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

01.26.16

Links 26/1/2016: MPlayer 1.2.1, Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5

Posted in News Roundup at 5:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Save up to 74% in this amazing magazine sale

    You’ll be familiar with Linux Format ; but did you know our publisher also produces loads more of your favourite mags?

    Now you can make the most of 2016 with a year of award-winning content from our wide range of magazines, heavily discounted for the January Sale!

    Save up to 74% when you subscribe from a huge range of magazines before 31 January. Whether you’re interested in film, games, technology, design, music or photography, there’s a wide range of magazines to choose from.

  • Desktop

    • Which is More Important: Distro, Desktop…or Something Else?

      A couple of weeks back when we ran our two part GNU/Linux distro poll, a couple of commenters made a single point that, at first glance, seemed valid.

      It’s not the distro that’s important to most users, they said, because most users don’t interact with the distro itself as they work and play on their Linux machines. Instead, the average user’s direct interaction with a computer is primarily through the desktop environment, whether that be KDE, GNOME, Unity or something they rolled on their own on a Friday night instead of having a boys’ or girls’ night out.

      In other words, they opined, it’s the desktop, and not the distro, which represents the operating system — or even the entire computer — to most users.

      That’s probably a truth without being the truth.

    • Saying Linux Is Fragmented Is Wrong, This Is Why

      One of the things that some people say about the Linux platform is that it’s fragmented, just like Android. The truth is that fragmentation doesn’t really apply to the Linux platform, and the fact that there are too many distros to count is actually a good thing.

      Android is a broken system that works. If we take a look at the Android slice right now, we’ll see that most people are still using KitKat 4.4, about 40%, and about 15% have just moved on to Lollipop 5.0. The rest up to 100% are split in even older versions of the operating system.

    • My Linux Story: The Big Switch

      It recently occurred to me that I’ve been running Linux on my computers for about thirteen years. I’ll be the first to admit, it doesn’t seem all that long ago. But as I reflected upon my switch over to Linux, I began to realize that there wasn’t a single event that pushed me over to the Linux desktop. In reality, it was a series of events and discoveries. This article will explain how my switch to Linux came to pass.

    • Artist using Linux – INTRODUCTION

      I am an artist (mainly musician) from Croatia. I learned to play the Trombone, and had a classical education at the Music school in Varaždin, after which I went on and studied Business & Economics in Zagreb. Music performance has always been my passion but I also enjoy song writing, music production, photography, photo editing, DJ-ing and the likes. I fell in love with the Linux philosophy of openness back in 2006. and being a sort of a rebel I thought “This is for me!”. I downloaded my first Linux distribution (Ubuntu 6.10) and burned it to a CD, booted the thing, and felt like a REAL HACKER. Back then there were a lot of hardware issues, you had to know your stuff to make things work, and I was a total noob, lost in the totally new world with endless possibilities – TOTAL FREEDOM. But as a professional musician I still needed to use commercial software to make it (so I thought). The Mac was my dream (all the cool artists use Mac), but it was way out my budget… Long story short, I was dual-booting with Windows up till 2011 on my Dell Inspiron, then went total Linux on my laptop and had a dedicated Windows machine for my music. Bought a Mac Mini in 2012, got disappointed, swapped it for a MacBook Pro in 2013, got totally disappointed, then gave it to my wife, installed Ubuntu on the MacBook Pro (BTW. today she is the happiest computer user in the world), and stuck with my Dell using only Linux and compensating with standalone HARDWARE options, like the ZOOM R8, analogue photography, and the recently bought Roland JD-Xi. But, things got complicated when I wanted to create a polished product I can sell without spending millions of dollars, so I need to use a computer that can take the workload, and I need to use software to make it cheap (I learned that the expensive way with analogue photography).

    • Ghosts in the Linux Machine

      Not me. I’m a Linux user.

      And then we took the huge one-two punch from Shellshock and Heartbleed. Wow. While I do not run servers of any flavor, the fact that a Linux server or code could be infected by either of these nasty brothers….

    • Student-run help desk introduces teens to Linux

      Every student at Penn Manor receives a laptop at the beginning of the school year, and I first learned about the help desk program when I visited the tech room because mine wasn’t charging properly. The small room was crowded with computer stations, and student helpers were huddled around a table working on a project.

  • Kernel Space

    • Last Minute Linux 4.5 Updates For Ceph, Thermal & MIPS

      While Linus Torvalds tends to get angry about last-minute pull requests by subsystem maintainers at the end of a kernel cycle’s merge window, he ended up honoring a few of them today for Linux 4.5

      Within the Ceph updates are AIO (Asynchronous I/O) support as well as a number of fixes regarding authentication key timeout/renewal code.

    • Linux 3.5 To Linux 4.5-rc1 Kernel Benchmarks

      Last week I carried out tests of the Linux 3.5 through Linux 4.4 kernels. Those benchmarks were fairly interesting in looking at the evolution of the Linux kernel performance over the past three and a half years. With Linux 4.5-rc1 now out, here are benchmarks with this latest kernel version that’s currently under development.

    • A Linux 4.5-rc1 Kernel With AMDGPU PowerPlay Enabled For Ubuntu Systems
    • Linux Kernel 4.1.16 LTS Released with Updated USB and Networking Drivers, More

      After announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.3.4, kernel maintainer and developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has proudly informed users about the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 4.1.16 LTS.

      Looking at the diff from Linux kernel 4.1.15 LTS, we can notice that Linux kernel 4.1.16 LTS is almost identical in changes to Linux kernel 4.3.4, and according to the appended shortlog, it changes 51 files, with 390 insertions and 164 deletions. Therefore, it looks like it is even smaller than the previous maintenance release, which was announced in mid-December 2015.

    • Linux 4.5-rc1 Kernel Released
    • Linus Torvalds Releases Linux Kernel 4.5 RC1 with a Little Something for Anybody
    • Linux Foundation Responds to Accusations About Community Representation

      The Linux Foundation made some changes to by-laws, and that stirred things in the Linux community. The organization has issued a statement now addressing the concerns.

      The modifications made to the by-laws of The Linux Foundations were underlined by Matthew Garrett, in an article that also touched on possible motives for the changes. He pointed towards Karen Sandler, who is the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. We chose not to take that part of the Matthew’s article since they are conjecture and can’t be verified.

    • Linux Kernel 4.3.4 Is Out, Has Updated Drivers and Network Stack Improvements

      After the release of Linux kernel 3.2.76 LTS, the kernel developers have announced the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.3.

    • Linux Foundation quietly scraps individual memberships

      “Much of the code in Linux is written by employees paid to do this work, but significant parts of both Linux and the huge range of software that it depends on are written by community members who now have no representation in the Linux Foundation. Ignoring them makes it look like the Linux Foundation is interested only in ‘promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software’ if doing so benefits their corporate membership rather than the community as a whole. This isn’t a positive step,” says Garrett in his post.

      The Register has again contacted the Linux Foundation for comment and will update this story if we hear back from them.

    • The Linux Foundation’s Response To Leadership Controversy Is Plain Disappointment

      In response to the recent leadership controversy, the Linux Foundation has come up with an unsatisfactory response. Linux Foundation chief executive Jim Zemlin has written a blog post on the Foundation’s website and talked about irrelevant aspects of the issue.

      In our last article on this issue, fossBytes listed clear points telling why the latest change in community representation is a bad news for Linux and open source. Up until recently, the organization allowed the individual community members to elect two board members and ensure that the voice of Linux users is present at the board decisions — now this clause has been erased from the bylaws.

      Zemlin chose to ignore the concerns and started his response with an irrelevant line: “First, The Linux Foundation Board structure has not changed. The same individuals remain as directors, and the same ratio of corporate to community directors continues as well.”

      His reply ignores facts and lacks some gravity. How can the ratio remain same when Linux community is now not allowed to choose its directors?

      [...]

      I support every word Zemlin has to say against trolling and unacceptable online behavior of the community members. But, Zemlin chooses to drift from the central point of discussion — Is Karen still eligible to run for the board? What about the current situation of the community representation in the Linux Foundation board?

      Over the past years, Linux and other big names in the open source world have embraced the support of corporate executives. This recent step is another move away from the community of many individual bright programmers. I hope the Foundation makes room for common Linux users and restores their voting rights and faith.

    • Are Codes of Conduct dangerous to open source software development?

      Codes of Conduct have often been pushed to create “safer” environments, while opponents sometimes find such codes repressive and suffocating. But are Codes of Conduct a real danger to the development of open source software?

      One developer, fearing for the loss of his job, posted his anonymous response to what he thinks are dangerous Codes of Conduct.

    • Major Linux Kernel 4.5 Update Released For Testing

      The new kernel, version 4.5, includes major driver improvements, including better 3D graphics support for the Raspberry Pi

      Developer Linus Torvalds on Sunday released the first release candidate (RC) for the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, including expanded driver and architecture support as well as other updates.

    • Linux Kernel 3.14.59 LTS Is Out, Brings Btrfs, EXT4, and IPv6 Improvements

      After releasing the Linux 4.3.4 and Linux 4.1.16 LTS kernels, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman informs the world about the release of the fifty-ninth maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 3.14 kernel series.

    • Was Linus Behind LF Membership Changes?

      Writer journalist Vox Day speculated the other day that Linus Torvalds himself may have been behind the Linux Foundation’s elimination of individual memberships from their organization. FOSS Force is back with another poll and quiz today and Eric Hameleers released an updated Slackware Live. Debian update 8.3 was announced Saturday and several reviews warrant a mention.

    • Stop whatever you’re doing and pay attention: Linux kernel 4.5rc1 is here

      ANY MINUTE now we should see the first release candidate for Linux kernel 4.5, and there’s a lot to look forward to.

      It seems like only a fortnight ago that we talked about the final release of Linux 4.4 (it was) but a lot has happened.

      Most notable is that the kernel is now ready for Kaby Lake, the next generation of Intel processors due later this year. This was expected to start in 4.4 but the method of the Linux release schedule meant it was dropped.

    • No SJWs allowed
    • An anonymous response to dangerous FOSS Codes of Conduct

    • Graphics Stack

      • Libinput 1.1.5 Released, Still Dealing With Multi-Touch Woes

        Peter Hutterer this weekend announced the release of libinput 1.1.5 as the newest version of this input handling library used by Wayland, X.Org Server (if using xf86-input-libinput), and Mir systems.

      • Core Compute Shader Support Under Review For Gallium3D

        Samuel Pitoiset sent out a set of 17 patches today that add the core of the compute shaders support to the Mesa state tracker as needed by Gallium3D drivers.

        This is almost one thousand lines of code for providing the core changes needed for handling OpenGL 4.3′s important ARB_compute_shader extension. There still are changes needed to Gallium3D drivers in getting the compute shader support going, but this is a major piece of the puzzle.

      • Intel Is Still Maintaining A Proprietary OpenCL Driver For Linux
      • Understanding Intel’s GEN Assembly For OpenCL Kernels
      • libinput and semi-mt touchpads

        libinput 1.1.5 has a change in how we deal with semi-mt touchpads, in particular: interpretation of touch points will cease and we will rely on the single touch position and the BTN_TOOL_* flags instead to detect multi-finger interaction. For most of you this will have little effect, even if you have a semi-mt touchpad. As a reminder: semi-mt touchpads are those that can detect the bounding box of two-finger interactions but cannot identify which finger is which. This provides some ambiguity, a pair of touch points at x1/y1 and x2/y2 could be a physical pair of touches at x1/y2 and x2/y1. More importantly, we found issues with semi-mt touchpads that go beyond the ambiguity and reduce the usability of the touchpoints.

    • Benchmarks

      • PV vs PVHVM on next XenServer

        That’s not really surprising: new hardware tends to include more and more instructions to assist virtualization. So in fact, the “cost” of virtualization (in terms of performances) is reduced.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Best Linux Desktop Environments for 2016

      Linux creates a friendly environment for choices and options. For example, there are many Linux-based distributions out there that use different desktop environments for you to choose from. I have picked some of the best desktop environments that you will see in the Linux world.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Interview with Cremuss

        I grew a bit tired of it during high school so I stopped for a time and it’s only after finishing high school that I wanted to start digging into CG software again. I was fully converted to open-source projects and GNU/Linux at this moment so in my mind I obviously had to give Blender a try. I learned it, loved it and fall in love with video game art while helping with the development of an open source video game/engine, SpringRTS.

      • Plasma tricks: custom title bars for apps and some consistency

        Plasma 5 comes with a very cool feature: KWin can set a different colour scheme for title bar of each app (basing on app identity or title of the window).

      • In the Mansion House

        Here is deepest Padania a 4 story mansion provides winter cover to KDE developers working to free your computers.

      • Goin’ to FOSDEM

        I’ve skipped a few years, but I’m looking forward to seeing some of the familiar KDE faces there, as well as finally meeting a couple of the KDE-FreeBSD folks. There’s a long list of familiar faces at the Legal Devroom. For once, I have a plan of talks that I want to see, even some that I can claim are work-work related (yay!). Whether I’ll be useful at the KDE booth, I don’t know: last time I was there there was Plasma-desktop to be demonstrated and me with still KDE4 on my laptop. I’m not a good poster child for the modern generation.

      • Seasons of KDE (2)

        As mentioned in my earlier post, the KIOSK framework changed a lot between KDE3 and Plasma. So using the old code and simply port it to kf5 was not an option. My Mentor suggested, I start implementing profile support, which is one of the key feature of KIOSK.

      • Next Kdenlive Cafés

        This is an opportunity for Kdenlive developers and users to exchange ideas, talk about how we want to see the Kdenlive project evolve and also discuss how you can help us on that way!

      • Plasma tricks: start a torrent from another device

        Are you browsing the web with your Android smart-phone/tablet and suddenly you see that your favourite distro just release the ISO you are waiting? Do you want to tap on “download” and start the torrent but… do you want to use your PC instead of the current device? OK here KDE Connect and KTorrent are your heroes. Let’s see how to setup all.

      • Wrapping up the Google Code-In
      • Kicking off 2016 — the first Krita Sprint

        This weekend, we had our place full of hackers again. The Calligra Text Layout Sprint coincided with the Krita 2016 Kick-Off Sprint. Over the course of the sprint, which started on Wednesday, we had two newcomers to KDE-related hacking sprints, and during the weekend, we had an unusual situation for free software: actual gender parity.

      • New Year Calligra Words Sprint

        When the streets are covered with snow and ice in many parts of Europe, it’s a good time to sit inside in front of our computers and to improve that software we are sharing here with each other.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME Settings To Get a Major Design Overhaul

        The GNOME settings app is to get a major design overhaul, GNOME designers and developers have revealed.

        The new design proposals will see the utility switch from a grid layout with fixed window size to one using a sidebar list and resizeable window frame.

  • Distributions

    • This Week in Solus – Install #19

      Alongside our crunch and focus for 1.1, we’ve also been continuing our campaign of bug crushing. We’ve crushed 22 bugs over the last week, ranging from long sitting bugs that have been resolved since the Budgie rewrite to recent ones that are related to inclusion of git-based patches for new software in the repo.

    • Reviews

      • Hands-On: Kali Linux Light (Xfce) and Mini distributions

        In my previous post, I looked at the Full version of the new Kali Linux 2016.1 Rolling release. That version uses the Gnome 3 desktop and includes a large number of security, forensic, and penetration-testing utilities. In this post I am going to look at the Light version, which uses the Xfce desktop and includes only a few security utilities in the base installation, and the Mini version, which lets you choose your desktop, but includes no additional utilities in the base installation.

        It seems to me that there are two reasons for the Kali Light distribution. First, a lot of people don’t like using Gnome 3 — especially a lot of experienced Linux users — so this offers a popular alternative desktop. Second, by including very few additional security packages, it lets you build up the distribution with just the tools you want and need.

      • Linux Mint 17.3 “Xfce”

        Linux Mint Linux Mint is arguably one of the more popular distributions in the open source ecosystem. The project takes packages from the Ubuntu repositories and uses them, along with custom Mint utilities, to build a user friendly operating system. The Mint project has gained a reputation over the years for delivering a practical desktop operating system that offers users a familiar desktop environment with multimedia support.

      • Apricity OS 12.2015 review – Apre Trouble

        Linux, the final frontier. A fellow named Mehdi emailed me the name of this Linux distro for sampling, testing and review. Having already recommended a bunch of software in the past, with pretty good results, I thought this could be another enjoyable exercise.

        To make everything all the more mindboggling, Apricity OS tell us it is based on Arch Linux, which means goats and blood and the essence of virgin nerds. Archy Arch and the Funky Byte. But maybe the dreadful can be abstracted into a nice and friendly product. Anyhow, version 12.2015 Beta, underway!

      • Enter the Void! First impressions of Void Linux

        While Gentoo is a great way to spin your own flavour of Linux, after a year I’ve found that recompiling packages every time you do an update becomes a bit of a drag. With that in mind I decided to look around for an alternative distribution, and while nothing is 100% perfect I have to say I really am very happy with Void Linux. There are a number of “live” iso images which will happily boot from a USB stick, I only looked at two of the images Cinnamon and Xfce, while Cinnamon was all very pretty and all that, I couldn’t get the audio volume widget to show itself and besides I didn’t see any real advantage. I’ve long been a fan of Xfce basically because of what it doesn’t try to do, you don’t get the kitchen sink (thankfully) but what you do get works solidly.

        Now its entirely possible that I missed something obvious with the void_installer script but it has two distinct behaviours depending on what installation source you choose. If you choose to install from the internet what you get is a bare minimum of packages (command line only) and you’ll be left with a fair bit of configuration to do for yourself – this isn’t always a bad thing if for example you have some specific use maybe an embedded kiosk for example. For more usual desktop use, its better to choose the installation media itself as the source, this basically copies and configures the “live” image onto your machine. I did find that after an update I had to manually delete the old kernel, but once I did that and a few more of the usual chores one normally expects when installing a new system – (eventually after correctly using the installer!) I found myself in possession of a really nice system.

    • New Releases

      • Antivirus LiveCD 16.0-0.99 Promises to Clean Your PC of Viruses with ClamAV 0.99

        Today, 4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki informs us about the release and immediate availability for download of Antivirus Live CD 16.0-0.99.

        If you don’t know what Antivirus Live CD is, we will take this opportunity to remind you that it is a small, free and easy-to-use Live ISO image built around the open-source Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) antivirus software and designed for cleaning your PC of viruses, no matter if you’re using Linux, Mac or Windows.

        The new release, Antivirus Live CD 16.0-0.99, brings support for the recently announced ClamAV 0.99.0, which has all the latest virus definition updates and bugfixes for protecting your computer from malware. Besides that, Antivirus Live CD 16.0-0.99 is now based on the 4MLinux 16.0 operating system.

      • Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) Gets Linux Kernel 4.1.16 in the Third Test Build

        The Parsix GNU/Linux developers have announced the release and immediate availability for download of the third TEST build for the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 “Atticus” operating system.

        According to the release notes, Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) TEST3 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.1.16 kernel, which has been patched with BFS and TuxOnIce 3.3 and has been built around the latest stable and most advanced GNOME 3.18 desktop environment. It also comes with updates for many of the pre-installed apps and core components.

      • Solus 1.1 to Land Really Soon, Users Needed to Test AMD GPU Drivers

        The Solus operating system is now available in a stable form, and its developers are preparing to release the first point release.

        Since Solus is going to be supported for the next couple of years, the developers need to work on the problems that have been reported by the community. They have already promised that they will squash all the bugs in a little over a month, but they are also preparing for the first point release.

      • Zenwalk 8.0 Linux OS Enters Beta, Replaces Mozilla Firefox with Chromium

        The developers of the Slackware-based Zenwalk Linux operating system have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming Zenwalk 8.0 computer operating system.

      • Zenwalk 8.0 Linux Distribution Now In Beta

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • ROSA Desktop Fresh KDE R7 Linux OS Ships with KDE Plasma 5, Linux Kernel 4.1.15

        The developers of the ROSA Desktop Fresh operating system announced today, January 26, the release and immediate availability for download of the ROSA Desktop Fresh KDE R7 Linux operating system.

        Being based on the long-term supported ROSA 2014.1 platform, which will receive security fixes and patches until Autumn 2016, ROSA Desktop Fresh KDE R7 updates the default set of KDE4 applications with the addition of the Kamoso and Kup applications, and the removal of the KWallet utility. Support for H.265 encoded videos is now available for new installations, along with numerous other multimedia codecs.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Meet exGENT Linux, a Rolling Gentoo Live DVD Powered by Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS

        Softpedia has been informed today, January 25, 2016, by GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton about the immediate availability for download of a new build of his excellent exGENT Live DVD Linux operating system.

        As this is the first time we’re writing a news story about exGENT Linux, we would like to introduce you guys to it first. So, as its name might suggest, exGENT is a rolling-release Gentoo-based Live Linux distribution built around the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and based on the latest GNU/Linux technologies.

    • Arch Family

      • BlackArch Linux Expands Its Roster of Tools for Security Research

        If having more tools is better for security, then the latest release of the BlackArch Linux distribution will be warmly received by security researchers. Version 2016.01.10 of BlackArch Linux, which was released on Jan. 10, boasts more than 30 new security tools, bringing the total number of security tools to 1,330. BlackArch is a security-focused operating system that is based on the Arch Linux distribution. Arch Linux is what is known as a rolling release Linux distribution because it is constantly being updated. BlackArch builds on top of Arch and includes anti-forensic, automation, backdoor, crypto, honeypot, networking, scanner, spoofer and wireless security tools for security research. Among the new tools is a utility to conduct attacks against IBM Lotus Domino servers. The new Jooforce tool, meanwhile, enables security researchers to attack the open-source Joomla content management system. Another interesting addition is the credential mapper (credmap) tool that aims to show researchers when user and account credentials have been reused. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the BlackArch 2016.01.10 milestone release.

      • Manjaro Deepin 15.12
      • Arch just works, Ubuntu is customizable

        Ever actually treid to make a package for Ubuntu? Understanding .deb takes a good couple of days of documentation until you get it down, every idiot can make a Pacman package because it’s simpler, it “just works”. The AUR’s success is probably tied to that any idiot can make a Pacman package.

    • Slackware Family

      • SlackWare 14.1 on Pandora: Everything is Awesome!

        I hope that line is not trademarked by LEGO… anyway, the point is that Slackware 14.1 on the Pandora is a great distro. I had tested it in the past but I had not given it enough of my attention then, and I now realize my mistake. Don’t get me wrong: Super Zaxxon is great and all, but if you want to enhance the utility factor of your Pandora, Slackware is one of the best ways to do it, without losing much of SZ either.

      • Slackware Live Edition, updated

        During the past weeks I have been working on my “liveslak” scripts for the Slackware Live Edition. Check out my previous articles about Beta1 Beta2 and Beta3 releases for these scripts, they contain a lot of background about the reasons for creating yet another Slackware Live, as well as instructions on the use of the Live ISO images and their boot parameters.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Will 2016 Be Red Hat Inc.’s Best Year Yet?

        This year may not be spectacular, but the merciless march toward market-beating sales and cash flows will continue. Hint: The company doesn’t mind market weakness.

      • Google Integrating Cloud Platform With Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated

        The goal is to enable Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated managed container application platform customers to build and host their apps on Google’s Cloud Platform.

      • Red Hat Boosts Hybrid Clouds

        Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has begun shipping an update to its open source IT automation framework, designed to bring increased stability, new automation capabilities, and new integrations with a variety of services and providers. The solution, Ansible 2.0, is intended to better support public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, as well as Microsoft Windows environments and network management.

      • Brokerages Set Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) PT at $89.73

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) has received a consensus rating of “Buy” from the thirty-four analysts that are currently covering the stock, ARN reports. Two analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, six have assigned a hold rating and twenty-five have assigned a buy rating to the company. The average 12 month price target among brokerages that have updated their coverage on the stock in the last year is $89.73.

      • The CentOS CI Infrastructure: A Getting Started Guide

        The CentOS community is trying to build an ecosystem that fosters and encourages upstream communities to continuously perform integration testing of their code running on the the CentOS platform. The CentOS community has built out an infrastructure that (currently) contains 256 servers (“bare metal” servers”) that are pooled together to run tests that are orchestrated by a frontend Jenkins instance located at ci.centos.org.

      • Mackay Shields Acquires New Stake in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

        Mackay Shields acquired a new stake in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The hedge fund acquired 18,481,000 shares of the open-source software company’s stock, valued at approximately $24,132,000.

      • Promising stocks in today’s market: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)
      • Red Hat, Inc. Analyst Rating Update

        As many as 16 brokerage firms have rated Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) at 1.5. Research Analysts at Zacks Investment Research have ranked the company at 3, suggesting the traders with a rating of hold for the short term. The stock garnered a place in the hold list of 3 stock Analysts. 2 analysts suggested buying the company. 11 analysts rated the company as a strong buy.

      • Brokerages Set Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) PT at $89.73

        Shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) have been given a consensus rating of “Buy” by the thirty-four research firms that are covering the company, AnalystRatings.NET reports. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell recommendation, six have given a hold recommendation and twenty-five have given a buy recommendation to the company. The average twelve-month target price among brokers that have covered the stock in the last year is $89.73.

      • Fedora

        • GPG: a Fedora primer

          GPG, or GnuPG, refers to the Gnu Privacy Guard utility. GPG is a freely available implementation of the OpenPGP standard that was released by Werner Koch in 1999. The security and privacy of data and individuals is an important topic in modern culture. The OpenPGP standard allows GPG and other applications to work together to secure and protect your data.

          This series will explain the basic fundamentals of GPG and take you step by step through using it. The OpenPGP standard includes the basic features of confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation. By supporting this standard, GPG provides all three features.

        • How is systemd doing on github?

          Blue and green lines are the total number of issues and the number of closed issues, number of the left y-axis. Red line is the difference, number on the right axis. The number of issues is growing linearly. Overall, we aren’t doing too bad, 85% of issues have been closed.

        • 6 months with Fedora Design
        • IBus-Anthy 1.5.8
        • IBus 1.5.12
        • Fedora23 – First Impressions

          When you read my blog posts you know that I switched not that long ago from Manjaro, an Arch-based distribution to Arch. And now I switched again – this time to [Fedora]. Even so I was really satisified with Arch. It worked, it was fast and the Arch User Repositories are awesome. I rarely had to google how to install a software. I just had to use a wrapper to search them. And when I googled the first hit was often the Arch Wiki. Right now the Arch Wiki is probably the best documentation for Linux-related software.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian GNU/Linux 8.3 “Jessie” Now Available for Download, Live DVDs Coming Soon

        We reported earlier on the official release of the third stable update in the Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” series of Linux kernel-based operating systems, Debian 8.3.

        At the moment of writing the respective article, there were no installation mediums or Live DVD ISO images available for download. This is because Debian GNU/Linux 8.3 is not a new version of the acclaimed operating system, but a collection of updates that can be easily applied by existing Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 “Jessie” users through the official channels.

      • Reproducible builds: week 39 in Stretch cycle

        The switch made in binutils/2.25-6 to use deterministic archives by default had the unfortunate effect of breaking a seldom used feature of make. Manoj Srivastava asked on debian-devel the best way to communicate the changes to Debian users. Lunar quickly came up with a patch that displays a warning when Make encounters “deterministic” archives. Manoj made it available in make/4.1-2 together with a NEWS file advertising the change.

      • QNAP TS-x09 installer available again

        Debian 8.3 came out today. As part of this update, Debian installer images for QNAP TS-109, TS-209 and TS-409 are available again. These devices are pretty old but there are still some users. We dropped installer support several years ago because the installer ramdisk was too large to fit in flash. Since then, users had to install Debian 6.0 (squeeze) and upgrade from there. When squeeze was removed from the Debian mirrors recently, I received mail from a number of users.

      • neovim-coming-to-debian

        Almost 9 months after I took ownership of the Neovim RFP, I finally tagged & uploaded Neovim to Debian. It still has to go through the NEW queue, but it will soon be in an experimental release near you.

      • Derivatives

        • HandyLinux 2.3 Is Based on Debian 8.3, Dedicated to the Memory of Ian Murdock

          The developers of the HandyLinux computer operating system have been proud to inform Softpedia earlier about the immediate availability for download of the HandyLinux 2.3 release.

          Being based on the well-known and powerful Debian GNU/Linux 8.3 (Jessie) operating system created by Ian Murdock, who sadly passed away on December 30, 2015, today’s HandyLinux 2.3 release is dedicated to his memory, and because of that, it has been dubbed by its developers “Ian.”

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu for TV Possibly Still in the Works

            Ubuntu for TV was briefly a thing for Canonical, but it never really took off, and it slowly faded away, but it seems that they haven’t given up on that idea, and we might still get it.

            Ubuntu for TV was a really different operating system that was initially showcased back in January 2012, at CES. It’ s been four years since then and Ubuntu for TV is no more. The previous Ubuntu community manager, Jono Bacon, said that the project didn’t actually die, it was just folded back into the main distro.

          • Bq’s Ubuntu tablet could showcase long-awaited desktop-mobile convergence

            The rumors are true: An Ubuntu-powered tablet blessed by Canonical is coming—from Spanish device maker Bq, which plans to unveil it at Mobile World Congress in February.

            Linux fans have waited a long time for the realization of Canonical’s long-promised vision of “convergence,” an OS that seamlessly transitions between mobile and desktop environments. Ubuntu blog OMGUbuntu first reported the tablet on January 14, but Canonical refused to comment. In a recent interview with Spanish website Xataka, however, Bq (which has partnered with Canonical on phones) confirmed the rumor.

          • What you missed in tech last week: Ubuntu’s big win, iOS battery bug, iPhone 6C leak
          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-10 for Ubuntu Phones Launches on March 3, 2016

            We have just been informed by Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical about a preliminary release schedule for the next OTA software updates for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

            According to Mr. Zemczak, the Ubuntu Touch developers have decided that it will be appropriate to release a post OTA-9 hotfix update after all, OTA-9.5, which will be the next thing they prepare for. The OTA-9.5 update will enter final freeze on January 29, two days after the launch on OTA-9 on January 27, and will be released for all supported Ubuntu Phone devices on February 10, 2016.

          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 to Land This Week Without Delays, OTA-9.5 Hotfix Coming Soon

            The Ubuntu Touch team at Canonical announced earlier the release schedule for the upcoming OTA software updates for Ubuntu Phone devices, and we promised to give you guys more info on the whereabouts of the OTA-9 update.

          • Here’s What’s New in the Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Update for Ubuntu Phones
          • Canonical “Secretly” Changed the Ubuntu Orange Color to Another Orange

            Canonical has made some changes to the famous orange color and has changed it, in secret, to a different kind of orange.

            The famous color that’s been used in Ubuntu for a long time serves two purposes. One is to make the operating system easily recognizable, and the other one is to drive people who don’t like orange crazy. Most of the community doesn’t really care about the color being used, and people either let it be or change it; the rest of the users are always asking Canonical to replace it.

          • Uniform Icons Are Unshaped But Looks Great on Ubuntu/Linux Mint Desktop

            There are many icon themes available for Linux and you already know that in one icon set all icons have same pattern, but this is not the case here. The guy (0rax0) who designed this icon theme could have tested every shape on the planet to get a unique and good looking icon set for Linux, and he followed totally unshaped pattern for his icon set but can’t we see these icons still looks awesome, I would say great contribution to eyecandy for the Linux. We all have tested many of the icon theme and none of them have icons for every application, there is always something missing, so don’t expect this set to be complete but good news is that it is in development mode by another guy (ZMA) who is now constantly working on it and adding icons to this icon set. If you encounter any issue or see any missing icon then you should ask ZMA to create and add that icon. You can use Unity Tweak Tool, Gnome-tweak-tool or Ubuntu-Tweak to change icons.

          • Open Source in the World of App Stores
          • Bq Confirm Ubuntu Tablet with Convergence is Coming
          • Ubuntu Scope Showdown Is Back, And The Prizes Are Better Than Ever

            The competition, which runs from today and closes February 29, 2016, gives participants just six weeks to create an all-new original Scope for the Ubuntu Phone and publish it to the store.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu-Based Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 Distro Arrives with Updated Kernel, More

              Black Lab Software, through Roberto J. Dohnert, has informed Softpedia earlier today, January 26, 2016, about the immediate availability for download and update of the Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 operating system.

              According to the developers, Black Lab Linux 7.0.3 is the third maintenance release in the Black Lab Linux 7.0 series of operating system, bringing the latest software updates, bugfixes, under-the-hood improvements, and security patches.

            • You Can Now Have a Single Live ISO Image with All the Linux Mint 17.3 Flavors

              Softpedia has been informed today, January 26, 2016, by the Linux AIO team about the immediate availability for download of an updated version of their Linux AIO Linux Mint project, which is now based on Linux Mint 17.3.

              Many of our readers know what the Linux AIO project does, and we bet that they were waiting impatiently for them to release a new Live ISO image that would consist of all the flavors of the recently released Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa) operating system, including Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon, Linux Mint 17.3 MATE, Linux Mint 17.3 Xfce, and Linux Mint 17.3 KDE.

            • Deepin 15 – See What’s New

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Many People Ignore Open Source Software

    Since its advent, Open Source Software or OSS has grown significantly over the years. This is due in part to the advances made in its development. A few of these advances include: “user-friendliness”, functional capabilities, and their low cost. But despite these achievements, OSS has not achieved the type of pervasive adoption that we have envisaged. And this, in my opinion, is a result of a variety of reasons in different regions. In Liberia for example, I have come to learn of two cardinal reasons: lack of OSS knowledge and the unwillingness by some individuals to ignore common myth held against OSS.

    The lack of OSS knowledge in Liberia echoes one thing: Our unarticulated unwillingness to remove ourselves from that which we are comfortable with –proprietary software. Across the Liberian ICT spectrum, Open Source Software is a mundane topic. Yet, it is rare to see ICT professionals in Liberia proffer Open Source Software solutions, even though their ICT budgets face serious strangulations. One can inarguably surmise therefore, that the option for perfunctory proprietary solutions is sought only because it aligns with the skills of their choosers. But how does this benefit a struggling organization?

  • Why we made Mattermost an open source Slack-alternative

    We had several requests to blog about why we created Mattermost as an open-source alternative to Slack and proprietary communications software and we wanted to share our story:

  • 5 Open Source Predictive Analytics Tools

    Launching a predictive analytics initiative can be quite costly. Fortunately, companies can use open source predictive analytics tools to keep costs low while exploring the possibilities of predictive analytics. Building a kit of open source predictive analytics tools enables data scientists to take advantage of each tool’s strengths and add new tools when ready to widen the scope of prediction types.

  • Events

    • SCALE 14X Is One for the Record Books

      Whew. It had over 140 exhibitors, and over 185 sessions. It had just north of 3,600 people registered for the event. It had four days of peace, love and FOSS.

      That was SCALE 14X.

      But we’re getting ahead of Sunday’s story.

      After the cacophony of Saturday night’s Weakest Geek — Ruth Suehle won her third, with talk of a dynasty in the air for that particular game — and the fun and games of, well, Game Night, Sunday rolled into Pasadena on a more quiet, thoughtful note.

    • Lightning talk: Rewiring Generation Z

      Busting the myth that the generation after millennials are digital natives, that they are really good at computers. But they’re not. Charlie Reisinger tells us how closed software and hardware plays a role. And, how open source software and hardware is the answer.

    • Visit Brussels and learn about open source at FOSDEM 2016

      Every January, more than 5,000 free and open source enthusiasts from around the world flock to a humble university campus in Brussels, Belgium, for a weekend of talks, discussions, and open source projects. FOSDEM stands for Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting, and it’s one of the largest community-organized events in Europe.

    • DevConf.cz 2016 is coming

      DevConf.cz 2016 is just around the corner (starts on Feb 5th). If you’re going to attend the conference, the organizers have prepared useful information for you. Check devconf.cz and especially the transportation page.

    • Pasadena welcomes Linux Scale 14X and its tribe of developers

      Pasadena City Councilmember Andy Wilson proudly welcomed Linux 14X, the 14th Annual Southern California Linux Expo, to the Pasadena Convention Center Saturday morning.

      Wilson, who himself comes from the software industry, was thrilled to call himself a “geek” among the packed ballroom, filled with software developers and aficionados. He described his own excitement at having the growing event move from its former location near LAX to Pasadena. The event will draw more than 3500 Linux fans to the convention center over this weekend.

  • Web Browsers

    • Ex Firefox Boss Releases Open Source Ad-Blocking Web Browser In Brave Move.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 44.0 Primed For Release

        Firefox 44 continues allowing unsigned extensions thanks to a last minute change by Mozilla. Firefox 44 also has an option that can be enabled for moving WebGL off the main thread. Firefox 44 additionally presents Brotli compression algorithm support, support for VP9/WebM video support for systems lacking MP4/H.264, WebRTC improvements, Firefox For Android updates, H.264 system decoder support, the new Service Workers API, a WebSocket Debugging API, and other developer enhancements.

      • Mozilla Firefox 44.0 Is Now Available for Download for Linux, Mac and Windows

        Just a few minutes ago, January 26, 2016, Mozilla pushed the final Firefox 44.0 web browser to the FTP channels of the project, for anyone to download and install on their personal computers.

      • Add-on Signing Update

        In Firefox 43, we made it a default requirement for add-ons to be signed. This requirement can be disabled by toggling a preference that was originally scheduled to be removed in Firefox 44 for release and beta versions (this preference will continue to be available in the Nightly, Developer, and ESR Editions of Firefox for the foreseeable future).

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Google Wants Apache’s Attention to Evolve Cloud Dataflow Tool

      The Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has elevated a slew of big data and cloud computing projects to Top-Level status recently. With that designation, projects get more attention from the development community and other perks.

      Now, Google is making a big open source-focused move by offering its Dataflow technology to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as an incubator project. Cloudera, Data Artisans GmbH, PayPal Holdings and Talend are all backing the move.

    • New Outreachy interns, NFV deployment growth, and more OpenStack news

      Interested in keeping track of what is happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for news in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

    • Forrester Names Top Five Hadoop Distributions

      Analysts at Forrester Research have been tracking the upward trajectory of the open source Hadoop big data project for years, and have now pronounced that the platform is “mandatory” for companies in pursuit of advanced analytics that leverage their data stores.

    • NFV Deployment Growing Thanks to OpenStack

      While the open-source OpenStack cloud platform got its start as a platform for compute and storage, networking efforts are now leading the way forward. In particular, the adoption of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) by global carriers is now being accelerated in part by adoption of OpenStack.

  • Databases

    • Getting dirty with open source databases

      A decade ago, most enterprises building a database had only two or three choices: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and – to a lesser extent – IBM DB2. Open source systems such as MySQL and PostgreSQL existed, but they were not on the radar of most commercial organisations.

      But as proprietary licensing has become more complex and costly, and businesses’ needs have changed, so open source systems have emerged to meet evolving demands.

    • 9 Million for Open Source Database

      MariaDB announced $9 million in venture funding to support its open-source relational database solutions. The company also named Michael Howard as its CEO and Michael “Monty” Widenius as chief technology officer.

  • CMS

    • 5 Best (and Easy) Open Source Website Builders

      A website is essential for every small business, even if it’s just a simple information page. Forget phone books or newspapers; prospective customers look websites. You can publish and maintain your own site, and these five open source website builders make it easy and affordable.

  • Education

    • Using Git in the classroom

      In my advanced programming classes I’ve discovered that middle school students are capable of far more complex operations than we often suspect. In many cases, they’re wholly capable of using industry-standard tools to produce remarkable work.

    • Indiana University Joins Open Source Initiative

      The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) announced today the Affiliate Membership of Indiana University (IU), a long time champion for the use of open source software as a means for greater efficiency in higher education. The partnership highlights the OSI’s recent efforts to extend support to higher education: helping colleges and universities across the globe realize the benefits of open source software, develpoment models and communities.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Key Charities That Advance Software Freedom Are Worthy of Your Urgent Support

      I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege, for the last 20 years, to be either a volunteer or employee of the two most important organizations for the advance of software freedom and users’ rights to copy, share, modify and redistribute software. In 1996, I began volunteering for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and worked as its Executive Director from 2001–2005. I continued as a volunteer for the FSF since then, and now serve as a volunteer on FSF’s Board of Directors. I was also one of the first volunteers for Software Freedom Conservancy when we founded it in 2006, and I was the primary person doing the work of the organization as a volunteer from 2006–2010. I’ve enjoyed having a day job as a Conservancy employee since 2011.

    • Andreas Enge: Novena board set-up for the GNU Guix build farm, part 1

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Dawn of Open Source Insulin

      Based on WHO (World Health Organization) reports on diabetes, in 2012, an estimated 1.5 million deaths were directly caused by diabetes and it is projected to be one of the leading causes of death in 2030. More than 80% of diabetes deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • ZeMarmot in 2015: research, script finalization and character design

    As a side note, we are also now in contact with a scientist, specialist on marmots (yes it does exist!). Not that ZeMarmot is any kind of scientifically-accurate film, but it is always nice to get some scientific background as a basis, even if it means later breaking the rules of nature (which is ok when done on purpose). We’ll tell more about this if the contact evolves into a real cooperation.

  • Microsoft Surface blamed for NFL football playoffs meltdown

    “They’re having some trouble with their Microsoft Surface tablets,” announced CBS reporter Evan Washburn. “That last defensive possession the Patriots’ coaches did not have access to those tablets to show pictures to their players. NFL officials have been working at it. Some of those tablets are back in use but not all of them. A lot of frustration that they didn’t have them on that last possession.”

  • Why the Sun 2 has the message “Love your country, but never trust its government”

    Alec figured that message was never supposed to be seen and suggested it was a kind of silent protest of someone in Sun against the US Government. I replied, saying I was pretty sure such a message anywhere in the Sun bootprom code must have originated by John Gilmore. So I asked John, and he did not disappoint. This is what I wrote me back…

  • So you think offline systems need no updates?

    So, yes, security issues are harmful. They must be taken serious, and a solid and well designed security concept should be applied. Multiple layers, different zones, role based access, update often, etc.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Virginia Tech expert helped expose Flint water crisis

      Four months after Flint switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River, Lee-Anne Walters’ family began to experience strange health issues.

      It started in August 2014 when Walters’ four children and her husband got rashes on their skin and started losing hair. Then, her 15-year-old son became so nauseated, dizzy and in pain that he couldn’t go to school for three weeks.

      The worst of it came when one of her toddler twin sons fell behind his brother in weight and developed a bright red rash with scaly patches on his body after bathing. He was diagnosed with lead poisoning.

    • Watch Bill Clinton Defend Bernie Sanders’ Health Care Plan (in 2009)

      Former president Bill Clinton joined his wife and daughter in assailing Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care plan last week, saying that it would lead to “overcharging and inflation.”

      But in 2009, he defended the single-payer approach, in which the government pays for everyone’s health care. During an appearance on CNN, host Sanjay Gupta asked the former president whether single-payer was “politically unpalatable, or is it a bad idea?”

      “Well, I think it’s more politically unpalatable than it is a bad idea,” responded Clinton. “Because single-payer is not socialized medicine. Canada has a single-payer system, and a private health care system. Our single-payer systems are Medicare and Medicaid and Medicare is quite popular. The good thing about single-payer is the administrative costs are quite low. We probably waste $200 billion a year between the insurance administrative costs, the doctors’ and other health care providers’ administrative costs, and employers’ administrative costs in health care that we would not waste if we had any other country’s system.”

  • Security

    • LeChiffre Ransomware Hits Three Indian Banks, Causes Millions in Damages

      An unknown hacker has breached the computer systems of three banks and a pharmaceutical company and infected most of their computers with crypto-ransomware.

      The incident took place at the start of January, all companies were located in India, and the hacker(s) used the LeChiffre ransomware family to encrypt files on the infected computers.

    • LeChiffre, Ransomware Ran Manually

      It encrypts files and appends to their names an extension “.LeChiffre”.

    • when preloads go sideways

      One solution would be to install an alternative operating system, like OpenBSD. Sorry, I meant to say ARCH LINUX.

      I note that a fair bit of the above foolishness revolves around adding some amount of pollution to the OS’s cabal store. Maybe we can use an OS that comes with a store we trust? For example, there’s several ways a user can install OpenBSD and verify that cert.pem has only the 4943 lines it’s supposed to have. That only pushes the question back a step, however. What lines are supposed to be in this file?

      [...]

      The trials and tribulations of bundleware mirror those of the government. For as long as most traffic was unencrypted, it was easy to inject value. But as sites started moving to full time https, the well of value started to dry up, requiring workarounds to stay in the game. Governments are facing much the same challenge, hence the large number of proposals to build a socialized, universal AV software, so that all citizens can enjoy its benefits on both desktop and mobile. How else will TrendMicro keep us safe from Let’s Encrypt?

      When asked to comment, Hillary Clinton responded with a statement. “I clearly specified that the problem was to be solved by Silicon Valley’s best and brightest, not bumbling mediocrity.” Donald Trump promised to build a wall around malware and make the neckbeards pay for it. Carly Fiorina simply tweeted, “Go Iowa!”

    • Microsoft putting users at risk by forcing Windows 10 upgrade

      Microsoft is forcing Windows users to upgrade to Windows 10 by quietly slipping in code through its regular updates. This has been confirmed by multiple sources.

      But what of those Windows users who want to stick with a known devil — in this case, their own versions of Windows, be they 7, 8 or 8.1 — until a little more is known by the public at large about the strengths and weaknesses of Windows 10?

    • Playing with Letsencrypt

      While I’m not convinced that encrypting everything by default is necessarily a good idea, it is certainly true that encryption has its uses. Unfortunately, for the longest time getting an SSL certificate from a CA was quite a hassle — and then I’m not even mentioning the fact that it would cost money, too. In that light, the letsencrypt project is a useful alternative: rather than having to dabble with emails or webforms, letsencrypt does everything by way of a few scripts. Also, the letsencrypt CA is free to use, in contrast to many other certificate authorities.

    • Linux’s Latest Security Vulnerability: Hype vs. Reality

      In the latest bout of alarmist frenzy to sweep the security world, researchers disclosed a vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s open source code last week. It turns out to pose little real threat.

      The flaw, which has existed in Linux since 2012 but remained unknown, was reported by the Israeli security company Perception Point. It allows attackers to gain root access to computers running affected versions of the kernel. With root access, they can do anything they want to the system.

    • Important OpenSSL Update Announced for January 28

      A new OpenSSL release has been announced for January 28, and it’s going to cover a couple of problems, one of which it’s going to be very important.

    • Security updates for Monday
    • New Linux malware spotted [Ed: Stuff that the user must actually INSTALL]

      A new backdoor for Linux has been spotted by security researchers, one which can download malicious files to an infected system, log keystrokes and take screenshots.

    • Simple Yet Efficient Linux Backdoor Trojan Discovered

      Threats to Linux computers are now appearing on a regular basis, and what was once dubbed a “no-virus zone” has started being targeted by malware authors.

    • Exploiting a Linux Kernel Infoleak to bypass Linux kASLR
    • Thousands of gamers’ passwords easily cracked in 3 minutes

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • You Won’t Like It, But Here’s the Answer to ISIS

      You’d need to start with a persuasive review of what hasn’t worked over the past 14-plus years. American actions against terrorism — the Islamic State being just the latest flavor — have flopped on a remarkable scale, yet remain remarkably attractive to our present crew of candidates. (Bernie Sanders might be the only exception, though he supports forming yet another coalition to defeat ISIS.)

      Why are the failed options still so attractive? In part, because bombing and drones are believed by the majority of Americans to be surgical procedures that kill lots of bad guys, not too many innocents, and no Americans at all. As Washington regularly imagines it, once air power is in play, someone else’s boots will eventually hit the ground (after the U.S. military provides the necessary training and weapons). A handful of Special Forces troops, boots-sorta-on-the-ground, will also help turn the tide. By carrot or stick, Washington will collect and hold together some now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t “coalition” of “allies” to aid and abet the task at hand. And success will be ours, even though versions of this formula have fallen flat time and again in the Greater Middle East.

    • Winston Churchill: Britain’s “Greatest Briton” Left a Legacy of Global Conflict and Crimes Against Humanity

      Churchill’s legacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Kenya in particular is also one of deep physical and physiological scars that endure to this day.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • City Of Chicago ‘Embraces’ Transparency By Releasing Shooting Video To Draw Attention Away From Attorney Misconduct

      The city of Chicago has decided it’s not going to wait for a judge to order it to release video footage depicting another unarmed person being shot by one of its police officers. It has released surveillance video showing Cedric Chatman being killed by Officer Kevin Fry. Fry claimed Chatman was carrying a gun. It turned out to be an iPhone box, allegedly taken from the victim of a carjacking.

    • Video of 2013 Police Shooting Is Released as Chicago Relents

      For the second time in recent months, Chicago officials released video of police officers chasing and fatally shooting an African-American teenager, bowing to public and legal pressure amid calls for greater scrutiny of officers’ use of deadly force.

      The latest set of videos — with views from at least four surveillance cameras — provides a distant, and somewhat incomplete, view of the brief moments on Jan. 7, 2013, after the police confronted Cedrick Chatman, a 17-year-old black youth, in a car at a busy South Side intersection.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • From Antarctica to Africa, penguins are facing extinction

      January 20 is Penguin Awareness Day. No need to wear a fish-shaped ribbon or dress in black and white, but sadly these dapper flightless birds are facing bigger problems than Benedict Cumberbatch not being able to pronounce their name correctly.

  • Finance

    • Clinton Calls for Small Donor Matching Funds on Citizens United Anniversary

      Hillary Clinton declared on the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that as president she would “fight to create a robust small-donor matching system.”

      Clinton previously endorsed such a system for congressional and presidential candidates as part of her campaign’s platform. While Clinton hasn’t laid out any specifics, almost all House Democrats have co-sponsored the Government by the People Act, which would match political donations up to $150 at a six-to-one ratio with public money. For example, a donation of $100 to a candidate would be matched with $600, so the candidate would actually receive $700 total.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The BBC, Savile and investigations

      In a week when the BBC has been hit by yet more scandal as a result of suppressing an investigation into the notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile, we ask: does the BBC need an investigations unit?

    • Does British TV have a problem with independent documentary?

      he Unorthodocs season at Somerset House features acclaimed documentaries never seen on British TV. Are UK broadcasters denying audiences access to a golden age of independent film-making?

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Power Wars: How Obama justified, expanded Bush-era surveillance

      By going through various deliberative processes, including the secret interrogation of Abdulmutallab, the end result was the acceleration of the process to hunt down and kill Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Muslim cleric living in Yemen. It was al-Awlaki who helped guide the young Nigerian would-be terrorist. Al-Awlaki himself was killed in a drone strike in September 2011.

      This key event is one of the stark reminders that in some ways the Obama White House took policy decisions that even Bush did not.

      “Even Bush had not signed off on the deliberate killing of a United States citizen without a trial,” Savage writes. “And notwithstanding the extraordinary precedent this established for state power and individual rights, the Obama administration would fight for years to keep the basic facts and legal analysis about its action secret from the public.”

      Indeed, it wasn’t until 2014 that the legal rationale was finally published, after a federal appeals court ordered that it be released.

      Many groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, would argue that the extrajudicial killing is in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property…without due process of law.” However, the Obama administration argued that the killing of terror suspects like al-Awlaki is justified as they pose a “continuous and imminent” threat to the national security of the United States.

    • For an immediate end to the French state of emergency: call for a mass mobilisation!

      On the 5th February, the French National Assembly1 will consider the law on the constitutionalisation of the state of emergency. Prime Minister Manuel Valls has already announced that he wanted an extension to the state of emergency “until we can get rid of Daesh (fr)”, that is to say, for months or years. Together with numerous organisations, La Quadrature du Net calls for the rejection of trivialisation of the state of emergency and for a mass mobilisation against interference with civil liberties and with the rule of law, notably by demonstrating on 30 January and more specifically by calling MPs.

    • EFF wants the NSA to destroy the phone records it collected over 14 years of mass surveillance

      When the USA Freedom Act passed last June, it put an end to the country’s National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance program in which it collected millions of phone records of citizens’ calls over 14 years.

      But the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believes that isn’t enough to protect people’s privacy, because those records still exist in various NSA databases. The non-profit is calling on a secret court to consider ways to delete this trove of data without destroying evidence that proves the NSA snooped on citizens.

    • EFF Letter to DOJ Counsel re FISC Order BR-15-99
    • So What About those Phone Records Now? EFF Writes to FISA Court

      Now that the mass collection of telephone records by the NSA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act has ended due to the passage of USA Freedom, the question has arisen: what should the NSA do with the big mass of records that it already has? The secret FISA Court recently asked the government what it thinks should happen, and EFF sent a letter to the FISA Court (by way of the Department of Justice, asking that it be conveyed to the Court) giving our perspective.

    • GCHQ crypto flaws, Dridex strikes and Ukraine malware attacks: The week in security
    • Latest Tech News: GCHQ-developed phone security ‘open to surveillance’
    • EFF to Court: Accessing Cell Phone Location Records Without A Warrant Violates the Constitution

      Citizens Rightfully Expect Privacy in Data That Reveals Their Whereabouts

      Chicago—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal appeals court in Chicago to rule that police need a warrant to access cell phone location records that can reveal our everyday travels—when we leave home, where we go and whom we visit.

      In an amicus brief filed Friday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, EFF, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and ACLU of Wisconsin said cell phone location information—data that show where our phones are at a given time and date—generates a comprehensive picture of a person’s movements. Because we carry our phones with us wherever we go, these data can reveal intensely personal information like when we see the doctor, attend a political meeting, or visit friends. Americans have the right to expect that this information remain private and beyond the reach of law enforcement officers unless they first obtain a search warrant.

    • Prosecutors Say Cops Don’t Need Warrants For Stingrays Because ‘Everyone Knows’ Cell Phones Generate Location Data

      Up in Baltimore, where law enforcement Stingray device use hit critical mass faster and more furiously than anywhere else in the country (to date…) with the exposure of 4,300 deployments in seven years, the government is still arguing there’s no reason to bring search warrants into this.

    • Algorithm Might Protect Non-Targets Caught In Surveillance, But Only If The Government Cares What Happens To Non-Targets

      Ashkat Rathi at Quartz points to an interesting algorithm developed by Michael Kearns of the University of Pennsylvania — one that might give the government something to consider when conducting surveillance. It gauges the possibility of non-targets inadvertently being exposed during investigations, providing intelligence/investigative agencies with warnings that perhaps other tactics should be deployed.

    • Documents Uncover NYPD’s Vast License Plate Reader Database

      The police department’s contract with Vigilant Solutions gives it the ability to track people across the country.

    • This TorFlow Map Shows How TOR’s Data Looks As It Flows All Around The World

      Using the publicly available data, data visualization software firm Uncharted has prepared TorFlow — a map for visualizing how TOR’s data looks as it flows all across the world. It shows TOR network’s node and data movements based on the IP addresses of relays bouncing around the connections of users to avoid spying.

    • When You Crack Open The Surveillance Door, The Food Police Will Want Your Metadata

      But those concerns are all about the practical utility of such a law, not the larger concerns over whether this kind of data collection ought to be happening to begin with. To see an example of why a free people shouldn’t allow the government to crack open this door, however, one needs only look again at the law in Australia. What was supposed to be collection chiefly to combat major criminal actions is now a collection that even the food police are trying to get in on. And, yes, I really do mean the food police.

    • Despite rhetoric, DoJ, NSA still seek backdoors

      The U.S. took its encryption argument international last week, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch telling the World Economic forum that it doesn’t want to put security backdoors into encrypted communications, it just wants to vendors and service providers to decrypt when ordered to by a court.

      That ignores that facts that vendors and providers can’t decrypt unless there is a backdoor of some sort, and that any backdoor undermines the security and therefore the value of encryption.

      It’s a case of the Department of Justice – via Lynch and FBI Director James Comey – trying to steer clear, at least technically, of demanding backdoors, but it’s all a semantic game. Earlier, Comey stopped using the term backdoor and asked for front-door access to decryption instead. Backdoor had become too much of a flashpoint, even though a front-door is exactly the same as a backdoor from a technology standpoint.

      So the department is changing the spoken terms of its demand even though it is still seeking backdoors. Now it just describes its needs, not how vendors and providers should fulfill them. They want these entities to come up with decrypted communications when they present a court order telling them to do so. It’s up to the vendors and providers to figure out how to do that.

    • Expert claims GCHQ-designed secure communications system ‘vulnerable to hacking’
    • NSA Director Rogers Talks About the Future of Encryption [Ed: People who break encryption pretend to be for it:]
    • NSA director: ‘Encryption is foundational to the future’
    • US faces technological ‘peer competitors’ in cyberspace, says USCYBERCOM
    • Released Documents Show NSA Actually Surprised To Find Itself Portrayed Negatively In Popular Culture

      The NSA may know lots of stuff about lots of people, but it’s still fairly clueless about how the world works. Documents obtained by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski show the NSA was shocked to find it hadn’t been portrayed more favorably in a major motion picture.

  • Civil Rights

    • MI5 officer has evidence of torture?

      Well, this story is interesting me extremely, and for the obvious as well as the perhaps more arcanely legal reasons.

      Apparently a former senior MI5 officer is asking permission to give evidence to the Intelligence and Security Committee in Parliament about the Security Service’s collusion in the US torture programme that was the pyroclastic flow from the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

      I have long speculated about how people with whom I used to work, socialise with, have dinner with in the 1990s might have evolved from idealistic young officers into people who could condone or even participate in the torture of other human beings once the war on terror was unleashed in the last decade.

      During the 1990s MI5 absolutely did not condone the use of torture – not only for ethical reasons, but also because an older generation was still knocking around and they had seen in the civil war in Northern Ireland quite how counter-productive such practices were. Internment, secret courts, stress positions, sleep deprivation – all these policies acted as a recruiting sergeant for the Provisional IRA.

    • ‘New form of criminality’: Sex attacks on NYE in 12 German states, says leaked police report

      Cologne-style sex attacks and thefts happened on New Year’s Eve in 12 other German states, according to a leaked federal police report cited by media. German investigators said the assaults represented a “new form of criminality.”

      Local broadcasters WDR and NDR, and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, reported that the attacks were much more widespread than earlier thought, citing a confidential document prepared for the Interior Ministry by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA).

    • On this Invasion Day, I am angry. Australia has a long way to go

      I am an Aboriginal women, born in 1987 into a staunch family who were ready to teach me and my siblings the truth from birth. They had walked the walk and had earned their right to talk the talk, to educate.

      But before I had even left my mother’s womb, I was a statistic, another Aboriginal person to be counted on the census to add to the 3% or so of other Aboriginal people that made up our population in 1987 on a continent where only 199 years prior to my birth, we made up 100% of it. By 1900, it was estimated that the Aboriginal population had decreased by 87%.

      Many Australians today will tell you that what happened was not their fault, that they can’t change what their ancestors and other “colonisers” did. In order to truly understand, this country needs to accept a lot of truths that are otherwise conveniently ignored.

    • Judge Tosses Out Criminal Case In Canada Over Twitter Fight

      Last summer, we wrote about a troubling criminal case up in Canada, exploring whether or not a Twitter fight constituted criminal harassment. The details are long and complex and I tried to summarize them in the last post so if you want more details go there.

    • A Tale of Two Grandmothers

      Two months after the Ash Wednesday protest where Grady Flores was charged with violating the order, on May 23, 2013, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the National Defense University defending his drone program: “Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set.” Despite his pledges, the civilian death toll from U.S. drone strikes continues to climb.

    • We Accept Assembly-Line Justice for the Poor. But We Shouldn’t.

      When a person stands accused of a crime without a competent lawyer, there can be no justice.

    • DOJ’s New Restrictions On Surveilling Journalists Contain Exception For National Security Letters

      In 2013, it was revealed the DOJ had added First Amendment-trampling to its always-cavalier treatment of the Fourth Amendment by gathering journalists’ phone records. Under the guise of investigating leaks, the DOJ crossed over into totalitarian territory. Following the backlash, the DOJ “revised” its rules on surveilling the press.

      How much revision actually took place is still a secret. The Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the DOJ last year for its refusal to release its secret rules on surveilling journalists. The DOJ released some documents but they were redacted into near-complete opacity, prompting the Foundation’s FOIA litigation.

    • Presidential Crimes Then And Now

      Americans have become a small-minded divided people, ruled by petty hatreds, who are easily set against one another and against other peoples by their rulers.

    • Video of Denver inmate dying at hands of deputies raises calls for federal investigation

      Restraining practices have been called into question since Denver released a video showing the last moments a homeless man who died face-down while being restrained by five deputies. His family is now calling for a federal investigation into the incident.

      The release of the video, which runs for more than 45 minutes, comes after Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey said last week that he would not bring charges against the officers responsible for Michael Marshall’s death while in custody in a jail.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Senators Whine About FCC’s 25 Mbps Broadband Standard, Insist Nobody Needs That Much Bandwidth

      Just about a year ago, the FCC voted to raise the base definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream — to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. This, of course, annoyed the nation’s mega providers, since the higher standard highlights the lack of competition and next-generation upgrades in countless markets. It especially annoyed the nation’s phone companies, given that the expensive, sub-6 Mbps DSL foisted upon millions of customers can no longer even technically be called broadband.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Big Pharma’s worst nightmare

      Jamie Love has spent years battling global drug companies, unshakable in his belief that even the world’s poorest people should have access to life-saving medicines. Is it time that our own government listened to him?

    • Copyrights

      • Transparent and Participatory Processes Are Vital to Creating Copyright Rules that Work for Everyone

        If copyright is to succeed in promoting the creation and dissemination of culture, then it needs to address the diverse needs of creators, fans, and critics. Copyright law achieves this in some jurisdictions through policies such as fair use, but more often than not it fails to address the concerns of anyone who isn’t a copyright holder. Much of the blame for why copyright grows increasingly out of touch with how people experience culture lies with a lack of transparency in, and industry capture of, copyright policymaking.

        Nowhere is this problem more apparent than in international trade agreements. For years, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and other copyright industry groups have taken advantage of trade venues to pass copyright rules that would not otherwise survive public scrutiny. Trade negotiations have historically been closed in order to allow negotiators to discuss import tariffs and other market barriers to the trade of goods without political interference. However, the scope of issues covered by these deals have broadened significantly over the years. They have come to include policies on copyright, data transfers, telecommunications, and more. Even as trade agreements now cover all kinds of digital regulations that can affect how lawmakers can set domestic policy, the negotiations have remained entirely closed off from the public.

      • Viral Video Creator Sues Over ‘Honey Badger Doesn’t Give a Shit’ Merchandise

        Remember that viral video from 2011 where a honey badger trots around, aggressively not caring about things? Well, the guy who made it—Christopher Gordon, who goes by the pseudonym “Randall”—is suing Papyrus and design company Drape Creative over some greeting cards that use the phrase HONEY BADGER DON’T GIVE A SHIT.

      • ‘Honey Badger’ Narrator Sues Greeting Card Company For Selling Products Featuring An Apathetic Honey Badger
      • Nigerian Copyright Reform Becomes Less Transparent As Comments Roll In

        The Nigerian government has continued to make progress toward new copyright legislation in recent weeks, but efforts appear to have become less transparent, as the results of a public comment period that ended weeks ago have not been made available and as of press time the draft copy of the bill was no longer available on the Copyright Commission website.

      • World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Downloaded By Users After 12 Years
      • World’s Oldest Torrent Is Still Being Shared After 4,419 Days

        A fan-created ASCII version of the 1999 sci-fi classic The Matrix is the oldest known torrent that’s still active. Created more than 12 years ago, the file has outlived many blockbuster movies and is still downloaded a few times a week, even though the site from where it originated has disappeared.

01.24.16

Links 24/1/2016: Linux 4.5 RC1, Debian 8.3 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 8:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Nginx Plus R8 Improves HTTP2, Adds OAuth2

    Nginx Inc is out this week with a new release of its flagship product platform, Nginx Plus R8. Among the highlights of the new web server platform are improved HTTP2 capabilities, OAuth authentication and HTML5 video caching features.

  • Events

    • POSSCON Cancelled Until 2017

      POSSCON has been cancelled. The surprise announcement was made Thursday by way of an email from IT-oLogy, the nonprofit organization which hosts the event. The conference, which focuses on the enterprise and is targeted at IT professionals who develop or use open source software, was scheduled to be held in Columbia, S.C. on April 12-13.

    • SCALE 14X Saturday in Pictures

      Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls — that covers most of you: From a press standpoint, to say that SCALE 14X was busy would be a clear understatement. While the event has pretty much ratcheted itself up to the next level, staying atop the show in my capacity as the publicity chair is somewhat daunting.

      So rather than tell you what happened today, I’m just going to show you. You’ll thank me for it later, trust me.

    • SCALE 14X Gets Rolling for the Weekend

      One of the fears — one of the many in having an established conference at a brand spanking new venue — is this: Suppose they gave an outstanding Friday keynote, and nobody came? All those sleepless nights worrying about it were essentially for naught, since Cory Doctorow’s keynote at SCALE 14X Friday was a standing room only success.

  • Web Browsers

    • Brave Browser Promises to Defend Users’ Privacy

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • The final act for Mozilla’s Persona

        Mozilla has announced that it will close down its Persona.org identity service in November 2016. The browser maker stopped developing the Persona software in 2014, citing low adoption, but has maintained Persona.org as a public service. With the announcement that the service will be discontinued, the question arose as to whether or not the software could survive as an independent, community-driven project. Questions also arose as to why Persona failed to take off, and whether Mozilla should have managed the project differently.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Why I love hacking at LibreOffice

      The LibreOffice codebase is, to be frank, messy. This isn’t a criticism of previous developers – it’s still an amazing product and an amazing feat of programming given the number of platforms it runs on. The StarView guys, and later OpenOffice.org development team, did a great job. For instance, I was reading up on the font mapping code and I often saw Herbert Duerr’s name, and I’ve got nothing but respect for the work that he did and his dedication to the project.

    • Way Down In The Libreoffice Menus

      With the release of LibreOffice 4.4 last year, we began making incremental updates to the main menus, with the major overhaul happening in the upcoming 5.1 release. The work is guided by LibreOffice’s new Human Interface Guideline (HIG), which has given us the core framework, however some questions have arisen challenging the reasoning of our work. So this post is a summary of what we changed, primarily focused on why we’ve done it – and a little outlook of what is planned for the future.

    • Update on Libreoffice and GNOME integration

      It’s been a long time I have talked about the project that I started with GSoC 2015 some time back. We reached at pretty much exciting results by the end of the summer where we could see the integration working pretty well with LibreOffice. We finished and merged all the major work on the Libreoffice side alongwith just-made-it-work integration with gnome-documents. Things were still in the development stage for gnome-documents, and we needed good amount of effort to get it merged upstream.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • EMC, Pivotal Launch New Program For Open-Source Development

      With an eye on the changing IT landscape, EMC and Pivotal launched a new program in Cambridge, Mass., focused on the development of open-source software and applications for the cloud.

      In Japanese, “dojo” means “the place of the way,” and EMC and Pivotal have named the center the Cloud Foundry dojo. Cloud Foundry is a Platform-as-a-Service offering centered around cloud-native application development.

    • Facebook open-sources Transform, a tool that cuts 360-degree video file size by 25%

      At its Video @Scale conference at company headquarters today, Facebook is announcing that it’s open-sourcing Transform, a piece of software it uses to stream users’ 360-degree videos in an efficient way.

  • BSD

    • Basis Of The Lumina Desktop Environment by Ken Moore

      The Lumina Desktop Environment is a new, BSD-licensed, graphical system environment which is designed primarily for BSD and UNIX-based operating systems. This focus on BSD systems results in a number of distinct differences in from the current collection of Linux-focused desktop environments, only one of which is independence from all the Linux-based system management frameworks.

    • Skylake x86 Target Finally Added To LLVM

      For whatever reason it didn’t come for many months until after Skylake CPUs shipped, but LLVM Git/SVN now has Skylake and its features added to the x86 target list.

      Elena Demikhovsky of Intel landed this weekend the Skylake x86 target in LLVM that exposes all of the various CPU instruction set extensions supported by these latest-generation processors. There is also the Skylake server processor class for those with AVX-512 support.

    • DragonFlyBSD Intel Graphics Driver Caught Up To Linux 4.1

      The DragonFlyBSD Intel DRM graphics driver sure is getting close to catching up against the upstream Intel Linux graphics driver with the mainline kernel.

    • The Imaginary Linux Interview from Hell Part 1 [Ed: garbled mess]

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Denmark evaluates eHealth solutions

      Denmark’s Digital Welfare Strategy 2013 – 2020 is managed by the Danish government, Local Government Denmark (LGDK) and Danish Regions. The aim is to increase the uptake of eHealth solutions, and increase the use of technology to improve welfare.

    • Spain expands its electronic Judicial network
    • Latvia’s authorities meet open technologists

      The smart city activities of Riga and the intelligent transport systems devised by Latvia’s state road department are two of the many topics in next week’s “Open Technologies and Smart Solutions” conference. The meeting on 28 January is organised by Latvia’s Open Technology Association (LATA).

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Space Agency Releases First Set of Files for the Open Source, 3D Printed Ultrascope Explorer Plus

      If there’s one field you wouldn’t expect to utilize crowdsourcing, it would be space exploration. However, that’s pretty much what the Open Space Agency (OSA) does. Founded by entrepreneur James Parr, OSA has created a network of amateur citizen scientists to supplement the work of the professional space agencies – or even create their own space programs – right from their backyards. At the heart of the collective is the Ultrascope, a robotic telescope, or automated robotic observatory, controlled by a smartphone.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Open source textbooks should be the future

        Like many businesses, there are economies of scale in publishing. A book that only sells 1000 copies a year will necessarily be expensive. But how many people are going to take a class in introductory calculus this year? What about psychology or health? They have to number in the tens of thousands, if not higher. There are also some fields where knowledge or convention changes so rapidly that books must be constantly updated. But the state of the art in introductory calculus hasn’t changed a whole lot since Isaac Newton. There’s no defensible reason that most books, especially ones for introductory classes, should be so expensive. It seems to me, that purchasing textbooks is a classic principal-agent problem. Professors select their classes’ book and students are essentially obliged to purchase them. Value for money is usually not a central concern, and this lets publishers set essentially whatever prices they so desire.

  • Programming

    • An open letter to GitHub, the new Brave browser, and more news

      Many developers working on open source projects choose to put their code on GitHub. By doing so, they use—and depend on—many of this platform’s features, including support. According to The Register, more than 1,100 developers recently sent an open letter to GitHub about the lack of support. In response, GitLab, another code repository unrelated to GitHub, wrote a letter to developers about how they strive to help large and small open source projects use GitLab.

Leftovers

  • More Indians Died Taking Selfies Than Anywhere Else In The World

    Until now, at least, 27 “selfie-related” deaths have been reported around the world last year, out of which around half of the deaths occurred in India.

  • Science

    • History of Computer: From First Generation Of Computer To Third Generation

      Story of the history of computer from a mechanical device to smartphones in modern days computing — how the history of computer saw the replacement of different mechanical parts with electrical ones and then eventually with electronic ICs and Microprocessors — everything in detail.

    • New prime number discovery breaks record at 22 million digits

      Prime numbers, which can only be divisible by themselves, are presumably infinite. However, the higher you count, the fewer and farther between prime numbers are.

      The previous highest known prime number held the record for nearly three years. On January 25, 2013, 2 to the power of 57,885,161 minus 1, a figure 17,425,170 digits long, was announced by Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Flint hospital reports finding Legionnaires’ bacteria in water

      A hospital in Flint, Michigan, reported Friday that low levels of Legionnaires’ disease bacteria were discovered in its water system.

      The discovery came after the city switched its water supply and the medical staff noticed an increase in people coming in for treatment who were diagnosed with Legionnaires,’ McLaren Hospital said.

      Legionnaires’ disease is a respiratory bacterial infection usually spread through mist that comes from a water source.

    • Michigan’s top environmental officer has pledged to work with the US Environmental Protection Agency to ensure the safety of Flint’s drinking water, but is challenging the legality and scope of some federal demands
    • Anger in Michigan Over Appointing Emergency Managers

      In the spring of 2013, Detroit was groaning under the weight of its troubles. It had accumulated billions in debt, was riddled with crime and had seen much of its affluent tax base disappear. A former mayor, Kwame M. Kilpatrick, was convicted of racketeering and fraud.

      Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, swept in with a rescue plan: the appointment of an emergency manager, Kevyn D. Orr, who was charged with saving a city in fiscal despair. Many Detroiters were furious that Mr. Orr, then a high-profile bankruptcy lawyer from Chevy Chase, Md., had been given a role with extraordinary power, usurping control from local elected officials.

      That anger has been revived in Michigan this week. Public outrage over the tainted water in Flint and the decrepit schools in Detroit has led many people to question whether the state has overreached in imposing too many emergency managers in largely black jurisdictions.

    • The Contempt That Poisoned Flint’s Water

      Even before the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was found to be tainted with lead—before water from some areas tested at more than twice the level considered to be toxic waste, and public-health officials said that every last child in the city should be treated as if the child had been poisoned—the governor’s office knew that the water was discolored, tasted bad, smelled strange, and was rife with “organic matter.” They knew, as one memo sent to Governor Rick Snyder in February, 2015, noted, that “residents have attended meetings with jugs of brownish water.” Officials figured that a reason it looked that way was the presence of rust. And they thought that was just fine. They wished, in fact, that the residents would realize how good they had it, when it came to the water’s substance, and stop complaining about its style. Various safe-water laws, the February memo said, “ensure that water is safe to drink. The act does not regulate aesthetic values of water.” The “aesthetics” (the word comes up several times in e-mails about Flint, which the governor released Tuesday night under pressure) were bad because “it’s the Flint River”; “the system is old”; “Flint is old”—the water, in a word, fit their picture of the city, in which about forty per cent of its hundred thousand people lived below the poverty line (and more than half are black). Until April, 2014, Flint had been part of Detroit’s water system, which had Lake Huron as its source. It was scheduled to be connected to a new pipeline in 2016 or 2017, which would save money; Flint is in such desperate financial straits that it was under the oversight of an Emergency Manager. When that manager felt he couldn’t negotiate a low enough price for Detroit water in the interim, the city was left with the option of drinking from the river that ran by it, and past its active and derelict factories, and had been last regularly used decades before. The city would treat the water itself. All the city had to do was pass a few tests; as long as it did, it didn’t matter if the residents were, in effect, drinking dirt. But then, almost immediately, the water began to fail the tests. In August, 2014, and again that September, the water was found to have unacceptably high levels of fecal coliform bacteria, and specifically E. coli. Certain neighborhoods were instructed to boil their water, while the city added chlorine to the supply to disinfect it. It took a lot of chlorine—and that may be where Flint’s troubles really began. (NBC has a timeline of the crisis.) The city’s water managers, unaccountably, seem not to have added any anti-corrosion agents to the water. Nor did they check for corrosion issues in a way they ought to have for a city Flint’s size. (In a remarkable memo a year later, Brad Wurfel, the spokesman of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said that the staff had “made a mistake,” and followed the wrong protocol.) By October, 2014, General Motors had announced that it would no longer use the water, because it was corroding its equipment. It was also—and this should have been entirely predictable—eating into the lead pipes that delivered the water to people’s homes, causing them to crumble into the water. Flint is old, and its water system took decades to build. It took only months of cheap, corrosive water to mangle and perhaps permanently destroy it.

    • GCHQ-developed Phone Security Contains Backdoor
    • How can Indonesia extinguish its forest fires for good?

      In recent months, Indonesia has again come under the international spotlight for a problem that has dogged the country for more than two decades – haze resulting from uncontrolled and sometimes uncontrollable land fires.

      The last two major El Niño seasons – in 1997 and 2015 – elevated haze into a regional issue. Politicians struggled to find a balance between soothing domestic outrage and risking foreign relations fallout with Indonesia.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Canada shootings: Four killed in Saskatchewan

      Four people have been killed and several injured in shootings in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, police say.

    • If you’re so tough, “go fight ISIS”: Bill Maher blasts Bundy siege’s “wackadoodle militiamen”

      The armed right-wing extremists who’ve taken over a federal building at a wildlife refuge in Oregon just keep digging themselves into an even deeper hole with their past unlawful indiscretions coming home to roost. It seems the government’s idea to wait them out has turned them into an even bigger joke than they already are. So, of course, Bill Maher took them to task on Friday’s “Real Time: New Rules.”

      “They keep on promising to ‘occupy that building until… well, we’re not really sure,’” Maher mocked the disorganized cult of stupidity. “And they’re not sure, something about ‘redneck lives matter.’”

  • Finance

    • Hillary Clinton Laughs When Asked if She Will Release Transcripts of Her Goldman Sachs Speeches

      After Hillary Clinton spoke at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday, I asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs. She laughed and turned away.

      Clinton has recently been on the defensive about the speaking fees she and her husband have collected. Those fees total over $125 million since 2001.

      Her rival Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, has raised concerns in particular over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that has regularly used its influence with government officials to win favorable policies.

    • How bitcoin tech could spark a revolution in government services

      The bitcoin digital currency is underpinned by a distributed ledger based on block chain technology: in this case the distributed bitcoin ledger ensures that the bitcoins are authentic. But the basic block chain approach can also be modified to incorporate rules, smart contracts, and digital signatures, which could make it a handy tool for government services.

    • Here is how TTIP threatens small businesses in the UK

      As an entrepreneur, I know how difficult it can be to set up and run a successful business. To do this against a backdrop of the biggest companies in the world having an unfair advantage is a sure-fire way to threaten our vibrant business sector.

      This is just one of the many reasons why the EU-US trade deal TTIP is a major threat to small and medium-sized business in the UK and Europe. And that’s why I’ve joined with other British business owners to launch the initiative, Business Against TTIP.

  • Censorship

    • The art of self-censorship

      There is a passage in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Joke, in which a young man sends a card to his girlfriend, and adds a funny comment about the communist regime of Czechoslovakia. The authorities intercept the letter, search for the sender and put him behind the bar. The author uses this fictitious incident to denote how the state with its all seriousness cannot take a joke.

  • Privacy

    • New tools for teaching and learning Email Self-Defense

      For starters, we’ve added a page to help you teach your friends and community what you’ve learned. We’ve also made a number of improvements in the guide itself, including clarifying many technical points and updating it to reflect changes in the software. We’ve expanded the troubleshooting sections by adding links to external resources, so that you can get alternative explanations of the steps, if you find that helpful. There are also new, advanced sections so that skilled users, as well as beginners, can learn something new.

    • What is Privacy?

      Privacy is a basic human emotion like love, aspiration, empathy, and understanding. It’s what we feel when we lock the restroom door, it’s what we feel when we lay back on the couch with a good book, it’s what we feel when we close our eyes on the warm beach and just have a little moment completely to ourselves.

    • Should Intelligence Whistleblowers Be Protected?

      Employees seeking to report wrongdoing are safeguarded across all federal agencies—but the process for doing so in the classified intelligence community can be dangerous.

    • John McAfee: “Obama Administration Doesn’t Know The Meaning Of Privacy”

      The maker of McAfee antivirus and privacy advocate John McAfee is again in the headlines. In his latest op-ed, he stresses upon the need of encryption, calling it a necessity. Bashing the governments who demand restrictions on encryption measures, he says that Obama administration lacks the real understanding of privacy.

    • The NSA Can Spy On You With Or Without Encryption

      The leaders controlling the US surveillance apparatus can’t agree on encryption. FBI Director Comey has hysterically characterised it as a safe haven for evil-doers. A high-ranking Department of Justice official insisted that encryption could cause a child to die. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency’s leaders are extremely chill about encryption — which is terrifying.

      “Encryption is foundational to the future,” NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers said in a speech today. “So spending time arguing about ‘hey, encryption is bad and we ought to do away with it’ … that’s a waste of time to me,” he continued.

      That sounds nice and reasonable, right? Rogers isn’t going on a rogue stand for privacy, though. He’s maintaining a status quo. NSA Directors haven’t really given a shit about encryption for a while. And while it’s less annoying than Comey’s fear-mongering, the NSA’s relaxed attitude is worth treating with suspicion.

    • No, NSA Has Not Changed Stance on Encryption

      If you tuned into a talk by Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., this week, you might think the NSA had begun to change its tune about encryption—the technology favored by Apple and its Silicon Valley brethren to scramble users’ data and communications (much to criminal investigators’ chagrin), making them unintelligible to spies and hackers alike.

    • Interactive Advertising Bureau Bars Adblock Plus From Conference, When It Should Be Listening To Them

      Ad blocking and the software that powers it seems to be in the news lately, and for all the wrong reasons. Recently, several prominent sites have attacked ad blockers in several different ways, ranging from lawsuits on the extreme end down to simply withholding content. These attempts are all misguided in the same way, however, in that they attack the software that readers find useful rather than attacking the core problem that makes users turn to ad blockers in the first place: incredibly crappy and occasionally downright dangerous advertising inventory.

      One would think that websites and online advertisers would have much to learn from the providers of ad blockers. It seems there is little appetite for education amongst them, however, as we’ve recently learned that the Interactive Advertising Bureau has flat out barred Adblock Plus from its annual conference.

    • NSA Takes Pro-Encryption Stance: Can It Spy On Your Encrypted Data?

      The National Security Agency (NSA) is easing its stance on encrypted data. The agency’s director Mike Rogers shared his thoughts on the ongoing debate surrounding encryption and revealed that the NSA is now in favor of encrypted data.

    • GCHQ to stage a cyber careers event for women in Birmingham [Ed: GCHQ femmewashing]

  • Civil Rights

    • Senate Intelligence Committee Members Ask White House For Official Apology From CIA For Hacking Senate Computers

      The White House and CIA have yet to comment on the letter and there’s nothing in the history of the incident that suggests either will move forward on this. Obama’s on short time and the CIA already cleared itself of all wrongdoing with an in-house “investigation” and further showed its disdain for independent oversight by throwing its Inspector General and his report on the spying efforts under the bus.

      Jason Leopold and Vice obtained hundreds of documents through FOIA requests that appeared to show the opposite of what the CIA’s internal investigation claimed. But it was the CIA that had the last word, proclaiming itself innocent and simultaneously accusing Senate staffers of improperly accessing restricted documents.

      But the most damning document — at least in the context of a demand for an official apology from the CIA — was the apology the agency unofficially disavowed when it cleared itself of hacking allegations.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • TRAI Open House on Net Neutrality

      By some miracle, I was in Delhi, and was able to attend the open house. The telcos made a huge pitch for differential pricing at the TRAI Open House on Net Neutrality, but civil society and the Save The Internet coalition and others argued that the Internet cannot be regulated like telecom networks because users on the Internet are both content creators and consumers.

    • The FCC Should Ensure Digital Rights for Prisoners and Their Families

      But from the perspective of inmates and their friends and family, these new technologies often do not result in stronger lines of communication at all. Some prison officials use the technology to justify restricting in-person visitation or traditional mail. Many communications services are offered under unfair terms and with artificially inflated fees that are only possible because the services operate monopolies at each prison or jail. In addition, users of these systems face potential privacy violations, as illustrated by the recent Securus data breach of more than 70-million prisoner phone calls.

    • Facebook and India: Introducing a digital caste system

      All societies share rich commons, the cultural and material resources shared by all, and owned equally by either everyone or no one. The air we can freely breathe, the sun that shines on us all. We once shared land too, but the development of small landholding enclosures created private property.

      Now there’s a looming enclosure of the digital commons, with Facebook threatening to capture the future of India’s internet. Its ‘Free Basics’ service threatens to limit free access to the digital sphere.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • The Academy Bullied CNN Into Including Trademark Icon For ‘Oscars’ On Its Crawl For Some Reason

        Usually when we talk about the Oscars behaving badly about intellectual property, it has to do with either its combat against film piracy or its rather stunning tradition of facilitating it. What’s clear in most of those stories, though, is that when the Motion Picture Academy decides to sink its collective teeth into something, it is bulldog-ish in its unwillingness to let it go. It seems that this is the case on matters of trademark, as well. Unimaginably petty trademark matters.

    • Copyrights

      • Creative Kids Turn MIT Website Into a ‘Piracy’ Haven

        In recent weeks the music industry has started to target the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website over tens of thousands of copyright infringements. The deviant behavior doesn’t come from typical pirates though, but from children using the Scratch project to share ‘their’ creative expressions.

      • Fair Use Economics: How Fair Use Makes Innovation Possible and Profitable

        Just over 30 years ago, the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Sony v. Universal City Studios (usually referred to as the Sony/Betamax case), clearing the way for a technology company to sells its products (Betamaxes, and by extension, VCRs) even though they could potentially be used for infringing purposes. After all, the court reasoned, customers also deployed their VCRs to engage in non-infringing fair uses, such as recording soap operas to watch after work. If a product was capable of “substantial noninfringing uses,” the fact that it could also be used for unlawful purposes shouldn’t be enough to force it off the market (and/or require its maker to pay millions in damages).

      • “Notice-and-Stay-Down” Is Really “Filter-Everything”

        There’s a debate happening right now over copyright bots, programs that social media websites use to scan users’ uploads for potential copyright infringement. A few powerful lobbyists want copyright law to require platforms that host third-party content to employ copyright bots, and require them to be stricter about what they take down. Big content companies call this nebulous proposal “notice-and-stay-down,” but it would really keep all users down, not just alleged infringers. In the process, it could give major content platforms like YouTube and Facebook an unfair advantage over competitors and startups (as if they needed any more advantages). “Notice-and-stay-down” is really “filter-everything.”

      • Digital Freedom Depends on the Right to Tinker

        One of the most crucial issues in the fight for digital freedom is the question of who will control the hardware that you have in your home, in your pocket, or in your own body.

        Have you ever been frustrated when a beloved feature was taken away in an update? Or felt helpless to prevent the apps on your phone from oversharing your personal data with advertisers? Or had to pay through the nose for proprietary cartridges of ink or 3D printing material? Or found that your independent repair shop wasn’t allowed to fix your car or appliance? If so, then you’ve experienced a small—but accumulating—frustration of losing of control over your stuff.

      • We’ll Probably Never Free Mickey, But That’s Beside the Point

        Mickey Mouse is synonymous with copyright term extension, and with good reason. Every time the first Mickey cartoons creep towards the public domain, Disney’s powerful lobbyists spring into action, lobbying Congress for a retrospective term-extension on copyright, which means that works that have already been created are awarded longer copyright terms. In the USA, copyright law is supposed to serve an incentive to make new works, and there’s no sensible way that getting a longer copyright on something you’ve already made can provide an incentive to do anything except lobby for more copyright, and sue people who want to make something new out of your creation.

      • Singer Sues Google For Not Asking Her Permission To Use A Licensed Song In Its Cell Phone Commercial

        Darlene Love, the voice on the Phil Spector-produced hit “He’s A Rebel,” is suing Google and its ad producer, 72 & Sunny, for violating her publicity rights by using a song she recorded in one of its ads without her permission.

        The lawsuit seems to revolve around California’s much-maligned “right of publicity” law, which allows plaintiffs to sue entities for using pretty much anything about them, rather than just for bog standard copyright infringement.

01.23.16

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Opinion: Open source for all mankind

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

  • Verizon Joins ONOS Open-Source SDN Project

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

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

  • How getting started in open source can help your career

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

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

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

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

  • Google Open Sources Dataflow Analytics Code through Apache Incubator

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

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

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

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

  • Events

    • 11 steps to running an online community meeting

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

    • SCALE 14X Thursday: New Morning in Pasadena

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

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

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

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

    • Drupal Higher-Ed Summit

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

    • Meet Guix at FOSDEM!

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox OS

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

      • Announcing Rust 1.6

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

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

      • Rust Lang 1.6 Stabilizes Libraries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • SaaS/Big Data

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

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

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

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • No single license to success

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

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

  • Openness/Sharing

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

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

Leftovers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • How new money has ruined Sesame Street

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

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

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

  • Science

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

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

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • They Tell Us Nothing But Lies — Paul Craig Roberts

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

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

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

    • Afghanistan Bans Toy Guns to Curb Culture of Violence

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

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

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

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

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

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

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

    • Indonesia’s Fires Blamed For Potent Greenhouse Gases

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

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

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

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

  • Finance

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

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

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

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

    • Dangerous Regulatory Duet

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

    • Graft allegations hit ally of Japan PM

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

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

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

    • 10 textbook firms rewarded 4,000 officials

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

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

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

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

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

    • Poverty may alter the wiring of kids’ brains

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • US experts gird Finnish officials for information war

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

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images

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

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

    • FBI May Have Hacked Innocent TorMail Users

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Australia’s day for secrets, flags and cowards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Platform Loyalty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Pirate Party politics

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

    • WIPO Conference on IP and Development Provisional Programme Is Out

    • Copyrights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Piracy Can Boost Digital Music Sales, Research Shows

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

01.22.16

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

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

English/Original

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

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

–Daniel Webster

Pierre-Yves Le Borgn'
Photo via Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

De nuevo otro ejemple de Battistelli ejerciendo autoridad sin supervisión.

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

01.21.16

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • The State Of Meteor Part 1: Growing Pains

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

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

  • Hardware

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

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

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Michael Moore: Dear President Obama, please visit Flint

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

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

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

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

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

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why Won’t Iran Act Like Our Enemy?

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

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

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

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

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

    • How Iraqis Remember The First Gulf War

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

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

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

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • African elephants could be extinct ‘within a decade’

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

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

    • 2015 smashes record for hottest year, final figures confirm

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

    • Pakistan turns to coal to keep factories running

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

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

  • Finance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

    • CK*wirtschaftsfacts in conversation with Michael Hudson

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

    • Martin Luther King — Paul Craig Roberts

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

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Bowie and the Beeb [2016]

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Censorship

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

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

    • Science and Censorship

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

    • Fighting censorship with circumvention tools: Tor + Psiphon

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

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

    • Censorship in the social media age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Sheryl Sandberg Thinks Facebook Likes Can Help Stop ISIS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Privacy

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

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

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

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

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

      Adblock Plus won’t be attending, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      No wonder the government wants an algorithm.

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

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

    • Does the government want to break encryption or not?

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

    • What Agency Is Claiming Hillary Received SAP Emails?

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

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

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

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

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

    • French say ‘Non, merci’ to encryption backdoors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Civil Rights

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

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

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

    • Jimmy Savile inquiry leak reveals scathing criticism of BBC

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

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

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

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

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

    • How a Young American Escaped the No-Fly List

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

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

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

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

    • Two Americans Detained in Iran Are Not Coming Home

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

    • When resting is resistance

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

    • Let’s Put Prison Sentences on Probation

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

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

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Netflix Is About To Get More Expensive for Some Users

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

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

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

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

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

    • 8 reasons to make the switch to IPv6

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

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Trademarks

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

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

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

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

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

    • Copyrights

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

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

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

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

      • Copyright Week 2016: Making Copyright Work For The Public

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

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

      • Pirate Site Trial in Norway Ends in Record Sentence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

01.20.16

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

01.19.16

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What a Linux User Misses From Windows

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

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

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

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

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

    • Reviews

      • Deepin Takes Linux to New Depths

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

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

    • New Releases

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

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

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

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

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

      • SystemRescueCd 4.7.1 Free System Recovery Live CD Incorporates GParted 0.25.0

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

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

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Update 2016-01-18 (stable)

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

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

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

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

    • Red Hat Family

      • DevOps tool Ansible gets a major overhaul

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

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

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

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

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

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

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

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

    • LOHAN takes the stage at Oz Linux shindig

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

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

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

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

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

    • Phones

      • Android

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

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

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

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

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

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source software powers NASA’s Mars VR project

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

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

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

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

  • How Kubernetes is helping Docker blossom

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

  • Licensing

Leftovers

01.18.16

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Desktop

  • Server

    • High Performance computing and parallel computing amateur linux test lab

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

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

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

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

  • Kernel Space

    • Coreboot Ported To The Librem 13 Laptop, Without Purism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Graphics Stack

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Benchmarks

      • Testing DDR3 and DDR4 RAM performance on Linux

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

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

      • Intel NUC Skylake NUC6i3SYK Linux Benchmarks

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

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE PIM changes in openSUSE Tumbleweed

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

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

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

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

      • Zanshin 0.3 on FreeBSD

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

      • First Krita 3.0 pre-alpha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

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

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

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

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

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

  • Distributions

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

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

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

    • This Week in Solus – Install #18

    • Reviews

      • Back to basics with Kwort 4.3

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

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

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

      • Review: Solus 1.0 “Shannon”

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

    • New Releases

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • A brief 360° overview of my first board turn

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

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

    • Red Hat Family

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

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

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

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

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Meetup Pune – January 2016

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

        • What is a Fedora “Year in Review”?

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

        • Fedora: Next generation configuration mgmt

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

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

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

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

        • Add-on Metadata Initiative – Update 2

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

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

        • Fedora plans formal upgrade leapfrog scheme

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

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

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

    • Debian Family

      • Reproducible builds: week 38 in Stretch cycle

      • Derivatives

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

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

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

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

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

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

          • RockWork Project Provides Amazing Pebble Support on Ubuntu Touch

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

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

          • Goodbye Docker on CentOS. Hello Ubuntu!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            The Scopes in question are for Amazon and Skimlinks.

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

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

          • ​Where would we be without Ubuntu

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

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

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

          • AT&T chooses Ubuntu Linux over Microsoft Windows

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

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

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

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Contributing to Open Source Projects and Code

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

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

  • 4 questions to ask before open sourcing a project

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

  • 5 Key Aspects For a Successful Open-Source Project

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

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

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

  • A Higher Calling For Open-Source Software

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

  • Events

    • The Penguicon Lucas Tech Track

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

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

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • MongoDB/NoSQL Injection – Security

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

    • A Primer on Open-Source NoSQL Databases

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

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • BSD

    • Doc like an Egyptian: Managing project documentation with Sphinx

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

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

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • A letter from Gabon to the GNU Health community

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

  • Licensing

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

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

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Belgium overhauls it data portal

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

    • Open Access/Content

      • 10 Facts About Wikipedia That You Didn’t Know

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

    • Open Hardware

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

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

  • Programming

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

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

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

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

Leftovers

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

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

  • Science

    • Is the ‘impact agenda’ stifling methodological innovation?

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

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

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

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

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

  • Health/Nutrition

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • President Obama, Please Come to Flint

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

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

    • Anger and Scrutiny Grow Over Poisoned Water in Michigan City

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Anger and Scrutiny Grow Over Poisoned Water in Michigan City

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

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

      [...]

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

    • Citizens Of Flint Fight Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Security

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

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

    • Things I learned from OpenSSH about reading very sensitive files

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

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

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

    • WhatsApp virus affects iOS and Android – and maybe more

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

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

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

    • OpenSSH, security, and everyone else

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

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

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

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

    • Google Fixes Cryptographic Key Security Issue in Go Programming Language

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

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

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

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

    • On the Firing Line: Bullies in Stetsons

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

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

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

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

    • Western Powers Protect Arms Markets Ignoring Civilian Killings

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

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

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

    • Reheating the Cold War

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

    • The US Tiger and the North Korean Mouse

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

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

    • Ike Had a Dream, and it Unfortunately Came True

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

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

    • When Peace Breaks Out With Iran…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

    • The CIA Coup That Remade the Middle East

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

      [...]

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

    • Netanyahu at War, Stuck in the Dominant Paradigm

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

    • Why the GOP’s Fence Fantasy Is a Farce

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

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

    • Desert Storm at 25: a Grim Anniversary

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

  • Transparency Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Number of England’s marine conservation zones nearly doubles

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

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

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

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

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

    • Obama to “Halt” New Coal Leases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Climate and laws fan Brazil’s forest fires

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Finance

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

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

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

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

    • A Bitcoin Believer’s Crisis of Faith

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

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

    • The Dangers of a Blockchain Monoculture

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

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

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

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

    • Philanthropy: Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Donald Trump is a Mediocre Businessman

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

      But this doesn’t seem to be true.

      [...]

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

    • The Chart That Explains Everything

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

    • Big Crony CEO Pay Grab–Effects Beyond Greed!

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

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

    • Davos and Its Threat to Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Charleston Workers March For Higher Wages Outside The Democratic Debate

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

    • TTIP’s regulatory cooperation has already begun attacking democracy

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

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

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

    • The Rise of Sanders Claus

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

      [...]

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Battle Between Trump And Cruz Goes Nuclear

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

    • British Parliament Will Formally Debate Banning Donald Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Robert Reich: Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics

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

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • The Color of Surveillance

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

    • What’s missing in the new NSA report?

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

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

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

    • NSA maintains phone surveillance regime meets privacy standards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Civil Rights

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

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

    • Chuck Norris vs. Communism

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

    • Bullying kids: G4S abuse of child prisoners exposed

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

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

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

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

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


    • Crime (?) and Punishment-A Comparative Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Cambodian trials offer important lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Lawsuit Over Wisconsin Ban on Selling Homemade Cookies

      Sell a cookie, go to jail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Controversial article to remain in new charter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Norway imam: Muslim kids should shun birthday parties

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

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

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

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

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

    • The lack of access to justice is a national disgrace

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

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

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

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

    • The Mirage of Justice

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

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

    • Barrett Brown Named a Finalist for National Magazine Award

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • I Wonder What Dr. King Would Say

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • World Bank opposes Facebook’s Free Basics

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

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

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

    • FAQ HTTP 2

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

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

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

  • DRM

    • Fighting DRM in the W3C

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

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

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

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

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • An Update on the Yosemite Park Trademark Dispute

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

    • Copyrights

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

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

« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »

RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time

New to This Site? Here Are Some Introductory Resources

No

Mono

ODF

Samba logo






We support

End software patents

GPLv3

GNU project

BLAG

EFF bloggers

Comcast is Blocktastic? SavetheInternet.com



Recent Posts