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09.11.15

Links 11/9/2015: Rackspace Liaising With Canonical, Amarok 3.0 on the Way

Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • As US$12bn is wiped off Apple’s value in one day, iOS 9, OS X 10.11 and Watch OS 2 dates set

    Maybe that enormo-slab stylus wasn’t such a hot idea?

  • Why Apple’s Launch Event Was “Creepy As Hell”

    Yesterday all eyes were on Apple’s product launch.

    This is because Apple has become a bellwether for the stock market as a whole.

    Legendary short seller Jim Chanos spoke candidly to CNBC, explaining that institutional investors and hedge funds are treating Apple stock as a “hedge fund hotel” where they can buy a single name and ride it upwards as opposed to concocting complex trading systems as they did in the past. Indeed, SEC filings by hedge funds bear this out, and so the product launch attracted a huge audience, generating play-by-play reporting on CNBC and Yahoo Finance.

    By the end of trading, Apple stock declined nearly 2%, indicating that investors were not impressed.

    To paraphrase poet Horace, the mountain shuddered and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse.

  • Skype restricted my paid account, without recourse, over a billing hiccup

    Skype is a regular tool in my journalist toolkit. It’s far and away the easiest method by which to record phone interviews (using the Call Recorder plug-in). I prefer it over Google Voice or Google Hangouts because it’s a much simpler tool to deal with, and damn near everyone already has a Skype account anyway. For about $60 a year, Skype gives me a phone number in my area code and the ability to make unlimited calls to and from it, and I’ve been paying that $60 a year and using Skype for six years without incident.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Major web security company sought to conceal that it ran compromised servers

      A controversy has erupted today at London security conference 44CON as details emerge of U.S. security company FireEye’s attempts to stifle any public disclosure of a major series of vulnerabilities in its suite – all of which have now been patched.

      The vulnerabilities are said to have included the default use of the ‘root’ account on a significant number of the Apache servers providing services to FireEye’s clients.

    • GM Took 5 Years to Fix a Full-Takeover Hack in Millions of OnStar Cars

      When a pair of security researchers showed they could hack a Jeep over the Internet earlier this summer to hijack its brakes and transmission, the impact was swift and explosive: Chrysler issued a software fix before the research was even made public. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration launched an investigation. Within days Chrysler issued a 1.4 million vehicle recall.

    • John McAfee: For today, for the future — here’s why I’m running for president

      The last few days have been amazing. I am humbled by the outpouring of support and encouragement that I have received. I did 27 interviews yesterday and today looks to be about the same. I have found that the issues we are bringing up are resonating. America cares about these things. Officially, my complete presidential platform is forthcoming, but I wanted to share on Digital Trends a number of reasons why I am running for president and founding a party.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Jeremy Corbyn confident Labour will unite around him if he wins

      Runaway favourite in election will offer collegiate leadership, but criticism from right of the party is already growing

    • Labour Are Still a Bunch of Crooks

      Tessa Jowell claimed she did not read the mortgage documents before signing them or know where the money was coming from. David Mills was eventually acquitted on a technicality by the Italian legal system, but it is not in dispute that the money came from Berlusconi or that he lied in court. Jowell claimed she did not read the documents and had no idea where the money came from or what her husband was doing. She then “left” him and went through a sham “separation” which the whole London establishment knew was a fake, (but the media obligingly did not publish), until the heat died down and the couple could get together again.

    • This is bad: Russia ‘abducts’ Estonian officer after Obama says US will defend Estonia

      On Friday morning, less than 48 hours after President Obama delivered a speech in Estonia warning that Russian aggression against Estonia could trigger war with the US and NATO, Russian security forces have seized an officer with Estonia’s state security bureau at gunpoint and taken him into Russia.

      Estonia says the officer was kidnapped (or “abducted”) on Estonian soil and taken across by force. Moscow says the Estonian officer was on Russian soil and detained with a gun, 5,000 euros and “materials that have the character of an intelligence mission.” Nearby Estonian police radios were reportedly jammed during the incident.

    • Shovels for Guns: Mexican Artist Melts Guns to Make Shovels for Planting Trees

      Culiacán, the western Mexico city, has the highest death rate from gun-related crime and violence in the country.

      Creative activist Pedro Reyes felt that something positive could be done with the city’s weapons. He addressed the issue of gun violence by turning them into more productive tools, like shovels for planting trees in the local botanical garden.

      Reyes started a campaign for residents to hand over their guns in exchange for a coupon. They could use those coupons to buy electronics or household appliances later on.

    • The Day Chile and the Rest of Latin America Remember as Their 9/11

      There are two 9/11’s: one that we all know of and a second, older and neglected aerial assault that took place on Santiago, Chile, when Air Force jets bombed the La Moneda presidential palace and replaced an elected president with a military dictatorship that lasted close to two decades.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • California drops plan for 50% cut in petroleum use

      California has dropped plans to halve petroleum use in vehicles by 2030, after intense oil industry lobbying.

      Governor Jerry Brown and other senior lawmakers had included the proposal in a climate change bill, but were forced to retreat amid growing opposition.

      State senate leader Kevin de Leon, who supported the cut, accused oil firms of deploying “scare tactics”.

      The leaders have vowed to push ahead with other reforms, including boosting renewable electricity use.

      “I’d say oil has won the skirmish, but they’ve lost the bigger battle,” Mr Brown said.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • The debate over “Concussion”: Is movie “self-censorship” merely censorship by another name or just good business?

      We like to think about the history of copyright as a grand sweep from control over publication by the sovereign, aided by the guild as the beneficiary of monopoly rights, to the current reconfiguration, which emphasizes the author and the arrangements by which incentives to create are put into place for the
      ultimate benefit of the public. Censorship as a system for regulating what gets published is anathema to our fundamental values of what copyright is all about. That is true, as far it is goes. But what about the role of private censorship and the willingness of the creator or the commercializer of the creative work to self-impose restrictions on the content of a work, having regard to possible considerations regarding third parties?

  • Privacy

    • How Ashley Madison Hid Its Fembot Con From Users and Investigators

      The developers at Ashley Madison created their first artificial woman sometime in early 2002. Her nickname was Sensuous Kitten, and she is listed as the tenth member of Ashley Madison in the company’s leaked user database. On her profile, she announces: “I’m having trouble with my computer … send a message!”

      Sensuous Kitten was the vanguard of a robot army. As I reported last week, Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

      [...]

      Emails in Biderman’s inbox from November 2012 contain evidence that the company knew very well that most of their money came from bots flirting with men. Security researcher Alejandro Ramos found these emails, which contain an internal presentation that was passed around to many of the company managers. One slide (reproduced below) reveals that 80% of the men who “convert,” or make a purchase on Ashley Madison, are doing it as a result of engagers.

    • Germany’s Homegrown NSA

      It’s somewhat amazing how much important news doesn’t reach us via the mainstream press. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see photos or film on Facebook of massive demonstrations that somehow never make it to the six o’clock news. For example, I’m willing to bet that very few people here in the U.S. know of the protests in Berlin outside the still-under-construction new headquarters of Ger­many’s for­eign in­tel­li­gence agency, the Bundesna­chrichten­di­enst (BND).

      This looks like important news to me. Many are saying that the BND is getting ready to go NSA on us. Indeed, the spooks at the BND already cooperate with the NSA to an extent that isn’t known, according to a report yesterday from NationalJournal’s Dustin Volz.

      This news is somewhat, but not completely, surprising given Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s spying on Germany that included listening in on German Chan­cel­lor An­gela Merkel’s phone calls. But there are reports that the BND, at the request of the NSA, is spying on German and European companies — Airbus and Siemens are mentioned — and politicians.

    • FBI and Apple’s Encryption

      It’s not. The rumor I am hearing is not about access to a particular user and his communications. It is about general access to iOS data and communications. And it’s in the FISA court, which means that it’s not a domestic criminal matter.

    • Let’s talk about iMessage (again)

      It’s this detail that exposes the real weakness of iMessage. To make key distribution ‘simple’, Apple takes responsibility for handing out your friends’ public keys. It does this using a proprietary key server that Apple owns and operates. Your iPhone requests keys from Apple using a connection that’s TLS-encrypted, and employs some fancy cryptographic tokens. But fundamentally, it relies on the assumption that Apple is good, and is really going to give you you the right keys for the person you want to talk to.

      But this honesty is just an assumption. Since the key lookup is completely invisible to the user, there’s nothing that forces Apple to be honest. They could, if inspired, give you a public key of their choosing, one that they hold the decryption key for. They could give you the FBI’s key. They could give you Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s key, though The Rock would presumably be very non-plussed by this.

      Indeed it gets worse. Because iMessage is designed to support several devices attached to the same account, each query to the directory server can bring back many keys — one for each of your devices. An attacker can simply add a device (or a fake ‘ghost device’) to Apple’s key server, and senders will encrypt messages to that key along with the legitimate ones. This enables wiretapping, provided you can get Apple to help you out.

    • US spy chief’s ‘highly unusual’ reported contact with military official raises concerns

      Barack Obama’s intelligence chief is said to be in frequent and unusual contact with a military intelligence officer at the center of a growing scandal over rosy portrayals of the war against the Islamic State, the Guardian has learned.

      James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is said to talk nearly every day with the head of US Central Command’s intelligence wing, Army Brigadier General Steven Grove – “which is highly, highly unusual”, according to a former intelligence official.

      Grove is said to be implicated in a Pentagon inquiry into manipulated war intelligence.

    • First Library to Support Anonymous Internet Browsing Effort Stops After DHS Email

      Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.

      But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.

      In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

      Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

    • FBI, intel chiefs decry “deep cynicism” over cyber spying programs

      On a stage in a ballroom in the Walter Washington Convention Center on September 10, the heads of the United States’ intelligence community gathered to talk about the work their agencies perform and the challenges they face—or at least as much as they could in an unclassified environment. But the directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency also had one particular mission in mind as they took the stage at the Intelligence & National Security Summit, an industry event largely attended by government officials and contractors: stopping the poisoning of the public debate around their missions, and especially around the issue of encryption, by unreasonable haters.

      CIA Director John Brennan suggested that negative public opinion and “misunderstanding” about the US intelligence community is in part “because of people who are trying to undermine” the mission of the NSA, CIA, FBI and other agencies. These people “may be fueled by our adversaries,” he said.

  • Civil Rights

    • Raed Jarrar on Syrian Refugee Crisis, Tim Karr on Net Neutrality Trickery

      People around the world have been riveted by heartbreaking images of refugees fleeing Syria, as well as heartening ones of European citizens offering help and hospice. But if the pictures drive you to want to know more, don’t expect much help from US media, who are not that interested to get at the roots of the situation. We’ll talk about the Syrian refugee crisis with Raed Jarrar from the American Friends Service Committee.

    • Saudi Arabia offers Germany 200 mosques – one for every 100 refugees who arrived last weekend

      Saudi Arabia has reportedly responded to the growing number of people fleeing the Middle East for western Europe – by offering to build 200 mosques in Germany.

      Syria’s richer Gulf neighbours have been accused of not doing their fair share in the humanitarian crisis, with Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the UAE also keeping their doors firmly shut to asylum-seekers.

      According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which quoted a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al Diyar, Saudi Arabia would build one mosque for every 100 refugees who entered Germany in extraordinary numbers last weekend.

    • Washington Post’s Balko Blasts Media’s “Fact-Free Fearmongering” About A “War On Cops”

      Conservative media have consistently worked to undermine and smear the Black Lives Matter movement by blaming them for the recent deaths of police officers in Illinois and Texas, even labeling the movement a hate group that inspires violence against police.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Why academics need to lobby for copyright reform – now

        The Hargreaves review teaches us several things. First of all: Progress is possible.

        But the fact that it is surprising that the government listened to academic evidence on copyright also tells us that in many other instances, simply producing evidence has not been enough. We’ve seen this on a European level in the case of the term extension for phonograms, where independent academic evidence was largely ignored.

      • Popcorn Time Creator Reveals His Real Identity

        The man behind Popcorn Time, the popular and free BitTorrent-based video streaming platform, has decided to reveal his true identity in an interview with Norwegian website DN.no.

09.10.15

Links 11/9/2015: Android Pay, Plasma 5.4.1 in Kubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • New open source tool to help reporters rethink quotes in stories

    QuickQuote, which was open-sourced last week, requires users to upload their video footage and then provides an automated transcription using natural language processing.

    After the transcription is generated, the user can click anywhere in the text to see and hear the corresponding video and audio, highlighting their desired quote with their mouse.

  • Beware of Open Source Software Zombies

    TL;DR — When putting source code into the open, reserve some time & energy to build a community around it, otherwise: zombie.

  • 5 open source alternatives to Gmail

    But Gmail is far from the only name in the game when it comes to web-based email clients. In fact, there are a number of open source alternatives available for those who want more freedom, and occasionally, a completely different approach to managing their email without relying on a desktop client.

    Let’s take a look at just a few of the free, open source webmail clients out there available for you to choose from.

  • Teaching big data processing with open source software

    The current move towards open data generating massive amounts of data, needs real-time processing needing intelligent solutions to process it. Having more tools which are open source can fuel further open data research impacting not only computing, but social sciences, where economists and governments can make use of big data as well.

  • Concurrent launches open-source CDN platform

    Concurrent, a provider of high-performance Linux and storage products, announced a new open-source content delivery network (CDN) platform. Concurrent’s new CDN platform combines open-source technologies with the company’s enterprise support services to deliver streaming video and other content to consumers on connected devices. Concurrent is leveraging community-driven open-source technologies including Apache Traffic Server for caching and streaming, Traffic Control for request routing, Ceph for storage and its own packaged feature enhancements to create a CDN platform that is well-suited for commercial applications.

  • How to manage an open source project

    Put yourself in their shoes – that’s the most important thing to remember as the boss of a free software project.

    Whether you’re handling a code patch from an argumentative contributor or trying to attract users via a release announcement, it’s vital to think carefully about how other people will see it.

  • Node.js Fork is Done as Node v 4.0.0 Released

    Now the first code release as part of the Node.js Foundation is out with v 4.0.0.

    “This release represents countless hours of hard work encapsulated in both the Node.js project and the io.js project that are now combined in a single codebase,” the Node.js foundation wrote in a blog post. “The Node.js project is now operated by a team of 44 collaborators, 15 of which form its Technical Steering Committee (TSC). Further, over 100 new individuals have been added to the list of people contributing code to core since v0.12.7.”

  • Node.js says all is forgiven, welcomes io.js fork back into the fold

    The Node.js Foundation has released version 4.0.0 of the Node.js, the first version that reunites the JavaScript-based server-side web application framework with its io.js fork.

    “This release represents countless hours of hard work encapsulated in both the Node.js project and the io.js project that are now combined in a single codebase,” the Foundation said in a technical blog post announcing the release.

  • Node.js v4.0.0 Released
  • Largest email group for women in tech teams up with Peace Corps

    Systers is the world’s largest email community of women in tech.

    First a little history, from Anita Borg.org: Systers was founded by in 1987 as an email mailing list for women in “systems.” At last official count, the community has over 5,500 members from at least 60 countries. Women technologists of all ages and at any stage of their studies or careers are welcome to contact the current Systers-keeper, Rose Robinson.

    In this interview Rose Robinson talks with me about Systers’ participation in the Open Source Day Codeathon taking place at the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) in Houston, Texas this year—where attendence will hit record numbers. (You can still register!) Systers is one of a group of participating organizations during the codeathon.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL: Playing open source catch-up to arrogant Oracle

      Part of why people are choosing PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB is because users get to see the way the company works.

      “Not only can people see how we develop the code but they can see how we deal with bug fixes and things like that, but they can also see how we work. Everything we do is out in the open so you’re not hiding behind the PR department.”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • Openwashing

      • Open-Source Email Archiving Software Expands with IMLS Grant

        The ePADD open-source email archiving and processing platform developed by Stanford University Libraries was awarded a $685,000 National Leadership Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) on August 31. The software “supports archival processes around the appraisal, ingest, processing, discovery, and delivery of email archives,” according to the project site. “Email archives present a singular window into contemporary history; however, they are often inaccessible to researchers due to screening, processing, and access challenges, as well as the sheer volume of material.”

      • Thales adopts open-source ERTMS testing tool

        Signalling and train control supplier Thales Deutschland has agreed to use the ERTMSFormalSpecs open-source modelling tool to test braking curves in the development of its onboard unit for the ETCS Baseline 3 specifications.

  • BSD

    • GhostBSD 10.1 BETA2 now available

      We are pleased to announce the availability GhostBSD 10.1 BETA2 MATE & XFCE which is available on SourceForge for the amd64 and i386 architectures.

      Before going further I will like to say a special thanks Ovidiu who recently join back the project and Andrea who join the project, they have help to make GhostBSD better, add up new feature and fixed issue.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free Software Foundation seeks nominations for 18th annual Free Software Awards

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today call upon the free software community to submit nominations for the 18th annual Free Software Awards. The Free Software Awards include the Award for the Advancement of Free Software and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. The awards are presented each year at the LibrePlanet free software conference, and at the same time nominations for the next year’s awards open.

    • Infinity progress update

      I’m expecting the addition of a second DWARF interpreter to GDB to be contentious, but they’ll optimized for different things and doing different things. For example, Infinity could work better with some type tracking (and will likely need it to make function calls secure) but it’s different from what GDB’s existing interpreter needs and it’s difficult to see how to combine the two without ending up with something that’s not very good at either. Not to mention that getting it to a point it can be moved to common code would likely slow it down a ton.

  • Public Services/Government

    • UK government backs away from Microsoft, moves closer to Open Document Format

      In a further blow to Microsoft’s grip on government desktop computing in the UK, the UK government has published 18 guides offering detailed information about the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and how to move organisations to ODF-compliant solutions.

      ODF 1.2 was selected last year as the standard for editable office documents to be used across UK government departments, along with HTML5 and PDF, which became the official defaults for static documents that would be viewed, but not edited after they were published. The fact that native Word formats were not included as an alternative option was a major defeat for Microsoft, which had lobbied hard—and until 2014, lobbied successfully—to prevent this high-profile victory for ODF’s open standard.

    • Munich’s Open Source Transformation Has Made it a Top Contributor

      For years now, open source tools and applications have been gaining traction in parts of Europe, and Munich has been involved in a multi-year effort to transform its technology infrastructure by throwing out Microsoft applications and using open tools instead. Munich’s move to open source has been followed here on OStatic, and it has not been without hiccups. There were problems, for example with people finding Linux too complex.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Mac User Groups Fade in Number and Influence, but Devotees Press On

    When Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, presents an updated iPhone and other gadgets at an event on Wednesday, several hundred of the company’s invited guests will be seated in a giant auditorium in San Francisco to watch.

    More than 5,000 miles away in Britain, members of the London Mac User Group — comprising about 90 people, many of whom are longtime Apple enthusiasts — will also be watching Mr. Cook’s event closely, but via a live stream at a pub called the Sun Tavern. Along with bar snacks and pints, a bingo game and a raffle will be part of the fun. The top prize: an Apple accessory.

  • iPhone S Models blah-blah-blah, 12mp is truly lame at this time blah-blah-blah, annual market share will be down vs 2014

    So the new iPhone S models are out. Am so underwhelmed with 12mp camera as the big tech upgrade. The old joke still holds, to see what will be in next iPhone, look at a 5 year old Nokia flagship (yes the Nokia N8 had 12mp back in 2010). And rose gold color? Ooh, color me unimpressed. The time when colors were big news in mobile phones was about 15 years ago – incidentially also a Nokia invention. But yeah. So faster guts, big whoopte do.

    There was no dual SIM or waterproofing or anything radical that could help now. There was no update to the ‘nano’ model ie the entry-level model iPhone 5C. And these two 6S and 6S Plus iPhones will of course be appealing to Apple users who have been begging for more colors and better cameras but for the rest of us, no, this is not going to help reverse Apple’s diminishing annual market share trend. But that gap in price/performance grows ever larger with each iPhone model and soon many consumers will simply arrive to the conclusion that the emperor doesn’t have clothes (or the few it has, are way too expensive compared to rivals). iPhone market share will continue down. The iPhone owners (aka iSheep as I mockingly often call them and that is a crass oversimplification many do actually love Apple products for being the best gadgets in any category for usability and that is a virtue of course. Others love iToys for their bling factor, nothing wrong with that either if you go by style over substance).

  • Science

    • First new cache-coherence mechanism in 30 years

      In a modern, multicore chip, every core — or processor — has its own small memory cache, where it stores frequently used data. But the chip also has a larger, shared cache, which all the cores can access.

      If one core tries to update data in the shared cache, other cores working on the same data need to know. So the shared cache keeps a directory of which cores have copies of which data.

      That directory takes up a significant chunk of memory: In a 64-core chip, it might be 12 percent of the shared cache. And that percentage will only increase with the core count. Envisioned chips with 128, 256, or even 1,000 cores will need a more efficient way of maintaining cache coherence.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Homeopathy conference ends in chaos after delegates take hallucinogenic drug

      An alternative medicine conference has ended in chaos in Germany after dozens of delegates took a LSD-like drug and started suffering from hallucinations.

      Broadcaster NDR described the 29 men and women “staggering around, rolling in a meadow, talking gibberish and suffering severe cramps”.

      The group of “Heilpraktikers” was discovered at the hotel where they held their conference in the town of Handeloh, south of Hamburg, on Friday.

    • California Becomes First State to Label Monsanto’s Roundup As a Carcinogen

      In a first for the country, California’s Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) has issued plans to list glyphosate—the toxic active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide—as known to cause cancer.

      According to a “notice of intent” issued last week by the Cal/EPA’s California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), the effort falls under California’s Proposition 65, in which the state is required to publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm.

    • Experts: Pending Health Insurance Mergers Will Hit Patients Right In The Wallet

      Impending multi-billion health insurance mergers involving four major providers have drawn the ire of patient advocacy groups that say such deals violate antitrust laws and threaten to fatten insurance companies’ coffers at patients’ expense.

    • Ciao GMO Crops – Europe Doesn’t Want You Around!

      The European Union has initiated plans to ban genetically modified crops. Currently, each country and sometimes each state can decide to approve GMO crop cultivation, creating a “patchwork” approach that is causing confusion and inconsistencies.

      GMO crops are allowed throughout North, Central, and South America, as well as Asia. In March, the EU approved a law allowing the European Commission to approve genetically modified crops individually for import, but also allows countries to opt-out of the importation even if deemed safe.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Nuclear Experts Praise Iran Nuclear Deal’s Plutonium Concession As A Major Triumph

      Nuclear experts are lauding the Iran nuclear deal for ensuring a major turnaround in Iran’s production of plutonium, a key concession ignored by critics of the deal.

    • Iran’s ‘Nuclear Ambitions’ Go Unquestioned in Coverage of Iran Deal Momentum

      In other words, if the deal with Iran fails, then the US must go to war with Iran, because war is the only means to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. So the entire spectrum of debate allowed by the Post accepts an Iranian quest for an atomic bomb as an article of faith–and the “left” edge of the debate endorses the legitimacy of preemptive war (FAIR.org, 8/20/15).

    • Media Fail To Note How The GOP Plan To Derail The Iran Agreement Is “Dishonest”

      Media outlets reported on congressional Republicans’ plan to delay implementation of the landmark nuclear agreement with Iran by alleging President Obama inappropriately failed to provide details of the “side deals” between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to Congress. But those outlets failed to note that the IAEA deal with Iran is confidential, which is “standard operating procedure” for agreements of this type.

    • In Washington, the nuclear deal with Iran is politically unstoppable

      US president Barack Obama doesn’t need to worry: for all intents and purposes, his signature foreign policy accomplishment—a nuclear deal with Iran—will be safe from a congressional override vote.

      The 159-page “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” that the president and his administration negotiated with Iran and the P5+1 (UN Security Council members plus Germany) was an endeavor that required an immense amount of political will and diplomatic acumen. US secretary of state John Kerry, secretary of energy Ernest Moniz, and undersecretary of state Wendy Sherman pulled it off after nearly two years of intensive talks with Iran’s delegation, led by one of the best negotiators in the world—Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

    • Hillary Clinton Goes to Militaristic, Hawkish Think Tank, Gives Militaristic, Hawkish Speech

      Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing.

      Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars – Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon – spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that invading Iraq was wise and just, and spent the years after that assuring Americans that the “victorious” war and subsequent occupation was going really well (in April 2003, O’Hanlon debated with himself over whether the strategy that led to the “victory” in his beloved war should be deemed “brilliant” or just extremely “clever,” while in June, 2003, Pollack assured New York Times readers that Saddam’s WMD would be found).

    • Exclusive: I Can Reveal the Legal Advice on Drone Strikes, and How the Establishment Works

      This may be the most important article I ever post, because it reveals perfectly how the Establishment works and how the Red Tories and Blue Tories contrive to give a false impression of democracy. It is information I can only give you because of my experience as an insider.

      It is a definitive proof of the validity of the Chomskian propaganda model. It needs a fair bit of detail to do this, but please try and read through it because it really is very, very important. After you have finished, if you agree with me about the significance, please repost, (you are free to copy), retweet, add to news aggregators (Reddit etc) and do anything you can to get other people to pay attention.

      The government based its decision to execute by drone two British men in Syria on “Legal Opinion” from the Attorney-General for England and Wales, Jeremy Wright, a politician, MP and Cabinet Minister. But Wright’s legal knowledge comes from an undistinguished first degree from Exeter and a short career as a criminal defence barrister in Birmingham. His knowledge of public international law is virtually nil.

      [...]

      The only known occasion when this did not happen was the Iraq War. Then the FCO Legal Advisers – unanimously – advised the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, that to invade Iraq was illegal. Jack Straw asked the Attorney General to dismiss the FCO chief Legal Adviser, Sir Michael Wood (Goldsmith refused). Blair sent Goldsmith to Washington where the Opinion was written for him to sign by George Bush’s lawyers. [I know this sounds incredible, but it is absolutely true]. Sir Michael Wood’s deputy, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, resigned in protest.

      In consequence Blair and Straw decided that, again for the first time ever, the FCO’s chief legal adviser had to be appointed not from within the FCO legal advisers, who had all declared the war on Iraq to be illegal, but from outside. They had to find a distinguished public international lawyer who was prepared to argue that the war on Iraq was legal. That was a very small field. Blair and Straw thus turned to Benjamin Netanyahu’s favourite lawyer, Daniel Bethlehem.

      [...]

      Jeremy Wright pretends to give a Legal Opinion, actually from FCO legal advisers based on the “Bethlehem Doctrine”. The Labour Party pretends, very unconvincingly, to be an opposition. The Guardian, apparently the leading “opposition” intellectual paper, publishes articles by its staff neo-con propagandists Joshua Rozenberg (married to Melanie Phillips) and Rafael Behr strongly supporting the government’s new powers of extrajudicial execution. In summer 2012 Joshua Rozenberg presented a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled “Secret courts, drones and international law” which consisted mostly of a fawning interview with … Daniel Bethlehem. The BBC and Sky News give us wall to wall justification of the killings.

    • The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits From Global Violence and War

      Authors Mark Pilisuk and Jennifer Rountree discuss their new book, “The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits From Global Violence and War.” They contend that organized violence is not an inescapable part of human existence, but is organized and carried out by the dominant social order to enhance its own power.

      In the second half of the program, Tara Dorabji joins in to explain how violence and social control are wielded in two of the world’s occupied lands, Palestine and Kashmir, and the role women play in preserving life and culture in those areas, despite the occupiers’ brutality.

  • Transparency Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • ​The US Owes the World $4 Trillion for Trashing the Climate

      In a just world the United States would pay back the $4 trillion dollars it owes, according to new research, for trashing the climate.

      Global warming wasn’t created equal. Rich, industrialized nations have contributed the lion’s share of the carbon pollution to our currently-unfolding catastrophe—the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets, of course—while smaller, poorer, and more agrarian countries are little to blame. The subsequent warming from our carbon-stuffed skies will, naturally, impact everyone, often hitting the poorer countries harder. So, since the rich fueled the crisis that’s about to soak the poor, they might help chip in to soften the blow.

      That, in super-basic terms, is the concept of climate debt, which guides current emissions negotiations and efforts to distribute funds for adaptation to nations most affected by climate change. If you acknowledge, as the UN does, that there’s a carbon budget—an amount of greenhouse gas pollution the world can collectively churn out before we land in dangerous warming territory, currently figured at a 2˚C threshold—then it follows that nations that have overstepped theirs should pay back those who haven’t.

    • NRA’s Ted Nugent Wants To Drive Over “Rotting Corpses” Of Al Gore And “Pathetic” Environmentalists

      National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent shared a Facebook post on September 9 showing off several cars and wrote (sic throughout): “Look closely & you shall see a huge leaking pipeline connected directly to a Saudi Prince’s ass sucking massive quantities of rawcrude as I throttle relentlessly over the rotting corpses of mikeymoore & algore & all the pathetic greenies.” “Greenie” is a term for an environmentalist or conservationist.

  • Finance

    • Uruguay Withdraws From TISA, Strikes A Symbolic Blow Against The Trade Deal Ratchet

      In other words, the ratchet clause ensures that there is only one direction of travel — towards greater deregulation, and greater loss of control by sovereign nations.

      TISA is unusual for being honest about introducing a ratchet. But there’s another, more subtle, kind of ratchet that acts on all major treaties. It means that once a country has joined the negotiations, it becomes increasingly hard to back out, whatever the growing reservations of its public once they find out what is being done in their name. Indeed, that one-way street is one of the most powerful features of trade agreements: corporations only need to get some coveted but controversial measure inserted in a treaty’s text, and it will automatically cascade down to all the signatories, however much they — or their people — may dislike it. It’s how things like anti-circumvention laws for DRM were brought in: once it was included in the WIPO Copyright Treaty, all signatories had to pass legislation implementing it, because they had “no choice”, the treaty “forced” them to do it — a convenient excuse for passing unpopular laws.

    • Does Your Candidate Support Workers’ Interests? David Brooks Thinks You Have a Psychological Problem

      New York Times columnist David Brooks discussed the rise of Jeremy Corbyn on the left in the Labor Party in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders on the left in the United States, along with Donald Trump and Ben Carson on the right. He argues that none of these people could conceivably win a national election. He therefore concludes that their support must stem from a psychological problem, which he identifies as “expressive individualism.”

    • ‘They Were Willing to Pay the Price With Other People’s Bodies’ – CounterSpin interview with Felicia Kornbluh on the legacy of ‘welfare reform’

      Janine Jackson: In 1996, Bill Clinton signed something called “The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,” calling it an effort to “end welfare as we know it” and to “promote fundamental values of work, responsibility and family.” Ten years later, Clinton took a victory lap with a New York Times column headed “How We Ended Welfare, Together,” shouting out “the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action,” which Clinton claimed led to a “new beginning” for millions of Americans.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • National Geographic gives Fox control of media assets in $725 million deal

      Ever since it was launched from the temple-like headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington in 1888, National Geographic magazine has illuminated the world’s hidden places and revealed its natural wonders.

    • Fox expands National Geographic partnership by buying NG media unit for $725M

      Fox has had an 18-year partnership with the society, in which the two have jointly owned and operated National Geographic cable network channels that are distributed worldwide. But the latest deal expands the relationship. Fox and the society will create a new corporate entity, called National Geographic Partners, that will own and operate nearly all other National Geographic media operations, including the cable networks, the famous yellow-border magazine, the video studio, books, maps, children’s media, catalog, licensing and e-commerce businesses.

    • Watch These Fox News Hosts Promote A Hate Group Leader’s New Book

      Fox News hosts have used the controversy surrounding Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis to repeatedly hawk the new book from a man considered one of America’s most extreme and prominent anti-gay hate-group leaders.

      Tony Perkins is the president of the Family Research Council (FRC), an organization that has been labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for spreading damaging lies about gay people, including the myth that they are more likely to engage in pedophilia.

    • Trump And How The Media’s Birther Blind Spot Keeps Getting Bigger

      For instance, since June 1, the New York Times has published approximately 180 articles or columns that included the word “Trump” five or more times, according to Nexis. But just a handful of those have made any mention of Trump’s previous birth certificate folly. The same goes for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, for example: Nearly 180 detailed Trump articles and columns published since June between them, but just a few that have addressed the birther nonsense.

    • Comcast-Owned Vox Explains the Great Deal You’re Getting From Comcast

      It appears Ezra Klein’s new media startup Vox is taking on many of the habits of old media—like blurring the lines between business and editorial by running a thinly disguised commercial for Comcast, the cable giant that not only seeded Vox‘s initial run, but recently invested $200 million more in its parent, Vox Media, Inc.

    • Scott Walker’s Day One Plan to “Wreak Havoc” Lifted from ALEC

      If Scott Walker is elected president, he will enact American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) policies on the first day of his presidency.

      Walker was an ALEC member as a state legislator, and according to outlets like The Guardian, Walker could be “The First ALEC President.”

  • Censorship

    • Saudi Arabia bans National Geographic cover about Pope Francis

      Saudi Arabia has banned the August issue of National Geographic’s Arabic edition, whose cover featured Pope Francis standing inside the Sistine Chapel.

      In a statement published on National Geographic’s Arabic Language Twitter account, the magazine said the edition was banned for “cultural reasons.”

      “Dear readers in Saudi Arabia, we apologize that you did not receive August’s magazine,” the editor-in-chief, Alsaad Omar al-Menhaly wrote, Foreign Policy magazine reported. “According to the distribution company, the magazine was refused entry for cultural reasons.”

    • WordPress Adds Subaru to Takedown “Hall of Shame”

      WordPress.com is taking a strong stance against rightsholders who abuse its takedown process. The company maintains a “hall of shame” which recently expanded with the addition of Subaru. The car manufacturer tried to take down a blog which was created in response to one of Subaru’s own contests.

    • Ex-Ashley Madison CTO threatens Brian Krebs with libel suit over rival hacking claims

      One of the more unusual things to come from the Ashley Madison hack was the discovery that AM’s founding CTO, Raja Bhatia, had apparently hacked another company, Nerve, after that company expressed an interest in setting up a competing adult dating service.

      That story was first reported by Brian Krebs, and it seems that Bhatia, no longer at Ashley Madison, isn’t very happy with it. His lawyer has threatened Krebs with a libel suit.

    • New Zealand protests planned in solidarity with banned book

      Silent readings of Ted Dawe’s Into the River are being planned across New Zealand tomorrow in protest at the much-praised young adult novel’s nationwide ban.

      Following a complaint from Christian group Family First about the award-winning title’s “detailed descriptions of sex acts, coarse language and scenes of drug-taking”, New Zealand’s Board of Film and Literature Review has placed an interim restriction order on Into the River, meaning that “no one in New Zealand can distribute, or exhibit, the book”. Individuals who breach the order face a fine of $3,000 and companies who breach it will be fined $10,000. The board will revise the order and consider a permanent age restriction for the novel in October.

  • Privacy

    • BOSTON STILL TRACKS VEHICLES, LIES ABOUT IT, AND LEAVES SENSITIVE RESIDENT DATA EXPOSED ONLINE

      Prior to two weeks ago, when this reporter alerted authorities that they had exposed critical data, anyone online was able to freely access a City of Boston automated license plate reader (ALPR) system and to download dozens of sensitive files, including hundreds of thousands of motor vehicle records dating back to 2012. If someone saw your shiny car and wanted to rob your equally nice house, for example, they could use your parking permit number to obtain your address. All they had to do was find the server’s URL.

    • Class action launched against Facebook over biometric slurpage

      Facebook has been hit with a class-action complaint over its biometrics slurpage, with millions of possible plaintiffs who may claim damages if the advertising giant is found to have acted unlawfully.

      The complaint (PDF) states that “Facebook has created, collected and stored over a billion ‘face templates’ (or ‘face prints’)”, which, ostensibly, are as uniquely identifiable as fingerprints. These have been gathered “from over a billion individuals, millions of whom reside in the State of Illinois”.

    • EFF to ICANN: Privacy Must be Purposeful—Not an Afterthought

      The working group at Internet Corporation for Assignment of Names and Number (ICANN) that has been tasked with designing a new domain registration database can’t seem to wrap its head around why privacy matters when it comes to domain registration services. ICANN’s Expert Working Group on gTLD Registration Directory Services (EWG) issued a Preliminary Issue Report on Next-Generation gTLD Registration Directory Services to Replace WHOIS in July, and EFF has submitted comments.

    • ​Europeans to win the right to sue in US courts over privacy breaches

      Europeans whose data has been mishandled by US authorities will soon have the right to take legal action in the US courts.

      EU citizens’ right to seek legal redress in the US comes as part of a new EU-US data protection agreement covering instances where EU citizens’ personal data is involved in US criminal and terrorism investigations. The deal brings rights of EU citizens in line with those of US citizens, who can sue in European courts for similar privacy breaches.

    • Legal Actions Before the French Council of State and Constitutional Council

      Since January 2015, La Quadrature du Net, FDN and the FDN Federation have begun a series of legal actions before the French Council of State and the French Constitutional Council against the laws and the implementing decrees that these associations consider fatal to civil liberties. In order to help people to follow over time the different stages of these procedures, this page explains in a few lines each of these appeals and their progresses.

  • Civil Rights

    • Top female student takes on corruption in Egypt after scoring zero on exams

      Dubbed ‘zero schoolgirl’, Mariam Malak is drawing national attention after appeals to investigate forgery allegations were repeatedly dodged by authorities

    • Hungarian nationalist TV camera operator filmed kicking refugee children

      A camera operator for a Hungarian nationalist television channel closely linked to the country’s far-right Jobbik party has been filmed kicking two refugee children and tripping up a man at the border hotspot of Rőszke on Tuesday.

      Petra László of N1TV was filming a group of refugees running away from police officers, when a man carrying a child in his arms ran in front of her. László stuck her leg out in front of the man, causing him to fall on the child he was carrying. He turned back and remonstrated with László, who continued filming.

    • The price of Europe’s fecklessness

      In Luis Bunuel’s eponymous 1961 film, the young postulant Viridiana leaves her convent to claim her uncle’s rural estate, and creates a refuge for local beggars. They ransack her house in a bachannalia staged to lampoon the Last Supper, and a couple of them rape her. The classic film should be mandatory viewing for European officials caught up in refugee euphoria. This is going to end very, very badly.

    • How Inmates and Loved Ones Review Jails on Yelp

      A few years back, Jenny Vekris says she was prescribed the sleeping pill Ambien for insomnia. It took her a while to figure out that the drug was affecting her in dangerous ways. “I’d wake up to car damage, bruises, fast-food wrappers, and who knows what else, because I was sleeping and driving,” she says. Twice, she woke up in jail. One of those times, she was charged with a DWI.

      When she got home, she turned to a place she knew she’d be understood: Yelp.

      “So, one morning, I wake up next to a girl in the big house. It took a minute to realize where I was, and I started asking the girl questions,” Vekris wrote in a review of the Austin city jail, which is more formally known as Travis County Jail. “My Cellie told me I was in jail, and then she started crying. I asked why, and she said she had to poop. That’s cool, whatever, do it. So she sits on the silver toilet, pooping and crying, and apologizing to me.” Twenty-six people marked the review “useful” and 22 thought it was “cool.”

    • We Need the Right to Repair Our Gadgets

      We don’t have to keep buying new gadgets. In fact, we should insist on the right to keep old ones running.

      Who hasn’t experienced a situation like this? Halfway through a classic Jack Lemmon DVD, my colleague Shira’s 40-inch TV conked out. Nothing showed up on the screen when she pressed the power button. The TV just hiccupped, going, “Clip-clop. Clip-clop.”

    • Houston cops shoot unarmed black patient in hospital — and then charge him with assault

      Alan Pean is a 26-year-old biology student with no criminal record or history of violence. But on August 27th, he was shot in the chest by an off-duty Houston police officer working as a security guard at the St. Joseph Medical Center. The police are claiming that Alan became combative and that they followed standard operating procedure. It’s Alan, they say, who is as fault, and they have charged with two counts of aggravated assault against a public servant. He was arraigned today.

    • O’Reilly: “I Think General Powell Needs To Apologize To The American People” For Supporting Black Lives Matter
    • Female cartoonist could have 12 year prison term extended for shaking her lawyer’s hand

      An Iranian artist currently serving more than 12 years in prison for criticising the government now faces further charges of “indecency” for allegedly shaking her male lawyer’s hand.

      Amnesty International reports that Atena Farghadani, 29, who was jailed after she depicted Iranian government officials as monkeys and goats in a satirical cartoon, may face a longer sentence amid claims over the handshake.

    • Letter to Obama regarding plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility

      I write on behalf of Human Rights Watch concerning recent reports of an administration plan to close the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay that would include transferring a number of detainees there to the United States.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Software-Defined Radio May Cause FCC to Restrict WiFi Modifications

      The comment period for the Federal Communications Commission’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on software-defined radios was supposed to end on Sept. 8. But the FCC has extended the comment period because the topic is complex, and the parties involved need time to work.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Getty Images Tries To Copyright Troll 2600 Magazine Over Content It Has No Copyright Over

        So, we were just discussing Getty Images’ latest foray into ridiculous copyright trolling (something the company has a long history with), by demanding money for a meme image used on a blog. Today, we have another example of Getty Images copyright trolling that is even worse. It’s so bad, that Getty Images doesn’t even have a legitimate copyright claim here at all, let alone abusing a legitimate copyright to shakedown someone. The target? The famed hacker publication 2600, which a Getty subsidiary, Trunk Archive, claimed was infringing on one of its images.

      • Testing Old Tapes For Playability

        Audio recordings are a huge part of the world’s cultural history—and some are in danger of degrading so much that they’ll be lost forever. Now researchers report that infrared spectroscopy offers a quick, noninvasive way to separate magnetic tapes that can still be played from those that can’t. This could help archivists know which tapes need special handling, and soon, before they get any worse. (Anal. Chem. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5b01810).

        The Cultural Heritage Index estimates that there are 46 million magnetic tapes (VHS, cassette, and others) in museums and archives in the U.S. alone—and about 40% of them are of unknown quality. Many of these tapes are reaching the end of their playable lifetime, and given the limited number of studio-quality tape players available for the digitizing process, not all the tapes will be digitized before the world loses them.

09.09.15

Links 9/9/2015: Steam for GNU/Linux Rising, Plasma 5.4.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 11:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for the Unix shell

    When I first got involved in Unix and open source, I was choosing a pseudonym for a little podcast that I do called GNU World Order. I naively thought that in a community that values technology and, frequently, speculative fiction, the name “Klaatu” would be a quaintly obscure reference to my favorite movies. Of course, I have since learned that “Klaatu” as your handle in the tech community is rather like “Bob Smith” in the real world, so online I am also sometimes known as “notKlaatu” to set me apart from the other Klaatus.

  • Events

    • Birthday party at Endocode in Berlin: 30 years Free Software Foundation

      On 3 October 2015 Free Software Foundation Europe invites you for the 30th birthday party of the Free Software Foundation. While the main event will take place in Boston/USA, there will be several satellite birthday parties around the world to celebrate 30 years of empowering people to control technology, and one of them will be at Endocode in Berlin.

    • Lightning Fast

      For the last two years, we had only lightning talks & workshops at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. This is an exceptionally good model for creation-type events like ours and your event might benefit from it, too.

    • Looking Ahead to New Linux/FOSS Promotional Events

      While the FOSS/Linux expo season is winding down – Ohio Linux Fest, All Things Open and the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL) next month, and Fossetcon in November in sunny Florida, before we ramp up for the first-of-the-year 2016 event at SCALE 14x in January – thoughts wander to other events that could possibly take place sometime in the future, with a little imagination.

    • Inkscape Workshop at Smallworld

      Last weekend, I had the first Inkscape workshop at smallworld. It was very successful, we had 13 participants.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla pays it forward

        Mozilla and seven other organizations will be participating in the Grace Hopper Open Source Day codethon taking place during the main conference event, on October 14. Emma Irwin is a Community Education Lead with Mozilla, and talks to me about why Mozilla is involved in the codethon, what she gets out of it, and what participants learn from it.

      • Bugzilla Bug Tracker Was Key to Recent Firefox Security Snafu

        The Bugzilla bug tracker has been a major part of how Mozilla has kept Firefox secure and stable for a long time, but according to the company, it was also the key to a recent attack on Firefox browser users. “An attacker was able to break into a privileged user’s account and download security-sensitive information about flaws in Firefox and other Mozilla products,” Mozilla said Friday in an FAQ about the security snafu (PDF doownload available). “Information uncovered in our investigation suggests that the user re¬used their Bugzilla password with another website, and the password was revealed through a data breach at that site.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Education

    • Linux and Python education for students in Israel

      Now entering its third year, the ROSE (Red Hat Open Source for Education) Project is a cross-community effort that brings students from Tira together with students from Yonatan Middle School in Ra’anana to the Red Hat offices in Israel to learn about the Linux operating system and Python programming. The students spent six months on a weekly basis working and learning together. At the graduation ceremony executive members of both municipalities were present and awards were given to the students including two special achievement awards.

    • Apps, bots, drones, and 3D printers: Coming to a school near you?

      I work at a university, in the computer science department, and my college-age students have access to all this technology and more. Imagine the things they’re able to do and create—better yet, imagine the things they’ll be able to do and create in five years with the next generation of all these technologies in the workplace and at home.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Free Software Foundation: 30 years in

      We’re also endorsing hardware that respects users’ freedoms. Hardware distributors whose devices have been certified by the FSF to contain and require only free software can display a logo saying so. Expanding the base of free software users and the free software movement has two parts: convincing people to care, and then making it possible for them to act on that. Through this initiative, we encourage manufacturers and distributors to do the right thing, and we make it easy for users who have started to care about free software to buy what they need without suffering through hours and hours of research. We’ve certified a home WiFi router, 3D printers, laptops, and USB WiFi adapters, with more on the way.

  • Public Services/Government

    • UK government publishes ODF guidance

      The UK government on 7 September published recommendations and guidelines on the use and implementation of ODF, the Open Document Format. The compendium is authoritative, from its general introduction to the recommendations on procurement, a guide on integration of ODF with enterprise software, software that allows collaborating on documents and a review of ODF’s change tracking features.

    • Munich Becomes A Big Contributor To Open-Source

      The arguably best town in the world is now even better! The beautiful city of Munich has become “a major contributor to open-source.”

    • After Ditching Microsoft, the City of Munich Is Now an Open Source Contributor

      The city of Munich became famous in the open source community by ditching its dependency on Microsoft products and adopting open source. This, in turn, is having a secondary effect on the community because the developers working with the city are now contributing code back.

    • Belgian HR agency promoting use of open badges

      Selor, the recruitment and selection agency for the Belgian public administration, is encouraging the use of Mozilla’s open badges, aiming to make the recognising of skills and achievements interoperable across organisations and systems. The HR agency is one of the organisers of the first Belgian workshop on Open Badges on 26 November.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • 15 open web advocates to follow on Twitter

      Working on the Open Web is a niche area of the greater open source community. Usually the work does not get the same level of fanfare of other areas of open source, but the work is very important.

      Here, I’ve compiled a list of 15 people helping move the Open Web forward you should follow on Twitter. All of them are doing amazing work and have great content to share and will help keep you up to date on important things happening on the Open Web.

    • Every Lesson Is an Experiment with ‘Open Source’ Science Class

      If you ask Rosalind Poon about the science class of yester-year — the kind my generation, my parents’ generation and their parents’ generation attended, where the entire class follows the same instructions for an experiment like it was a recipe for baking cookies — it doesn’t explain how real science happens.

      “If you think about champagne or penicillin,” said Poon, teacher consultant with the Richmond School District and a trained biology teacher, “a lot of our discoveries are discovered by mistake.”

    • Three New Experiments in Science Education
    • A closer look at the world’s first open digital cinema camera

      The journey of the AXIOM camera began years ago with simple, small devices, and then gained suuport in 2014 with a successful Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that exceeded its funding goal. A couple months later, a grant from the European Union gave the project the financial momentum it needed to move forward.

    • Open Data

      • Reedsy Launches Open Source Author Survey

        How much money do authors typically make? And how much does it cost an author to self-publish a book?

        Questions like these are part of a new author survey launched by Reedsy, an all-encompassing self-publishing platform.

      • Open Data: ‘civic engagement’ is on the cusp

        Mark Headd is the key guy when it comes to developer evangelism at Accela — the firm provides cloud-based ‘civic engagement’ solutions for government.

    • Open Access/Content

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Tuesday
    • SELinux insides – Part2: Neverallow assertions
    • Researchers have disclosed severe security flaws within the firm’s products over the holiday weekend.

      Ormandy’s disclosures were made at the same time another researcher’s findings, Kristian Erik Hermansen, were posted online. Hermansen publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability within cyberforensics firm FireEye’s security product, complete with proof-of-concept code.

    • Seagate drives at risk of data theft over hidden ‘root’ account

      A public vulnerability disclosure warns that an attacker could remotely download files from an affected hard drive, thanks to the hard-coded default password.

    • HP Drops Support For Hacking Competition As Wassenaar Arrangement Continues To Make Computing Less Safe

      An international agreement to treat certain software as weaponized is well on its way towards making computing less safe. Recent changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement — originally crafted to regulate the sale of actual weapons — have targeted exploits and malware. The US’s proposed adoption of the Arrangement expands on the definitions of targeted “weapons,” threatening to criminalize the work done by security researchers. While the Arrangement will likely have little effect on keeping weaponized software out of the hands of blacklisted entities, it could easily result in a laptop full of security research being treated like a footlocker full of assault weapons.

    • Duo Security Research Reveals Half of Apple iPhones on Corporate Networks Run Out-of-Date Versions of iOS

      Duo Security, a cloud-based access security provider protecting the world’s largest and fastest growing companies, today announced results from a Duo Labs research study focusing on mobile devices on corporate networks. Unpatched and end-of-life devices that are no longer supported by the manufacturer are much more prevalent than expected and create significant risk for corporate networks. The Duo Labs research draws on data gathered from thousands of customer deployments in more than 150 countries worldwide.

    • TSA Master Keys

      Someone recently noticed a Washington Post story on the TSA that originally contained a detailed photograph of all the TSA master keys. It’s now blurred out of the Washington Post story, but the image is still floating around the Internet. The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors, whether in cryptographic systems or physical systems: they’re fragile.

    • A Tale of Three Backdoors

      The tale of three backdoors: TSA locks, the CALEA interface, and the Dual_EC PRNG, all amply illustrate the dangers posed by backdoors in systems. For backdoors may fail catastrophically, degrade national security, and can potentially be used against those who demanded the backdoors in the first place. The scars born by the security field in dealing with failed backdoors provides ample illustration why we find the idea of backdoors troubling and dangerous.

    • reproducible builds are a waste of time

      Yesterday I read an article on Motherboard about Debian’s plan to shut down 83% of the CIA with reproducible builds. Ostensibly this defends against an attack where the compiler is modified to insert backdoors in the packages it builds. Of course, the defense only works if only some of the compilers are backdoored. The article then goes off on a bit of a tangent about self propagating compiler backdoors, which may be theoretically possible, but also terribly, unworkably fragile.

      I think the idea is that if I’m worried about the CIA tampering with Debian, I can rebuild everything myself from source. Because there’s no way the CIA would be able to insert a trojan in the source package. Then I check if what I’ve built matches what they built. If I were willing to do all that, I’m not sure why I need to check that the output is the same. I would always build from scratch, and ignore upstream entirely. I can do this today. I don’t actually need the builds to match to feel confident that my build is clean. Perhaps the idea is that a team of incorruptible volunteers will be building and checking for me, much like millions of eyeballs are carefully reviewing the source to all the software I run.

      The original source document doesn’t actually mention deployment of the whacked SDK, just research into its development. Perhaps they use it, perhaps they rejected it as being too difficult and risky. Tricking a developer into using a whacked toolchain leaves detectable traces and it’s somewhat difficult to deny as an accident. If we assume that the CIA has access to developer’s machines, why not assume they have access to the bug database as well and are mining it for preexisting vulnerabilities to exploit? Easy, safe, deniable.

    • Debian Reproducible Builds to Detect Spyware

      Debian has been getting a lot of attention the last couple of days for Jérémy Bobbio’s work on Reproducible Builds. Bobbio has been working on this idea and implementation for a couple of years now, but after a presentation at Chaos Communication Camp last month it’s come back into focus. In other Debian news, updates 8.2 and 7.9 were released.

    • Debian Linux versus the CIA

      Hidden backdoors into software have long been a concern for some users as government spying has increased around the world. Now the Debian project has taken aim at the CIA and other government spy agencies with reproducible builds that aim to stop hidden backdoors.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Operation Flavius and the Killer Cameron

      Exactly twenty years ago the European Court of Human Rights found that the British Government had acted illegally in shooting dead three IRA members in Gibraltar, even though the court accepted that the government had a genuine belief that they were planning a bombing attack. Indeed the court accepted the victims were terrorists, and refused compensation to their families on those grounds. But the court refused to accept there was no possibility of foiling the plot through methods other than summary execution.

  • Finance

    • Has the CETA free trade deal run into more trouble?

      The EU/Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CETA) may have run into more trouble following news that the EU trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, has indicated that that there are now “no plans” to change the initialed agreement containing a rejected ISDS clauses – as she had previously said would happen.

      The Investor State Settlement clauses – which allow secret courts to adjudicate on disagreements between companies and sovereign states and on the ability of companies to sue sovereign countries at the ISDS court if they believe a country has taken actions which effect their profits or interests – have been holding up what the commission has described as “legal scrubbing” – tidying up the legal language and drafting errors.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • 6,000 drop in number of UK journalists over two years – but 18,000 more PRs, Labour Force Survey shows

      Government statistics suggest the number of employed journalists has declined by 6,000 from a peak of 70,000 in 2013.

      The latest figures, for the year to June 2015, estimate that 64,000 people in the UK describe themselves as “journalists, newspaper and periodical editors”.

      This is a slight increase on the figure for the year to June 2014 of 60,000, but still a decline on the 2013 total.

      Meanwhile, the number describing themselves as “public relations professionals” as risen sharply from 37,000 in 2013 to 55,000 in the last data.

  • Privacy

    • IBM just signed a brilliant deal with ARM to ‘watch’ billions of devices on the Internet

      IBM has scored a sweet new partnership with ARM, the company best known for designing the chips that power our smartphones and tablets. This deal will let IBM’s cloud watch and analyze data from billions of devices on the internet.

      The Internet of Things is the trend of adding chips and sensors to everyday items (from dishwashers to thermostats) and connecting them to the internet.

      Sensors will do everything from monitor the health of industrial equipment to monitor your medical issues in a fitness device.

    • Apple and Other Tech Companies Tangle With U.S. Over Data Access

      In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.

      Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.

    • US claim on the world’s servers at a crossroads

      The Obama administration on Wednesday will argue to a US appeals court that companies operating in the US must comply with valid warrants for data—even if that data is stored on overseas servers.

    • Facebook’s Way Past Friends—It Wants to Be Your Whole World

      Facebook doesn’t just want to be a social network. It wants to be your world.

      At an event at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters today, Facebook said that 45 million small businesses worldwide are now using Pages as their digital storefronts. And Facebook wants to make it even easier for you to find businesses, and for businesses to serve you, all within its app.

      [...]

      The crux of these new updates comes down to the increasing power of your phone. As more and more users gravitate to mobile, businesses are hoping to reach users where they are. But according to a recent Forrester study, 85 percent of time spent on smartphones happens within apps, not web pages. That’s a problem not just for small businesses but larger businesses, too, says Benji Shomair, Facebook’s product marketing director for Pages. Apps are difficult and expensive to build—plus most users wouldn’t want, say, a company-specific app anyway.

  • Civil Rights

    • Right Wing’s False Narrative on Scott Walker Probe Fueling Attack on Election Watchdog

      Newly-released emails from the now-halted campaign finance investigation into Scott Walker and his allies are being touted by right-wing media as proof of the probe’s partisan motivations.

      Yet in many ways, the documents show the opposite.

      The Wall Street Journal editorial board trumpeted the two emails, sent between two lawyers in 2013, claiming that they demonstrate “that partisanship drove Wisconsin’s John Doe.” Wisconsin Watchdog calls the emails “explosive,” which “expose the regulator as hyper-partisan.”

      In truth, the emails demonstrate that prosecutors had a stated goal of not influencing the gubernatorial election, and show a career federal prosecutor leaning over backwards to avoid doing so, ultimately erring on the side of helping Walker and undercutting claims of his opponent.

    • Commission won’t ask EU judges to decide on legality of ISDS

      The European Commission will not ask EU judges to decide on the legality of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism in free trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

    • European migrant crisis: Top UN official urges ‘global response’ for asylum seekers; Germany calls for joint system

      The United Nations’ top official in charge of migration says that the crisis rocking Europe needs a “global response” amid a warning from the European Union that the situation could last for years.

    • Cautious on Syria war, Obama now cautious on refugee crisis

      During the past four years, 4 million Syrians have fled their country’s civil war. The US has accepted just over 1,500 refugees, so far allowing Europe to take the lead on the issue.

    • Confidential Informants: Inherently Trustworthy Until They’re Not

      The Tampa Police Department has suddenly been put in a very uncomfortable situation. On May 27, officers executed a raid on an alleged drug dealer. By the time it was done, one suspect had been killed by the SWAT team and only $2 worth of marijuana — 0.2 grams — had been recovered.

      It was a righteous kill. Letting themselves in through an unlocked door after no one answered their knock, the SWAT team came across Jason Westcott in his bedroom. Westcott had a gun (a legally-owned one) which he raised when the cops came crashing through the door. He was shot multiple times. Open/shut. Officers in danger, suspect with weapon, etc.

    • As Systems Collapse, Citizens Rise

      As we see pictures of German citizens cheering tens of thousands refugees arriving from Syria and other war zones, we may be witnessing an emerging pattern of the years to come: bureaucracy is failing (EU), systems collapsing (millions of Asylum seeking refugees in urgent need of helping hands) — AND: citizens rising to the occasion!

  • DRM

    • Here’s Why Netflix Won’t Let You Download Movies

      Now that some Amazon Prime subscribers are able to download movies and TV shows for offline viewing, rival streaming company Netflix has been left to defend its reasoning for not offering a similar service.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • IP Enforcement Czar Wants To Hear From You About Government’s IP Enforcement Plan

      It’s that time again. The White House’s IP Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) — often called the IP Czar — is asking for public input on the upcoming “Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement” that it will be releasing next year. The Joint Strategic Plan comes out every three years and is supposed to guide the federal government in how it handles priorities around intellectual property enforcement. Now, I recognize that the cynical among you will already be insisting that there is no value in responding to this, because the government is going to simply repeat the arguments of the legacy industries and its copyright extremists. However, in the past, these open comment periods have actually helped, and the two previous Joint Strategic Plans have not been as bad as expected. In 2010, we sent in our feedback and was pleasantly surprised that at least some of it was reflected in the plan. It recognized the importance of fair use and encouraging innovation. It also admitted that most studies on the impact of intellectual property on the economy were bogus.

    • Copyrights

      • Minding the gap in research and policy

        Opening keynote speaker Julia Reda, MEP for the German Pirate Party, started the debate by calling for more and better evidence. Recounting a number of tales of poor stats, she warned that industry lobbyists are quick to fill the evidence void.

        [...]

        Closing keynote speaker Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley, encouraged academics to write more for non-academic audiences. She recounted her great fear that she would never be taken seriously again after penning an article for WIRED on the ‘Copyright Grab.’ Her fears were unfounded, but it does touch on a key point – there is a cultural taboo associated with non-academic publishing within academia. (Aha! That explains the slight terror I have every time I click the Blogger ‘publish’ button.)

      • Kim Dotcom Seeks Delay of 10th Scheduled Extradition Hearing

        Kim Dotcom and his former business partners want to delay an extradition hearing scheduled to take place in two weeks’ time. The U.S. government wants Dotcom to face the largest copyright infringement trial in history but the Megaupload defendants say a fair hearing will be impossible if they aren’t able to fund expert witnesses outside New Zealand.

      • Police Raid Fails to Dent UK Top 40 Music Piracy

        A raid last week by the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has done little to reduce the availability of packs containing the country’s most popular music tracks. Aside from the disappearance of the torrents usually uploaded by the individual who was arrested, it was very much business as usual during last Friday’s global release day.

      • Getty Images Goes Copyright Trolling After A Meme Penguin

        Getty Images has a bit of a reputation for being a ridiculous copyright troll at times — sending out threatening letters demanding large sums to “settle” for people who use an image from Getty’s database. But, now, it appears to have taken the trolling to a new level, as the German blog GetDigital.de revealed last week when it reported that Getty had demanded nearly $1,000 for one year’s use of an image of a penguin that is actually part of a semi-popular meme, better known as the Socially Awkward Penguin.

09.08.15

Links 8/9/2015: Peppermint 6, elementary OS 0.3.1

Posted in News Roundup at 5:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Viewer for Ubuntu Touch Making Great Progress

      Developers are preparing a LibreOffice viewer for the Ubuntu phones, and it looks like it’s coming along just nicely. It’s still early work, but its makers are already reporting great progress and really good performance.

    • Microsoft vs OpenOffice in Pesaro: first, let’s recap

      Pesaro is a town of about 100 thousands people on the northern adriatic coast of Italy. Its Public Administration has been facing lots of critics from Free/Open Source software supporters because, in the last five years, it changed twice the same, important part of its ICT infrastructure. Both those changes bring consequences and open issues, both for the critics and for Pesaro, that have had little or no coverage at all so far, especially outside Italy (1). Before talking about them, however, it is necessary to summarize what happened.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Porting Guix and GuixSD

      A few weeks ago, Manolis Ragkousis announced the completion of the GSoC project whose purpose was to port Guix to the Hurd. The system distribution, GuixSD, cannot run GNU/Hurd yet, but the package manager itself can both cross-compile from GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd and build natively on GNU/Hurd. The work of Manolis is being gradually merged in the main branch.

      More recently, Mark H Weaver posted a series of patches porting GuixSD to MIPS (Lemote Yeeloong), making it the first GuixSD port to non-Intel-compatible hardware (the package manager itself has supported mips64el for two years already.) By removing several platform-specific assumptions, this work paves the way for future ports.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Munich now a major contributor to open source

      The city of Munich is a major contributor to free and open source projects, sending bugfixes to upstream developers, making available software solutions and sharing best practices and technical information. In August, Munich IT staff members shared the city’s accomplishments with the community of Debian developers, one of the main free software distributions.

    • Munich Does A Lot Of The Right Things But Still Drags Onwards

      Munich may have put out the fire but they still are far from optimal in IT. There’s no reason at all they have to support 20-year-old computers. Such things can be replaced rather readily in today’s market with savings in energy-consumption, size, space, noise, dust,… Why spend a lot on labour to maintain obsolete technology far past its “best before” date? It’s not as if they are just getting full value out of previous expenditures nor keeping junk out of the landfill. Ten years’ support does that very well. Twenty years is just silly. 20 years ago, I was using a ‘486, for pity’s sake.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Know Your Language: C Rules Everything Around Me (Part One)

      C is everywhere and in everything. C powers the Mars Curiosity rover, every computer operating system, every mobile OS, the Java Virtual Machine, Google Chrome, ATM machines, the computers in your car, the computers in your robot surgeon, the computers that designed the robot surgeon, the computers that designed those computers, and, eventually, C powers itself as its own implementation language.

Leftovers

  • How Apple is preparing for the end of the iPhone affair

    The launch of the iPhone 6s, fourth generation Apple TV and iPad Pro is impending…

    [...]

    Apple knows it can’t rely on the annual iPhone hype-release cycle
    forever.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

      Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you’ll instantly know something about the people who live in the house attached to it.

      If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it’s brown, or if the yard contains plastic water tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.

  • Security

    • Linux Foundation Security Checklist: Have It Your Way

      The Linux Foundation’s recently published security checklist may draw more attention to best practices for protecting Linux workstations, even if IT pros do not embrace all of its recommendations.

    • ICT faces critical shortage of IT security execs

      There’s a critical shortage of IT security experts in Australia to meet an otherwise welcome increase in the demand for ICT executives after months of employment uncertainty for the country’s tech executives.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why Murdoch Pushes for War

      Given the disgraceful Sun front page and middle spread urging war on Syria, and the all-out propaganda on Sky News, it is important to understand why Murdoch is pushing so hard for war. I therefore reproduce my article from February 2013. It is important to note that the links are to industry publications: this is very genuine, hard information.

    • Secret RAF drone strike kills two Britons in Syria

      DAVID CAMERON revealed yesterday that the RAF carried out a secret drone strike in Syria which killed two British citizens fighting for Islamic State (Isis).

      The Prime Minister insisted the strike was “necessary and proportionate” to stop attacks being planned on Britain.

      But campaigners described it as a an “extrajudicial killing” that “violated” the will of Parliament.

  • Finance

    • ‘Why this long PayPal delay?’

      In the past I sold a few personal items on eBay that were paid for with PayPal. On those occasions I had immediate access to the money I received.

      However, in recent weeks I have sold some other items, also paid for with PayPal, but was able to access the money only after 21 days, even though PayPal deducted its fees immediately. Have things changed?

    • I Foreclose Houses For Banks: 5 Awful Realities

      About a decade ago, home prices exploded to bizarro levels, then millions of families got behind on their mortgage payments. A financial crisis spiraled out from there, almost destroying the world. Things have improved a bit since then, but it still sucks for lots of people. If you can’t make your payments, the bank squares the debt by seizing your home, and you’re left out in the cold. In the modern world, it’s one of the worst things that can happen to you that doesn’t involve a somber doctor asking you to please sit down.

      That’s where Evelyn comes in. As part of her real estate job, she works with banks to handle foreclosures, evictions, and lockouts. We asked her what it’s like watching this tragedy unfold again and again.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Says He’s Running for President

      After exceeding his $1 million crowd-funding goal, Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig announced today on “This Week” that he is running for president.

      “I think I’m running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We have to recognize — we have a government that does not work. The stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn’t work.”

    • The Usual Warmongers

      To many of us who have been in conflict zones without a sanitised cordon around us, and actually seen the effects close-up (and that excludes almost all of the political class), it is astonishing that the neo-cons constantly seek to promote war, any war. They just cannot sit comfortably unless we are blowing somebody, somewhere, limb from limb.

      Little Aylan Kurdi and his family were fleeing Kobani, a town the US Air Force have been bombing relentlessly for weeks. Bombs are entirely agnostic over who they kill, and have not made life notably better for the population.

      Yet the news media are now insistently beating the drum for British bombing in Syria.

  • Censorship

    • Google DMCA Notice Record Smashed Again – But Why?

      Despite scaling dizzy heights in recent months, the record for DMCA notices being sent to Google’s search engine has been smashed again. In a single week Google just processed a mind-boggling 13.68 million URLs, or to put it another way, almost 23 copyright complaints every second. So what’s behind the massive surge?

    • Pirate Party Offers Uncensored DNS to Bypass Pirate Bay Blockade

      The Norwegian Pirate Party has made a big statement by launching a free DNS service which allows Internet users to bypass the local Pirate Bay blockade. The party advocates a free and open Internet for everyone and believes that the recent website blockades set a dangerous precedent.

    • Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

      Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet’s DNS servers should enable access.

  • Privacy

    • It’s Impossible to Torrent Anonymously, Lawyer Says

      With dozens of cases under his belt Oregon lawyer Carl Crowell can be considered an expert when it comes to suing BitTorrent pirates. However, a recent claim that pirates can’t be anonymous online conflicts with day-to-day reality.

  • Civil Rights

    • Sex abuse royal commission: Geelong Grammar paedophile teacher paid to retire to avoid scandal

      A former Geelong Grammar headmaster paid a teacher to retire early, in order to avoid a formal complaint about sexual abuse, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has heard.

      The former headmaster, Nicholas Sampson, is now the principal of elite New South Wales school, Cranbrook School.

      Former teacher Jonathan Harvey was jailed in 2007 for 10 months, with another 22 months suspended, after pleading guilty to abusing a former student, known as BLF, between 1976 and 1978.

      In his testimony to the royal commission on Monday, Harvey claimed the elite school’s then-headmaster Nicholas Sampson suggested that he retire early, after hearing of his misconduct relating to a student.

    • Feds allege 4 men executed heist of $1 million worth of MacBook Airs

      Saljanin appears to have stopped at home in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he left the large, rented Penske truck in a parking lot overnight. When he came back the next day, he told police, the truck was gone. Of course, he told the authorities, he had no idea who could have done such a thing, nor did anyone else know that he was making the delivery.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • How Comcast is changing tactics in response to cord cutters

      Reddit user demian87 recently posted a letter from Comcast notifying him or her of a new Comcast internet access pricing plan being trialed in Fort Lauderdale, the Keys, and Miami, Florida. According to this letter, Comcast will set a limit beginning on October 1 of 300 GB per household per month. Customers who exceed this limit will have to pay $10 for every additional 50 GB needed after that, or sign up for an unlimited data plan for an additional $30 per month.

      Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed that the letter is authentic, along with the company’s new unlimited pricing plan. Douglas explained that “the company has trialed three other pricing plans since 2012 when Comcast had a static limit of 250 GB per month.”

      In a related development reported by the New York Times, Comcast will campaign to win over the quintessential cord-cutter class with new TV services designed to entice them into subscribing to its internet access service. Comcast will begin offering a $15-a-month TV service called Stream that includes broadcast networks and HBO for its internet customers. The new service will be available in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle later this year and across the company’s coverage areas in the United States in 2016.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

09.06.15

Links 6/9/2015: Debian 8.2, HandyLinux 2.2

Posted in News Roundup at 6:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Want your kids to learn coding? Train the darn teachers first

    A number of schools have failed to train their teachers in the government’s flagship computing curriculum introduced last year, which was intended to turn Blighty into a nation of coders.

    One third of 27 secondary schools teaching kids up to and including GCSE level have failed to spend any money training staff in the computing curriculum (on the new Key Stage 3 and 4), according to a number of Freedom of Information responses sent to software company MapR Technologies.

  • Hardware

    • IT Support 3/3: Lenovo, little did I know

      Around two years ago I wrote about my problems with the Lenovo support Germany.

    • IT Support 2/3: Dell
    • IT Support 1/3: HP

      Tech support called me a few hours later and the guy at the other end started by asking, if I already tried to fix the issue by clearing the NVRAM. After my short but descriptive “what?!” he explained to me how I could clear the NVRAM just before I told him that I did not even switch on the server yet. He was surprised and wanted to know how I then knew, the NIC was broken. That’s when I pointed him to the picture, I sent in. Silence. So I explained to him what could be seen on said picture and he asked if he could put me through to another colleague. I agreed.

      I will spare you the details of that second conversation but it was basically the same.
      Cleared NVRAM? No. Why? See picure please. … … NIC is broken hardware-wise. Ah, ok. We will send you a permission sheet so you can bring it back to your retailer.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Amazon, UPenn sued over student’s cyanide suicide

      Amazon and the University of Pennsylvania are being sued by the family of a student who killed herself two years ago with cyanide she allegedly purchased without a problem from the online retailer.

    • Japan lifts evacuation order for town near doomed nuke plant

      Japan’s government on Saturday lifted a 4 1/2-year-old evacuation order for the northeastern town of Naraha that had sent all of the town’s 7,400 residents away following the disaster at the nearby Fukushima nuclear plant.

      Naraha became the first to get the order lifted among seven municipalities forced to empty entirely due to radiation contamination following the massive earthquake and tsunami that sent the plant’s reactors into triple meltdowns in March 2011.

      The central government has said radiation levels in Naraha have fallen to levels deemed safe following decontamination efforts.

  • Security

    • How small states prepare for cyber-war

      After famously gathering in public to sing its way to freedom from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia quickly reclaimed its Nordic and Hanseatic linkages, joining the EU, NATO and the eurozone. Necessity, not evolution, sparked Estonia’s rapid metamorphosis from tiny post-Soviet republic into world-leading info-state, my term for countries at the forefront of achieving secure connectedness. Centuries of Russian subjugation, German invasion, and Soviet occupation created a messy record of who actual citizens were and the legitimacy of land titles.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Disturbing: Is this evidence Obama is building his own military unit?

      During the Vietnam War it was common knowledge that President Johnson was selecting and approving bombing targets from the Oval Office – the height of micromanagement. One of the concerns I have in prosecuting combat operations against Islamic jihadists is the belief that drones are the panacea for everything.

      Let me be clear, drones are not a strategy, although they do create nice talking points of one guy killed here, five guys killed there, oops, an American and Italian hostage killed here. But what I find most interesting about the Obama administration reliance on drone usage is that the liberal progressive left would be going apoplectic if a Republican presidential administration were using similar tactics.

    • Putin Now ‘On the Offensive’ in Syrian Conflict – German Newspaper

      Despite Western countries’ failed policies in the Middle East, the Russian President made it clear that Russia is ready to cooperate with Washington to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis.

    • US launches secret drone campaign in Syria

      The Washington Post, citing U.S. officers, reported Tues.in that the collaborative effort has-been chargeable for “several” current strikes against senior ISIS operatives deemed “high-value targets”. Other officials would discuss the program only on the condition of anonymity.

    • CIA Running Anti-ISIS Drone Campaign in Syria

      Officials are also insisting that the Syria war won’t be using the same model as the Pakistan and Yemen drone wars, but rather that the Syria CIA war, in which they are working closely with special forces, could itself be a model for even more drone wars elsewhere around the world.

    • U.S. launches secret drone campaign to hunt Islamic State leaders in Syria
    • US steps up with secret kill squad
    • CIA, US special forces launch drone campaign in Syria: Report

      The new programme has only conducted a handful of strikes in Syria so far, unnamed US officials told The Washington Post

    • CIA Conducting Secret Campaign against IS in Syria, U.S. Media Says
    • Reporters face subpoenas in case over CIA head’s resignation

      A couple suing over leaks in the federal investigation that led to CIA Director David Petraeus’ resignation intend to subpoena at least two journalists in an attempt to compel testimony about their sources, The Associated Press has learned.

      That legal strategy was driven by a judge’s decision in July to quash efforts by lawyers for Scott and Jill Kelley to question Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who was the Defense Department’s general counsel at the time of the investigation.

      The judge had told the Kelleys’ lawyers that because Johnson was a Cabinet secretary, they could not question him until after subpoenaing reporters about any conversations Johnson or his subordinates had with journalists about Jill Kelley’s relationship with Petraeus or Marine Gen. John R. Allen.

      “It may turn out that the information plaintiffs seek cannot be obtained through any other means, but that … has yet to be established,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in her ruling.

    • The CIA’s Drone War Comes to Syria

      It was probably only a matter of time before the Obama administration employed its preferred fallback counterterrorism strategy against the growing threat posed by ISIS: The Washington Post’s Greg Miller reports today that the CIA and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, have launched a secret drone campaign in Syria.

      Unnamed U.S. officials tell the Post that the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center is only involved in identifying and locating the targets while JSOC is carrying out the strikes, which are exclusively focused on “high value targets.” Officially, the CIA has no established presence within Syria, though it has certainly been involved in the conflict, notably by vetting and supplying rebel groups in the country. The drone program means that its role has escalated, likely due to recent setbacks in the not-secret campaign against ISIS.

    • The Islamic State Conundrum

      Sadly, in the interim it is causing shocking cultural damage and brutalizing and killing a lot of people (mostly Muslims) in acts designed to shock with their “authenticity.” But the number of deaths from ISIS itself pale next to the ongoing deaths and devastation resulting from over a decade of western-imposed war.

    • Pentagon’s ‘Secret Kill’ Campaign In Syria Revealed!

      The report from The Washington Post stressed that the revelation breached the vow of transparency given by United States President Barack Obama in relations to the country’s counterterrorism efforts. Also, Mr. Obama had promised to eventually changed CIA’s framework from one that is spying in nature to being one of a paramilitary force.

    • Obama’s Drone War Escalates In Syria, Despite Fueling Violence In Other Countries

      President Barack Obama’s administration has apparently expanded covert drone operations in Syria in order to strike leaders of the Islamic State. But the expansion is destined to fail as much as previous operations in other countries, which have only fueled the rise of violent extremism.

      A number of anonymous U.S. officials spoke to The Washington Post, for a September 1 report, about drone operations and how the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) are working together. The CIA and JSOC have been responsible for recent strikes on senior Islamic State operatives.

    • Washington launches new drone assassination program in Syria
    • Petraeus: Use Al Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS
    • Former CIA Boss and 4-Star General: U.S. Should Arm Al Qaeda

      Former CIA boss and 4-star general David Petraeus – who still (believe it or not) holds a lot of sway in Washington – suggests we should arm Al Qaeda to fight ISIS.

    • David Ignatius: U.S. drone strikes batter Jabhat al-Nusra

      Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria, has disclosed that it suffered heavy casualties when the U.S. launched drone attacks last month to defend a moderate opposition group called “Division 30.”

    • Ex-CIA chief Petraeus wants US to rope in al Qaeda to tackle IS

      The heart of the controversial idea stems from former commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and ex-CIA director David Petraeus’ experience in Iraq in 2007, when the US persuaded Sunni militias to stop fighting with al Qaeda and work with American military, The Daily Beast reported.

    • Report: Former CIA Director Petraeus Urging Cooperation with Al-Qaeda Against ISIS
    • David Petraeus’ bright idea: give terrorists weapons to beat terrorists

      The latest brilliant plan to curtail Isis in the Middle East? Give more weapons to current members of al-Qaida. The Daily Beast reported that former CIA director David Petraeus, still somehow entrenched in the DC Beltway power circles despite leaking highly classified secrets, is now advocating arming members of the al-Nusra Front in Syria, an offshoot of al-Qaida and a designated terrorist organization. Could there be a more dangerous and crazy idea?

    • Former CIA Chief: US Should Support Al Qaeda to Defeat ISIS
    • Petraeus’s Plan to Defeat Islamic State Won’t Work

      It sounds like the “Sunni Awakening” from his time in Iraq, but there’s little to no chance of repeating that in Syria today. Recent U.S. action, and inaction, shows why.

      Just last week, the commander of Division 30, the Syrian “moderate” opposition group that hosts a few dozen U.S.-trained fighters, sent out a worrying notice: His troops had just been bombed by planes from Assad’s air force. The U.S. military did not respond.

    • Former CIA director Petraeus wants to use Al-Qaeda to fight ISIS – report

      Former Army general and CIA director David Petraeus has been urging US officials to consider using the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front to fight ISIS in Syria, The Daily Beast reported.

      Petraeus has been discreetly urging US officials to consider using “moderate” members of Al-Nusra Front to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Syria, the website reported, citing four sources familiar with conversations – including one person who reportedly spoke to Petraeus directly.

    • Indira Gandhi considered military strike on Pakistan’s nuclear sites
    • Indira Gandhi considered strikes on Pak’s nuke sites: CIA
    • Indira Gandhi considered military strike on Pakistan’s nuclear sites: CIA document
    • CIA’s warning led Pakistan to end Harkat support

      Pakistan backed away from supporting Harkat-ul-Ansar terror group which it used as a proxy against India in the late 90s fearing that its backing would land it on the US list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism”, according to recently declassified CIA documents.

    • Rajiv Gandhi saw Pakistan as buffer against USSR
    • Cuban-born ex-CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles hospitalized after crash

      Cuban officials accuse Posada Carriles of masterminding the downing of a Cuban jet off Barbados in 1976 that killed 73 people.

      Havana also says that he was behind several assassination plots against former President Fidel Castro, and was involved in a 1997 Havana hotel bombing that killed an Italian tourist.

    • Tony Abbott says decision on joining air strikes in Syria will be made ‘next week’
    • Australian air strikes in Syria may help Assad but still worth doing: ex-CIA chief David Petraeus

      The former CIA director and commander of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, David Petraeus, has backed the proposed plan for Australia to extend its anti-Islamic State bombing campaign into Syria, even as he admitted it would help the “despicable” regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

      But he added that such action would also assist moderate Syrian rebels which the US-led coalition “have to support” to defeat Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

      Answering questions after giving the Lowy Lecture at Sydney Town Hall on Wednesday night, Mr Petraeus revealed he had spoken about the proposal – to go before Cabinet’s national security committee next week – with foreign minister Julie Bishop earlier that day.

    • Gen Petraeus’s mad plan to bring Syrian al-Qaeda into US war against ISIS

      America loves its military generals. It elected two of them president – Eisenhower and Grant – and has deified a great many more, in particular MacArthur and Patton.

    • Forty Years Ago: Allende’s End

      Henry Kissinger, then presidential assistant for national security affairs, had met the chief of the CIA’s undercover operations to approve a plot to oust Allende, the report said.

    • Obama’s Covert Drone War on Syria

      Claiming the drone campaign “reflects rising anxiety among US counterterrorism officials about the danger the Islamic State poses, as well as frustration with the failure of conventional strikes to degrade the group’s strength” is subterfuge, concealing Washington’s real mission.

      The way to defeat the Islamic State is simple. Stop supporting it with arms, funding, training and direction.

      Near the end of its detailed report, WaPo admitted “(t)he CIA has long-standing ties to the Jordanian intelligence service and operates clandestine bases in that country where the agency has trained and armed thousands of fighters sent back into Syria’s civil war.”

    • As Obama’s War In Iraq And Syria Rumbles On, Are Intel Books Getting Cooked?
    • Faux reports of progress against IS: The harsh lessons of history

      Allegations that American military analysts may have “cooked the books” to skew intelligence assessments about the campaign against Islamic State (IS), providing a more optimistic account of progress, are a sign of bad things to come.

      Bad intel leads to bad decisions. Bad intel created purposefully suggests a war that is being lost, with the people in charge that loathe to admit it even as they continue to stumble forward, ever-more blind. And if that sounds like America’s previous war in Iraq, or its earlier one in Vietnam, you are not wrong.

    • (W)Archives: Cooking the Books on the Islamic State and the Viet Cong

      According to recent press reports, the Pentagon’s Inspector General is investigating whether officials from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) have skewed intelligence assessments to show more progress in the fight against the Islamic State than the facts would justify. Allegedly, these politicized assessments have made their way to senior officials right up to the president.

    • Is the Islamic State Winning or Losing?

      Accusations were recently levied at CENTCOM for cooking the intelligence on its campaign against the Islamic State. What do we know? One year after it started, is the anti-Islamic State campaign any closer to victory?

    • Politicization of Intelligence: Lessons From a Long, Dishonorable History

      In the struggle against ISIS, such “obscuration of the facts” is something our country cannot tolerate, particularly if it is being fostered by senior defense and intelligence community officials too afraid to speak truth to power. Only time will tell whether the current investigation — presently led by an agency facing a $100 million lawsuit by former intelligence whistleblowers — will be an honest one.

    • Can we trust Iran? Can they trust us?

      The people of the Middle East have long memories for good reason. They are descendants of 5,000 year-old-civilizations who invented writing, astronomy and mathematics. What happened 60 years ago is recent history.

      In 1953 Iran, a CIA-organized coup overthrew the elected president, Mossadeq, and reinstated Shah Reza. He and his CIA-trained secret police became quite unpopular over the next two decades.

      Finally a broad-based alliance (including a widely admired Muslim scholar, the Ayatollah Khomeini) succeeded in unseating him. While differing factions negotiated their future form of government, student supporters of the Ayatollah occupied the U.S. Embassy, taking its personnel hostage. They’d wanted the Shah extradited from the U.S., to put him on trial in Iran.

    • Michigan Imam: Release of Marine Detained in Iran May Be Imminent: Listen

      A Dearborn Heights imam said a former U.S. Marine from Michigan held captive in Iran for the past four years may be released soon.

      Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi told the Detroit Free Press he spent nearly an hour last week in the prison in Tehran where Amir Hekmati, of Flint, has been held on charges that he’s a spy for the CIA. Hekmati’s supporters say the charges are bogus.

    • Sotloff’s Legacy: A Year After His Murder, Millennials Keep Signing Up For Arabic

      One of them is Maryanne Rodriguez, who attended Coral Reef Senior High in Miami-Dade. In June, Rodriguez graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts with a major in Arabic. Along the way, she’s studied in Jordan, Yemen and Morocco – and last weekend she left for Turkey on a Fulbright Fellowship.

      Rodriguez believes it’s crucial to be able to conduct more honest discussions with Middle Easterners about issues ranging from women in Islam to U.S. drone attacks in the region.

    • Valerie Plame’s Head ‘Spins’ Over Scooter Libby Question To Trump

      Donald Trump would not say if he would pardon former George W. Bush White House official Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Trump said the question was “not pertinent,” but Valerie Plame’s response on Twitter to The Daily Caller’s question to Trump about Libby was, “My head is spinning.”

    • From a Tibetan Adventurer, a Tale of Bravado and Betrayal

      The relations between China and Tibet are a matter of controversy. The People’s Republic of China insists on affirming the imperial borders of the Manchu or Yuan era, but ties in that era were more complex and fluid. There was no “China” and both these were, in fact, foreign empires who ruled over China. However, what matters now is that Tibet is under the firm control of the PRC and there is little chance in the near term that this situation will change. The only change that can come is through negotiation and dialogue and better awareness in China of how shoddily they have treated their minority peoples and culture. This is a lesson that Gyalo learnt the hard way, going through the process of associating with the CIA and Indian intelligence agencies to stoke an insurgency against Chinese rule, failing and thereafter seeking to achieve Tibetan autonomy through dialogue.

    • Doyle McManus: A Joe Biden candidacy could divide Democrats over foreign policy

      oe Biden hasn’t decided whether to run for president, but he tells almost everyone who asks that he’s giving it serious thought.

      Can a 73-year-old vice president who’s been a punch line for comedians really win the Democratic nomination against a juggernaut like Hillary Rodham Clinton?

    • Andrew Niccol on the Drone Pilot Thriller, Good Kill

      Ever since his 1997 debut Gattaca, filmmaker Andrew Niccol has established himself in the world of science fiction with his original ideas about what the future might look like, but his latest movie Good Kill, his third film with Ethan Hawke, is far more grounded in the world as it is today than any of his previous work.

      [...]

      CS: How do you research a movie like this? Are you able to do research that much, because I couldn’t imagine that the military would give you much access to this realm.

      Niccol: Yeah, I had to rely on ex-drone pilots, and there’s so much burnout, which is kind of what you sort of see with Ethan’s character in the movie, that they are available out there. There are a few things that they won’t say, that they won’t tell you, but I relied on them heavily to make the movie look and sound authentic, so yeah, that was an important part of it. The other thing that I relied on was Wikileaks, because that’s the only way you can really see a drone strike, is through Wikileaks, so I should’ve credited Chelsea Manning as a researcher for the film. And it’s ironic of course, because there is a video with every drone strike because that’s how it’s done, but we rarely see them.

    • Independent Investigation Undermines Key Evidence Justifying U.S. Hostility Toward Iran

      Interviews with more than a dozen former FBI, CIA and other federal officials found compelling evidence that the 1996 bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia was carried out by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida—not Iran-supported Saudi Hezbollah, as U.S. officials claim.

      The findings are significant, writes independent investigative reporter Gareth Porter, because the attack “remains a key part of the litany supporting a coercive US policy toward Iran.”

      Published in 2009, Porter’s findings are again relevant because the man accused of planning the attack—Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Mughassil, a Saudi Shiite oppositionist—is reported to have been captured in Beirut on Aug. 8.

    • Drones offer military risk-free killing at the expense of diplomacy
    • Who Are We Supposed to Feel Sorry for in ‘Good Kill’?

      The real conflict will be internal as Egan fights with his demons as each and every drone mission becomes more morally questionable than the prior one, especially after the mysterious voice known only as “Langley” begins to give the orders. Much of the film’s action takes place in the control room where they perform these missions. Egan and his team, which include such boring archetypes as the brutish, war-hungry males and the lone sensitive, considerate female, carry out countless missions to eradicate “threats to America.”

    • Director Andrew Niccol on drones, PTSD, and ‘Good Kill’ on Blu-ray today

      Good Kill is a film that delves deep into painting a portrait of the human side of drone warfare. Set in 2010, the film is a blistering journey that not only is about military unmanned aerial vehicles, but also a harsh look into the life of someone facing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), written and directed by creative genius Andrew Niccol.

    • Bernie Sanders Says He Will Not End Drone Program If Elected President

      Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said Sunday that if elected president he would not end the U.S.’s controversial drone program in the Middle East.

    • US presidential candidate: I would continue assassination drone program
    • Bernie Sanders Says He Wouldn’t End Drone Program

      Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would not put a stop to the United States’ lethal and controversial drone campaign if he entered the White House, the presidential contender said in a television interview Sunday.

    • Sanders: I wouldn’t end drone program

      The U.S. lethal drone campaign would not come to an end if Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) entered the White House, the presidential contender said on Sunday,

      In an interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Sanders indicated that he would limit the use of drones so that they do not end up killing innocent people abroad, but declined to say that he would end the targeted killing campaign completely.

      “I think we have to use drones very, very selectively and effectively. That has not always been the case,” Sanders said.

    • Bernie Sanders Wouldn’t End Obama’s Drone Program, Promises To Use It ‘Very Selectively’
    • Strange Words From St. Bernard and the Sandernistas
    • Bernie Sanders Embraces Limited Use of Drones as One Tool of Foreign Policy
    • The 19 most important years in the history of military drones
    • Allegations against Sweden, Germany for participating in Afghan ‘kill decisions’
    • Germany, Sweden helping US with ‘kill decisions’ in Afghanistan
    • Germany and Sweden Are Said to Help Make Afghan ‘Kill Decisions’

      Two European allies of the United States have been directly participating in so-called kill decisions against insurgents in Afghanistan despite rules prohibiting them from doing so, according to two senior Western officials with knowledge of the operations.

      The accusations concern airstrikes, mostly by drones, that American officials have justified as part of a lasting counterterrorism mission agreed to with the Afghan government. However, some of the strikes have come under question as being far more aggressive than the security deal allows for.

    • Five dead in new Israeli raid on Syria

      The officials said the cell had been behind the four rockets fired on Thursday into Israel.

      [...]

      The Golan is regarded internationally as occupied territory despite Israeli annexation.

    • SA researchers take on threat of autonomous weapons

      A new military law unit at the University of Adelaide has kicked off its work this morning, with the looming threat of autonomous weapons systems high on its agenda.

    • More On-Air Shootings to Be Expected

      The more we secure our safety, the less secure we seem to feel.

    • What will it take to bring peace to our planet?

      The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called “hypocrites” and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter. Whew!

    • In Order To Breathe

      It’s not just a “crazy person” with guns though. The culture of aggression, dripping with violence, is pervasive. Drones, a president with a kill list, invasions, a conquest-oriented foreign policy, a conquest-oriented domestic policy enforced through police militarization, and an utterly terrifying array of politicians that pander to our basest predispositions: fear. And especially fear of anyone dissimilar.

    • What happens if a jet engine sucks in a drone?

      Engine manufacturers spend a lot of time throwing various objects into running jet engines to see what happens, and to make sure they either keep working or shut down safely. To test bird strikes, they actually use a “chicken gun” that shoots dead birds into the engine fan. However, no one is testing for drones, yet.

    • When it comes to drones, do Americans really care about international law?

      If the American public is really as disengaged from foreign policy as we think, how much can they really know—or care—about international law? In reporting on their fascinating and important research on international law and US public support for drone strikes, Sarah Kreps and Geoffrey Wallace find that US citizens are surprisingly receptive to arguments that drones should not be used because they violate international law. Their compelling findings make valuable contributions to debates about the power of international law in everyday politics, but some key omissions leave their conclusions open for debate. Do American voters support drones even when compared to other options? And perhaps even more fundamental, why do they care about international law at all?

    • Drones are ‘legally blind’ so why do we rely on them?

      Hoping to dispel many of the myths surrounding drones, Cockburn has written a new book, “Kill Chain: Drones and the Rise of High-Tech Assassins.” Addressing a packed audience at Edinburgh’s Book Festival held yearly in August, Cockburn argues that people tend to endow the military and political officials responsible for running the U.S. drone program with powers “that they don’t warrant.” In fact, he says, that they’re not anywhere as competent as the hype would lead people to expect. Thanks to a Pentagon inquiry of a bungled drone attack in Afghanistan in 2010, we now have an unexpurgated transcript of conversations between officers, pilots and targeters stationed at command centers in Florida, Afghanistan and Nevada (where most drone operations are carried out) as they try to make up their minds whether to launch a strike on what appears to be a convoy of militants traveling along a desert road. The officers can’t decide whether the individuals they’re seeing in the trucks are armed or not. The possibility that some of the passengers might be children is discounted. After several minutes of expletive-riddled exchanges, an order is issued to go ahead. Twenty-three Afghanis were killed including women and children. The victims proved to be villagers on their way to Kabul to find work. None of them was armed. What the officers believed were rifles, based on the heat they were emitting, turned out to be turkeys the villagers were bringing as gifts to relatives.

    • UK plan to join Syria air strikes threatened by Corbyn

      Prime Minister David Cameron’s hope that Britain would join air strikes against Islamic State (IS) group targets in Syria is fading due to the likely election of anti-war campaigner Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition Labour Party.

      After parliament returns Monday, Cameron’s centre-right government had hoped to call a vote on the issue in a bid to extend Britain’s current role in coalition air strikes against IS targets in Iraq.

      But Corbyn, a leading opponent to the 2003 Iraq war who wants to apologise over the conflict if elected leader of Britain’s main opposition party on September 12, is deeply opposed to the move.

      “I will only proceed going further on this issue if there is genuine consensus in the United Kingdom about it before going back to parliament,” Cameron said during a press conference on Friday.

    • Civilian deaths claimed in 71 US-led airstrikes on Isis

      The US-led coalition’s bombing of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has been described as the “most precise ever”, faces allegations that civilians have been killed in 71 separate air raids.

      A spokesman for US central command (Centcom) disclosed the claims to the Guardian. Many of the claims have been dismissed, but he said 10 incidents were the subject of fuller, formal investigations. Five investigations have been concluded, although only one has been published.

      To date, the coalition acknowledges civilian deaths in a single strike: in November 2014 a US strike on Syria killed two children, a Centcom investigation published in May found. Centcom said it will only publish investigations where a “preponderance of evidence” suggests civilians have died.

    • Assisting Al Qaeda

      For years, drone strikes have been a regular feature of U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Yemen. They have taken out many of al Qaeda’s most important leaders, yet the organization’s reach has increased dramatically.

    • Yemen’s Hidden War: How the Saudi-Led Coalition Is Killing Civilians
    • Yemeni forces successfully captured a Saudi spy drone in Jizan / Pics
    • US & Saudi Arabia War Crimes Keep Killing Yemenis

      The Saudi government made similar representations about their terror-bombing of Yemen that began March 26 and has continued on a near-daily basis to the present.

    • More than five months of conflict in Yemen

      Key dates in Yemen since a Saudi-coalition intervened after Huthi Shiite rebels overran the capital Sanaa and advanced on Aden, the second biggest city.

      UN figures put the overall number of dead in the conflict at more than 4,300, including 400 children, and the number of displaced at 1.5 million.

      Riyadh-led coalition begins offensive

      On March 26, 2015, Saudi Arabia begins Operation Decisive Storm with air strikes on the rebels after forging a coalition of nine countries to defend embattled Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi. Iran opposes the intervention.

    • Questions the Media Should Be Asking About DOD’s Latest Targeted Killing

      Next, there are a number of important questions about the UK’s involvement and stance on Hussain’s death. Where is the British government on this issue? Early reports suggested that both the US and UK are keeping quiet about such killings out of concern that an official announcement will upset Muslim communities inside the United Kingdom. Such silence may speak volumes about the program’s efficacy and sustainability. If a government cannot quickly comment — in defense of or opposition to — the killing of one of its citizens by another nation, then there might be a real problem with the program.

    • Full-Scale Military Drone Operation Confirmed By US DARPA Gremlin Program

      The US’ Department of Defense has confirmed plans to build an army of drones that will eventually replace manned aircrafts in a war zone.

      The Gremlins program, unveiled by DARPA — Defense Advanced Research Project Agency is researching unmanned aerial vehicles that can be launched mid-air by a larger aircraft.

    • 34th Senator Backs Iran Deal, Ensuring Implementation

      Two more Democratic senators have backed the Iran nuclear deal, meaning the agreement is all but certain to gain passage through Congress. On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey and Delaware Senator Chris Coons came out in support of the historic accord between Iran and six world powers. Obama has said he will veto any resolution by Congress to block the deal. The White House is now only one vote short of the 34 required to uphold the veto.

    • Cardin’s opposition to Iran deal sets back White House hopes

      White House hopes for stopping a congressional challenge to the Iran nuclear deal and sparing President Barack Obama from using a veto suffered a blow Friday when a key Senate Democrat announced his opposition.

      [...]

      In the House, some 110 Democrats were on record supporting the deal as of Friday, with around 15 opposed.

    • Nine protesters arrested at Volk Field

      Voices for Creative Nonviolence, along with several other groups protesting the use of military drones and police violence, marched from Madison to Volk Field in Camp Douglas, leading to nine arrests Aug. 24.

      For eight days, the group trekked from downtown Madison to the Wisconsin Air National Guard Base at Volk Field. While protesting at Volk, nine group members crossed a restricted area and were arrested. According to Voices for Creative Nonviolence member Buddy Bell, the nine members arrested spent a few hours in the Juneau County Jail before being released.

      When the group reached Volk, they were met by officers from the Juneau County Sheriff’s Office. After singing and chanting the names or drone victims and a black woman reportedly killed by police, several members crossed into a restricted area and were arrested for trespassing and disorderly conduct. The nine arrested will be in Juneau County court on Sept. 30.

    • We’re not weaponizing drones, Grand Forks County sheriff says

      Grand Forks area law enforcement officials want to make one thing clear: They have no intention of weaponizing unmanned aircraft in the near future, despite some saying it’s legal to under state law.

    • One Day Soon, That Drone Overhead May Be Pointing a Taser at You

      The Federal Aviation Administration issued proposed regulations on drone use earlier this year. Drones would not be allowed to fly over people unless they are directly involved with the flight. The rules would apply to drones that weigh 55 pounds or less. Drone flights could take place only during the daytime. They would be limited to an altitude of 500 feet and speeds of 100 mph. And they could not fly near airports or restricted airspace. The operator would have to maintain eye contact with the drone at all times.

      It could take years for these regulations to be implemented. Meanwhile, the FAA has reported 700 near misses between airplanes and drones in U.S. airspace so far this year. Some of the drones have been flying at high altitudes—10,000 feet or more.

      Twenty-six states have passed laws regulating the use of drones, and six more states have adopted resolutions. Issues addressed in these laws include defining what a drone is, the manner in which they can be used by law enforcement and other state agencies, how they can be used by the general public, and how they can be used to hunt game.

      In February, the White House began requiring government agencies to inform the public where federal agencies fly drones, how frequently, and what information they secure from drone use.

      Two federal bills are pending: in the Senate, The Protecting Individuals From Mass Surveillance Act, and in the House, Preserving American Privacy Act. The Senate bill would require a warrant before federal law enforcement officers could use drones and manned aircraft, but it carves out an exemption within 25 miles of the border, and it wouldn’t bind state or municipal agencies. The House bill would require warrants to conduct state or federal drone surveillance with some exceptions. Evidence obtained in violation of both these bills would be inadmissible in court.

      Given the significant invasion of privacy occasioned by the use of drones by law enforcement, warrants should be mandatory before using them for surveillance. And weaponized drones of any sort should be outlawed.

    • In a first, drones used to smoke out criminals
    • Military sources: Al-Shabaab attack in Somalia kills dozens of AU troops
    • Somalia: Al-Shabaab’s Revenge Sparks Another Crisis in Somalia

      On Tuesday, exactly a year after leader Ahmed Abdi Godane was killed by a ferocious American drone assault, Al-Shabaab got its revenge.

    • Three Uzbeks Among Six Killed in US Drone Strike Against North Waziristan

      All of the casualties were identified by Pakistani officials as “suspected militants.”

    • U.S. Drone Kills Five Alleged Extremists in Pakistan

      Following that incident, the Pakistani Government condemned the incident saying that those acts violate this country’s soverighnty and international right.

    • Pakistan condemns US drone strike in North Waziristan

      Pakistan condemned a US drone strike in North Waziristan tribal region that killed six people. ”Pakistan condemns such strikes which are in disregard of our territorial sovereignty and international law,” Xinhua news agency quoted Pakistani Foreign Ministry’s statement as saying.

      The statement added that the strike in North Waziristan resulted in a number of casualties. ”These strikes also generate distrust among the local populace. We reiterate our call for cessation of such strikes,” the statement said. A US drone fired two missiles at a compound in Karwanda area of Datta Khel Tehsil, and some foreigners were among those killed.

    • Pakistan: U.S. Drone Strike Kills 6

      Pakistani officials say a U.S. drone strike has killed at least six people after it struck a house in North Waziristan Tuesday. Officials say the compound belonged to suspected militants. The identities of the victims have not been determined.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Researcher Scoffs at Stonewalled CIA Request

      A researcher seeking budget records for intelligence support the CIA gave Israel told a federal judge that the agency is improperly claiming ignorance of its own policy.

      Grant Smith, who runs the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, says he filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to inspect the CIA’s funding for Israel-related intelligence.

    • WikiLeaks’ Assange stays indoors, fears CIA drone attack
    • WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fears being ‘droned’ by Central Intelligence Agency if he leaves

      The WikiLeaks editor-in-chief said he told Snowden to ignore concerns about the “negative PR consequences” of sheltering in Russian Federation because it was one of the few places in the world where the CIA’s influence did not reach.

    • Julian Assange gets paranoid about Harrods

      Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who will not face a Swedish sex charge inquiry because he thinks it is all a CIA plot, now thinks the dark forces of Mohamed Abdel Moneim Al-Fayed have joined in.

      Al-Fayed who is a big supporter of the monarchy, and particularly Prince Phillip, has apparently been involved in a plot to spy on Assange and all his doings.

      Al-Fayed owns Harrods which is just across the road from Assange who has placed himself under house arrest in the Ecuadorean embassy secretly helping police to spy on him in his embassy hideout.

    • Assange: Snowden Would Have Been Kidnapped or Killed in Latin America

      Edward Snowden fled to Russia somewhat than Latin America, says fellow whistleblower Julian Assange, as a result of he warned the Nationwide Safety Company leaker that he can be kidnapped or probably killed there.

      “Snowden was nicely conscious of the spin that may be placed on it if he took asylum in Russia,” the editor-in-chief, who’s sheltered on the Ecuadorian embassy in London, advised in London.

      “He most popular Latin America, however my recommendation was that he ought to take asylum in Russia regardless of the damaging PR penalties, as a result of my evaluation is that he had a big danger he might be kidnapped from Latin America on CIA orders. Kidnapped or probably killed.”

    • Judge Orders CIA to Release Information about Killing of Pablo Escobar…11 Years after Initial Request

      Eleven years after it was asked to release the information, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been ordered by a federal judge to produce at least some records pertaining to the killing of former Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

      The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004 to learn more about the CIA’s involvement in the killing of Escobar, as well as a Colombian death squad, Los Pepes. The CIA at first didn’t respond to the request, and then sent the think tank only some declassified foreign broadcast reports and government records that were heavily redacted.

      IPS sued the CIA in federal court, where U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth this week ordered the CIA to produce an index of classified documents that it says it can’t release, with explanations of how publishing the documents would harm U.S. interests.

    • Cryptic Clinton emails may refer to Iranian scientist

      New Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department appear to lift the curtain on the bizarre circumstances surrounding Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist who claims to have been abducted by the CIA.

      The just-released emails, which were sent to Clinton back in 2010, seem to support what State Department sources have long maintained: that Amiri was not abducted, but a defector and paid informant who changed his mind about helping the U.S.

      The emails also appear to offer insight into the department’s plans to get Amiri back to Iran safely.

      Amiri’s complicated story began in 2009, when he mysteriously disappeared while on a religious pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. Almost immediately, Tehran accused the U.S. of abducting him. The U.S. denied the accusation, saying it had no knowledge of Amiri’s whereabouts.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Bi-Polar Disorder: Obama’s Bait-and-Switch Environmental Politics

      The climate change-driven fires of Washington continued their record-setting ravages not so far from the dinner party while the gathering’s Sixties Age “Berkeley liberal” host called for the nuclear incineration of Baghdad and Fallujah and his Bernie-fan spouse explained that Iraq’s dire straits reflect its primitive and savage nature – not the criminal racist and petro-imperialist destruction of that nation by the America Empire over more than three decades. The destruction has always been driven by Washington’s longstanding compulsion to secure and sustain global dominance by controlling the supply of global oil – the very substance whose over-extraction and burning has most particularly driven the world to the edge of full environmental catastrophe.

      No doubt the liberal and progressive couple is more than okay with Sanders’ recent announcement on ABC News last Sunday that if elected president he will not discontinue Barack Obama’s controversial and mass-murderous drone program in the Middle East. Since Obama took office in January of 2009, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports, at least 2,464 people and 314 innocent civilians have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia. Nine times more strikes have occurred under Obama than under George W. Bush. Obama’s strikes have killed nearly six times more people and twice as many civilians as Bush’s. At least seven American citizens have been extra-judicially killed by Obama’s drones, including one 16-year-old. Obama directly ordered many if not most of the strikes. A study by the human rights group Reprieve found that as of Nov. 24, 2014, US attempts to liquidate 41 alleged terrorists with drones killed 1,147 civilians, including more than 200 children. The U.S. under Obama has carried out drone attacks on weddings (“for better or worse”) and funerals, along with “double-tap” strikes on rescue workers. A proud record under the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize! If anything, the nice liberal couple (the husband, quite explicitly) mentioned above would like to see a much higher civilian Muslim body count.

  • Finance

    • Ignoring the Cause of Welfare: Not Laziness but Low Wages

      Numerous US media outlets recently uncritically echoed a methodologically flawed report by an anti-immigration organization with ties to white supremacist groups (FAIR.org, 9/4/15). Beyond this serious problem, however, lies a larger and more endemic issue in media: an overarching anti-welfare framing.

      News articles like those on a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report, which claims 51 percent of US households headed by immigrants receive some kind of welfare benefits, internalize anti-government assistance values, implicitly assuming that receiving welfare is a bad thing.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Fox’s Megyn Kelly Bemoans The “Anti-Cop … Thug Mentality” She Sees In “Black Communities”
    • The Syrian Refugee Crisis and the ‘Do Something’ Lie

      It didn’t take long for the universal and entirely justified outrage over a picture of a dead three-year-old to be funneled by the “do something” pundits to justify regime change in Syria. The “do something” crowd wants us to “do something” about the refugee crisis and “solve” the “bigger problem,” which, of course, involves regime change. To create the moral urgency and to tether the refugee crisis to their long-standing warmongering, these actors have to insist the US has “done nothing” about Syria.

    • Cultural Imperialism and Perception Management: How Hollywood Hides US War Crimes

      There is an unspoken, yet very clear, bond between Hollywood and the US government that overtly supports US foreign policy. The movie industry in Hollywood has been active in hiding US war crimes and sanitizing the US military campaigns in NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, Anglo-American occupied Iraq, and elsewhere in the world. Moreover, the dominance of Hollywood as a tool of cultural imperialism in Europe and the rest of the world make Hollywood films an excellent tool for getting Washington’s ideas out internationally and sedating global audiences with misleading narratives.

    • The True Story Behind Boris Pasternak’s ‘Dr. Zhivago’

      Among the book’s most intriguing revelations is how Doctor Zhivago became a weapon of the Cold War. In 1958, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency commissioned a Russian translation of Doctor Zhivago. While the book was officially banned inside the Soviet Union, the CIA distributed it to Russian expatriates and eventually smuggled it inside the USSR itself. Doctor Zhivago was sold on the black market and was passed hand-to-hand as fast as Soviet citizens could read it.

    • Sanders pledges his campaign to save Democratic Party

      In a speech Friday afternoon to the Democratic National Committee, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders portrayed his presidential campaign as the only way to rebuild popular support for the Democratic Party and save its electoral prospects in 2016.

    • Bernie Sanders: ‘People Are Responding to Our Message’

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Report: Colombia collecting bulk data without warrants

      Intelligence agencies in Colombia have been building robust tools to automatically collect vast amounts of data without judicial warrants and in defiance of a pledge to better protect privacy following a series of domestic spying scandals, according to a new report by Privacy International.

      The report published Monday by the London-based advocacy group provides a comprehensive look at the reach and questionable oversight of surveillance technologies as used by police and state security agencies in Colombia.

    • Problem: Male Operators Use Surveillance Cameras For Ogling Women; Mayor’s Solution: Employ Only Female Operators

      Lo Barnechea is a commune of Chile located in Santiago Province, with a population of about 75,000. Its Mayor, Felipe Guevara, has decided what Lo Barnechea really needs is a massive surveillance system installed in aerostats tethered over the area, as explained by a post on the Derechos Digitales site (original in Spanish.) It’s not clear from the article why he chose this unusual approach; perhaps it’s because most of his district is mountainous, and that poses problems for conventional surveillance systems.

    • 14-year-old added to UK police database for using Snapchat to send naked selfie

      A 14-year-old boy has been added to a UK police intelligence database for using Snapchat to send a naked picture of himself to a female classmate he was flirting with from his bedroom. She saved the image and shared it with others, which is how the case came to light. Although the boy was not arrested or charged, the incident was nonetheless recorded as a crime of “making and distributing an indecent image of a child,” even though it was of himself. As The Guardian reports, “the [database] file remains active for a minimum of 10 years, meaning the incident may be flagged to potential employers conducting an advanced Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) check, such as for those who work with children.”

  • Civil Rights

    • US Turns Teen Into ‘Terrorist’ – OpEd

      The crime of providing material support for terrorists only came into existence with the Patriot Act passed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. There are now people serving very long prison terms for providing humanitarian aid, translating documents, sending money abroad, or expressing views in support of nations or groups the United States classifies as terrorist. These crimes are vaguely defined and are often of little consequence to ISIS or any other organization the federal government designates as an enemy.

    • Former APA President, Cornell Professor Defends Cooperation With CIA

      In light of allegations this summer that the American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense during the administration of George W. Bush, Prof. Robert Sternberg, former president of the APA, spoke critically of the accusations against him and his colleagues.

      On July 2, former federal prosecutor David Hoffman released an independent 542-page report that concluded top APA officials and psychologists cooperated with the CIA and the DoD to help justify the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation programs.

    • Letter: How can Cheney defend war in Iraq, CIA torture?

      A recent broadcast of “Sunday Morning” with Charles Osgood treated us to the bizarre (if eminently consistent) ramblings of former vice president Dick Cheney and his doting daughter. He defended the war in Iraq and its CIA prisoner torture, and seemed unable to see how the Arab world could possibly take issue with the physical and political destruction we have wrought throughout the Middle East.

      While profiting financially from that and other wars, Cheney cynically waves the flag and still contends that the country, whose moral high ground he personally helped to undercut, is still “exceptional.” In addition to causing virtually every other country on the planet to lower its opinion of the righteousness of U.S. motives, the Bush administration oversaw the rolling out of the Patriot Act – the greatest restrictions on the liberty of American citizens in history, while his followers continue to whip into a frenzy the easily duped, who think that making assault rifles illegal signals Armageddon.

      Predictably Cheney sides with Israeli hawks over the Iran nuclear agreement, and has the unmitigated chutzpah to shift blame from himself and his fellow draft-dodging warmongers to President Obama for the rise of terrorism in general and Islamic State in particular. Small wonder Cheney’s supporters line up behind The Donald as the leading Republican contender to run the country. Exceptional indeed.

    • Who Is Listening to Dick Cheney?

      Dick Cheney is a former vice president who had an enormous effect on public policy, and therefore on history. He should be interviewed by media outlets. He should be asked tough questions about every single aspect of his tenure in the White House. We cannot pretend that Cheney does not belong in history books, or that he will vanish if we just wish hard enough.

      But the line should be firmly drawn. Cheney is part of history, and there he should stay. But not so much that we pretend he is toothless and apolitical. He should not be steered out as a fun toy, the way Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright and other, shall we say, controversial politicians have been on stunt-cast on shows ranging from Gilmore Girls to The Colbert Report.

    • Legal case demands details about how CIA used windowless warehouse in Lithuania as secret prison

      In one of Vilnius’s best known museums, over 50,000 visitors a year squeeze themselves into cells used by the KGB in the 1960s to hold dissidents and human rights activists. A few miles up the road, a more recently constructed prison is gaining similar international attention.

      The windowless white warehouse about the size of an Olympic swimming pool was constructed in 2004. It soon became a topic of gossip among the 750 inhabitants of Antaviliai, a small hamlet ten miles north east of the Lithuanian capital and encircled by pine forest.

      The workmen who built it worked mostly at night, using brand new equipment that was out of place among the tumbledown factory buildings, allotments and unpretentious Communist-era housing blocks. Villagers, who only agreed to interviews on the condition of anonymity, describe how English-speaking security guards had patrolled the perimeter of the site and vehicles with tinted windows shuttled up and down the forest road leading to the capital. According to one resident, a van from a Vilnius restaurant – often used at the time for government receptions – regularly delivered food to the building.

    • Feinstein Slams New Book by Former CIA Officials

      Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA’s controversial interrogation program, said Saturday that a new, critical book by some top former CIA officials “doesn’t lay a glove” on her panel’s conclusions that the agency carried out torture to get information that had already been extracted by “more traditional and acceptable ways.”

    • Canada files charges against Syrian officer in CIA rendition case

      Canadian federal officials have filed charges against a Syrian intelligence officer for torturing a Canadian citizen given up by the CIA.

    • Swiss police fire rubber bullets during pro-refugee protest in Zurich (VIDEO)

      A pro-refugee demonstration in Zurich has ended with riot police firing rubber bullets after leftist protesters intervened in the rally. People have taken to the streets to criticize European governments in their handling of the ongoing crisis.

    • Kansas Man To Be Sentenced For Wichita Airport Bomb Plot, Could Face 20 Years of Prison Time, Judge Says

      A Kansas man who has plead guilty to trying to use a weapon of mass destruction is set to be sentenced on Monday. Judge Monti Belot of the U.S. District said that if Terry L. Loewen rejects the plea, he can withdraw it, but he is “almost certain” that he will accept the 60-year-old man’s proposed sentence of 20 years.

    • Mysterious Fuat Avni’s possible CIA ties

      What a mysterious whistleblower, who tweets under the pseudonym Fuat Avni, has reported lately has once again turned out to be true when the government initiated an operation on Tuesday, Sept. 1, against a critical media group, Koza İpek.

    • Accused 9/11 Co-Conspirator Wants Trial Halted Until He Gets Better Medical Care

      One of the five accused Sept. 11 co-conspirators is asking a federal court to place a freeze on his ongoing military trial until the U.S. provides him with improved medical care at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, where he has been detained since 2006.

      Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who was held in CIA black sites from 2003 to 2006, has several chronic health problems that his lawyers say are the direct result of three years of abuse under the agency’s torture program and inadequate medical treatment since being transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

    • What’s Wrong with Police in America

      Instead a violent incident was peacefully halted…incredibly with nobody hurt.

      That’s how policing is done in much of Europe, where police shootings are almost unheard of. It’s how it should be done here.

      But the whole concept of policing in the US is quite different from what prevails in most democratic countries. For one thing, abroad police are not ubiquitous in most places. I was in Finland, Austria and southern Germany last year, as well as in Quebec, and it’s actually hard to find a cop in any of those places when you’re looking for one. I walked for two hours in Montreal and didn’t see a single police officer, on foot or in a patrol car. Not so in New York, Philadelphia, Boston or even my local community of Upper Dublin, PA, where it’s easy to pass two or three cop cars just while driving the three miles between my house and the train station.

    • Other Voices: Media is under fire again

      That’s chiefly because Obama and his national security advisers have reiterated the disdain for reporters that for White House occupants stretches back to Richard Nixon.

    • Canada’s Insidious Role in the US-NATO War on Libya: “Boots on the Ground”

      In direct contravention of these legally binding resolutions, Canadian troops were on the ground in the North African country. On September 13, three weeks after Tripoli fell to the anti-Gaddafi National Transition Council, Canada’s state broadcaster reported: “CBC News has learned there are members of the Canadian Forces on the ground in Libya.”[i] A number of other media outlets reported that highly secretive Canadian special forces were fighting in Libya. On February 28, CTV.ca reported “that Canadian special forces are also on the ground in Libya” while Esprit du Corp editor Scott Taylor noted Canadian Special Operations Regiment’s flag colours in the Conservatives’ post-war celebration. But, any Canadian ‘boots on the ground’ in Libya violated UNSCR 1973, which explicitly excluded “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.”

    • 290 foreign agents exposed in Russia in 2014 – television

      Russian secret services have said that in 2014 security agencies exposed 290 foreign agents and published several reports concerning the work of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers in Moscow, involving disguise techniques such as dress-changing when communicating with their informers.

      The ChP program on NTV television on Sept.4 showed video footage of disguise techniques used by the wife of CIA agent Robert Hynes.

      The video shows two “well-groomed ladies,” the CIA agent’s wife Laura Carlson and the wife of yet another CIA agent, Janice Chisholm, leaving the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and heading to a coffee shop.

      Having entered the coffee shop, Chisholm went to the toilet while Carlson waited for her near the door. A while later, a man in a hat went out of the toilet and hastily left the coffee shop.

    • Death at sea

      This year 350,000 migrants have arrived in Europe by sea compared with 219,000 during the whole of 2014, itself a record year. Greece alone has seen 234,000 people land on its shores, compared with 35,000 in 2014. Authorities are struggling to cope as most people cross to a handful of small islands situated kilometres from the Turkish coast. Some 23,000 have arrived in the past week, 50% more than the previous week. The majority of recent migrants are fleeing from Syria and Afghanistan. Most people will journey further north to seek asylum in countries like Germany, which accepts most asylum-seekers in total, and Sweden, which takes in most as a share of its own population. Germany expects at least 800,000 asylum-seekers this year compared with 173,000 in 2014.

    • Argentina official says doors open to Syrian refugees

      Argentina’s cabinet chief said on Friday that the South American nation is willing to welcome more Syrian refugees fleeing their country’s civil war.

      Anibal Fernandez said that the government eased the entrance of Syrians through a program begun last year, but he didn’t specify how many of the refugees had arrived so far. He said the Syrians will be welcomed through the country’s tradition of helping out during humanitarian crises.

    • Canada less welcoming to refugees under Harper’s leadership

      Canada has long prided itself for opening its doors wider than any nation to asylum seekers, but the number it welcomes has waned since Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper took power almost 10 years ago.

      Harper has rejected calls to take immediate action to resettle more Syrian refugees, despite the haunting image of a drowned 3-year-old washed up on a Turkish beach that has focused the world’s attention on the largest refugee crisis since World War II.

    • If All Lives Really Matter: The False Racial Unity of Glenn Beck’s Massive March on Birmingham

      Contrary to what conservative pundits would have you believe, Black Lives Matter is not a call to division.

      It’s actually a call for unity.

      Because the truth is, we aren’t united and haven’t been.

      [...]

      And unity can’t be achieved by papering over the chasms of racial injustice with trite and whitewashing refrains of All Lives Matter. Rather real divisiveness has to be confronted without regard to respectability and addressed without apology.

      [...]

      So to respond to Black Lives Matters with All Lives Matter is fundamentally manipulative and disingenuous. It not only misses the point; it misrepresents it as well. Black Lives Matters doesn’t assert that all lives don’t matter. It asserts that all lives already don’t matter in this country, specifically those lives of people of color. It is a demanding cry for the nation to wake up to the daily reality people of color face in this nation.

    • Guatemala ex-president goes to court after night behind bars
    • Guatemala’s President resigns amid corruption probe, faces prison for “criminal conspiracy”

      As I type this blog post, the former Army general who was a member of Guatemala’s CIA-backed G2 elite death squad is sitting in court, forced to listen to tapped audio recordings of his own phone conversations which the Ministerio Publico claims are proof he presided over a scheme of kickbacks and self-dealing known as #LaLinea. The corruption scandal set off a protest movement against government corruption which miraculously, unbelievably, led to the removal a sitting president in Guatemala by means other than a military coup.

    • Is Guatemala’s President Going to Jail? Legislature Strips Pérez Molina of Immunity After Protests
    • A Central American spring?
    • Take 10,000 refugees, petition urges Mexico

      A petition that has picked up 15,000 signatures in four days is urging the Mexican government to take an international leadership role and permit the immigration of 10,000 Syrian refugees.

    • Republicans Want “Border Wall”… Even With Canada!
    • Why border walls – even with Canada – are not the Republicans’ Trump card

      Despite the novelty value of proposing a wall along the 49th parallel, and the controversy that Walker’s comment has already prompted on both sides of the border, the Wisconsin governor was addressing an increasingly familiar refrain on the contentious election issue of immigration.

    • Donald Trump’s Shaky Grasp on Immigration

      To these voters, a country where 13 percent of the population was born abroad and where 17 percent identify as Latino is a scary place. But what is most paradoxical about that belief is that Mr. Trump’s central proposition — that illegal immigration into the United States remains a critical problem — is actually wrong. Mr. Trump, as Mr. Massey succinctly put it, “is beating a dead horse.”

    • Inside Ben Carson’s quiet surge

      And though Trump’s rhetoric has upended the Republican presidential race, Carson is no stranger to controversy. He told CNN earlier this year that some people become gay in prison, indicating homosexuality is a choice — a comment for which he later apologized. And in August, he said that while he wouldn’t use drones to kill undocumented immigrants, he would order strikes on caves used to transport people across the southern U.S. border.

    • Ben Carson’s Views: A look at the candidate’s views on immigration, gun rights, women’s rights, and same-sex marriage

      “Drones can help with surveillance,” Carson told CNN. “In no way did I suggest that drones be used to kill people.”

    • Candy and cuddly toys: Migrants finish epic trek to Germany
    • 47 dead as rebels battle IS Jihadists in Syria

      In recent days, the US-led air campaign fighting IS in Syria has carried out strikes against the group near Marea, according to the Pentagon. More than 240,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with peaceful anti-government protests.

    • US commentators call for Australian-style gun law reform

      At the Lindt cafe siege, we saw very clearly that Australia is not immune from horrendous gun violence. We can only hope the US will follow us, and not the other way around.

    • Nestle: Forced labor has no place in our food supply chain

      Nestle says “forced labor has no place in our supply chain” following a U.S. class action lawsuit that alleges the Swiss food company knowingly supported a system of slave labor and human trafficking to make its Fancy Feast cat food.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

09.05.15

Links 5/9/2015: Elive 2.6.10 Beta, Mozilla’s Bugzilla Issue

Posted in News Roundup at 5:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source meets bankers’ agility demands

    Open source technology can be particularly useful in the financial and banking sectors, says Matthew Lee, regional manager for Africa at SUSE.

    In the fields of banking and stock trading, agility is of critical importance, as is maintaining top performance and around-the-clock availability for the business systems that underpin trading and banking activity, Lee says.

  • LinkedIn Open-Sources FeatureFu, A Toolkit For Building Machine Learning Models

    LinkedIn today announced that it is open-sourcing an internal tool called FeatureFu. The FeatureFu toolkit is meant to make it easier for developers to build their machine learning models around statistical modeling and decision engines.

    The idea here is to take LinkedIn’s knowledge around “feature engineering” and make it accessible to developers outside of the company. In machine learning, feature engineering is basically using your detailed knowledge of the phenomenon you are looking at and then using that to build machine learning models.

  • Netflix Open Sources Sleepy Puppy XSS Flaw Detection Tool

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Improving Security for Bugzilla

        Openness, transparency, and security are all central to the Mozilla mission. That’s why we publish security bugs once they’re no longer dangerous, and it’s why we’re writing a blog post about unauthorized access to our infrastructure. We have notified the relevant law enforcement authorities about this incident, and may take additional steps based on the results of any further investigations.

      • Mozilla: data stolen from hacked bug database was used to attack Firefox

        An attacker stole security-sensitive vulnerability information from the Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracking system and probably used it to attack Firefox users, the maker of the open-source Firefox browser warned Friday.

      • Mozilla’s Bugzilla Hacked, Exposing Firefox Zero-Days

        Mozilla admitted today that its Bugzilla bug tracking system was breached by an attacker, who was then able to get access to information about unpatched zero-day bugs.

        While Mozilla doesn’t have finite timelines on when the breach occurred, it may well have happened as far back as September 2013. According to Mozilla, the attacker was able to breach a user’s account that had privileged access to Bugzilla, including the non-public zero-day flaw information.

      • Firefox is coming to Apple’s iOS devices

        Apple’s iOS has been around for well over half a decade now and Mozilla in its usual style has been a bit too relaxed in getting itself onto the platform, that coupled with Apple’s unwillingness to allow competing browsers onto its platform for so many years has meant Firefox is only just arriving on iOS. Today, Mozilla have announced that those residing in New Zealand can get their hands on the first public preview of Firefox for iOS.

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Five Ways Open Source Databases Are Best for Business

      Today 78% of organizations run part or all of their operations on open source software, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2010. And according to ranking site DB-Engines, six of the top 10 databases are open source, and the top eight non-relational technologies are all open source.

      So why do so many organizations standardize on open source? Why do 66% of organizations look to open source before considering proprietary software alternatives? When it comes to databases, it turns out that the most important criteria are likely to be better addressed by an open source product.

  • Education

    • Bringing Python into the classroom

      Teachers across the globe have answered the call to code. “Yes,” they say, “we will teach our kids to program, even if we don’t know how ourselves.” They’ve delivered lessons on Scratch; they’ve celebrated the Hour of Code. Perhaps they’ve even dabbled in Codecademy’s offerings to familiarize themselves with this newly popular, suddenly ubiquitous competency called “coding.”

    • Did you ever use open source tools in school?

      People of all ages are heading back to school now. For the next couple of weeks, Opensource.com is highlighting a range of open source software, hardware, and tools for students and educators. We’ll also sprinkle in open education stories for good measure.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • IT certifications lose their luster among employers

    It’s still an employee’s market for IT jobs. But as always, the right skills are commanding the most pay. Over the 12-month period that ended in July, premium pay for both certified and noncertified skills soared by 9 percent, according to the latest survey of pay in the IT industry by Foote Partners.

    Not surprisingly, hot sectors such as security, application development, big data, and the cloud experienced the most gains. But the new report contains a surprising bit of information: Noncertified job skills are increasing most rapidly as some employers question the value of certifications. “They [noncertified skills] are less immune to manipulation,” says David Foote, the research firm’s chief analyst.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Jeremy Corbyn: I wouldn’t send troops abroad without UN vote

      Jeremy Corbyn, the frontrunner in the Labour leadership contest, has said he cannot currently envisage circumstances in which he would agree to deploy Britain’s armed forces on overseas military operations.

      In the last hustings before the ballot closes on 10 September, the leftwinger questioned if the UK could maintain a “global reach”, and said that any armed intervention by British forces should be approved by the UN.

      Corbyn also marked himself out from his more mainstream rivals by launching a strong attack on the EU for “increasingly operating like a free market across Europe”.

    • Report: Hundreds of Civilians Killed in 71 US Airstrikes on ISIS

      Reports of civilian deaths in US airstrikes against ISIS started pretty much the same day the strikes did, and over a year into the war, the US is accused of killing hundreds of civilians over the course of 71 different incidents.

    • Corbyn Came Out Top – Sky Interactive Poll

      Jeremy Corbyn scored an overwhelming lead over his rivals during the Sky News Labour debate, according to an unofficial poll of viewers using Sky Pulse.

      About 80.7% of those surveyed immediately afterwards believed Mr Corbyn had won the final hustings.

      Liz Kendall was a distant second on 8.5%, with Yvette Cooper on 6.1% and Andy Burnham on 4.7%.

      Mr Corbyn, who is the frontrunner to be the next Labour leader according to opinion polls, seemed to gain momentum during the debate.

      Before it began, 66.5% of Sky Pulse users believed he would outperform the other contenders.

    • Number of US babies being named after guns on the increase

      Parents appear to be arming their newborn babies with intimidating names in a tough-guy take on giving them the best start in life.

    • Abusing Dead Syrian Children

      Images are a powerful tool in the hands of propagandists. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes. If a powerful image can be manipulated to tell a tale even if false, it can persuade more viscerally than can a thousand reasoned arguments.

      So it is with the tragic photograph making the mainstream media rounds yesterday of a lone Syrian child drowned on a Turkish shore. Reams of articles can be written about the current refugee crisis but particularly in the US they will go relatively unnoticed by those not directly affected. There may be some video clips on the nightly news but overall the story – and particularly the context – will go unexplained.

      But the powerful image of a dead child, abandoned by the world on the capricious sway of the tide, is putty in the hands of propagandists.

      And proponents of the four-year US policy of Syrian destabilization and regime change are lining up to make their case that the current refuge crisis – now swamping Europe with Syrians desperate for something approaching a normal life – is one hundred percent the fault of both Syrian president Assad and the western non-interventionists who objected to plans in 2013 for the US and UK to begin bombing Syria.

    • Netanyahu arrest up for debate as UK petition hits target

      Call to detain PM for ‘war crimes’ can now be discussed by MPs after garnering 100,000 signatures on Parliament website; senior MP dismisses ‘completely absurd’ petition

    • CIA spy ship built to raise Soviet sub becomes victim of oil slump

      A ship built by the CIA for a secret Cold War mission in 1974 to raise a sunken Soviet sub is heading to the scrap yard, a victim of the slide in oil prices.

    • CIA spy ship built to raise Soviet submarine becomes victim of oil slump

      A ship built by the CIA for a secret Cold War mission in 1974 to raise a sunken Soviet sub is heading to the scrap yard, a victim of the slide in oil prices.

      Christened the Hughes Glomar Explorer, after billionaire Howard Hughes was brought in on the CIA’s deception, the 619-foot vessel eventually became part of the fleet of ships used by Swiss company Transocean to drill for oil.

    • Why Indian nuclear stockpiles are not vexing America

      Prior and during the Pakistan visit by American National Security Advisor Ms Susan Rice a salvo of reports were dripping out of American, Indian and some Pakistani writers apropos Pakistan becoming third largest nuclear stockpiling country in the world. These writers mostly referred Toby Dalton and Michael Krepon, two renowned think tanks of the US for estimating more than one hundred nuclear warheads possessed by Pakistan. Selection of the occasion of American NSA’s visit to Pakistan, for demonising the country on nuclear issue appeared to be for creating a coercive background favouring both American NSA and India.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Hillary Clinton refuses to apologize for email choices

      Hillary Clinton on Friday declined on two occasions to apologize for using a personal email account and server while serving as secretary of State.

      In a rare national interview, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked Clinton if she was sorry that she had bucked traditional protocol and routed her work email through a private email account and server.

      Clinton responded by acknowledging that “it wasn’t the best choice,” and said that she “should have had two accounts.” But she also continued to defend the decision as “above board” and something that was “allowed by the State Department.”

      “People in the government knew I was using a personal account,” Clinton said. “But it would have been better if I had two separate accounts to begin with, and I’m doing all I can now to be transparent about what I had on my work related emails. They will be coming out. I wish it was faster. I’m frustrated it’s taking a while, but there’s a process that needs to be followed.”

    • Decoding the current war in Syria: The WikiLeaks Files

      The US strategically schemed to cause unrest in Syria against the incumbent Bashar al-Assad government. Faced with the rise of ISIS, which the US was not only aware of but also encouraged, the US slides deeper into a complicated war it helped escalate in the first place, recently involving the once reluctant Turkey and clandestinely including 80 British personnel as well.

    • WikiLeaks’ Assange told Snowden to flee to Russia or risk being killed after NSA leak

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange warned Edward Snowden to escape to Russia or risk being “kidnapped or possibly killed”. Assange told the former NSA contractor Snowden to flee to Moscow after he leaked information about the US government’s mass surveillance programme to the media in 2013.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • UN plan to save Earth is “fig leaf” for Big Business: insiders

      At the end of this month, the UN will launch its new 2030 Sustainable Development agenda for “people, planet and prosperity” in New York, where it will be formally adopted by over 150 world leaders.

      The culmination of years of consultations between governments, communities and businesses all over the world, there is no doubt that the agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer an unprecedented vision of the interdependence of global social, economic and environmental issues.

      But records from the SDG process reveal that insiders at the heart of the UN’s intergovernment engagement negotiations have criticised the international body for pandering to the interests of big business and ignoring recommendations from grassroots stakeholders representing the world’s poor.

    • The Next Not-So-Cold War: As Climate Change Heats Arctic, Nations Scramble for Control and Resources

      President Barack Obama arrived in Alaska on Monday for a three-day tour during which he will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Alaska Arctic. On Monday, Obama highlighted the dangers posed by climate change in the region. “Arctic temperatures are rising about twice as fast as the global average,” Obama said. “Over the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed about twice as fast as the rest of the United States.” As the Arctic region warms, the geopolitical significance of the region is growing as new areas become reachable, spurring maritime traffic and oil drilling. Resources below the Arctic ice cap are worth over $17 trillion, the rough equivalent of the entire U.S. economy. According to investigative journalist James Bamford, the region has become the “crossroads of technical espionage” as the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway and Denmark battle for control of those resources. Bamford joins us to talk about his recent piece, “Frozen Assets: The Newest Front in Global Espionage is One of the Least Habitable Locales on Earth—the Arctic.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • USA Today Provides a Platform for Anti-Immigration Think Tank’s Flawed Study

      “Report: More Than Half of Immigrants on Welfare,” USA Today titled a recent story (9/2/15). Not mentioned in the headline is that this report was conducted by an anti-immigration think tank with ties to white supremacist groups.

      Citing a study by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), USA Today‘s Alan Gomez claims that roughly 51 percent of immigrant-led households receive welfare, compared to 30 percent for “native”-led households. (By “native,” the paper does not mean indigenous Americans, but rather US citizens.)

    • Media Run With Discredited Nativist Group’s Research To Claim More Than Half Of Immigrant Households Receive “Welfare”

      CIS Attempts To Promote Anti-Immigration Agenda By Connecting Immigration To Welfare

    • Mainstream Media Call Out Conservative Outlets For Linking Black Lives Matter To Anti-Police Violence And Increased Crime

      Mainstream media are calling out conservative outlets such as Fox News for connecting the Black Lives Matter movement to the deaths of police officers and increases in crime, writing that such claims “have a lack of evidence” and are based on “junk science and political opportunism.”

    • NRA Host: Guns Overly Blamed For Violence Because They’re Louder Than “Quiet” Knives

      National Rifle Association (NRA) web series host Colion Noir cited the “theatrics” and the loud sound guns make as the reason people want to restrict firearms after a high-profile shooting occurs. Noir made the comment during an appearance on a conservative news show where he also defended his recent, controversial advice to the parents of two murdered Virginia journalists.

    • Call It By Its Name: Censorship

      What does it say about the people who run the news media that they don’t want to report news?

      If you read on, you probably expect this lede to be revealed as hyperbole. Sorry, no. I mean it: newspaper editors and TV producers routinely come across delicious slices of news, and then decide not to publish it or put it on the air.

      Yet nobody calls them what they are: censors.

      Or crazy people.

      News businesses constantly refuse to serve news to eager news consumers. Because censorship is normative, it rarely makes the news itself.

  • Censorship

    • Canada’s Mr. Robot Premiere Censored By False DMCA Notice

      The Canadian launch of Mr Robot scheduled for Friday evening has been dealt an early blow. Showcase in Canada is currently offering the pilot episode on its website to tempt users in advance, but NBCUniversal in the U.S. has reported Showcase as pirates and Google has taken the search link down.

    • UK arts officials raise censorship concerns over cancelled ‘jihadi play’

      Senior figures at Arts Council England, the UK’s main arts funding body, raised concerns that the controversial cancellation of a play about radicalisation amounted to censorship and discussed whether they should step in to “help find a way to get this play shown,” newly released emails have revealed.

    • Radicalisation play in Britain axed over extremism concerns
    • Radicalisation play cancelled by theatre after concerns about ‘extremist agenda’
    • Homegrown director: ‘My play didn’t have an ‘extremist’ agenda – so why was it shut down?’

      Last month, 112 students were getting ready to perform an exciting, controversial new play called Homegrown.

      The 14-25 year olds had spend six months rehearsing the play, which tackled the complex topic of young people being radicalised in Britain.

    • Emails Give Insight Into National Youth Theater Leader Decision to Cancel Play

      An email sent by the artistic director of the National Youth Theater, that has been made public offers insight into why his company abruptly canceled its production of “Homegrown” — a play about young Islamic State recruits — before its planned opening in August.

      An immersive production set to feature over 100 youth actors, the play was canceled in late July, about two weeks before it had been scheduled to open. The decision drew intense media scrutiny and some public accusations of censorship.

    • Wikipedia founder defends decision to encrypt the site in China

      This summer, Wikipedia switched to encrypted HTTPS for all users, preventing ISPs from seeing which pages a user was visiting or injecting traffic into the stream. But while the change offered new security for visitors, it also offended Chinese censorship authorities, which had grown accustomed to blocking individual pages on the site. Wikipedia was blocked in mainland China following the changes and has remained blocked for more than two months now, a result that has been controversial among a number of anti-censorship groups and drawn significant opposition from Chinese editors of the site. But today, Wales pushed back against the criticism, publicly defending this summer’s decision and the organization’s general policy toward China in a long interview with the anti-censorship group Great Fire.

    • Jimmy Wales on Censorship in China
    • Murong Xuecun: Chinese censorship ‘threat to free world’

      One of China’s leading independent writers, Murong Xuecun, will today warn that Chinese censorship is becoming so pervasive that it is threatening free speech across the world, including in Australia.

      He will urge concern about “hearing Australian academics and media loudly singing the praises of the authoritarian Chinese system … backed by China’s economic power”.

    • Google will comply with censorship laws to get Play store into China, says report
    • Google Pursuing a Return to China
    • Hey, Look! Tanks in Tiananmen!

      The engineered limpidity was meant to be the perfect backdrop for a display of seven types of missiles, stealth fighter jets, a new bomber, aircraft carrier-killing munitions, tanks rolling by Tiananmen Square, and wave upon wave of uniformed men and women marching in step. It was meant to be a mark of achievement for the Chinese government and its military. And maybe a new source for calendar revenues.

    • Putin’s Censorship Regime Now Reaches into the Past

      The ongoing efforts of the Russian government to curtail its citizens’ access to information that hasn’t been preapproved by the Kremlin is now reaching into the past, according to a group that monitors the IP addresses of websites that have been blocked by censors in Russia. One of the latest victims is the site archive.org, which hosts the “Wayback Machine.”

      A valuable tool for journalists and researchers, the Wayback Machine is an archive of websites that preserves them as they looked on various days in their history. Among its many functions is making it difficult for governments, businesses and other entities to retroactively remove content, change data or otherwise falsify the past.

    • Russian government backs down on Wikipedia censorship
    • America’s true P.C. villains: The maddening “censorship” doublespeak of right-wing culture warriors

      Lately, there has been a great deal of debate amongst liberals on the sudden return of political correctness to academia. The Atlantic has published multiple pieces — such as “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and “That’s Not Funny” — discussing what seems to be a kind of infantilization of millennials in college. Some students are even having trouble reading literary classics, as described in this Columbia Spectator piece (don’t even try to assign “Naked Lunch”), and laughing at jokes (warning, George Carlin and Richard Pryor are full of triggers).

    • Associate prof. studies censorship, surveillance on the Internet

      Some of Crandall’s research efforts involve studying Facebook censorship in certain countries, but his team is currently taking on a much bigger project: measuring Internet use daily over three years and attempting to log almost every instance of censorship on the Web.

      [...]

      “A bigger issue for the U.S., though, is surveillance. Surveillance is difficult to measure. If someone censors your chat session, you’ll know it because your message to your friend will never arrive. But surveillance happens silently. If you’re a journalism institution in the United States (e.g., the New York Times) and you have a network in your company and an Internet gateway connection so your employees can use the Internet, how do you know if things that could compromise sources or otherwise violate privacy rights are being sent out over the Internet by your employees or the software that they use? This is a problem we’re starting to look at: combining reverse engineering with network monitoring technologies to help organizations understand what’s getting put out there via their Internet gateways.”

    • Terrorist slippery slope

      The UK government should look to what is happening to free expression in Egypt and Turkey before broadening terrorist laws to include those who “spread hate”.

    • Case of Vice reporters underlines Turkish crackdown on Internet freedom

      Two British reporters with Vice News charged with “deliberately aiding an armed organization” in Turkey, because their Iraqi colleague allegedly downloaded encryption software on his computer, were released from jail Thursday after a week in custody, a Vice spokesman told Al Jazeera.

    • Turkey releases two Vice News journalists, must free third
    • VICE News Journalists Transferred to Prison Hours From Legal Help

      VICE News’ team of three journalists — who remain detained in Turkey for entirely baseless and absurd charges — have now been transported to a high-security “F-type” prison facility more than five hours away from where their legal representation is based, and from the court where they are due to appear, said Kevin Sutcliffe, VICE’s Head of News Programming in Europe.

    • 5 countries using anti-terror legislation to muzzle journalists

      Two British journalists and a local fixer working for Vice News were charged on Monday 31 August in Turkey with “working on behalf of a terrorist organisation”. They will remain in detention until their trial, the date of which has not yet been announced.

    • Facebook must obey local censorship laws, says Germany’s justice minister
    • Cardiff Withdraws Exhibition Showing Jews, Arabs Playing Soccer

      An Israeli-sponsored exhibition in Cardiff, Wales showing photographs of Jews and Arabs playing soccer together was taken down on Friday, the Guardian reported, sparking accusations of censorship and capitulation to anti-Israel pressure but winning applause from at least one pro-Palestinian group.

    • Cardiff removes Israeli football exhibition after protests

      A council has been criticised for withdrawing a photography exhibition intended to show that football can bring diverse together communities in Israel.

      Cardiff city council was accused on Friday of censorship, buckling to pressure from anti-Israel activists and failing to keep sport and politics separate, following its decision.

      The Israeli football team arrives in the city to play Wales in a European Championship qualifier on Sunday, when anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrations are planned.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Selective Demonisation

      I am delighted by the apparent sea-change in media opinion on the treatment of refugees, but concerned that in modern society compassion only seems able to operate in a wave of emotional hysteria rather than as a fundamental, underlying everyday principle. There is also a danger that those arriving in the Mediterranean and Balkans are viewed, quite wrongly, as in some way different from those in the awful camps at Calais, who have been demonised all summer, reaching its peak when a child being killed by a train led to vicious media headlines about delays to British passengers.

      Cameron and May’s apparent willingness to budge at least minimally in admitting more from Syria must be matched by a willingness to admit those from the Calais camps who are genuine refugees. I still have a home in Ramsgate from which you can actually see France. I for one am willing to make accommodation available at no charge to help out in the crisis.

    • Viktor Orban: The ‘fascist’ Hungarian prime minister at the centre of Europe’s refugee crisis

      Not for the first time, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is at the centre of a storm of controversy. On Thursday, 3 September the leader of the anti-immigration Fidesz party drew criticism for declaring the immigration crisis facing Europe a “German problem” as that is where those arriving in the EU “would like to go”.

      In Budapest, there has been a two day stand-off between police and thousands of refugees, with authorities refusing to let unregistered immigrants leave the country, and immigrants determined to reach Germany, where authorities have accepted tens of thousands of asylum applications.

    • Egyptian billionaire offers to buy island for refugees
    • ‘West creates refugees by destroying Islamic nations’ – Chechen leader

      The head of Russia’s Chechen Republic claims the current asylum seeker crisis in European countries originated in the aggressive policies of the United States and the EU. He also called upon all Muslim nations to jointly fight the root of the problem.

    • Nima Shirazi on Iran Deal, Mark Trahant on Native Americans

      Also on the show: When Obama, headed to Alaska to talk about climate change, approved officially renaming what the federal government called “Mt. McKinley” to what Alaska Natives have always called it, Denali, the New York Times called it an effort to “improve relations between the federal government and the nation’s Native American tribes, an important political constituency that has a long history of grievances against the government.” Do media really see indigenous people as an important constituency?

    • 2 North Carolina teens hit with child porn charges after consensual sexting

      Later this month, a North Carolina high school student will appear in a state court and face five child pornography-related charges for engaging in consensual sexting with his girlfriend.

      What’s strange is that of the five charges he faces, four of them are for taking and possessing nude photos of himself on his own phone—the final charge is for possessing one nude photo his girlfriend took for him. There is no evidence of coercion or further distribution of the images anywhere beyond the two teenagers’ phones.

    • Whistleblowers File $100 Million Suit against NSA, FBI

      The plaintiffs are former NSA employees Thomas Drake, Ed Loomis, J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, and former congressional staffer Diane Roark. They seek “punitive damages in excess of $100 million because of Defendants [sic] callous and reckless indifference and malicious acts …” as well as well as an additional $15 million for lost wages and to cover costs.

    • Snowden: Russia ‘wrong’ to limit human rights

      National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden on Saturday criticized Russia for limiting online and human rights.

      “It’s wrong in Russia, and it would be wrong anywhere,” Snowden said, according to The Express Tribune. Snowden, who was accepting a Norwegian award via a video conference from Russia, added that Moscow’s stance on human rights is “disappointing. It’s frustrating.”

  • DRM/Wi-Fi

    • Tested: How Flash destroys your browser’s performance

      Last month, the axe seemingly came down on Adobe Flash: three undiscovered vulnerabilities in Flash were leaked and exploited. In response, Mozilla’s Firefox blocked Flash by default until Adobe issued a patch. You should know by now that installing Flash equals a security risk. But are you aware of how badly your PC can slow down as well?

    • Help Us #SaveWiFi
    • FCC accused of locking down Wi-Fi routers, but the truth is a bit murkier

      The Federal Communications Commission is considering new restrictions that would make it harder for users to modify Wi-Fi routers, sparking controversy and an apparent misunderstanding over the FCC’s intentions.

      The FCC’s stated goal is to make sure routers and other devices only operate within their licensed parameters. Manufacturers release products that are certified to operate at particular frequencies, types of modulation, and power levels but which may actually be capable of operating outside of what they’ve been certified and tested to do.

    • Ubiquiti UniFi AP Pro

      I bought 3 Ubiquiti UniFi access points (at enormous cost) to try to deliver reliable wifi to all points of my oddly shaped home (long and thin with some thick brick walls that mask all radio signals).

    • America’s crackdown on open-source Wi-Fi router firmware – THE TRUTH and how to get involved

      America’s broadband watchdog is suffering a backlash over plans to control software updates to Wi-Fi routers, smartphones, and even laptops.

      In a proposed update [PDF] to the regulator’s rules over radiofrequency equipment, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would oblige manufacturers to “specify which parties will be authorized to make software changes.”

      In addition, it proposes that “modifications by third parties should not be permitted unless the third party receives its own certification.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Bogus Security Company Can’t Take Criticism, Issues Bogus DMCA Takedowns, Creates Sockpuppet Accounts

        A few weeks ago, Brian Krebs published a fantastic article entitled how not to start an encryption company, which detailed the rather questionable claims of a company called Secure Channels Inc (SCI). The post is long and detailed and suggests strongly that (1) SCI was selling snake oil pretending to be an “unbreakable” security solution and (2) that its top execs had pretty thin skins (and in the case of the CEO, a criminal record for running an investment ponzi scheme). The company also set up a bullshit “unwinnable” hacking challenge, and then openly mocked people who criticized it.

      • Rightscorp Lures Hollywood With ‘Popcorn Time Protection’

        Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp has launched a new service which targets Popcorn Time users with legal threats and settlement demands. With their “Popcorn Time Protection” service the company hopes to lure new clients, but in reality there’s nothing new under the sun.

09.04.15

Links 4/9/2015: Acer Predator 8, GNOME 3.17.91 Released

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • New Cyber Threat Detection Tool Made Open Source

    Lockheed’s move points to the power of open source, particularly when it comes to big overreaching issues such as cybersecurity. Rather than Lockheed keeping their tool as internal proprietary software and requiring others to license or purchase it, they recognized the potential their innovation holds for the greater good. This represents a huge step for both the open source and cybersecurity communities.

  • Why Does the Government Use Open Source Code?
  • Twitter open-sources Diffy, a tool for automatically spotting bugs in code

    Twitter is today announcing the availability of Diffy, a new piece of open-source software that developers can use to spot bugs when they’re making updates to certain parts of code.

    Twitter uses the code internally. Now the social networking company is releasing it to the rest of the world.

  • We wrote an open source bank parser

    Our first project is something I was already working on, an extensible parser to chew bank statements and shit out transaction sheets. We made a gem, made an API and learnt a lot in the process. (We even wrote a java API to unlock pdf files given a password. Whew!). We currently have a meager three bank support, but we’ve managed to build a framework that makes it super easy to add other banks and statement formats.

  • Events

    • Ada Initiative runs out of puff, shuts its doors

      This manifested itself largely in attempts to force conference organisers to adopt draconian codes of conduct. In 2013, Aurora was very much in the public eye when she forced the organisers of the Security BSides conference in San Francisco to cancel a talk that she deemed unsuitable.

      The presenter was well-known speaker Violet Blue and the talk was titled “sex +/- drugs: known vulns and exploits”.

      Though Aurora tried her level best to make out that she had been asked to look over the conference programme by the organisers, it became apparent that she was the one who had poked her nose into the whole affair and tried to muscle the organisers into cancelling the talk.

    • Australian Linux conference back in the black, says Linux Australia president

      The Australian national Linux conference has not made a loss in 2015 after a disastrous 2014, according to the president of Linux Australia, Joshua Hesketh.

      Hesketh said LCA 2015, which was held in Auckland earlier his year, was expected to return to profit once the books were fully closed and audited.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • FossaMail Open-Source Mail Client Launches Update

        FossaMail is built on the Mozilla Thunderbird client but without all the will-they-or-won’t-they of the rumors that Mozilla has done with Thunderbird. Even better, FossaMail is compatible with both Windows and Linux, while offering a 64-bit download in Windows to up the speed, address more memory, and perform other 64-bit operations.

        At the same time, FossaMail looks and feels just like Thunderbird, despite the oval tab fiasco. It still offers a contacts list, calendar, and chat, just like most users have come to expect from their email platforms. It’s so close to Thunderbird, in fact, that the developers didn’t bother with an extensive tutorial or FAQ, but instead just point users to the Thunderbird help section if they have any problems.

  • Databases

    • Five Ways Open Source Databases Are Limited

      Two of the reasons to deploy an open source database are cost and philosophy. Philosophically, the open source movement subscribes to the notion that having community-developed product creates a better product, and/or “contributes to the world in a better way.” The other reason is cost, which usually means “free,” or at least no-charge for the software database license.

  • CMS

    • Proprietary vs. open source WCM [Ed: pro-proprietary]

      As it turns out, open source software is not always so free, proprietary software is not necessarily closed, and help from the open source community isn’t nearly as comprehensive as the level of support you get from a professional vendor.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open source-distributions for Romanian public administrations

      Advocates of free and open source have tailored two Linux-distributions, motivating the country’s public administrations to use this type of software solutions. The distributions were presented on 29 August at events in Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, the country’s most-populous cities. The Ministry of Education is the first to take an interest.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Action Alert: NYT Gives a False Pass to US on Cluster Bomb Sales

      The New York Times‘ Rick Gladstone (9/3/15) has an article on the use of cluster bombs—aptly described as the “widely outlawed munitions that kill and maim indiscriminately”—in conflicts in Libya, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, five countries that have not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which banned the production, sale and use of these weapons in 2010.

      [...]

      This is just wrong: The Convention not only bans the use of cluster bombs—which the US military used against Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq before the treaty went into effect, but did not use subsequently in its air attacks on Libya—it also mandates that signatories are “never under any circumstances to…develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer to anyone, directly or indirectly, cluster munitions.”

    • The New York Times: Diplomats Agree That Iran Deal “Is As Good A Deal As You Could Get”

      Diplomats from the UK, China, France, Germany and Russia told Congress that the Iran nuclear deal is the best deal possible, according to a report from The New York Times.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Web of Secrecy Surrounding Federal Half-a-Billion Handout to Charter Schools

      Secretary Duncan has previously called for “absolute transparency” when it comes to school performance, but that’s just a talking point unless he releases the applications, or even a list of the states that are in the running, before they are given the final stamp of approval.

    • Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Calls Out Trump For Bullying The Press

      Kareem Abdul-Jabbar called out Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for the “insidious political crime” of increasingly “attacking the First Amendment’s protection of a free press by menacing journalists.”

      In an essay for The Washington Post’s PostEverything section, Abdul-Jabbar detailed Trump’s increasingly hostile attacks on the press. On two separate occasions, Trump has thrown Hispanic journalists out of his press conferences.

  • Privacy

    • Snowden: Clinton’s email server ‘a problem’

      “If an ordinary worker at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency … were sending details about the security of the embassies, which is alleged to be in her email, meetings with private government officials, foreign government officials and the statements that were made to them in confidence over unclassified email systems, they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution for it,” he added.

      Snowden also set his sights on GOP White House front-runner Donald Trump for calling him a “total traitor” earlier this summer.

      “It’s very difficult to respond in a serious way to any statement that’s made by Donald Trump,” he said of the outspoken billionaire.

      Clinton’s voter support is fading amid controversy over her technology habits while serving as secretary of State. Critics say her use of a personal storage device prevented accountability of her actions and jeopardized national security secrets.

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • There’s still a chance to save WiFi

      You may not know it, but wifi is under assault in the USA due to proposed FCC regulations about modifications to devices with modular radios. In short, it would make it illegal for vendors to sell devices with firmware that users can replace. This is of concern to everyone, because Wifi routers are notoriously buggy and insecure. It is also of special concern to amateur radio hobbyists, due to the use of these devices in the Amateur Radio Service (FCC Part 97).

09.03.15

Links 3/9/2015: Xiaomi’s Linux Push, Calligra/Krita 2.9.7

Posted in News Roundup at 12:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Special Exclusive: Q&A with Joyent CEO Scott Hammond

    So far, we have utilized open source as a model to innovate quickly and engage with customers and a broad developer community. SmartOS and Node.js are open source projects we have run for a number of years. In November of last year we went all in when we open sourced two of the systems at Joyent’s core: SmartDataCenter and Manta Object Storage Service. The unifying technology beneath both SmartDataCenter and Manta is OS-based virtualization and we believe open sourcing both systems is a way to broaden the community around the systems and advance the adoption of OS-based virtualization industry-wide.

  • Gandi Joins Open Source Initiative Corporate Sponsorship Program

    Sponsorship consolidates technical infrastructure and support for OSI’s web hosting and administrative systems.

  • Building efficiency software available as open source code

    A set of automated calibration techniques for tuning residential and commercial building energy efficiency software models to match measured data is now available as an open source code. The Autotune code, developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is available on GitHub.

  • ORNL-Developed Building Efficiency Software Now Available
  • Project Calico: Open Source, High-Scale Network Fabric For The Cloud

    Cloud developers and operators are facing a challenge: Much of the IT toolkit that has worked well for “silo” architectures and well enough for virtual machine environments isn’t a good match for apps made using containers or for microservices, where components may be not just on different machines but in many locations, and instances may come, go, or multiply. Yesterday’s “network fabric” does not accommodate this activity efficiently or reliably.

  • The True Internet of Things

    For a clear and encouraging look at where this should be going, read Phil Windley. He not only writes eloquently about the IoT, but he has been working on GPL’d open-source code for things and how they relate. To me, Phil is the Linus of IoT—or will be if people jump in and help out with the code. Whether Phil fills that role or not, nobody has more useful or insightful things to say about IoT. That’s why I decided to interview him here.

  • Events

    • Hello, Columbus: Ohio LinuxFest Up Next Oct. 2-3

      Next up on Brother FOSS’s Traveling Salvation Show — pack up the babies and grab the old ladies and everyone go — brings the proverbial tent and revival show to Columbus, Ohio, at the beginning of next month.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome 46 Enters Beta with Flexible Animations, Optimized Image Loading

        After announcing the promotion of the Google Chrome 45 web browser to the stable channel on September 1, Google pushed earlier today, September 2, the Chrome 46 web browser to the Beta channel for testers worldwide.

      • Android developers can now build Chrome custom tabs into their apps

        Google released Chrome 45 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android yesterday, and today we’re learning that the Android update includes support for a new feature called Chrome custom tabs. You can download the new Chrome version now from Google Play, but you won’t see Chrome custom tabs right away — today’s news is primarily aimed at developers. That said, Google has partnered with a few apps already — Feedly, The Guardian, Medium, Player.fm, Skyscanner, Stack Overflow, Tumblr, and Twitter will support custom tabs “in the coming weeks.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • How open-source MySQL keeps Eurovision live

      The European Broadcasting Union, one of the world’s largest broadcasting networks and the organisation behind the Eurovision Song Contest, has sought help to manage the open-source MySQL databases that power its online video and audio streaming services.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.0 review – Good stuff

      I woke up this morning babe, and the Internet was storming, inside of me. And when I get that feeling I know I need some LibreOffice testing. Yes. What happened was, I opened the browser, like, and I was, like, there’s a new, like, LibreOffice, like, and it’s a whole-number version. Yay.

      In all seriousness, LibreOffice 5.0 got me really excited. Yes, I know, it was an almost arbitrary increment of a minor version to a major one, much like Mozilla did with Firefox a few years back. Still, I totally liked the previous version, and for the first time in many years, it showed real, actual potential of being a viable alternative to payware solutions. Let’s see in which direction this latest edition carries the good news and all that hope.

    • Is Office 365 really cheaper than going open source?

      The claim certainly generated plenty of headlines about the benefits of moving from OpenOffice to Office 365. However, it seems that, from the report, some of those savings are tied to the specific scenario facing the local authority in question, while others would diminish over time, as the bulk of the cost difference stems from estimates of lost productivity during years immediately after shifting to OpenOffice.

    • Should I switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice or Microsoft Office? [Ed: yes, it’s Microsoft Jack promoting Microsoft Office again]

  • Sleepy Puppy

  • Funding

    • Open Source’s money issue

      These past years -and months- we have had several examples how lack of funding can cut a project’s ability to develop, patch and maintain its codebase and by project I mean developers not getting adequate money, if no money at all, for what they do. There is really two sides to the same coin here. There’s the one where an entire industry re-uses entire FOSS stacks or components, sometimes without even acknowledging it licence-wise or even just in name. And there’s the other side, where the same industry will not compensate anyone upstream, because the license terms enables simple reuse and distribution of those software components.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD on Beagle Bone Black (with networking)

      I set out to run FreeBSD on my Beagle Bone Black (now dubbed “smurf” by the kids on account of it’s small and blue), for network services. My DSL modem is a crappy under-configurable thing, but I don’t dare to start hacking on it directly because it runs the telephony side of things, too. So I decided to use the Beagle Bone Black to take control of my home network.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Code ninjas earn “belts” with CoderDojo

      But where, one may ask, will we as a global workforce find the next generation of bright young programmers, hardware engineers, and system administrators? This is the problem being addressed—in part—by CoderDojo, an Ireland-based international organization of more than 700 coding clubs worldwide. By engaging young people ages 7-17 in informal, creative environments, independent clubs of youngsters can learn web and application development along with other opportunities to explore technology and learn what excites them. Volunteer adults lead the local clubs, called Dojos, and teams of mentors and helpers are working together to keep the Dojo active and healthy. The kids are usually referred to as Ninjas and can complete activities and earn belts as their skills grow, although most clubs are using color-coded USB bracelets to signify ranks.

    • Stupid RCU Tricks: Hand-over-hand traversal of linked list using SRCU

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Trackpoint falling off Page 10? NOT ON MY WATCH

      Sure, sure the mouse won on desktop and the trackpad won on laptop. IBM’s magnificent Trackpoint is a tiny minority share of the pointer market on both, maybe even headed for extinction. Even Lenovo has been leaving it off some ‘Thinkpads’.

    • Intel GPU memory bandwidth

      Two days ago, I commented I was seeing only 1/10th or so of the theoretical bandwidth my Intel GPU should have been able to push, and asked if anyone could help be figure out the discrepancy. Now, several people (including the helpful people at #intel-gfx) helped me understand more of the complete picture, so I thought I’d share:

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Earth has ‘lost more than half its trees’ since humans first started cutting them down

      The planet of the trees has given way to the planet of the apes. The Earth has lost more than half of its trees since humans first learned how to wield the axe, scientists have found.

      A remarkable study has calculated that there are about 3 trillion trees on the planet today but this represents just 45 per cent of the total number of trees that had existed before the rise of humans.

      Using a combination of satellite images, data from forestry researchers on the ground and supercomputer number-crunching, scientists have for the first time been able to accurately estimate the quantity of trees growing on all continents except Antarctica.

  • Finance

    • Walmart and Walker: Always Low Wages

      What do Governor Scott Walker and Walmart have in common? They talk pay raises in public while cheating their workers of pay.

      When Walmart announced with great fanfare that it was boosting pay for frontline workers, CMD questioned the spin. After all, Walmart is regularly forced to pay back wages between 2007-2012 amounting to an astonishing $30 million according to a U.S. Senate report. This week, Bloomberg reported that Walmart is cutting hours for its workers, robbing many of the benefit of the recent pay hike.

    • The Great Wealth Transfer to the London Elite

      The Guardian has a fascinating piece on house prices which deserves to be read and studied in detail. In London in 2013 the median house price had reached 300,000 while the median salary was 24,600. House prices are 12.2 x salary. That means it is in practice impossible for working people, without inherited wealth, to buy a house.

      But the point is, that it should be equally impossible to rent a house. Landlords look for a rental return of approximately 6% of rental value. So that would put median rent in London at around 18,000 pa, which is a realistic figure. But nobody on a salary of 24,600 before tax can pay 18,000 pa in rent. So we should be at a stage where it is impossible for Londoners who have not inherited homes to live there at all.

    • UK welfare spending: how much does each benefit really cost?

      Benefit spending is constantly in the news but how much do we really know about where the benefits money goes in the UK?

      Well, we have collected the data as part of our annual analysis of UK public spending. It shows how benefit spending dominates the UK’s budget each year – but it also breaks it down in detail.

      What it shows is that the Department for Welfare and Pensions is the biggest spending department in the UK – spending £166.98bn in 2011-12, which is Of that huge sum, £159bn was spent on benefits – an increase of 1.1% on the previous year. That is 23% of all public spending.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Did ‘Ferguson Effect’ Cause Murder Wave? No. Is There a Murder Wave? Unclear

      But there’s a more fundamental problem with the Times story than suggesting that criticizing police violence is (maybe) responsible for a rise in homicides: It’s not clear that the rise in homicides that the story is pegged to actually exists as a nationwide phenomenon.

      The evidence for this supposed murder wave seems to be the responses the Times got when it called police departments across the country. After the story’s lead detailed a rise in homicides in Milwaukee, the story continued: “More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago.” That’s 30 out of a number that the New York Times does not disclose, making it a numerator without a denominator—though the story makes reference to the (steady) crime rate in Newark, which is the 69th largest city in the country, so depending on how thorough the Times‘ survey was, it’s possible that half or more of the cities it contacted did not report any increase in violence.

      And when the story rephrases the data, it’s clear that “increases in violence” is a flexible concept: “Yet with at least 35 of the nation’s cities reporting increases in murders, violent crimes or both, according to a recent survey, the spikes are raising alarm among urban police chiefs.” How many cities actually had a rise in homicides–the statistic that justifies the story’s lead about “cities across the nation…seeing a startling rise in murders”? Remarkably, the Times story doesn’t say.

    • Fox’s Bill O’Reilly Accuses Jorge Ramos Of Enabling Murderers By Opposing His Proposed “Kate’s Law”

      O’REILLY: Now, we want Kate’s Law, which would say, if an aggravated felon — someone convicted of an aggravated felony in the United States is deported and comes back, mandatory five year prison, can get more, all right, in a federal penitentiary. You support that?

      RAMOS: No. Because I don’t think–

      O’REILLY: It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous.

      RAMOS: –you are approaching the problem in a global way. And this is a problem. I’m not here to be defend criminals.

    • Sean Hannity Calls Black Lives Matter A “Racist Group Threatening To Kill Cops And Kill White People”

  • Censorship

    • Twitter Suspends ‘Pirate’ Site Accounts Over Dubious Claims

      Twitter has suspended the accounts of two popular torrent and linking sites in response to dubious takedown notices. The accounts in question didn’t link to any infringing material on Twitter, but were called out because their websites allow people to download pirated movies.

  • Privacy

    • HIV clinic data breach

      “EU needs to finish its work on data protection so that better enforcement and fines of 2% of turnover make this a board room issue for every organisation.”

    • Top HIV Clinic Accidentally Reveals The Identity Of Hundreds Of Its Patients

      The e-newsletter, which contains the latest information about HIV services and treatment, is sent out monthly but normally the details of recipients are hidden. Instead the full list of recipients was visible, therefore revealing the fact that everyone in the address bar is HIV-positive. The clinic then sent an email trying to recall the original one, alerting patients to the mistake, before sending a further email apologising.

    • Judge: Rights of ‘tens of millions violated’ by NSA phone data program

      A federal judge, whose ruling against the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data was overturned by an appeals court last week, maintained Wednesday that he believed the surveillance program violated the constitutional rights of “tens of millions of people every single day.”

      With the case back in his court, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon urged conservative activist Larry Klayman to amend his challenge to the NSA program, suggesting that he would again rule to block the bulk collection before it expires Nov. 29.

    • Episode V: The Snoopers’ Charter Strikes Back!
    • Three French NGOs Challenge French International Surveillance

      Today, the non-profit ISPs FDN and the FDN Federation as well as La Quadrature du Net announced the introduction of two legal challenges before the French Council of State against the Internet surveillance activities of French foreign intelligence services (DGSE). As the French government plans the introduction of a new bill on international surveillance, these challenges underline the need for a thorough oversight of surveillance measures.

  • Civil Rights

    • When the Politics Has to Stop

      There are times when political considerations must give way to the relief of immediate human suffering. The current refugee crisis is one of those times and the UK must take genuine refugees on the same scale as Germany, starting immediately.

    • 6 charts and a map that show where Europe’s refugees are coming from – and the perilous journeys they are taking

      More migrants and refugees are arriving in Europe than ever recorded before as war, persecution and poverty continues to drive people from their homes – and the numbers are still rising.

      One in every 122 people in the world is currently either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum because the “world is a mess”, according to the head of the UN’s refugee agency.

    • Germany raises estimate on refugee arrivals to 800,000 this year

      218,221 asylum applications filed in first half of 2015, and government more than doubles forecast for year from original 300,000

    • British public spreads ‘refugees welcome’ message online

      Yesterday’s tragic images of a young Syrian boy washed ashore on a beach in Turkey have shocked many Britons into using social media to say that those fleeing war and persecution are welcome in the UK.

      People across Britain are calling on the government to address the plight of those trying to escape conflict in their home countries.

    • We asked David Cameron if Britain can do more to help refugees like Aylan Kurdi. His answer? ‘We’re doing enough’

      David Cameron has responded to photographs of a dead Syrian child washed up on a Turkish beach by telling The Independent that Britain is doing enough to help refugees.

      A string of politicians and charities have urged the Prime Minister to do more to improve the desperate plight of those fleeing war-torn countries, following The Independent’s publication of the powerful images of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi.

      Thousands have signed a petition calling on the Government to ensure the UK works with other European Union countries to set and welcome a quota of refugees.

      The pictures were sent to Downing Street, whose response suggests the Prime Minister is content the UK should not do any more to improve the ongoing crisis.

    • Jeremy Corbyn blasts David Cameron for ‘wholly inadequate’ response to refugee crisis after images of drowned Syrian child emerge

      Jeremy Corbyn has hit out at David Cameron over his “wholly inadequate” response to the Syrian refugee crisis, after the emergence of powerful images showing a dead child washed up on beach in Turkey.

      The Labour leadership front-runner said Britain was being “shamed by our European neighbours” by refusing to take in more than just a few hundred Syrian refugees and said we were failing in our duty under international law and “as human beings” to offer those fleeing conflict a place of safety.

    • Refugee crisis: David Cameron is placing himself on the wrong side of history

      Downing Street isn’t saying whether David Cameron has seen the photo of the little boy in the red shirt and the blue shorts. I’m not entirely sure why. Actually, the little boy is still wearing his shoes. I’ve only just noticed that. I think it’s his shoes that make it look like he’s only sleeping.

      Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to look at it. In fact, he shouldn’t have to. None of us should.

      There are lots of very difficult decisions you have to make as prime minister. Whether to go to war. When to make peace. Where the axe of austerity should fall. Where the hand should be stayed.

    • Houston, We Have a Problem: False Equivalencies on Police Violence

      Just as there is no moral equivalence of a rapist and the rape victim, there is none between the police and Blacks. It is nowhere near a 50/50 equivalence of blame between the police and Blacks, though it is not surprising that there may be some Black pastors or some in the NAACP who will equally tell police and Blacks to tone down the rhetoric, or worse tell only Blacks to do so. It is not a school ground situation where a principal may tell two boys who are fighting to just shake hands and make peace.

    • Journalists arrested on terrorism charges in Turkey for using crypto software

      Three journalists working with Vice News have been charged with “engaging in terrorist activity” on behalf of ISIL (ISIS), because one of them used encryption software. A Turkish official told Al Jazeera: “The main issue seems to be that the [journalists'] fixer uses a complex encryption system on his personal computer that a lot of ISIL militants also utilise for strategic communications.” There are no details as to what that “complex encryption system” might be, but it seems likely that it is nothing more than the PGP email encryption software, or perhaps the The Onion Router (TOR) system, both of which are very widely used, and not just by ISIL.

      The correspondent and cameraman for Vice News, who are both British, and their fixer, who is Iraqi but Turkey-based, were arrested last Thursday in Diyarbakir, located in south-eastern Turkey, and an important centre for the country’s Kurdish population. According to The Guardian, the Vice News journalists were covering “recent clashes between Turkish security forces and the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement, the youth wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).”

    • New York TSA agent charged with molesting traveler in bogus search

      A Transportation Security Administration agent at New York’s LaGuardia Airport was arrested after being accused of luring a woman to an airport bathroom under the pretense of a security search and molesting her, authorities said on Friday.

      The suspect, identified by officials as Maxie Oquendo, 40, was wearing a TSA uniform when he brought the 22-year-old traveler to an upstairs bathroom and molested her on Tuesday night, according to Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

  • DRM

    • FCC Fires Wi-Fi Router Salvo in Battle of DRM vs. Open Source

      Digital Rights Management (DRM), the backbone of copyright protection for every form of digital property from games and software to ebooks and music is finally coming to blows with its natural enemy: the open-source software movement.

      The fight is rooted in the longstanding belief of organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that DRM and open source are “fundamentally incompatible” and comes to the fore on an unlikely front: Wi-Fi routers.

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