted 359 in favour, 212 against and with 31 abstentions for the formal call for an EU arms embargo.

      Although the vote is not legally binding, lawmakers hope it will pressure the European Union to act.

    • The rape of East Timor: “Sounds like fun”

      Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

      The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

    • A New Low for the International Criminal Court

      The ICC really has plumbed new depths in the current trial of ex-Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo. I do urge you to read the analysis I wrote at the time of his overthrow. Gbagbo certainly was guilty of crimes, but much more killing and violence was done by current Ivory Coast President, and former Deputy MD of the IMF, Alassane Ouattara. My article was written at the time to counter an extremely misleading one written by Thalia Griffiths, editor of African Energy, and published in the Guardian. I have since discovered more about the role of Trafigura in funding Ouattara’s forces, and the picture becomes ever clearer.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

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

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

    • Tesla Says GM Pushing Indiana Bill To Kill Direct-To-Consumer Tesla Sales

      As we’ve documented extensively, the auto industry has worked tirelessly to erect barriers to Tesla’s market entry. Legacy automakers have been engaged in sustained hysterics specifically regarding Tesla’s direct-to-consumer sales model, which lets customers buy vehicles directly from Tesla online, with limited showrooms to view, touch and test drive the Tesla vehicles. Annoyed by this pesky Californian upstart, the auto industry has frequently tied draft legislation to campaign contributions to ban Tesla’s successful model. Why compete when you can cheat?

    • The Kafkaesque Battle of Soulseek and PayPal, and Why Free Speech Defenders Should be Worried About Payment Networks

      Does your business follow copyright law to the best of its ability? Not good enough. At least that was the case for one long-standing peer-to-peer network, which had its payment processing shut down after more than 14 years of being a loyal PayPal customer.

      Soulseek, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, faced a Kafkaesque battle with PayPal. When its donors were cut off from making payments to Soulseek, the network struggled to figure out what it had done wrong—or even get a response from PayPal to its questions. Thankfully, Soulseek reached out to EFF. We got in touch with Paypal and helped convince them to reinstate the network.

      PayPal did the right thing by restoring Soulseek’s account, and we commend them for that. But we’re also concerned: it’s not scalable for EFF to intervene whenever a law-abiding website is shut off from a payment provider (as we have done with an online bookseller and a short story archive). In addition, we think of Soulseek’s situation as indicative of a larger trend of Web censorship, as websites that haven’t violated any laws are choked of funds—a situation that was disastrous for WikiLeaks and is currently tightening a noose around the electronic neck of Backpage.com.

    • Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed

      There is an alternative. Achieving it requires understanding the dynamics at work and distinguishing between earned and unearned income, between productive and unproductive means of gaining wealth. That is the antidote to the neo-rentier power grab.

    • New Zealand Says Laws To Implement TPP Will Be Passed Now, Despite US Uncertainties, And Won’t Be Rolled Back Even If TPP Fails

      As Techdirt has noted, there is evidence from multiple sources that TPP will produce negligible economic benefits for most of the nations involved. Some governments are clearly well aware of this, because they are desperate to avoid an objective cost-benefit evaluation that would show that claims about TPP’s value don’t stack up. Even given that pig-headed determination to push the deal through, basic prudence would surely dictate that before making all the complex legislative changes required by TPP, countries should at least wait to see whether it’s going to happen.

    • Small businesses paying more tax than Uber

      When Uber revealed this week it paid just over $403,000 in tax in Australia over a three-year period many small businesses were left scratching their heads.

      The Silicon Valley technology giant with a market valuation of over US$60 billion responded to questions taken on notice at the Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance to disclose the amount of corporate tax it paid in Australia has only slightly increased from $19,387 in 2013, to $134,387 in 2014, and then $249,280 in 2015.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Anthony Hilton: Stay or go – the lack of solid facts means it’s all a leap of faith

      I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. “That’s easy,” he replied. “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”

    • With Donald Trump Looming, Should Dems Take a Huge Electability Gamble by Nominating Hillary Clinton?

      Many Democrats will tell you that there has rarely, if ever, been a more menacing or evil presidential candidate than Donald Trump. “Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory,” pronounced Vox’s Ezra Klein two weeks ago. With a consensus now emerging that the real estate mogul is the likely GOP nominee, it would stand to reason that the most important factor for many Democrats in choosing their own nominee is electability: meaning, who has the best chance of defeating the GOP Satan in the general election? In light of that, can Democrats really afford to take such a risky gamble by nominating Hillary Clinton?

    • Bernie Sanders Has Led Hillary Clinton in This Major National Poll Nearly All Month

      Bernie Sanders finds himself in a familiar place once again. Far away from home on the campaign trail in South Carolina and Missouri on Wednesday, Sanders is once again fighting off a rush of pundits and political talkers looking to write off his presidential campaign after an upset in Nevada last weekend — but according to one new national poll, Sanders has only been growing more popular all month.

    • The Party of ‘No Way!’

      Perhaps the most important thing Washington will do this year is decide whether to approve President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. But Republicans have already announced their decision: “No way!”

      It’s rich for Republicans to declare pre-emptively that they will not even hold hearings on an Obama nominee, considering that they used to denounce (while their party held the White House) the notion that judges’ nominations shouldn’t proceed in an election year.

      “That’s just plain bunk,” Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said in 2008. “The reality is that the Senate has never stopped confirming judicial nominees during the last few months of a president’s term.” His sense of reality has since changed.

    • Annotating The Letter Disney’s CEO Sent To Disney Employees Asking Them To Fund Disney’s Sketchy Lobbying Activities

      Here’s quite a scoop from Joe Mullin over at Ars Technica. Apparently, Disney is getting a bit desperate on the whole TPP thing. The company, which has been having a rough go of things because of the next generation not giving a shit about ESPN, decided to take things up a notch. CEO Bob Iger apparently emailed Disney employees asking them to contribute to DisneyPAC, specifically to help Disney pay for lobbyists to push the TPP across the finish line.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Tor users are actively discriminated against by website operators

      Computer scientists have documented how a large and growing number of websites discriminate against people who browse them using Tor.

      Tor is an anonymity service that is maintained with assistance from the US State Department and designed in part to allows victims of censorship in countries like China and Iran to surf the web. New research show how corporations are discriminating against Tor users, in some cases partly because it’s harder to classify anonymous users for the purpose of pushing ads at them.

    • Rather Than Ending NSA’s Key Surveillance Tool, White House To Now Let Other Agencies Use It

      Late last night, the NY Times broke a very troubling story. Rather than finally putting an end to Executive Order 12333, it appears that President Obama is going to expand the power of it in dangerous ways. We’ve written about EO 12333 a bunch of times, but for those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s an executive order signed by President Reagan that basically gave the NSA pretty free rein to collect signals intelligence outside of the US. Because it’s not (technically) about domestic surveillance, what the NSA does under EO 12333 is not subject to Congressional oversight. That is, Congress is mostly as much in the dark as everyone else is on what the NSA is doing overseas. And, as former State Department official John Napier Tye revealed a couple of years ago, for all the talk of domestic surveillance programs revealed by Ed Snowden, the NSA’s real power comes almost entirely from 12333.

      And it has no limitations. Napier noted that the other programs — things like Section 215 (now morphed into whatever the USA FREEDOM Act allows) and Section 702 — were merely used to “fill in the gaps” not covered by 12333.

    • White House moves to expand ‘sharing intelligence between NSA, FBI and CIA’

      The Obama administration is reportedly moving to broaden the current scope of information sharing between the National Security Agency (NSA) and other US intelligence agencies by stripping away existing restrictions on who exactly has access to communications data scooped up by surveillance programmes.

      The change would impact the sharing of both phone calls and email content collected alongside data from satellite transmissions and messages acquired from overseas intelligence agencies, according to The New York Times.

    • NSA poised to share more intel; Comey not interested in Apple precedent; encryption bill on its way

      MORE INTEL SHARING: The Obama administration is poised to expand NSA intelligence sharing “without first applying any privacy protections” for it, the New York Times reports. “The change would relax longstanding restrictions on access to the contents of the phone calls and email the security agency vacuums up around the world, including bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies,” the Times reports.

    • JOHN MCAFEE: The US may be violating the 13th amendment if it forces Apple to create a back door
    • JOHN MCAFEE: The NSA’s back door has given every US secret to our enemies [Ed: same as below]
    • JOHN MCAFEE: The NSA’s back door has given every US secret to our enemies

      Deng Xiaoping, in 1979 – his second year as supreme leader of China – perceived a fundamental truth that has yet to be fully grasped by most Western leaders: Software, if properly weaponized, could be far more destructive than any nuclear arsenal.

      Under Deng’s leadership, China began one of the most ambitious and sophisticated meta- software development programs ever undertaken.

      And what is meta-software? It’s the one science that the entire Western World has entirely overlooked. It is a high level set of principles for developing software that are imperative if a nation is to survive in a cyberwar.

    • Appeals Court Urged to Allow Wikimedia to Fight NSA Surveillance

      In the amicus brief filed Wednesday, EFF urges the Fourth Circuit to recognize standing for allegations of harm based on actual past and ongoing surveillance, like those alleged in both Wikimedia and Jewel.

    • EFF pushes forward with new amicus brief in case against NSA spying

      The foundation has had an ongoing case which has been termed Jewell v NSA, as well as Wikimedia v NSA. There are many irons in the fire in this battle and now the EFF has filed a new amicus brief in the Wikimedia case.

      On Wednesday the organization filed the brief, which urges the court to allow the various parties to continue their pursuit of the NSA for what the EFF terms “illegal surveillance”. This has been filed with the Fourth Circuit Court, which could prove favorable as it allowed Jewell v NSA to go forward after quite a bit of stalling by the government.

    • Apple Asks: Why Hasn’t The FBI Asked NSA To Break iPhone Encryption?

      The question Apple is asking the FBI: If you want to hack into our iPhone so bad, why don’t you just have the U.S. National Security Agency do it? That’s what a strongly worded legal brief filed Thursday amounts to. The brief asks a federal magistrate to throw out an order requiring Apple to build special software that would enable investigators to break into the iPhone 5c used by one the San Bernardino shooters.

    • Apple: The FBI Should Ask the NSA to Hack Shooter’s iPhone

      In a strongly-worded argument filed in court today, Apple pushed the US government on a question that many observers have been asking: If the FBI wants to hack an iPhone, why doesn’t it just ask the NSA?

      Last week, the company challenged a court order to build malicious software that would allow the FBI to crack the passcode of an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the deceased shooters responsible for the workplace rampage in San Bernardino last December. Apple is being compelled under the All Writs Act, a centuries-old law that allows courts to order anyone to do pretty much anything, as long as it’s meant to help execute a court order and isn’t “unreasonably burdensome.”

    • Judge Wants To Know More About FBI’s Secret Recordings Of Conversations Near Courthouse Steps

      Last November, lawyers defending five real estate investors against auction price-rigging allegations discovered the FBI had planted bugs to capture conversations during real estate auctions on the San Mateo (CA) Courthouse steps.

      The lawyers questioned whether these surreptitious recordings violated wiretap laws, despite them taking place in a public area. As they noted, investors often huddled away from the steps to discuss bidding strategies in “hushed tones” in order to prevent competitors from overhearing them. According to these lawyers, the “hushed tones” were not unlike the closing of a phone booth door — a key element in the Supreme Court’s 1967 Katz decision, which found an expectation of privacy could be found in public areas, provided the person being targeted by recording devices performed certain actions.

    • We Read Apple’s 65 Page Filing Calling Bullshit On The Justice Department, So You Don’t Have To
    • The Government Is Already Forcing Companies to Give It Access to Our Data
    • 7 Reasons a Government Backdoor to the iPhone Would Be Catastrophic

      You’ve likely caught wind of the fact that the government and Apple are in the midst of an intense legal showdown in what Edward Snowden has called “the most important tech case in a decade.” The battle is over the legality of a court order compelling Apple to write new software — which the company cleverly referred to as GovOS in a court filing today — that disables several security features that the FBI claims are preventing it from accessing the contents of the work phone of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack. Apple is resisting the order, and the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has committed to going all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary.

      Lest there be any doubt, the ACLU is with Apple on this one, as it was in a similar case several months back. The government’s request is not just about this one iPhone — it has far-reaching consequences for every device, for global cybersecurity, and for basic freedoms at home and around the world. Communications security is critical for the functioning of democracy, and the precedent the government is seeking could do terrible and lasting damage.

    • FBI Waited 50 Days before Asking for Syed Rezwan Farook’s iCloud Data

      Apple’s motion to vacate the All Writs Act order requiring it to help FBI brute force Syed Rezwan Farook’s iPhone is a stupendous document worthy of the legal superstars who wrote it. To my mind, however, the most damning piece comes not from the lawyers who wrote the brief, but in a declaration from another lawyer: Lisa Olle, Apple’s Manager of Global Privacy and Law, the last 3 pages of the filing.

      Olle provides an interesting timeline of FBI’s requests from Apple, some of which I’ll return to. The most damning details, however, are these.

    • Labor, Coalition vote against strong encryption in Senate

      Both of Australia’s major political parties have explicitly rejected a Senate motion calling on the Government to support public use of strong encryption technologies, in a move that comes in the wake of the US Government’s demand that Apple provide it with a backdoor for open access to its iPhone handset.

      Yesterday in the Senate, Greens Senator and Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam (pictured) moved a motion dealing with encryption technology.

      The motion called upon the Senate to note that strong digital encryption protects the personal and financial information of millions of people; that encryption is an important tool to prevent identity theft and other crime; that encryption ensures that public interest whistleblowers, journalists and other civil society actors can conduct their activities more securely; and that the Government, through services such as Medicare and Centrelink, and digital platforms such as myGov, depends on encryption to keep client information safe.

    • MWC 2016: Mastercard rolls out selfie ID checks [iophk: biometrics]

      Credit card firm Mastercard has confirmed it will accept selfie photos and fingerprints as an alternative to passwords when verifying IDs for online payments.

    • The FBI’s Not-So-Compelling Pitch For Sacrificing Security For Safety

      The FBI’s attempt to use an All Writs order to force Apple to help it break into a locked iPhone is seemingly built on a compelling case: a large-scale shooting involving people with ties to terrorist groups. This is exactly the sort of case Comey hoped would help push his anti-encryption agenda forward. Or so it seems.

      But is the case really that “compelling,” especially in the legal sense of the word, which requires the court to weigh the imposition on Apple against the public’s interest in seeing wrongdoers punished/future terrorist attacks prevented?

    • The Way You Ask The Questions Matters: Reuters Poll Says People Support Apple Against FBI, But It’s All In The Questions

      And then, just days later, Reuters/Ipsos released a poll of its own, saying… basically the exact opposite, and it’s being spun to claim that there is “Solid support for Apple in iPhone encryption fight.”

      [...]

      And, once again, the poll is basically meaningless when it comes to the actual issues in this case. You can read the details of the questions in the linked document, which shows that, before asking the key question, the pollsters asked a bunch of questions about whether or not people were willing to “give up privacy” to help the US government on a variety of things. And lots of people said no. These questions more or less framed the issue as one about protecting your own privacy — as compared to the Pew poll that framed it more as being about investigating the San Bernardino attacks. Then after all those questions, the poll asks about the specifics of the Apple case, where they frame the question much more broadly than Pew’s.

    • Alternate Titles: Apple Now Looking To Close The Backdoor The FBI Discovered

      Yesterday the NY Times put out a story claiming that Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack, with the underlying thrust being that this is a response to the big DOJ case against it, in which the court has ordered Apple to undermine key security features, which would then enable the FBI to brute force the (almost certainly weak) passcode used by Syed Farook on his work iPhone. But, here’s the thing: prior to that order and its details coming to light, many people were under the impression that the existing iPhones were ones that it “couldn’t hack.” After all, it was offering full disk encryption tied to the device where it didn’t hold the key.

    • Charlie Rose Talks to Michael Hayden
    • CIA Director: It’s the Media’s Fault That Terrorists Are So Good at Encryption
    • CIA Director Blames The Media For Terrorists’ Encryption Skills
    • It’s Dangerous and Foolish for CIA and NSA to Blame Press for Terrorist Encryption
    • Obama Administration Set to Expand Sharing of Data That N.S.A. Intercepts

      That also means more officials will be looking at private messages — not only foreigners’ phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the N.S.A…

    • Apple: The FBI Should Ask the NSA to Hack Shooter’s iPhone

      In a strongly-worded argument filed in court today, Apple pushed the US government on a question that many observers have been asking: If the FBI wants to hack an iPhone, why doesn’t it just ask the NSA?

    • ‘Rethink U.S. presence in Italy’

      “I’m a friend of everyone, all it takes is that others respect our work”, he said. Daily La Repubblica and sister weekly l’Espresso carried the Wikileaks reports that the NSA listened in on three-time premier Berlusconi as Italy was on the brink of a Greece-style crisis, an economic emergency that eventually forced him from office. Berlusconi has often said he was the victim of an international plot.

    • Rome ‘Won’t Protest’ Against NSA Tapping as Italy is ‘Loyal US Servant’

      Even after finding out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was wiretapping former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government in Rome, being Washington’s loyal servant, won’t protest against it, Italian journalist Mario Sommossa said.

    • Italian Media: Rome won’t protest NSA Spying…loyal servants

      Even after finding out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was wiretapping former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government in Rome, being Washington’s loyal servant, won’t protest against it, Italian journalist Mario Sommossa said.

      On Tuesday, WikiLeaks released a batch of classified documents revealing how the NSA was tapping different world leaders, including former Italian leader Berlusconi. Later that day, the Italian Foreign Ministry called US Ambassador John Philips to clarify the uncomfortable findings.

    • Spy Court Called Insufficient to Rein in NSA

      Brought to light by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA program Upstream intercepts traffic from what has been called the “Internet’s backbone,” a phrase that refers to the major foreign and domestic Internet cables and switches.

    • Think the NSA is scary now? Wait till Donald Trump controls it.

      Donald Trump is pretty obviously an incipient tinpot dictator. He’s got the demagogue’s knack for both playing off and encouraging the worst instincts of his supporters, including violent reprisals against scapegoats. He’s got wide support among authoritarians. He’s even got the taste for garish prestige construction projects.

    • Will the NSA Finally Build Its Superconducting Spy Computer?

      Today, silicon microchips underlie every aspect of digital computing. But their dominance was never a foregone conclusion. Throughout the 1950s, electrical engineers and other researchers explored many alternatives to making digital computers.

    • The NSA spied on top-secret climate negotiations between world leaders

      Climate negotiations between the world’s powerhouses usually take place behind closed doors — unless, that is, the U.S. government is secretly listening in.

      A batch of documents released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday reveal that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spied on communications regarding international climate change agreements, including negotiations in 2008 between United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the NSA had reportedly been spying on for decades. The NSA listened in on a private meeting between the two leaders ahead of a 2009 conference in Copenhagen, and gleaned information about their hopes that the European Union play a major role in climate change mitigation, adding Merkel thought the “tough issue” would involve carbon trading.

    • Federal Judge Approves Gathering of Evidence on NSA Warrantless Surveillance Program

      For the first time, mass surveillance opponents can dig into evidence on the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet spying programs, a federal judge ruled Friday.

      Heeding the words of a December 2015 Ninth Circuit ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeffery White lifted a 12-month stay in two related class actions that accuse the government of illegally spying on citizens.

      An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said this is the first time the court has allowed a party to gather evidence on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program.

    • Opera star Katherine Jenkins performs at GCHQ [Ed: which violates human rights and laws]
    • WATCH: Singing star Katherine Jenkins comes to GCHQ and sings to staff as thanks for their work
    • WATCH: Singing star Katherine Jenkins comes to GCHQ and sings to staff as thanks for their work
    • Katherine Jenkins gives spies singing treat

      The classical music star hailed workers at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham as “heroes”, before singing songs from her repertoire including Habanera from the opera Carmen.

    • Singer Katherine Jenkins performs at GCHQ
    • Spy agencies say Clinton emails closely matched top secret documents: sources

      U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as “top secret” because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.

      The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.

    • Arizona Legislators Trying (Again) To Ban Traffic Cameras

      Well, sort of. The bill is still undergoing massive invasive surgery from entities unwilling to see this revenue stream dry up. Another proposal to scale back the state’s reliance on traffic cam income moved forward after being limited solely to state highways — basically killing off cameras in only two towns along those roads. This more expansive proposal is experiencing whatever the opposite of growing pains are. The exceptions to the proposed rule are turning the bill into a hollow shell of an idea, despite the ban having widespread support from the public.

    • Some websites turning law-abiding Tor users into second-class citizens

      About 1.3 million IP addresses—including those used by Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, and Yelp—are turning users of the Tor anonymity network into second-class Web citizens by blocking them outright or degrading the services offered to them, according to a recently published research paper.

      Titled “Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users,” the paper said 3.67 percent of websites in the Alexa 1,000 discriminated against computers visiting with known Tor exit-node IP addresses. In some cases, the visitors are completely locked out, while in others users are required to complete burdensome CAPTCHAs or are limited in what they can do. The authors said the singling out was an attempt by the sites to limit fraud and other online crime, which is carried out by a disproportionately high percentage of Tor users. In the process, law-abiding Tor users are being treated as second-class Web citizens.

      “While many websites block Tor to reduce abuse, doing so inadvertently impacts users from censored countries who do not have other ways to access censored Internet content,” the authors wrote.

    • Thoughts on Tor router hardware

      I recently came across a small travel-router that claimed to provide transparent access to the Tor-network. Just make a wifi connection to its Tor access point and all the TCP and DNS traffic is routed through the Tor-network. For a price of only $25 I could not resist and bought one. Over the last month I have been playing with the device and… it worked flawlessly, it was fun!

      So, running the Tor software on cheap router hardware works, but is it a good idea? I believe it is. In this article I will argue that having Tor on the router benefits both security and usability. It opens up new possibilities for expanding the Tor-network and can provide a much needed source of income for the Tor-project.

    • Judge confirms what many suspected: Feds hired CMU to break Tor

      A federal judge in Washington has now confirmed what has been strongly suspected: that Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers at its Software Engineering Institute were hired by the federal government to do research into breaking Tor in 2014. The judge also made a notable statement in his court order that “Tor users clearly lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP addresses while using the Tor network.”

    • US authorities used students to hack into Tor

      THE US COURTS have confirmed that the Department of Defence is not immune to employing students, and used a gaggle of them from Carnegie Mellon to find a way to crack into privacy alternative Tor.

      We would expect students to be against this kind of thing, but who knows these days? People like a challenge and there are plenty who would support efforts to crack Tor. The Russians are rather keen, for example.

    • Silk Road 2.0 Court Docs Show US Government Paid Carnegie Mellon Researchers To Unmask Tor Users

      Rumors that the US government used a university’s research institute to uncloak Tor users began floating around nearly two years ago. In July of 2014, the first hint that something weird was going on at Carnegie Mellon took the form of a hastily-cancelled Black Hat Conference talk on the subject of de-anonymizing Tor users. Carnegie Mellon’s lawyers stepped in and called the whole thing off at the last minute. The thought process at the time was that CMU’s legal team may have been concerned the researchers’ actions had broken wiretap laws.

    • Confirmed: Carnegie Mellon University Attacked Tor, Was Subpoenaed By Feds

      In November, Motherboard reported that a “university-based research institute” provided information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that led to the identification of criminal suspects on the so-called dark web. Circumstantial evidence pointed to that body being the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). After a media-storm, CMU published a very carefully worded press release, implying that it had been subpoenaed for the IP addresses it obtained during its research.

    • How Existing Wiretapping Laws Could Save Apple From FBI’s Broad Demands

      There are all sorts of interesting (and frustrating and challenging) legal questions raised by the FBI’s use of the All Writs Act to try to force Apple to build a system to allow the FBI to hack Apple’s customers. But there’s one interesting one raised by Albert Gidari that may cut through a lot of the “bigger” questions (especially the Constitutional ones that everyone leaps to) and just makes a pretty simple point: the DOJ is simply wrong that the All Writs Act applies here, rather than the existing wiretapping statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or 47 USC 1002, better known by basically everyone as CALEA. CALEA is the law that some (including the DOJ) have wanted “updated” in ways that might force internet companies and mobile phone companies to make their devices more wiretap-ready. But that hasn’t happened.

    • Facebook Is Making a Map of Everyone in the World

      Americans inhabit an intricately mapped world. Type “Burger King” into an online box, and Google will cough up a dozen nearby options, each keyed to a precise latitude and longitude.

      But throughout much of the world, local knowledge stays local. While countries might conduct censuses, the data doesn’t go much deeper than the county or province level.

      Take population data, for instance: More than 7.4 billion humans sprawl across this planet of ours. They live in dense urban centers, in small towns linked by farms, and alone on the outskirts of jungles. But no one’s sure where, exactly, many of them live.

  • Civil Rights

    • Refugee crisis: Concern over ‘unprecedented’ arrivals in Greece and Italy after 2016 total passes 100,000

      More than 100,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Europe so far this year – more than eight times the rate seen during the same period in 2015.

      Humanitarian organisations have already raised concern about the “huge” numbers and their implications as border controls continue to tighten on the long route to western Europe and the political will to welcome asylum seekers wanes.

    • Plaintiffs had no First Amendment right to take cellphone video of police, federal judge rules

      A federal judge in Philadelphia has ruled that citizens don’t have a First Amendment right to take cellphone videos of police unless they are challenging or criticizing the police conduct.

      U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney ruled (PDF) on Feb. 19 in consolidated cases involving Richard Fields and Amanda Geraci, the Legal Intelligencer (sub. req.) reports. Fields, a Temple University student, took a cellphone photo of about 20 police officers standing outside a house party because he thought it would be an interesting picture. Geraci, a trained legal observer, tried to move closer to see and possibly record an arrest during a protest of hydraulic fracturing.

      An officer handcuffed Fields, searched his cellphone before returning it, and cited him for obstructing the highway and public passages, Fields says. Geraci says an officer physically restrained her to prevent her from recording the arrest. Both sued for alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations.

    • Victorian Government to begin talks with First Nations on Australia’s first Indigenous treaty

      The Victorian Government will begin talks to work out Australia’s first treaty with Indigenous people within weeks.

    • The Obama Guantánamo Plan — What You May Have Missed

      There were both good and bad developments buried in Obama’s speech and plan to close Guantanamo.

      I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines or read the news on President Obama’s speech this week about the plan he sent to Congress to close the Guantánamo prison. But what’s really going on? And what new developments — good or bad — were buried in the speech and the plan? Here’s our take.

    • America’s Killer Prisons

      If the people running prisons know there’s a problem and do nothing about it, is that not manslaughter? Is that not depraved indifference? A person who should be alive is not — all because of the incompetence or apathy of prison administrators. This isn’t an issue of who did what or who broke what law. Every American deserves decent health care. That includes our prisoners.

    • Albert Woodfox, the Last of the Angola Three, Is Finally Free

      Albert Woodfox turned 69 years old Friday. He also was released from prison that day after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, more time than anyone in U.S. history. “Quite a birthday gift,” Woodfox told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, in his first televised interview after gaining his freedom. Woodfox is a living testament to the resilience of the human spirit when subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of solitary. His case also serves as a stark reminder of the injustice that pervades the American criminal-justice system.

    • Court Says Cops Can’t Testify In Case After Destroying Footage Of DUI Arrest

      They like automatic cameras that record license plate and location data. They like surveillance cameras aimed at citizens around the clock. They even like dashcams and body cams, provided the released footage is limited to exonerating officers of wrongdoing.

      What they don’t like are cameras that don’t show their side of the story. A camera is inherently trustworthy — much like a confidential informant — until it isn’t, at which point any footage captured is claimed to be devoid of “context” or unable to show “the whole picture.” In some cases, the cameras don’t show anything at all.

      Sure, the footage may have been available at some point. But it’s suddenly missing when the defense needs it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Whistleblowers Detail Accountability Problems At The Top Of WIPO; US Congressional Members Prepare Actions

      A set of senior former employees of the World Intellectual Property Organization and their representatives yesterday gave detailed sworn testimony to US lawmakers on what they termed extremely serious misconduct and retaliation at the United Nations agency. A congressional subcommittee chairman told Intellectual Property Watch afterward that based on all they have heard, they believe WIPO Director General Francis Gurry has “gone rogue” and that action against him will begin immediately. The US State Department will be pressed to demand a copy of a newly completed UN investigation of Gurry that apparently has been shared with the Colombian Ambassador in Geneva, Gabriel Duque, who is chair of the WIPO General Assembly this year.

    • Trademarks

      • Google Threatens 9to5Google Over Trademark, Rescinds Threat, Leaves Everyone Frightened

        If you correct for company size, Google is generally pretty decent on intellectual property matters. But, hey, I guess no corporation is perfect. The company whose motto is “don’t be evil” is, of course, very big. And they certainly have a very big legal team. I think it might be time for that legal team to get a quick primer on the wider culture at Google and do a quick review on the company motto, because those lawyers apparently suddenly decided that a news site, called 9to5Google, was suddenly violating Google’s trademark after a scant five full years in operation.

        The threat device Google decided to employ in this case was the news site’s use of Google’s Doubleclick/Ad Exchange network, which the site claims is a decent profit center for 9to5Google. There had apparently been occasional blips of the network not working in the past, all of which had been quickly resolved. Not the case this time, however.

    • Copyrights

      • HTTPS Renders UK Pirate Site Blocklist Useless

        By now most UK Internet users have gotten used to pirate sites being blocked by their ISPs. However, thanks to HTTPS many subscribers have been enjoying a glimpse of an open and unrestricted web, as several popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents are no longer being blocked by all providers.

      • UK’s Pirate Site Blocklist Even More Pointless Than Previously Thought: HTTPS Defeats It

        Apparently this has been known in certain circles for quite a while. Some pirate sites have even gone so far as to force users to connect using HTTPS to enable them to enjoy this further advantage of encryption. There’s an interesting discussion in the comments on the TorrentFreak post as to when and why HTTPS connections can get around the court-mandated blocks, and what ISPs might try to do to close this gaping loophole. Even if they do, the other circumvention methods will remain.

      • RIAA Wins $22 Million Piracy Lawsuit Against MP3Skull

        A group of prominent RIAA labels have won a default judgment against piracy site MP3Skull. A Florida court awarded the music companies more than $22 million in damages and issued a permanent injunction which allows the RIAA to take over the site’s domain names.

      • Japan Police Arrest 44 in Nationwide Internet Piracy Crackdown

        Police in Japan have arrested 44 people suspected of being involved in illegal Internet file-sharing. Raids in over 90 locations across the country targeted individuals suspected of downloading and distributing a wide range of content including movies, music, anime, manga and software. If convicted they face fines and up to ten years in jail.

02.24.16

Links 24/2/2016: Wine-Staging 1.9.4, CaffeOnSpark

Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 tips for growing your developer community on GitHub

    You’ve done it: you’ve taken your own personal utility, library, or web application and placed it on GitHub as free and open source software for all the world to see.

    Maybe you wrote this software to fill a personal need, or maybe you’ve always hoped that it would reach more people. One thing’s certain: it’s always been yours, and yours alone—but the moment you pushed that code for the first time, your baby left the nest. What comes next is up to you.

  • BeeGFS Parallel File System Now Open Source
  • Let’s meet the 2016 OSI Board of Directors candidates!

    The nominations for the Open Source Initiative board of directors closed on February 15th and we are delighted to share our list of candidates with you!

    We are excited that so many people want to take part, and as such would like to introduce you to the candidates before voting opens on February 29th.

  • Web Browsers

    • on ditching css frameworks and preprocessors
    • Run Windows 98 And Linux In Your Web Browser, Thanks To JavaScript And NodeJS

      Short Bytes: A coder, known as Fabian on GitHub, has created x86 architecture based emulations that allow you to run Windows 98, Linux, KolibriOS etc. inside your browser.

    • Mozilla

      • A Mozilla journey: Contributor to Firefox Student Ambassadors executive board

        One thing that I have learned from working in the open source community is that you must never hesitate to ask for help. People are really very friendly, and finding the right mentor can prove to be immensely helpful in your life. Contributing to open source projects will only help you, so don’t waste too much time thinking about it. Take a leap of faith and dive into the community behind your favorite open source product. If you’re specifically interested in acquiring technical skills, there’s nothing a commit a day can’t solve! It also enhances your e-karma.

      • The case for an embeddable Gecko

        Strap yourself in, this is a long post. It should be easy to skim, but the history may be interesting to some. I would like to make the point that, for a web rendering engine, being embeddable is a huge opportunity, how Gecko not being easily embeddable has meant we’ve missed several opportunities over the last few years, and how it would still be advantageous to make Gecko embeddable.

      • Continuing the Conversation About Encryption and Apple: A New Video From Mozilla

        In the past week, the conversation about encryption has reached fever pitch. Encryption, Apple, and the FBI are in headlines around the world. And lively discussions about security and privacy are taking place around kitchen tables, on television, and in comment sections across the Internet.

        Mozilla believes the U.S. government’s demand for Apple to circumvent their own security protections is a massive overreach. To require Apple to do this would set a dangerous precedent that threatens consumer security going forward. But this discussion is an opportunity to broaden public understanding of encryption. When people understand the role encryption plays in their everyday lives, we can all stand up for encryption when threats surface — this key issue related to the overall health of the Internet becomes mainstream.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Don’t Laugh: Yahoo’s Open Source AI Has a Secret Weapon

      Yet another tech giant is sharing its artificial intelligence know-how with the world. Today Yahoo published the source code to its CaffeOnSpark AI engine so that anyone from academic researchers to big corporations can use or modify it.

    • Yahoo open-sources CaffeOnSpark deep learning framework for Hadoop

      Yahoo today is releasing some key artificial intelligence software (AI) under an open-source license. The company last year built a library called CaffeOnSpark to perform a popular type of AI called “deep learning” on the vast swaths of data kept in its Hadoop open-source file system for storing big data. Now it’s becoming available for anyone to use under an open-source Apache license on GitHub.

    • Google’s Managed Hadoop and Spark Cloud Service Goes Live

      Google has announced that its Cloud Dataproc service — a managed tool based on the Hadoop and Spark open source big data software — is now generally available. Google Cloud Dataproc, because it leverages both Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, promises to be in strong demand, especially at enterprises.

      “When analyzing data, your attention should be focused on insights, not your tools,” Google notes. “Often, popular tools to process data, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, require a careful balancing act between cost, complexity, scale, and utilization. Unfortunately, this means you focus less on what is important — your data — and more on what should require little or no attention — the cluster processing it. We created our managed Spark and Hadoop cloud service, Google Cloud Dataproc, to rectify the balance, so that using these powerful data tools is as easy as 1-2-3.”

  • Databases

    • Vendor: ‘Governments moving to open source databases’

      Governments across the world are increasingly turning to Postgresql, an open source relational database management system, according to a press release by Enterprisedb. The company provides commercial services for the database system, and reports a hefty growth of its government contracts.

    • Introducing motranslator

      What changes you can expect? First of all it supports all current PHP versions. It also performs way better – in my tests loading of mo file is 4-5 times faster and memory consumption went down about 10 percent. You can additionally use object API instead of traditional function based.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • current LibreOffice native gtk3 elements

      LibreOffice typically basically has just one gtk widget per top level window and draws everything you see itself, using the gtk themeing apis to make what it draws look like they do in gtk.

      But there are some truly native gtk elements. Some of them new.

    • LibreOffice 5.1 Videos: Analytics

      For LibreOffice 5.1 we created a playlist of short videos highlighting some of the new features in action. At the time of writing, these videos have been viewed over 50,000 times in total. Here’s the breakdown:

      Calc: 15,346
      Impress: 12,275
      Writer: 25,229

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook TIPs the Scales Toward Better Networking

      TIP will bring together telecommunications companies, infrastructure providers, system integrators and other technology companies, according to Jay Parikh, Facebook’s global head of engineering and infrastructure.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Intel Graphics Driver Gets BXT Support, Aims For A Blob-Free Skylake

      Thanks to the fabulous open-source graphics driver porting work done by François Tigeot, the DragonFlyBSD kernel’s i915 Intel DRM graphics driver is up to a comparable state to the code ported from the Linux 4.2 kernel.

      Just months ago the i915 DragonFlyBSD graphics driver was years behind the upstream Linux kernel while in recent times a lot of headway has been made where the Intel graphics driver on this BSD operating system is just a few releases behind the upstream state.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Software Freedom Conservancy, Others, Makes Case for FOSS at NY City Hall

      On Tuesday, representatives of four FOSS friendly agencies testified before a New York City committee considering bills that would mandate the use of FOSS by city government.

      “Free and open source software has many advantages over proprietary software,” Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, testified Tuesday before the New York City Council Committee on Contracts. “Studies show that, over time, free software is safer from vulnerabilities. Free software is auditable — security and functionality can be verified upon inspection. Anyone can independently assess the software and its risks. Developers can more easily and quickly repair discovered vulnerabilities or bugs (and bugs are very common in all software – the Software Engineering Institute estimates that an experienced software engineer produces approximately one defect for every 100 lines of code). Free software removes dependence on a single party, as anyone can make changes to their version of the software. And municipalities can hire any contractor on the open market to work on the software.”

    • ARM Adds Cortex-A32 Support To GCC Compiler

      ARM only announced the Cortex-A32 ARMv8 32-bit processor yesterday but already they’ve gone ahead and landed the support inside the GNU Compiler Collection.

      It’s not an entirely big surprise that there is already compiler support baked for the Cortex-A32 considering this is just an ultra power efficient cut-down version of the ARMv8 that runs in 32-bit mode. The ARMv8 64-bit support has been maturing in both GCC and LLVM/Clang for quite some time already. However, it’s nice to see the quick turnaround time by ARM on getting the support upstream.

    • denemo @ Savannah: Release 2.0.4 is imminent!

      new features:

      Conditional Directives on Chords/Notes
      Create editions with/without ornaments, fingerings …
      Conditional items are highlighted in the display
      Object Inspector reports on them
      Enhanced Object Editor
      Set Conditional Behavior
      Initiate Search/Edit from Object
      New Commands
      Gaps in Staffs
      Enharmonic transpositions of passages
      Generating Parts
      Part naming extended to multi-staff instruments

    • GDB 7.11 Released For Better GNU Debugging

  • Public Services/Government

    • Munich Greens: Linux is made a scapegoat for IT issues

      The Green party in Munich says the city’s use of the Linux operating system is wrongly being blamed for all IT issues. “The problem is usually not the operating system, but something else”, says Florian Roth, leader of the city’s Green Party. The party wants to increase support for the city’s central IT department, to bolster the open source strategy.

    • Portugal adds 20 eGovernment service access points

      The government of Portugal has opened another 20 Espaços do Cidadão (Citizen Spots), in town halls across 8 of its 18 districts. There are now almost 200 such eGovernment service access points across the country. Here citizens can go online to renew driving licences, apply for permits and request official documents.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Can we tackle the Zika virus with rapid, open research?

      One of the major issues with the Zika virus is that so little is known about it. That means that a lot of research has to be done very quickly.

      The Zika virus is at the heart of a global health emergency. It became a global health emergency after outbreaks began in 2015, and has possible links to birth defects. When the virus was first discovered in the late forties, human infections had been observed as early as 1952 according to Wikipedia.

    • Flanders services exchange eGovernment practices

      Municipalities and public service organisations in Belgium’s Flanders region are exchanging their eGovernment practices and ICT policies. Many municipalities are considering an overhaul of their websites in order to improve eGovernment services, reports the region’s ICT Organisation (V-ICT-OR). Additionally, local administrations are looking for solutions to manage meeting minutes, and want to boost IT security, V-ICT-OR says.

    • Open Data

      • Portugal to monitor public health through a national open data portal

        The National Health Service in Portugal (SNS – Serviço Nacional de Saüde) has set up an open data portal whose goal is to provide a dashboard to monitor the health of Portuguese people. Called Transparencia (Transparency), the portal gathers operational data generated or collected by the agencies of the national health system.

    • Open Access/Content

      • President Obama Nominates New Librarian Of Congress Who Supports Open Access, Fights Against Surveillance

        So here’s a pleasant surprise. President Obama has nominated Carla Hayden as the new Librarian of Congress, and at a first glance, she looks perfect for the job. The job is super important for a whole variety of reasons, including that the Librarian of Congress controls the Copyright Office (more on that in a bit…). The former Librarian of Congress, James Billington, was really bad. He apparently was mostly focused on hobnobbing with rich people in fancy places around the globe than doing anything useful. A report by the Government Accountability Office found a massive leadership vacuum with Billington when it came to technology issues, noting that he basically ignored technology entirely. When Billington announced he was retiring, the Washington Post reported that employees were absolutely elated…

Leftovers

  • NY Yankees Do Fans A ‘Favor’ By Preventing Them From Printing Their Tickets At Home

    As an avid sports fan, and more specifically an avid baseball fan, I can still remember the advent of home-printed tickets. My reaction was perhaps more elation than what was warranted, but having spent years going up to the Wrigley Field box office with my father and later my friends, the idea of being able to purchase tickets online and then print them at home in order to bypass the lines and go directly to the gate was exactly the kind of technological progress that, albeit small, meant something to me.

  • Canada Forcing Cheaper, More Flexible Pricing On TV Industry March 1. Will It Work?

    Starting next week, Canadian cable providers will be forced by the government to do something inherently and violently foreign to them: offer cheaper, more flexible cable bundles. In March of last year, Canadian regulator CRTC announced it would be combating high TV prices by forcing cable operators to offer cable channels a la carte, or so-called “skinny bundles” of cheaper cable channels, by December 2016. The CRTC’s full ruling declared that by March 2016, all Canadian TV providers must at least provide a $25, discounted skinny bundle, letting users pick and choose individual channels beyond that.

  • Science

  • Security

    • Hackers use Microsoft security tool to pwn Microsoft security tool

      FireEye security wonks Abdulellah Alsaheel and Raghav Pande have twisted the barrels of Microsoft’s lauded EMET Windows defence gun 180 degrees and fired.

      The result of their research is p0wnage of the enhanced mitigation toolkit so that instead of defending Windows it attacks it.

      The attacks the pair found affect older versions of Windows which rely on EMET for modern defences like address space layout randomisation and data execution prevention.

    • Is Linux Really as Secure as You Think It Is?

      Security is an important topic on everyone’s minds in today’s highly-technological world. With all of the security news that pops up on almost a daily basis, trying to be aware of the choices you make can make a big difference. Linux is often touted as the most secure operating system you can get your hands onto, but is this reputation deserved?

    • A Fedora Distribution download primer

      With the fresh news of a compromise in the Linux Mint distribution images, I thought I would take a few minutes to explain how Fedora handles image downloads and what you can do as an end user to make sure you have the correct and official Fedora images.

    • Mousejack: Hacking Computers Via Your Mouse With 15 Lines Of Code And Radio Dongle
    • How Criminals Could Hijack Wireless Mice to Hack Computers from Afar

      Wireless computer mice give users the convenience of not having to deal with cumbersome wires and cables. But they might also open up the door for malicious hackers to get a way into their computers, researchers warn.

      A flaw in the way several popular models of wireless mice and their corresponding receivers, the sticks or “dongles” that plug into a USB port and transmit data between the mouse and the computer, handle encryption could leave “billions” of computers vulnerable to hackers, security firm Bastille warned on Tuesday.

    • Child tracking firm calls out security researcher on ‘hack’

      A CHILD MONITORING COMPANY is mad as heck at a security researcher for highlighting a security problem without asking its consent first. Or something.

      The company in question is uKnowkids and its target is a chap called Chris Vickery, a security researcher. His crime? Security research.

      uKnowKids.com is a kind of virtual Mary Poppins. It does not put children in danger, like Mary Poppins, but it does look out for them and keep an eye on what they do by monitoring their communications and stuff.

      We imagine that in some circumstance it has got some children in trouble. This week it is getting an older person in trouble, and accusing a security researcher of hacking as opposed to security researching.

    • URL shortening – are these services now too big a security risk to use?

      Spammers and malware pushers are still heavily abusing URL shortening services, messaging security firm Cloudmark has reported in its 2015 annual security report (reg required). The popular Bit.ly service has recently become a particular favourite with criminals with 25,000 individual malicious links run though that service every single day in recent times. This sounds alarming but it gets worse. According to the firm, this meant that an extraordinary 97 percent of Bit.ly links now led to malicious websites.

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Google, Red Hat discover critical DNS security flaw that enables malware to infect entire internet

      Google and security firm Red Hat have discovered a critical security flaw in the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) that affects a library in a universally used protocol. This means an attacker could use it to infect almost everything on the entire internet. With the flawed code spread far and wide, it will likely take years of effort to patch the bug.

    • Hackers compromise Linux Mint Cinnamon ISO and forums
    • Why the Linux Mint hack is an indicator of a larger problem

      Security vulnerabilities at the Linux Mint project highlight substantial issues with the popular Linux distribution, and the difficulty of maintaining a Linux distribution as a hobbyist project.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Malaysian Borneo’s air quality hits hazardous levels as forest fires rage

      Forest fires spread over 500 acres in the north of the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Borneo island have raised air pollution to hazardous levels on Monday in areas close to the inferno, government data showed.

    • Trade Officials Promised Exxon That TTIP Will Erase Environmental ‘Obstacles’ Worldwide

      Newly released documents show that, in back-room talks, European officials assured ExxonMobil that the pending US-EU trade agreement would force the removal of regulatory “obstacles” worldwide, thus opening up even more countries to exploitation by the fossil fuel empire.

      Heavily redacted documents pertaining to an October 2013 meeting, obtained by the Guardian and reported on Tuesday, reveal that then-trade commissioner Karel de Gucht met with two officials from ExxonMobil’s EU and U.S. divisions to address the benefits of the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

      As the Guardian notes, the meeting was held at a time when countries in South America and Africa were “tightening regulations on fossil fuel companies for the first time in a decade, despite ExxonMobil’s ambitions to open up shale gas fracking wells in North Africa, Asia and South America.”

  • Finance

    • Google tax deal: MPs criticise secretive settlement

      Google’s controversial tax deal cannot be properly assessed by MPs because of secrecy surrounding the negotiations, according to a report by parliament’s public spending watchdog.

      But the deal to pay £130m in back taxes for a 10-year period seems “disproportionately small when compared with the size of Google’s business in the UK”, the public accounts committee has found.

    • House Speaker Paul Ryan Demands TPP Be Renegotiated; Neglects To Mention It Was His Bill That Makes That Impossible

      Go back and work on this agreement? Oh really? Now, this is the same Paul Ryan who (as he mentions in the interview) was the driving force behind the so-called fast track or “Trade Promotion Authority.” Though Ryan totally misrepresents what that means. He claims that the TPA gave the USTR “the ability to go negotiate trade agreements.” That’s hilariously not true. After all, the USTR has been negotiating the TPP for more than half a decade at this point, and only got Trade Promotion Authority in June. All Trade Promotion Authority REALLY does is ties Congress’s hands so that it can no longer ask the USTR to go back and renegotiate sections, because the whole point of the TPA is that it limits Congressional authority to a simple yes or no vote — rather than allowing it to actually debate and challenge specific aspects of the agreement.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Tesla: GM wrote a bill in Indiana to stop us from selling cars in the state

      Tesla recently sent a letter to “Tesla Owners and Enthusiasts” living in the Indiana area asking for their help to defeat a piece of legislation introduced by state lawmakers that would prevent auto manufacturers from selling cars directly to their customers. Tesla has almost exclusively sold vehicles to customers through direct vehicle sales, and it says if the bill is signed into law it would revoke Tesla’s permission to sell vehicles from its existing storefront in Indianapolis.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • New Group Seeking Privacy/Security Balance Loads Up On Former Government Officials And RSA Employees

      This is the same Art Coviello who said anonymity is the “enemy of privacy.” Why? Because it allows bad people to do bad things and get away with it — a sentiment echoed by any number of law enforcement officials and intelligence agency heads.

      Coviello’s timing couldn’t be better. Against the backdrop of the FBI’s efforts to force Apple to help it break into iPhones, Coviello hopes a balanced discussion of the issues may result in workable common ground between parties he feels often “talk past each other.”

    • What’s At Stake In Apple/FBI Fight: Who Gets To Set The Rules That Govern Your Privacy & Security

      Lots of people, mainly those supporting the DOJ/FBI’s view of the Apple fight, have been arguing that this isn’t a big deal. They’re just asking for one small thing. Other people have tried to examine “what’s at stake” in the case, with a number of the arguments falling into the typical “privacy v. security” framing, or even something around precedents related to privacy and security. However, Jennifer Granick recently wrote a great piece that does a much better job framing what’s truly at stake. It’s not privacy vs. security at all, but rather who gets to set the rules over how software works in an era where software controls everything.

    • Bay Area Rallies Against FBI Threats to Privacy and Security

      Dozens of people gathered at the Apple Store in San Francisco this evening to shout their support for the company’s position defending privacy and security in the face of irresponsible government demands.

    • Where’s Obama’s Encryption Policy?

      The news has been flooded with reactions to Apple’s principled stance in defense of user privacy. But even as Apple opposes the FBI’s demands to undermine the security of its operating system, where is President Obama on the issue of strong encryption?

      On Wednesday, the President’s press secretary said that “the F.B.I. can count on the full support of the White House.” Does that mean President Obama is going to turn his back on strong security for modern tech?

      EFF, Access Now, and a coalition of nonprofit and industry groups launched a public petition calling on President Obama to defend strong encryption and oppose backdoors in September. We used the We The People API, Obama’s preferred petition tool, and quickly surpassed 100,000 signatures.

      President Obama has promised to respond to any We the People petition that receives at least 100,000 signatures. But so far, we’ve gotten only nonresponses.

    • California Says Companies Should Embrace NSA-developed Data Protections

      The state of California has put companies on notice that they should be following a basic set of 20 information security controls developed by the U.S. government’s top code breakers.

      Many of the 657 data breaches California businesses and agencies reported during the past four years could have been prevented or at least more rapidly triaged had the protections been in place, according to a new state audit.

      “The set of 20 controls constitutes a minimum level of security – a floor – that any organization that collects or maintains personal information should meet,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat, said in the February breach analysis.

    • NSA leak probe ‘heavy handed,’ says Hayden

      The leak investigation included armed raids on the homes of veteran congressional investigators and agency staff, and ended six years later with the collapsed prosecution of NSA official Thomas Drake.

    • Could the former NSA director be encryption’s friend?

      It isn’t every day that civil libertarians and national security hawks agree on policy, but the encryption debate has created an unlikely alliance.

    • NSA spied on U.N. Secretary General/Merkel whilst having climate change talk
    • Italy Summons US Ambassador Over WikiLeaks Spying Reports

      Italy s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it had summoned the US ambassador to Rome over reports of widespread US surveillance of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, among several other European leaders.

    • Italy summons US ambassador after reports on NSA
    • US Ambassador To Rome Summoned
    • Italy summons US envoy over reports Berlusconi was spied on
    • Italy asks US to explain NSA spying report
    • Italy Summons U.S. Ambassador over Reports NSA Spied on Prime Minister
    • NSA: World Leaders Under Surveillance, Claims Wikileaks
    • Foreign affairs programmer watched by NSA
    • Rocky Anderson: Why I’m Suing Bush, Cheney and the NSA

      On today’s special episode of Loud & Clear, host Brian Becker is joined for the full hour by former mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson to discuss why he filed a class action lawsuit against former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the National Security Agency.

    • Confessions From Bush’s NSA Spy Program

      A memoir from former NSA director Michael Hayden reveals new details about the controversial U.S. intelligence program that targeted Americans’ private communications.

    • Why we must defend our last shred of privacy

      It’s not only Apple. Hundreds of technology companies large and small are engaged in a historic battle to determine how much access governments can have to your personal information. This includes Google, Microsoft, and nearly every technology company that has significantly impacted your life over the last two decades.

    • Facebook Tries (Again) to Take On Google and Twitter With Search

      There are 1.5 billion searches a day on Facebook, but the vast majority are for people’s names—the kind of search one might surreptitiously conduct after meeting an alluring stranger in a bar. Last October, the company quietly made it possible to search for all public posts on Facebook, not just material posted by friends or pages. Stocky’s team developed the new function, which uses an algorithm to rank and refine trillions of posts from Facebook users. “What we really tried to do was make Facebook a place where you could tap into the global conversation of what was happening in the world,” Stocky said at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters, unwittingly (or perhaps not) trotting out a favorite phrase of executives at rival Twitter. “We really want to basically make Facebook the best place to find what people are saying about something right now.”

    • Danish police back online monitoring plans

      The Danish government’s controversial plan to reintroduce so-called ‘session logging’ received the backing of Danish National Police (Rigspolitiet) Commissioner Jens Henrik Højbjerg, who said the Justice Ministry’s proposal would give police a means of tracking and catching criminals who are now conducting their illegal activities on the internet.

      “Crime and communication is increasingly taking place in cyberspace. But our investigation opportunities are undermined if we do not have the opportunity to get information on internet traffic,” Højbjerg said speaking to Danish broadcaster DR.

      Denmark scrapped the so-called ‘session logging’ in 2014 and the European Court of Justice has previously ruled that the blanket retention of internet usage is illegal.

    • German police allowed to use its own “federal Trojan”

      The German Interior Ministry has approved for investigative use a spying Trojan developed by the German Federal Criminal Police (a so-called “federal Trojan”). In fact, it could end up being used as early as this week.

    • FTC Dings ASUS For Selling ‘Secure’ Routers That Shipped With Default Admin/Admin Login (And Other Flaws)

      ASUS’s insecure products are no different than countless others offered by competitors. Far too many companies view end user security as something that can always be patched into existence after the first big breach. Why the FTC has chosen to hang ASUS rather than any number of other misbehaving tech manufacturers isn’t clear, but it could be this is just the first in a wave of settlements.

      The FTC isn’t just unhappy about ASUS’s bogus security claims. It’s also unhappy with the company’s response time. The complaint notes ASUS failed to act quickly in response to reported security holes.

    • Justice Department Wants Apple to Extract Data From 12 Other iPhones

      The U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing additional court orders that would force Apple to help federal investigators extract data from twelve other encrypted iPhones that may contain crime-related evidence, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    • DOJ Reached Out To San Bernardino Victims For Legal Support Before Going To Court Against Apple

      The FBI keeps insisting that it’s legal fight with Apple is not about the precedent and not about using the tragic incident in San Bernardino as an emotional plug to break down strong encryption. And yet… now it’s come out that even before going to court, federal prosecutors from the DOJ went to the families of those killed in the San Bernardino attacks and asked them to file an amicus brief of support with the court…

    • Is the FBI v Apple PR war even about encryption?

      The war between Apple and the FBI is a PR war. And it’s one that the FBI has fought well, from its initial selection of the battleground (a fight over access to a dead murderer’s government-owned iPhone) to the choreographed intervention of the relatives of the victims of the San Bernadino shootings – who were contacted by the FBI for support before the dispute even became public, according to Reuters.

    • San Bernardino Shooter’s Apple Password Changed While in Government Possession

      They lie like a rug.

    • Pew Asks Stupid Misleading Question About FBI Apple Fight, Gets Stupid Misleading Answers

      The folks over at Pew Research usually do pretty good work, but they decided to weigh in on the Apple / FBI backdoor debate by asking a really dumb poll question — the results of which are now being used to argue that the public supports the FBI over Apple by a pretty wide margin.

    • FBI’s Scorched Earth Approach To Apple Means That Tech Companies Now Have Even Less Incentive To Help Feds

      On Friday, we debunked a key FBI talking point, which the press has been parroting, that Apple had helped the FBI in 70 previous cases, and only changed its mind now for “marketing” or “business model” reasons. As we explained, that’s not even remotely true. In the past, Apple helped out because it had access to the content, and so it got it and turned it over following a lawful search warrant/court order. In this case, the situation is entirely different. Apple does not have access to the content that the FBI wants, and is now being forced to create a backdoor — build an entirely revamped operating system — that undermines some key security features found on iPhones today. That’s quite different.

    • Netherlands begins eID pilots

      The Dutch government has started pilots with electronic identification cards and smart phone apps, to allow online identification for eGovernment services. The first eID card was handed out in mid-February, marking the official start of both pilots. The eID pilots are intended to increase security, and prevent identity fraud.

  • Civil Rights

    • Latest Wikileaks documents: Irish citizen working for the UN Refugee Agency was targeted by the NSA

      It’s still early days but it appears from the latest Wikileaks document release that an innocent Irish citizen, Bernard Doyle, was targeted by the NSA. Doyle is currently the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “Regional Representative for Central Asia.”

    • Federal Judge Says Recording Police Not Protected By The First Amendment

      Over the years, the nation’s courts have moved towards recognizing First Amendment protections for citizens who film public servants carrying out public duties. Nearly every case has involved a citizen arrested for filming police officers, suggesting far too many law enforcement entities still feel their public actions deserve some sort of secrecy — even as these agencies deploy broader and more powerful surveillance tools aimed at the same public areas where no expectation of privacy (under the Fourth Amendment) exists.

    • FBI Borrows From Anti-Muslim Playbook in New Video Game

      Earlier this month, the FBI quietly launched “Don’t be a Puppet,” a website aimed at teachers and students, ostensibly to teach them how to spot and counter the “radicalization” of young people. It wasn’t a hit. One tech writer called it an “awful, out-of-touch 90s educational game.” Another headline read, “The FBI made a video game and it sucks.”

      From the landing page, players set off through five stages: What is Violent Extremism? What are Known Violent Extremist Groups? Who Do Violent Extremists Affect? Why Do People Become Violent Extremists? How Do Violent Extremists Make Contact? As players successfully answer questions, they get to cut the puppet strings and ultimately earn an “FBI certificate” upon completion.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Facebook is not a charity: Mark Zuckerberg’s “Internet for all” push is big business, barely disguised

      Tech titans have drawn good press in recent months. In December, Mark Zuckerberg pledged his and his wife’s fortune to charity – sort of. Apple chief Timothy Cook is now standing up to the U.S. government’s request to unlock a killer’s cellphone, which is has been a public relations hit as well as the right thing to do. If you were reading the news superficially, it might look like the tech community had turned into a big, friendly non-profit devoted to changing the world for the better.

      But developments overseas reminds us that these companies – whatever their mix of good and bad qualities– are self-interested, for-profit corporations that aim to make money by expanding markets. And not everyone is eager to buy what they’re selling.

    • The Web’s First Blackout Protest: The CDA, 20 Years Later

      Twenty years ago, large chunks of the Web went dark. These sites were changing their layout, or in some cases even going offline, to protest the Communications Decency Act, signed on February 8 by President Bill Clinton as Title V of the landmark Telecommunication Act. By some estimates, more than 5% of sites online on the early Web took part.

      The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was embroiled in controversy: as a direct response to the new law, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow wrote his influential Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace; EFF kicked off the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech campaign that became one of the most iconic images of online activism of the era.

      It’s only against that background that the largest show of online activism to that point—a web blackout campaign, known variously as “Turn the Web Black,” “Great Web Blackout,” or the “Black World Wide Web protest”—could be anything but center stage. Even if it’s not as widely remembered, though, the CDA blackout has made itself part of the DNA of online protest, and its influence can be seen on major recent protests, such as those against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

      At 25 years old, EFF is one of the few digital rights groups to have participated in the CDA protests first-hand. To mark the 20th anniversary of the passage of that law—and the protests against it—we pulled some of the most interesting material from the archives of that era.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • The ‘Coke Zero’ Trademark Madness May Finally Be Coming To An End

        Did you know that Coca-Cola has been attempting to get a trademark on the word “zero” for beverages in the United States for well over a decade? Yes, the most well-known soft-drink maker, which sells a product called ‘Coke Zero’, first filed for a trademark on the single word in 2003. The fight has been ongoing ever since, with Dr. Pepper Snapple Group opposing the trademark, because, well, lots of other beverage companies use that common word and because of course it did. Oddly, we covered a trademark case a few years back in which Coca-Cola was on the receiving end of a trademark suit over its use of the word, that time from a water company that offered a product it had named ‘Naturally Zero.’

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Office Decides To Rewrite Copyright Law Itself, Blesses A ‘Making Available’ Right That Isn’t There

        The Copyright Office has decided to take a stance on copyright law that requires two slightly odd things. First, it requires ignoring what the Copyright Act actually says and then, separately, it requires pretending that the law says something that it clearly does not say. That’s pretty incredible when you think about it.

        For quite some time now there have been ongoing legal fights in the copyright world over whether or not there’s a “making available right” in copyright law. The issue is actually super important. 17 USC 106 lays out the only six exclusive rights granted to rights holders under copyright.

      • Fancy an Anti-Piracy Threat….To Your Dropbox Email Address?

        Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is stepping up its game when it comes to scaring would-be pirates. While people sharing files in public using BitTorrent are the group’s usual targets, BREIN has just sent scary emails to people who thought they were sharing eBooks privately using Dropbox.

02.23.16

Links 23/2/2016: Libinput 1.2, KDE Neon Alive

Posted in News Roundup at 8:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • BeeGFS Parallel File System Goes Open Source

    Today ThinkParQ announced that the complete BeeGFS parallel file system is now available as open source. Developed specifically for performance-critical environments, the BeeGFS parallel file system was developed with a strong focus on easy installation and high flexibility, including converged setups where storage servers are also used for compute jobs. By increasing the number of servers and disks in the system, performance and capacity of the file system can simply be scaled out to the desired level, seamlessly from small clusters up to enterprise-class systems with thousands of nodes.

  • 2016 Survey Shows More and Diverse SDN Use Cases Being Deployed by Open SDN Power Users
  • NoviFlow and IP Infusion Collaborate To Integrate Commercial-Grade Networking Stacks With The ONOS Controller For Use In Scale-Out SDN Router Applications
  • SDN Open Source Movement to Advance as NoviFlow Joins ONOS Project

    The Open Network Operating System (ONOS), a Software Defined Networking (SDN) OS had another name added to its list of collaborators as NoviFlow Inc. joined the project. This was publicized in an announcement made by NoviFlow Inc. which is a leading provider of high-performance OpenFlow-based switching solutions.

  • OpenDaylight Beryllium Advances Open-Source SDN [VIDEO]

    The new Beryllium follows the Lithium release that debuted in 2015, and adds performance, and stability to the platform

  • Open Source Project Managers Can Keep You on Track

    When you’re collaborating with other people who may be at disparate locations around the world, sometimes you need collaboration software to manage projects and keep workflows humming along. Open source project managers can be just the ticket for these needs. Collabtive is one tool that we’ve covered in this area, and an increasingly popular one is OpenProject. These have several features that make them competitive with proprietary alternatives.

  • Events

    • Bulgaria Web Summit 2016 Report & Videos

      The morning sessions were dominated by database topics including MariaDB, RocksDB and MammothDB. The MariaDB talk was particularly strong while the rest were with average attendance.

      In the afternoon we switched to DevOps and Docker and the room exploded. There were people sitting on the ground and standing around the walls. There was not enough oxygen for everyone in the room.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • MapR and Ericsson Team to Advance Hadoop+Spark Analytics

      MapR Technologies, which we’ve reported on extensively as it has focused on Hadoop and the Big Data space, has gained a powerful and experienced partner. It has formed a partnership with Ericsson, and the two companies are working together to advance adoption of the MapR Converged Data Platform. The platform integrates file, database, stream processing and analytics, and is gaining attention at enterprises. It’s also interesting because it marries Hadoop and Spark, which are probably the hottest open technologies in the Big Data space.

  • Databases

    • Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions 2016-W07

      As the flow of incoming bugs for upcoming 4.6.0 has slowed down a bit it was more time for code cleanups and related tasks. But it’s also time where potential Google Summer of Code students come to our organization and want to get involved.

      On the cleanup side the biggest was change to remove embedded PHP libraries which are available on Packagist from our Git and use Composer to manage the dependencies. This change will happen in 4.7.0, so it’s still some time ahead, but it’s already in our master branch. There still some third party libraries which we use and can not be installed using Composer, so we keep these for now.

    • Encryption – MariaDB

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • IBM proves love for Swift, releases Kitura web server framework for Linux

      IBM held a press conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to update the world on its MobileFirst offering, which supports enterprise applications on Apple iOS devices.

      A couple of things were notable about the event. Although IBM presents MobileFirst as a partnership with Apple, nobody from Apple bothered to turn up. Second, the assembled press had to endure a panel of no doubt worthy but hardly notable app demos from various customers, and a number of journalists headed for the exit before IBM got around to delivering its actual news: that it was supporting Swift on the server with a new web framework.

    • GigaSpaces Announces ARIA, an Open Source, Open Governance Framework for TOSCA-based Cloud Orchestration
    • Exclusive: Infosys is using Open Source as its most lethal weapon yet! [Ed: Infosys is more like a Microsoft extension]

      Open source became huge in 2015 with more consumers adapting it like never before. Though to a layman the quick adaptability will be credited to the ‘free’ aspect of it all, a survey done by Infosys actually contradicts this and brings the real picture forward.

      [...]

      Talking about the main strategy to target the open source market in India, he said Infosys doesn’t really go and sell Open Source. “We are there as the customer demand is there.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Upcoming features in GCC 6

      The GCC project has traditionally made major releases yearly in the March/April timeframe. March is rapidly approaching and the GCC project’s engineers are busy polishing things up for the GCC 6 release. I’m going to take a short break from my own release efforts to briefly talk about some of the new features.

  • Public Services/Government

    • EU funds open source programming research

      The European Research Council (ERC) is funding several open source software research projects, including code audits, security testing an on cryptography. Each of four projects in Austria, France and Germany received just under EUR 2 million in so-called Consolidator Grants.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • IBM Cloud to Easily Replicate VMware Workloads and Enterprise Java

      For those shops that want to migrate their existing enterprise Java workloads to the cloud, IBM has released IBM WebSphere Cloud Connect. This connector provides an easy way to bridge server side Java applications to the cloud for the 100,000 enterprise users that run the IBM WebSphere Java Enterprise Edition server.

      IBM has estimated there are approximately 13 million Java programmers worldwide.

    • What Is Programming And Why You Should Learn To Code?

      With the advent of new online opportunities, learning how to code is easier than ever. Read more to know why everyone should learn to code and grab the best courses to kickstart your coding career.

Leftovers

Links 23/2/2016: Meizu Pro 5 at MWC, Bill Gates Openly Promotes Back Doors

Posted in News Roundup at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Office 365 suffers European outage due to ‘high resource utilisation’

    Office 365 is experiencing a European outage, marking the second time in three months that Microsoft’s critical enterprise systems are unavailable for a sustained period.

    The company has been quoted as attributing the problems to “high resource utilisation”.

    Many users are unable to log into Office 365 through its front-end portal, resulting in perpetual lag, while the website promising that technicians are “working on it”. If users are able to log in to services – for example Outlook – they are experiencing further lag inside the service environment when trying to open emails.

  • Hardware

    • NXP unveils a tiny 64-bit ARM processor for the Internet of Things

      Additionally, the LS1012A is the first processor designed specifically for an emerging new storage solution, dubbed object-based storage. Object-based storage relies on a smart hard disk drive that is directly connected to the data center’s Ethernet network. The processor must be small enough to be integrated directly on the circuit board for a hard disk drive.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Kaminsky: A Skeleton Key of Unknown Strength
    • A Skeleton Key of Unknown Strength

      TL;DR: The glibc DNS bug (CVE-2015-7547) is unusually bad. Even Shellshock and Heartbleed tended to affect things we knew were on the network and knew we had to defend. This affects a universally used library (glibc) at a universally used protocol (DNS). Generic tools that we didn’t even know had network surface (sudo) are thus exposed, as is software written in programming languages designed explicitly to be safe. Who can exploit this vulnerability? We know unambiguously that an attacker directly on our networks can take over many systems running Linux. What we are unsure of is whether an attacker anywhere on the Internet is similarly empowered, given only the trivial capacity to cause our systems to look up addresses inside their malicious domains.

    • IPFire 2.17 Core Update 98 Patches Glibc Vulnerability for the Linux Firewall

      Michael Tremer, a developer working on the open source IPFire Linux firewall project, announced on February 22, 2016, the availability of a new Core Update for the distribution.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • No, Michael Hayden–The Case for Drones is Much More Complicated Than That

      I don’t really know where to start with Michael Hayden’s piece in the New York Times defending drone strikes. Perhaps with the report last fall from the Intercept that shows that the very data we use to characterize the results of drone strikes is cooked “by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets.” Drone strikes are automatically effective if you assume they are effective, and you can do that by the casual us versus them analysis that says “If you live in one of these areas, or are walking near particular people, you’re probably a terrorist.” The only (ironic) way in which this might be true is that, if you didn’t hate the United States before indiscriminate drone killings, you’re much more likely to afterwards, when someone you know was killed. Not that the targets are necessarily well-chosen, either. One analyst has described these methods as “completely bullshit.”

    • Michael Hayden’s Defense of Drone Warfare Doesn’t Add Up

      It should be acknowledged that it is difficult to evaluate Hayden’s op-ed, because he refers to intelligence reports that the American public will never see. Moreover, it is impossible to know whether everything Hayden wanted to reveal is included in the published Times piece, since the content of the op-ed must have been approved by the CIA Publications Review Board, whether as a stand-alone piece or an excerpt from his forthcoming book. Nevertheless, there are a few troubling aspects to the op-ed, which are consistent with all U.S. government officials’ arguments in support of drone strikes: how the program is framed and what complicating bits of information that are left out.

    • Let’s hope the NSA hasn’t actually used this machine-learning model to target drone strikes

      The U.S. National Security Agency could be relying on a seriously flawed machine-learning model to target drone strikes in Pakistan, according to a new analysis of slides uncovered last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

      Published last May by The Intercept, the slides detail the NSA’s so-called Skynet program, in which machine learning is apparently used to identify likely terrorists in Pakistan. While it’s unclear if the machine-learning model has been used in the NSA’s real-world efforts, it has serious problems that could put lives at risk if it were, according to Patrick Ball, director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Mozilla, EFF, and Creative Commons call for more openness in trade negotiations

      Browser maker Mozilla, digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Creative Commons have called for more openness in global trade agreements.

      The trio—alongside a variety of expert “stakeholders representing Internet users, consumers, innovative businesses, cultural institutions, and scholars”—released a “Brussels Declaration on Trade and the Internet,” which was launched on Monday to coincide with the start of the 12th round of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations in Brussels.

  • Finance

    • Global Alliance Condemns Internet Rulemaking Through Closed Trade Agreements

      EFF has spent years battling the undemocratic Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); not because we are against free trade, but because we fear that the undue influence that vested interests have over the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In turn, the USTR exercises its own influence over foreign policymakers, ultimately resulting in punishingly strict copyright rules and ham-fisted digital policies sweeping the globe. These concerns have been fully validated with the belated release of the final text of the agreement.

      In fact, even we have been surprised at some of the new Internet-related policies that have now been subsumed into these closed trade negotiations—such as rules dictating how countries have to manage their country-code domain names, and limiting their flexibility to mandate the review of source code in consumer technology, or to require private data of their citizens to be hosted locally. It would be fair to say that until recently nobody ever expected such rules to be the subject of closed door negotiations between trade negotiators, rather than being openly debated in national parliaments, or in more transparent international bodies such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), or even the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • People Are Freaking Out About This Insane Picture Of Mark Zuckerberg

      A picture of Mark Zuckerberg brandishing a slightly evil smile on his face, walking past thousands of people wearing VR headsets, has caused a havoc online. It happened at this year’s Mobile World Congress, during Samsung’s Galaxy S7 launch event in Barcelona.

    • NSA data centre brings 300 million daily security scares to its Utah home

      Utah is being hit with up to 300 million security incidents a day, the state’s public safety commissioner says.

      He complains that the undefined “incidents”, the bulk of which are likely automated scans, have skyrocketed since 2010 when the number of incidents peaked at 80,000 a day.

      Commissioner Keith Squires told local broadcaster KUTV he suspected the increase is thanks to construction of the National Security Agency’s major data centre in the state.

    • Wikileaks Reveals the NSA Spied on World Leaders’ Secret Meetings

      Wikileaks released tonight a new cache of documents, showing that the United States’ National Security Administration bugged private meetings between major world leaders, including the United Nations Secretary General.

      The N.S.A. bugged meetings between U.N.S.G. Ban Ki-Moon, German chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and several representatives from other major world governments, listening in on their conversations on climate change, global economics, and even “how to deal with Obama,” according to the new documents.

    • WikiLeaks Releases Documents on NSA’s Spying on World Leaders’ Negotiations
    • Wikileaks: NSA bugged Netanyahu-Berlusconi meeting on US-Israel relations
    • WikiLeaks: NSA Spied on Israel’s Attempts to Repair Relations With U.S.
    • NSA Targets World Leaders for US Geopolitical Interests
    • WikiLeaks: NSA spied on UN’s Ban Ki-Moon & other world leaders for US oil companies
    • NSA Tapped a Netanyahu-Berlusconi Call Over U.S.-Israel Relations
    • Court Says EFF Can Move Forward With Discovery In Its Big Case Against NSA Surveillance

      Jewel v. NSA is the EFF’s big case against the NSA over its surveillance efforts. It predates the Snowden revelations (from a lot), and stems from that time an AT&T technician, Mark Klein, just walked through the doors of the EFF to provide the organization with evidence that AT&T basically routes a bunch of data through NSA filters for “upstream” collection (part of the NSA’s “702″ collection program). The case has gone through a bunch of permutations and procedural issues, many of which have not gone the EFF’s way, unfortunately.

    • Spying Suit Against NSA Moves Forward

      For the first time, mass surveillance opponents can dig into evidence on the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet spying programs, a federal judge ruled Friday.

    • Former NSA director asks fed court to quash metadata lawsuit

      Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and newly minted startup founder, filed a motion asking a federal court to quash a lawsuit that named him personally violating Americans’ constitutional rights through the NSA’s bulk metadata telephone surveillance program.

      The lawsuit – which resulted in the groundbreaking ruling by Judge Richard Leon that the bulk metadata collection program “likely violates the Constitution” – also named President Obama, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and others.

    • The ’80s Classic ‘WarGames’ Apparently Set The Stage For NSA Spying

      WarGames is an ’80s classic and, for many people, their first introduction to the concept of hacking. Matthew Broderick plays a hacker who thinks he’s found a fun war simulation, but is in fact talking to a NORAD supercomputer that controls the nukes, and nearly starts World War III. And believe it or not, it not only had a basis in reality, it set up how the government perceives, and deals with, cybersecurity.

    • New Hampshire Legislator Introduces Bill Protecting Libraries’ Right To Run Tor Relays

      A small town library in New Hampshire that went to war with the DHS over a Tor relay has become the unlikely impetus for new legislation aimed at protecting public libraries from government overreach.

    • Issues with corporate censorship and mass surveillance

      There are companies – such as CloudFlare – which are effectively now Global Active Adversaries. Using CF as an example – they do not appear open to working together in open dialog, they actively make it nearly impossible to browse to certain websites, they collude with larger surveillance companies (like Google), their CAPTCHAs are awful, they block members of our community on social media rather than engaging with them and frankly, they run untrusted code in millions of browsers on the web for questionable security gains.

      It would be great if they allowed GET requests – for example – such requests should not and generally do not modify server side content. They do not do this – this breaks the web in so many ways, it is incredible. Using wget with Tor on a website hosted by CF is… a disaster. Using Tor Browser with it – much the same. These requests should be idempotent according to spec, I believe.

    • Yle MOT: Supo to get Big Brother-type muscle

      Finnish authorities are moving ahead with plans to give security and intelligence officials web surveillance powers, says Yle’s investigative journalism programme. According to MOT the move follows revelations by US whistleblower Edward Snowden, who revealed extensive global intelligence programmes involving governments and telecoms companies, but in which Finland was not involved.

    • Bill Gates Says Apple Should Unlock Shooter’s iPhone For FBI
    • Bill Gates backs the U.S. government in Apple’s iPhone privacy standoff
    • Bill Gates sides with government in Apple clash
    • Bill Gates Is Backing the FBI in Its Case Against Apple

      In an interview with the Financial Times published late Monday night, Gates dismissed the idea that granting the FBI access would set a meaningful legal precedent, arguing that the FBI is “not asking for some general thing, [it is] asking for a particular case.”

    • Bill Gates says Apple should unlock the San Bernardino iPhone

      The tech industry has been generally supportive of Apple in its fight against the FBI’s demand to unlock an iPhone linked to the San Bernardino shootings, but one big name is on the FBI’s side: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who seems unswayed by fears of compromised security and a potential legal precedent.

    • The FBI Says Its Fight With Apple Is Just About One Phone. Police and Prosecutors Say Otherwise

      The war between Apple and the FBI over the iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, hinges mostly on one major question: Is the court order telling Apple to help the FBI unlock Farook’s iPhone an isolated case, or is it just the start of a new method for the government to guarantee access to anyone’s device?

    • No, The FBI Does Not ‘Need’ The Info On Farook’s iPhone; This Is Entirely About The Precedent

      Over and over again as people keep talking about the Apple / FBI encryption stuff, I keep seeing the same line pop up. It’s something along the lines of “but the FBI needs to know what’s on that phone, so if Apple can help, why shouldn’t it.” Let’s debunk that myth. The FBI absolutely does not need to know what’s on that phone. It might not even care very much about what’s on that phone. As the Grugq ably explained last week, there’s almost certainly nothing of interest on the phone. As he notes, Farook destroyed his and his wife’s personal phones, indicating that if there were anything truly important, he would have destroyed the last phone too.

    • Remember When The FBI & NYPD Told People To Upgrade Their iPhones To Enable Stronger Security?

      Look, let’s face facts here. For all the talk coming from the law enforcement community that they need backdoors into encryption to stop crime, they absolutely know that the reverse is true: strong encryption prevents crime. Lots of it. Strong encryption on phones makes stealing those phones a lot less worthwhile, because all the information on them is locked up.

    • More Support for Justice Department Than for Apple in Dispute Over Unlocking iPhone

      As the standoff between the Department of Justice and Apple Inc. continues over an iPhone used by one of the suspects in the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, 51% say Apple should unlock the iPhone to assist the ongoing FBI investigation. Fewer Americans (38%) say Apple should not unlock the phone to ensure the security of its other users’ information; 11% do not offer an opinion on the question.

    • Apple Hires Former Solicitor General, Who Lost Wife In 9/11, To Defend It Against FBI

      Two can play at the “pull on the heart strings about losses due to terror” game apparently. While the FBI has rolled out the “but the poor victims of San Bernardino” argument for why it wants to force Apple into hacking the security of its own customers, Apple has countered with a big gun of its own: it has hired former Solicitor General Ted Olson to defend the company against the FBI in this case. Olson is a mega-star in legal circles. He’s argued tons of cases before the Supreme Court, and of course, was Solicitor General under George W. Bush (whose election he helped ensure in representing him in Bush v. Gore).

    • Freedom, the US Government, and why Apple are still bad

      In order to prevent unauthorised firmware being installed on a device, Apple (and most other vendors) verify that any firmware updates are signed with a trusted key. The FBI don’t have access to Apple’s firmware signing keys, and as a result they’re unable to simply replace the software themselves. That’s why they’re asking Apple to build a new firmware image, sign it with their private key and provide it to the FBI.

    • Michael Hayden on Apple’s fight with FBI, 2016 campaigns

      A powerful intelligence insider is weighing in on Apple’s standoff with the FBI over unlocking the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone. Retired Gen. Michael Hayden says Apple is right in principle, but the government has a point. The former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA created and oversaw controversial programs designed to keep Americans safe. Hayden joins “CBS This Morning” to discuss his new book, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.”

    • FBI’s Own Actions Likely Made Farook’s iPhone Data Inaccessible

      On Friday, we noted that one of the reasons that the FBI was unable to get access to the data on the remaining iPhone from Syed Farook was because after the shooting and after the phone was in the hands of the government, Farook’s employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, initiated a password change on his iCloud account. That apparently messed stuff up, because without that, it would have been possible to force the phone to backup data to the associated iCloud account, where it would have been available to the FBI. But, after we published that article, a rather salient point came out: the Health Department only did this because the FBI asked it to do so.

    • FBI Director: We’re Only Forcing Apple To Undermine Security Because We Chase Down Every Lead

      Over the weekend the narrative the FBI has been trying to spread around the legal effort to get Apple to build a system that lets the FBI hack Apple customers began to crumble, as it was revealed that the FBI’s own actions were largely responsible for the fact that the information on Syed Farook’s phone was no longer accessible. That gave more and more weight to the argument that the whole reason that the FBI did this was to set a precedent that judges can force companies to hack their own customers, should the FBI want them to do so. Again, it seems fairly obvious that the FBI chose this case in particular, because basically everyone agrees that Farook and his wife were bad people who murdered a bunch of Farook’s co-workers. That obviously makes the FBI’s case more sympathetic for setting a precedent. But with the shady actions that resulted in the data being locked up, that nice story was starting to slip away.

    • NSA Would Like to Keep Zero-Day Bugs Secret for as Long as It Can

      The NSA (National Security Agency) is in the midst of a two-year-old lawsuit with the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) for the right to keep its zero-day handling process secret from the prying eyes of the outside world.

  • Civil Rights

    • Military Prison Blocks Chelsea Manning from Reading EFF Blog Posts

      EFF was dismayed to learn last week that the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Fort Leavenworth has refused to provide inmate Chelsea Manning with printouts of EFF blog posts and other materials related to prisoner censorship. Worse yet, it appears that the reason is ostensibly to protect EFF’s copyrights.

      Manning is serving a 35-year sentence for her role in the release of military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks. A volunteer from her support network attempted to send her a series of articles EFF wrote last year about our work defending the rights of inmates to maintain an online presence. This included articles about severe punishments leveled at inmates with Facebook profiles and our views on how prison telecommunications systems should be regulated. Also attached were relevant public records from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, EFF’s comments to the Federal Communications Commission, and articles from Buzzfeed and the Harvard Business Review.

    • Military Prison Blocks Won’t Let Chelsea Manning Read EFF Blog… To Protect EFF’s Copyright

      Officials at Ft. Leavenworth prison, where Chelsea Manning is confined has apparently become super interested in protecting EFF’s copyright. Or so they claim. Manning has been blocked from reading printouts of EFF blog posts, and the US Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) insists it’s just about the copyright and not because they might disapprove of the EFF’s message.

    • State-funded Danish Muslim school tells girls not to date

      The private Muslim school Iqra Privatskole, located in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district, received 18.5 million kroner in state-funded support in 2015. But the school’s outlook on dating may put future funding in jeopardy.

    • Yanis Varoufakis: “The UK should stay in the EU to fight tooth and nail against the EU’s anti-democratic institutions”

      In an interview with EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis discusses the launch of his new ‘Democracy in Europe’ movement (DiEM25), the UK’s upcoming referendum on EU membership, and why a surge of democracy is needed to prevent the EU from sliding toward disintegration.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • US Congressional Hearing On WIPO Accountability This Week

      Brown was brought in as a high-level adviser to Gurry, a fellow Australian, at the start of his first term in 2008, but she soon balked at what she saw as unacceptable practices by Gurry and later left the organisation as a whistleblower.

    • Copyrights

      • Three Strikes System In Australia ‘Too Costly’ For Industry; Seems Piracy Not Such A Massive Problem After All

        It was evident when the “three strikes” or “graduated response” was first proposed in France back in 2009 that it was a really bad idea. After all, in its crudest form, it cuts people off from what has become a necessity for modern life — the Internet — simply because they are accused of copyright infringement, an area of law that is notoriously full of uncertainties. Given that inauspicious start, it’s no surprise that over the years, the three strikes system has failed everywhere, with some of the early adopters either dropping it, or putting it on hold.

02.22.16

Links 22/2/2016: IceWeasel/Firefox Debian Debate, Linux-powered Microwave

Posted in News Roundup at 6:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • ETSI Launches Open Source Mano Group

    A total of 23 Service Providers and Solution Vendors have announced their intent to join the Open Source MANO (OSM) Community in the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona focused on delivering an open source Management and Orchestration (MANO) stack aligned with ETSI NFV Information Models. OSM has been created under the umbrella of ETSI and it is an operator-led community to meet the requirements of production NFV networks such as a common Information Model (IM) that has been defined, implemented and released in open source software.

  • OSM Demos First Steps to Open Source MANO

    A new ETSI-based open source community, launched this week, is demonstrating its model-based approach to management and orchestration for NFV here at Mobile World Congress, hoping to build consensus and speed practical deployment of virtualization by solving its most persistent problem.

  • How to choose a brand name for your open source project

    When it comes to developing a new open source software project, most developers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about brand strategy. After all, a great idea, solid code, and a passionate community are what really matter when you’re getting a project underway.

  • Web Log: Quitter appeals to Twitter deserters

    All the hoo-hah around Twitter tweaking its timeline, shortly after ditching ‘favourites’ for ‘likes’, along with its decision to censor certain content and accounts, has left some folks weary and wary of the microblogging platform.

    If you’re planning on quitting Twitter perhaps you plan on tweeting via Quitter?

    That’s a bit of a mouthful but Quitter is an ad-free, not-for-profit alternative that runs on a volunteer basis.

  • Mejiro Update: Responsive and Improved

    As always, a Mejiro demo is available for your viewing pleasure. And you can download the latest version of the app from the project’s GitHub repository.

  • Events

    • Connfa: An open source mobile app for conferences and events

      Connfa is an open source app for conferences and events aimed to make paper brochures a thing of the past. Yes, those large, clumsy brochures.

      Imagine you’re at a conference. A nice person at the reception desk checks your ticket and hands you one of these bright and shiny paper program guides. You walk off and start circling the events you want to attend. Everything goes fine until you miss the session you wanted to go to because you confused the date, or maybe you spent ages looking for the venue. To top it all off, you forget the brochure the next day and you’re pretty lost. Sound familiar?

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox: on the right fix, and why the Bugzilla breach made me proud

        At Mozilla, we keep security-sensitive bug reports confidential until the information in them is no longer dangerous. This week we’re opening to the public a group of security bugs that document a major engineering effort to remove the rocket science of writing secure browser code and make Firefox’s front-end, DOM APIs, and add-on ecosystem secure by default. It removed a whole class of security bugs in Firefox – and helped mitigate the impact of a bug-tracker breach last summer.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ls output changes considered unacceptable

      There are some software changes that are simple accidents resulting in bugs; folks find them, fix them, and all is well. Then there are intentional changes, which don’t affect functionality, but instead change _essential aesthetics_. These are much more alarming issues, the kind of issues that get under your skin, that disrupt your relationship with the terminal, as though you suddenly woke up and all your countrymen but not you spoke with a hardly comprehensible accent. It’s a shock, a disruption, a psychological chasm. And, when such a change is made in software considered “core”, by a single individual unilaterally without extremely wide consultation of the larger community, it is clear that a grave an unacceptable thing has happened. The recent change to ls (commit 109b922) must be reverted immediately, a new package version released, and only after large multi-distro discussion might a similar change be made.

  • Programming

    • Don’t use the greater than sign in programming

      Has 15 other possible ways to be expressed if you include the greater than sign and don’t make your expressions conform to the number line.

    • Upgraded to Jekyll 3.0

      Github Pages now supports Jekyll 3.0 which has some backward incompatible features, so I have decided to upgrade. I was quite surprised when I realized I am still using Jekyll 1.0 and everything was working great so far!

    • GCC vs. Clang On POWER8 Is A Competitive Compiler Match

      Most often when running GCC vs. LLVM Clang compiler benchmark comparisons it’s done on Intel/AMD x86 hardware or occasionally on ARM when benchmarking an interesting ARMv7/ARMv8 system. However, in having remote access last weekend to the prototype of the Talos Secure Workstation powered by a POWER8 design, I was very anxious to run some compiler benchmarks to see how these open-source compilers compete on the alternative architecture.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Mercury Splatters the Central U.S.

      Several years after scientists thought they had put the problem to rest, they have once again discovered increasing concentrations of mercury, this time in rainwater. “It’s a surprising result,” says David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may not necessarily be the case.”

    • Flint’s Poisoned Children Deserve the Truth

      The Michigan Legislature must amend the state’s Freedom of Information law to include itself and the governor’s office.

      By now, you’ve surely heard about the Flint water crisis. And you probably know why it happened: After the state of Michigan suspended democracy in the impoverished, predominantly African-American city, emergency managers appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder were given absolute power to make unilateral decisions that resulted in the lead poisoning of the municipality’s water supply.

      Congress, the Department of Justice, and the FBI are all conducting investigations. And the ACLU of Michigan, along with the National Resource Defense Council, local pastors and residents, is litigating to force the state to replace lead service lines immediately.

    • US School Agrees to Pay $8,500 to Get Rid of Ransomware

      As criminal probes and lawsuits examine the Flint water crisis, some of the key decision makers have been reluctant to discuss their roles.

      But their e-mails, released under the Freedom of Information Act, offer contemporaneous accounts of the crisis as it was happening. Here are some of the e-mails exchanges that have been recently released and what they show about a crisis that has drawn international attention.

    • Russian doping official planned book before sudden death

      The former executive director of the Russian anti-doping agency planned to write a book on drug use in sports shortly before his sudden death, a former colleague and Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper reported Sunday.

      Sunday Times sports writer David Walsh, renowned for his coverage of cycling champion Lance Armstrong’s doping, reported that Nikita Kamaev wrote to him in November offering to reveal information on doping covering the last three decades since Kamaev began work for a “secret lab” in the Soviet Union.

  • Security

    • SMEs vulnerable through insufficient IT, data security

      Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to breaches of IT security, according to a newly published survey which finds that security of data and IT systems is a growing concern for business leaders across Australia.

      Despite facing the same online risks as larger corporates, research by recruitment agency Robert Half the shows that small and medium businesses typically use fewer data protection tools than large companies.

    • US School Agrees to Pay $8,500 to Get Rid of Ransomware [Ed: Microsoft Windows]

      Administrators of the Horry County school district (South Carolina, US) have agreed to make a $8,500 / €7,600 payment to get rid of a ransomware infection that has affected the school’s servers.

    • Linux Computers Targeted with Fresh Fysbis Spying Malware

      One fresh malicious program called Fysbis, whose other name is Linux.BackDoor.Fysbis has been created for targeting Linux computers through installation of a backdoor which reportedly opens the machine’s access to the malware owner, thus facilitating him with spying on the user as well as carrying out more attacks.

    • CVE-2016-2384: arbitrary code execution due to a double-free in the usb-midi linux kernel driver

      This post describes an exploitable vulnerability (CVE-2016-2384) in the usb-midi Linux kernel driver. The vulnerability is present only if the usb-midi module is enabled, but as far as I can see many modern distributions do this. The bug has been fixed upstream.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Gallup Poll Shows Americans Prefer Terrorist Nations Over Iran. Why?

      A February 17th Gallup Poll showed that Americans prefer the chief nation that sponsors international terrorism, when given a choice between that terrorist-sponsoring nation and Iran. The disapproval shown of Iran is 79%; the approval is 14%. Back in 2014, the disapproval / approval were 84%/12%. At that time, Saudi Arabia had figures of 57%/35%. Iran was seen by Americans as being even more hostile toward Americans than Saudi Arabia.

    • The Saudi Slaughter in Yemen

      Although the Saudis have promised a high-level committee to investigate civilian deaths from their airstrikes in Yemen, they continue to strike civilian targets with countless deaths and destructions.

    • Darkness at High Noon in Korea

      As the world focuses on the war in Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, and the primary slugfest in the United States, the two Koreas are heading toward a catastrophe in the Far East.

      Although relations on the Korean peninsula have been deteriorating for the better part of eight years, the last six months have been particularly tense. North Korea recently conducted its fourth nuclear test and followed up with a satellite launch using a long-range rocket. The international community reacted in its customary fashion, with condemnations and the imposition of more sanctions. South Korea joined in the chorus of disapproval.

    • Jeb Bush Is Dropping Out of the GOP Race. Here’s Why I’ll Miss His Campaign.

      There were more than a few reasons for a libertarian (or, okay, anyone) to dislike Jeb Bush: his consistent support for his brother George W. Bush’s administration, his aggressive backing of awful government surveillance programs, his general air of hawkishness, and the easy, entitled comfort with which he slipped into his place as the early favorite of the Republican party establishment. Jeb Bush and his supporters stood for continuity with the GOP under his brother, and all that was wrong with it.

    • It Took Jeb $150 Million, 250 Days And 3 States To Figure Out Republicans Don’t Want More Bush

      The massive expenditure of funds earned him 2.8 percent of the vote in Iowa, 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and, at the time he announced his withdrawal from the race, about 8 percent of the vote in South Carolina.

    • Uber Driver Allegedly Responsible For Kalamazoo Shooting Spree That Killed 6

      Police have arrested a suspect for a six-hour shooting spree that started in an apartment complex parking lot and ended in a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

      Jason Brian Dalton, a 45-year-old Uber driver, is suspected of killing six people and injuring two at random with a semiautomatic handgun during multiple shootings Saturday night. The shootings started around 6 p.m. when a woman was shot four times while with her three children. CNN reported the woman is in serious condition but is expected to survive the attack.

    • Kosovo Chaos Undercuts Clinton ‘Success’

      President Bill Clinton’s Kosovo war of 1999 was loved by neocons and liberal hawks—the forerunner for Iraq, Libya, Syria and other conflicts this century—but Kosovo’s political violence and lawlessness today underscore the grim consequences of those strategies even when they “succeed,” writes Jonathan Marshall.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • South Florida’s Tourist Season From Hell

      February and March are the prime times for tourists to come to Florida for a respite from cold winter weather. So imagine the panic that people who run fishing charters, paddle board concessions, beachfront hotels and restaurants are feeling as dark agricultural swill gushes from the state’s center to the east and west coasts, killing marine life.

      “It’s brown, it stinks, it’s cold,” a tourist from New Mexico told a TV reporter in Fort Myers.”It doesn’t look very appealing to get into to go swimming in.”

    • Why I Support Dr. Jill Stein for President

      The political crisis in America is severe. The old ideas that buttressed the ruling class and promised democracy, growth and prosperity—neoliberalism, austerity, globalization, endless war, a dependence on fossil fuel and unregulated capitalism—have been exposed as fictions used by the corporate elite to impoverish and enslave the country and enrich and empower themselves. Sixty-two billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s population, 3.5 billion people. This fact alone is revolutionary tinder.

      We are entering a dangerous moment when few people, no matter what their political orientation, trust the power elite or the ruling neoliberal ideology. The rise of right-wing populism, with dark undertones of fascism, looks set in the next presidential election—as it does in parts of Europe—to pit itself against the dying gasps of the corporate establishment.

    • NOAA Forecast for Red Tide in Florida

      A red tide, or harmful algal bloom, is the rapid growth of microscopic algae. Some produce toxins that have harmful effects on people, fish, marine mammals, and birds. In Florida and Texas, this is primarily caused by the harmful algae species, Karenia brevis. It can result in varying levels of eye and respiratory irritation for people, which may be more severe for those with pre-existing respiratory conditions (such as asthma). The blooms can also cause large fish kills and discolored water along the coast.

    • Preparing for the Collapse of the Saudi Kingdom

      For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So tight is the trust that U.S. special operators dip into Saudi petrodollars as a counterterrorism slush fund without a second thought. In a sea of chaos, goes the refrain, the kingdom is one state that’s stable.

  • Finance

    • An Open Letter To My CEO

      I haven’t bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I’m lazy, but because I got this ten pound bag of rice before I moved here and my meals at home (including the one I’m having as I write this) consist, by and large, of that. Because I can’t afford to buy groceries. Bread is a luxury to me, even though you’ve got a whole fridge full of it on the 8th floor. But we’re not allowed to take any of that home because it’s for at-work eating. Of which I do a lot. Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent. Isn’t that ironic? Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy can’t afford to buy food. That’s gotta be a little ironic, right?

    • Bank of Finland predicts country will be cash-free by 2029
    • More Than 100 State and Local Governments Considering Anti-TPP Resolutions

      More than 100 state and local governments have introduced or passed resolutions opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In addition, more than 100 resolutions opposing the TPP were passed at recent precinct caucuses in Iowa.

    • TTIP reading room to open in the UK, but campaigners warn of lack of transparency

      The UK government has announced its plans to open a special ‘TTIP reading room’ where MPs are able to read the negotiating texts of the controversial trade deal being negotiated between the EU and the USA – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The announcement was made in response to a written parliamentary question by Caroline Lucas MP, in advance of the 12th round of the TTIP negotiations which start in Brussels on 22 February.

    • Secret TTIP talks resume Monday as EU-US rifts deepen

      EU and US resume their negotiations next week over the TTIP trade and investment deal. But deep rifts have emerged over the corporate courts in which investors can sue governments for any actions that reduce their profits. Meanwhile MPs are seething over their restricted access to draft texts and negotiating documents.

    • A New Infographic on TPP and Your Digital Rights

      Anyone familiar with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) may find that it can be challenging to explain to others, in simple terms, how it threatens our rights online and over our digital devices. We often begin by describing the secretive, corporate-captured process of the negotiations that ultimately led to the final deal, then go into some of the specific policies—including its ban on circumventing digital locks (aka Digital Rights Management or DRM), its copyright term extensions that will lengthen restrictions on creative works by 20 years, and its inclusion of “investor-state” rules that could empower multinational corporations to undermine new user protections in the TPP countries.

    • Canada’s first Chinese FIPA case in the making?

      You never know where the next huge story is going to come from. I remember the first time I saw Enbridge’s proposal for a West Coast oil tanker port mentioned in a tiny newspaper article 15 years ago, and we know what happened with that.

    • Globe & Mail columnist calls for scrapping ISDS to save CETA

      The Globe and Mail’s national business correspondent Barrie McKenna has a solution to getting the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) through the European Parliament – drop the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provision.

    • In Murky 2016 Contest, Clear Opposition to Trade Agreements

      One of the few things clarified by a presidential contest where much remains unclear is the diminished support for–and, in some quarters, outright hostility toward–more trade deals. This goes beyond candidates pledging support for “fair trade” rather than “free trade,” which is par for the course during campaign season. What’s happening this cycle has implications for not only the next administration but also the global economy.

    • Obama Punts On Trade Agreement With EU

      The Obama administration has all but given up on a trade agreement with the European Union.

      Negotiations on the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership continue, but the administration is so invested in saving its other free trade agreement – the Trans-Pacific Partnership – that it has punted the T-TIP to the next administration.

    • Majority of U.S. Public School Students Live in Poverty

      For the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

    • You Can’t Earn a Living on the Minimum Wage

      When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about? Whether they know it or not, it’s something like this.

    • Looking for ‘Revitalization’ in All the Wrong Places

      On the one hand, using the Kings arena as a hook to examine chronic homelessness (though the examination here doesn’t go much beyond “it exists”) isn’t the worst thing in the world, especially for local newscasts that almost never focus on the lives of the poor. But on the other, this report reveals how deeply messed up local development reporting can be.

      [...]

      The FOX40 reporters who put together this piece probably didn’t think that this was the message they were conveying, but that shouldn’t let them off the hook. If you’re going to be a journalist, it’s vitally important that you think about not only what you’re covering, but how you’re covering it, and what assumptions go into the way you frame your story.

    • Billionaire-Owned Observer Whines About Democratization of Media in 2016’s Worst Op-ed

      Second only to glib equivalencies between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, 2016’s most popular lazy media trope is the idea that rabid Sanders fans have unleashed dark populist forces that threaten our republic. Both are fairly common, and more or less write themselves if the author tosses coherence and intellectual honesty out the window. But it’s rare that both are on such stark display as with New York Observer‘s editor-at-large Ryan Holiday’s recent op-ed (2/17/16).

      The diatribe, “The Cause of This Nightmare Election? Media Greed and Shameless Traffic Worship,” poses as media criticism but is little more than petulant establishment gatekeeping. Let’s begin with the thesis, or what passes for one, which is that the democratization of media has created a “sub-prime market” for the media.

    • Presstitutes At Work

      Like the Supreme Court the presstitutes have aligned themselves with the rich and powerful. Fox “News” reported that Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, declared that to make the poor rich requires making the rich poor and we shouldn’t make the rich poor. Apparently, Fox “News” believes that aligning Rubio with the One Percent is helpful to his political career. Fox showed Rubio’s audience cheering and applauding his defense of the One Percent.

      This is “democratic America” where the people have no representation.

    • ‘Nobody Asked a Worker!’
    • NYT Rounds Up ‘Left-Leaning Economists’ for a Unicorn Hunt

      With Hillary Clinton ramping up her attacks on Bernie Sanders as a budget-buster—in the February 11 debate, she claimed his proposals would increase the size of government by 40 percent—the New York Times (2/15/16) offered a well-timed intervention in support of her efforts: “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’ Plans.”

      While the “left-leaning” is no doubt meant to suggest critiques from those who would be inclined to sympathize with Sanders, all the quoted economists have ties to the Democratic establishment. So slight is their leftward lean that it would require very sensitive equipment to measure.

      Opinion pieces critical of Sanders often begin with a pledge of allegiance to his “impracticality.”

    • Wall Street Analyst Says Hillary Clinton Would Be the Best President for Healthcare Investors

      Amidst a tense battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders over competing visions for health care, a leading Wall Street analyst has put out a report saying that Clinton would be the best candidate for healthcare investors.

    • Hillary Clinton Again Declines to Disclose What She Told Big Banks in Her Paid Speeches

      The guy in the audience said it was a matter of trust. “Please just release those transcripts so we know exactly where you stand,” he said.

      But Hillary Clinton wasn’t going there. At the MSNBC town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates on Thursday evening in Las Vegas, Clinton once again refused to release transcripts or recordings of the secret speeches she was paid millions of dollars to make to Wall Street banks.

    • Voodoo Journalism: Dr. Krugman Strikes Again—Risking His Credibility

      Paul Krugman is at it again. This time, he’s using his position as the leading progressive columnist in the “nation’s newspaper of record,” to ballyhoo a letter from four former heads of the Council of Economic Advisors.

      Their letter criticizes an economic analysis of Bernie Sanders’ policies performed by University of Massachusetts economist, Gerald Friedman, which found that Sander’s platform would increase growth by 5.3%.

      Krugman’s column this past Friday suggests that the former CEA chiefs’ letter puts Bernie in the same camp as the Republicans, who’ve been spouting voodoo economics such as trickle-down and the elixir of tax cuts for decades now, complete with magic asterisks designed to make nearly $6 trillion in deficits disappear.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Hillary is the foolish idealist: Clinton derides Sanders as naive, but has no plan for battling GOP obstruction

      Throughout this Democratic primary season, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly cast herself as “a progressive who likes to get things done,” and her opponent, Bernie Sanders, as a foolish idealist whose ideas “sound good on paper but will never make it in the real world.”

      “I want you to understand, I will not promise you something I cannot deliver,” she told a South Carolina crowd last Friday. “I will not make promises I know I cannot keep.”

      But, contrary to these assurances of realism and pragmatism, Clinton has actually set forth a bold, sweeping agenda to transform America.

    • This is the key to Bernie Sanders’ political revolution: Here’s how we beat GOP obstruction

      It is my belief that Sen. Bernie Sanders will be the next president of the United States — a belief I’ve held since he first announced. Bernie is one of the most gifted politicians I have ever observed. He’s a person of great integrity and very clever. Many thought that calling himself a democratic socialist doomed his presidential candidacy, initially causing “the powers that be” to dismiss him. It turned out to have been an asset because this lack of national attention from opinion-makers permitted Bernie to grow his movement below the radar.

    • Why Bernie Can Win

      The pundits are wrong. Bernie Sanders is the most electable candidate this November.

    • Team Clinton: Fools, Damn Fools and Democrats

      However, we Americans are bombarded relentlessly with mind numbing pro-regime, pro-status quo propaganda. This is why it is always worthwhile repeating information that is out there already.

    • WATCH: Amy Goodman Critiques Media Coverage of Election 2016 on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”

      “…it is astounding that Bernie Sanders is where he is today. Look at that Tyndall Center report that found in 2015, in the months leading up to December, you had 234 total network minutes, like almost four hours, CBS, NBC, ABC, covering Trump. That’s four hours and how much got coverage? Sanders got 10 minutes. On ABC World News Tonight in that year, Sanders got 20 seconds. Trump got like 81 minutes,” said Goodman.

    • Backed by Airline Dollars, Congress Rejects Effort to Address Shrinking Legroom

      An amendment to address shrinking legroom for airline passengers was defeated recently by members of Congress fueled by campaign dollars from the airline industry.

      An amendment proposed by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., would have required the federal government to study the issue of shrinking legroom and allowed it to set a minimum dimension for commercial airline seats.

    • Hillary Wins a Squeaker in Nevada, But It’s a Rout in the Headlines

      In case you’ve ever wondered about the value of a narrow 5-point win in a state you were expected to take easily, just take a look at today’s headlines. The margin of victory doesn’t matter. The headlines in all four of our biggest daily newspapers were clear as a bell: Hillary won and her momentum is back. That’s the story everyone is seeing over their bacon and eggs this morning.

    • Sanders: ‘We Have Enormous Momentum’ Going Into South Carolina

      Despite a narrow loss in the Nevada presidential caucus on Saturday, Bernie Sanders is not slowing down, and neither are his supporters.

      A report filed over the weekend with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) shows the senator from Vermont has received more than four million contributions, raising a total of $94.8 million through January 31st after his campaign launched last April.

    • How Hillary Clinton Won Nevada

      It might have been closer than most people would have guessed a month ago, but Hillary Clinton’s long-term investment in Nevada paid off. The former secretary of state edged out Sen. Bernie Sanders by about five percentage points in the Nevada caucuses. It wasn’t quite the 20-point edge that Clinton had in polls from late last year, but it was a decisive win that backs up the Clinton campaign’s contention that Sanders won’t be able to maintain the same level of support he enjoyed in Iowa and New Hampshire as the contest moves to more diverse states.

    • [Old but republished] Clinton’s Experience: Fact and Fantasy

      From the Archive: Hillary Clinton’s win in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses and her big lead in South Carolina restore her status as Democratic frontrunner but lingering doubts about her honesty and her coziness to Big Money continue to dog her path to the White House, a problem that Barbara Koeppel identified during Clinton’s first run in 2008.

  • Censorship

    • February 22, 1976, Forty Years Ago: Court On Censorship

      “The press is not only an instrument for disseminating information but a powerful medium for moulding public opinion by propaganda. True democracy can only thrive in a free clearing house of competing ideologies and philosophies — political, economic and social — and in this, the press has an important role to play. The day this clearing-house closes down would toll the deathknell of democracy,” says a judgment by Justices D.P. Madon and M.H. Kania of the Bombay High Court. It adds: “It is not the function of the censor acting under the censorship order to make all newspapers and periodicals trim their sails to one wind or to tow along in a single file or to speak in chorus with one voice. It is not for him to exercise his statutory power to force public opinion in a single mould or to turn the press into an instrument for brainwashing the public. Under the censorship order, the censor is appointed the nursemaid of democracy and not its grave-digger. Dissent from opinions and views held by the majority and criticism and disapproval of measures initiated by a party in power make for a healthy political climate, and it is not for the censor to inject into this the lifelessness of forced conformity.

    • A culture of silencing

      A fortnight ago I was due to chair a session at the British Houses of Parliament organised by the Labour Friends of Palestine, in which MPs would “hear directly from four young Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and a Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, live via Skype”. As a Palestinian, born in a Gaza refugee camp, this opportunity to present lawmakers with the reality on the ground was dear to my heart.

      The session was cancelled at the last minute under extreme pressure from the Labour Friends of Israel parliamentary group and a campaign waged against me in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. This is not the first, and I am certain it will not be the last, time I have been prevented from offering the Palestinian point of view by the powerful machinations of the Zionist lobby and the propaganda department of the state of Israel known as Hasbara (‘explaining’).

    • Call For Stories: User Uploads and Takedown Abuse

      EFF is filing public comments on a series of studies initiated by the U.S. Copyright Office, and we need your help. One of the studies focuses on the notice-and takedown procedures outlined in section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). We’d like to hear from you about your experience with those procedures, and the policies and practices that platforms have implemented to comply with them.

    • Don’t censor A-rated movies: Petition filed on change.org after the beeped-up screenings of ‘Deadpool’

      With a message echoing that Indian cinemagoers can handle mature content and a plea to release A-rated movies without any cuts, a petition has been started by Change.org, a technology platform, to submit before the Shyam Benegal Committee on censorship.

    • Cairo gallery bemoans unprecedented censorship as it prepares to reopen

      The director of one of Egypt’s most respected art galleries has warned it faces unprecedented censorship as it seeks to reopen to the public next month after being shut down by the authorities in December.

      William Wells, the director of Townhouse gallery, said staff were allowed to return last week, having been given two weeks to comply with new legal restrictions, some of which amounted to state control of its work.

    • Censorship & Localisation – Reasons To Be Cheerful

      Xenoblade Chronicles X is one of my favourite games of last year. It’s a bloody great game and you should all play it. But a few outspoken gamers caused a ripple on the social media ocean when it was discovered that the Western versions of the game would be subject to some censorship.

    • Twitter Meets Orwell — an FAQ by Daddy Warpig

      Twitter has introduced a brave new way of screwing with users, which some have taken to calling shadowbanning.

      Basically, this acts like a gag: you can send normal tweets normally, but people Following you won’t see them on their timeline. (However, people reading your profile will see them.)

      The following restrictions also apply:

      Your tweets won’t show up in certain hashtags (which and why is unknown).

      Your tweets won’t show up in Search, either by keyword or by account name.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Paul Rosenberg on Antonin Scalia, Darnell Moore on Black Futures Month

      This week on CounterSpin: The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia sent shockwaves through the political and media world; but for many the real shock was hearing a man eulogized as gracious and thoughtful who called the Voting Rights Act a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” complained of the law profession’s “anti-anti-homosexual culture” and argued that mere “actual” innocence is no reason for the state not to kill someone.

    • Antonin Scalia’s death during secret junket points to new ethical violations

      Antonin Scalia died as he lived, indulging behind closed doors in the largess of the very wealthy, who could depend on the right-wing associate justice to defend their interests in the United States Supreme Court.

      The nauseating praise for Scalia as a towering judicial figure is exposed as all the more dishonest and absurd by the still emerging circumstances of his passing.

      On Friday, February 12, the start of the Supreme Court’s annual week-long President’s Day recess, Scalia took a chartered jet from Washington, D.C., accompanied by an unidentified lawyer friend, to the exclusive Cibolo Creek Ranch in the Chinati Mountains of West Texas, near the Mexican border. US marshals assigned as Scalia’s bodyguards were told not to make the trip.

    • Albert Woodfox, Last of the Angola Three, Is Free After 43 Years in Solitary Confinement

      Just moments ago, Albert Woodfox, the last remaining member of the Angola 3 still behind bars, was released from prison 43 years and 10 months after he was first put in a 6×9 foot solitary cell for a crime he did not commit. After decades of costly litigation, Louisiana State officials have at last acted in the interest of justice and reached an agreement that brings a long overdue end to this nightmare. Albert has maintained his innocence at every step, and today, on his 69th birthday, he will finally begin a new phase of his life as a free man.

    • ‘Where Are Your Guts?’: Johnny Cash’s Little-Known Fight for Native Americans

      In 1964, Johnny Cash faced a backlash for speaking out on behalf of native people — and he fought back.

      In 1964, Johnny Cash released a Native American-themed concept album, “Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.” In an incredible but little-known story, Cash faced censorship and backlash for speaking out on behalf of native people — and he fought back.

      A new documentary airing this month on PBS, “Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears,” tells the story of the controversy. For the album’s 50th anniversary, it was re-recorded with contributions from musicians including Kris Kristofferson and Emmylou Harris, and the documentary also chronicles the making of the new album.

      ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Stephen Pevar, author of “The Rights of Indians and Tribes,” had a chance to ask writer/director Antonino D’Ambrosio about the film.

    • Siding With Foreclosure Victim, California Court Exposes Law Enforcement Failure

      The California Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously in favor of a fraudulently foreclosed-upon homeowner in a case that should serve as a wake-up call to state and federal prosecutors that mortgage companies continue to use false documents to evict homeowners on a daily basis.

    • 5 Questions for CIA Director John Brennan

      NPR national security reporter Mary Louise Kelley tweeted on Friday that she would be interviewing CIA Director John Brennan on Saturday. Brennan was just on 60 Minutes last weekend, where Scott Pelley tossed him softballs.

    • Labor Board Sides With Trump Hotel Workers In Union Battle

      Just days before Nevada’s Republican presidential caucus, a federal labor official weighed in on the ongoing dispute between Donald Trump’s signature luxury Las Vegas hotel and the hundreds of workers who voted in December to unionize. Trump Hotel management had asked the National Labor Relations Board to throw out the results of that election, claiming that organizers from the Culinary Workers Union intimidated and coerced employees into voting yes, which “interfered with their ability to exercise a free and reasoned choice.” But after weeks of reviewing the evidence, the labor board did not agree.

    • Albert Woodfox released from jail after 43 years in solitary confinement

      US’s longest-standing solitary confinement prisoner set free in Louisiana after more than four decades in form of captivity widely denounced as torture

    • A Hindu priest in Muslim-majority Bangladesh has been hacked to death and two devotees injured in an attack on a temple in the country’s north

      A Hindu priest in Muslim-majority Bangladesh was hacked to death and two devotees injured in an attack Sunday on a temple in the country’s north.

      Police said Jogeshwar Roy, 50, was attacked as he came out after people threw stones at the temple in the Deviganj area of Panchgarh district, on the border with India.

      Quoting local people and witnesses, police officer Kafil Uddin said the assailants on a motorbike attacked the priest with a sharp weapon, fired guns and exploded crude bombs, injuring two devotees who tried to help him. The attackers fled.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • A Tale of Two Treaties: Marrakesh and Beijing Both Make Their Way to the Senate

        The White House has submitted two copyright treaties to the Senate for ratification: the Marrakesh Treaty, which would improve access to copyrighted works for people with visual and print disabilities; and the Beijing Treaty, which could create a new layer of monopoly rights for the creators of audiovisual works. International copyright treaties move slowly, so neither of these is a surprise. For years now, we’ve encouraged the adoption of Marrakesh and the rejection of Beijing.

02.21.16

Links 21/2/2016: Linux Mint Web Site Breaches, MWC 2016

Posted in News Roundup at 8:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Tencent and Why Open Source is About to Explode in China

    One of the pioneers of the internet in China gave a highly provocative talk – asking the audience why China had yet to birth a major open source project. The consensus in the audience (polled via WeChat platform) was that China’s culture inhibited open source. I heard this in my travels throughout China.

    Frankly I can see this both ways. While I see the cultural challenges everyone was telling me about, their awareness of the challenge is so tangible that it is driving leaders in the community like Tencent’s Marty Ma and TethrNet’s Kevin Yin to try just a little harder. Even if the majority of Chinese tech workers don’t quite fully get open source now, we’re seeing leaders emerge in the country willing to invest of their time and energy to change things. I wouldn’t bet against them.

  • IoT industry leaders announce open source standard group

    On Friday, a group of industry leaders making headway in the Internet of Things (IoT) market announced a cross-industry collaboration effort aimed at unlocking the massive opportunities for consumers and business with IoT devices, and ultimately a way to quickly get everyone to adopting a single open standard.

  • Coreboot Now Supports U-Boot As A Payload
  • Coreboot Receives Initial POWER8 Support
  • New Businessweek Comic Uses Open-Source Al Jazeera Code

    Businessweek just published a comic strip online by Peter Coy and Dorothy Gambrell, which also appeared in print today. It argues against Fed Chair Janet Yellen introducing negative interest rates. For online readers that find their view of the strip too constricted, the site offers a way to focus on one digestible bit at a time. Open-source software released by Al Jazeera America (AJAM) last year under the MIT license, called Pulp, allowed Bloomberg to better the reading experience without writing new code.

  • AquaJS framework for Node.js is open source and in beta

    AquaJS is a framework for Node.js that was created at Equinix, which provides carrier-neutral datacenters and Internet exchanges for interconnection. AquaJS was developed to provide a way to start microservice-based application development. It is built with open-source modules, along with a few in-house modules, such as including architecture and design, programming best practices, technology, and deployment and runtime.

  • Learn Why Node.js is an Open Source Juggernaut

    The Node.js Foundation was created last year to support the open source community involved with Node.js, which offers an asynchronous event driven framework designed to build scalable network applications.

  • Events

    • What Should We Stop Doing? (FLOSS Community Metrics Meeting keynote)

      One trend I see underlying a big chunk of FLOSS metrics work is the desire to automate the emotional labor involved in maintainership, like figuring out how our fellow contributors are doing, making choices about where to spend mentorship time, and tracking a community’s emotional tenor. But is that appropriate? What if we switched our assumptions around and used our metrics to figure out what we’re spending time on more generally, and tried to find low-value programming work we could stop doing? What tools would support this, and what scenarios could play out?

    • Comparing Codes of Conduct to Copyleft Licenses (My FOSDEM Speech)

      I will briefly mention my credentials in speaking about this topic, especially since this is my first FOSDEM and many of you don’t know me. I have been a participant in free and open source software communities since the late 1990s. I’m the past community manager for MediaWiki, and while at the Wikimedia Foundation, I proposed and implemented our code of conduct, which we call a Friendly Space Policy, for in-person Wikimedia technical spaces such as hackathons and conferences.

    • What to expect from QCon London 2016

      Actually, it’s mostly more of the same (in a good way)… but perhaps at a slightly amplified level — the only change we have reflected here is to profile QCon London in the open source blog category.

      Okay yes there will be your proprietary players there too, but open source will be especially strong this year… as it is everywhere.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Open Source Interview: Former Mozilla President Li Gong on the HTML5 OS

        In this article, I introduce our new series—the Open Source interview—inviting you to suggest questions to ask our interviewees in a follow-up email interview. The first candidate is Li Gong, former president of Mozilla, who is now heading Acadine Technologies. They are busy launching H5OS, an open source platform for mobile and IoT.

      • Servo Lands Its New GPU-Accelerated Rendering Backend

        Mozilla’s experimental Servo web layout engine written in Rust has landed its new “WebRender” back-end that leverages GPU rendering.

        WebRender is an experimental GPU rendering back-end for Servo. WebRender tries to offload as much of the rendering work to the GPU rather than having to draw the web content via the CPU.

      • Mozilla: Real Data Encryption Requires Political Action, Not Just Code

        Mozilla took a strong stance on online privacy this week by reiterating the need for more encryption — but also noting that, in our age of government backdoors, encryption software alone may not be enough to keep data secure.

        In a blog post, Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox and other popular open source software, declares that “encryption isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.” And it plays up the importance of projects like Let’s Encrypt, a partnership Mozilla helped launch in 2014 to create an open certificate authority for encrypting websites.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Analysts Find Hadoop Now Entrenched in Banking, Government

      The open source Hadoop Big Data platform is not only on the rise, but it is becoming more entrenched in important sectors, including business and government. That is just one of the findings in a Research and Markets report titled “World Hadoop Market – Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014 – 2021″.

      The report also finds that the global Hadoop market is expected to garner revenue of $84.6 billion by 2021, registering a CAGR of 63.4% during the period 2016 to 2021. That is nothing to shake a stick at.

      North America accounted for around 52% share of the overall market revenue in 2015, according to the report, owing to higher rate of adoption in industries such as IT, banking, and government. Europe is anticipated to witness the fastest CAGR of 65.7% during the forecast period.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Joining The Document Foundation Board

      At the end of 2015 I was honoured to be elected to serve as a director of The Document Foundation — the charity that develops LibreOffice — for two years. The new Board commenced yesterday, February 18 and immediately started conducting business by selecting a Chair – Marina Latini from the LibreItalia community – and a vice-chair, the redoubtable Michael Meeks of Collabora.

      While some doubted when it was formed, with a few even mounting campaigns to undermine it for reasons I still don’t understand, The Document Foundation has quickly developed into a model for new open source community charities.

    • Pondering the future of the Document Foundation

      This past week we had had the pleasure to welcome both our new marketing assistant and the new board of directors of the Document Foundation. I would like to say a few words on where the Document Foundation stands now – and I must stress that I’m confident the new board has the right people to handle the future of the foundation.

      The Document Foundation is still a small entity compared to the Mozilla or OpenStack Foundation. However, with several hundreds of thousands of euros/dollars of resources, it just happens to stand just behind these behemoths. It is not an easy task. Commonly held opinions often do not apply with us: “pay X to code feature Y”. That is somewhat possible, but we tend not to do it, unless there is a strategic reason (and enough money) to do it. We do fund, however, our entire infrastructure, the release management process, infrastructure and tools that help the community develop, improve and release LibreOffice. As the Document Foundation is now four years old, we are adjusting our internal processes and decision making structure in order to scale up and be more effective. There is no easy answer, because most of the ones that could be made were already found during the past four years.

  • CMS

    • Remember WordPress’ Pingbacks? The W3C wants us to use them across the whole web

      Something called Webmentions – which looks remarkably like the old WordPress pingbacks, once popular in the late 2000s – is grinding through the machinery of the mighty, and slow-moving, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

      But don’t be deceived. Lurking behind that unassuming name lies something that might eventually offer users a way of ditching not just Facebook and Twitter but also those other massive corporations straddling the web.

  • Google Openwashing

  • IBM

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Kuhn’s Paradox

      I believe this paradox is primarily driven by the cooption of software freedom by companies that ostensibly support Open Source, but have the (now extremely popular) open source almost everything philosophy.

      For certain areas of software endeavor, companies dedicate enormous resources toward the authorship of new Free Software for particular narrow tasks. Often, these core systems provide underpinnings and fuel the growth of proprietary systems built on top of them. An obvious example here is OpenStack: a fully Free Software platform, but most deployments of OpenStack add proprietary features not available from a pure upstream OpenStack installation.

      Meanwhile, in other areas, projects struggle for meager resources to compete with the largest proprietary behemoths. Large user-facing, server-based applications of the Service as a Software Substitute variety, along with massive social media sites like Twitter and Facebook that actively work against federated social network systems, are the two classes of most difficult culprits on this point. Even worse, most traditional web sites have now become a mix of mundane content (i.e., HTML) and proprietary Javascript programs, which are installed on-demand into the users’ browser all day long, even while most of those servers run a primarily Free Software operating system.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • GitHub is proprietary, therefore it is evil

      There has been a lot of noise recently on how GitHub is bad, and how developers should stop using it.

    • Hello, Kotlin: Another programming language for JVM and JavaScript

      Why Kotlin? JetBrains is a developer tools company whose IntelliJ IDEA IDE has been adapted by Google for Android Studio, and the short answer seems to be that the company wanted something better than Java with which to build its own products.

    • A Programmer’s Dream: This Is What Your Code Actually Looks Like On GitHub

      Codeology is an online visualization program that allows you to see your GitHub project in front of your eyes.

    • The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2016

      It’s been a very busy start to the year at RedMonk, so we’re a few weeks behind in the release of our bi-annual programming language rankings. The data was dutifully collected at the start of the year, but we’re only now getting around to the the analysis portion. We have changed the actual process very little since Drew Conway and John Myles White’s original work late in 2010. The basic concept is simple: we periodically compare the performance of programming languages relative to one another on GitHub and Stack Overflow. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion (Stack Overflow) and usage (GitHub) in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.

Leftovers

02.19.16

Links 19/2/2016: Samsung’s ARTIK, ZFS in Ubuntu 16.04

Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Power Of Open Source To Solve The Data Fragmentation Challenge

    Apache Arrow is a new open-source project that helps data analysts wrestle diverse data sets into a single format. Apache Arrow is a collaborative effort that spans many of the largest providers and users of data infrastructure today including Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Cloudera (Private:CLOUD), Databricks, DataStax, Dremio, Hortonworks (NASDAQ:HDP) MapR, Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), Trifacta and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR). That so many different companies can collaborate on one initiative to improve data analysis industry-wide is a testament to the power of open source to inspire and engender great change.

  • Events

    • Akademy 2016 part of QtCon
    • Program Announced for Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today is announcing its full schedule of keynote speakers and conference sessions for Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit, taking place April 4-6 in San Diego, Calif. These events are co-located, and one registration provides access to all sessions and activities for both events.

    • Embedded Linux and OpenIoT conference details emerge
    • Flock 2016 update: Submissions and lodging

      The call for submissions for talks and workshops is also open, and contributors may submit at the same registration site. The deadline for call for submissions is Friday, April 8, 2016. In a change from previous Flocks, talk and workshop selection will be driven by a Flock Scheduling panel. The panel members will work with the Flock staff and the Fedora Council to determine which talks and workshops are accepted.

    • DevConf 2016: community and containers

      This year it was even more difficult to decide how to spend my time at DevConf, the annual Fedora, Red Hat, JBoss developers’ conference in Brno. There were several good presentations in parallel, often I wished I could be in two separate rooms at the same time. There were also developers from all over the world, and I have missed quite a few talks due to some very good in-depth discussions about syslog-ng. As a community manager for syslog-ng, I have tried to focus on community-related presentations and on technologies related to syslog-ng: containers, security and packaging.

  • Web Browsers

    • The future of loading CSS

      Chrome is intending to change the behaviour of link rel=”stylesheet”, which will be noticeable when it appears within body. The impact and benefits of this aren’t clear from the blink-dev post, so I wanted to go into detail here.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox for iOS is Faster with 3D Touch and More

        We recently released the first version of Firefox for iOS. It’s a great browser and we’re excited to bring you more new features today. The latest release of Firefox for iOS brings improvements to make browsing simpler and more fun by taking advantage of the latest iOS hardware and software features.

        Firefox for iOS on iPhone 6S and 6S Plus now offers 3D Touch to help you access commonly used features faster than ever before. Simply press the Firefox app icon to open the Quick Access menu which has shortcuts to Open Last Bookmark, open a New Private Tab or a New Tab.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Apache Arrow to Accelerate Open Source Big Data Analytics

      The Apache Software Foundation is rolling out a new top level project this week, and it’s one that didn’t first have to undergo the typical project incubation phase. Apache Arrow, an effort to build columnar in-memory analytics technology that could dramatically accelerate Big Data analytics, is launching with support from 13 major open source Big Data projects.

    • Spark 2.0 will offer Interactive Querying of Live Data

      The next version of Apache Spark will expand on the data processing platform’s real-time data analysis capabilities, offering users the ability to perform interactive queries against live data.

      The new feature, called structured streaming, will “push Spark beyond streaming to a new class of application that do other things in real time [rather than] just analyze a stream and output another stream,” explained Matei Zaharia, Spark founder and Databricks chief technology officer, at the Spark Summit East, taking place this week in New York. “It’s a combination of streaming and interactive that isn’t really handled by current streaming engines.”

  • CMS

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD, Variants Not Affected by Recent GNU Bug

      Much has been made about a vulnerability in a function in the GNU C Library. And searching far and wide over the Internet, there was little — actually nothing — I could find regarding how this affected BSD variants.

      However, you can rest easy, BSDers: Not our circus, not our monkeys.

      Dag-Erling Smørgrav, a FreeBSD developer since 1998 and the current FreeBSD Security Officer, writes in his blog that “neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • Dutch Gov: ‘Our lack of knowledge hinders open source’

      A lack of understanding of free and open source software is hindering its uptake by Dutch public administrations, writes Minister for the Central Government Sector Stef Blok in a letter to the country’s House of Representatives. Not knowing how to deal with software errors, is a service risk that “multiple organisations have experienced”, the minister says.

    • Govt’s Move To ‘Open Source’: Firm support system a necessity for adoption

      Switching over to open source software across all Central departments, as per a policy decision taken by the NDA government last year, could entail substantial savings on the Centre’s software expenses as most open source alternatives are free. Experts, though, caution that the obvious financial advantages of adopting open source notwithstanding, concerns pertaining to security and operational efficiency may have to be addressed concomitantly.

    • France involves public to draft support contract

      France’s ministries are involving free software communities and the public in writing their next multi-year framework contract for services and support on free and open source software. It is the first time that an IT services support contract will be co-written by administration and citizens.

    • Tallinn Saves A Bundle Using GNU/Linux

      Schools in the city of Tallinn (Estonia) are gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. A pilot in March 2014 switched 3 schools and 2 kindergartens. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools.

  • Licensing

    • Canonical Says There Is No ZFS and Linux Licence Incompatibility

      Canonical announced that support for the ZFS (Z File System) will be available in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but a lot of users have been asking about a possible license conflict. Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland explained why that’s not a problem.

      ZFS (Z File System) is described as a combination of a volume manager (like LVM) and a filesystem (like ext4, xfs, or btrfs), and it’s licensed under CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License). Don’t worry if you didn’t hear about it. It’s not something that’s commonly used.

    • ZFS Licensing and Linux

      We at Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the industry’s leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS.

      And in doing so, we have concluded that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with their terms of both of those licenses.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Google green-lights Go 1.6

      In a blog post, Google’s Andrew Gerrand called the HTTP/2 support “the most significant change” in the release, with the revision bringing the new protocol’s benefits to projects like the Go-based Caddy Web server. He otherwise described the upgrade, the seventh major stable release of the language, as more incremental than Go 1.5, which was released last August.

      The team has tinkered with garbage collection, featuring lower pauses than version 1.5, particularly for large programs, but programs may not necessarily run faster. “As always, the changes are so general and varied that precise statements about performance are difficult to make. Some programs may run faster, some slower,” according to release notes.

    • Version control isn’t just for programmers

      So that’s why I’ve personally chosen Mercurial. That said, there’s an analogous process in most of these other systems for what I’m going to describe here. So if you’d prefer to use Git or Fossil, I say that’s great. At least you’re using something. That puts you a step ahead of most other creatives.

    • Supporting Beep Beep Yarr!

      Some of you may be familiar with LinuxVoice magazine. They put an enormous amount of effort in creating a high quality, feature-packed magazine with a small team. They are led by Graham Morrison who I have known for many years and who is one of the most thoughtful, passionate, and decent human beings I have ever met.

      Well, the same team are starting an important new project called Beep Beep Yarr!. It is essentially a Kickstarter crowd-funded children’s book that is designed to teach core principles of programming to kids. The project not just involves the creation of the book, but also a parent’s guide and an interactive app to help kids engage with the principles in the book.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • EU Parliament Members Seek To Curb Antibiotics In Animals, Boost New Research

      In the fight against antimicrobial resistance, members of the European Parliament’s Environment and Public Health Committee have advocated banning collective and preventive antibiotic treatment of animals, and supported measures to stimulate research into new antibiotics, including longer data protection.

      Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have been working on the update of a European Union law on veterinary medicine. According to a European Parliament press release, MEPs took a vote yesterday on draft plans for legislation on antimicrobial resistance.

    • Voices From the Front Lines of the Flint Water Crisis

      Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder’s successive emergency managers are now gone from Flint, but the wreckage of their rule there still pollutes many homes. The crisis in Flint is, on the surface, about water. In April 2014, the city switched from the Detroit water system, which it had used for more than 50 years, to the Flint River, ostensibly to save money. The Flint River water made people sick, and is likely to have caused disease that killed some residents. The corrosive water, left untreated, coursed through the city’s water system, leaching heavy metals out of old pipes. The most toxic poison was lead, which can cause permanent brain damage. The damage to the people of Flint, the damage to the children who drank and bathed in the poisoned water, is incalculable. The water is still considered toxic to this day.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Nitro Zeus: USA’s Secret Cyber War Plan To Destroy Iran’s Complete Infrastructure

      Alex Gibney is known for his investigative documentaries that garner a unanimous applause from the critics. During the reporting for his latest cyber warfare-focused film Zero Days, the US government’s secret plan called Nitro Zeus was uncovered. This plan deals with a massive cyberattack on Iran’s infrastructure if the nuclear negotiations with Iran would have fail.

    • FBI Won’t Explain Its Bizarre New Way of Measuring Its Success Fighting Terror

      The Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly developed a new way to measure its success in the war on terror: Counting the number of terror threats it has “disrupted” in a year.

      But good luck trying to figure out what that number means, how it was derived, or why it doesn’t jibe with any other law-enforcement statistic, most notably the number of terror suspects actually charged or arrested.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Climate Change Panel Seeks To Improve Communication, Open Doors To Private Sector

      The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seeks to improve its communication to promote its reports, its chair said at a briefing yesterday. Working on its next assessment report expected to be released in five or six years, the IPCC seeks to increase participation of the private sector as a major stakeholders upon which depends the investment to find solutions to climate change he said.

    • Indonesia to continue easing restrictions on foreign investors: President Widodo

      Indonesia will continue opening up its market, making it easier for foreign investors to enter the country.

      Speaking to about 300 business leaders and other stakeholders at an ASEAN Economic Community conference in San Francisco on Wednesday (Feb 17), President Joko Widodo said even though Indonesia is doing more to attract investments, and announced a number of deregulation packages, he is still not satisfied.

      “I’m not satisfied; please understand we are still only at the beginning,” he said. “We will continue to simplify, continue to open up, continue to modernise our rules and regulations. There are still many excessive permits, licenses, and protections.”

      Mr Widodo gave a key note address at the conference after attending the US-ASEAN Leaders Summit in Sunnylands which ended on Tuesday. He said Indonesia’s investment climate is still not conducive enough and the country needs to deregulate more.

    • Shockingly, authorities arrest activists instead of people responsible for the Aliso Canyon methane gas leak

      The California State Patrol has arrested two people in connection with the massive methane leak in Southern California’s Aliso Canyon, but many residents who had to leave their homes near the leaking underground gas storage site think the wrong people are in custody. Instead of busting company executives and engineers who are responsible for the massive methane gas leak, the CSP arrested two protesters who draped banners on the headquarters of the California Public Utilities Commission. The protesters draped banners to highlight the lax regulatory environment that enabled the spill — similar to the political culture that enabled the water poisoning in Flint. But unbelievably, the activists are now the ones going to jail.

  • Finance

    • Minimum wage, minimum chance of a future: This is how horrible living on the minimum wage has become

      When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about?

    • Listen to interviews with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples discussing the Trans Pacific Partnership

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, if approved, would be the largest trade agreement in history involving 11 countries including the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru Singapore, and Vietnam.

      Cultural Survival staff caught up with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, to discuss the trade deal’s implications for Indigenous Peoples in these countries, based on her recent research and report on this topic.

    • TTIP: Alternative ISDS No Real Alternative, NGOs Warn

      Malmstroem’s ICS proposal did not address most of the problems of the extra-judicial redress mechanisms for foreign investors, the study explains in a detailed comparison of ISDS and ICS. Instead, “it arguably grants investors even more rights than many existing investment treaties, which have already led to hundreds of investor-state lawsuits around the world,” the study states.

      A specific provision (section 2, article 3.4) of the proposed new system would allow for complaints when investors feel their “legitimate expectations” have been violated by regulatory acts of states. But “explicit protections of investors’ legitimate expectations are generally not part of existing treaties,” CEO and its partners warn.

      [...]

      Nevertheless, ISDS is expected to be back on the agenda of negotiators next week after the EU Commission’s DG Trade after Malmstroem had taken it off the agenda while the public consultation in the EU was ongoing.

    • MPs can view TTIP files – but take only pencil and paper with them

      MPs have won access to documents covering controversial and secretive trade talks between Brussels and Washington, but can only take a pencil and paper into the room where the files can be viewed.

      Confidentiality rules mean no electronic devices – including phones, tablet and laptop computers, or cameras – are allowed in the room at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in Westminster. This is fuelling concerns about a “cloak of secrecy” surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the EU and the US government.

      UK business minister Anna Soubry agreed to provide the room in BIS’s offices on the condition that MPs keep the TTIP documents private. Soubry said pressure on Brussels officials from EU governments had won the concession, but the department was obliged to maintain secrecy.

    • Expanded Version: The Us Economy Has Not Recovered and Will Not Recover

      Jobs offshoring benefitted Wall Street, corporate executives, and shareholders, because lower labor and compliance costs resulted in higher profits. These profits flowed through to shareholders in the form of capital gains and to executives in the form of “performance bonuses.” Wall Street benefitted from the bull market generated by higher profits.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Sanders tops Clinton in a national poll for the first time

      Bernie Sanders has passed Hillary Clinton at the top of a national poll for the first time in the 2016 race.

      A Fox News poll of the Democratic presidential race released Thursday shows Sanders with 47 percent support to Clinton’s 44 percent.

      That’s a gain of 10 percentage points for Sanders a January version of the poll. Clinton’s support declined 5 points.

      Clinton posted leads as high as 30 points over the summer, but Sanders has been steadily closing the gap. While no other poll of the race going back to 2014 has ever showed Clinton trailing a rival, she led Sanders by just 2 points in the last two Quinnipiac University tracking polls.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC votes to “unlock the cable box” over Republican opposition

      The Federal Communications Commission today approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks to give consumers more choices in the set-top boxes they use to watch cable TV.

      The vote was 3-2, with Chairman Tom Wheeler and fellow Democrats Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel voting in favor of the proposal, while Republicans Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly voted against. An NPRM is not a final vote. Instead, this will kick off a months-long public comment period leading up to a final vote that is likely to happen before the end of this year.

      The FCC is essentially trying to create a software-based replacement for CableCard. Pay-TV operators from the cable, satellite, and telco industries would have to provide content and programming information to makers of third-party hardware or applications. Theoretically, customers could then watch their TV channels on various devices without needing to rent a set-top box from their cable company and without buying equipment that is compatible with a physical CableCard.

    • FCC Votes to Dismantle Cable’s Monopoly Over The Set Top Box

      The FCC voted 3-2 today to begin dismantling the cable industry’s long-standing monopoly over ye olde set top cable box. As noted previously, the FCC is pushing a proposal that would require cable operators make their programming accessible to third-party set top manufacturers, without requiring the use of a CableCARD. The goal is to create competition in the set top box market, giving consumers a choice of better and cheaper gear, in the same way consumers can buy their own cable modems. 99% of consumers currently pay about $231 annually in rental fees for hardware that’s generally worth about half that much.

    • AT&T Makes It Clear: It Bought DirecTV So It Doesn’t Have To Upgrade Its Lagging Networks

      When AT&T originally announced the company wanted to spend $69 billion on a satellite TV company on the eve of the cord cutting revolution, even M&A bullish Wall Street thought AT&T was a little nuts. After all, AT&T’s refusal to seriously upgrade its aging DSL networks to full fiber have left it at a serious disadvantage to faster cable broadband. Given Verizon’s FiOS fiber build clocked in somewhere around $24 billion, the $69 billion AT&T spent on DirecTV could have gone a long way toward bringing those customers into the modern fiber to the home era.

    • AT&T, Time Warner Cable Hope Incessant Whining Will Keep Google Fiber From Louisville

      For fifteen years now, companies like AT&T and Time Warner Cable (and their various PR and policy tendrils) have whined incessantly about the “burdensome regulations” that saddle the U.S. broadband industry. Less regulation, they argue, will pave the path to broadband nirvana, opening the door to immense innovation and more competition in the sector. So Louisville recently set about reworking its city broadband ordinances to streamline both the pole attachment and franchise agreement processes dramatically, something you’d assume would thrill both companies.

    • Zero Rating: What It Is and Why You Should Care

      Zero-rating has become the bleeding edge of the net neutrality debate. India recently decided to reject zero-rating plans such as Facebook’s Free Basics, while in the United States carriers push boundaries with zero-rating experiments such as T-Mobile’s Binge-On plan (which led to a public spat with EFF over our criticism of the service, for which Legere has since apologized), as well as AT&T’s Sponsored Data, Verizon’s FreeBee, and Comcast’s Stream TV.

      What is zero-rating and why should you worry about it? In a nutshell, zero-rating plans exempt particular data from counting against a user’s data cap, or from accruing any excess usage charges. The most dangerous of these plans, such as the AT&T and Verizon offerings, only offer their users zero-rated data from content providers who pay the carriers money to do so. Such “pay for play” arrangements favor big content providers who can afford to pay for access to users’ eyeballs, and marginalize those who can’t, such as nonprofits, startups, and fellow users.

  • DRM

    • Let’s Unlock the Set-Top Box–For Real

      Imagine traveling back to 1996 in a typical American living room. What’s changed? The TV is three feet thick and weighs 150 pounds. There’s a VHS videocassette recorder underneath, but no Internet-connected devices to be seen.

      Now, what hasn’t changed?

      The cable or satellite tuner box. It’s a black or grey plastic slab. You have to lease it from your pay-TV provider for a monthly fee. It doesn’t add much functionality to your living room setup, except that your TV subscription doesn’t work without it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Disclosure Requirement In IP Applications Necessary To Comply With Obligations, Speakers Say

      Carlos Correa, special advisor on trade and intellectual property at the South Centre, said the obligation to disclose the source of genetic resources is necessary if the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity are to be implemented.

    • Trademarks

      • The Indonesian IKEA case: what happened and why it might actually be good for foreign companies

        Based on a literal interpretation of the Trademark Law’s non-use provisions, the decision appears to have a sound basis in law: while IKEA’s two original applications were registered in October 2006 and 2010, the first IKEA store selling Class 20 and 21 goods did not open in Indonesia until October 2014, with no ‘acceptable reason’ to excuse the non-use. Interestingly, the Supreme Court’s ruling was a 2-1 decision, with Judge I Gusti Agung Sumanatha filing a rare dissent, arguing that because IKEA had proven that it was the owner of a legitimately registered well-known trademark, the non-use provisions should not apply. While not explicitly supported by the Trademark Law’s text, Judge Sumanatha’s dissent speaks more to the spirit and purpose of the Law and is a welcome development. Troubling, however, is that both courts ruled PT. Ratania’s applications for the mark “IKEA INTAN KHATULISTIWA ESA ABADI” were “legitimate” (“sah”). Such a ruling is as unclear as it is unnecessary and ignored clear evidence presented during the trial that PT. Ratania knew about IKEA prior to filing their own applications, strongly implying that the applications were impermissibly filed in bad faith. While the courts’ unclear language and meaning likely lead to the confusion in reporting on this case, neither the Commercial Court nor the Supreme Court said that PT. Ratania is now the true and legitimate owner of the IKEA mark in Indonesia.

    • Copyrights

02.18.16

Links 18/2/2016: New Ubuntu Phone, Go 1.6

Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 7 Reasons Why Open Source Code is Better Than Proprietary

    I’m always surprised when users wish that Microsoft Office or PhotoShop would be ported to Linux. Probably, some just want to be able to use standard industry software on their favorite operating system. But so far as I am concerned, applications like LibreOffice Writer or Krita are not just substitutions — even without my ideals, I would choose them as the highest quality software available for my needs.

  • Top 4 open source issue tracking tools

    So let’s take a look at four excellent choices for managing bugs and issues, all open source and all easy to download and host yourself. To be clear, there’s no way we could possibly list every issue tracking tool here; instead, these are four of our favorites, based on feature richness and the size of the community behind the project. There are others, to be sure, and if you’ve got a good case for your favorite not listed here, be sure to let us know which is your favorite tool and what makes it stand out to you, in the comments below.

  • How to make sense of any open source mess

    Open source development and collaboration takes place online, in places made of information. From individual commit messages to project websites and even larger digital structures, each piece of information we create is part of a mess. This is not a slight against open source; all human endeavors are messy, because that is just the way we are as human beings. We all bring our own strengths and failings, wisdom and ignorance, to everything we do.

  • ONF Offers OpenDaylight Support in Latest Atrium SDN Stack

    The embrace of the OpenDaylight SDN controller follows the support of the ONOS controller in the first release of the Atrium software last year.
    Open Networking Foundation officials are hoping to accelerate the adoption of network virtualization by including support for the OpenDaylight SDN controller in the latest release of its open-source Atrium software distribution.

  • Wikimedia: We’re Building Something, But It’s Not A Search Engine To Challenge Google

    The Wikimedia Foundation has rejected the media reports that claimed that the non-profit is working on some search engine that will be a one-click replacement of Google.

  • ReactOS 0.4.0 Released
  • Open source Windows-clone ReactOS hits version 0.4 (ten years after 0.3)

    The developers of ReactOS have been working to develop an open source operating system capable of running Windows software since 1998.

    It’s been slow going: version 0.3.0 was released in 2006. Nearly 10 years later, ReactOS 0.4.0 is available for download.

  • Skytap Supports the Modern Developer Toolchain with Vagrant, Open Source Contributions
  • Here’s why Bottle Rocket is contributing open-source code

    Bottle Rocket has stepped out from behind its proprietary code and expanded its reach into the open-source market.

    The Addison-based company, which creates custom mobile applications for business customers, has released its first few pieces of code for Android and plans to build on the code it has shared with the development community.

  • IBM Contributes Thousands of Lines of Code to Blockchain Efforts
  • IBM Goes Open-Source For Better IoT Apps

    Putting limits on what the Internet of Things can do to transform everything from in-store retail operations to multinational logistics is a great way to hamstring a potentially revolutionary technology. So too is keeping the way IoT apps and services are developed locked away behind the closed doors of intellectual property laws.

    Fortunately, IBM has seen the light of publicly supported solutions and is releasing a new open-source IoT development tool by the name of Quarks. Supported by the IBM Streams platform that specializes in compiling and analyzing gigabytes of live data in real time, Quarks might be used alternatively by hospitals to share designs for vitals monitoring apps that can be used with wearables and by industrial companies outfitting their workers’ uniforms with safety sensors, TechCrunch reported.

  • IBM’s Open Source Quarks Pushes IoT Analytics to the Edge

    IBM has open sourced new technology called Quarks to push Internet of Things (IoT) analytics from centralized systems out to the actual edge devices that are collecting and spewing out vast amounts of data.

  • The Grid: Web Design by Artificial Intelligence

    Flow-Based Programming (FBP) is a software development paradigm where applications are built by “wiring together” various reusable components inside a graph.

    Since running into the concept in 2011, I’ve built the NoFlo environment, which brings Flow-Based Programming to the universal runtime of JavaScript, allowing flows to be run on both Node.js and the browser.

  • Google’s TensorFlow Serving Goes Open-Source
  • Google ups the ante in the machine learning wars
  • Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google Introduces TensorFlow Serving
  • Google Delivers TensorFlow Serving, Advancing Machine Learning
  • Google’s TensorFlow Serving goes open source for large scale machine learning model creation

    Google has released TensorFlow Serving to the open-source community, a fresh addition to computer learning software for large-scale modeling projects.

  • Events

    • Devconf – Amazing place for a developer

      As a fresh start of 2016, I got a chance to be part of Devconf – an annual conference which takes place in the beautiful Brno city of Czech Republic. From past three years, its been happening in February month’s first Friday to Sunday and hence this year it was from 5th to 7th February.

    • Get ready to Fork the System at LibrePlanet

      Hundreds of people from around the world will meet at LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System, March 19-20, 2016 at MIT in Cambridge, MA. This year’s conference program will examine how free software creates the opportunity of a new path for its users, allows developers to fight the restrictions of a system dominated by proprietary software by creating free replacements, and is the foundation of a philosophy of freedom, sharing, and change. Sessions like “Yes, the FCC might ban your operating system” and “GNU/Linux and Chill: Free software on a college campus” will offer insights about how to resist the dominance of proprietary software, which is often built in to university policies and government regulations.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.1 Offers Reorganized User Interface for Its Apps

      The Document Foundation (TDF) released LibreOffice 5.1 on Feb. 10, providing users with a new milestone update of the popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice originated as a fork of the open-source OpenOffice suite in 2011 and has been downloaded more than 120 million times since then. LibreOffice includes Writer document, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, Base database and Draw drawing programs as part of the integrated suite. In the LibreOffice 5.1 update, a key area of improvement is the user interface throughout the suite’s programs, which all benefit from a reorganization as well as menu additions. With the 5.1 update, the office suite’s integrated programs can now load and save files from remote locations directly through menu dialog box. LibreOffice is the default standard office suite in many mainstream Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE and Ubuntu. LibreOffice is also available for both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the highlights of the new LibreOffice 5.1 release.

    • LibreOffice Is Getting Better GTK3 Support

      Last year LibreOffice made much progress in receiving GTK3 support that it also began running on Wayland. The battle though is not over and more GTK3 improvements are still forthcoming.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

    • Tallinn schools piloting open source software

      Schools in the city of Tallinn (Estonia) are gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. A pilot in March 2014 switched 3 schools and 2 kindergartens. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 2016 Open Source Awards Finalists Named

      The Benjamin Franklin Award is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatis.org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.

    • Open Data

      • Geography students bring open-source mapping group to State College

        Two geography students have started a Maptime chapter in State College to support community cartography and teach people how to use and create maps. The endeavor is co-sponsored by The Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach in Penn State’s Department of Geography.

        “I really want to put State College on the map—literally,” geography graduate student Carolyn Fish said. “So much open-source mapping is centered in large cities, such as New York, Washington and San Francisco.”

    • Open Access/Content

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source CowTech Ciclop 3D Scanner Kit Available on Kickstarter for $99

        Montana-based startup CowTech launched an affordable 3D scanner kit on Kickstarter and they easily breezed past their funding goal in the first 24 hours. The CowTech Ciclop is a $99 3D laser scanner kit that was designed specifically with owners of 3D printers in mind. The buyer can print most of the scanner parts out on their own 3D printer and the parts were designed to fit on virtually any desktop 3D printer with a print bed volume of 115 x 110 x 65 mm (4.5 x 4.3 x 2.6 in) or higher. Once all of the components have been printed, the assembly process is quick and simple, and the Ciclop can start scanning in less than 30 minutes.

  • Programming

    • Go 1.6 is released

      Today we release Go version 1.6, the seventh major stable release of Go. You can grab it right now from the download page. Although the release of Go 1.5 six months ago contained dramatic implementation changes, this release is more incremental.

      The most significant change is support for HTTP/2 in the net/http package. HTTP/2 is a new protocol, a follow-on to HTTP that has already seen widespread adoption by browser vendors and major websites. In Go 1.6, support for HTTP/2 is enabled by default for both servers and clients when using HTTPS, bringing the benefits of the new protocol to a wide range of Go projects, such as the popular Caddy web server.

    • Go 1.6 Released
    • Women write better open source code on GitHub than men [Ed: conveniently (and wrongly) concludes from that it’s FOSS (not CS) that discriminates against women]

      Woman may be more competent than men at writing code but still there is evidence that they are discriminated against in open source communities because they are women.

    • A New Study Suggests That Women Write Better Code Than Men

      A recent study conducted by researchers from the computer science departments at Cal Poly, San Luis, Obispo and North Carolina State University reports that women write better code than men.

    • If Women Are Better at Coding, It’s Because They Have to Be

Leftovers

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