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01.14.16

Links 14/1/2016: Android Auto Adoption, SSH Hole

Posted in News Roundup at 6:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

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

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

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

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

  • Kernel Space

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

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

    • Linux Foundation Scholarship Recipient: Vaishali Thakkar

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

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 The goal of her project was replacing out-of-date API uses and deprecated functions and macros in the Linux kernel with more modern equivalents.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

    • Participate in the 2016 ODL User Survey
    • Linux Update Improves Processor Support

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

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

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

    • F2FS & XFS File-Systems Updated For Linux 4.5

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

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

    • Reiser4 & ZFS Get Updated For The Linux 4.4 Kernel

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

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

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

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

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

    • PacketFence v5.6 released

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

    • Proprietary

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine or Emulation

    • Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kdenlive 15.12.1 released

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

      • OpenDesktop.org Acquired By KDE-Loving Blue Systems
      • OwnCloud founder sells openDesktop.org

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

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

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Ballnux/SUSE

    • Slackware Family

      • PulseAudio comes to Slackware-current Beta

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

    • Red Hat Family

      • Oversold Conditions For Red Hat (RHT)

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

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

      • Recent Investment Analysts’ Ratings Changes for Red Hat (RHT)
      • Red Hat ships Ansible 2.0 to boost support for hybrid cloud deployments with new automation capabilities
      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Stock Rating Reaffirmed by SunTrust

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

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

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

      • Stock in Momentum: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)
      • HPC research cluster get Red Hat OpenStack private cloud

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

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

      • Fedora

        • Brian Proffitt: How do you Fedora?

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

        • Future Fedora upgrades

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

    • Debian Family

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

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

      • Reproducible builds: week 37 in Stretch cycle

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

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

      • Working as a paid LTS contributor

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

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • CES 2016: Much ado about bots and drones

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

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

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

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

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

    • Zulu embedded inside the Internet of Things

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

    • Phones

      • Tizen

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

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

      • Android

        • Android Auto coming to 40 car models this year

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

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

        • 5 ways IT leaders should prep for the mobile future

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

        • Smartphones Aren’t PC’s Only Nemesis

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

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

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

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

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

        • 5 Big Updates We Want From Android in 2016

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

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

        • Add a to-do list to your notification shade on Android
        • Shopify brings its point-of-sale system to Android devices
        • Android Malware Hacks One-Time Codes
        • Android banking malware SlemBunk is part of a well-organized campaign
        • 2015 was the Year of the Linux Phone … Nah, we’re messing with you

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

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

        • How to Put Android On Your Desktop with Remix OS

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

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

        • ZeroTurnaround Announces JRebel for Android 1.0

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

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

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

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

        • Living with the Pixel C: The best and worst of Android in one device
        • The only small-screened Android phone worth buying is coming to the US

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

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

Free Software/Open Source

  • 3 open source tools for supply chain management

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

  • Zimbra Collaboration Suite (Open Source Edition) review

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

  • Events

    • How conference organizers can create better attendee experiences

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

    • FOSSASIA 2016
    • DevConf 2016 schedule is out!

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

    • 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference Call for Microconferences

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

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Why We Need FOSS Force

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

  • BSD

    • BSD Is Ready for SCALE 14X

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

    • openbsd laptops

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

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

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

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

    • Denemo Release 2.0.2 is imminent
    • From TPP to saving WiFi, the FSF fights for you

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

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

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

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Economic Commons Sense

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

    • Open Access/Content

      • Alternative education can help close IT skills gap

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

      • New York Public Library Releases 180,000 Free Images

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

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

Leftovers

  • The Dark Side of David Bowie

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

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

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

  • How India Post And Customs Office Cheated fossBytes

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

  • Humour

    • New North Korean Weapon Unleashed: Bad Video Editing

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

  • Hardware

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

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

  • Health/Nutrition

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

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

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

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

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

    • ‘Denmark is no longer the country I loved’

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

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

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

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

    • EPA stayed silent on Flint’s tainted water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Thursday
    • Important SSH patch coming soon

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

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

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

    • De Raadt: Important SSH patch coming soon
    • OpenSSH: client bug CVE-2016-0777 and CVE-2016-0778
    • Pretty Nasty DHCP Vulnerabilty Closed in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Hillary Clinton: A Proven Warmonger
    • Russia Is Preparing a Military Response to the Expansion of NATO

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

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

    • Financial collapse leads to war

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

    • From Sarajevo to Madaya: Starvation as Propaganda

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

    • Their Headchoppers and Ours

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

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

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

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

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Sweden asks to question Assange, waits for Ecuador answer

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • M56 chemical spill halts traffic in Greater Manchester

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

    • We Shouldn’t Take Their Oil

      Donald Trump’s slippery slogan is delusional.

      [...]

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

    • We Might Have Finally Seen Peak Coal

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

    • What to make of COP21?

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

    • Romanian village blocks Canadian firm from mining for gold

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

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

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

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

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

  • Finance

    • Winning the Fight for $15 in 2016

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

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

    • “We will not treat you like Africa”

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

    • From Google Payroll to Government and Back Again

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

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Requiem for a News Channel

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

    • David Bowie, Media Critic

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

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

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

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

    • Clinton’s Lead Over Sanders Shrinking Nationwide: Poll

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

    • Revealed: how Jeremy Corbyn has reshaped the Labour party

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

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

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

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

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Lords discusses identity cards
    • The Internet of Things that Talk About You Behind Your Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Cyber: The War India Never Fought, But Lost

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

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

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

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

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

    • U.S. official sees more cyber attacks on industrial control systems
    • We keep too many hacks secret, says ex-NSA director

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • White House Meets With Silicon Valley Execs to “Disrupt” ISIS Online

      This new strategy is based on the government’s firm belief that the real cause of radicalization is because some suburban kid reads a Tweet and then poof! skips Spring Break for jihad. The idea that the roots of radical actions lie deep and involve complex motivations, including being torqued off at bloodthirsty U.S. foreign policy, meh, let’s blame social media and that damn rock ‘n roll you kids like and use it all as a way to clamp down on political speech the government doesn’t like.

      [...]

      I especially love the bit in Item C about providing “metrics to help measure our efforts to counter radicalization to violence.” Exactly how does one gather metrics to prove a negative, i.e., how many people allegedly don’t join ISIS because of something they read online?

    • Big Brother Watch sign letter calling on the Home Secretary to protect encryption

      The Don’t Spy On Us coalition, which Big Brother Watch are a member of, have written to the Home Secretary calling for any plans to weaken encryption in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to be scrapped.

      The indication that the draft Bill will require companies to hand over encrypted data have raised concerns amongst academics, industry experts and civil society groups. These proposals, it is believed, would undermine cyber-security in the UK, putting us at odds with a number of our allies, including the United States and the Netherlands, who have both declared their intentions to protect encryption.

    • Protecting the Choice to Speak Anonymously Is Key to Fighting Online Harassment

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the Department of Education today to protect university students’ right to speak anonymously online, warning that curtailing anonymous speech as part of anti-harassment regulations would not only violate the Constitution but also jeopardize important on-campus activism.

      “Battling gender and racial harassment and threats on college campuses is vitally important,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “But some are calling for blanket bans on the use of platforms that allow anonymous comments, and that’s a counterproductive strategy. Online anonymity is crucial for students who fear retaliation for their political and social commentary. It helps many people avoid being targets of harassment in the first place.”

      EFF’s letter to the Department of Education comes after a number of groups pressed for new federal guidelines for fighting online harassment. EFF agrees with the majority of the recommendations, including ensuring prompt reporting and investigation of all reports of harassment, and disciplining and/or prosecuting perpetrators. However, preemptively removing access to anonymous online speech platforms violates all students’ First Amendment rights—threatening projects like the USG Girl Mafia at the University of Southern California, where students anonymously map locations of assault reports on campus. Anonymity was also essential for student activists at Guilford College in North Carolina, who used an online form to collect anonymous testimonials about racial violence from those who felt unsafe revealing their identities.

    • Investor to AT&T – give us a peek at your NSA data dealings

      An activist investor is pressing AT&T for more details about how it handles government data requests.

      Arjuna Capital said it will ask at the next shareholder meeting for investors to vote on a proposal [PDF] requiring AT&T to issue detailed reports of the company’s policy on providing customer information to the NSA in light of recent revelations of AT&T’s handover of information to the NSA.

      The Arujuna proposal calls on the company to provide shareholders with a one-time report detailing “to the fullest extent possible” its policies regarding NSA requests for user information.

    • Pentagon to Inquire Into NSA Monitoring of Snowden Copycats

      The Defense Department inspector general is initiating an investigation into measures by the National Security Agency to control computer users with access to sensitive information.

    • 12 NSA Patents That Prove the Future of National Security Will Be Bizarre

      Whether or not you care that the NSA has archived your personal information in a server farm somewhere and whether or not you live in America, the future of U.S. national security strategy will effect you. And that future will be governed to no small degree by the technologies employed by the NSA, which doubles as a skunkworks for out there monitoring projects and creates patents at an almost industrial pace.

    • GCHQ is More Than Likely Secretly Monitoring Our Financial and Medical Records
    • Ex-NSA chief defends end-to-end encryption, says ‘backdoors’ will make us less secure

      No one will ever accuse the National Security Agency of being champions of privacy. But General Michael Hayden, a former Director of the NSA, does see some value in preserving secure end-to-end encryption on the web without giving government agencies their own “backdoors” they can use to break it in the name of intelligence gathering. Per CNN, Hayden told a cybersecurity conference in Florida this week that breaking encryption would not make Americans safer even if encrypted communications do pose new challenges for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

    • Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road appeal focuses on corrupt agents

      Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht’s lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.

      The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn’t do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”

      As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Ian Buruma: Wages of Guilt

      The comparison of Germany and Japan with respect to their recent history as laid out in Buruma’s book throws a spotlight on various aspects of the psychology of German and Japanese population, while at the same time not falling into the easy trap of explaining everything with difference in the guilt culture. A book of great depth and broad insights everyone having even the slightest interest in these topics should read.

    • Perry County DA: Investigation into Penn Township shooting of 12-year-old continues

      A 12-year-old Penn Township girl died Monday morning after a bullet fired at her father by a constable during an eviction went through her father’s arm and hit her, state police said today.

      The bullet was fired at Donald Meyer, 57, by Constable Clarke Steele, 46, after Meyer confronted Steele at the door of the Meyers’ apartment with a rifle.

    • 12-year-old girl fatally shot by police in Pennsylvania

      A 12-year-old girl was fatally shot by police in Pennsylvania when an officer served an eviction warrant to her family.

      Ciara Meyer was accidentally killed in her home on Monday after Constable Clarke Steele fired a single shot at her father Donald Meyer, 57, who was allegedly armed with a rifle, Pennsylvania State Police said according to Penn Live.

      The bullet passed through Mr Meyer’s arm, striking Ciara, and the young girl was pronounced dead at the scene.

    • Rebekah Brooks: New claims that phone hacking was rife at The Sun under former editor

      Rebekah Brooks is facing a legal battle over new allegations that phone hacking was “endemic” when she was editor of The Sun, a court has heard.

      Lawyers for News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s UK print business, told a High Court hearing that a “new flank” of hacking claims had been opened against Rupert Murdoch’s daily tabloid.

    • Living the CES security farce

      Are you kidding me?

      I recently returned from the Consumer Electronics (CES) trade show in Las Vegas, and that question has been on my mind. The question doesn’t refer to any of the technologies vying to be the next big thing — although I do wonder how many Bluetooth controlled vibrators does one really need? No, what has me wondering is the big announcement ahead of CES about much tighter security restrictions. I wrote before the show that it would be a disaster with never-ending lines and disgruntled attendees, but that wasn’t exactly how it turned out. It was certainly chaotic, but it was a general surrender even before the event opened.

      CES is among the world’s biggest conferences, with 170,000 people shuffling into Las Vegas for a week. This year, attendees were warned that new security practices would be in place. Among the guidelines were: “Bags will be searched. We suggest you use clear bags (mesh, plastic, vinyl, etc.) to expedite this process”; “Bags and backpacks with many pockets are not helpful. Pockets slow search time”; and “Everyone will be subject to metal detector screening and body pat downs upon entering show premises.”

    • ISIS Supporter Joins Ammon Bundy’s Armed Occupation as Resident Computer Expert

      David Fry told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he drove from Ohio to join the occupation because he knew that the other militants “were pretty good people.”

      “It was (a) miracle, that I got here,” Fry said. “I’ve had quarrels with the government myself, and I feel there has to be some point where people have to put their foot down against the problems.”

      Earlier this week, Fry recorded a video from one of the government buildings that militants are using as a computer and media center. He explained that he had created a website for the occupation.

    • Outrage in Oregon

      Taking over a federal building at the point of a rifle gives protest a bad name.

    • The Stateless and the State of the Union

      The raids have provoked protests across the country. Last Friday, seven people were arrested in New York City in front of the local ICE headquarters, chaining themselves together and blocking traffic. Among those arrested was Claudia Palacios. Her story is remarkable. She was born in Texas and served for five years in the U.S. Marines, with two years in Okinawa and several years around the world deployed with a Marine Expeditionary Unit. Even though she served her country honorably, this U.S.-born military veteran has documentation issues of her own.

    • The human search for a home

      Stories from the Macedonian refugee camps in Gevgelija bordering Greece, and Tabanovce bordering Serbia, tell of kindness, of the shock and powerlessness of being “othered”, and of loving Shakespeare.

    • Hollywood Sure Loves Sequels: For The Second Year In A Row, Zero Actors Of Color Get Oscar Nominations

      This is frustrating, though not totally surprising: Industry insiders had been fretting about a repeat of an all-white acting slate for a while now. But it’s a bad look for an awards show already clinging to relevance like Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to hope that someday he’ll actually win an Oscar.

    • Megyn Kelly Attacks DNC Chair For Inviting A Muslim Representative From CAIR To State Of The Union Address

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

    • Netflix CEO ‘Loves’ Netflix Password Sharing

      For a few years now, HBO has turned a blind eye to users that decide to share their passwords for HBO Go (the streaming app for existing cable providers) and HBO Now (the standalone streaming app for cord cutters). Last year HBO CEO Richard Plepler said the company keeps a close eye on the company’s password sharing stats, but said the sharing isn’t a huge phenomenon.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Have your say on the enforcement of intellectual property rights

      Today the European Commission has published a public consultation on the evaluation and modernisation of the legal framework for the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR).

      With this consultation the Commission seeks views from all interested parties, in particular rightholders, the judiciary and legal profession, intermediaries, public authorities, consumers and civil society, on the question if the legal enforcement framework is still fit for purpose.

    • A Look At The Marrakesh Treaty Ratification In Brazil

      The main goal of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled is to establish set mandatory limitations to ensure access to printed material for the benefit of the visually impaired.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Blocking Security Research: Researchers Barred From Exploring Leaked Archive

        Two researchers for Kaspersky Lab, Costin Raiu and Anton Ivanov, have published an absolutely fascinating tale of how they successfully tracked down a zero day exploit in Microsoft Silverlight. The story is totally worth reading, and it stems from the researchers trying to find an exploit that was described in an Ars Technica article by Cyrus Farivar, concerning a hacker selling exploits to Hacking Team, which was revealed last summer when Hacking Team got hacked and had all its emails (among other things) released.

      • Metallica Sends 41 Page Legal Threat To Canadian Cover Band [Updated]

        Metallica, in some circles, will always be known as the band that sued Napster and promised to go after the band’s own fans that used the platform. For some former fans of the band, nothing the band has done since can redeem it. And I’m assuming the latest move probably won’t help much either: various reports note that a Canadian Metallica tribute/cover band called “Sandman” showed up at a gig recently, only to discover a 41 page cease and desist letter from the band’s lawyers, claiming that they were unfairly profiting off the Metallica name and logo.

        [...]

        No one’s getting confused. No one thinks that it’s actually Metallica. Everyone recognizes what a tribute band is. And the reason they go see and support tribute bands (hell, the reason people create tribute bands in the first place) is because they love and support the original band. None of this is done to be unfair to Metallica, but to celebrate the band, and how does the band react, but with a giant legal threat.

        That’s pretty messed up.

        Update: And… of course, now that the band is getting lots of bad publicity over this, it’s suddenly blaming “an overzealous attorney” and insisting that neither the band nor its management had any idea about this. Maybe time to find better lawyers.

01.13.16

Links 13/1/2016: Desktop Declines, Apple Losing to Chromebook (Gentoo)

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • How Linux won without winning [Ed: clueless anti-Linux article from IDG's Apple booster]

    You rarely see Linux when you boot your computer or turn on your smartphone, but the truth is Linux is everywhere

  • How Well Do You Know Your Linux History?
  • The most exciting Linux and open source Kickstarter projects of 2016 (so far)

    Kickstarter has brought us many successful Linux and open source products, including Mycroft AI, Pebble Time, and Ouya, among others. Some of these raised millions of dollars in funding.

    Who will be next?

    Keep an eye on this slideshow as it evolves over the course of the year. We’ll keep you updated on new projects and let you know who met their funding goals.

  • A Brief Guide to Alternatives to Windows: 2016 Edition

    Now the easiest and simplest route for people who are ready for a change is to buy the Google computer also known as a Chromebook. For folks that want a full Linux there is Crouton, which enables one to run ChromeOS and Linux at the same time.

  • Linux Quiz, Another Poll, and Win-ning

    Today in Linux news, FOSS Force is running a Linux history quiz – fun for the whole family. OpenSource.com is running a poll wondering which Linux distribution you use and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols outlines “what’s new and nifty in Linux 4.4.” Infoworld.com’s Galen Gruman said today that “Linux won without winning” and the community should celebrate. Jack Wallen said Ubuntu messed up when they dropped UbuntuOne while Ubuntu 16.04 is said to be the best Ubuntu in years.

  • Into The Unknown – Sunday, 2016-01-10

    You’d think “Unknown” would actually be known by someone somewhere with such popularity but I can’t find it. How is it more popular than Android/Linux in some places and StatCounter doesn’t know about it?

  • 22 Years of Linux Journal on One DVD – Now Available

    In easy-to-use HTML format, this fully searchable archive offers immediate access to the essential resource for the Linux enthusiast: Linux Journal. The archive contains all 260 issues of the magazine, from the premiere March 1994 issue through the most recent issue, December 2015. That’s 260 issues of Linux Journal, with well over 4,100 articles!

  • Desktop

    • Apple loses more ground to Google’s Chromebook in education market

      Apple is no longer the undisputed head of the K-12 class.

      For the first time, Chromebook sales surpassed 51% in the K-12 market nationwide in the third quarter, according to a recent report by market researcher Futuresource Consulting. The surge reflects a fundamental shift in how American schools are buying tech in bulk and assessing students online, placing an emphasis on low-cost, easy-to-manage machines.

    • Configuring Linux for music recording and production

      If you’re a programmer, you’ll find GNU/Linux systems quite powerful and robust. When it comes to areas like visual arts, video, business, or gaming, you’ll find some tools with promising potential, but lots of bugs, quirks, and challenges. You can accomplish whatever you need in most cases, but the setup and learning curve may not be as smooth as proprietary options on proprietary systems.

      In this article, based on my talk at SCaLE 14x this year, we’ll cover the basics of configuring your Linux system for music making, highlighting what works best and acknowledging the challenges with recommendations on how to find help.

    • Google Chrome Users Will Push Content to Chromecast Without Dedicated Extension
    • Should you install Linux on a gaming laptop?

      Linux is everywhere these days, and Linux gamers have never had more games to play than they do right now. But is Linux really well suited for a gaming laptop? One redditor asked about it on the Linux subreddit and got some interesting answers from his fellow Linux users.

  • Server

    • IBM targets flexible mainframes with open source golang on z Systems

      While IBM sees improved uptake for its mainframes, the HPC supercomputer market is also seeing interest with demand for new systems.

      The Go programming language is being brought onto IBM’s System z mainframes.

      In a post on GitHub, the popular code-sharing site, Big Blue made both its port available and its Linux on IBM z Systems project.

    • All Systems z are Go: IBM ports Google language to mainframes

      IBM has been spotted bringing the open-source Go programming language to its System z mainframes.

      Big Blue made its port available via a GitHub repository and its Linux on IBM z Systems project – which is working on bringing across various other packages, too.

      Developed by Google and released in 2009, Go is designed with an emphasis on concurrency among other features, and is used in Google’s own applications as well as technology from Linux container biz Docker and anti-DDoS outfit CloudFlare.

    • SGI to Build Supercomputer for Climate Research Center

      The “Cheyenne” system is based on SGI’s ICE XA, the latest example of the growing demand for more supercomputing power by weather researchers.

      Supercomputer maker SGI will build the next generation system for the work being done by the National Center for Atmospheric Research regarding climate change and a range of other atmospheric issues.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Next-Gen Media Controller Support Going Into Linux 4.5

      Landing with the Linux 4.5 kernel will be the next-generation media controller support. This “next-gen MC” work is the result of one year of development and enables media controller support at the DVB subsystem, improves the media controller to support other types of V4L devices like radio and TV devices and to extend the media controller functionality so it can be used by other subsystems (DVB / ALSA / IIO). A new ioctl is presented as part of this next-generation support for exposing it to user-space, but for the Linux 4.5 kernel that code is disabled until Linux 4.6 rolls around to ensure the ioctl is in good shape.

    • ​What’s new and nifty in Linux 4.4

      2015 saw a lot of controversy about how Linus Torvalds directs the Linux project. But, that didn’t stop him from delivering the latest update of the Linux kernel: Linux 4.4 on time.

    • KVM Changes Prepped For Linux 4.5

      Paolo Bonzini sent in the first pull request this morning for KVM (Kernel-Based Virtual Machine) changes for Linux 4.5.

    • Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS Officially Released, with 3D Support in Virtual GPU Driver
    • Linux 4.4 released
    • Linux Kernel 4.4 Long-Term Support officially released
    • What’s new in Linux 4.4

      Plus: Apple says it’s not creating software for users to switch to Android from iPhone, and Apple loses ground to Chromebooks in the education market

    • Linux 4.5 Input Updates Bring Changes Even For PS/2 Mice

      If you still are relying upon a PS/2 mouse, it really is time to think about upgrading to a USB mouse, but keep reading as there are some changes with Linux 4.5.

      The PS/2 mouse change is that its module has been reworked in order to “limit number of protocols we try on pass-through ports to speed up their detection time.” Not too exciting but it’s an improvement nevertheless if stuck using this technology dating back to the late 80′s.

    • Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS Is Unofficially Available for Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint

      GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs us today about the availability of a custom Linux 4.4 kernel package for 64-bit Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, and Linux Mint operating systems.

    • ACPI & Power Management Updates For Linux 4.5

      Intel’s Rafael Wysocki has sent in the refreshed ACPI and power management code that’s targeting the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window.

      Of interest with these updates is a debugfs interface for communicating with ACPICA’s new AML debugger so it can be accessed from a new user-space tool, more efficient handling of CPUfreq governors, many CPUfreq driver changes (including Intel’s P-state driver), and updates to the device properties framework.

    • LZ4 Compression Support Is Unlikely For Btrfs

      Patches have been posted several times now, but the Btrfs file-system is unlikely to offer support for LZ4 transparent file-system compression.

    • The Staging Update Is Modestly Sized For Linux 4.5

      Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in his pull requests today for the various kernel subsystems he maintains, including the kernel’s staging area.

      About this cycle’s staging pull, Greg KH wrote in the pull request, “Lots of cleanups and fixes here, not as many as some releases, but 800+ isn’t that bad.”

    • Will Blockchain Technology Transform Transactions?
    • The Dronecode Project Taps Open Source for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Platform

      When the next generation of unmanned “drone” aerial vehicles starts buzzing around above you, don’t be surprised if an open source platform is make it possible. Dronecode, a nonprofit organization developing a common, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), has announced major milestones that include investments from 27 new member organizations and the formation of technical working groups to advance the Dronecode open source platform for UAVs.

    • ADLINK Releases Mac and Linux Drivers for USB DAQ Series
    • ADLINK Releases Mac and Linux Drivers for USB DAQ Series

    • Graphics Stack

      • A High Performance, OpenCL-Based VP9 Encoder

        Ittiam has announced an OpenCL-based VP9 encoder for high performance, power efficient HD video encoding.

        Targeting mobile and consumer hardware where there may not be dedicated VP9 hardware, Ittiam has developed an OpenCL-based encoder that will work with the likes of ARM Mali graphics hardware. Obviously doing this encoding on the GPU in software is more efficient and performant than a CPU-based software encoder. The Samsung S6 was demonstrated with this OpenCL-based encoder for efficient VP9 usage.

      • It Looks Like X.Org Might Be Safe For A Few More Years

        As a follow-up to last week’s X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name, where it looked like the X.Org Foundation would lose their single-letter domain unless getting very lucky, they managed to get their domain renewed today. The X.Org Foundation has yet to issue a statement, but perhaps thanks to all the public pressure the past few days had a helping hand in getting the domain situation sorted out in a timely manner.

      • Partial Fermi Re-Clocking Being Talked About For Nouveau

        Karol Herbst, the independent open-source developer who has been focusing upon Nouveau re-clocking support in recent months, has made a new proposal and patch series concerning NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400/500 “Fermi” re-clocking on this open-source driver.

    • Benchmarks

      • A 10-Way Linux Distribution Battle To Kick Off 2016

        As our first multi-way Linux distribution comparison of 2016, I took ten different modern Linux distribution releases and benchmarked them on the same Intel Haswell system. Being benchmarked were various releases of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Debian, Clear Linux, Fedora, Antergos, and CentOS.

      • 8-Way ARM Board Linux Benchmark Comparison From The Pi Zero & ODROID To Tegra

        The kind folks at LoverPi.com sent over many of the ARM boards seen in this comparison today. They provided the ODROID C1 Plus, Raspberry Pi 2, Orange Pi Plus, Orange Pi PC, and Banana Pi M2. They will also be allowing some other ARM board Linux tests on Phoronix in the future. Beyond those various ARM SBCs, for this performance comparison I also included a Raspberry Pi Zero, NVIDIA Jetson TK1, and NVIDIA Jetson TX1.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Applications 15.12.1 Lands with More Than 30 Bugfixes Across All Apps

        Just a few minutes ago, January 12, 2016, the KDE developers have had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of the KDE Applications 15.12.1 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment.

      • Seasons of KDE

        Before I started working on my Seasons of KDE project, I already did some Junior Jobs. I reviewed Bugs and fixed a few of them. This helped me a lot to get a little deeper into KDE. Especially in getting to know all the tools, which are being used when developing KDE software.

      • KDE: Kubuntu: Status Update, Patreon and Donations notifications.
      • openDesktop.org changes

        Today I have very exiting news to share. Effectively January 1 2016, my company hive01 GmbH has been bought by Blue Systems GmbH. hive01 GmbH runs the network of opendesktop.org sites like KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org, GNOME-Look.org, Qt-apps.org and all the other 30 websites

      • openDesktop.org. 15 years in review

        I launched KDE-Look.org, the first website in the openDesktop.org network nearly 15 years ago. This is a long time and I announced today that I sold the network to Blue Systems. So I think it is time for a look back at how everything started and where we are today.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME supports the work of Software Freedom Conservancy

        The GNOME community has dedicated the last 18 years to building great software for our users. We have created a library of work that is found not only in our desktop but also in various other important software and hardware. As a proud part of the GNU Project, GNOME licenses its software freely to ensure that the work will continue to be free for everyone to use and build on. To do this, we use the GPL (GNU General Public License) and the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License).

      • Manjaro Gnome 15.12 released

        The Manjaro community is proud to present another update to the Gnome Edition installation media.

        This release keeps to the style of the 15.12 release being that it is highly vanilla, but of course is up-to-date at the time of build and includes the latest Manjaro back-end infrastructure. Note this means a very vanilla Gnome configuration, it doesn’t mean ‘minimal’, the full set of Gnome software and other apps are provided out-of-the-box.

      • GNOME Calendar Just Landed in Ubuntu 16.04 Daily Build

        A new package has just landed in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and it’s the promised GNOME Calendar.

        The development of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is still far from being completed, and the Ubuntu Team has started to add some of the packages that have been promised. One of the apps that haven been announced for Ubuntu 16.04 is the GNOME Calendar, and it’s now implemented by default.

      • Manjaro Linux GNOME 15.12 Distribution Officially Released, Includes GNOME 3.18.2

        On January 12, the Manjaro community had the great pleasure of making an official announcement regarding the Manjaro Linux GNOME 15.12 computer operating system, which was made available for download a few days ago.

      • GNOME Control Center to Get a Completely New Design in Future GNOME Releases

        GNOME developer Allan Day wrote a full-length article on January 13, 2016, explaining the last work done by the GNOME Project for the new design of GNOME’s Settings application.

      • A settings design update

        Over recent months, a fair amount of work has been done on the design of GNOME’s settings. Quite a lot of this work is experimental, but I wanted to share the work in progress and explain some of the reasoning behind it.

        A major feature of the latest settings designs is a rethink of the GNOME Settings “shell” (that is, the overall framework of the settings application). We want to move from the current model, that uses an icon grid and fixed window size, to one that uses a list sidebar for navigation, and has a resizeable window.

      • GNOME Settings Is Getting Improved

        Allan Day has written a blog post today about some of the improvements that are being worked on for GNOME’s settings area.

      • GNOME Project Announces Its Support for Software Freedom Conservancy

        The GNOME Project, a non-profit organization that delivers the open-source GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, announced on January 12, 2016, that they are supporting the work of Software Freedom Conservancy.

        GNOME has been building open-source and free software distributed under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) and GPL (GNU General Public License) licenses for almost two decades, and they’re proud members of the GNU Project.

        But to ensure that their work will continue to be free for everyone to use or redistribute, they make an appeal for the community to follow the rules of the open-source licenses before attempting to “borrow” their code and make it proprietary.

  • Distributions

    • Linux Lite 2.8 Beta Arrives with Btrfs Support and New Linux Kernel

      Linux Lite, a distribution created with the purpose of showing users just how easy it is for non-technical folks to use a Linux distribution, has advanced to version 2.8 and is now ready for download and testing.

    • The Best Linux Distros of 2016

      2015 was a very important year for Linux, both in the enterprise as well as in the consumer space. As a Linux user since 2005, I can see that the operating system has come a long way in the past 10 years. And, 2016 is going to be even more exciting. In this article, I have picked some of the best distros that will shine in 2016.

    • 9 Linux distros to watch in 2016

      Last year, right about this time, I listed my top Linux distributions to watch during 2015. Not which ones would be the best. Nor which would be the worst. Simply which ones I believed would be the most interesting, the most fascinating, to watch over the course of the year. I’ve done so again this year. Because it sounded like fun and I wanted to. Enjoy.

    • Solus Devs Working to Fix Boot Problem, People Warned Not to Use Unstable Repo

      The Solus developers have started to implement some of the promised fixes, and they have warned users not to use the unstable repo.

    • Solus Operating System 1.0 Provides New Linux Desktop Experience

      In the Linux desktop world, there is now another viable option for a stable desktop environment, thanks to the Solus Project’s Budgie Linux desktop environment. After following a somewhat meandering path toward its final release, the Solus Project debuted version 1.0 of its Solus Operating System Linux distribution on Dec. 27, providing users with an alternative take to the more common GNOME- and KDE- based Linux distributions. The Solus Operating System’s most distinguishing feature is Budgie, which provides a unique graphical interface for the Linux desktop. A core part of Budgie is the Raven applet technology that provides a simplified notification center for desktop users. While Budgie is the flagship technology of the Solus Operating System, it also will work with other Linux distributions, including Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and openSUSE, providing an alternative Linux desktop environment choice. Alongside the new desktop are common applications to many Linux distributions, including the Mozilla Firefox Web browser, the Rhythmbox music player, the VLC media player, the Transmission bittorret client and the HEX Internet Relay Chat client. In this slide show, eWEEK examines some of the key highlights of Solus Operating System 1.0.

    • Arch Family

    • Slackware Family

      • Slackware Linux 14.2 Beta 1 Brings Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS and Pulse Audio

        Slackware Linux, a complete 32-bit and 64-bit multitasking “UNIX-like” system that is currently based around the 4.4 Linux kernel series, has been upgraded to version 14.2 Beta 1 and is now ready for download.

        Slackware Linux is probably the oldest Linux distribution that’s still being maintained, and it managed to keep the same kind of development model for a very long time. There are no official repos and most of the changes, fixes, and new features are added by its creator, Patrick Volkerding.

      • Slackware 14.2 Beta Released, Now Uses PulseAudio

        First off, Slackware 14.2 has finally begun using PulseAudio. Years after other Linux distributions switched to PulseAudio, the day has come for Slackware since they upgraded to BlueZ 5. With BlueZ 5, the ALSA support has been dropped and now presents a hard dependency on PulseAudio. From there, the project basically had to make the switch.

      • Current (pre-release) ChangeLog for x86_64

    • Red Hat Family

      • Top Stocks of the day: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)
      • Red Hat’s Ansible 2.0 brings new power to devops

        Ansible, the Python-powered IT automation and configuration framework that recently became a Red Hat property, officially released its 2.0 version today. Its new features satisfy two needs that are sometimes deeply contradictory: Make the product more powerful and useful, but don’t break compatibility with the already large and growing culture of Ansible scripts and modules.

        The Ansible scripts known as Playbooks have long lacked a mechanism to group together tasks in logical units or elegantly perform error handling. Version 2.0 can do so thanks to blocks. Actions described within a block only take place if a given set of conditions are met.

      • Ansible 2.0 Has Arrived

        After a year of work, we are extremely proud to announce that Ansible 2.0 (“Over the Hills and Far Away”) has been released and is now generally available. This is by far one of the most ambitious Ansible releases to date, and it reflects an enormous amount of work by the community, which continues to amaze me. Approximately 300 users have contributed code to what has been known as “v2” for some time, and 500 users have contributed code to modules since the last major Ansible release.

      • Red Hat JBoss Fuse – Switchyard in OSGi

        So what exactly is SwitchYard? If you have ever played with JBoss Fuse Service Work, then you will probably know this already.

        SwitchYard is a structured framework for developing integration applications using the design principles and best practices of Service Oriented Architecture.

      • Why Red Hat heaps praise on naysayers

        Outspoken employees who complain about problems often get branded as malcontents. Even if they call attention to important failings in their organization, they tend to lose their stature with senior leaders.

      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Receives “Buy” Rating from SunTrust

        SunTrust reissued their buy rating on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research note published on Monday, MarketBeat reports. SunTrust currently has a $73.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock.

      • BMO Capital Markets Begins Coverage on Red Hat Inc (RHT)

        BMO Capital Markets began coverage on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research note published on Thursday, The Fly reports. The brokerage issued an outperform rating and a $97.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock.

      • Why CIOs should change their minds (and their organizations) once a year

        Flexibility is paramount. That is our mantra and our discipline throughout the Red Hat IT organization. It has to be, because it allows us to change rapidly when needed. And with the pace of technology change, we run into that need quite often.

        At Red Hat, we’ve committed to changing our IT organization annually to ensure that our focus remains on the biggest business opportunities at the time. Each year, we review our priorities, centralize some functions, disperse some functions, add new organizations, remove organizations, and adjust elsewhere. And by setting that expectation with everyone on the team, they know that their responsibilities and the services they are accountable for may change over time.

      • Red Hat Ansible 2.0: a ‘playbook’ for agentless automation

        We know that Red Hat is a major player in the open source enterprise space (on many levels) and Ansible was (and still is) a company (now an internal Red Hat brand) that makes “agentless” orchestration and configuration management tools.

      • Insider Selling: Red Hat Inc (RHT) Director Sells 18,972 Shares of Stock
      • Red Hat Survey: Mobile Investments Are Paying Off

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced results from a recent mobile measurement survey, which revealed that 74 percent of respondents whose organizations use key performance indicators (KPIs) to some extent to measure mobile application success are achieving positive return on investment (ROI), demonstrating that prior investments in mobile have paid off. Red Hat’s mobile measurement survey revealed that 85 percent of organizations are using KPIs to measure mobile app success, while nine percent use other means and the remainder are not measuring mobile success at all.

      • The SLOTH attack and IKE/IPsec

        The SLOTH attack released today is a new transcript collision attack against some security protocols that use weak or broken hashes such as MD5 or SHA1. While it mostly focuses on the issues found in TLS, it also mentions weaknesses in the “Internet Key Exchange” (IKE) protocol used for IPsec VPNs. While the TLS findings are very interesting and have been assigned CVE-2015-7575, the described attacks against IKE/IPsec got close but did not result in any vulnerabilities. In the paper, the authors describe a Chosen Prefix collision attack against IKEv2 using RSA-MD5 and RSA-SHA1 to perform a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack and a Generic collision attack against IKEv1 HMAC-MD5.

        We looked at libreswan and openswan-2.6.32 compiled with NSS as that is what we ship in RHEL7 and RHEL6. Upstream openswan with its custom crypto code was not evaluated. While no vulnerability was found, there was some hardening that could be done to make this attack less dangerous that will be added in the next upstream version of libreswan.

      • Fedora

        • Project Fi and replacement phones: Android could learn from Fedora…

          I’ve had really good luck with smartphones (/me knocks on wood) over the years. I’ve dropped phones a number of times, but other than a few scuffs and scratches, no permanent damage. (My first-generation iPhone did have an unfortunate encounter with a softball years ago, but since then – smooth sailing.) This weekend, though, I biffed the Nexus 6 just wrong on the tile floor and the screen got the worst of it.

          This is one of the big downsides for Project Fi, in my opinion. With normal carriers, I can saunter into a physical store and have a replacement same-day. Or next morning if it happens to be 11 p.m. when the phone has its unfortunate incident. Project Fi? No such luck.

        • First Fedora 23 Updated Lives Available!

          Back on Dec 3rd, the latest iteration of Fedora, Fedora 23, came to being and now the first Updated Lives for 23 are available in torrent and raw iso download format from: (Includes GNOME,KDE,LXDE,MATE,CINNAMON,SOAS,XFCE)

          Fedora 23 Updated Lives

          Additional Spins available from:

          Fedora Spins

          All Versions also available via Official Torrent from:

          All Official Fedora Torrents

          If you are unfamiliar with upgrading between versions please take a read of either the Release Article over at:

          Fedora Magazine

        • Upgrading from the previous stable Fedora release

          One of the big topics we’re working on in Fedora QA right now is what we sometimes refer to as ‘N-1 upgrades’. The Fedora release process is expressly designed such that each release does not go EOL until a short time after the next-but-one release comes out (so Fedora 22 will not go EOL until a month after Fedora 24 comes out). This has a couple of benefits which are generally agreed to be valuable: you always have at least a couple of Fedora stable releases to choose from at any given time (so you have the previous one to fall back on if the current one turns out to be a complete lemon for your purposes), and – theoretically at least – if you maintain long-lived Fedora systems, you don’t have to upgrade to each new release if you don’t want to; you can always skip one.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Developers Preparing For PHP 7.0 In Stretch

        Debian’s PHP package maintainers are preparing for PHP 7.0 packages for Debian Stretch that will also contain some changes compared to how they packaged PHP5.

      • New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2015)

        The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

        Stein Magnus Jodal (jodal)
        Prach Pongpanich (prach)
        Markus Koschany (apo)
        Bernhard Schmidt (berni)
        Uwe Kleine-König (ukleinek)
        Timo Weingärtner (tiwe)
        Sebastian Andrzej Siewior (bigeasy)
        Mattia Rizzolo (mattia)
        Alexandre Viau (aviau)
        Lev Lamberov (dogsleg)
        Adam Borowski (kilobyte)
        Chris Boot (bootc)

      • Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, December 2015

        A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

      • 2016 Resolutions

        People these days often do think about what worked well in the last year that they are proud of, what didn’t work so well and what they plan to change the coming year. For me a fair amount of the resolutions were about my name. One of them was getting rid of my old name from the Debian—Project Participants page.

      • Debian Domination, Unstable Fedora, Simple Elementary

      • Derivatives

        • Call for testing: 2.0~rc1

          You can help Tails! The first release candidate for the upcoming version 2.0 is out. We are very excited and cannot wait to hear what you think about it :)

        • Tor-Based Tails 2.0 Anonymous Live CD Gets Closer to Release, RC1 Is Ready for Testing

          The development cycle of the upcoming Tails 2.0 amnesic incognito live system continues today, January 13, 2016, with the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) build, which is now available for download and testing.

          Tails 2.0 RC1 brings a great number of changes since the Beta build, among which we can mention support for the passphrase strength indicator in the GNOME Disk Utility (Disks) software, the Tor Browser 5.5 Alpha 6 anonymous web browser based on the Tor project, and the replacement of the Claws Mail app with the Icedove email client.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Weekly phpMyAdmin contributions

    The biggest task was focused on codebase cleanup. As Microsoft is ending support for old Internet Explorer version, we’ve decided to do same thing for next major release. This allowed us to remove some compatibility code and also upgrade jQuery to 2.x branch, which removes support for older browsers as well.

  • What are the best tools for open source web development?

    Apache: This is the most important web server without which no developer can do anything.

  • ownCloud Developers Are Planning on Making the Upgrades More Robust

    The ownCloud devs have announced earlier that they are planning on making the upgrades for their powerful and open-source ownCloud Server more robust.

  • Open source communities need mentors

    To me it seems a natural pairing because they are two things I am passionate about and things that I do and use every single day. So many of the principles of open source correlate with the positive outcomes most desired for children: collaboration, participation, and transparency (honesty, integrity, openness). For children who are interested in how things work, open source software can give them that behind-the-scenes peek. I love teaching children about open source because there are so many ways they can get their hands dirty and get involved in communities and meet people who share their particular interests. There are many projects that were developed with children in mind, like the great work done by Sugar Labs.

  • Opening your mind to open source

    As we embark on another new year it’s always worth casting our minds back over the previous twelve months. And what a bumpy 12 months they were for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (Meta) region.

    Declining oil prices, currency fluctuations, and political instability all played their role in fuelling the turbulence, with IDC taking the prevailing macroeconomic and political situation into account when we revised our forecast for META ICT spending in 2015 down from $270 billion to $250 billion.

  • A new year of opportunities and risks for the open web

    Looking forward to 2016, one thing we can be sure of is that there is much opportunity—and, at the same time, risk—for the open web. I believe efforts like Let’s Encrypt, which started and really heated up last year, will play a big role in making encryption everywhere more of a reality.

  • Events

    • Schedule of DevConf.cz 2016 is out!

      A couple of days ago, DevConf.cz 2016 schedule has been published. It’s bigger than ever before. This year, we have over 200 talks and workshops! There aren’t many bigger events devoted to open source in Europe. And I can finally enjoy it more because after 4 editions (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) I’m no longer the main organizer.

    • Google I/O 2016 event dates and location revealed

      Pichai tweeted out the news Tuesday, noting that the event will take place in the “neighborhood where it all started 10 ys ago: Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View.” Details about conference sessions, ticket sales, etc., have not been updated yet on the Google I/O website.

    • Jos Poortvliet: I’ll be at SCALE and FOSDEM, how about you?

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Shutting down persona.org in November 2016

        Hi Everyone,

        When the Mozilla Identity team transitioned Persona to community ownership, we committed resources to operational and security support throughout 2014 [1], and renewed that commitment for 2015 [2]. Due to low, declining usage, we are reallocating the project’s dedicated, ongoing resources and will shut down the persona.org services that we run.

        Persona.org and related domains will be taken offline on November 30th, 2016.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Apache Spark 1.6: Strong Typing, Faster Throughput

      The release of Spark 1.6 continues the evolution of the data analysis platform toward greater performance and usability, according to Reynold Xin, co-founder of Spark sponsoring company Databricks. He noted that the number of project contributors has topped 1,000, a 50 percent increase in the past year.

      He points to automatic memory management among the ways the new release makes life simpler for users.

      “Now, instead of users having to tune memory settings, it figures it out for you. Most users don’t understand tuning,” he said.

    • Citrix Exits Cloud Server Business

      The CloudPlatform technology is based on the Apache CloudStack open-source project that Citrix helped to start. Citrix contributed the CloudStack code to the Apache Software Foundation in April of 2012. The CloudStack technology itself came to Citrix by way of the acquisition of cloud.com in July 2011.

    • Apache Apex Joins a Slew of Free Tools for Next-Gen Big Data

      As I’ve noted in some recent posts, the Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, squarely turned its focus to Big Data tools in 2015. There are also clear signs that it is continuing to do so as 2016 launches. One of the more interesting tools on this front is Kudu, which Cloudera has offered to the Apache Software Foundation for open source stewardship. Cloudera has a whole whitepaper on Kudu here, but its far from the only big data tool that is attracting TLC from Apache.

  • CMS

    • Drupal Hardens Its Security in Response to Criticism

      The open-source Drupal content-management system (CMS) is talking steps to help protect against multiple potential risks that have been publicly revealed. On Jan. 6, security research vendor IOactive first disclosed the issues, which are focused on the Drupal update process. The Drupal project’s security team is aware of the concerns and is fixing all the issues, though it is also downplaying the overall risk.

    • Kicking the Tires on a CMS Solution? Start Here.

  • LLVM

    • The Radeon Machine Scheduler Will Soon Come To AMDGPU LLVM

      Months after Axel Davy originally posted his patch-set for the SI machine scheduler to enhance the performance of AMD GCN GPUs on the open-source driver, it looks like the code will soon land in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end.

      Axel posted his work on this Southern Islands machine scheduler months ago for AMD’s LLVM GPU back-end. As tests showed back in August, this scheduler helps significantly boost the performance for certain workloads. One of the Phoronix readers that tested out this scheduler at the time exclaimed, “The si scheduler is such a huge performance boost! Not only it is faster, but now radeonsi is faster than Catalyst in *all* tests, sometimes by a wide margin!”

    • LLVM / Clang 3.9 Is Now Under Development

      LLVM Clang 3.8 has been branched from trunk, thus making LLVM Clang 3.9 the new version under development.

      LLVM developers were right on time for branching LLVM 3.8.0 and they are now preparing for the LLVM 3.8 release candidate. A LLVM 3.8 RC2 release is planned meanwhile for 27 January while the official release of LLVM 3.8.0 is expected around mid-February.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Stallman’s One Mistake

      We all owe [Richard Stallman] a large debt for his contributions to computing. With a career that began in MIT’s AI lab, [Stallman] was there for the creation of some of the most cutting edge technology of the time. He was there for some of the earliest Lisp machines, the birth of the Internet, and was a necessary contributor for Emacs, GCC, and was foundational in the creation of GPL, the license that made a toy OS from a Finnish CS student the most popular operating system on the planet. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without [Stallman], open source software wouldn’t exist.

    • The Future of the Free Software Foundation: Your Input Requested

      Addressing questions about the Free Software Foundation (FSF)’s future direction seems long overdue. For that reason, the FSF’s current online survey seems a step in the right direction.

      In many ways, the survey is a necessity. Although the FSF regularly tackles too many major issues to count, its entire operating budget for 2013 was $1,250,498, approximately five percent of the budget for the more corporate-oriented Linux Foundation during the same year. Under such budget restraints, some selection seems inevitable if the FSF is to avoid spreading itself too thin.

    • Friday Free Software Directory IRC meetup: January 15th

  • Public Services/Government

    • France Parliament: source code should be made public

      The French Parliament wants to make it mandatory for the country’s public administrations to make public the source code of its custom-built software solutions. An amendment to France’s upcoming law for the Digital Republic was adopted by France’s lower house on Wednesday.

    • ‘France should give priority to free software’

      The French government should make the use of free software a priority in its Law for the Digital Republic (La République numérique), says April. The French free software advocacy group is asking Members of Parliament to reintroduce such a requirement into the draft law. The French government has ignored April’s proposal; the 3rd most-popular suggestion resulting from last year’s online public consultation.

  • Licensing

    • Qt open source licensing changed and product structure updated to strengthen community and extend adoption

      The Qt Company has announced changes to the open source licensing and product structure of the Qt cross-platform application development framework that will further strengthen the Qt community and make additional functionality available to software developers using the open source license. A new “start-up” license has also been announced that will help small businesses that want to utilize Qt in commercial desktop and mobile applications.

    • Qt Does Some Licensing Changes

      Qt will be introducing a “start-up license” to help small companies make use of the Qt tool-kit for commercial desktop and mobile applications. The Qt open-source licenses have also now been updated.

    • Qt is Guaranteed to Stay Free and Open – Legal Update

      The KDE Free Qt Foundation already played an important role when Nokia bought Trolltech, the original company behind Qt, and later sold Qt to Digia, which then founded The Qt Company. The contracts are carefully worded to stay valid in cases of acquisitions, mergers or bankruptcy. The history of the past 17 years has shown how well the legal set-up protects the freedom of Qt – and will continue to protect it in the future.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Carmakers Open IP Vaults To Boost Electric Car Demand

      Several carmakers are aggressively sharing intellectual property and patents in a collective bid to help the fledging vehicle type catch on in the marketplace as a mainstream alternative.

    • Open Data

      • UK Minister wants a more ‘data-driven government’

        The UK government wants to become more data-driven by using its own data and maintaining high-quality published data, Matthew Hancock, Minister of the Cabinet Office, said during the ODI (Open Data Initiative) Summit in November.

      • Open data in Austria: a strategy also shared with the private sector

        Companies, NGOs, industries, research centres, scientists and citizens in Austria can now publish their own data under an open license though a dedicated portal, Martin Kaltenböck, from Austrian-based Semantic Web Company, said during the ODI Summit 2015 last November.

    • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • libxml++ 3.0 soon

      Kjell Ahlstedt has done some work on a new parallel-installable version of the libxml++ API, to fix some mostly-minor but annoying things that needed ABI breaks. You can see the code in libxml++’s git master.

    • Go language expands to IBM mainframes

      IBM hopes that Google’s language, already in use by Docker and Kubernates, will stretch the open source ecosystem for its mainframes

Leftovers

  • Alton Towers announces first VR rollercoaster

    UK theme park Alton Towers has announced a new rollercoaster passengers ride while wearing virtual reality headsets.

  • Google X, Alphabet’s Secret Research Division, Just Got A New Logo And A New Plan

    When Google founders decided to restructure the company under Alphabet’s umbrella, everyone’s eyes were set upon the future of Google X. This secretive division of Google works on turning the moonshot ideas into reality. In a related development, the company has now renamed Google X as X and revealed its new logo and a better future plan.

  • Dumb Criminal Agrees To Take SnapChat Selfie With Robbery Victim, Is Caught Quickly

    We used to do cover a certain type of story around here, where we informed our readers about some truly dumb criminals doing truly dumb things with technology. We stopped doing those posts more recently, in part because they were starting to feel stale and in part because we didn’t want to force our readers to confront the true levels of stupidity that exist on this planet. But, like a member of the Corleone family, they just keep pulling me back in.

    Victor Almanza-Martinez is just an armed robber looking for love in all the wrong places apparently, as he and two others decided to rob four people of their belongings in California, but took a break from the robbery to exchange SnapChat information and take a selfie with one of the female victims.

  • Man Arrested for Armed Robbery After Taking Snapchat Selfie with Victim

  • Science

    • Against School

      In this previously unpublished essay, Aaron Swartz sought an explanation for the persistent—and possible deliberate—failures in our school system.

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Venezuela’s Food Revolution Has Fought Off Big Agribusiness and Promoted Agroecology

      Just days before the progressive National Assembly of Venezuela was dissolved, deputies passed a law which lays the foundation for a truly democratic food system. The country has not only banned genetically modified seeds, but set up democratic structures to ensure that seeds cannot be privatized and indigenous knowledge cannot be sold off to corporations. President Maduro signed the proposal into law before New Year, when a new anti-Maduro Assembly was sworn in.

    • The Barbarism of Rick Snyder: a Statement and Curse

      Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, aided by craven functionaries, cut public spending by replacing the clean Lake Huron water that had been the domestic water source for Flint, Michigan with the Dupont- and GM- poisoned water of the Flint River. Doubling down on the racist, class-oppressive carelessness of making the people of Flint consume this toxic waste, an act unimaginable for wealthier, whiter communities, Snyder allowed the water be treated with ferric chloride, a coagulating agent that would somehow magically make the meandering channel of old waste water that is the Flint River potable. Instead, it greatly accelerated the leaching of lead into the supply; hence, Snyder’s austerity-driven actions have resulted in exposing all of the children of Flint, not to mention the adults, to the dangers of massive lead poisoning.

    • My Right to Die

      Every story has a beginning. This one starts in late 2001, when my father-in-law fractured three of his ribs. Harry was a retired physician, and after a thorough workup that he insisted on, it turned out that his bone density was severely compromised for no immediately apparent reason. Further tests eventually revealed the cause: He had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.

      Harry’s cancer was caught early, and it progressed slowly. By 2007, however, it had taken over his body. When my wife saw him in early 2008, she remarked that he looked like someone in a lot of pain but trying not to show it—despite the fact that he was taking oxycodone, a powerful opiate.

    • Hillary Clinton in 2008: “Since When Do Other Democrats Attack Each Other on Universal Healthcare?”

      Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been excoriating fast-rising rival Bernie Sanders for his proposal to adopt a single-payer universal health care plan. But in 2008, she decried the notion that a fellow Democrat would attack another for proposing universal coverage.

      While Clinton was campaigning against then-Senator Barack Obama, his campaign sent out a mailer criticizing her plan to mandate health insurance coverage. In response, Clinton called a press conference.

      “Since when do Democrats attack each other on universal healthcare?” Clinton asked. “I thought we were trying to achieve Harry Truman’s dream.”

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Moammar Gadhafi Warned U.K.’s Tony Blair That Ousting Him Would Open the Door to Jihadis

      Transcripts of two fraught telephone conversations between the U.K.’s Tony Blair and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 show Gadhafi warning that his removal from power would enable jihadi groups to seize control of Libya and use it as a staging ground to attack Europe.

      Blair, who was not Britain’s prime minister at the time, reportedly decided to act as an intermediary between Gadhafi and the West because of the contact the two men had while Blair was in office. Blair confirmed that both London and Washington, D.C.—presumably meaning Hillary Clinton, then-secretary of state and current Democratic presidential candidate—were aware of the calls.

    • Hellfire Missile Shipped to Cuba Targets U.S./Cuban Relations

      On Thursday, January 7, 2016, the date known in Latin culture as the one when the three Kings of the traditional Christian nativity story drop in on children, bearing gifts, the Wall Street Journal published the news that a very special gift had been dropped in Cuba: a made-in-the-USA air-to-ground Hellfire missile. Presumably, the offering would have delighted Cuba’s president, as he might finally having a look inside yet another one of the instruments that the U.S. had prepared for doing away with Cuba’s Castros.

      But what really lies beneath this extraordinary journalistic scoop brought to light by Devlin Barrett and Gordon Lubold more than 19 months after it actually took place?

      After closely reading the article and the comments it has engendered, including those from well-known politicians like John McCain, a number of questions surface that must be evaluated as part of any meaningful analysis.

    • America Has Grown Cowardly: ISIS is No Threat to Our Existence Whatsoever

      ISIL is no joke, but its potential for destruction pales in comparison to the danger once posed by the Soviet Union.

    • The Biggest Threat

      Why do we have over 7,000 nukes in our arsenal – enough to destroy the world several times over? Why are the contracts for “modernization” speeding through the procedural hoops faster than anyone can keep track of them?

    • Home Office, Saudi Arabia and the need for a ‘safe space’
    • Saudi Arabia and Israel: An Axis of Convenience

      Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows. Take Israel and Saudi Arabia for instance. The two Middle Eastern powers might be expected to have zero common ground. Israel is the arch-colonizer of Arabs and Muslims, while Saudi Arabia governs the motherland of the Arabs and the two capitals of Islam, Mecca and Medina. The two do not even have formal diplomatic relations.

      Yet since 2006, and especially since the 2011 Arab Spring, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been close de facto allies in what might be called the Crescent Wars: a sustained assault against the “Shia Crescent” (Iran, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah, and to some extent Iraq) by a US-led coalition (including both Western and Sunni Muslim forces).

    • U.S. Media Condemns Iran’s “Aggression” in Intercepting U.S. Naval Ships — in Iranian Waters

      It goes without saying that every country has the right to patrol and defend its territorial waters and to intercept other nations’ military boats that enter without permission. Indeed, the White House itself last night was clear that, in its view, this was “not a hostile act by Iran” and that Iran had given assurances that the sailors would be promptly released. And this morning they were released, exactly as Iran promised they would be, after Iran said it determined the trespassing was accidental and the U.S. apologized and promised no future transgressions.

    • The reckless power behind the throne

      In the past year, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has abandoned the cautious fence-sitting that long characterised its diplomatic style in favour of an unprecedented, hawkish antagonism. That this transformation coincides with the meteoric rise of a previously little known prince – 30 year-old Mohammad bin Salman – is no accident; it seems that the prince is now the power behind the throne.

      Since the death of the first king of modern Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz, in 1953, the kingdom has been ruled by an increasingly elderly succession of six of his 45 sons; the last incumbent, Abdullah, died last January aged 90 and was replaced by the present king, Salman, who is 81 and rumoured to be suffering from dementia. The youthful, sabre-rattling Prince Mohammad, insiders say, is Salman’s favourite son by his third and favourite wife, Fahda.

      Salman has one remaining brother – 75 year-old Muqrin – who would normally have been next in line for the throne. Whether alone, or at the instigation of others, Salman removed Muqrin from the succession three months after he became king. Prince Mohammad now moved up the line of succession to become ‘deputy Crown Prince’, with only his 56 year-old cousin, Mohammad bin Nayef between him and the throne.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Reporter Sues Gitmo Over Audio Censorship at Military Trials

      In 2012, New Yorker reporter Mattathias Schwartz covered the tribunal of suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on two occasions at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Schwartz was allowed to sit in a separate room behind three panes of soundproof glass and watch the tribunal in real time, but a 40-second delayed audio feed inside the room ensured that no classified information was inadvertently leaked.

      But Schwartz noticed a problem. What Schwartz saw from behind the glass didn’t jibe with what he heard over the audio. That’s why the reporter is now suing the Department of Defense and several other agencies to get some answers.

    • Judge Calls Out Prosecutors For Bogus Subpoena Gag Orders

      At long last, it appears some prosecutors will no longer be putting BS gag orders on their subpoenas. Eastern District of New York judge Raymond J. Dearie has expressed his displeasure with the language found on nearly all subpoenas issued by the Brooklyn, New York US Attorney’s Office.

      With the exception of National Security Letters, recipients of subpoenas are free to inform the targets of the documents as well as discuss them publicly. (The exception is financial institutions served in grand jury investigations related to fraud or drug trafficking.) But that doesn’t stop prosecutors and investigators from adding misleading statements to their subpoenas. They can only ask recipients not to disclose anything. They can’t demand it. That’s called “prior restraint” — something the government should be taking great care to avoid. But some still make it appear as though the recipient has no choice but to comply and shut up.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Looking back at the corporate circus inside COP21

      The “sponsors” board at the entrance to COP21/Adam Ramsay

      The world finally has a climate deal. But however triumphant our leaders and the mainstream media may be, let there be no doubt – the Paris climate agreement fails justice, it fails our future, and leaves so many behind.

      Rich countries have been excluded from liability for loss and damage in the poorest, most vulnerable and least responsible nations. Human rights have been removed from the text. The 1.5°C goal is only aspirational. A peak date for emissions is absent. The concept of “emissions neutrality” has been inserted, implying pollution can continue, but with dodgy offsetting, technofixes and geoengineering. Numerous other loopholes and injustices have been allowed through.

      With this in mind, lets take a look back at the environment in which this deal was hashed out.

    • Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Look of a Badly Oiled Planet

      When it comes to news about Saudi Arabia, the execution of an oppositional Shiite cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, has topped the headlines recently — and small wonder. Aging King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud and his 30-year-old son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the new defense minister who has already involved his country in a classic quagmire war in Yemen, clearly intended that death as a regional provocation. The new Saudi leadership even refused to return the cleric’s body to his family for burial, but interred it with the many al-Qaeda terror suspects killed at the same time, some beheaded. After death, in other words, al-Nimr was left in uncomfortable company. Think of it as the ultimate beyond-the-grave insult. The provocative message embedded in the announcement of his execution was so obvious that, in Shia Iran, crowds supporting that country’s religious hardliners (with their own hideous execution policies) promptly torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran. In the following days, as the Saudis broke diplomatic relations with Iran, ended a failing truce in Yemen (promptly bombing a home for the blind and also hitting the Iranian embassy in Sana’a), and rallied Sunni neighboring states to similarly break ties or at least downgrade relations, the whole, roiling region hit the news as war fears rose.

    • Huge U.S. coal company declares bankruptcy

      One of the nation’s largest coal companies, Arch Coal, filed for bankruptcy Monday, making it the second company with large Western mines to seek Chapter 11 restructuring in recent months.

      The St. Louis-based company announced that it expects to continue to operate its mines and pay its 4,600 employees while it seeks a bankruptcy court’s approval for its debt restructuring. Arch said its lenders had agreed to reduce its debt by more than $4.5 billion, but that deal would have to be approved by the court.

      Responding to its employees’ and retirees’ fears, Arch said it does not anticipate major layoffs or disruptions to its pensions due to the bankruptcy. But it conceded that market conditions may impact staffing. The company operates two surface mines in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin as well as the underground West Elk mine in Somerset, Colorado. It has proposed opening a surface mine in southeastern Montana, the Otter Creek project. It also has mines in Appalachia and Illinois.

    • Anonymous Takes Down Nissan’s Website Against Illegal Whale Hunting In Japan

      With changing times, the international community has banned the whale hunting practice. However, it’s a common knowledge that Japanese people call whale meat their “nostalgia food” as it connects them to their culture and heritage. As a protest against Japan’s stance on whale hunting, Anonymous hacking collective has taken down Nissan’s website to put indirect pressure on the government.

  • Finance

    • The Chapo Secrets the Press Should Be Squealing About

      If Penn is sincere in his stated desire to end the war on drugs, ending the profits for American banks tied to illicit trafficking would need to be one of the first steps.

      But he doesn’t name those companies that are laundering Chapo’s money, which will continue to be laundering Sinaloa cartel money even as Guzmán gets removed from the network.

      Of course, Spiny and El Alto probably share Chapo’s desire to keep those names out of print, in part because they’re part of the power structure that the banks bolster, in part because banks sometimes narc on their customers to save their own hides.

    • The Secret of El Chapo’s Success: Diversification

      By some estimates, the just-nabbed billionaire drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, supplies more than half of the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana that comes into the United States. But not all of those drugs were created equal in his eyes. While pot undoubtedly helped El Chapo get his start, it’s no longer the key to his dominion.

    • How Years Of Welfare Politics Is Leaving Thousands To Freeze This Winter

      As winter sets in around the country, thousands of the nation’s poor are struggling to keep the heat on thanks to intentional underfunding of a key federal progam.

      Pennsylvania saw an 11 percent increase in applications for heating assistance but granted benefits to just 1 percent more households than last season. There are more than 24,000 households in the state going without normal utility service at the start of the coldest months, a 14-year high.

      And in Idaho, state officials expect to assist at least 2,000 fewer households than last year after a streamlined process and more generous per-household benefits drained the state’s allotment of funds. The state “still has crisis funding available for individuals who have a crisis situation” later in the year, program administrator Kristin Matthews said in an email. But in the meantime, the state is encouraging low-income households left out in the cold to seek help from charities.

    • Caputalism: will capitalism die?

      Reduced growth is, for various reasons, a systemic problem. To understand this we must examine a decisive factor in capitalism. What made it so successful and prosperous was investment credit. In other words, it needs debt. Firms take out credit, run up debt in order to invest, but these investments only pay back if there’s adequate growth; if not, there’s a wave of bankruptcy.

    • Hillary Clinton Whiffs on Reforming Wall Street’s Rating Agencies

      Hillary Clinton’s response to Bernie Sanders’s plan to aggressively break up the big banks responsible for the financial crisis is to suggest that he is naive.

      “My plan also goes beyond the biggest banks to include the whole financial sector,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed in December. “My plan is more comprehensive,” she said at the first Democratic debate in October — and for that reason, “frankly, it’s tougher.”

      But Clinton’s vision of financial reform neglects one part of the industry everyone agrees was an essential factor in the 2008 crisis: the credit rating agencies, which assess the worthiness of Wall Street securities for investors.

      Sanders’s plan, released last week, would no longer allow the companies that issue securities to pick which rating agency they use – a simple but outrageous practice that creates an enormous conflict of interest and helps facilitate fraud.

      The heart of Clinton’s pitch on Wall Street is that she recognizes all potential hazards. But there is not one word in her big reform plan about the rating agencies.

    • Govt confirms plans to sign TPP in Auckland

      The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said New Zealand had offered to host the signing in early February.

      It said arrangements were still being finalised as TPP partner countries completed their domestic procedures to sign it.

      Last week the Chilean government announced the signing would be taking place in New Zealand on about 4 February, but duty minister Simon Bridges said at that time arrangements had still to be confirmed.

      The 12 countries which are signing the agreement are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam.

    • Obama Calls For TPP Approval On Eve Of ITC Hearing

      The three-day hearing starting today at the ITC starts the legislative process to adopt the TPP and the general feedback of most large business associations can be roughly summarized as “in favor with concerns.”

    • Chinese Official: Bets Against Yuan Are ‘Ridiculous and Impossible’

      Wagers that the yuan will slump 10% or more against the dollar are “ridiculous and impossible,” a senior Chinese economic official said Monday, warning that China had a sufficient tool kit to defeat attacks on its currency.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The Miami Herald Exposes How The GOP Tried To Sell Two Different SOTU Responses
    • Bakery Owned By Anti-Immigrant Texas Politician Hired Undocumented Immigrants

      Thomas McNutt, who’s currently running to be a state representative in Texas, is relying on a stringently anti-immigrant platform. He’s criticized “politicians in Austin” for refusing “to address the problem of illegal immigration,” and his campaign website proclaims the country needs to “turn off the magnets that drive further illegal immigration.”

      However, McNutt hasn’t necessarily put those policies into practice at his company, Collin Street Bakery — a Corsicana, TX business that’s known for its fruitcakes. At least two undocumented immigrants say they were once employed by the Collin Street Bakery, with one going so far as to call McNutt a “hypocrite.”

    • Is Britain’s media biased against the left?

      It is difficult to be a pacifist and love terrorists, but then logic and accuracy are not required in media attacks on Jeremy Corbyn. While some political leaders can simply re–order their front bench to improve competence or coherence, for Corbyn the motive is said to be ‘revenge’. Some commentators, from the Guardian to the Telegraph saw the New Year reshuffle as effective in establishing his authority, but the BBC which shouldn’t be taking sides, dismissed it as, “a political pantomime”, which, “has again exposed his team’s lack of know–how in just getting things done”, with “days of concern and chaos” (BBC Radio 4 News, 6th January 2016). The concern has very largely been with the BBC and the right–wing media, but as Martin Kettle in the Guardian notes, Corbyn has actually stabilised his position, “His project… is about control of the Labour party and by that yardstick… this has been a good week” (6th January 2016).

    • Six Years Of Right-Wing Media Attacks On Obama’s State Of The Union Addresses

      Right-wing media personalities have incessantly attacked President Obama’s six previous State of the Union addresses — from calling the speeches “boring” to questioning his decision to invite a wounded veteran to the event — and have even frequently waged the attacks before the addresses even occurred. Ahead of Obama’s January 12 State of the Union address, Media Matters looks back at conservative media’s long history of attacking annual addresses.

    • Why the BBC needs Hoggart’s vision now

      We need a vision of public service broadcasting that extends intellectual and imaginative freedom, and is as relevant to today’s battles as the Pilkington Report was fifty years ago.

    • Fox News Has Given Donald Trump Nearly $30 Million In Free Airtime During The Presidential Campaign

      According to a previous Media Matters analysis, Trump far outpaced the other Republican presidential candidates in Fox News interview airtime in the second half of 2015. From May through December 15, Trump appeared on the network for nearly 23 hours — no other candidate had more than 10 hours on the network during that time period.

    • Bernie Has More Supporters Than Trump, Gets 4% of Coverage

      Everyone knows it. The RNC knows it. The MSM knows it. Everyone who can do basic math knows it.

      That’s not me saying it, either. That’s the finding from the RNC’s 2012 “autopsy report”. The GOP needs 40% of the Latino vote to win. Romney didn’t come close. The current GOP crop is doing worse. And then there is Trump. See this super long line? That is Trump’s unfavorability among Latinos: a record 51% . Yes, it was back in August but if anything, it has gotten worse.

    • Ayn Rand’s Perverted Worldview Will Destroy the GOP in the End

      Ryan, like many politicians on both sides of the aisle, is being cynical. True, it’s particularly disconcerting when someone exercises that kind of cynicism in response to a president crying for the dead—the dead schoolchildren, the dead churchgoers, the dead on the streets of Chicago—and all other varieties of gun-murdered citizens—but Ryan and the Republicans are hardly our only detached cynics. They are, however, our most open and brazen ones, particularly on the issue of modest gun-control measures of the sort that—it’s a cliché at this point to state—a vast majority of Americans and Republicans support.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Open letter to the world’s governments: protect encryption!

      La Quadrature du Net joins other organisations and individuals around the world by signing the open letter to governments in order to encourage them to promote encryption techniques for communications and IT systems. The original letter and its signatories can be found on the website “SecureTheInternet.org”.

    • How to Chat Anonymously Online

      Chatting anonymously on the Internet isn’t used solely for shadowy criminal hackers and government operatives. From journalists to congressmen, learning how to adjust the privacy of our digital communication is becoming an ever more important skill.

    • EFF To Court: Cisco Must Be Held Accountable For Aiding China’s Human Rights Abuses

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging a federal appeals court to reinstate a lawsuit seeking to hold Cisco Systems accountable for aiding in human rights abuses by building the Chinese government a system that Cisco officials knew was intended to identify—and facilitate the capture and torture of—members of the Falun Gong religious minority.

      In an amicus brief filed Monday with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, EFF and the groups ARTICLE 19 and Privacy International argue that the plaintiffs sufficiently alleged that Cisco understood that the “Golden Shield” system (also known as The Great Firewall) it custom-built for China was an essential component of the government’s program of persecution against the Falun Gong—persecution that included online spying and tracking, detention, and torture.

      In Doe v. Cisco Systems Inc., Falun Gong victims and their families sued Cisco under a law known as the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to bring claims in U.S. federal court for violations of human rights laws. A federal judge dismissed the case, saying the plaintiffs didn’t offer enough support for their claim that Cisco knew the customized features of the Golden Shield enabling the identification and apprehension of Falun Gong practitioners specifically would ultimately lead to torture.

    • Pentagon Will Investigate NSA Crackdown on Would-Be Snowdens

      A Defense Department inspector general is initiating a review of a National Security Agency crackdown on computer users who have access to too much information.

    • What Sean Penn Teaches Us About How Not to Chat With a Fugitive

      INTERVIEWING THE MOST WANTED MAN in the hemisphere is not something any sane person undertakes lightly. Aside from weighing the risk to one’s personal safety, a journalist must also protect his or her source by taking careful precautions — some reporters have gone so far as to risk or actually receive jail time rather than break the confidence of their sources. As the Snowden revelations have brought ubiquitous mass surveillance into sharp relief, these considerations have become far more complex and personal fortitude isn’t always enough.

      On Saturday, Rolling Stone published a major scoop: Actor Sean Penn traveled to northwestern Mexico to speak with Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera — “El Chapo” — the notorious leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. It was El Chapo’s first (and perhaps last) press interview as a free man. At the time of the visit, El Chapo was a fugitive in hiding, but the day before the article went live, Mexican marines, with support from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals, captured him after “a fierce gun battle.”

    • Ex-spy chief: Ukrainian cyberattack a warning sign for US utilities

      Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA, says the US faces ‘darkening skies’ after malware linked power outages in Ukraine.

    • NSA is world’s best hacker thief, says former director
    • NY State Senator Proposes Ban On Sale Of Encrypted Smartphones

      It appears someone’s listening to local crackpot New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s demands that encryption be outlawed to make law enforcement easier. His “white paper” didn’t have the guts to make this demand, instead couching it in language stating he would be completely unopposed to a legislative ban on encryption, but that he wasn’t going to be the bad guy asking for it.

    • Maj. Gen. Westergren tapped to run NSA codebreaker unit

      Maj. Gen. Mark Westergren will be the next deputy chief of the National Security Agency’s Central Security Service, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

    • Air Force general tapped to run NSA codebreaker unit
    • Former Director: NSA Are the Best Thieving Hackers in the World

      The former director of the NSA made no qualms while speaking about cyberespionage operations at a recent cybersecurity conference in Miami Beach. Hayden delivered the keynote address at the S4X16 conference, with the night’s topic of focus on hackers targeting critical infrastructure such as power plants and utilities like water and gas.

    • Social Media Companies Should Decline the Government’s Invitation to Join the National Security State

      The pressure on social media companies to limit or take down content in the name of national security has never been greater. Resolving any ambiguity about how much the Obama administration values the companies’ cooperation, the White House on Friday dispatched the highest echelon of its national security team — including the attorney general, the FBI director, the director of national intelligence, and the NSA director — to Silicon Valley for a meeting with technology executives chaired by the White House chief of staff himself. The agenda for the meeting tried to convey a locked-arms sense of camaraderie, asking, “How can we make it harder for terrorists to leveraging [sic] the internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?”

      Congress, too, has been turning up the heat. On December 16, the House passed the Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act, which would require the president to submit a report on “United States strategy to combat terrorists’ and terrorist organizations’ use of social media.” The Senate is considering a far more aggressive measure, which would require providers of Internet communications services to report to government authorities when they have “actual knowledge” of “apparent” terrorist activity (a requirement that, because of its vagueness and breadth, would likely harm user privacy and lead to over-reporting).

    • House Grills State Department Over Wassenaar Arrangement

      Congressional Representatives grilled the parties responsible for the U.S. implementation of controversial changes to the Wassenaar Arrangement in a joint hearing before subcommittees of the House Oversight and Homeland Security Committees today. Witnesses included officials from the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of State, as well as representatives of the tech industry, including Symantec, Microsoft, VMWare, and the Information Technology Industry Council.

    • Will James Clapper Be the First Known Victim of OmniCISA’s Regulatory Immunity?

      Viscerally, I’m laughing my ass off that Verizon (among others) has shared Clapper’s metadata without his authority. “Not wittingly,” they might say if he asks them about that. But I recognize that it’s actually not a good thing for someone in such a sensitive position to have his metadata exposed (I mean, to the extent that it wasn’t already exposed in the OPM hack).

    • Teen Who Hacked CIA Email Is Back to Prank US Spy Chief

      One of the “teenage hackers” who broke into the CIA director’s AOL email account last year hasn’t given up targeting government intelligence officials. His latest victim is the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Motherboard has learned.

      A group of hackers calling themselves “Crackas With Attitude” or CWA made headlines in October, hacking into CIA Director John Brennan’s email account and apparently getting access to several online tools and portals used by US law enforcement agencies.The hackers’ exploits prompted the FBI to issue an alert warning government officials of their attacks.

    • The FBI Is Using NSLs to Target “Facilities” Now

      The Freedom of the Press Foundation has been looking for more details about when the FBI can use NSLs to obtain records including the communication records of journalists, and they just obtained initial response to a FOIA on the subject. There is abundant reason to believe the government does this in leak cases, though as Trevor Timm noted in his piece on this, “a ‘broad reading’ of the media guidelines [was] allegedly hindering leak investigations” in the summer of 2015.

      As part of DOJ’s response to FPF’s FOIA, the provided a section of the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide for the FBI that covers NSLs generally. While I don’t think the FOIA response provides the date of the DIOG (it was declassified on November 6, 2015), it appears to post-date last June’s passage of USA Freedom Act, because it incorporates the language on disclosure from that bill (see the last section).

    • Illumio Taps Former NSA Guru as Strategy Chief

      Illumio, the hot cybersecurity startup that aims to protect corporate infrastructure in internal data centers and outside clouds, has hired Nathaniel Gleicher, former director for cybersecurity for the National Security Council.

    • The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’

      While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

      The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

      The man had a firearm conviction and gang associations, so out of caution police called a negotiator. The suspect surrendered, and police said the intelligence helped them make the right call — it turned out he had a gun.

    • CES 2016 takeaways: IoT could be the death of your security

      For the most part, the CES 2016 show was largely a yawner—maturation rather than innovation. Yes, there was a lot of interesting stuff outside of IT gear—and the IT gear could be as fun as a 200-node Raspberry Pi cluster running hadoop or wicked-fast IEEE 802.11ac wireless hubs that do endless if secure tricks.

      The damage, the damnation, the truculent total churl of the event was this: all of the new Interent of Thingies/IoT/KewlGear has no cohesive security strategy. It’s a mosh pit of certificates, easy-auth, Oh! Let’s Connect Our Gear Together! (add breathy sigh!) meaninglessness.

    • Cell-site data analysis nabs robber who used mobile phone during heists

      A woman charged in connection to a string of armed jewelry store heists was arrested after the authorities analyzed cell-site data of telephone calls made during the nine-month robbery spree across the US Southeast, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.

      The bureau said in court documents that the 24-year-old suspect, Abigail Kemp, wore an earpiece and was talking into it during several of the robberies. Store employees were tied up and shoppers were held at gunpoint during the robberies. At one incident in Florida in August, in which the Georgia woman allegedly netted $400,000 in jewelry, the FBI said (PDF) that the suspect “was observed with a cellular telephone and wearing a cellular telephone earpiece during the robbery and was heard speaking to someone. At one point during the robbery, the earpiece fell out of the white female’s ear and she promptly put it back in.”

    • The hostile use of civilian drones in the UK, and what to do about it

      Remote Control, a project hosted by Oxford Research Group, has issued a report exploring the designs and capabilities of over 200 current and upcoming unmanned aerial, ground, and marine drones in order to understand the threats these platforms pose to potential targets. The report, entitled “Hostile drones: the hostile use of drones by non-state actors against British targets,” also outlines the strategies available to mitigate the threats.

      The report notes that: “There are particular concerns that drones will be used as simple, affordable and effective airborne Improvised Explosive Devices.” It says that “Governments are also concerned by the decentralisation and democratisation of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities made possible by the widespread availability of drones,” but points out that activists working to hold governments and corporations to account regard them as powerful new tools for that reason.

    • Ex-NSA boss says FBI director is wrong on encryption
    • Ex-NSA boss says FBI’s plan for ending encryption is a terrible idea
    • Former Director Of NSA And CIA Says US Cybersecurity Policy MIA
    • Former Director says NSA is world’s best hacker thief
    • Latest Email Dump Shows Hillary Clinton Telling Aide To Send Classified Documents Over Unsecure Fax Line

      In the latest batch of Hillary Clinton emails — forced out of the State Department’s gnarled fists by an FOIA lawsuit and a recently-released Inspector General’s report showing the agency flat out sucks at responding to FOIA requests — there’s a conversational thread suggesting the presidential candidate considers her access to classified information more important than the security of that information.

    • We know this isn’t about PRISM, Matt Warman MP. But do you?

      The MP offered distracting and irrelevant counter-statements to former NSA man Bill Binney during an oral evidence session last week before the Parliamentary committee scrutinising the draft Investigatory Powers Bill.

      The Register understands that Binney may seek to resubmit his evidence after the committee’s poor hearing.

      Warman incorrectly stated that GCHQ’s upstream data acquisition program (which he misidentified as PRISM) wasn’t covered by the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, and that even if it was, he wrongly stated the program would be prevented by the draft legislation’s “request filters”.

    • [Old] NSA Whistleblower Tells UK Parliament: “Snooper’s Charter” Is Deadly
    • The State of the Union, Ignoring the Elephant in the Room

      But even after the Snowden revelations, mass surveillance by the National Security Agency remains largely unchecked. With a year remaining in its final term, the Obama administration has failed to implement the wide-ranging reforms necessary, as the President eight years ago promised in writing, “to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

    • Et tu, Fortinet? Hard-coded password raises new backdoor eavesdropping fears

      Less than a month after Juniper Network officials disclosed an unauthorized backdoor in the company’s NetScreen line of firewalls, researchers have uncovered highly suspicious code in older software from Juniper competitor Fortinet.

      The suspicious code contains a challenge-and-response authentication routine for logging into servers with the secure shell (SSH) protocol. Researchers were able to unearth a hard-coded password of “FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27″ (not including the quotation marks) after reviewing this exploit code posted online on Saturday. On Tuesday, a researcher posted this screenshot purporting to show someone using the exploit to gain remote access to a server running Fortinet’s FortiOS software.

    • Companies can monitor workers’ private online chats, European court rules

      Privacy concerns dismissed by European court of human rights after Romanian engineer fired for using Yahoo Messenger to communicate with fiancee

    • EFA gets behind global call for strong encryption

      Non-profit, digital freedom and rights group, Electronic Frontiers Australia, has joined experts and organisations in more than 35 countries in asking world leaders to support strong encryption and to reject any law, policy, or mandate that would undermine digital security.

      EFA Executive Officer Jon Lawrence said today that calls to undermine encryption in the name of ‘national security’ are “fundamentally misguided and dangerous”.

      According to Lawrence, encryption is a “necessary and critical tool enabling individual privacy, a free media, online commerce and the operations of organisations of all types, including of course government agencies”.

  • Civil Rights

    • Victory Against Islamophobia: NYPD Banned from Ethnic-Based Targeting

      In a major legal victory, New York City will appoint an independent civilian monitor to oversee the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism activities. The announcement comes after two lawsuits challenged the NYPD’s programs of spying on Muslims and religious centers. The suits argued the NYPD violated the U.S. and New York state constitutions by singling out and stigmatizing entire communities based on their religion. The settlement restores some of the NYPD’s outside oversight, which was eliminated after the September 11 attacks. We are joined by Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.

    • Bernie Sanders’ Plan to Fight Mass Incarceration Doesn’t Add Up

      There are a lot of good ideas there, but again, it’s unclear how it adds up to a 25 percent reduction in national incarceration numbers. Just 16 percent of federal inmates are in privately operated facilities, and the percentage of state prisoners in private facilities is less than half that. The mandatory minimums in question are for federal crimes only. And Sanders’ proposal to decriminalize marijuana at the federal level would by his own explanation leave states the option of continuing to ban it. The closest he comes to an explanation of how he’d bring the United States’ levels below that of China is by a seismic cultural shift at the state and local level to prioritize treatment for drug offenses and disincentivize “implicit quotas” for low-level crimes. But that a lot’s different than having a plan to get there.

    • Puerto Rico’s Sovereignty Is at Stake in Supreme Court Case

      On September 28, 2008, Luis Sánchez Valle and Jaime Gómez Vázquez were indicted separately in Puerto Rican courts on multiple weapons-related charges. While those cases progressed, both were indicted separately by federal grand juries on similar charges. Both pleaded guilty to the federal charges, which carried less severe penalties, and both successfully petitioned the Puerto Rican trial courts to dismiss the local charges on double-jeopardy grounds.

    • Democratorship in Argentina

      Second in this strategy, the gag on information, began with the accession of several high-ranking Clarín and La Nación managers to government posts. This move is to be completed with the annulment of the Broadcasting Act, which has been praised by the United Nations and the Organization of American States as a global example for freedom of expression and pluralism. In order to abolish it, Macri decreed the intervention of the Agency for the Control of the Audiovisual Communication Services and its equivalent for the Internet, thus violating the autonomy of these entities and virtually liquidating the effective implementation of the law. This is intended to ensure that market domination by both communication groups will not be threatened and also to ensure their access to the State, which is something that was previously denied them.

    • Police are Calculating Your ‘Threat Score’ to Decide How to Treat You

      I watched a documentary about North Korea which explained how the government there assigns a score to each citizen, based on how large a threat to the regime s/he is perceived to be. When I lived in Taiwan under a military government years ago, such a number was encoded into every national ID card. Those citizens every interaction with the government and police force was shadowed by those scores.

    • Armed
    • L.A. Police Chief Wants Officer Charged For Killing Unarmed Homeless Man

      Between 2000 and 2014, the LAPD shot an average of one person every week. Yet no officer has been charged for a fatal shooting in the last 15 years.

      If Police Chief Charlie Beck gets his way, that could change soon. Despite push-back from his colleagues, Beck has recommended that Officer Clifford Proctor be charged for shooting and killing an unarmed homeless man in Venice last year.

    • Putting Teens in Jail for Sexting Is Always Immoral

      One of the most bizarre teen sexting prosecutions in recent memory became even more awful last month when it was revealed that the detective in the case, David Abbott, had inappropriate contact with two boys, ages 11 and 13.

    • Welcome to Israel’s Version of Apartheid

      Depriving Palestinian citizens of law enforcement – except when repressing dissent – has left their communities weak and oppressed by crime and guns. For years Netanyahu has ignored pleas from Palestinian leaders for increased gun control – until now, when one of those weapons targeted Jews.

      Settlers have also been policed lightly, so long as their violence was directed at Palestinians, whether in the occupied territories or Israel. More than a decade of settler violence – labelled “price-tag” attacks – has gone largely uninvestigated.

      The truth is that most Israeli Jews have long supported two Israels: one for them and another for the Palestinian minority, with further, even more deprived ghettos for Palestinians under occupation.

    • The Oligarchy is Using Our Lizard Brain to Enable a Silent Coup

      And nothing short-circuits reason as well as fear. This tired tactic should be played out by now. Remember those bogus color-coded terrorist alerts back in the 2004 Bush campaign? Or the sudden increase in talk of terrorism in 2008? And the attempted reprise in 2012?

      Call it Willie Horton Redux.

      But once again, here in the home of the brave, Americans are cowering in their basements from trumped up threats about terrorism, while plutocrats and fat cats take advantage of their fear-addled state to slip their favorite errand boys – and girls – into the election. Of course, the corporate-owned press is aiding and abetting this silent coup.

    • Video Allegedly Shows Cop Shoot Man In The Back 3 Times as He Was Face Down in Handcuffs

      On January 8, 2015, 42-year-old James Dudley Barker was killed by Officer Matthew Taylor. Since then, Taylor managed to avoid charges because the body camera footage gave an incomplete depiction on the incident.

      However, exactly one year later, cell phone camera footage was released showing that Barker was face down with his hands behind his back when he was shot 3 times by officer Taylor.

    • VIDEO: Remember How Bernie Sanders Treated a Muslim Woman Who Stood Up at One of His Rallies?

      A few days after Donald Trump looked on and made faces as a peaceful Muslim woman was heckled out of one of his campaign rallies, it’s worth recalling how Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders responded to a Muslim student who questioned him about racism and Islamophobia at a rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., in late October.

      Before 1,700 of her peers, Remaz Abdelgader began, “As a Muslim student, as an American Muslim student who aspires to change this world—.” She then paused as the senator motioned her to the stage and hugged her. Returning to her question, she asked him to comment on the bigotry and racism heard and seen in the Republican presidential campaigns and the media.

    • Ferguson School District on Trial

      Ferguson, Missouri, has a long and ugly history of racial discrimination. Like many communities across the United States, a history of state-sanctioned housing discrimination has led Ferguson to be highly segregated by race. And the Ferguson-Florissant School District, in fact, was created in the 1970s as part of a federal order in the face of resistance to school desegregation during the 1970s. (Yes, this was two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.)

      But discrimination doesn’t disappear overnight. While 80 percent of students in the school district are Black, there were zero Black school board members as recently as 2014. Today just two out of seven board members are Black.

    • This is Trauma: Erica Garner & Ramsey Orta on Coping with the Aftermath of a Police Killing (Pt. 2)

      In our post-show conversation, Eric Garner’s daughter, Erica Garner, talks about the impact of her father’s death on her family. Eighteen months after Eric Garner’s death at the hands of New York City police, one officer is finally facing charges. But the charges are not criminal, and the officer was not directly involved in Garner’s death by chokehold. Instead, Sergeant Kizzy Adonis, who is African-American, faces internal charges of “failing to supervise.” The internal charges against Adonis come just over a year after a grand jury elected not to indict white officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Garner in a chokehold.

    • Keys Case Spotlights Flaws of Computer Hacking Law

      Old laws can cause confusion and unduly harsh consequences, particularly when courts confront situations Congress did not anticipate. This is particularly true for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030—the federal “anti­hacking” statute prompted in part by fear generated by the 1983 techno­thriller “WarGames.” The CFAA was enacted in 1986, and the government’s current prosecution of journalist Matthew Keys—who faces sentencing on Jan. 20 for three counts of violating the CFAA—illustrates the 30-­year­-old statute’s many problems.

      The CFAA makes it illegal to intentionally access a “protected computer”—which includes any computer connected to the Internet—”without authorization” or in excess of authorization. But the CFAA does not define “without authorization.” This has given overzealous prosecutors broad discretion to bring criminal charges against individuals for behavior that simply doesn’t rise to the culpability Congress had in mind when it passed this serious criminal law, such as doing something on a computer network that the owner doesn’t like. (There is currently a circuit split on whether violations of employer­imposed use restrictions can give rise to CFAA liability, with the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Second, Fourth and Ninth Circuits finding that they cannot, and the First, Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh finding that they can.)

    • El Chapo and the Fog of the Drug War

      THE FOOTAGE IS unquestionably dramatic: Members of Mexico’s most elite security forces clear a four-bedroom house in a predawn raid. Over the course of 15 chaotic minutes, the Mexican marines can be seen moving room to room through the smoky building. Gunfire thunders. The walls are pocked with bullet holes. The commandos toss grenades. A marine goes down. “They got me,” he screams. The marines detain an unidentified individual with flex cuffs and find two women hiding in a bathroom. Garbage and high-powered rifles litter the floor.

      The narrative that follows the gunfight is every bit as fast-paced. When the smoke cleared, four people were under arrest, with five more reported dead. Photos of their bloody bodies appeared online the next day. Two others escaped, however — one of them a stocky, bearded man named Ivan Gastelum, the alleged assassin-in-chief for the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico’s most powerful and sophisticated drug-trafficking organization. Gastelum, who goes by the nickname “El Cholo Ivan,” was accompanied in flight by his boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the world’s most infamous drug trafficker and Mexico’s most wanted man.

      [...]

      And so ended Operation Black Swan. Of course, how much of that story is true remains to be seen. Initial accounts of high-stakes military raids, particularly those with profound political implications, are notoriously prone to inaccuracies and often take years to sort out, regardless of the country in question. The raid that killed Osama bin Laden is but one prominent example. In Mexico, where it is not uncommon for journalists covering drug-related violence to be killed on the job, or for the government to obfuscate facts, the truth can be especially difficult to pin down.

    • Virginia Supreme Court Says ‘No Thanks’ To Improving State’s Dismal Court System

      Criminal defendants face a tilted playing field all over the country. If it isn’t the frequent withholding of exculpatory material by prosecutors, it’s everything leading up to it — beginning with questionable interrogation methods and continuing with the admission of dubious physical evidence.

    • Va. decides not to change rules that withhold documents from defense

      The criminal justice system in Virginia appeared to be on the verge of radical change, at last. In a state where defendants are not entitled to the police reports in their case, the witness statements against them or even a witness list, a prominent committee issued a detailed report late last year proposing to carefully change all that, and more.

      “Where trial by ambush has been the norm,” committee chair and retired Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne wrote, “there is now clarity and transparency.”

    • A brief history of governments hacking human rights organizations

      We always knew that governments and military forces spied on each other. But over the last five years or more, we’ve seen them spying on NGOs, journalists and human rights workers, too.

      The world first became aware of states hacking “civilian” targets in 2010, when Google revealed it had detected an intrusion by the Chinese government. Adobe Systems and Juniper Networks then confirmed they were attacked as part of the same campaign, and further investigation revealed that Yahoo and Symantec were also targeted. At the same time, the Chinese were using similar tactics against Tibetan NGOs, and their targeting of the Tibetan community continues to the present day.

    • Federal Law Now Says Kids Can Walk To School Alone

      Relax, parents. Now you can allow your kids to walk, ride a bike, or take a bus to school, without you or your children getting arrested. The recently-signed Every Student Succeeds Act contains a section (858) that protects the rights of kids to walk or go out alone. The act was sponsored by Utah senator Mike Lee, who is a supporter of the Free Range Kids movement, and provides some hope for parents who feel that their kids should be allowed some autonomy to get by own their own.

    • President Obama Defends Muslims

      During Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama spoke directly to recent political attacks on Muslims, imploring people to tone down the anti-Muslim rhetoric:

      “When politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or our fellow citizens, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid is called names, that doesn’t make us safer,” Obama said. “That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. And it betrays who we are as a country.”

    • The Unbelievably True Story Of How Craigslist Murdered Over 100 People

      Frankly, I’m surprised the number isn’t higher. Not because Craigslist is the best thing that happened to pimps and murders since the invention of the internet, but because it encompasses nearly every major and minor city in the United States.

      And, seriously: “Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark?” I realize “users of Craigslist passed the 100-murder mark” is a much clunkier sentence, but this sounds like it was written by a grandstanding sheriff, rather than a journalist.

      Not only is it accessible by a vast majority of the US population, but its reach goes far beyond the buying and selling of goods. It also handles personal ads, searches for roommates and dozens of other ways for two strangers to meet face-to-face.

    • A Kid is Dying in the Bronx.

      I know the cop’s name from those same articles, which included a lot more information about the cop than the kid. The cop is going to be OK, luckily will heal up from his wounds, and in fact was struck by rounds fired by another cop, not the kid. That pretty much ended the media’s interest in much of a follow up story. “Cop Shooter Who Missed” is weak copy compared to “Cop Killer,” and somebody reading would say, well, that’s that. Mouse click and what was the score of the game? Sports is easier, every game has a winner.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • John Legere Just Can’t Stop The Misleading Bullshit About BingeOn

      The big story of last week was T-Mobile CEO John Legere’s meltdown over people calling out the bullshit claims about BingeOn “optimizing” mobile video when the truth is that it was simply throttling all video traffic (partners and non partners alike). Things got even worse when Legere decided to attack EFF and suggest that it was being paid to discredit BingeOn. The simple fact remains, however, that T-Mobile is throttling video streams (and downloads).

      Legere briefly went quiet about all of this, but on Monday came out again with yet another statement in the form of an “Open Letter to Consumers about Binge On” which is at least a little more honest, but is still mostly misleading bullshit — the very thing T-Mobile has built its recent reputation on avoiding.

    • Clarifying The Bullshit From John Legere: What T-Mobile Is Really Doing And Why It Violates Net Neutrality

      Earlier today we wrote about the latest misleading claims from John Legere and T-Mobile about its BingeOn program. I’ve seen some confusion some of the discussions about this — some of it thanks to Legere’s misleading claims — so I wanted to go through exactly what T-Mobile appears to be doing and why it’s problematic. Also, with that, I wanted to highlight the key part of the FCC’s net neutrality rules regarding throttling, and the one single paragraph that T-Mobile appears to be banking on to protect it from getting slapped around.

      First, let’s be clear: T-Mobile wants to pretend that this is a “semantic” dispute about what it’s doing, but that’s bullshit. From the beginning the company has been flat out lying about its actions. That may get it in trouble in two ways — first for violating the bright-line “no throttling” rules and for violating the corresponding transparency rules as well.

    • AT&T Whines That FCC Report Highlights Broadband Coverage Gaps Company Helped Create

      The FCC’s recent broadband progress report (pdf) highlighted the telecom industry’s continued failure with not only getting any broadband to rural areas, but with getting next-generation speeds to existing broadband customers. The FCC has noted that 34 million Americans still lack access to fixed broadband at the FCC’s benchmark speed of 25 Mbps for downloads, 3 Mbps for uploads. The agency also notes that two-thirds of homes lack access to more than one provider capable of delivering these speeds. If you recall, the FCC bumped its definition of broadband to 25 Mbps from a measly 4 Mbps about a year ago.

    • IPv6 Usage Set to Grow in 2016

      Nearly five years ago, there was an official ceremony in Miami, Florida that marked the end of the free pool of IPv4 addresses. As of February 3, 2011, the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) no longer had any free blocks of IPv4 address space to give out to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Despite that ceremony, IPv4 has continued to dominate, though its’ successor IPv6 is making strides.

    • House Rushes To Gut FCC Authority To Prevent Inquiry Into Comcast Broadband Caps

      Historically, the FCC has steered well clear of regulating broadband prices. Hell, for most of the last fifteen years the FCC hasn’t even admitted that high prices due to limited competition are a problem, instead focusing on the politically sexier idea of ensuring uniform availability. The FCC certainly collects pricing data from broadband ISPs, but, at the industry’s behest, never shares that data with the public. As a result, we get things like our $300 million national broadband map, which will happily show you (largely hallucinated) speed and competitive options in your neighborhood, but won’t tell you how much they cost.

    • Comcast-Funded Think Tank: Broadband Usage Caps Make Netflix Streaming Better. You’re Welcome.

      As we’ve noted for some time, the broadband industry (and all the think tanks and politicians that work for it) have spent the last few years trying to vilify Netflix. That’s primarily due to the company’s support of net neutrality, but also its opposition to anti-innovative and anti-competitive broadband usage caps. These attacks usually start with the criticism that Netflix now dominates around 37% of peak downstream traffic (as if that’s a bad thing), followed by some bizarre and unfounded claim that Netflix should be forced to “pay its fair share” (read: give us a cut of revenues despite us having no legitimate claim to it).

    • President Obama’s State Of The Union: Praises Open Internet… Complains About Terrorists Using Open Internet

      Both points have an element of truth in them, but the whole thing seems pretty silly. If you have an open internet, then part of the point is that anyone can use it — even people you don’t like. Fighting ISIS and other terrorists is certainly important, but even mentioning the fact that they use the internet is silly. Some of them drive cars too. It’s not really all that relevant.

      Beyond that, there really wasn’t much related to stuff that we’re interested in around here. It talks about bringing back our innovative spirit (did it really go away?), but (unlike in past States of the Union) chooses not to mention patent reform (even though the President’s suggested reforms haven’t gone anywhere).

      It’s silly to expect too much from the State of the Union Address, which gets a lot more buzz than it’s worth, but as a first pass, the idea that the two mentions of the internet contradict each other more or less summed up one of the big problems with the way this administration has treated the internet. It tends to talk out of both sides of its mouth on these issues, and never really take a stand. There truly are a number of really great people working in the White House on tech policy, looking to maintain a free and open internet, but there are plenty of others who are trying to undermine it, and to give in to FUD about the “dangers” of an open internet. It’s a bit disappointing that the President never really came out with a strong leadership position on this and made it clear that we’re not going to undermine a free and open internet out of fear — but instead continues to give lip service to the free and open internet, while hinting at a willingness to toss it out the window.

    • Comcast Appears to Be Injecting Browser Pop-Ups to Upsell Crappy Modem Deals

      Comcast sneakily injecting pop-up ads into user’s browsers is one of the company’s older and shitter tactics. But using those unsolicited ads to push a modem you don’t need, paid for by a system that’s a hilarious ripoff? That’s just downright sleazy.

    • EDRi’s first input to EU regulators on net neutrality guidelines

      The Body of EU Telecoms Regulators known as “BEREC” has held its first round of discussions with stakeholders to exchange views on how BEREC should interpret the uncertainties created by the EU Regulation on net neutrality. These include questions surrounding traffic management measures and their transparency, Internet Access Services’ quality parameters, so-called “specialised services” and commercial practices like “zero-rating”.

    • Council Of Europe Guidelines For Network Neutrality To Protect Freedom Of Expression, Privacy

      The Council of Europe (CoE), the intergovernmental regional group that includes the European Union, today called on European governments protect the principle of network neutrality at the national level. The member countries adopted guidelines on protecting and promoting the right to freedom of expression and the right to privacy related to network neutrality.

  • DRM

    • You Can’t Destroy the Village to Save It: W3C vs DRM, Round Two

      The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the nonprofit body that maintains the Web’s core standards, made a terrible mistake in 2013: they decided to add DRM—the digital locks that train your computer to say “I can’t let you do that, Dave”; rather than “Yes, boss”—to the Web’s standards.

      At the time, we fought the proposal on a principled basis: DRM has no place in the open Internet because of the many ways it shuts down legal, legitimate activities.

      We lost.

      [...]

      To understand why DRM is a bad technology for open standardization, you need to understand the laws that protect it.

      Around the world, laws like the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Canada’s C-11, New Zealand’s Bill 92A; and accords like the European EUCD, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and the US-Australian and US-Korean Trade Agreements establish special legal protections for DRM. These governments (and many others) give legal backing to companies that try to lock you out of devices, software, and media that you own, and this interferes with activities like repairing your own electronics or your car, making backups or remixes of videos, auditing the security of medical devices, and many more legitimate and otherwise-lawful activities.

      It gets worse. In practice, it’s not hard to break DRM, so to slow the spread of information about how to remove the locks on the stuff you own, laws like the DMCA also has been used to punish disclosure of bugs and defects. This doesn’t mean that bad guys—enemy spies, cyber arms-dealers, voyeurs, identity thieves, and griefers—don’t discover and weaponize these bugs. It just means that you don’t get to learn about them until they are used in a high-profile attack, or until a brave security researcher risks a lawsuit to come forward.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Kenya Takes Steps To Enhance Intellectual Property Awareness [Ed: Kenya brainwashing African population, pushing Western mechanisms for exercising control over poor nations/people]

    • Trademarks

      • Louis Vuitton Loses Trademark Lawsuit Over Joke Bag; Judge Tells Company To Maybe Laugh A Little Rather Than Sue

        When I was very little, my father drove a 1972 Ford Pinto (yes, one of the exploding versions) that had a faded bumper sticker reading “My other car is a Porsche.” I remember this very clearly because I remember, at a very young age, asking my father to explain the “joke” and still not really getting it. Of course, that “my other car is a…” joke has been around for a long time. It may not be a good joke, but it’s a pretty well-known joke. Except, apparently, for the overly serious trademark lawyers at Louis Vuitton.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Question: Does David Bowie Get The Copyright On Computer Generated Lyrics?

        There have been a number of copyright-related discussions spurred by the unfortunate passing of David Bowie, but here’s one more that might make for an interesting law school exam. Matthew Braga, over at Vice’s Motherboard, has a really wonderful story about how Bowie used a lyric writing word randomizer app called Verbasizer in writing his album Outside in the mid-1990s. He includes this clip from a documentary about it:

      • Hateful Eight Pirated Leak Harms Film All The Way To Box Office Records

        Mike just recently did a post on the horrible effects of piracy on Hollywood box office results from last year, which can be summarized as “holy shit, look at all the money!” That post took a macro look at the year Hollywood had at the box office, in which revenue and individual ticket sales were both up, despite the fact that piracy exists. Still, the post warned of one potential rebuttal some might make: yeah, but Star Wars.

      • Settlement Reached In Class Action Lawsuit Against Rightscorp For Robocalls

        In late 2014, we wrote about a class action lawsuit filed against copyright trolling operation Rightscorp, which argued two things: (1) that the company’s robocalling people’s mobile phones accusing them of copyright infringement violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), because you’re not allowed to robocall mobile numbers, and that (2) the use of questionable DMCA 512(h) subpoenas to discover accounts associated with IP addresses was “abuse of process.” Rightscorp and co-defendant Warner Bros. got that second claim tossed for violating California’s anti-SLAPP law.

      • Accused ‘Pirates’ Win Class-Action Settlement From Rightscorp and Warner Bros

        Piracy monetization firm Rightscorp and several copyright holders, including Hollywood studio Warner Bros, have agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over intimidating robo-calls. The defendants will set aside $450,000 to cover the costs and more than 2,000 accused pirates are eligible for a $100 settlement each.

      • Don’t jail online pirates for ten years, UKIPO told

        The UK government’s proposal to introduce a ten-year sentence for online pirates has been overwhelmingly opposed.

        Responding to a consultation launched by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO), 989 out of 1,032 respondents said they were against the idea of introducing a ten-year jail term for infringement.

        Last year WIPR’s sister publication TBO reported that the government had launched a consultation in which it sought feedback on its plan to increase the maximum sentence for “commercial-scale” online infringement from two to ten years.

      • Why Radio Stations Probably Couldn’t Just Play David Bowie Music As A Tribute: Copyright Law Is Messed Up

        That’s not just something that SoundExchange came up with on its own. It’s written directly into US Copyright law (at the bottom of the page). At some point, years ago, Congress (or, more likely, a recording industry lobbyist), wrote up rules that said online radio couldn’t play too many songs in a row by a single artists, because of the ridiculous fear that if they could, no one would buy music any more.

        Now, the rules do say that the performance complement “may only be violated if the service has received specific waivers from the owner of the sound recording copyright” — so it’s possible that the copyright holder on Bowie’s music could waive those rules, but it would have to be to a bunch of different radio stations, and it’s unlikely they’re going to do that.

      • How David Bowie Correctly Predicted The Future Of The Internet 16 Years Ago

        David Bowie was one of the most influential musicians of his era. The fiercely forward-looking songwriter died of cancer at the age of 69. As it turns out, apart from his work in music, he was a trailblazer in technology too. Here’s how this internet pioneer predicted the future and watch his famous BBC interview.

01.12.16

Links 12/1/2016: Solus 1.0 Reviews, Fedora 24 Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Best Linux Distros For Newcomers

      Most of the top Linux distributions are of the “easier to use” variety. Some observers might dispute this, but the fact is that most people not working in IT or software development will gravitate toward the easiest experience when it comes to Linux.

      In this article, I’ll share my top picks for best Linux distro for newcomers. These selections are chosen based on their ease of use, not their potential for “learning Linux.” I hope to put to bed once and for all that myth that all who use Linux need to have a strong familiarity with how Linux works. After many years of casual usage, I can say for certain that this will tend to itself over time.

    • 8 Reasons to Switch from Windows 10 to Linux

      Windows 10 has been out in the wild for a while now. For the most part, people have been really liking it. It’s probably the most streamlined version of Microsoft’s operating system to date. Still, some people aren’t happy with the upgrade and are looking at alternatives.

      Introducing Linux: it’s a free and open source platform which many operating systems are built upon. If you’re looking to move from Windows to an alternative, here are eight compelling reasons why you should leave Microsoft for a more free and open source operating system.

  • Kernel Space

    • GNU Linux-libre, Free as in Freedom

      Linux, the kernel developed and distributed by Linus Torvalds et al, contains non-Free Software, i.e., software that does not respect your essential freedoms, and it induces you to install additional non-Free Software that it doesn’t contain.

    • GNU Linux-libre Kernel 4.4 Officially Released for Those Who Want 100% Freedom

      The guys over at the GNU Linux-libre project have had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of the GNU Linux-libre 4.4 kernel on January 10, 2016.

    • With Skylake Out, It’s Becoming Easier To Build A Cheap Haswell Xeon Linux System

      Now that Skylake Xeon processors are appearing at major Internet retailers in sufficient quantities (such as the recently reviewed Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5), prices on older-generation Xeon CPUs are falling further. With prices on DDR3, SSDs, and Haswell-compatible motherboards also continuing to fall, it’s possible to build a sufficiently powerful yet cheap Haswell Xeon system.

    • The Intel Graphics Highlights Of The Linux 4.5 Kernel
    • Neat drm/i915 stuff for 4.5

      Kernel version 4.4 is released, it’s time for our regular look at what’s in store for the Intel graphics driver in the next release.

    • Intel Knights Landing Perf Support Comes To Linux 4.5

      Ingo Molnar has already been sending in his many Git pull requests for the newly-opened Linux 4.5 merge window.

    • Cgroup v2 Is To Be Made Official With Linux 4.5

      The cgroup v2 interface will be made official with the in-development Linux 4.5 kernel.

      Maintainer Tejun Heo sent in the cgroup changes today for the Linux 4.5 merge window. About the new interface he notes, “cgroup v2 interface is now official. It’s no longer hidden behind a devel flag and can be mounted using the new cgroup2 fs type. Unfortunately, cpu v2 interface hasn’t made it yet due to the discussion around in-process hierarchical resource distribution and only memory and io controllers can be used on the v2 interface at the moment.”

    • 4.4 Linux Kernel Long-Term Support Release is Now Available

      Linus Torvalds yesterday released the Linux 4.4 kernel. This is a long-term support (LTS) release, as was determined at the Linux Kernel Summit and announced in October by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who will maintain it for 2 years.

      This release checks in at more than 20.8 million lines of code, which is up considerably from Version 4.1, released in June 2015 with slightly more than 19.5 million lines of code, according to Phoronix. For historical comparison, version 0.01 of the Linux kernel — released in 1991 — had just 10,239 lines of code (source: Wikipedia).

    • LinuxChanges

      Summary: This release adds support for 3D support in virtual GPU driver, which allows 3D hardware-accelerated graphics in virtualization guests; loop device support for Direct I/O and Asynchronous I/O, which saves memory and increases performance; support for Open-channel SSDs, which are devices that share the responsibility of the Flash Translation Layer with the operating system; the TCP listener handling is completely lockless and allows for faster and more scalable TCP servers; journalled RAID5 in the MD layer which fixes the RAID write hole; eBPF programs can now be run by unprivileged users, they can be made persistent, and perf has added support for eBPF programs aswell; a new mlock2() syscall that allows users to request memory to be locked on page fault; and block polling support for improved performance in high-end storage devices. There are also new drivers and many other small improvements.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • A build of GNOME from scratch

        The majority of the work I’ve been doing so far with Codethink has been to build and integrate a GNOME reference build with the Baserock build system.

        [...]

        I’ll probably return at some point to give a more thorough explanation of exactly what Baserock is and what it is not, but that is not the point of this post, suffice to say that it is a build system and as of the close of 2015 it includes a reference build of GNOME which is quite functional and fairly well integrated.

      • Template-GLib

        One of the things necessary in an IDE is the ability to create projects from templates. This is something we’ve been lacking since the beginning, and I’m finally in a position to follow through on it.

      • Build Panel

        Note that you can write build system implementations in Python or Vala now. That should lower the barrier for contributions quite a bit.

  • Distributions

    • Which Linux distribution do you use?

      Your Linux distribution of choice says a lot about you. Of course, one of the many great things about Linux is the diversity of options you have to choose between. Maybe you like a slimmed down minimalist option. Maybe having all of the bells and whistles is important to you. Or maybe you just prefer a distribution that you find easy to use.

      Whatever your preferences, chances are, there’s at least one distribution out there that’s a perfect fit for your needs. Because of the huge number of choices, which we couldn’t possibly list all here, we relied up DistroWatch.com to provide us with a starting point of the ten highest ranking distributions from the past twelve months.

    • Reviews

      • Solus Project’s Virtues Begin and End With Stability

        Linux distros with a variety of lightweight desktop environments are nothing new. Most of the choices already available work well and are more advanced than Budgie.

        If Budgie is going to gather any traction, the developers must push the envelope and offer a desktop with more functionality and completeness. At this point, the Solus Project has too many reasons for users to stay clear of trying it.

      • Investigating Solus 1.0

        I tried running Solus in two test environments, a physical desktop computer and a VirtualBox virtual machine. Solus worked fairly well inside the VirtualBox environment, though it did not integrate with VirtualBox and I could not access my display’s full resolution. As VirtualBox’s guest modules were not available in Solus’s software repositories, I downloaded the official guest modules from Oracle and installed those. After a reboot, I was able to run my Solus guest with full screen resolution. Unfortunately, the Budgie desktop was still sluggish to respond. I tried experimenting with and without 3-D effects enabled and Budgie was always slow to respond and programs were slow to open. The operating system used approximately 270MB of memory when logged into the Budgie desktop.

      • Solus Reviewed, Arch Still Ahead, & Reasons to Switch

        Today in Linux news, two Solus reviews found issues with the newly stable 1.0. FOSS Force’s Best Desktop Distro poll finds Arch still leading the pack and Derrik Diener posted 8 reasons to switch from Windows 10 to Linux. A couple of Tumbleweed posts catch us up while Clem Lefebvre officially releases Mint 17.3 KDE and Xfce.

    • Arch Family

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • My Tumbleweed install for January 2016
      • UEFI and opensuse Leap 42.1

        Leap 42.1 started out with some UEFI problems. The last of those were fixed in an update yesterday. However, the fix only solves the problem for already installed systems. The install media still have these problems. Since opensuse usually does not re-release install isos, it is unlikely that install problems will completely go away.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat CEO: What the community has taught me about open organizations

        Six months of conversations with managers, leaders, and readers in the Open Organization community have taught me this important lesson. And those conversations almost inevitably raise the following question: What’s next? How can we begin putting open organizational practices in place? Where will open thinking eventually lead us?

      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Coverage Initiated at BMO Capital Markets

        BMO Capital Markets initiated coverage on shares of Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) in a research note issued on Thursday, The Fly reports. The brokerage set an “outperform” rating and a $97.00 price target on the open-source software company’s stock. BMO Capital Markets’ price target suggests a potential upside of 23.30% from the stock’s previous close.

      • Red Hat (RHT) to Report Q3 Earnings: What’s in Store?
      • Looking Back on Containers in 2015

      • Fedora

        • Upcoming Features of Fedora 24 Linux, the Alpha Build Arrives on March 1, 2016

          We’ve covered the development cycle of the Fedora 24 Linux operating system Fedora 23 was still in Beta, informing you guys about its upcoming features as we got our hands on them, but now the time has come to make a summary of them all.

        • Astronomy & Neuro Proposed For Fedora 24

          First up would be an Astronomy spin, which would provide “a complete toolchain for both amateur and professional astronomers.” This would basically be a spin of Fedora 24 that includes KStarts, astropy, AstrOmatic, and other astronomy software components installed by default.

        • Fedora 24 Delayed Officially and Ubuntu Needs Direction

          As reported last night, Fedora 24 needs a few extra weeks to rebuild everything with GCC 6 and tonight the request was approved. Elsewhere, Caitlyn Martin had troubles with Debian 8.1 and Christopher Shaw said Ubuntu needs a “firm direction.” Daniel Vrátil reported on the progress with Akonadi saying, “Human-readable formats are overrated” and Ken Vermette posted a book review of KDE Plasma 5.5.

        • Fedora 24 Will Likely Ship With Golang 1.6

          Go 1.6 is expected for release in February and so it simply makes sense going for this new version with Fedora 24 due for release now in late May or June. Go 1.6 adds experimental ports for 64-bit MIPS Linux, Android on 32-bit x86, support on FreeBSD for compiling under Clang by default, transparent support for HTTP/2, runtime improvements, and a wide variety of other changes. There are not, however, any changes to the programming language itself with Go 1.6.

        • New MirrorManager2 features

          The latest MirrorManager release (0.6.1) which is active since 2015-12-17 in Fedora’s infrastructure has a few additional features which provide insights into the mirror network usage.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • 10 years TeX Live in Debian

          I recently dug through my history of involvement with TeX (Live), and found out that in January there are a lot of “anniversaries” I should celebrate: 14 years ago I started building binaries for TeX Live, 11 years ago I proposed the packaging TeX Live for Debian, 10 years ago the TeX Live packages entered Debian. There are other things to celebrate next year (2017), namely the 10 year anniversary of the (not so new anymore) infrastructure – in short tlmgr – of TeX Live packaging, but this will come later. In this blog post I want to concentrate on my involvement in TeX Live and Debian.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 to Enter Final Freeze This Friday, More New Features Landed

            We have just been informed by Mr. Łukasz Zemczak of Canonical about the latest and hottest news that happened in the Ubuntu Touch world during the day of January 11, 2016.

          • Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Be the Best Release in Years, Here’s What’s New

            Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is still a month away from feature freeze and developers have plenty of time for some new features, but the distribution has already received a lot of attention already.

            Canonical has been focused on Ubuntu Touch these past two years, so there hasn’t been much activity on the desktop front. That’s about to change as the Ubuntu developers have already implemented (or are planning) a huge number of new features, and some of them are really surprising.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.3 KDE and Xfce released

              Linux Mint has long proven to be one of the most popular desktop distributions around. And now the Linux Mint developers have released version 17.3 for KDE and Xfce.

              You can download Linux Mint 17.3 KDE and Xfce right now from the Linux Mint site. You can also read the release notes and what’s new for Linux Mint 17.3 KDE, as well as the release notes and what’s new for Linux Mint 17.3 Xfce.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • MINIX NEO U1 Media Hub Review

      Whereas most other Amlogic S905 boxes have adopted the typical cost down approach, MINIX has done the reverse and built what they believe will be the number one Android box on the market. Their newest device, the NEO U1 is expected to surpass their own high-end flagship model – with more features at a lower price.

      If you’re unfamiliar with MINIX NEO, this Android-powered device transforms any conventional TV or monitor with an HDMI connection into a Media Center / fully functional PC. Enabling you to run Apps, browse the Internet, access Google Play Store, Netflix, Skype and even comes pre-installed with a new custom version of KODI which uses an audio pass-through mechanism not found on any other versions of KODI on the Android platform.

    • Linux-Based Drones Upstage Other Mobile Gadgets at CES

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

      The most prominent mobile devices at CES were not boring old mobile phones or tablets, but unmanned autonomous vehicles, better known as drones. New Linux-based UAVs include Parrot’s fixed wing Disco, Zerotech’s Snapdragon Flight based Ying, as well as new autopilots that turn a Raspberry Pi board into a flight computer (see below). These newcomers were joined by other recently announced Linux drones, such as the indoor-ready Fleye and Parrot’s BeBop 2.

    • First Mini-STX motherboard and mini-PC pop up at CES

      ASRock unveiled what it says are the world’s first Mini-STX motherboard and mini-PC, based on 6th Gen Intel Core (“Skylake”) processors, up to 65W TDP.

    • Research Online: Receiver with open software interface

      The platform can be seen as a hardware-assisted software receiver where computational complex methods are implemented on digital FPGA hardware whereas algorithms can be developed and implemented on receiver side on a user-friendly GNU/Linux system. A transparent access to the hardware is made available via the Open GNSS Receiver Protocol that gives deep access to the hardware control and enables deepcoupling of inertial sensors and optimized precise positioning solutions.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • What’s unique about open source people

    Welcome, one and all, to 2016. I wish every one of you a happy and prosperous new year.

    I have been meaning to write this column for a while. It is one part observation, one part lecture, and mostly utter rambling, so please do stay with me. I hope that, if nothing else, this column shares an important insight that came to me a while back that you may find interesting.

  • Girl Scouts: Cookies or code?

    Carrie Raleigh is the STEM program manager for Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio in California where she says they are much more than a cookie program. Girls Scouts has been coordinating experiences to help teach girls life skills for over 100 years, and as our world changes, they will need to as well. To learn the right skills for our current world, Girl Scouts is focusing their efforts on teaching girls about robotics, cybersecurity, coding, gaming, and gaining STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) career exposure.

  • Events

    • FOSS Rock Stars at SCALE 14x

      Sure you go to Linux expos such as SCALE to sharpen your coding skills and to learn about how to get your hands dirty going under the hood with you favorite open source applications. You might even go to learn a little bit about the business of open source. But you have to admit that an added attraction is just getting to see presentations from FOSS rock stars, the well known movers and shakers who have taken a big part in shaping the past, present and future of free and open source software. These are people whose presentations you’ll be tempted to attend no matter what the subject because…well, just because. Some of these are legends; some are not. But they’re all rock stars. And as usual, there’ll be an abundance of them at SCALE.

    • SCALE14x Plans

      In a week and a half I am flying out to Pasadena to the SCALE14x conference. I will be there from the evening of Wed 20th Jan 2016 to Sun 24th Jan 2016.

    • GNU Guix talk in Boston, MA (USA) on January 20th

      David Thompson will be giving a talk about Guix on January 20th at the BLU gathering at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts (USA).

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • As Spark Advances, IBM’s Commitment Does Too

      Last year was a giant one for Apache Spark, now one of the most talked about data analytics tools going. Not only did the project graduate to Top-Level Status at Apache, but IBM made a huge financial commitment to it. Late last year, Databricks, which was founded by Spark’s creators, revealed that an increasing number of users are choosing to complement or replace Hadoop tasks with Spark processes.

    • Apache Tools, Hadoop Get Added to Manthan’s Customer-Centric Analytics

      Manthan, which specializes in Big Data and analytics for retailers and other businesses has overhauled its Customer Marketing solution for Hadoop, adding data management, auto-scale and real time computing capabilities to its existing analytics arsenal. Manthan also has an interesting infographic out on the “consumerization of analytics.”

    • OpenStack Finding its Moxie in the APAC Region
    • ownCloud and Western Digital Advance Plans for Self-Hosted Device

      ownCloud, an open platform that anyone can leverage to create their own cloud platform, has been getting a lot of attention for its flexibility, and because interest in private clouds is on the rise. You can move beyond what services such as Dropbox and Box offer by leveraging ownCloud, and you don’t have to have your files sitting on servers that you don’t choose, governed by people you don’t know. We’ve provided several guides for getting going with it.

    • Get Ready for OpenStack Newton in 2016 and OpenStack Olimpic in 2017

      It’s not yet official, but the names of the ‘N’ and ‘O’ OpenStack releases have been voted on and there is a (preliminary) pair of winners.

  • CMS

    • Announcing the 2015 Winner for Best Open Source CMS

      Congratulations to the developers and community that supported Django CMS on their win. For those of you who have never had a chance to try Django, there’s never a better time than the present. Head on over to their website and give them a whirl, you might just find yourself a new favorite!

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • LLVM

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash 2.6.11 Release – 2016-01-11

      The GnuCash development team announces GnuCash 2.6.11, a snap release to fix a QIF import regression and the eleventh maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

    • GNU Health 3.0 Released With New Features

      The GNU Health developer announced the release today of Health 3.0. GNU Health is “a Free/Libre project for health practitioners, health institutions and governments. Its modular design allows to be deployed in many different scenarios: from small private offices, to large, national public health systems. It covers the functionality of Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Hospital Management, and Health Information System (HIS).”

    • GNU on Smartphones (part II)

      So, why should we bother if we already have Android, some might ask? If it’s just because of some binary blobs, one could just use Replicant, right?

      Well, one of the problems is that Android development is done in hiding, and pushed downstream when a new version is launched. There is no community behind that anyone can join. Replicant ends up either following it or staying behind. It could do a fork and have its own innovations. And I am all for it. But the lack of manpower for supporting devices and keeping up with the latest versions and security fixes already takes most of the time for the one or two developers involved.

      Also, Android has a huge modularity problem, that I will discuss further below. But it’s hard to replace many components in the system, unless you replace them all. And that also causes the problem that applications can hardly share extra components.

      I would rather see Debian running on my devices and supporting good environments and frameworks for all kinds of devices, like phones, tablets, TVs, cars, etc. It’s developed by a community I can join, it allows a diverse set of frameworks and environments, and it’s much easier to replace single components on such a system.

    • the half strap: self-hosting and guile

  • Licensing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Intel Skylake bug causes PCs to freeze during complex workloads

      Intel has confirmed that its Skylake processors suffer from a bug that can cause a system to freeze when performing complex workloads. Discovered by mathematicians at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), the bug occurs when using the GIMPS Prime95 application to find Mersenne primes.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • What Did the Governor Know About Flint’s Water, and When Did He Know It?

      On Tuesday, Governor Rick Snyder declared a state of emergency due to lead in the water supply. The same day, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it is investigating what went wrong in the city. Several top officials have resigned, and Snyder apologized. But that’s only so comforting for residents. They’re drinking donated water supplies—though those donations are reportedly running dry—or using filters. Public schools have been ordered to shut off taps. Residents, and particularly children, are being poisoned by lead, which can cause irreversible brain damage and affect physical health. It could cost $1.5 billion to fix the problem, a staggering sum for any city, much less one already struggling as badly as Flint is.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Gmail and a Can of Spam

      I am still trying to figure out the events that led to this intrusion. I’ve read almost everything there is to read on Google’s Gmail pages, without finding much. Google seems adamant about not giving-out one-on-one help, but maybe I just didn’t look long enough. On my own, I’ve evoked two step verification on my main email addresses, so that’s settled. But still…I’d like to figure out when and how this breach took place. What magic sequence of events happened to allow this?

      Did I mention I’m a security idiot? Yeah…I thought I did.

      It feels strange to again delve into antivirus and malware protection. I’ve been a smug, self-assured dummy when it comes to online threats and Linux in general. And while what happened can’t really be blamed on Linux per se, it happened in a Linux neighborhood, so I am going to arm myself against any and all malware comers

      Although I’m not above paying for good software, trying to discern what software is good and which is shiny junk can be a daunting challenge, especially in the Linuxsphere. In the tests I’ve studied over the past four days, ClamAV seems to be an online favorite, but they lack the one thing I am going to need on our Reglue kid’s computers: a friendly, useful graphical interface. I’m not going to tell an 11-year-old to drop to the command line to do anything, even if they do need to learn that the blinking prompt can make magic things happen. In time, I will teach them, but for now…. ClamAV failed the initial tests.

    • 602 Gbps! This May Have Been the Largest DDoS Attack in History

      Cyber attacks are getting evil and worst nightmare for companies day-by-day, and the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one of the favorite weapon for hackers to temporarily suspend services of a host connected to the Internet.

      Until now, nearly every big website had been a victim of this attack, and the most recent one was conducted against the BBC’s websites and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s main campaign website over this past holiday weekend.

    • How to Set up a Successful Bug Bounty Program [VIDEO]

      A bug bounty program is among the most impactful additions to a software security process. With a bug bounty program, security researchers submit reports on potential vulnerabilities, typically with the promise of a reward or “bounty” for their efforts.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Why ISIS Cannot Be Negotiated With

      In his recent Atlantic piece on “What to Do About ISIS,” Jonathan Powell, a former senior British diplomat, posits that eventually, the West would have to negotiate with the so-called Islamic State. It’s a comforting thought, in a way—the suggestion presupposes that ISIS, just like many other armed organizations throughout history, is the kind of group that can eventually be reasoned with, however distasteful its enemies may find the prospect. Noting numerous examples in which governments have talked their way to peace with terrorist organizations, Powell acknowledges, “of course people argue that ISIS is completely different from anything we have seen before. But people have said that about each new armed group since the rise of the IRA in 1919.”

    • Ukraine’s Power System Hacking: Coordinated in More than One Way? [Ed: Why are some fools still using SCADA systems? Have they learned nothing from Stuxnet?]

      The part that piques my attention is the defeat of SCADA systems by way of a multiphased attack — not unlike Stuxnet. Hmm…

      Another interesting feature of this cyber attack is its location. It’s not near sites of militarized hostilities along the border with Russia. where many are of Russian ethnicity, but in the western portion of Ukraine.

      More specifically, the affected power company served the Ivano-Frankivsk region, through which a large amount of natural gas is piped toward the EU. Note the map included above, showing the location and direction of pipelines as well as their output volume. Were the pipelines one of the targets of the cyber attack, along with the electricity generation capacity in the region through which the pipes run? Was this hack planned and coordinated not only to take out power and slow response to the outage but to reduce the pipeline output through Ukraine to the EU?

    • In Yemen, Civilians Suffer Relentless Bombing by Saudi-led Coalition

      AFTER NEARLY 10 MONTHS of war, the destruction of Yemen continues with little respite for civilians.

      On Sunday, a hospital in northern Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym, MSF) was bombed, killing at least five people and destroying several buildings that were part of the facility. Ten people were injured in the attack, including three of the group’s staff.

      The humanitarian group said it cannot confirm the origin of the attack but that planes were seen flying over the facility at the time. The only air power currently operating in Yemen is a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states that have waged a relentless bombing campaign since March.

      More than 6,000 people have been killed in the war, including over 2,800 civilians, the majority of them from airstrikes, according to the United Nations. The United States has backed the Saudi-led coalition with logistical and intelligence support, including crucial aerial refueling and targeting assistance, as well as billions of dollars worth of arms sales.

    • To End North Korea’s Nuclear Program, End the Korean War

      North Korea announced recently that it had successfully detonated its first hydrogen bomb. “This test is a measure for self-defense,” state media announced, “to firmly protect the sovereignty of the country and the vital right of the nation from the ever-growing nuclear threat and blackmail by the U.S.-led hostile forces.”

      South Korea, Japan, and China were swift to respond with condemnation, as was the UN Security Council, which issued a statement that North Korea’s test was a “clear violation of Security Council resolutions” and resolved to take “further significant measures.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Circus Elephants to Retire

      The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is ending its elephant acts a year and a half early, and will retire all of its touring elephants in May.

      The move comes amid increasing scrutiny on circus elephant acts with local governments passing “anti-circus” and “anti-elephant” ordinances in response to concerns over animal cruelty.

    • For the second time, we are witnessing a new geological epoch

      11,700 years ago, the Earth suffered a catastrophic climate change. As the ice age ended, sea levels rose by 120 meters, the days grew warmer, and many kinds of plant and animal life died out. But one animal began to thrive more than ever before. Homo sapiens, which had already spread to every continent except Antarctica, came up with a new survival strategy. Today, we call it farming.

    • California Senate Responds To Natural Gas Leak With Package Of Regulatory Legislation

      Leadership in the California Senate announced a package of bills Monday in response to the ongoing natural gas leak in Porter Ranch, a Los Angeles neighborhood 25 miles northwest of downtown.

      The four bills have several key elements, including increasing inspections and safety requirements for the state’s natural gas infrastructure. The package calls for changes to the emergency management of methane leaks; sets emissions reduction targets for short-lived greenhouse gases, including methane; and puts an immediate moratorium on gas being put in any of the wells located at the Aliso Canyon Storage Facility. It also requires the polluter — in this case, Southern California Gas Company — to be solely responsible for mitigation and emergency response costs.

    • Activists on Trial for Blocking Oil Train Will Argue It Was Justified by Climate Change

      In September 2014, five climate activists with Rising Tide Seattle managed to halt the passage of a crude oil train at the BNSF Delta rail yard in Everett, Wash. After eight hours blocking the tracks, the five were arrested and charged with criminal trespass and blocking a train. Today, they go on trial.

    • Toxic “Reform” Law Will Gut State Rules on Dangerous Chemicals

      A NEW SET OF BILLS that aims to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act may nullify the efforts of states such as Maine and California to regulate dangerous chemicals. The Senate’s bill, passed last month, just before the holidays, is particularly restrictive. The Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act — named, ironically, for the New Jersey senator who supported strong environmental protections — would make it much harder for states to regulate chemicals after the EPA has evaluated them, and would even prohibit states from acting while the federal agency is in the process of investigating certain chemicals.

    • Sanders is First to Sign ‘Fix Democracy’ Pledge Rejecting Fossil Fuel Cash

      Bernie Sanders is the first presidential candidate to sign onto an ambitious “Fix Democracy” pledge launched Monday by Greenpeace and more than 20 other climate justice organizations.

      In doing so, Sanders vows to reject campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry and to support a “people-powered democracy” marked by full voting rights for all and public funding for campaigns.

      “A critical way for candidates to show they support a people-powered democracy is by rejecting fossil fuel money and supporting voters rights,” said Annie Leonard, executive director at Greenpeace USA. “So far only Bernie Sanders has agreed to fossil fuel-free funding and protection of voters rights. It’s time for Hillary Clinton and anyone with serious White House aspirations to match Sander’s leadership. Our democracy has to stop being sold at auction to the highest bidders.”

    • Don’t Underestimate Bernie: Sanders Poised for Potential Victories Over Clinton in First Two Primaries

      According to a series of new polls, Clinton’s months-long lead in first-in-the-nation-voting Iowa has sunk to the outskirts of the margin of error, signaling that her campaign is approaching a statistical tie with Bernie Sanders.

  • Censorship

    • Twitter’s Policy Reboot: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

      The subsection on violent threats now includes a short clause on “threatening or promoting terrorism.” The clause is likely to have been added as a response to critics who claim Twitter is not doing enough to silence Daesh recruiters on its service. Seemingly short and concise, the clause is worryingly vague. Our own Supreme Court has struggled with defining the word “terrorism,” and Twitter does not offer a working definition either. Further, Twitter has not given us any information on what it considers speech that is “promoting terrorism,” or when free speech crosses the line and becomes offending content on the basis of promoting terrorism. This presents Twitter the massive responsibility of defining terrorism and justifying account suspensions accordingly. The lack of transparency in what is considered the promotion of terrorism risks Twitter applying its new policy to users inconsistently and arbitrarily, and ultimately, suppressing free speech.

    • Twitter’s History of Erratic Censorship Policies

      Some might question the use of the term “censorship” to describe Twitter’s mysterious and erratic policies for banning users and blocking content, since Twitter is a private company and its users aren’t even paying anything for their accounts.

    • Board will consider paying to settle claim of censorship of prison publications

      A state board Tuesday will consider paying nearly a half-million dollars to settle violations by the Nevada Corrections Department of a stipulation entered 15 years ago concerning censorship of prison publications.

      The proposed settlement before the state Board of Examiners is the latest in a string of costly problems that have plagued the agency in recent years and led to the forced resignation of former Director Greg Cox.

      In 2000, U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben granted an injunction against the Corrections Department, prohibiting prison officials from blocking prisoner access to Prison Legal News, a monthly magazine on criminal justice issues. Prison officials deemed it an inmate publication or newsletter prohibited by state regulation.

      The state paid about $44,000 to settle that case and signed a stipulation saying prisoners are permitted to subscribe to publications of their choice, with some limitations and censorship depending on content. Only a warden was authorized to reject a publication.

    • 3 Years After Aaron Swartz’s Death, Here’s What’s Happened to Aaron’s Law

      Monday marks the third anniversary of Aaron Swartz’s death. A hacktivist and early Reddit team member, Swartz was prosecuted in 2011 for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR while he was a fellow at Harvard University. Swartz worked for the Creative Commons and had a history of downloading paywalled academic material and releasing it to the public, according to Wired. He was accused of breaking federal hacking laws with intent to publicly disseminate the downloaded documents, and faced a 35-year prison sentence along with a $1 million fine. JSTOR, which incurred no financial damages, wasn’t seeking a suit against Swartz. Two years into his legal battle with the federal government, Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn, New York, apartment.

    • Aaron Swartz’ Warning That Social Media Companies Could Censor The Net Rings Truer Than Ever

      Today is the third anniversary of Aaron Swartz’s death. Had he lived, the legendary programmer, hacker and free speech campaigner would have been 30 today.

      Swartz committed suicide in 2013, facing up to 35 years in jail for data theft. His “crime” had been one committed by virtually every undergraduate student in the country; downloading articles from the online academic library JSTOR. The legal hunt for Swartz was widely criticised; former White House legal counsel called it “overzealous overcharging.”

    • New constitution to give govt more media censorship powers

      The Constitution Drafting Committee plans to give the government greater powers to censor the media under the new constitution.

      In addition to the ability to censor the press during times of war – a power granted in the 2007 constitution – the CDC now plans to give the state the ability to block news during political crises and other “unusual situations”, such as during the mass street protests that lead to 2014′s military coup.

      CDC spokesman Udom Rathamarit said on Tuesday that the committee agreed that the government should have such censorship powers following the imposition of an emergency decree or under martial law.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Tim DeChristopher on Bundy Takeover: Gov’t is More Afraid of Civil Disobedience Than Armed Militias

      The armed occupation of a federally owned wildlife outpost in remote Oregon has entered its second week. A self-styled right-wing antigovernment militia calling itself the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in support of two ranchers sentenced to prison for setting fires that burned federal land. Leaders of the occupation include Ammon and Ryan Bundy, the sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who refused to pay decades’ worth of cattle grazing fees, prompting a standoff with federal rangers in 2014 in Nevada, during which an armed militia rallied to his support. A recent piece by the website Waging Nonviolence compares the federal government’s handling of the Bundy case and that of Tim DeChristopher, a climate activist who spent 21 months in federal custody for posing as a bidder in 2008 to prevent oil and gas drilling on thousands of acres of land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management in his home state of Utah. DeChristopher joins us to discuss.

    • What’s the Real Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s Execution of Shia Cleric al-Nimr?

      The cleric has been a vocal critic of Saudi Arabia’s ruling royal family for some years. In 2009 he went as far as threatening Shi’ite secession, provoking a government crackdown in the minority’s eastern heartland. The Saudis have had al-Nimr in custody since 2012, and he was sentenced to death in 2014.

      While there are external factors, particularly the broader Saudi-Iranian struggle for power in the Persian Gulf, those are secondary. The execution of al-Nimr was a signal sent by the new King to his supporters and adversaries at home.

    • Spanish fragmentation continues after the elections
    • Election Year Anti-Crime Posturing Could Derail Even Limited Sentencing Reform

      LAST MARCH, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley spoke on the Senate floor against a bill aimed largely at reducing mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. He decried the “leniency industrial complex” that would see too many low-level offenders released.

      Just a few months later, in a seeming about-turn, he co-sponsored an albeit more limited bill, but with the similar aim of sentencing reform and a higher likelihood of success. “We need this,” said the archetypal tough-on crime Republican. Either, criminal justice reform has become a bipartisan political sine qua non, or Grassley’s reform bill was fiercely limited. Or, a bit of both.

    • Exposing Major PC Cover-up in Sweden – Leading Daily Dagens Nyheter Refused to Write About Cologne-like Sex Crimes in Central Stockholm

      The Cologne sex assault on New Year’s Eve, where groups of Arab and North African men groped more than a hundred German women, has shocked Europe this last week. But a very similar incident, with a large number of perpetrators and victims, took place in the Swedish capital last summer. That incident however was silenced by large Swedish newspapers and media companies, despite repeated attempts from police officers to contact journalists. This is how leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter tried to cover up a politically inconvenient sex assault story.

    • Swedish police accused of covering up sex crimes at music festival in Stockholm

      Swedish police faced allegations of a cover-up Monday for failing to inform the public of widespread sexual assaults against teenage girls at a music festival last summer.

      Police hadn’t mentioned the August incidents at the “We are Sthlm” festival until newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported on them this weekend following a string of sexual assaults and robberies on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany.

    • 10 Year Old Girl Aggressively Patted Down by TSA. Does this look right to You?
    • Six hopeful breakthroughs from 2015

      Despite conflicts and crises at home and abroad, 2015 offered glimpses of the road to a more just, compassionate, and sustainable world.

    • Video Game Bans Muslim Professor Because His Name Is Like a Terrorist Financier’s

      A prominent video game company mistakenly used a Treasury sanctions list to block a Muslim American professor from signing up to play one of its video games.

      Muhammad “Zakir” Khan is a speech professor at Broward College in Florida and the executive director of the Transparency and Accountability Project, a police accountability database.

    • WSJ Lines Up Behind Conservative “Web Of Dark Money” Pushing SCOTUS Case To Weaken Public-Sector Unions

      On January 11, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case calling into question a California state teachers union’s right to charge an “agency fee” or “fair share fee” to non-members who benefit from the union’s collective bargaining efforts despite not paying full membership dues. Media have noted that if the case results in the court overturning a previous decision, it would weaken all public-sector unions — and a “who’s who” of conservative anti-union backers have been instrumental in bringing it before the Supreme Court as quickly as possible.

    • Fear of Assimilation

      The Israeli Ministry of Education has struck a book from students’ reading lists.

      Big deal. Happens every day in Russia, China and Iran.

      But this was not a revolutionary work by a fire-eating rebel. It is a gentle novel by an appreciated female author, Dorit Rabinyan.

      Her cardinal sin was the plot: a love story between a Jewish girl and an Arab boy. They meet on American soil.

      The Ministry shuddered. What? A kosher daughter of Israel with an Arab Goy? Unthinkable. Like a love story between a white woman and a black man in the Atlanta of Gone with the Wind. Or between a Jewess and a pure Aryan in Hitler’s Germany.

      Shocking. Good that the wise men of the ministry stopped it in the nick of time.

    • Donald Trump Rides a Big Wave of Disgust

      Many of Trump’s positions are abhorrent. Many are inconsistent with traditional American values, Republican Party dogma, various articles of the Constitution and Trump’s own views in the past. But substance is, in a way, less important than style. Trump couldn’t possibly do half of what he promises, and probably doesn’t really want to do much of the rest.

    • Not Just Trump Is a Recruiter of Terrorists

      In America, the public, some politicians, and even President Obama have a vague awareness that U.S. government policies affect the recruitment of terrorists by radical groups. However, going too far with such self-awareness leads to excessively unsettling conclusions that would demand radical changes in U.S. foreign policy. Thus, as a nation, we generally avoid going down that road at all costs. It is to our peril.

      Some politicians, both Democratic and Republican, had criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s advocacy of preventing Muslims from entering the United States, which had the odor of fascism. Now that a news clip of Trump’s proposal has been used as a recruiting video for the radical Islamist group al-Shabab in Somalia, he is getting further criticism on the campaign trail. Not only does Trump’s proposal probably violate the Constitution’s First Amendment protection of freedom of religion and at least the spirit of the 14th Amendment’s stipulation of equal protection for all under the law – it is bad policy. The reason that the United States has had fewer problems than Europe does with radicalized Islamists within its borders is that American Muslims are prosperous and more integrated into their host society than in Europe. As a result, the overwhelmingly peaceful American Muslim population is U.S. law enforcement’s greatest source of intelligence on any radical activities by a tiny minority. Trump’s proposal singling out Muslims for discrimination, even if never enacted, is likely to begin undermining that integration by breeding Muslim fears that even more draconian measures could be taken in the future.

    • White Nationalist Leaders Robocalling Iowa Voters to Support Donald Trump

      If there were any lingering doubts that Donald Trump has the racist vote all locked up, news that a white supremacist group has thrown its support behind the candidate should put them to bed. Talking Points Memo reports that a white nationalist PAC is robocalling voters in Iowa, urging them to vote for Trump, who they promise will keep non-whites out of the country.

    • Donald Trump: The Chinese Sure Knew How to Display Toughness at Tiananmen Square

      So after eight years of Ronald Reagan, within weeks of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Trump is convinced that America is perceived as weak. I guess in Trumpland, America is always weak. Too bad we’re not more like the Chinese at Tiananmen Square. Sure, they almost blew it, but in the end they did what they had to do. I guess they would have known what to do with those Occupy hippies and all the Mexicans flooding into the country too.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Is Happy To Remove Wireless Broadband Caps, But Only If You Sign Up For Its TV Services

      We’re formally now bearing witness to the “synergistic” fruit of AT&T’s $69 billion recent acquisition of DirecTV. When the deal was first proposed, even Wall Street wondered why AT&T would spend that kind of money on a satellite TV provider on the eve of the cord cutting revolution. But AT&T has a very clear plan of attack, and as we recently noted, its first move post merger was to raise the rates of DirecTV and AT&T U-Verse TV customers in perfect unison. Now AT&T has added a new wrinkle to its post-merger plans, bringing back unlimited wireless broadband data — but only if you sign up for the company’s television services.

    • The Sad State of Web Development

      2015 is when web development went to shit. Web development used to be nice. You could fire up a text editor and start creating JS and CSS files. You can absolutely still do this. That has not changed. So yes, everything I’m about to say can be invalidated by saying that.

      The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived.

  • DRM

    • Game Cracking Group Predicts The End Of Cracking Because Of Better DRM

      Spend any reasonable amount of time looking through all the posts we’ve done here on DRM — digital rights management — and one theme becomes abundantly clear: the whole thing is an exercise in futility. Far from a blanket solution to video game piracy, DRM instead can be best explained as an arms race between game publishers and the hacking groups that best them at speeds nothing short of remarkable. All, mind you, while mostly annoying legitimate customers of the games the DRM is meant to protect from the pirates that crack them.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trade Commissioner Malmstroem Promotes TTIP, Warns Against Intolerance

      At a New Year’s reception of the Regional Chamber of Commerce in Karlsruhe, Germany today, European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem promoted the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and warned against “extreme views, opposed to open societies and economies.”

    • Copyrights

      • MLB Goes To Court To Defend Antitrust Actions That Go Against All The Progress MLB Has Made

        We have talked quite a bit about Major League Baseball for a technology site, in no small part due to many of the forward-thinking things the league has done regarding operating its business in the digital age. In the realm of sports streaming, I’ve typically referred to MLB.TV and the league’s Advanced Media products as the gold standard and I think I’m on pretty solid ground in saying so. Beyond that, the league seems poised to embrace expanded streaming options and the dropping of some of its more intrusive blackout rules, positioning the league well in the midst of the cord-cutting epidemic winding its way through the cable television industry.

      • The Boy Who Could Change the World

        Many of Aaron’s writings have now been elegantly collected in The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. The book is a joy to read—partially because his ideas and the way he wrote about them were so compelling, but also because you get to see his thinking develop and change from his teenage years into adulthood. And he thought about a lot—everything from copyright law to privacy to political tactics to music.

      • Rare Movie Piracy Case Sees Men Face Eight Years in Jail

        In a rare case of Internet piracy being prosecuted in Hungary, four men behind a previously raided site now face up to eight years in jail. The defendants, which include a pensioner and the technical director of an IT company, are accused of making available around 1,900 movies via a torrent site. They also face a claim for more than $1.2m in damages.

      • Once Again, Piracy Is Destroying The Movie Industry… To Ever More Records At The Box Office

        I imagine that some will respond that this was really only because of the desire to see the new Star Wars flick, but isn’t that simply proof that if you deliver what the public wants, they’ll pay to go to the theater?

        The other response, then, is that the real problem is that the home video market has declined. Sure, but that’s the same home video market that Hollywood tried desperately to kill, so I’m not sure that’s a legitimate argument if you’re defending Hollywood.

        But, even if we accept the question of the home video market, I’ll just point out that, last I checked, Netflix had a valuation over $45 billion. So, at least Wall Street doesn’t seem to be too up in arms about the state of the “home video” market.

        Of course, every time we post this kind of thing, we’re left asking if Hollywood will finally recognize that, maybe, just maybe, piracy isn’t the issue they should be focused on. And it never happens. However, let’s be optimistic this year and hope that maybe Hollywood will finally come around to realize that the thing it’s been saying will kill it hasn’t done anything of the sort.

      • BowieNet: how David Bowie’s ISP foresaw the future of the internet

        In the summer of 1998, a strange press release made its way out to technology and music publications throughout the world. David Bowie, the legendary musician and cultural provocateur, would be launching his own internet service provider, offering subscription-based dial up access to the emerging online world. At a time when plenty of major corporations were still struggling to even comprehend the significance and impact of the web, Bowie was there staking his claim. “If I was 19 again, I’d bypass music and go right to the internet,” he said at the time. He understood that a revolution was coming.

      • David Bowie as a paralegal

        He was, in effect, a paralegal – bundling, copying, and so on.

        One can imagine him looking at a future laid out of a thousand High Court bundles, saying: Sod this, I am off to be Ziggy.

      • David Bowie Wasn’t Just An Incredible Music Visionary, But An Internet & Business Model Visionary Too

        As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, famed musician David Bowie passed away yesterday at age 69 due to cancer. As someone who influenced so many people in so many different ways, it’s great to see basically everyone celebrating his life and his music. But, given that this is Techdirt, I also thought that Bowie deserved a shoutout on topics that we discuss around here as well: Bowie wasn’t just an amazing music visionary, but he was similarly visionary about the music business and the internet as well.

        All the way back in 1996, he was the first major musician to release music only on the internet, launching the single for “Telling Lies” as a direct download off of his website, and announcing it in an online chat session. Yes, nearly 20 years ago, Bowie embraced internet distribution for his music.

01.11.16

Links 11/1/2016: Red Hat Upgraded, Tails 1.8.2

Posted in News Roundup at 12:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Copyright Industry Rhetoric Ignores The Existence Of Linux And Wikipedia

    Linux and Wikipedia (as well as other, less known achievements) show unambiguously that the idea of requiring any kind of payment for great tools, culture, or knowledge to come into being is an utter falsehood. It may be true in some cases. But the cases where it hasn’t been true have all shown that the basic premise, that the copyright monopoly is any kind of necessary, is the purest oxen fecalia.

    And these projects, free in all aspects as they are, now underpin the Android operating system which powers three billion smartphones and well over half of the world’s servers in various incarnations of the GNU/Linux operating system. They support every lower- and higher-level education on the planet.

    According to the copyright industry, these projects do not and cannot exist, as the authors weren’t paid.

  • How to set up a Linux-based music server at home

    In this article, I am going to focus on the hardware, software, and configuration issues that we need to resolve to set up a Linux-based music server as part of the home music system. Specifically, I’ll look at the Raspberry Pi, Cubox-i, and Fit-PC as options for hosting your digital home music system.

    Some of the material in this article can equally be applied to my previous article on the Linux laptop as a high-quality music player.

  • Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Toyota: all driving more Linux into cars

    The Ford Motor Company has for some time now been developing its open source Smart Device Link (SDL) middleware framework.

    The firm is now enjoying support from rival automotive manufacturer Toyota for this still-emerging technology.

  • My Linux wish list for 2016 is just one item long

    We’re past the point of predictions for 2016, so let’s talk about the one thing I really want to happen in the Linux world this year: desktop Linux on tablets.

  • Desktop

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.4

      Nothing untoward happened this week, so Linux-4.4 is out in all the usual places.

      The changes since rc8 aren’t big. There’s about one third arch updates, one third drivers, and one third “misc” (mainly some core kernel and networking), But it’s all small. Notable might be unbreaking the x86-32 “sysenter” ABI, when somebody (*cough*android-x86*cough*) misused it by not using the vdso and instead using the instruction directly.

      Full shortlog appended for people who care or are just curious.

      And with this, the merge window for 4.5 is obv

    • Rejoice, Penguinistas, Linux 4.4 is upon us

      Version 4.4 of the Linux kernel has been finalised and released into the wild.

      Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday evening, US time.

      What’s new this time around? Support for GPUs seem the headline item, with plenty of new drivers and hooks for AMD kit. Perhaps most notable is the adoption of the Virgil 3D project which makes it possible to parcel up virtual GPUs. With virtual Linux desktops now on offer from Citrix and VMware, those who want to deliver virtual desktops with workstation-esque graphics capabilities have their on-ramp to Penguin heaven.

      Raspberry Pi owners also have better graphics to look forward to, thanks to a new Pi KMS driver that will be updated with acceleration code in future releases.

    • Linux kernel 4.4 released
    • Linux 4.4 Kernel Officially Released
    • Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS Officially Released, Adds 3D Support in the Virtual GPU Driver

      Today, January 10, 2016, will enter in the Linux history books as the day when the Linux kernel 4.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) has been officially released by Linus Torvalds and his team of hard working kernel developers.

    • Nouveau Gets Some Improvements For Linux 4.5

      While it was looking like Nouveau might not have any big updates for Linux 4.5, a last-minute pull request was honored for DRM-Next that will provide some new/improved functionality to this open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

      David Airlie pulled the Nouveau DRM feature update into DRM-Next last night for the Nouveau DRM driver. This pull includes some fixes/improvements for the NVIDIA Tegra K1′s GK20A graphics processor, better support for high frequency HDMI modes, the Nouveau pstate control interfaces were moved from sysfs to debugfs, there is now support for PCI Express link speed changes, and various other fixes.

    • New AMD CPUs To Support Power Monitoring With Linux 4.5

      With the Linux 4.5 merge window’s hwmon subsystem pull request is an update for new AMD Family 15h processors to support power monitoring.

      With the hwmon update, the Family 15h Model 70h-7fh processors now support monitoring their power usage (in Watts) via the fam15h_power driver. I haven’t been able to find any concrete information for what APU/CPUs technically cover this Family 15h 70h series, but anticipate it being either the rumored desktop Carrizo APUs or Zen. If anyone knows for sure, please let us know in the forums.

    • Linux-Based XanMod Kernel Tests

      Following yesterday’s tests of the Liquorix 4.3 kernel, a Phoronix reader pointed out another customized kernel I previously hadn’t heard of: XanMod.

      XanMod is a Linux-based kernel with custom modifications aiming to “take full advantage in high-performance workstations, gaming desktops, media centers and others.” XanMod is primarily geared for Debian/Ubuntu systems but obviously could work elsewhere.

    • Linux 4.4 Ushers In 2016

      After 8 release candidates, the Linus Torvalds officially released the Linux 4.4 kernel on January 10, marking the first new Linux release of 2016. The first kernel release of 2016 is coming faster in the new year than 2015, with the first kernel release of 2015 not out until February 9.

      “Nothing untoward happened this week, so Linux-4.4 is out in all the usual places,” Linus Torvalds wrote in in his release announcement.

      Last week Torvalds explained that having an 8th release candidate for a Linux kernel release is typically a cause for concern to deal with unresolved issues, but that wasn’t the case with Linux 4.4 rc8.

    • Blob-Free GNU Linux-libre 4.4 Kernel Released

      The latest Linux-libre kernel is now available for those wanting a fully de-blobbed Linux kernel that doesn’t support drivers depending upon proprietary firmware/microcode or other non-free code.

      Alexandre Oliva announced the GNU Linux-libre 4.4-gnu kernel a short time ago, derived from last night’s release of the Linux 4.4 kernel.

    • Linux 4.4 kernel emerges with better support for Intel Skylake and Raspberry Pi

      The release has gone ahead as planned, despite some problems in mid-December. Linux kernel releases are based around a schedule rather than any specific features, but that hasn’t stopped a number of big additions to the code base provided by the community.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Missteps Of The X.Org Foundation

        With the recent news of X.Org possibly losing its valuable domain, many have commented in our forums and elsewhere how this could have possibly happened… However, in reality, it is sadly not much of a surprise.

        The X.Org domain issue is not new and they ran into a similar set of challenges ten years ago when having to renew the domain. However, there have also been other fumbles too, which doesn’t make it all that surprising.

      • X servers and dangerous aircraft

        Airbus A320 has two sidesticks, with no force feedback, and no physical link. So you are trying to recover from stall, you are pushing the sidestick fully and your first officer pulls the stick fully — result is you remain stalled. You don’t even know your first officer fights with you… That’s what happened to PK-AXC, report is here. (How did they get to stall? Computers spuriously adjusted their rudder trim when they lost power. No, you should not reset flight computers like that.)

  • Applications

    • MKVToolNix v8.8.0 released

      A new year, a new release – v8.8.0. Only ten days since 8.7.0, but a lot of users are hitting a regression in 8.7.0 that makes mkvmerge crash. The user-visible result is that the GUI (wrongfully) claims that the mkvmerge executable couldn’t be found. The underlying cause is a bug in the TrueHD detection code wrongfully thinking a file is indeed a TrueHD file while it actually isn’t – e.g. it’s happened with MPEG 2 video files, DTS files, h.264/AVC files etc.

    • OpenShot 2.0 Beta Finally Released

      What a surprise waking up to find that at long-last the OpenShot 2.0 beta is now available to early-backers of this open-source video editor’s Kickstarter project.

      It was just a few days ago mentioning it was one of the letdowns of 2015 — and non-linear Linux video editors in general. Fortunately, there’s some progress to report already for 2016 with the release of their long-awaited beta.

    • Rcpp 0.12.2: Keep rollin’

      The third update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R earlier today, and has been pushed to Debian. It follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, and the 0.12.2 release in November making it the seventh release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. This release is somewhat more of a maintenance release addressing a number of small bugs and nuisances without adding any new features.

    • MKVToolNix 8.8.0 Open Source MKV Manipulation Tool Has TrueHD Fixes, More

      MKVToolNix 8.8.0 has been released today, January 10, and it comes after only one week from the release of MKVToolNix 8.7.0, as Moritz Bunkus announced earlier on the project’s website.

    • Latex2MediaWiki and Google Code-In

      I have to admit that before Google Code-In 2015 I had never heard of Wikitolearn although I had used plasma and other KDE software and also read planetkde. In order to create “a free and user-friendly computing experience” it makes sense to also support projects aiming to create free content. Latex2MediaWiki is used to convert latex documents to the MediaWiki format which is used to contribute to Wikitolearn. However, it is not limited to Wikitolearn as Wikipedia and its sister projects also use MediaWiki.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Solus Linux Operating System to Be Soon Separated from the GNOME Stack

      A few minutes ago, January 10, 2016, Josh Strobl from the Solus Project published the seventeen installation of the weekly “This Week in Solus” newsletter, informing users of the Solus Linux operating system about the latest developments.

    • New Releases

      • 4MLinux 16.0 Enters Beta, Core Edition Uses GCC 5.3.0 and Linux Kernel 4.1.13 LTS

        A few minutes ago, January 10, we received an email from Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator of the 4MLinux project, where he informs us about the immediate availability for download of the Beta release of the upcoming 4MLinux 16.0 operating system.

      • Solus Devs Promise to Fix All Bugs in 4 Weeks, Solus 2.0 to Split OS from Regular Apps

        The Solus 1.0 operating system seems to have had a pretty good start, but developers have some really interesting plans for the 2.0 branch.

        One of the biggest problems, with any Linux distribution, is the number of problems at any given time. There are no perfect OSes, and they all have known issues. It might be something hardware related, or it may be something related directly to the Linux distro, but there is always something. In fact, most projects also list the known issues, not just features and changes.

    • Arch Family

      • Manjaro Linux Cinnamon 16.01 Now in Development, Ships with Arc and Nitrux Themes

        This past weekend, Ringo de Kroon, the maintainer of the Cinnamon desktop environment for Manjaro Linux, as well as the Manjaro Linux Cinnamon Community Edition, released for testing the first development build from the upcoming Manjaro Linux Cinnamon 16.01 series.

      • Manjaro Linux GNOME 16.01 Community Edition Gets a First Release Candidate

        The Manjaro Linux community was proud to announce the availability of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux GNOME 16.01 Community Edition operating system.

        We reported earlier the release of the Manjaro Linux Cinnamon 16.01 distribution, which also entered development, both being based on the newly released Manjaro Linux 16.01 Dev series about which we wrote last week. As expected, Manjaro Linux GNOME 16.01 Release Candidate 1 inherits all of Manjaro Linux 16.01′s GNU/Linux technologies, despite the fact that the maintainer didn’t reveal any juicy details about the features implemented.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT): Analysts Take

        Wall Street research analysts are predicting that Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) will post earnings per share of $0.31 when the firm next issues their quarterly results. According to the latest information, the firm should release the report on or around 2016-03-23. This is according to data compliled by Zack’s Research. Analysts and investors will be paying close attention to how the actual numbers compare with the estimates. A large surprise factor in either direction typically can lead to a significant swing in the stock price in the hours and days after the report. For the most recent quarter Red Hat, Inc. recorded a surprise factor of 3.33% as the actual EPS number was $0.01 off from the consensus estimate.

      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Earns Buy Rating from SunTrust

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT)‘s stock had its “buy” rating reaffirmed by investment analysts at SunTrust in a research note issued to investors on Monday, Analyst Ratings Net reports. They currently have a $73.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock. SunTrust’s price target suggests a potential downside of 7.77% from the company’s previous close.

      • Fedora

        • Archived-At Email Header From Mailman 3 Lists

          By now most Fedora email lists have been migrated to Mailman3. One little (but killer) new feature that I recently discovered was that Mailman3 includes the RFC 5064 Archived-At header in the emails.

          This is a feature I have wanted for a really long time; to be able to find an email in your Inbox and copy and paste a link to anyone without having to find the message in the online archive is going to save a lot of time and decrease some latency when chatting on IRC or some other form of real time communication.

        • Plan for 24 Fedora Design Suite

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 5 Now Uses i686 Kernel Over i586, SPARC64 Support

        The fifth alpha release of the Debian Installer being prepared for the 9.0 “Stretch” release is now available.

        Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 5 for its i386 configuration now uses the i686 kernel rather than i586, has initial debian-installer support for SPARC64, support for NVMe devices, various ARM device updates, accessibility support for all desktops, the Linux 4.3 kernel is now used, and a variety of other changes made to this Stretch Installer.

      • Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 “Stretch” Alpha 5 Installer Supports NVMe Devices, SPARC64

        The Debian Installer team, through Cyril Brulebois, has been proud to announce earlier, January 10, that the fifth Alpha release of the upcoming installer for Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 “Stretch” is now available for testing.

      • Ian Murdock, Debian Linux Founder Dies Aged 42

        The cause of Murdock’s death is still unclear, but tweets from his now deleted Twitter account stated his intention to take his own life. Reports have since surfaced that Ian Murdock had been involved in a police investigation, and that he had also been charged with assaulting an officer.

      • How To Talk About Mental Illness Online?

        Shortly after the death of Debian founder Ian Murdock, Bruce Perens, who succeeded Murdock as Debian Project Leader in 1996 and was also Murdock’s employer for a period of time, claimed very publicly that Murdock died of mental illness, although no evidence has been provided. Without referencing Murdock or Perens, another prominent Debian Developer, Daniel Pocock, has asserted that discussion about who has or had a mental illness is a step too far.

      • Derivatives

        • Tails 1.8.2 OS Leaves No Trace Online or Offline

          Tails, a live operating system that aims to preserve users’ privacy and that helps people use the Internet anonymously, has been upgraded to version 18.2 and is now ready for download.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical: One Billion People “Benefit from” Ubuntu Linux

            Ubuntu Linux has more than one billion users — or at least people who “benefit” from it, whether they know it or not — according to a recent statement from a Canonical executive about how many people actually run its open source operating system.

            Dustin Kirkland, who works on Ubuntu Product and Strategy for Canonical, said in a blog post that “more people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows.” That language seems to be an admission that Canonical actually has relatively little idea how many people run Ubuntu, and Kirkland offered few hard statistics.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” Xfce Screenshot Tour

              Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” Xfce arrived with its KDE counterpart and it’s the last one in the 17.x branch of the famous operating system.

            • What’s New In Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” KDE

              Linux Mint is one of the most popular Linux distributions. It’s known for its simplicity, stability and ease of use. Linux Mint recently released Linux Mint 17.3 ‘Rosa’ with many improvements, new features and updated software that make it more stable and reliable. In this article you’ll know what’s new in this release and how you can get it.

            • Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” KDE Screenshot Tour

              Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” KDE was released over the weekend, and it brings a ton of updates and various other changes for the operating system. We now take a closer look at the OS in a quick screenshot tour.

              Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” KDE is still based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which means that it still uses the old KDE SC implementation, and it’s one of the few distros that still do. This was to be expected and the new Linux Mint 18.x that will launch in a few months’ time will get the latest one, but for the time being, we can get to enjoy and say goodbye to the old KDE.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • David Bowie, musical legend behind Ziggy Stardust, dies aged 69 from cancer

    David Bowie, a music legend who used daringly androgynous displays of sexuality and glittering costumes to frame legendary rock hits “Ziggy Stardust” and “Space Oddity”, has died of cancer.

  • Hardware

    • Panasonic’s Invisible TV Is The Coolest TV Tech Of CES 2016

      This world has seen a lot of advancements in terms of TV designing and the introduction of newer generations of TV. From flat-screen to curved screen, HD to UHD and much more. Recently at CES 2016, Panasonic unveiled its transparent TV screen also being called as invisible TV. The TV screen was a thin LCD panel with adjustable dimensions. The adjustable dimensions make it easier for the user to hang the TV across two living room shelves.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Will the New Dietary Guidelines Make School Food Healthier?

      Here’s what the Obama Administration’s new food rules will mean for the nation’s cafeterias.

    • Medical Marijuana Seller Faces Prison in Washington, Where Pot Is Legal

      In a recent Forbes column, I described the limitations of the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, a spending rider aimed at preventing the Justice Department from interfering with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws. A trial that continues today at the federal courthouse in Tacoma illustrates one of those limitations: U.S. attorneys may claim the medical marijuana suppliers they choose to prosecute are not complying with state law, and that claim can be difficult to refute when the law is hazy, as it is in Washington.

    • My Right to Die: Assisted Suicide, My Family, and Me

      Harry’s cancer was caught early, and it progressed slowly. By 2007, however, it had taken over his body. When my wife saw him in early 2008, she remarked that he looked like someone in a lot of pain but trying not to show it—despite the fact that he was taking oxycodone, a powerful opiate.

      During a career that lasted more than three decades, he had watched all too many of his patients struggle with their final months, and this experience had persuaded him that he would take his own life if he found himself dying of an agonizing and clearly terminal illness. Now he was. Finally, on the evening of January 29, he stumbled and fell during the night, and decided his time had come: He was afraid if he delayed any longer he’d become physically unable to remain in control of his own destiny.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Syrian Army lets food Aid into Starving Madaya

      France24 Arabic reports that the Syrian government agreed Thursday to allow humanitarian aid into Madaya and two other besieged towns near the Lebanese border northwest of Damascus. The step was praised by the United Nations.

      The siege of Madaya, pop 40,000, has been going on for two years. It and Zabadani are Sunni Arab population areas that joined the rebellion against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. However, as the struggle turned into civil war, the fighters were radicalized. The towns became divided into quarters, some of which supported the Nusra Front (Syrian al-Qaeda) while others supported the Syrian Freemen (Ahrar al-Sham). The two hard line Salafi jihadi groups have a visceral hate for Shiites. Fear that they would make incursions into Lebanon brought Hizbullah across the border to join the siege. The location of the towns also makes them a threat to the capital.

    • Obama’s Crocodile Tears

      After seven years of mass murder, dirty tricks destroying countless lives and destabilizing many peaceful lands, thousands of extrajudicial killings conducted by young thugs from basement computer-games rooms at CIA, and unblinking acceptance of such brutal savageries as we’ve seen from Israel or Saudi Arabia or Turkey, his tears truly mean nothing, except perhaps somewhere in the back of his own dark and terrible mind.

    • Why the War Party Dominates the Media

      Indeed, the War Party dominates the three major media outlets in the English-speaking print world, and on television as well. As far as the former is concerned, the War Street Journal is dominated by the neocons. At the New York Times, liberal internationalists – Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, and Roger Cohen – reign unchallenged. The Washington Post is the worst: there the editorial director, Fred Hiatt, is an unabashed warmonger, with the rest of the crew – Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, Jackson Diehl, Marc Thiessen, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin – dyed-in-the-wool neocons.

    • Tomgram: Rick Shenkman, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About People and Love the Bombing

      Torturers, rapists, murderers: for more than a decade as I researched my history of the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves, I spent a good deal of time talking to them, thinking about them, reading about them, writing about them. They all had much in common. At a relatively young age, these men had traveled thousands of miles to kill people they didn’t know on the say-so of men they didn’t know, and for a mere pittance — all of it done in the name of America.

      I also spent time talking to another group of men, a much larger contingent who stood by and watched as those beside them tortured or raped or murdered. Some heartily endorsed these acts, some seemed ambivalent about them, some were appalled by them, but none did much of anything about them.

    • Will the Middle East Crisis Worsen in the New Year?

      The US war in Afghanistan has lasted 14 years and four months and is expected to continue for more years. The cost to US taxpayers so far is over $1 trillion, according to the Financial Times, and the final cost will be much higher. The only American victory in this war will be that of the US armaments industry.

    • Send Obama to Gitmo

      In his last year in office, President Obama must right two wrongs that would help salvage his legacy: close the US military prison and announce the willingness to close the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo and return the land to the Cuban people.

    • Turkey’s Idiotic War on the Kurds

      Erdogan believes that he can ride the tiger of the anti-Kurdish war.

    • God as the Original Terrorist: How the Bible Condones Atrocious Acts of Terror

      Last fall, Dutch pranksters put a cover from a Quran over a Bible and then asked passersby to read aloud homophobic, violent or sexist passages that violate modern moral sensibilities. The texts shocked people who had never immersed themselves in the Iron Age world of the Bible writers, a world in which daughters can be sold as sexual slaves and most of us deserve the death penalty: you included.

      By one count, the Quran has only 532 cruel or violent passages, while the Bible has 1,321. Christians respond that the Bible is longer and so the cruel, violent passages make up a smaller percent of the whole.

      ISIS terrorists claim that their scripts for jihad, executions, sexual slavery and theocracy come straight from the Quran, and they cite chapter and verse to back up their claim. But Christians who find ISIS horrifying might be even more horrified to learn that similar scripts can be found in their own Good Book, including endorsements of terrorism that rival the most vile atrocities committed in the name of Allah.

    • MPs resume scrutiny of arms exports to Saudi Arabia

      British defence exports to Saudi Arabia are set to come under parliamentary scrutiny this month with the revival of a cross-party committee on international arms sales.

      The Committee on Arms Exports Controls has lain dormant since the general election, but MPs have told House of Commons clerks to set it up again in the wake of the executions in Saudi Arabia earlier this month.

      Saudi has been a lucrative market for the UK – BAE Systems courted controversy with the £10bn sale of Typhoon jets to the repressive state.

    • Four Killed as Saudi Strike Kills Yemen Doctors Without Borders Hospital

      A new statement from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reported a Saudi rocket strike, likely an airstrike, hit one of their hospitals in the Yemeni capital city of Sanaa, killing four people and wounding 10 others, including three MSF staff members.

    • MI5 offered ‘new Jihadi John’ double agent job before he joined ISIS in Syria – reports

      British security services unsuccessfully tried to recruit terror suspect Abu Rumaysah, dubbed the ‘new Jihadi John,’ before he skipped bail and fled to Syria to join Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) with his pregnant wife and four children.

      Officers from MI5 approached Rumaysah, a Muslim-convert born Siddhartha Dhar to a Hindu family in London, on two separate occasions, the Sunday Times reports.

      A security source told the paper MI5 officers offered Rumaysah a role as an agent, and told him he would likely be killed if he went to Syria.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Emissions Cuts Boost Health and Wealth

      Going green by switching to renewable sources of electricity could be good business for the US, according to new research.

      A report by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California says that cutting greenhouse gas emissions meant that the US as a whole was $2.2 billion better off in 2013.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • How Sean Penn Got the Most Wanted Drug Kingpin in the World Captured

      A Mexican law enforcement official confirmed on Saturday that Penn’s interview with Guzmán led them directly to El Chapo’s compound.

    • Sean Penn Reveals Interview With Fugitive Drug Baron El Chapo

      Hollywood actor met Mexican kingpin, now sought by US for extradition, while he was on the run following prison escape.

    • Sean Penn, Intelligence Dangle

      What curious grammar describing Penn’s source’s remarkable knowledge. “A source familiar with the cartel informed me on October 3rd that the initial siege had begun.” Did his source inform him on October 3rd, as this passage literally claims? (The second facilitator in the story, whom Penn calls El Alto, stuck around after they emerged from the jungle on October 3.) The muddled structure of this passage would certainly allow for that, or it might mean his source informed him that on October 3 the siege began.

      Curiously, when Penn provided his bona fides to Chapo — which for the cartel boss, largely rested on the actor’s relationship with Hugo Chávez — he didn’t mention that he had a relationship with people who would be privy to otherwise unavailable information about what really went down in October, though he did admit he has “many relationships inside the United States government.”

    • A US Media Lost in Propaganda

      Vulgar, crude, racist and ultra-sexist though he is, Donald Trump can still see how awful the American mainstream media is.

      I think one of the main reasons for Donald Trump’s popularity is that he says what’s on his mind and he means what he says, something rather rare amongst American politicians, or politicians perhaps anywhere in the world. The American public is sick and tired of the phony, hypocritical answers given by office-holders of all kinds.

      When I read that Trump had said that Sen. John McCain was not a hero because McCain had been captured in Vietnam, I had to pause for reflection. Wow! Next the man will be saying that not every American soldier who was in the military in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq was a shining hero worthy of constant media honor and adulation.

      When Trump was interviewed by ABC-TV host George Stephanopoulos, former aide to President Bill Clinton, he was asked: “When you were pressed about [Russian president Vladimir Putin’s] killing of journalists, you said, ‘I think our country does plenty of killing too.’ What were you thinking about there? What killing sanctioned by the U.S. government is like killing journalists?”

    • Sanders and Clinton Neck-and-Neck in Iowa and New Hampshire

      In Iowa, Clinton has 48 percent, compared to 45 percent for Sanders.

    • Bernie Sanders Is Right About Clinton and Big Banks—and Here Are the Numbers to Prove It

      The Vermont senator recently pointed to how Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Wall Street becomes clear when you look at how much she’s charged for speeches to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and big banks. As an Intercept article puts it in a headline, her fees for just 12 speeches amounted to “more than most of us earn in a lifetime.”

    • White Man’s Pathology: Deep Inside the Popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

      You feel your whiteness properly at the American border. Most of the time being white is an absence of problems. The police don’t bother you so you don’t notice the police not bothering you. You get the job so you don’t notice not getting it. Your children are not confused with criminals. I live in downtown Toronto, in one of the most liberal neighborhoods in one of the most open cities in the world, where multiculturalism is the dominant civic value and the inert virtue of tolerance is the most prominent inheritance of the British empire, so if you squint you can pretend the ancient categories are dissipating into a haze of enlightenment and intermarriage.

    • Donald Trump talks at a fourth-grade level. Maybe that’s why the Fox News audience loves him

      It’s a cliché to say that democratic states can’t function properly without an informed electorate. But it’s absolutely true. And this is why, heading into the 2016 election year, I’m nervous about the future. With Donald Trump leading the Republican presidential contenders, even many Republican die-hards are shaking in their boots.

      But Trump isn’t the cause, just the symptom. The deeper cause is a strain of anti-intellectualism that runs through the roots of American culture. And while this strain is found on both sides of the political spectrum (see some liberals on vaccines and chemtrails), it’s mostly concentrated among religious conservatives on the political right. For those who espouse anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories have the same clout as legitimate science, the opinions of non-experts are just as credible as those of the experts, and ideology takes precedence over the cold hard facts.

    • Vegas billionaire donor keeps GOP candidates guessing

      But the truth, more than half a dozen sources close to Adelson say, is more complicated. The casino owner, who together with his wife spent nearly $100 million in the 2012 campaign cycle, is still weighing his options.

    • Flaunting Our Ignorance: We’re Looking at You, GOP Candidates

      It’s more than good ole American anti-intellectualism — we celebrate our ignorance and wear it as a badge of pride.

    • Jimmy Carter’s Blood Drenched Legacy

      Carter’s actions consistently prioritized economic and security interests over humanitarian concerns.

    • Making the news or breaking it: a unique problem for the BBC

      The argument over whether the BBC ‘orchestrated’ the resignation of a Labour shadow minister for political effect is more than it seems.

      It’s a storm in a tea-cup, they say. It’s just a bunch of barmy Corbynistas blaming the failures of their hero on some massive right-wing media conspiracy. Move on. Grow up. This is how the media work.

      The ‘on air’ resignation of a relatively unknown shadow business minister, Stephen Doughty, on the BBC’s Daily Politics last Tuesday may not rate very highly on the political agenda, but the brief searchlight it shone into the nation’s public broadcaster at a time of parliamentary turmoil and institutional crisis is instructive.

      First full disclosure: I know and like the BBC’s Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, who replaced Nick Robinson after the general election. I think Andrew Neil does an admirable job as an impartial questioner and presenter, making both the BBC’s Daily and Sunday Politics programmes entertaining and informative to watch. (It should also go without saying I do not support any ludicrous petitions demanding that either of them resign.)

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Beyond survival: moving to end domestic labour trafficking

      We are building a movement anchored on the belief that culture and economy should honour and value all human life equally. As we continue to draw national attention to cases of trafficked domestic workers, we hope to expand the number of survivor leaders and affiliates anchoring the Beyond Survival campaign and push for comprehensive federal legislation to address the trafficking of domestic workers.

      Domestic workers who have survived human trafficking are more than victims. Women like Karmo, Jing, and Shanti live at the edge of our globalised economy and at the centre of our future. Their experiences tell a critical story of our world’s new economic reality: extreme global inequality and unprecedented migration across borders, with women of colour in some of the most vulnerable positions. As organisers and activists, their voices and leadership in news headlines and public policy can transform the cycles of victimisation and hold our institutions accountable. Governments and policymakers alike need to recognise survivors, and work together in a movement to end human trafficking.

    • Campaign To Restore College Coursework Behind Bars Gets Big Boost In New York

      According to the New York Times, the governor announced on Sunday his intention to use $7.5 million in criminal forfeiture funds — along with another $7.5 million in private matching funds — to pay for a new program that offers an “integrated curriculum” to about 1,000 inmates statewide over the next five years. Cuomo made his announcement while speaking from the pulpit of Mount Neboh Baptist Church, a predominantly black congregation in Harlem, New York.

    • Marco Rubio’s claim that Obama wants to ‘take away our guns’

      Some of the claims he makes are not readily fact-checkable. For example, it’s true the military budget has decreased under Obama (partly because he pulled troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq) and that Obama has vowed to veto bills that strip federal funds from Planned Parenthood – but the two points aren’t comparable. The Israel-Iran comparison doesn’t make much sense; virtually no foreign government is off limits for the National Security Agency’s surveillance — including Israel and Iran — and security and military ties between Israel and the United States have grown closer than ever during the Obama administration.

      Instead, we will focus on two claims that stood out as the most curious: that Obama released terrorists from Guantanamo who are “plotting to attack” America, and that Obama’s plan after the shooting at San Bernardino was to “take away our guns.”

      What evidence supports these claims?

    • ICE-Free NYC protests raids on immigrant families and communities

      Eight protesters wearing cement-sleeves were arrested on Friday outside a New York City immigration court for blocking a busy intersection, as part of a protest against recent raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

      “In light of the national news that immigrant communities are again being terrorized, with people being woken up in the middle of the night and families being torn apart in states across the country, we felt it was imperative that, here in New York City, we have an action and call attention to this,” said Nastaran Mohit, an organizer with the pro-immigrant rights coalition ICE-Free NYC. “This is a crisis, and it demands action.”

    • Immigrant advocates take action following deportation raids in the South

      The first week of the new year brought hope and cheer for some. But for many Southern immigrant communities, it brought fear.

      News of the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to conduct immigrant deportation raids at the outset of 2016 circulated just before the Christmas holiday, and the first raids got underway this past weekend. They are part of the Obama administration’s efforts to stem a wave of women and children who have arrived in the U.S. since 2014, many fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. Officials said the raids target those whose asylum claims have been denied and who now face deportation orders.

    • When does the violation of women’s bodies become a “red line”?

      War is trauma. And it is the lack of mental health care that accompanies it.

      War is rape. And the silence and suffering that surrounds this stigmatized act.

      War is the acknowledgement that soldiers are worthy of reparations when they’re injured but that civilians who have been sexually violated or born children out of these acts—such as a whole generation of kids now living in Rwanda—are not. It took 20 years to bring reparations to any victims of wartime rape in Bosnia, and it’s worth noting that the men who’ve been ordered to pay say they can’t afford the $15,000.

    • The Great Forgetting

      Trump and Clinton, along with fellow candidate Bernie Sanders, refuse to admit what they know: Our most basic civil and political rights have been taken from us, the corporate oligarchy will remain entrenched in power no matter who wins the presidency, and elections are a carnival act. The downward spiral of lost jobs and declining incomes, of shredded civil liberties, of endless war, is unstoppable as long as we use the traditional mechanisms of reform, including elections, to try to cope with the existential threat we face. A vote for Clinton, in essence, is a vote for Trump or someone as bad as Trump. Right-wing populism, here and in Europe, is not the product of an individual but the disenfranchisement, rage and despair stemming from the damage caused by globalization. And until we wrest back control of our destiny by breaking corporate power, demagogues like Trump, and his repugnant doppelgangers in Europe, will proliferate.

    • How Tamir Rice Made It Impossible to Joke About Cleveland Anymore

      I still think Mike Polk Jr. deserves the key to the city for putting Cleveland on the map with his “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video” and “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video, 2nd Attempt.” I get the appeal of “Rust Belt Chic” and the self-deprecating humor of living in “The Mistake by the Lake,” telling stories about the Cuyahoga River catching fire reveling in the defiant blue-collar anthem “Cleveland Rocks” by Ian Hunter.

      But more and more it seems to me that joking about this shit is missing the point—and often it’s a deliberate missing of the point, joking about the stuff it’s fun and safe to joke about so we don’t confront the stuff that isn’t.

      See if you can make a joke out of this: A police officer (who came to work for the city of Cleveland after leaving the Cleveland suburb Independence after a “dismal” performance in firearms qualification training) shot and killed a 12-year-old boy holding a pellet gun two seconds after pulling up in his squad car. The grand jury declined to indict, saying Officer Loehmann was not guilty, and that his actions didn’t even merit a trial.

    • Locating ‘The Black Body’ in Class & in History: What Ta-Nehisi Coates took from Richard Wright

      In this sense, contemplating the corpses of black victims of state-sanctioned violence becomes a lesson in not just localized corruption or individual cop racism, but in the very nature of the American political-economic system. The site of “the thing” stumbled upon becomes a privileged site of study, the particular horror from which the general history can be extrapolated. It is the singular site from which son Samori can and must begin to grasp the nature of American society.

    • Merkel’s Refugee Woes Unbroken as Sexual-Assault Reports Rise

      Merkel’s open-door refugee policy has blown open with the revelation of the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults, feeding opposition to migrants and widening the risks the chancellor faces at the start of 2016. With the number of women filing complaints soaring to more than 500 and the police seeking suspects, the latest stage in the crisis is still unfolding.

    • New video: A different story of James Barker’s death at the hands of police?

      A newly discovered video purportedly shows James Dudley Barker facedown with his hands behind him near the intersection of I Street and Second Avenue when a Salt Lake City police officer shoots him three times in the back.

      Officer Matthew Taylor was exonerated in the shooting after his body camera caught Barker swinging a snow shovel at the lawman. The body cam then stopped working. Police said a scuffle had ensued and Taylor, injured and fearing for his life, shot Barker.

    • Ayaan Hirsi Ali: female genital mutilation and Islam (WARNING: graphic content)

      Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s beautiful and inspiring memoir is titled Infidel. Born in Somalia, she escaped to the Netherlands from an arranged marriage; became a member of parliament; worked with Theo Van Gogh on a film critical of Islam; he was murdered by a Muslim fanatic; and she wound up in America, at a think tank. Along the way she freed herself from religion.

      Hirsi Ali had lived in Kenya and Saudi Arabia as well as Somalia, her father usually absent on revolutionary organizing. As a young woman she tried to be the perfect Muslim. But the Koran’s fulsome verbiage about Allah’s justness jarred with how unjustly she saw women treated.

    • 26-year-old Hacker Sent To Jail For 334 Years, Highest Ever For A Cybercriminal

      A 26-year-old hacker, Onur Kopçak, from Turkey, was sentenced to 135 years in prison on Sunday for stealing 11 people’s credit card information. This new prison sentence is served on top of his previous 199-year sentence from 2013. As a result, Kopçak will now serve a record 334 years in prison.

      This new sentence hs been approved by Mersin third Criminal Court of General Jurisdiction where he was accused of selling the stolen credit card records to other cyber criminals. He is already convicted for running a phishing scam that used fake bank websites to steal online banking credentials of 43 bank customers.

    • Louisiana Cop Targeted Hispanic Drivers In Traffic Thefts: Police

      Police say Laquinton Banks stole more than $1,600 from motorists who didn’t speak English.

    • Black Homes Matter: San Francisco’s Vanishing Black Population

      In a nutshell, as prominent San Francisco historian and veteran community activist Calvin Welch described to me, the city’s vast construction boom is designed to increase the value of property and to boost the profits of private developers instead of improving the lives of people and communities, especially those living on the sidelines of this great prosperous city.

    • Why some human rights groups avoid public opinion research—and why they’re wrong

      It is easy to understand that people are inclined to favor local human rights groups when they or their communities benefit directly from such activities. But human rights activities are often directed at minorities and marginalized populations—homosexuals in a conservative culture, an ethnic minority, refugees or immigrants, criminals, or an enemy in a conflict. Majority groups may find it hard to relate to those populations, driving negative attitudes towards both the organizations and even human rights as a principle. Whatever the reason, it is not uncommon to see human rights groups disliked or even vilified at home.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Study: We Still Suck At Bringing Quality Broadband To All Americans

      The FCC is required by Congress to annually “determine whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion,” something the FCC’s latest broadband status report (pdf) suggests we’re still doing a relatively crappy job at.

      According to the FCC, 34 million Americans, or roughly 10% of the country, “still lack access to fixed broadband at the FCC’s benchmark speed of 25 Mbps for downloads, 3 Mbps for uploads.” Two thirds of the country still lacks the choice of more than one broadband provider at speeds of 25 Mbps, and 41% of schools have yet to hit the FCC’s goals of providing speeds of 100 Mbps to students. The FCC also notes the United States is 16th out of the top 34 developed countries when it comes to uniform broadband penetration, thanks in large part to our size.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • In 2016, let’s hope for better trade agreements – and the death of TPP

      Last year was a memorable one for the global economy. Not only was overall performance disappointing, but profound changes – both for better and for worse – occurred in the global economic system.

    • TPP, India Top Most-Read IP-Watch Stories Of 2015

      The most-read stories of 2015 on the Intellectual Property Watch website fairly reflected the trends of the year, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, India’s evolving intellectual property rights policies, European Patent Office patents on conventional vegetables, biologics, 3D printing, and some pop culture issues leading the way.

01.10.16

Links 10/1/2016: New Tails, GNOME Airplane/WiFi Hot Key

Posted in News Roundup at 5:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source makes Big Data analytics software appealing to SMEs

    Big Data Analytics software revenues will experience strong growth, doubling its current global 2015 revenue of $36.20 billion (US Dollars) to $73.77 billion by 2021 and reaching $81 billion by 2022, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12% in the next seven years, according to Strategy Analytics IoT Strategies report “Big Data Analytics: The Internet of Things (IoT) Differentiator.”

    Strategy Analytics says that much of Big Data Analytics software will be open source which is less expensive than proprietary software. It will also have the ability to run on commodity hardware, which OEM vendors are betting will help broaden its appeal to small and midsize (SMBs) and midsize enterprises (SMEs).

  • Events

    • Li-f-e at BITA Show 2016

      BITA IT Show, the biggest IT exhibition in western India is coming to town on 24-26 January, We will be there promoting Li-f-e. If you are in this part of the world, drop in to check it out.

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 6 Will Warn You About Misleading Code Indentations

      As reminded this weekend by Red Hat developer Mark Wielaard, GCC 6 will warn you about misleading code indentations.

      Among the numerous GCC 6 features to have been built up over the past year was the new -Wmisleading-indentation warning. This warning will notify you when it appears there is code that wasn’t indented properly and so may not match the intended logic of the developer.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Yahoo planning 10% layoffs as early as this month, report says [Ed: Microsoft killed Yahoo]

    Yahoo plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce as early as this month.

    The reorganization would eliminate 1,000 positions at the troubled company, according to Business Insider, citing sources close to the situation. Cuts are expected across the board, but will hit Yahoo’s media business, European operations and platforms-technology group harder than the rest of the company.

    “A team is working on it and they want to do it this quarter,” a source told Business Insider. The company has not commented on the report.

  • Super Thursday: what do the polls say about Britain’s bumper election day in May?

    Although we don’t yet know the date of the EU referendum, it is likely to be in 2016, and we already have had a great amount of polling for it. An average of EU referendum polls in December 2015 put the ‘Remain’ camp on 45.1%, the ‘Leave’ camp on 39.1% and ‘Don’t Knows’ on 15.4%. Excluding don’t knows, that’s a Remain-Leave split of 54%-46%. This lead is smaller than it was at other points in 2015, however; in June, the Remain campaign’s lead was 14 points. It’s now 6. In June, YouGov showed Remain leading by a 54-46 margin; they now show Leave leading by 51-49.

  • Twitter goes beyond 140 characters and I still hate it

    There have been a ton of reports in the media that Twitter developers are working on the ability of users to tweet longer messages that go far beyond the current 140 character limit. The company may even go as far as allowing a 10,000 character limit for tweets.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • 8 Signs Americans Are Moving Towards a Healthier, Saner Diet

      One of 2015’s food trends, in fact, was a craze for healthy maize. Organic, GMO-free corn products like Kiddylicious Sweetcorn Rice Rounds, Off the Cob Sweet Corn Tortilla Chips, Pipsnacks Popcorn and Pop Art Snacks Tandoori Yogurt Popcorn tantalized health-conscious taste buds at the 61st Annual Summer Fancy Food Show last summer in New York City.

    • Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

      The government’s chief advisor on health ignored more than 80 studies to produce her new Puritanical guidelines on booze – which asks Britons to forego their Friday drink.

      Civil servant Dame Sally Davies has drawn up the lowest recommendations in the West: there is no “safe drinking level”, her team declared.

      The question is what justification was used to get there. The answer isn’t pretty for “evidence based” policy.

      Repeated studies have shown that alcohol in moderation prolongs life: it reduces the risk of heart disease and strokes. In fact the benefits of alcohol in preventing strokes and heart disease are far clearer than the negatives of drinking.

    • It’s Not Just Shkreli: Another Pharma Giant Hikes Drug Prices

      Former pharma CEO Martin Shkreli, widely reviled for dramatically hiking the price of a life-saving drug used by HIV and cancer patients, is in good company.

      Starting at the beginning of 2016, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. quietly jacked up the U.S. prices of over 100 of its drugs, some by nearly a fifth.

      Reuters reported the findings on Friday, citing statistics from the information services company Wolters Kluwer that were included in a research note from by UBS Securities.

      “UBS said Pfizer increased prices by 20 percent for anticonvulsant Dilantin, hormone therapy Menest, angina drug Nitrostat, Tykosyn for irregular heartbeat, and antibiotic Tygacil,” Reuters noted.

      “The analyst report said U.S. prices were raised on a total of 105 Pfizer drugs,” the outlet continued. “No price reductions were reported.”

      Pfizer’s drug hike is consistent with broad industry trends.

    • Could Getting Rid Of Helmets Actually Make Football Safer?

      These days — thanks to mounting scientific research and the Hollywood movie Concussion — the public is much more aware of the fact that playing football can damage your brain. So now the question is: What, if anything, can be done to make the most popular sport in America safer?

      Recent research suggests the answer to that question might be counter-intuitive: getting players to take off their helmets.

      Researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that regular helmetless-tackling drills reduced the number of overall head impacts suffered by the participating players by 28 percent. This reduction was the result of removing helmets only for five minutes of drills after a few select practices — in this case, twice a week during the three-week preseason and once a week during the regular season.

      [...]

      “In football there are so many head impacts because their heads are protected,” Swartz told ThinkProgress. “The helmets, while they do serve a function, also introduce a false sense of security.”

  • Security

    • 602 Gbps DDoS Attack On BBC Proves That 2016 Isn’t Going To Be Any Different

      On New Year’s eve, the BBC website and iPlayer service went down due to a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The attack peaked up to 602 Gbps, according to the claims made by the New World Hacking group, who took the responsibility of the attack. In another recent attack, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s main campaign website was also targeted by the same group.

    • Fatally weak MD5 function torpedoes crypto protections in HTTPS and IPSEC

      If you thought MD5 was banished from HTTPS encryption, you’d be wrong. It turns out the fatally weak cryptographic hash function, along with its only slightly stronger SHA1 cousin, are still widely used in the transport layer security protocol that underpins HTTPS. Now, researchers have devised a series of attacks that exploit the weaknesses to break or degrade key protections provided not only by HTTPS but also other encryption protocols, including Internet Protocol Security and secure shell.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • North Korea: How Many Wake-Up Calls Will It Take?

      As the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have repeatedly warned, “We must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.” This will require good faith negotiations to end the nuclear arms race and achieve nuclear zero. And these negotiations must be convened and led by the US and Russia, the two most powerful nuclear-armed countries in the world.

    • Defense Industry Revenue Forecast Gushes Over Global Turmoil

      The global aerospace and defense industry is out of its doldrums. According to a new report by the accounting firm Deloitte, “the resurgence of global security threats” promises a lucrative “rebound” in defense spending.

      The report alerts investors that “revenue growth” is “expected to take a positive turn” due to the terrorism and war in the Middle East and the tensions in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.

    • ‘I went to join Isis in Syria, taking my four-year-old. It was a journey into hell’

      Sophie Kasiki stared at the photograph of a young English-speaking boy in a camouflage uniform and black bandana covered in Arabic calling for unbelievers to be killed in the latest Islamic State propaganda.

      Her eyes welled and she swallowed hard. “That could have been my son,” she said, her firm voice wavering. “That’s hard for me to say and makes me want to cry. I would have killed us both rather than let him become a killer, rather than let him fall into the claws of those monsters.”

    • U.S. Dropped 23,144 Bombs on Muslim-Majority Countries in 2015

      Council of Foreign Relations resident skeptic Micah Zenko recently tallied up how many bombs the United States has dropped on other countries and the results are as depressing as one would think. Zenko figured that since Jan. 1, 2015, the U.S. has dropped around 23,144 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all countries that are majority Muslim.

    • Latin America Has to Fight and Win!

      Indigenous people of Bolivia are proudly in possession of their own land.

      Venezuela has been inspiring the entire Latin America and the world by its internationalism and determined struggle against Western imperialism.

      Chile, step by small step, has been dismantling the grotesque legacy of Pinochet’s dictatorship, moving firmly towards socialism.

    • Though GOP Blames Obama, North Korea Developed Its Nuclear Program Under Republicans

      Despite claims to the contrary, strong stances have not always worked in the past against North Korea. Ronald Reagan was in office in 1986 when plutonium was first produced in a North Korean reactor. They continued their program under President George H.W. Bush, producing enough plutonium to make 1-2 bombs.

      During Bill Clinton’s presidency, North Korea froze its nuclear production, though it continued testing missiles until deterred by American pressure.

      In 2002, President George W. Bush took a strong stance against North Korea by including them in the “Axis of Evil” with Iran and Iraq. A year later, Pyongyang restarted their reactor and by 2005 produced another 15 kg of weapons grade plutonium. In 2006, North Korea is believed to have had between 4 and 13 nuclear bombs and tested a nuclear weapon for the first time.

    • Escalating Cold War, US Flies B-52 Bomber Over South Korea

      The U.S. military flew a B-52 bomber over South Korea on Sunday, in a Cold War-style show of force that was met with concern by human rights campaigners.

      American forces made the gesture amid climbing tensions following North Korea’s widely-disputed claim that it detonated a hydrogen bomb test on Wednesday.

    • Deaths Reported as MSF-Linked Hospital Bombed in Yemen

      A Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)-supported hospital in northern Yemen was bombed Sunday morning, killing at least four people and wounding eleven—marking the third attack in as many months against a facility associated with the medical charity.

      MSF said in a statement that it “cannot confirm the origin of the attack” on the Shiara Hospital, which is located in the Razeh district. But the organization noted that “planes were seen flying over the facility at the time.”

    • Russian Strike on al-Qaeda Lair kills 51 at Prison, as US hypocritically slams Moscow

      The Russian air war against al-Qaeda in Syria (the Nusra Front or the Support Front) took a tragic turn on Saturday when a missile hit a downtown government building complex and prison in Maarat al-Numan. It left some 51 or more dead and 70 wounded. The Russians also bombed nearby towns of Saraqib and Khan Shikhun.

      Presumably the inmates in a prison run by al-Qaeda were a mixture of other radicals (perhaps Daesh [ISIL, ISIS] and liberals of the former Free Syrian Army. Whether what we would consider criminals were in the prison I don’t know. Al-Qaeda runs its territory in Syria in a Taliban-like way, with morals police and social regimentation. So some prisoners could just be people who didn’t go along with the al-Qaeda state practices. Alarabiya is reporting that some of those killed or wounded were in the downtown market adjacent to the government buildings. Russia needs to be more careful or it will end up simply alienating all the ordinary Sunnis in Syria with these blunt tactics. Locals are demanding that Russia be charged by the international community with war crimes.

    • The Exultation of Lethal Violence in American Culture

      Up to now Obama has shed no public tears for the victims of police violence, whether black, Hispanic, white, or any other. Moreover, when others have championed the right of the victims of police violence to justice, they have come under sustained attacked from the right wing media establishment and the powerful police unions. Consider how the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was threatened with a nationwide boycott of his movies by police unions across the States after he attended a Black Lives Matter march and rally in New York towards the end of last year.

    • Neoliberalism Raises Its Ugly Head in South America: As Washington Targets Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina

      Politically, the neoliberal vision will mean an overturning and restructuring of the current Supreme Court, possible changes to the existing Constitution, and attempts to remove the duly-elected president from office before his term by various means. Apart from plans to stack the judiciary, as in Argentina, Venezuela’s new business controlled National Assembly will likely follow their reactionary class compatriots in Brazil, and move to impeach Venezuela president, Maduro, and dismantle his popular government – just as they are attempting the same in Brazil with that country’s also recently re-elected president, Rousseff.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • ‘Huge Ovation’: Citing #ExxonKnew, Vermont Governor Calls for Fossil Fuel Divestment

      ‘Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in,’ declared Gov. Peter Shumlin during State of the State address

    • After At Least 2,300 Home Evacuations, Big Methane Leak Causes State Of Emergency

      The Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles is officially in a state of emergency, according to a declaration by California Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday. The area has been suffering from the effects of a methane gas leak at the Aliso Canyon Storage Facility since late October. At least 2,300 homes have been evacuated, with many more requests pending.

      Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), which owns and operates the storage facility, has been constructing a relief well to stop the leak, which the company was unable to plug in the days and weeks immediately following the breach. The escaping methane has been treated with an odorant and is allegedly causing headaches, nausea, rashes, and other health problems among local residents. The company anticipates completing the relief well by March 15.

    • Oil Price Super-Cycle Collapse: Party Like It’s 1998?
    • Weather extremes slash cereal yields

      Climate change may have already begun to take its toll of agriculture. New research suggests that drought and extreme heat in the last 50 years have reduced cereal production by up to 10%. And, for once, developed nations may have sustained greater losses than developing nations.

      Researchers have been warning for years that global warming as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – in turn, a pay-off from increased fossil fuel combustion – will result in a greater frequency or intensity in extremes of weather.

    • Heat Waves And Drought Are Already Having A Devastating Impact On Important Crops

      For all the wrong reasons, the summer of 2012 was a historic one for the American Midwest. Plagued by the worst drought the region had seen in decades, as well as weeks of high temperatures, one of the country’s most productive agricultural regions faced massive shortages in its annual corn crop, driving corn prices to a record high.

    • In Age of Extreme Weather, Industrial Farming Threatens Us All

      The study is the latest evidence of the impacts of climate change, coming just a month after global leaders gathered in Paris to finalize an agreement aimed at curbing greenhouse gases.

      Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to push for maligned deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which critics have called a “giveaway to big agribusiness and food companies that want to use trade deals to attack sensible food safety rules, weaken the inspection of imported food and block efforts to strengthen U.S. food safety standards.”

      Over the past 50 years, 75 percent of the world’s biodiversity, soil, and water have been destroyed through the proliferation of mass food production and agrochemicals like pesticides and other synthetics, among other measures.

    • Environmental Damage Is Bad Enough To Create A New Geologic Period

      For over a decade, both climate activists and scientists have used one word to describe the mass-level changes humans are causing on Earth: Anthropocene. But whether or not this word actually describes a real, measurable geologic time period has been the source of major scientific debate.

      Now, a new study is adding fuel to that debate, finding that human influence on the environment changed the planet so dramatically that the world recently moved into a new geological epoch. In other words, there’s scientific proof that we’re living in the Anthropocene, the study’s researchers say.

    • Why James Hansen Is Wrong About Nuclear Power

      Those interested in what new nuclear power can and cannot plausibly contribute to stopping global warming should start with the most objective, independent, and comprehensive analysis done in recent years — the 2015 “Technology Roadmap” from the IEA and NEA. Those agencies’ bottom is line is that, if the industry gets its act together — a big IF, given recent history — new nuclear power can play an important but limited role. This just happens to be what I’ve been arguing consistently on Climate Progress for a long, long time.

      [...]

      A key reason new reactors are inherently so expensive is that they must be designed to survive almost any imaginable risk, including major disasters and human error. Even the most unlikely threats must be planned for and eliminated when the possible result of a disaster is the poisoning of thousands of people, the long-term contamination of large areas of land, and $100 billion in damages.

  • Finance

    • Update to BLS December Payroll Jobs Report: It is even worse than I reported — Paul Craig Roberts

      Good middle class jobs are continuing to decline. The new jobs are jobs that pay considerably less and often are part-time jobs devoid of benefits. Moreover, the new jobs are going to people outside the prime working age. The unavoidable conclusion is that for the majority of Americans, economic prospects are declining.

    • The CARD Act Has Saved Us $12 Billion Per Year

      Who do credit card companies make the most money from? Answer: the poor, by far, because they rack up the highest fees and the highest interest expense. Card issuers also make some money on the rich, because they buy a lot of stuff. This generates interchange fees (usually 2-3 percent of the amount charged) that exceed the cost the reward points they dole out to attract these customers.

    • US stocks suffer their worst first week of the year since records began

      Standard & Poor’s 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 6% and 6.2%, respectively, in the biggest ever fall for the first five days of January

    • Less Work, More Leisure

      The next Administration should make reducing work time a major focus. In addition to mandated paid sick days and paid family leave — proposals that have received some welcome attention thus far on the presidential campaign trail — policymakers should go much further and enact measures aimed at shortening workweeks and work years. Reducing our workweek and work years will lead to a whole host of benefits, including reduced stress and higher levels of employment.The United States has become an outlier among wealthy countries in having had little reduction in the length of the average work year since 1980. According to the OECD, between 1980 and 2013, the number of hours in an average work year fell by 7.6 percent in Belgium, by 19.1 percent in France, and by 6.5 percent in Canada. By comparison, it declined by just 1.4 percent in the United States. The average worker puts in 26 percent more hours a year in the United States than do workers in the Netherlands and 31 percent more hours than workers in Germany, a difference of more than 400 hours a year.

      [...]

      Reducing the workweek can also have another benefit: It will bring us to full employment faster.

    • Ben Carson Says He Wants To Help Working Families, Hands Massive Tax Break To The Wealthiest Instead

      On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson released his tax plan, the center of which is a flat tax of 14.9 percent.

      Rather than different tax brackets for different income levels and categories, the flat tax levies the same rate on all personal and business income, although Carson’s 14.9 percent rate would only apply to people who have incomes above 150 percent of the poverty level, or $36,375 for a family of four. Those who make less would have to make a small tax payment: “Even those who earn little income will pay taxes, no matter how small their contribution might be,” Carson says in his plan. Currently, 46 percent of Americans don’t have to pay federal income taxes because their incomes are too low.

    • Why ‘Going Negative’ on Bernie Sanders is a Very Dangerous Move

      Going negative against Bernard Sanders is a bad career move. Every time a political opponent has attacked Sanders, it has served only to strengthen him. We have come to accept attack ads as standard fare in presidential politics. When threatened, Hillary Clinton sharpens her knives and airs ads to eviscerate opponents, while Donald Trump hurls noisy epithets daily. They might want to choose another way to weaken Sanders, because direct, personal attacks tend to backfire.

      In 1980, when Sanders ran for Burlington mayor the first time, he started out lower than a long shot, a newcomer running against an entrenched Democratic machine. How could a 39-year-old Jewish guy from Brooklyn attract voters in a small town dominated by native French Canadians and Irishmen?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • CNN’s Van Jones Calls Out Donald Trump For Inspiring Support From White Supremacists

      Jones: “My Deep Concern Is That Donald Trump Is Beginning To Legitimate Some Of The Dark Things That Have Been In Our Country For A Long Time”

    • White Nationalist PAC Blankets Iowa With Robocalls For Trump

      Some registered voters in Iowa received robocalls Saturday from a white nationalist super PAC that urged them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

      “I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America,” Jared Taylor said on the robocall, paid for by the American National Super PAC. “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”

    • 5 European Leaders Who Are Kindred Spirits With Donald Trump

      The Donald has already professed his admiration for Vladimir Putin. He’d get along famously with Marine Le Pen.

    • The Frontline of Hasbara is on PBS

      The film serves two purposes. Besides the aforementioned hasbara effect, it also tries to salvage what it can of the Obama legacy and create a post facto explanation for why this Presidency has been an almost complete disaster. In that regard, it shapes recent history into a bizarre narrative, failing to mention the words “Cast Lead” or “Protective Edge” while trying to float the preposterous idea that Obama tried to be ahead of history and support the Arab Spring. My own view, while perhaps incorrect, is that he instead succeeded in subverting the genuine democratic uprisings across the region to serve his own ends. When things in Egypt became far too complicated by having a Muslim Brotherhood government across the Sinai from besieged Gaza, a coup was initiated and al-Sisi installed.

    • Jim Hightower: The Corporate Media Is Basically Pretending Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Exist

      The Tyndall Report, a non-partisan media monitoring firm that has been tracking the nightly news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, found that Trump is tromp, tromp, tromping over the airtime of everyone else.

      From last January through November, these dominant flagship news shows devoted 234 minutes of prime-time coverage to the incessant chirping of the yellow-crested birdbrain, with no other contender getting even a fourth of that.

    • Will Trump “Feel the Bern” at Campaign Stop in Sanders’ Hometown?

      Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is on Bernie Sanders’ turf of Burlington, Vermont—where the U.S. senator served as mayor for eight years—for a rally on Thursday night that has rankled police and the mayor while galvanizing the progressive spirit of the democratic socialist’s home base supporters.

    • How Corporate Political Spending Will Stay Secret in Wisconsin

      Wisconsin Republicans are insisting that they didn’t intend to allow corporate political donations to remain secret under the recent overhaul of the state’s campaign finance laws.

      But secrecy, in fact, has become the distinguishing characteristic of Wisconsin elections. And that is by design.

      Sweeping campaign finance changes signed into law by Governor Scott Walker last month allowed corporations, for the first time, to donate up to $12,000 directly to “segregated funds” created by political parties and legislative leaders.

  • Censorship

    • As Hollywood’s International Market Grows, Will Foreign Censors End Up Controlling U.S. Content?
    • Associated Press Self-Censors Anniversary Charlie Hebdo Cover

      Once you decide not to show an image for fear of offending people, the number of things people say they find offensive, and therefore worthy of silencing, may well multiply.

      So it goes today. On the cover of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this week, the anniversary of the terrorist slaughter that killed much of its staff in Paris, you will not find any images of Mohammad. The image is a figure of God—the Judeo-Christian visualization of him—with an assault weapon strapped to his back. The text on it, translated from French, says “One year on: The killer is still at large.”

      Even though this image does not include Mohammad, the Associated Press, nevertheless, has decided not to pass along images of the cover of the issue to its many, many subscribing media outlets. There actually were some images available from AP content providers earlier, but they’ve been yanked.

    • ‘Cover-up’ over Cologne sex assaults blamed on migration sensitivities

      Public anger is growing in Germany over a series of sexual assaults against women in the centre of Cologne on New Year’s Eve, amid suggestions that authorities were slow to act due to political sensitivity surrounding the perpetrators’ ethnicities.

      Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.

    • German broadcaster sorry for slow reporting on mob assaults

      German public broadcaster ZDF has apologised for delays in reporting on a wave of sexual assaults blamed on men of Arab appearance amid accusations Wednesday of media self-censorship of the inflammatory issue.

      The rash of attacks and thefts in a New Year’s Eve crowd in the western city of Cologne was only widely covered by national media early this week, after police had initially reported no major incidents.

      News editors of ZDF’s flagship “heute” (today) evening news programme apologised on social media for not reporting on the incidents at least in its Monday evening bulletin, four days after the attacks.

    • The Long Silence—The Cologne Sex Attacks And The German Media.

      It took four days for the German Mainstream Media to report New Year’s Eve mass sex assaults on women by up to 1000 heavily intoxicated immigrants of “Arab or North African origin “, as the German police describe the still-unapprehended perpetrators—now. The internet and social media alone forced the MSM’s hand. And the German political class has plans for that.

    • COLOGNE: Google, Facebook and Twitter Yield to German Govt Demand to Censor Anti-Migrant ‘Hate Speech’
    • Germany cracks down on speech by citizens enraged over its immigration policy
    • Germany cracks down on free speech when it comes to Muslim immigrants
    • Germany springs to action over hate speech against migrants

      Donald Trump may be testing the boundaries of tolerance on the U.S. campaign trail. But here in Germany, the government is effectively enforcing civility, taking aim at a surge of hate speech against refugees and Muslims.

    • Jews and Arabs Kiss in Protest against Banning of Novel

      Dorit Rabinyan’s novel Borderlife treats a love affair in New York between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, which ends when they return to their respective homes. The novel began being assigned by those inveterate social radicals, the High School Teachers, in Israel. But then senior officials of the ministry of education banned the book. Later they said it wasn’t banned and could be taught, but would not form part of any examination. (In education systems with year-end examinations, elective material that cannot appear on the exam is usually not much taught).

    • What the Media Can Learn From Bill Maher: 1 Year After Hebdo Attack, Satirists Still Take Risks Media Won’t

      This week marks the one-year anniversary of the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff. In typical Hebdo form, the magazine has chosen to mark the event with a provocative cover that features a bearded man representing God with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, accompanied by the text: “One year later: the assassin is still out there.” Their point? Little has changed.

      [...]

      And yet, one year after some of their cartoonists were murdered for daring to draw the Prophet, they are still under fire for being intolerant of religion. The obsessive critique reveals two key issues: First, despite being attacked by terrorists, the Hebdo artists are still criticized for their worldviews more than the terrorists themselves; and second, leftist politics is caught in a tough bind when it comes to openly debating religion and conflict.

    • Canadian Prof Yanked From Teaching Intro Psych Class For Insisting on Foul Language

      Via Inside Higher Ed comes one of the weirder stories about college I’ve read in a while.

      For years, Michael Persinger has taught an introductory psychology class at Canada’s Laurentian University. Before his first lecture, he has students sign a waiver that they won’t freak out over the ribald and offensive language he uses.

    • Our generation will take care of censorship and ensure there is no restriction on art: Anshuman Jha
    • Tweets About Israel Land New Jersey Student in Principal’s Office

      A New Jersey high school student found herself in a social media storm on Wednesday after she live-tweeted and apparently secretly recorded a trip to her principal’s office.

      She said administrators warned her that her comments about Israel and a fellow student on Twitter might have violated a state law against bullying.

      The student, Bethany Koval, a 16-year-old Israeli Jew, said she had been reprimanded by administrators at Fair Lawn High School in Bergen County for a tweet that contained a string of expletives directed at Israel and expressed happiness that a pro-Israel classmate had unfollowed her Twitter account.

      New Jersey has some of the toughest anti-bullying laws in the nation. After the suicide of a Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, in 2010, it passed the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, a far-reaching law with stiff penalties for educators who do not sufficiently respond to complaints of harassment or intimidation.

  • Privacy

    • Juniper Networks NSA Hack: Tech Company Stops Use Of Suspected Eavesdropping Code
    • Networking Giant Pulls NSA-Linked Code Exploited by Hackers
    • Juniper drops NSA-developed code following new backdoor revelations

      The networking company said in a blog post published Friday that it will ship product releases in the next six months that remove the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator from NetScreen firewalls. Security researchers have known since 2007 that it contains a weakness that gives knowledgeable adversaries the ability to decrypt encrypted communications that rely on the function. Documents provided by former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden showed the weakness could be exploited by the US spy agency, The New York Times reported in 2013.

    • You say advertising, I say block that malware

      The real reason online advertising is doomed and adblockers thrive? Its malware epidemic is unacknowledged, and out of control.

      The Forbes 30 Under 30 list came out this week and it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list.

      On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information. Or, as is popular worldwide with these malware “exploit kits,” lock up their hard drives in exchange for Bitcoin ransom.

      One researcher commented on Twitter that the situation was “ironic” — and while it’s certainly another variant of hackenfreude, ironic isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe what happened.

    • Juniper Plans to Repatch its Firewall to Root out Source of Flaw
    • Juniper will repatch its Netscreen operating system
    • What South Carolinians Think About Ryan’s Poverty Forum

      Billed as an opportunity for conservatives to outline their major plans on tackling poverty, the forum comes after months of heightened rhetoric on poverty and inequality—including a poverty tour by then-Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. These events are part of a concerted effort by conservative lawmakers and the media to paint the War on Poverty as a failure, even though the safety net reduced the poverty rate by more than half and lifted 48 million people above the poverty line in 2012.

    • Dismantling Nehru-Gandhi Film Censorship Regime

      The government had on January 1 constituted the panel to look into the revamp of the Censor Board functioning which has been mired in controversies in the recent past. The panel includes filmmaker Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, adman Piyush Pandey and film critic Bhawana Somaaya. National Film Development Council MD Nina Lath Gupta and Joint Secretary (Films) Sanjay Murthy are also part of the panel.

    • The risks — and benefits — of letting algorithms judge us

      China is considering a new “social credit” system, designed to rate everyone’s trustworthiness. Many fear that it will become a tool of social control — but in reality it has a lot in common with the algorithms and systems that score and classify us all every day.

      Human judgment is being replaced by automatic algorithms, and that brings with it both enormous benefits and risks. The technology is enabling a new form of social control, sometimes deliberately and sometimes as a side effect. And as the Internet of Things ushers in an era of more sensors and more data — and more algorithms — we need to ensure that we reap the benefits while avoiding the harms.

    • FBI changes animal cruelty data collection practices

      As of Friday, Jan. 1, 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) decision to begin collecting data on cases of animal cruelty as a Group A offense in the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) went into effect.

    • Facebook accused of crashing Android app to test users’ loyalty

      Facebook deliberately crashed its Android app for weeks at a time in a bid to test its users’ dedication to the social network, it has been reported.

    • New Zealand rules police raid on journalist Nicky Hager was illegal

      In a huge victory for press freedom, New Zealand’s High Court has ruled decisively in favor of independent journalist Nicky Hager in his case against the New Zealand government for raiding his house and seizing his family’s possessions in 2014.

      The court’s decision, which was released on December 17, 2015 just before the holidays, is not only a vindication for Hager and his work, but an important win for all journalists and whistleblowers in New Zealand.

    • Oregon Law Curbing Warrantless Collection of Cellphone Data Now in Effect

      On Jan.1, a new law prohibiting police from obtaining information from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases went into effect. The new law will not only protect privacy in Oregon, but will also address a practical effect of federal spying.

      Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), Sen. Tim Knopp (R – Bend) and Rep. John Huffman (R-The Dalles) introduced Senate Bill 641 (SB641) last February. The bill prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from using “forensic imaging” to obtain information contained in a portable electronic device except with a warrant, or by consent. “Forensic imaging” means “using an electronic device to download or transfer raw data from a portable electronic device onto another medium of digital storage,” but does not include photographing or transcribing information “observable from the portable electronic device by normal unaided human senses.”

    • Parents are worried about the new WiFi-connected Barbie, but should they be?

      Before Mattel’s new WiFi-connected, artificially-intelligent toy, Hello Barbie, had even made it onto store shelves, she was already generating terrifying news stories.

      “Your child’s talking Barbie doll may be eavesdropping on all of your private conversations,” claimed the New York Daily News. “Creepy,” wrote the Washington Post. “She’s not just creepy. She threatens children’s security,” added the Daily Beast. The New York Times warned that “synthetic friendship could supplant [kids’] real ones.”

    • ​Attorney for Edward Snowden to lead University of Hawaii law seminar

      Ben Wizner, a national ACLU attorney and head lawyer for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, will co-teach a seminar at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law this month.

      Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, will teach the week-long “Liberty and Security in the Age of Terrorism” seminar along with retired four-star Army Gen. David Bramlett.

    • ‘Secret expansion’: GCHQ may be employing ‘thousands more’ than it officially admits

      David Davis, a Conservative Party MP, told the Times that secrecy surrounding GCHQ’s numerical strength was “a bad opening chapter to this new era of transparency.”

      A spokesperson for GCHQ declined to give exact numbers of those employed in the agency and its partners.

      “The total number of people working for or with GCHQ constantly fluctuates due to the complex challenges we face and the threats we aim to counter,” the spokesperson told IBTimes UK, adding: “In a complex organization like GCHQ, as you would expect, our core mission is supported by a range of partners including industry and the military.”

      GCHQ employed 5,683 full-time staff in August 2014, according to official figures from the UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee. MI5 had 3,926 and MI6 2,430 employees.

    • Targeted data collection could have prevented Paris terrorist attacks

      A more targeted approach to data collection could have helped French authorities prevent the Paris attacks last year, according to former NSA technical director William Binney.

      Binney told a parliamentary committee evaluating the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, however, that bulk data collection could leave analysts with too much information to carry out effective assessments.

    • Will proposed surveillance powers weaken security for UK startups?

      Instead, much of the Investigatory Powers Bill’s focus is on facilitating the practice of mass surveillance.

    • Germany restarts joint intelligence surveillance with US
    • Germany resumes domestic surveillance in collaboration with the NSA
    • German spies revive internet snooping work with US: reports
    • NSA whistleblower: ‘UK mass surveillance may cost lives’
    • ‘Snooper’s charter’ will cost British lives, MPs are warned

      He told MPs that “Britain should not go further down this road and risk making the same mistakes as my country did, or they will end up perpetuating the loss of life”.

    • The UK’s new snooping law changes are all about money, says ex-NSA tech chief

      Asked why he thinks the UK government is pressing for this kind of approach, Binney’s answer is simple: money.

      [...]

      He points to the $3.8 billion Trailblazer program to capture internet communications as evidence of this and said that people were moving freely between working for the NSA and working for a contracted firm.

      “The contractors were lobbying for this… They were trading the security of the people of the United States and the people of the free world for money,” he said.

      When questioned on whether he thought £247 million over 10 years to deploy the powers in the bill would be sufficient, Binney said that this may be enough for retention and storage, but not processing, interrogation or software development.

    • Bill Binney: New UK spying law is going to kill people, ex-NSA technical director and whistleblower warns

      He described as “absolute horses**t” the claims by government lawyers that it wouldn’t be possible to sift through data before it was collected.

    • An NSA whistleblower just told government that mass surveillance doesn’t work

      William Binney, the former technical director of the NSA, today warned a UK parliamentary committee that proposed mass surveillance laws will damage the country’s national security.

    • Ex-NSA Official to Warn UK Lawmakers Against Online Surveillance Bill
    • Mass surveillance and bulk data collection won’t prevent terrorism, warns ex-NSA director William Binney

      “If we did everything through analysis and collection smartly, in a targeted way, we’d give privacy to everybody in the world because you don’t take in their data.”

      Referring to the 9/11 attacks, Binney suggested that targeted surveillance rather than bulk surveillance could have stopped the whole tragedy from happening.

      “All of these people were in knowledge bases already. If they’d taken a targeted approach from the beginning, keeping the data finite, the analysts would have found the threats,” he claimed.

    • Mass-surveillance ‘undermines security’ and failed to stop 9/11 attacks, says ex-NSA officer
    • French intelligence ‘could have prevented Paris attacks’

      The Paris attacks might have been prevented if French intelligence services had targeted their surveillance, he told the committee scrutinising the draft bill on 6 January 2016.

    • Snooper’s charter would be out of date in five years, says defence industry

      Vodafone, the UK telecoms company, said the government’s bill risked “significantly undermining trust” and rejected any move to require them to hand over data passing over their networks from outside the UK,.

      The criticism from the Silicon Valley internet giants is perhaps the most serious for Home Office ministers as it was their rejection of proposed British government requests to require them to hand over their customers’ confidential web data which lay behind the Liberal Democrats’ veto of the last snooper’s charter bill in 2012.

    • NSA Stalwart to Tell Parliament: ‘Bulk Collection Costs Lives’

      Binney is also set to argue that the UK government has misled parliament in claiming that MPs and other sensitive groups would be protected under the bill because there is so much data flowing along the pipe it “isn’t intelligible at the point of inception.”

      “These statements are false,” he will say. “They were made by someone who does not understand the technology.”

    • New UK spying law is going to kill people, ex-NSA technical director and whistleblower Bill Binney warns

      “It is 99 per cent useless,” Mr Binney said in a letter sent to MPs. “Who wants to know everyone who has ever looked at Google or the BBC? We have known for decades that that swamps analysts.”

      He said that strategy had led directly to mistakes that allowed the attacks on 9/11 to go ahead. The US had collected information from the terrorists involved in the attacks, but had not been able to check them because of resources, he claimed.

    • NSA whistleblower William Binney: Bulk data collection costs lives

      For example, Microsoft reported that 82 billion photos had been viewed…

      The revelations should be worrisome, according to Martin Brinkmann, founder of Ghacks.net: “While it is unclear what data is exactly collected, it is clear that the company is collecting information about the use of individual applications and programs on Windows at the very least.”

  • Civil Rights

    • Has principle of “innocent until proven guilty” fallen wayside?

      “Innocent until proven guilty” is a phrase that is often bandied about. From popular cop shows on TV to courtroom dramas on the silver screen, this phrase has been repeated over and over again. While we are all familiar with the words, have we become desensitised to the true significance of those four words?

      It is human nature to pre-judge. In the high-tension environment of a courtroom, it is easy to get emotionally swayed which could in turn, return a verdict that may not end up serving the course of justice. This is why such rigorous steps have been put in place as the judiciary evolved to ensure that this risk is mitigated. Indeed, this is one of the reasons cited for why jury trials were abolished in Singapore. It was thought that laypersons without a holistic knowledge of the law might be easily manipulated by the machinations of a wily lawyer.

      With the advent of the Internet and the rapid evolution of the social media and blogs, which has revolutionalised the spread of information, has the sacrosanct principle of “innocent until proven guilty” fallen to the wayside?

    • The Big Lie in the War Against Drugs

      Since the beginning, the War on Drugs has been about controlling political power–by breaking up Black communities and the dissident left.

    • Judge Mocks Inmate Who Soiled Himself Because Guard Wouldn’t Let Him Go To The Bathroom

      An Ohio judge has elicited chuckles for a poem he wrote to shoot down an inmate’s lawsuit this week. The inmate, Darek Lathan, sued after guards at the Correctional Reception Center in Orient refused to let him go to the bathroom, causing him to have diarrhea in his pants.

      Lathan is serving a 17-month sentence for a vandalism conviction. In his lawsuit seeking $2 million in damages, Lathan said the officer wouldn’t let him get out of line to go to the bathroom, even after he told the guard the prison’s cold showers were making him sick.

    • Muslim Woman Ejected from Trump Rally as Crowd Hurls Epithets

      A Muslim woman wearing a shirt which read “Salam, I come in peace” was forcibly ejected from a Donald Trump rally Friday night as some supporters of the 2016 presidential candidate reportedly hurled Islamophobic epithets at her.

      Rose Hamid, a 56-year-old flight attendant, had attended the rally at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina with a small group of people who wore yellow stars with eight points, a reference to the markers Jews were forced to bear during the Holocaust. The symbols read “Muslim” and “Stop Islamophobia.”

    • WATCH: Trump Supporters Harass Muslim Woman as She Is Kicked out of Rally
    • 12 People Who Made a Difference (and You Can Too!)

      Take a sweeping look at history and you will discover that almost all movements that mattered started with just one or two people—from the fight to abolish slavery, to the creations of the environmental, trade union, consumer protection and civil rights movements. One voice becomes two, and then ten, and then thousands.

    • Everything is a culture war now – even sports. I just want to watch the game

      Everything is a culture war now. It’s everywhere. And it’s impossible to avoid, even in the movies and sports many of us go to in hopes of finding a brief respite from all the yelling we find online and off. Sometimes I just want to watch the game, you know? Maybe flip on the TV and forget for a few hours that Donald Trump could become president of the free world.

    • Unions brace for supreme court case that could be a heavy blow to liberals

      Justices prepare to hear arguments in of case of California teacher and co-plaintiffs who say ‘tyranny’ of unions violates their rights through forced dues

    • Right-Wing Network Puts Anti-Union Case in Samuel Alito’s Lap

      Justice Samuel Alito has been scouring the land looking for a case to make his mark on history.

      Could he find a way to hold a big bank accountable for ripping off millions of consumers? Could he interpret intellectual property law to give more desperately ill people access to essential medicines? Could he hold a chemical company to account for poisoning people and hiding it for decades?

      No. Alito apparently decided to make his mark by helping a massive right-wing funding machine crush wages for teachers, nurses, firefighters, cops and prison guards.

    • What It’s Like To Be Shia Inside The Ardently Sunni Saudi Kingdom

      That population has often been on the receiving end of Saudi Arabian posturing on geopolitical issues, especially as they relate to Iran. While the Kingdom might oppose extremist Sunni militant groups like ISIS, it continues to promote extremist views in favor of Sunni predominance in the Muslim world.

    • Oregon Sheriff Meets Ammon Bundy, Greets Him With Handshake Not Handcuffs

      On Thursday, Harney County, Oregon Sheriff Dave Ward met Ammon Bundy in a remote area near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Bundy has been leading an illegal armed occupation of a federal building for almost a week. But Ward greeted Bundy with a firm handshake instead of handcuffs.

    • The Proof Is In: The US Government Is The Most Complete Criminal Organization In Human History — Paul Craig Roberts

      Unique among the countries on earth, the US government insists that its laws and dictates take precedence over the sovereignty of nations. Washington asserts the power of US courts over foreign nationals and claims extra-territorial jurisdiction of US courts over foreign activities of which Washington or American interest groups disapprove. Perhaps the worst results of Washington’s disregard for the sovereignty of countries is the power Washington has exercised over foreign nationals solely on the basis of terrorism charges devoid of any evidence.

      Consider a few examples. Washington first forced the Swiss government to violate its own banking laws. Then Washington forced Switzerland to repeal its bank secrecy laws. Allegedly, Switzerland is a democracy, but the country’s laws are determined in Washington by people not elected by the Swiss to represent them.

      Consider the “soccer scandal” that Washington concocted, apparently for the purpose of embarrassing Russia. The soccer organization’s home is Switzerland, but this did not stop Washington from sending FBI agents into Switzerland to arrest Swiss citizens. Try to imagine Switzerland sending Swiss federal agents into the US to arrest Americans.

      Consider the $9 billion fine that Washington imposed on a French bank for failure to fully comply with Washington’s sanctions against Iran. This assertion of Washington’s control over a foreign financial institution is even more audaciously illegal in view of the fact that the sanctions Washington imposed on Iran and requires other sovereign countries to obey are themselves strictly illegal. Indeed, in this case we have a case of triple illegality as the sanctions were imposed on the basis of concocted and fabricated charges that were lies.

    • Atlanta Police Stop and Put Gun to Head of Rapper After He Withdraws $200,000 From His Bank

      According to Sam Benson — who goes by the stage name of “Blac Youngsta” — he had just exited a Wells Fargo branch in the upscale community of Buckhead after withdrawing $200,000 in order to buy a new car.

      “I come out the bank, I see the police, I’m walking to my car, I see one of them point to my bag like ‘him,’” explained the rapper. “They come bum-rushing me at the car, put me on the ground, putting guns to my head.”

    • When money matters more than lives: The poisonous cost of austerity in Flint, Michigan

      A few days ago my partner and I were sharing some of our less-pleasant encounters in the New York City subway system. Nothing too outrageous, just the kind of awkward run-ins with mentally unwell people that have long been part of living in this city (and have become harder to avoid as of late). If you live here long enough, you eventually become pretty inured to these moments; but they’re still always a little sad.

      Sometimes, though, they’re not so much sad as they are scary. Far more often than not, people suffering from severe mental health issues are harmless. But that’s not always the case. My partner, for example, recounted that once she accidentally — but very slightly — stepped on a woman’s foot. She apologized, but for the rest of the time my partner was on the train, this woman was screaming at her. My partner knew it wasn’t really about her, of course; but it was still a shitty experience.

    • Judge allowed to sit on sharia court set up by Hebdo protest cleric

      A crown court judge has been allowed to rule on sharia cases, in the first case of its kind.

      District Judge Shamim Qureshi, who sits at Bristol Crown Court, received permission from the Judicial Office to double as “presiding judge” at the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT).

      The MAT was established in 2007 by a hardline cleric, Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, who led an anti-Charlie Hebdo demonstration after 11 of the magazine’s staff were murdered by terrorists.

      Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is due to launch an independent review into sharia courts and councils amid concerns that a “parallel” justice system is developing in Britain. There are particular concerns that the courts are discriminatory towards women.

      Judge Qureshi has overseen MAT, which is based in Nuneaton, Warks, and has four other branches.

    • Debbie Wasserman-Schultz Wants to Keep Arresting Pot Smokers

      Wasserman-Schultz doesn’t explain how giving people criminal records for smoking pot makes them “safer,” and she appears to still subscribe to the discredited gateway theory that if people start with marijuana, they’re going to end up as heroin addicts.

    • Obama’s Legacy is Executive Abuse

      When I got back from my winter vacation, America was still being run by a two-term president who believes it’s his job to impose his notions of morality, safety and decency on everyone, often trying to work around the limits the system places on him. This week, Barack Obama is going to institute new restrictions on Americans unilaterally—expanding background checks, closing supposed “loopholes” and tightening the process for law-abiding gun owners—because Congress “won’t act” and also because he believes it’s the right thing to do. Neither of those is a compelling reason to legislate from the White House.

    • One Day After Obama Announced New Gun Reforms, Scott Walker Threatens Lawsuit

      Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker waited just one day after President Obama announced a package of modest gun control reforms before directing his attorney general to explore challenging the new rule — becoming the first governor to threaten legal action over the regulations.

      Accusing President Obama of “disregarding the constitutional principles of separation of powers and exceeding his authority as chief executive,” Walker said in a statement that the executive order creates “uncertainty and fear of prosecution for law-abiding citizens who wish to exercise their right to sell firearms lawfully. Forthcoming federal rules could also deprive millions of Americans of their Second Amendment rights without any indication of imminent danger.”

    • Will the Canadian government shed light on the no-fly list?

      In 2007, when the Passenger Protection Program (PPP) — copied on the U.S. model — was established in Canada, the Canadian government at the time failed to produce any concrete evidence of the efficiency of such a program. Canada was under a lot of pressure from the U.S. government to have this program and prevent “unwanted” travellers from boarding planes. The problem with this list is that it is shrouded in secrecy. The number of persons listed is not public. It is estimated to be between 500-2,000 persons. The government refused to release the exact number, claiming that this might help the terrorists in their plans to attack or harm us.

    • After Cologne, we can’t let the bigots steal feminism

      In a perverse sort of way, it’s progress. After months of dog-whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen. They have achieved this by choosing not to make a fuss when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.

      On New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany, hundreds of men, almost all of reportedly ‘Arabic and North African’ appearance and including many asylum seekers, viciously attacked women who were celebrating in the central plaza, robbing and groping and tearing off clothes. At least one rape complaint has been filed. The police and the press were initially slow to react, and the Mayor of Cologne reacted to eventual protests by suggesting that women should adopt a code of conduct in public and keep an ‘arm’s length’ distance between themselves and strange men.

      This is not the first time a European city administration has responded to an outbreak of sexual violence by blaming the women. It is the first time in recent history that the right-wing press has not joined in the condemnation of these wanton strumpets who dare to think they might be able to have a good time without worrying what ‘invitation’ they’re sending to men. Instead, the right wing blames… liberals. Who apparently caused all this by daring to suggest that refugees should be able to come to Europe in safety.

    • Truthdigger of the Week: Fatema Mernissi, a Founder of Islamic Feminism

      In her book “Islam and Democracy,” published in 1992, the feminist thinker also analyzed the role that the first Gulf war had in turning the Arab world against the idea of democracy, a concept many have come to conflate with “violence and religion in the west, as perceived by Arab observers of American broadcasts.”

    • Clinton Renews Criticism Of Sanders Gun Record

      Sanders has indeed expressed a desire to modify the law rather than simply repeal it, in part because he says gun sellers should not be liable for crimes they could not have anticipated when they sold someone a weapon.”If you are a gun shop owner in Vermont and you sell somebody a gun and that person flips out and then kills somebody, I don’t think it’s really fair to hold that person responsible, the gun shop owner,” Sanders said in October.

    • Bundy Militia Standoff Escalates When Another Heavily-Armed Group Arrives to Provide ‘Security’

      The Oregonian reports that the Pacific Patriot Network has sent armed “security” — some of whom are carrying semi-automatic rifles — to the standoff on Saturday. But an attorney mediating the dispute between Ammon Bundy and federal officials said Bundy wants them to leave.

      “We don’t need that. We don’t want it and we’re asking you to leave,” Todd MacFarlane, an attorney mediating the dispute on behalf of the Bundys, told reporters Saturday.

      In a press conference Saturday morning, a representative from the Bundy group said they are looking to de-escalate the situation.

      Locals in the area of the standoff have, in turn, condemned the Bundy takeover. Residents have expressed fear at the presence of armed militia and asked the outsiders to leave.

01.09.16

Links 10/1/2016: Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” Xfce and KDE Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Sorry, grammar nerds. The singular ‘they’ has been declared Word of the Year.

    Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.

    In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over “thanks, Obama,” ammosexual, “on fleek,” and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year.

  • Science

    • Scientists At Odds With EPA Over Fracking Study

      In June, the Environmental Protection Agency released a draft report on fracking that concluded the practice has not led to “widespread, systemic impacts” on drinking water. Now, the agency’s own advisory board is taking some issue with those findings.

      In a draft peer review report released Thursday, the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) said that it had concerns regarding the agency’s conclusion in the fracking report. Namely, it found that the EPA failed to “clearly describe the system(s) of interest (e.g., groundwater, surface water) nor the definitions of ‘systemic,’ ‘widespread,’ or ‘impacts.’” In addition, the review board said it was “concerned that this statement does not reflect the uncertainties and data limitations described in the body of the Report associated with such impacts.”

    • All of the Reasons Scientists Are Certain We Are Now Living in the Anthropocene

      “Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

      What follows in “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene,” a new study published in Science, is a laundry list of human sins that, in total, add up to what its authors say is irrefutable evidence that Earth has entered a human-driven geological epoch that began midway through the 20th century and continues today.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Why Are We Dying From Drinking in Record Numbers?

      Almost 31,000 Americans died from drinking in 2014, a nearly 40 percent increase since 2002.

    • Campbell Announces Support for Mandatory GMO Labeling
    • ‘No GMO Soup for You’? Consumer Victory as Campbell Announces New Labels

      Campbell Soup’s announcement that it will become the first U.S. company to begin labeling genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in its products garnered accolades on Friday from food and safety groups, who heralded the development as a “significant win” for transparency.

      “The decision by Campbell’s sends a clear message to Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association which have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat GMO labeling laws,” Ronnie Cummins, the international director for advocacy group Organic Consumers Association, said in a statement.

    • Spike in Drug Shortages Worries ER Docs

      Drug shortages have jumped more than five-fold from 2008 to 2014, following a 7-year decline, and access issues are hurting emergency departments, researchers reported in Academic Emergency Medicine.

    • Lead Poisoned Kids in Flint Will Need More Than Apologies, Declarations

      The children of Flint will need more than new declarations of emergency, state-level resignations and public apologies to help reverse the damage that has been done to their young bodies and developing brains. And now is the time for the state to step in with a proven strategy to help the most vulnerable citizens among us.

      The tragic crisis in which too many Flint children have been poisoned by lead from drinking toxic water after lax state regulatory oversight requires an immediate and significant investment in proven interventions that already exist. That is why Michigan’s Children calls on the state to step in – without delay – to increase funding to Early On services, a proven and existing program that helps families with infants and toddlers birth to age three who have a developmental delay or a diagnosed health condition that could lead to such delay. Elevated lead is one of those health conditions that result in automatic eligibility for Early On due to its strong connection to cognitive impairment and developmental challenges.

    • President Obama Needs to Intervene in Flint Water Crisis

      It’s hard to believe that in 2016, people in the United States are contending with poisoned water, but that’s the sad, frustrating, outrageous problem facing many today in Flint, Michigan. Although Governor Rick Snyder finally declared a state of emergency, the problem has persisted for over a year, affecting almost 100,000 people, many of whom will feel the repercussions of this for years to come in the form of chronic health problems from lead exposure.

    • Important Reminder in the Flint Crisis: People Still Have No Safe Water

      The lead contaminated water crisis in Flint, Michigan is receiving increased national attention—yet what the people of the Rust Belt city urgently need to receive is clean drinking water.

      Republican Governor Rick Snyder on Thursday offered a second apology for the crisis, saying it’s an “unfortunate situation.” That problem, which began as the city was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, has left 200 children below the age of six with confirmed elevated blood lead levels, spurred calls for Snyder’s ouster, and prompted filmmaker Michael Moore to say the governor has to go to jail, as he “effectively poisoned, not just some, but apparently ALL of the children in my hometown of Flint, Michigan.”

    • Death Rates Rise for Young White Americans Too

      It’s not just midlife whites – mortality rates for whites ages 25 to 34 are also increasing

    • Comments about people with mental illness

      As a developer, I wouldn’t really like the idea of doctors meddling with my code, so why is it that some people in the IT and business community are so happy to meddle around in the domain of doctors, giving such strong opinions about something they have no expertise in?

    • Unpatriotic militants? No, Jeremy Hunt – doctors are just fighting to be able to care for us all.

      For the last 9 years I have been the medical director of an NHS service providing confidential help to doctors and dentists with mental health problems, seeing a rising number of doctors week on week.

      But our patients have changed.

      In our early days the ‘typical’ patient was an older male (GP or psychiatrist) with alcohol problems.

      Now nearly half of all new patients are under 30 years old. They come to us with depression, anxiety and symptoms akin to posttraumatic stress disorder. Many have worked in the NHS only a few years. They started out bushy tailed and bright eyed, but end up ‘burnt-out’ (a polite euphemism for depression) after only a few years working. Our youngest patients are only a few months qualified and many are in their Foundation years.

  • Security

    • Friday’s security updates
    • Hackers caused a major blackout for the first time

      Hackers were behind a cyber attack on Ukraine in December that had real offline consequences: A blackout that killed electricity to roughly 700,000 homes.

      On December 23, around half the homes in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region lost power for at least a few hours. Initially reported in Ukrainian media as being caused by hackers, cybersecurity experts have now confirmed that was the case, saying the power company was infected with malicious software.

    • Finland extradites Russian hacking suspect to US

      US authorities are to escort Maxim Senakh out of Finland within a month. They suspect him of stealing millions of dollars from infected computer servers in the US, Finland and elsewhere.

    • Linux Ransomware creators third time unlucky as researchers crack encryption again

      Researchers find Linux.Encoder 3 version still uses buggy encryption and allows file recovery

      Much to the delight of security researchers, a group of malware creators are currently having difficulty getting cryptographic implementations right in their ransomware. This has not happened once but thrice.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • In Response to Continued Resonance of Awlaki Videos, US Relaunched Social Media Propaganda Campaign

      As far as we know, the perpetrators of the November attack on Paris were radicalized by each other, in specific neighborhoods in Europe.

      According to the complaint filed against his Enrique Marquez, the friend who got him guns, Syed Rizwan Farook, adopted radical beliefs after consuming the lectures, videos, and magazine of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, Farook and Marquez moved towards planning an attack in 2011, in the immediate wake of the drone killing of Awlaki and his son. As to Tashfeen Malik, Farook’s wife, while she did some searches on ISIS just before Farook started an attack on his workplace, public reporting suggests that like the French terrorists, she adopted extreme beliefs through relationships formed in brick and mortar life.

    • Saudi Arabia’s US-Backed Air War in Yemen May Have Committed War Crimes—Again

      Saudi Arabia is yet again adding to its trail of destruction in its war in Yemen, and its tactics are drawing condemnation from the United Nations. The Saudi’s latest actions include firing missiles on civilian buildings in the capital, Sanaa—striking a wedding hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and a center for the blind—as well as dropping US-made cluster bombs on at least two of Sanaa’s residential neighborhoods.

    • One by One, South Sudan Tries to Name Its War Victims

      It was December 16, 2013, just hours into a civil war pitting President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, the largest tribe in the country, against Riek Machar, his former vice president and a Nuer, the second largest tribe. The war has defied ceasefires and continues to this day despite a peace deal signed in August.

    • Does North Korea Need Nukes to Deter US Aggression?

      Question 1– How many governments has the United States overthrown or tried to overthrow since the Second World War?

      Answer: 57 (See William Blum.)

      Question 2– How many of those governments had nuclear weapons?

      Answer— 0

    • North Korea’s “H Bomb”: No Ado About Something

      In my opinion, a lot of the mockery of the North Korean nuclear test—the silly little man with his silly little bomb—is racism that reassures. It evokes the explanation for why many poor rural whites adopted a posture of racial exclusion instead of class solidarity with poor rural blacks in the American South: “because ‘If you ain’t better than a ****, who are you better than?’”. We may have our problems, in other words, but at least we’re not North Korea.

    • Decades After Atrocities During US-Backed Dirty Wars, Nations Take Promising Legal Steps

      El Salvador says will make arrests over notorious massacre of Jesuit priests; Guatemala arrests over a dozen former officials for rights abuses

    • US drone crashes in Iraq; not shot down by enemy fire

      U.S. military officials say an American Predator drone crashed Thursday in Iraq but say it was not shot down by enemy fire.

    • 112 Killed across Iraq; US Drone Crashes
    • We Are the Human Shields of the Political Class

      Sitting ducks, in other words, people that are easy to kill. This is why they are targeted, obviously. A “hard target”, on the other hand, is an individual, structure, or institution that is very hard to inflict much damage on by any organization other than a technologically advanced military. The Pentagon (with the exception of 9/11), White House, Congress, Homeland Security, the elites who can afford round-the-clock protection, all these come to mind. These “hard targets”, although safe from attack, are usually the ones chiefly responsible for whatever danger from terrorism that we “soft targets” are exposed to. Blowback, the retaliation by those angered at Western interventionism, is our lot in life in the thick of War on Terror hysteria.

    • Saudi Arabia Executed a Nonviolent Shiite Cleric – It’s Going To Cost Them Big

      Apparently not content to rest on those dubious laurels, Saudi authorities followed that high water mark by executing 47 people – by beheadings and firing squads – on New Year’s Day alone. It was the highest number of executions in a single day in the kingdom since 1980, when Saudi authorities publicly beheaded 63 Sunni fundamentalists behind the takeover of the Kaaba during the 1979 Hajj.

      The majority of those killed on January 1 were alleged terrorists convicted on charges stemming from the country’s al-Qaeda insurgency, which wreaked havoc across Saudi Arabia in the mid-2000s. Four, however, were Shiites – including the internationally revered Ayatollah Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a vocal advocate for the kingdom’s oppressed Shiite minority.

    • Taking On the Nuclear Goliath

      Say hello to the Marshall Islands, the tiny, heroic island nation in Micronesia, with a population just over 70,000. This former U.S. territory, which still bears the terrible scars of 67 aboveground nuclear blasts between 1946 and 1958, when this country used it as an expendable nuclear test site, has engaged the United States – and, indeed, all nine nations that possess nuclear weapons – in lawsuits demanding that they comply with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and begin the process of negotiating global nuclear disarmament.

    • Kenya has become a perilous place to be a teacher with the threat of al-Shabaab leaving young people in crisis

      Morning was several hours off when passengers boarded the ill-fated bus bound for Nairobi. Among them, teachers heading home for the long holidays started to doze off, others murmured quietly.

      An hour into the journey from Mandera in northern Kenya, Osinga Atibu was awoken from his reverie by the sound of gunfire. Masked men, armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, forced the driver to a shuddering halt. A short while later, the terrified passengers were ordered off the bus, non-Muslims singled out, and forced to lie face down on the ground.

    • Saudi Arabia a Force for Stability? Dream On!

      The Saudi mass beheadings on January 2 proved nothing new to a world that well knows Saudi Arabia is still a tribal police state with a moral code of medieval barbarity. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-Muslim country that executes people for witchcraft, adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality (among other things). And the Saudi regime is perfectly willing to torture and kill a Shi’a-Muslim cleric for the crime of speaking truth to power, knowing that that judicial murder will inflame his followers and drive the region toward wider war. The Saudi provocation is as transparent as it is despicable, and yet the Saudis are held to no account, as usual.

    • U.N. Chief to U.S.-Backed Saudi Air Coalition: You May Be Committing War Crimes in Yemen

      The U.N. has asked Yemen to reverse its decision to expel a top U.N. human rights official after cluster-bomb complaints.

    • Noam Chomsky: Electing the President of An Empire

      The spectrum is broad but in an odd sense. The spectrum is basically center to extreme right. Extreme right. Way off the spectrum. The Republican Party about 20 years ago basically abandoned any pretense of being a normal political party. In fact, the distinguished, respected conservative commentators, from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, like Norman Ornstein, described the Republican Party as a radical insurgency which has abandoned parliamentary politics. They just don’t want anything to happen. Their only policies are “don’t do anything” or bomb. That’s not a political party.

    • Regime Change Madness: Hillary, Obama and Murderous Mayhem in the Muslim World

      Still, recalling that it was a Democratic U.S. president (Jimmy Carter) who first provided the resources that made Osama bin Laden a force to be reckoned with and that leading Democrat Hillary Clinton voted (as a U.S. Senator) for Bush’s invasion, responsible observers of U.S. policy need to give the current Democratic president, Barack Obama, and the next one, his former Secretary of State, Hillary, equal credit for growing deadly Sunni extremism. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton have pursued aggressive policies of regime change that have opened the door for jihadist expansion. They have done so over and against the opposition and warnings not just of peace activists but also of top U.S. military analysts and officials.

    • Russia, as Explained to Russians by Americans

      This is rather odd because who needs propaganda when the Russians can read the Western media themselves and see firsthand all the lies it puts forth about them and the demonizing of Putin. There are several political-debate shows on Russian television where they invite Western journalists or politicians; on one there frequently is a really funny American journalist, Michael Bohm, who keeps regurgitating all the western propaganda, arguing with his Russian counterparts. It’s pretty surreal to watch him display the worst political stereotypes of Americans: arrogant, gullible, and ignorant. He stands there and lectures high ranking Russian politicians, “explaining” to them the “real” Russian foreign policy, and the “real” intentions behind their actions, as opposed to anything they say. The man is shockingly irony-impaired. It is as funny to watch as it is sad and scary.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Federal Judge Finds NYPD Engaged In Evidence Spoliation By Destroying Documents Related To Summons Quota Lawsuit

      Just recently, we discussed the revelation that former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s emails were deleted right as he was exiting office — despite being ordered by a federal court to preserve all communications relevant to a summons quota lawsuit.

      The city claimed it was a clerical error, but the plaintiffs pointed out that, despite the retention order being issued in 2010, the city had yet to produce a single email from Kelly’s account in response to its discovery requests.

    • FBI Finally Completes FOIA Request 1,393 Days After It Was Filed; Withholds All 509 Responsive Pages

      Michael Morisy — founder of FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock — has been waiting since February of 2012 for the FBI to hand over information on its GPS tracking devices. Specifically, Morisy was looking for information on any devices it deactivated/recollected after the Supreme Court (US v. Jones) declared the warrantless, long-term tracking of individuals could amount to a Fourth Amendment violation.

      The decision didn’t explicitly state GPS tracking devices now needed to be accompanied by warrants, but it was enough that the FBI began shutting down its 3,000 devices. (It turned most of them back on a month later after securing the proper paperwork. Only 250 or so were permanently switched off. And, of course, the FBI grumbled about having to obtain warrants for devices it had already deployed, because the Fourth Amendment doesn’t do anything but slow down law enforcement.)

    • US Courts Administrative Office Sued Because PACER’s Bad Math Is Overcharging Users

      There’s plenty to complain about when discussing the federal court’s document filing system known as PACER. Lots.

      [...]

      Then there’s the fact that PACER hands over PDFs like the pages are rolling off the Xerox. To access a digital file, you’ll be paying $0.10 a page. Sure, it caps at $3.00 (30 pages) but that’s only per individual PDF. Download another from the same case and you’re back to square one, paying a dime a page. Opinions are free, which helps, but everything else steadily adds up.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Emergency Declared by Governor as Massive Methane Leak in Los Angeles Spews Record Amounts of Pollution
    • FBI to Track Animal Abuse Like Homicide—But Which Animals?

      Activists say new system is step in the right direction, but reveals bias that favors household pets over farm animals

    • More droughts may mean less power

      Rising temperatures and reduced rainfall will make the flow of rivers less dependable, affecting supplies to the electricity generators that rely on them.

    • Donald Trump fined for pollution from one of his private jets

      US presidential candidate joins the Bahrain royal family and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox America whose aircraft have all fallen foul of the EU’s emissions trading scheme

    • The U.S. Was Hit With Seriously High Temperatures In 2015

      If you thought 2015 was unusually hot, you were right. Last year was the second hottest on record in the United States since data collection began in 1895, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday.

      Last year was also the 19th consecutive time that average temperatures in the U.S. exceeded the 20th century average, which means everyone born after 1996 has only experienced warmer than normal temperatures. NOAA also reported that December was record warm for the contiguous United States, with temperatures at 6°F above average. Twenty-nine states had their warmest December on record, while no state was record cold. The last time the country saw a warmer December was in 1939.

      This year-over-year trend could continue in 2016. For this winter, NOAA said in October that above-average temperatures are forecast across much of the West and the northern half of the contiguous United States. Temperatures are also predicted to be above-average in Alaska and much of Hawaii.

    • New US Diet Guidelines Say Yes to Meat, Screw the Climate

      Every five years, the government tries to tell Americans what to put in their bodies. Eat more vegetables. Dial back the fats. It’s all based on the best available science for leading a healthy life. But the best available science also has a lot to say about what those food choices do to the environment, and some researchers are peeved that new dietary recommendations released yesterday seem to utterly ignore that fact.

      Broadly, the 2016-2020 dietary recommendations aim for balance: More veggies, leaner meats, try some fish! Oh, and eat way less sugar, no more than 10 percent of your total diet.

    • Charles Koch Is Disappointed That He Can’t Buy More Influence

      There are two interesting things going on here. First is Koch’s disappointment that his money doesn’t buy him more influence. It’s easy to laugh at that, but he’s probably right. He’s raised a lot of money. But it’s hard to see that Republican views have changed in his direction much. The entire party denies climate change and wants to lower taxes already, so there was no work to be done there. But a less aggressive foreign policy? An end to corporate welfare? Turning down the volume on social issues? Koch is right: all his money has had no effect on that. It’s only had a significant effect when he’s pushing in the same direction that the GOP wind is already blowing.

    • The Arctic Is Melting at a Record Pace — and It’s Having a Scary Impact on Global Weather

      Arctic sea ice is melting at a record pace – and every summer looks grimmer. This past summer saw the ice pack at its fourth-lowest level on record, and the overall trend in recent decades suggests this will only continue.

    • Look What We’ve Done: Human-Made Epoch of Nightmares Is Here

      There’s no question about it. A new epoch—the Anthropocene—has begun.

      So says an international group of geoscientists, in a paper published Friday in the journal Science. They point to waste disposal, fossil fuel combustion, increased fertilizer use, the testing and dropping of nuclear weapons, deforestation, and more as evidence that human activity has pushed the Earth into the new age that takes its name from the Greek anthropos, or human being.

      Some argue the new era began in the 1950s, the decade that marks the beginning of the so-called “Great Acceleration,” when human population and its consumption patterns suddenly speeded up, and nuclear weapons tests dispersed radioactive elements across the globe.

  • Finance

    • Basic Income, Basic Issues

      But basic income is much more than that because it addresses the basic human right without which all other rights are impossible: the right to material existence.

    • Yet Another Fabricated Jobs Report — Paul Craig Roberts

      Americans of prime working age, 25 years old to 54 year old, only received 16,000 or 5% of the new jobs.

      Those aged 46 to 54 lost 165,000 jobs. In other words, middle aged people are losing their jobs before they can provide for their retirement.

      There are 527,000 more Americans working multiple jobs in December 2015 than in December 2014.

    • Hillary Clinton Made More in 12 Speeches to Big Banks Than Most of Us Earn in a Lifetime

      Clinton’s most lucrative year was 2013, right after stepping down as secretary of state. That year, she made $2.3 million for three speeches to Goldman Sachs and individual speeches to Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, Apollo Management Holdings, UBS, Bank of America, and Golden Tree Asset Managers.

      The following year, she picked up $485,000 for a speech to Deutsche Bank and an address to Ameriprise. Last year, she made $150,000 from a lecture before the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

      To put these numbers into perspective, compare them to lifetime earnings of the median American worker. In 2011, the Census Bureau estimated that, across all majors, a “bachelor’s degree holder can expect to earn about $2.4 million over his or her work life.” A Pew Research analysis published the same year estimated that a “typical high school graduate” can expect to make just $770,000 over the course of his or her lifetime.

    • Paul Krugman: Are We Heading to a Global Economic Catastrophe?

      Paul Krugman does his best to analyze the current economic crisis and venture a guess about whether it will trigger a worldwide economic catastophe in Friday’s column.

    • The corporate university and its threat to academic freedom

      Neoliberalism has facilitated the emergence of the ‘corporate’ university, which dangerously prioritises market rationality and public relations over academic freedom.

    • How to Spend Less So You Can Afford to Save More
    • 6 Creepy Schemes Companies Use To Bury You In Debt

      Unless you come from an obscenely rich family, one of the first things you find out when you hit adulthood is that your future might depend on your willingness to take on debt. Do you want to go to college? You’ll probably need a loan for that. Need a car? That’s going to require a loan. Ready to put down some roots and settle in a permanent place of your own? Unless your name is Mr. or Ms. Money Bags, get ready to borrow.

      And the fact that borrowing is a part of adulthood isn’t even the bad news. If you were paying attention as a child, you saw that one coming. The bad news is that your car, education, and house are only the tip of the debt iceberg. Beneath the sea is a whole other landmass of ways the world wants to keep you in the red.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Nuclear Perceptions: North Korea and the arts of Guerrilla Partisanship

      Nuclear weapons have always had a habit of inviting games of perception. Will the state in possession of a nuclear option make use of it? Obviously, there is always precedent that any state with an option will, at some point, make do with it. The importance here is one of perception.

      The DPRK has tended to be in the business of mastering perceptions over reality for much of its existence. In many ways, it has had to. In the face of a dominant United States, a retreating Russia, and a China that has proven to be more qualified about its support, Pyongyang has become more boisterous and terrier-like in its pronouncements.

    • How is citizen journalism transforming the BBC’s Newsroom practices?

      User-generated content offers new ways of covering ‘black hole’ stories such as the Syrian conflict. But how do journalists make sense of what is happening on the ground?

    • Latest: Trump crowd estimated at 2,000, plus protests

      Donald Trump says the crowd for his speech Thursday night in Burlington was 25,000.

      Untrue, according to the city police chief.

      About 2,000 people lined up starting at 4:30 a.m. for access to the Flynn Center, Chief Brandon del Pozo told the Burlington Free Press. The Trump campaign instituted a loyalty test at the door and allowed into the 1,400-seat Flynn Center only people who professed support for the candidate.

    • ESPN Employees Keep Failing To Disclose Their Advertising Tweets As Advertising
    • Bernie Sanders Goes on the Offensive Against Trump: He’s “Doing What Demagogues Always Do”

      Sanders noted that the American worker is making far less today “in real, inflation adjusted for dollars” than thirty years ago, and that Trump is tapping into the anger that’s creating. “What I am saying is you have a right to be angry. Let’s create an economy that gets to the root cause of greed and corporate greed. Let’s take them on.”

      “You know what Trump is saying?” he asked. “The cause of your problems is that Latino tomato picker who’s making $8 an hour, or that Muslim engineering student — that’s the old-fashioned scapegoating, it’s doing what demagogues always do.”

    • Muslim Woman Gets Kicked Out Of Donald Trump Rally For Being Muslim

      A Muslim woman was kicked out of a Donald Trump rally on Friday night for no apparent reason. The woman, Rose Hamid, told CNN that she “came to the rally to let Trump supporters see what a Muslim looks like.” She stood silently with a t-shirt that read “I Come In Peace.”

      About halfway through the rally, held in Rock Hill, South Carolina, some people in the crowd “turned pretty ugly” toward the woman, shouting “epithets.” She was then escorted out by security.

    • Donald Trump’s Supporters Are Poorly Paid, Distrustful and Convinced They’re Anything but Racist
    • Trump’s angry white men – and why there are more of them than you think

      Michael has presumably had a rough day. Nine hours working as an exterminator takes a physical toll on the 45-year-old, who didn’t go to college, makes $33,000 a year, and relies on a steady swarm of pests to pester people in his 90% rural county.

      But home, with a glass of wine and Fox News, he’s excited to hear from the only candidate who’s making any sense these days: Donald Trump.

    • Fox Downplays Sexual Assault, Until It Fits Their Anti-Muslim Refugee Agenda

      Fox News devoted numerous segments to reports of mass sexual assaults committed in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve by men “having a ‘North African or Arabic’ appearance,” using the story to fearmonger about the “direct threat” posed by “how fast you allow … Syrian refugees into this country.” This reporting stands in contrast to Fox’s history of downplaying sexual assaults when it doesn’t fit their anti-refugee agenda.

  • Censorship

    • Canadian Company Netsweeper to Censor Bahrain’s Internet for $1.2M

      A Canadian company has offered to provide the Bahraini government with internet censorship technology, according to a tender published on Thursday—the latest in a string of questionable partnerships the company has forged in recent years.

    • ‘Censorship should be at the individual level’

      Censorship of any kind has to be individual wherein a person who does not like something should not watch or read it, said eminent author Nayantara Sahgal here on Friday.

    • Twitter Celebrates The Return Of Politwoops, Which It Tried To Murder

      Well, Politwoops has been resurrected, and here to tell us how great that is, is the new CEO of Twitter, the company that initially killed it off.

      [...]

      It’s a nice, well-crafted message, to be sure. That said, it wouldn’t feel right to laud Twitter for about-facing a terrible attempt to knee-cap the usefulness of its own site. If Twitter is a platform chiefly about inter-expression, then hiding any of that expression is antithetical to its very purpose. Reinstating a service primarily useful to the public, once murdered out of deference to the elite class, is self-evidently the right thing to do, and the only lesson to be learned here is that Twitter’s initial treatment of Politwoops was a major mistake to begin with.

    • The Pirate Bay Now Starts Operating From New .MS Domain

      Notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has just started operating from a new .MS domain name. Notably, The Pirate Bay already registered the new .MS extension many years ago but it didn’t use it as a primary domain until now. If we recall the recent troubles faced by the website operators over the copyright issues, the future of .MS domain name seems very uncertain.

    • Hong Kong Bookseller Abducted by Chinese Government Thugs
    • Sense and censorship

      A committee led by Shyam Benegal may have been set up to look into revamping the Censor Board. But if not censorship, then what system should films be subjected to?

    • Poll: Colleges Should Punish Students for Offensive Speech

      A new HuffPost/YouGov survey found majority support for the position that colleges should punish students who engage in racially offensive speech.

      Respondents consisted of 1,000 random adults from around the country—not just college students, in other words. Fifty-three percent agreed that colleges should discipline students for making racially insensitive comments. Just 28 percent disagreed, and 19 percent weren’t sure.

  • Privacy

    • Note to Congress: The NSA Seizes More than Just Your Conversations with Israeli Leaders

      Over the holiday break, Congress was up in arms over a Wall Street Journal report revealing lawmakers’ private conversations with Israeli officials and interest groups were swept up by the National Security Agency during the US-Iran nuclear negotiations. But these aren’t the only congressional communications collected by the NSA.

      How vast is the dragnet? On what other national policy matters has NSA surveillance impacted Members of Congress? A congressional investigation remains long overdue, but these revelations should prompt Congress to create a Church Committee for the 21st Century.

    • The NYPD spied on Muslim Americans. Will a court settlement change anything?

      Five years ago, news broke that the NYPD was engaged in an expansive domestic spying operation targeting American Muslim communities for surveillance, mapping and infiltration. Two lawsuits were filed in the New York federal courts in response to these practices and in defense New York City Muslims’ – and all minority communities’ – right to equal treatment and religious freedom.

    • Your Apps, Please? China Shows how Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship

      Xinjiang, home of the China’s muslim Uighur minority, has long been the world’s laboratory for Internet repression. Faced with widespread local unrest, and online debate, China has done everything it can to enforce its vision of the Net in the region, from imprisoning bloggers and online publishers, to quarantining the entire Xinjiang network from the rest of the Internet for over ten months in 2009. Nonetheless, Xinjiang residents still circumvent censorship and surveillance in the pursuit of privacy and free expression. They use virtual private networks and other methods to get around the Great Firewall. They use popular messaging apps that they have heard could defend them against surveillance, like WhatsApp and Telegram.

    • After Spending Time As Surveillance Subjects, Intelligence Oversight Committee Suddenly Performing Some Oversight

      Once again, it appears the only way to make our nation’s intelligence oversight committees care about surveillance is to include them in the “fun.”

      Fervent surveillance apologist Dianne Feinstein had zero fucks to give about the steady stream of leaks until it became apparent that the CIA was spying on her staffers while they put together the Torture Report. Likewise, many members of the House Intelligence Committee couldn’t be bothered to care much about domestic surveillance until they, too, were “inadvertently” included in the NSA’s dragnet.

    • White House Raises Encryption Threat in Silicon Valley Summit
    • Germany reportedly resumes domestic surveillance efforts with the NSA

      After halting its internet surveillance targeting German companies and officials last May, the country’s BND intelligence agency has resumed its spying operations in collaboration with the NSA, according to Reuters.

      German media reported that collaboration between the two agencies have started up again at the Bad Aibling surveillance station and that the BND has resumed supplying intelligence to the NSA.

    • Forbes, ad blockers and malware

      If you’ve been following the news about ad blockers, you might have heard about Forbes asking its readers to turn off ad blockers to access its content. Apparently the site promised to provide an “ad light” version of its site that provides less ads or something like that.

      Well one guy, Brian Baskins, turned off his ad blocker and promptly got some pop-under malware on the Forbes site.

    • The Transatlantic Data War

      The United States faces a profound choice. It can continue to work in a world of blurred lines and unilateral demands, making no concessions on surveillance and denouncing privacy rights as protectionism in disguise. Yet if it does so, it is U.S. companies that will suffer.

      Alternatively, it can recognize that globalization comes in different flavors and that Europeans have real and legitimate problems with ubiquitous U.S. surveillance and unilateralism. An ambitious strategy would seek to reform EU and U.S. privacy rules so as to put in place a comprehensive institutional infrastructure that could protect the privacy rights of European and U.S. citizens alike, creating rules and institutions to restrict general surveillance to uses that are genuinely in the security interests of all the countries.

      More broadly, the United States needs to disentangle the power of a U.S.-led order from the temptations of manipulating that order to its national security advantage. If it wants globalization to continue working as it has in the past, the United States is going to have to stop thinking of flows of goods and information as weapons and start seeing them as public goods that need to be maintained and nurtured. Ultimately, it is U.S. firms and the American economy that stand to benefit most.

    • How the US Is Playing Both Ends on Data Privacy

      There’s an excellent article in Foreign Affairs on how the European insistence on data privacy — most recently illustrated by their invalidation of the “safe harbor” agreement — is really about the US talking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue: championing privacy in public, but spying on everyone in private. As long as the US keeps this up, the authors argue, this issue will get worse.

    • House with Banksy mural mocking GCHQ spooks goes on sale for £350,000
    • United States network NBC News reports on ‘$300K sale’ of Cheltenham’s Banksy house
    • Millionaire businessman to put in offer for Banksy house with aim of turning it into a ‘spy museum’
    • Juniper will scrap code giving NSA backdoor access
    • Juniper promises to scrap firmware code that granted NSA backdoor access
    • New Questions Swirl About Security Failure at Tech Giant Juniper Networks
    • Juniper will release another patch for its backdoored firewalls
    • Juniper Networks will drop code tied to National Security Agency
    • Juniper’s products are still insecure; more evidence that the company was complicit

      It’s been a month since Juniper admitted that its firewalls had back-doors in them, possibly inserted by (or to aid) US intelligence agencies. In the month since, Juniper has failed to comprehensively seal those doors, and more suspicious information has come to light.

      U Illinois researcher Stephen Checkoway has revealed that Juniper’s backdoor was only possible because the company added a known-insecure random number generator, Dual_EC, years after the company had started using a more-secure alternative, ANSI X9.31, deliberately introducing a vulnerability into its product.

    • ‘Insider Threat’ Program: Hundred Thousand Pentagon Personnel Under Total Surveillance

      At least a hundred thousand military, civilian, and contractor personnel at the Defense Department have been subjected to a “continuous evaluation” or total surveillance of their electronic activities and communications. The surveillance is part of the department’s “Insider Threat” program and raises concerns about the extent to which whistleblower communications are being intercepted.

      According to a 2015 report to Congress obtained by Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, “Multiple pilots and concept demonstrations using ‘push’ and ‘pull’ capabilities to conduct continuous evaluation” have been used to monitor personnel with access to classified information.

    • Top White House Officials Talk Encryption in Silicon Valley
    • Gmail Creator Named Head of Y Combinator’s Tech Startup Incubator

      Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s largest startup factory, is rejiggering responsibilities at the executive level and adding more staff. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and of Google’s onetime slogan “Don’t be evil,” replaces Sam Altman as managing partner of Y Combinator’s main accelerator program, which helped launch companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, and Stripe.

    • This is the web browser you should be using if you care at all about security

      No matter what you’ve heard about the Tor network, the basics of the service are simple: Tor keeps anyone who uses it safe, secure, and anonymous on the Internet.

      Originally created by the U.S. Navy, Tor can be used to browse the Web anonymously, send and receive private communications, or make other computer software anonymous by integrating it with Tor software.

      Tor’s reputation, however, is less straightforward. Many equate the anonymity the network provides with those who decide to use it for illegal purposes. From terms like “Dark Net” and ”Deep Web” to who actually uses the privacy software, here’s everything you need to know about Tor.

  • Civil Rights

    • Neoliberalism and its forgotten alternative

      …the natural ‘commons’ is turned into a potential new source of value which can be speculated on by investors…

    • On the edge of a nation, sitting on the border

      Life in UK’s indefinite immigration detention regime evokes the ‘barbed wire disease’ experienced by ‘enemy aliens’ interned during the World Wars. We must learn from our past to end detention.

    • Mein Trumpf Makes a Stop in Vermont
    • VIDEO: Is Right-Wing Populism the New Normal?

      In this video from The Guardian, Younge describes the ascent of rightwing populist leaders as the result of democracy in crisis…

    • San Bernardino Police Abuse Victims May Get Screwed Over by Bankruptcy

      Today, three and a half years later, The Wall Street Journal reports that the city wants to find its way out of bankruptcy by wriggling out of its police abuse settlements.

    • Migrants In Europe Are Getting Stereotyped As Dangerous Criminals

      At least 18 migrants are among the 31 people believed to have carried out a spate of attacks on women at a New Year’s Eve celebration in Cologne, Germany. More than 170 criminal complaints have been filed, the majority of which claim sexually motivated attacks. A spree of similar attacks across Europe has been used to justify fears that so many Middle East and North Africa natives will not be able to fully integrate into European societies.

    • When Men and Women Work Together, Men Get All the Credit

      Anne Case and Angus Deaton recently wrote a paper that’s gotten a lot of attention. One of the minor ways it’s gotten attention is in the way a lot of people talk about it: as the Deaton paper, or the Deaton/Case paper, despite the fact that it’s traditional in economics to list authors alphabetically.

    • A Left-Wing Hero of Brazil, Jean Wyllys, Comes Under Fire for Israel Trip, Anti-Palestine Comments

      A POPULAR LEFT-WING Brazilian congressman known for his leadership in the social justice movement is trying to fend off a major backlash from his left flank while he travels in Israel. The legislator, Jean Wyllys, has angered much of the base of the leftist Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), which he represents, after participating in a conference at an Israeli university with deep ties to human rights abuses against Palestinians and then defending that decision with anti-Palestinian talking points common among hard-core Israel defenders. Wyllys’ unexpected stance is one of the most powerful cases yet to highlight the tried-and-true tactic of exploiting liberal social issues to generate left-wing support for militarism.

    • For Maine Gov. Paul LePage, “Cocaine Negroes” Have Given Way to Horny Heroin Dealers

      Says “guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” drive north from New York and Connecticut to sell drugs and knock up local girls.

    • Here’s Gov. Paul LePage’s Non-Apology for Comments About Drug Dealers “Impregnating” White Women

      “You’s don’t like me and I don’t like you.”

      That’s how Gov. Paul LePage began his press conference on Friday to formally address the racially charged remarks he made this week about drug dealers with names like “D-Money” and “Smoothie” coming to “impregnate” young white girls in Maine.

      LePage’s opening line, which he cited as a quote from the film “Rocky,” was aimed squarely at media and reporters in the room.

      “I made one slip up,” he said. “I was going impromptu and my brain didn’t catch up to my mouth.”

      “Instead of saying Maine women, I said white women,” he added. “I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you will see we are 95 percent white.”

    • Yo Guv, We Mighta Found Smoothie, Still Looking For D-Money and Shifty

      Sigh. Our racist imbecile of a governor Paul LePage is making news again for projectile vomiting moronic words out of his face – this time, blaming Maine’s real, ruinous, death-dealing heroin epidemic on imaginary black dudes named D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty, who come here from New York and Connecticut to sell dope, impregnate white girls, maybe rap a bit and then go home. After everybody freaked out that he actually out loud said those things, he sorta lumbered through an even more stunningly offensive non-apology that utterly, miraculously missed the point, blathering about how his “brain (sic) didn’t catch up to my mouth” and why are these lefty bloggers out to get him for One Little Slip-Up and anyway who said anything about race, not him, nope, uh uh. Twitter was on it. Samples: “The governor of Maine’s comments are disgusting. D-money, smoothie & shifty are actually stand-up guys once you get to know em” and “Je suis smoothie.”

    • Governor Delivers Racist Rant At Public Meeting
    • Right-Wing Governor LePage Issues Appalling Defense of His Racist Remarks

      He did add that perhaps his brain was slower than his mouth. “Instead of ‘Maine women,’ I said ‘white women’ and I’m not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essentially 95 percent white.”

    • Man Shoots Officer While Pledging Allegiance To ISIS, But Mayor Says He Doesn’t Represent Islam

      The shooting comes at a time when police deaths are actually at a low point, but when anti-Islam incidents — where American Muslims are harassed, shot, or have their houses of worship damaged or destroyed — are on the rise.

    • Cop Arrested Twice for Assaulting Women, Stayed a Cop and Was Just Arrested a Third Time

      Philadelphia police officer Deric Lewis was recently arrested for the third time, after being arrested on two other occasions and losing his job as a result. In his two previous arrests, Lewis was charged with assault and reckless endangerment, and was reported as being violent in both situations.

    • America Must See the Truth About Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan

      The Obama administration must see Turkey under the reign of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for what it is.

    • Saudi Arabia executions: Philip Hammond condemned by rights campaigners for ‘excusing’ mass killings

      The Foreign Secretary says ‘just to be clear, these people were terrorists’ – despite at least four of the 47 being arrested over political protests. Rights groups say Britain continues to ‘parrot the propaganda’ of its Middle East ally

    • Artist protests naked at Cologne cathedral

      “Respect us! We are not fair game, even when we’re naked,” Moiré’s sign read.

      The 32-year-old Swiss artist stood on the square outside Cologne’s world-famous cathedral for around 20 minutes on Friday morning, watched by members of the public and a few police officers, who joined the group of onlookers but took no action against Moiré.

      “I stand for women’s freedom to move freely. For the things we’ve achieved in the past 50 years – for women’s emancipation,” Moiré told Bild.

      “I don’t want people to trample on these values and for women to have to adapt themselves. Women must be able to live their values of freedom, with self-determination and self-awareness,” she said.

    • Former Cardinals Scouting Coach To Plead Guilty To Hacking In Espionage Case

      But media reports speculated that charged officials could incur heavy penalties for computer hacking under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — a law that has been used to convict malicious hackers but has also been used to prosecute more innocuous online behavior, such as downloading documents or using a shared password.

      Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide after the Justice Department charged him with criminal hacking under the CFAA for downloading documents from a research database. He was facing up to 35 years and $1 million in fines for downloading millions of academic articles.

    • The 2 Refugees Charged With Terrorism-Related Crimes, In Context

      Two Palestinian refugees, both born in Iraq, were arrested in Sacramento and Houston respectively on Thursday for terror related charges. The arrests have already elicited responses from certain U.S. governors who vowed to not accept Syrian refugees.

      “This is precisely why I called for a halt to refugees entering the U.S. from countries substantially controlled by terrorists,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said in a statement, according to Fox News. “I once again urge the President to halt the resettlement of these refugees in the United States until there is an effective vetting process that will ensure refugees do not compromise the safety of Americans and Texans.”

    • Teacher Says She Was Fired For Teaching Students About The Central Park Five

      A New York City high school teacher says she was fired after teaching her class about the Central Park Five — a case involving five black and Hispanic men who were accused of raping a jogger as teenagers but later exonerated after spending between six to 13 years in prison — because administrators were worried the lesson would “rile up” students of color.

    • Alabama Cops, Confederate Flags, Racism, and an Over-Eager Media

      Last month, dozens of news outletsshared a “bombshell” story about a cabal of neo-Confederate police officers in Dothan, Alabama. The officers had allegedly been systematically planting evidence on innocent black men for decades, resulting in hundreds of wrongful convictions.

    • 7 of 2015′s Most Outrageous Killings by the Drug War Police

      Drug law enforcement operations in the US killed people at the rate of more than one a week last year.

    • What The San Francisco Police Wants You To Do With Your Smartphone Instead Of Recording Police Misconduct

      San Francisco police want onlookers to turn their smartphone camera on suspected criminal activity — instead of police behavior.

      The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is reportedly developing a crime-reporting app, Fight Crime SF, that will allow citizens to submit photos and video of suspected criminal activity. The app doesn’t have a release date but is expected to be released to the public early this year, according to SFD spokeswoman Officer Susan Merritt’s statements in a recent issue of the police union’s journal.

    • The Rise of France’s Far Right

      France’s far right benefits from almost everything in the country: a broken economy; a still-rising unemployment rate; job insecurity and a fear of loss of social status; an endangered welfare system and public services; a repellent “European project”; a wave of migration, heightened by chaos in some Arab countries; coordinated attacks planned by those who claim to act in the name of Islam. And a Socialist Party that for almost 30 years has shared with the right the responsibility for neoliberal policies now locked in through European treaties, and a project of remaining in power indefinitely by presenting itself every election as the last defence against the Front National (FN).

      [...]

      Like the far right, the mainstream right likes to lambast the politically correct.

    • Europe Besieged

      More than a million requests for asylum; dozens of boats landing daily on Greek and Maltese beaches; a record number of deaths in the Mediterranean; armies sent in to control borders — migration in 2015 was exceptional in scale, and has challenged how the EU functions. Between August and October, Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia all reintroduced border controls to try to stem the influx.

    • Why the Feds Punk Out When Confronting White Rightwing Insurgents

      When a criminal justice system born in Native American genocide and Black slave patrolling finds itself in conflict with conservative white Christian landowners, it short-circuits.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • T-Mobile CEO John Legere got caught lying by the EFF, and now he’s totally losing it

      The Electronic Frontier Foundation caught T-Mobile and its bombastic CEO John Legere in a huge lie, and instead of addressing the findings, Legere is quickly becoming unhinged. Here’s the short version: T-Mobile has been claiming that its “BingeOn” program, which offers some free video from select partners to customers, and also downgrades the quality of all other video as part of an opt-out program, is collectively a form of video “optimization.” Three days ago, the EFF published an investigation that exposed T-Mobile’s marketing language for the euphemistic misdirection it is: instead of “optimizing” video streams, the company has been identifying video traffic and then throttling that traffic to 1.5Mbps.

      In other words, it’s the biggest fuck you to net neutrality that any company has dared since the FCC passed new rules in 2015. And John Legere wants you to thank T-Mobile for it.

  • DRM

    • iPhone & iTunes sync – Don’t want

      Aesthetics and hardware aside, iPhone 6 does not have a single usability advantage over its rivals. None whatsoever. Moreover, the ultra-restrictive way you must do things is frustrating and maddening and utterly sub-100 IQ. Fine for people who believe California is the center of the Universe, less so for people who can spell cynicism without getting confused. I will not partake in this silliness. Which means the moment my bunch of Apple stocks finally makes some kind of a profit, I will most likely dump them all back into the shares sea. There is no reason to keep investing in this. All I wanted was to play an MP3 file. That’s all I asked. Won’t let me play? Won’t give you my money. Fair deal. And you’re welcome, dear readers. I’m suffering so you don’t have to. We’re done.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Monsanto + Syngenta: Agribusiness Giants Get Even Bigger

      A merger between agricultural biotech giants Monsanto and Syngenta is becoming likelier by the minute. The proposed merger has generated much commentary and speculation in the business world as well as among anti-GMO activists since the resulting corporation would control 45% of the global seed market and 30% of the agrochemical market (1).

      In 2015 the US-based Monsanto tried to buy Syngenta twice, and was twice spurned by the European corporation. But Monsanto is not the only suitor. Syngenta has also been courted with similar buyout bids by Germany’s BASF and Asian corporate colossus ChemChina.

    • A Pill That Cures Hepatitis Costs Just $4, but If You Live in America It’s $1,000

      On April 8, 2013, the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, Inc., filed a New Drug Application claiming to be able to cure hepatitis C. They received the FDA’s coveted Breakthrough Therapy Designation, which is is given to drugs that show significant treatment advantages to existing options.

01.08.16

Links 8/1/2016: Polaroid, Freetel Android Devices, More From CES

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Thinking Outside The (Linux) Box

    So, what does this have to do with Linux or computers in general? It illustrates an important truth about technology and that is that it is not and never will be perfect. Anyone who wants to use any technology to make life easier or to accomplish a task must be prepared to live with imperfection and learn how to work around it. If you can’t handle that concept then you will find yourself very frustrated. Sometimes a little analytical thinking and judicious application of pragmatic logic are necessary to get the most from a complex system. Anyone not prepared to roll with the changes is doomed to failure. The Linux ecosystem is vast and developers are constantly working to find new ways to get things done, deprecating the old and embracing the new. It will never be perfect, it will never be one-size-fits-all. The number of choices are dizzying and that is a good thing because it gives you options to deal with these little imperfections and stumbling blocks as the present themselves.

  • Server

    • Behind the scenes: How the FCC migrated to the cloud

      “We literally retired two Sun E25Ks, which as background, these systems each weigh one ton. We clearly did not want to load those into the trucks, and they were 11 years old. Those were moved to newer server blades that were lighter, more modular, etc., so that they could be more easily transported to the commercial data facility. Those one-ton systems could now be gracefully retired and disposed of as appropriate,” Bray said.

    • Introducing dumb-init, an init system for Docker containers

      At Yelp we use Docker containers everywhere: we run tests in them, build tools around them, and even deploy them into production. In this post we introduce dumb-init, a simple init system written in C which we use inside our containers.

      Lightweight containers have made running a single process without normal init systems like systemd or sysvinit practical. However, omitting an init system often leads to incorrect handling of processes and signals, and can result in problems such as containers which can’t be gracefully stopped, or leaking containers which should have been destroyed.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 4 Episode 01

      In this episode: Ian Murdoch, creator of Debian, has died. AMD is overhauling its open source driver approach. Linux has been made to run on a PS4. IPv6 is now at 10% adoption, after only 20 years. And there’s an outbreak of common sense at the Dutch Government. All this plus our regular Finds, Brains and Voices sections. Plus, One. More. Thing.

  • Kernel Space

    • diff -u: What’s New in Kernel Development

      There’s an ongoing impulse among a diversity of developers to be able to compile some or all of the Linux kernel as a library, so that a piece of software could use kernel services and APIs while running under a different kernel entirely, or a different operating system.

    • FIXME and TODO comments in the Linux kernel source

      While looking at some code in the Linux Kernel this morning I spotted a few FIXME comments and that got me wondering just how many there are in the source code. After a quick grep I found nearly 4200 in v4.4.0-rc8 and that got me thinking about other similar comment tags such as TODO that are in the source and how this has been changing over time.

    • The Thousands Of FIXMEs & TODOs In The Linux Kernel

      Canonical’s Colin King has looked at the number of FIXME and TODO comments within the Linux kernel tree.

      King found that currently there are more than four thousand “FIXME” comments within the Linux 4.4 kernel source code. After becoming curious, he found almost 4,500 “TODO” comments in the kernel source code as well.

    • Automotive Grade Linux makes the grade with AGL UCB for Ford, Subaru, Mazda & Mistubishi

      Automotive Grade Linux , connected car open source software, announced that Subaru, Mitsubishi Motors, Mazda Motor Corporation and Ford Motor Company are joining The Linux Foundation and AGL. Ford Motor Company is the first U.S. car manufacturer to join AGL. These latest automakers join existing members Toyota Motor Corporation, Nissan Motor Company Ltd. and Linux Foundation board member Jaguar Land Rover to round-up the list of OEM supporters within AGL.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Akonadi – still alive and rocking

        It’s been a while since I wrote anything about Akonadi but that does not mean I was slacking all the time Wink The KDE PIM team has ported PIM to KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 and released the first KF5-based version in August 2015 and even before that we already did some major changes under the hood that were not possible in the KDE4 version due to API and ABI freezes of kdepimlibs. The KF5-based version of Akonadi libraries (and all the other KDE PIM libraries for that matter) have no guarantees of stable API yet, so we can bend and twist the libraries to our needs to improve stability and performance. Here’s an overview of what has happened (mostly in Akonadi) since we started porting to KDE Frameworks 5. It is slightly more technical than I originally intended to, sorry about that.

      • KDE Plasma 5.5: The Quintessential 2016 Review

        It’s the start of 2016 and over the past year KDE developers have brought numerous new features and improvements to the Plasma 5 desktop, some tangible with others more under-the-hood.

        With the sun set on 2015 it marks the first full year since Plasma 4, a stable workhorse which many users still rely on for day-to-day computing, has been discontinued. Plasma 5 is on the clock for users who need to know if the widgets, settings, and some painful regressions have been sorted out to see if it’s safe to embrace modern Plasma in the new year.

        This review will cover the evolution of KDE Plasma and its applications since the release of 5.2, listing many of the biggest differences and examining if they have caught up with Plasma 4 to a satisfactory degree for everyday users looking for a supported daily driver. We will also look at the desktop from the viewpoint of users who are thinking of trying or returning to the KDE/Plasma ecosystem, and may not necessarily know about some of the core Plasma functionality.

        While I have avoided bias to the best of my ability, for full disclosure I am a member of the KDE Visual Design Group.

      • Updates on KBibTeX

        In this posting, I am going to tell about the changes and development done in KBibTeX during the last few months. Most notably, KBibTeX has been ported to KDE Frameworks 5, but also some effort has been spent into code quality.

      • Care to help test?
      • Creating lessons with Cantor

        As a student from the competition Google Code In, I saw that there is a task to create lessons in Cantor. Although I haven’t worked with this KDE software before, I accepted the task.

      • The Kubuntu Podcast team’s latest video is live

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME’s Mutter Now Supports Screen Rotation On Wayland

        Thanks to work that landed today by GNOME’s Carlos Garnacho, there is now support on the GNOME desktop for supporting screen rotation on Wayland.

        Mutter has picked up native, DRM-based CRTC rotation based upon the modes exposed by the DRM kernel graphics driver. This implementation is only for drivers/hardware supporting rotation modes and is not yet a driver-independent solution. The other caveat, which isn’t anything really unique, is that when screen rotation takes place GNOME falls back to using a software cursor.

      • Watch: GNOME Desktop Environment Makes Appearance in Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’ Video

        It’s almost weekend, so we’re continuing our “Watch” series of articles with a really funny one, the latest video of Justin Bieber for the song Sorry, where you can see the GNOME Shell user interface of the GNOME desktop environment for GNU/Linux OSes.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Nvidia unveils Drive PX 2 platform for self-driving cars

      Nvidia unveiled a “Drive PX 2” platform for self-driving cars, an update to its earlier Tegra-based Drive PX automotive mainboard design.

      Nvidia and Qualcomm showed off new automotive platforms at CES that demonstrate the power of their advanced GPUs to achieve sophisticated computer vision capabilities. Qualcomm’s new Linux- and Android-ready Snapdragon 820a is an automotive spin on its quad-core 820 SoC, that targets in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Here, we look at Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 platform for self-driving cars, an update to its Tegra-based Drive PX automotive board with 16nm Tegras that haven’t even been announced yet.

    • Qualcomm aims new Snapdragon 820a SoC at smart cars

      Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 820a, a version of its 64-bit Snapdragon 820 SoC targeting automotive applications including IVI and ADAS.

      Nvidia and Qualcomm showed off new automotive platforms at CES that demonstrate the power of their advanced GPUs to achieve sophisticated computer vision capabilities. Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 platform is aimed at self-driving cars, and updates the Tegra-based Drive PX automotive board with 16nm Tegras that haven’t even been announced yet. Here, we look at Qualcomm’s Linux- and Android-ready Snapdragon 820a, an automotive spin on its quad-core 820 SoC designed for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

    • Augmented reality helmet moves to Skylake, RealSense, Linux

      Daqri has upgraded its augmented reality Smart Helmet, which now runs Linux on a 6th Gen Intel Core M7 processor, and includes an Intel RealSense camera.

      Daqri first announced its Daqri Smart Helmet in Sept. 2014, and rolled it out to aerospace, construction, oil & gas, and other industrial firms for pilot programs shortly thereafter. At CES this week, Daqri showed off a second generation model of the Linux-based augmented reality helmet that will ship commercially later this quarter.

    • Latest Intel Compute Sticks use Skylake and Cherry Trail CPUs

      With its relatively high, $89 (Linux) to $149 (Windows) price, middling Bay Trail processor, and one lonely USB port, the Intel Compute Stick was clearly in need of some improvements. At CES, Intel launched several second-gen versions that add more USB ports, faster 802.11ac 2×2 WiFi, and much faster processors.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Half of AT&T’s networks are controlled by open-source SDN code

    AT&T says it has replaced nearly half of the software in its vast operations with open-source software-defined networking (SDN) code.

    Speaking to developers just before this year’s CES conference kicked off on Tuesday, technology and operations veep John Donovan dropped that number as evidence that the operator’s SDN strategy is working.

  • Open-source ‘ecosystem’ central to fight against Ebola

    Harnessing open-source software and the voters’ roll solved the issue.

  • Embracing open source as a visual artist

    I’d heard about Linux, but I thought it was scrolling green terminal output on black monitors for Hollywood hackers and geeks. Reading Sennett write about Linux in such a way that connected free, open source software to craftsmanship (and radical, avant-garde politics) piqued my interest. Unhappy with the standard computing options and wanting a deeper understanding of the means of media production, I made a leap into the void and built a Linux desktop. It was my first rig and my first distro (Ubuntu). The learning curve was steep and the new environment put a serious hamper on my creative output as there was no 1:1 correlation between the tools with which I was familiar. I began working with openFrameworks and while a visualist-in-residence at The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, created my first truly open source art work.

  • Was 2015 the Year When Open Source Software Finally Won?

    Open source software has made huge strides in a short time. But do platforms like the cloud, IoT and Android help or hinder the mission of free and open source code?

  • The role the channel can play in managing open source security

    With the growing popularity of wearables providing determined hackers with yet another means of accessing the sensitive information they desire, this year will see a need for security to extend beyond the perimeter as these hackers continue to find ways into IT infrastructure through alternative, less prioritised routes.

  • Raspberry Pi-based home AI project open-sources key components

    Mycroft.ai, which is working to create a home AI platform based on Raspberry Pi, Arduino and an extensive in-house software stack, has opened an important part of that stack to developers everywhere as of Wednesday.

  • WD and ownCloud team up on consumer cloud device

    ownCloud started off as a humble ‘free software’ file syncing project from Germany. But that project has evolved into an open source company that is now headquartered in Boston, Mass. And ownCloud has become a platform that does much more than just file syncing: It has an online collaborative document like Office 365, it has apps like mail, it has calendar, and much more.

  • A new home AI system, an open-source AI engine, and Apple’s acquisition of AI company Emotient—SD Times news digest: Jan. 8, 2016
  • AT&T software plans gain steam, focus on cloud and open source

    AT&T continues to steadily march towards a virtualized future, which will see the carrier hit software control of 75% of its network by 2020 using software-defined networking and network functions virtualization technologies.

  • Mycroft Open Sources Artificial Intelligence Library for IoT Devices

    Mycroft says it aims to assure the future of open source artificial intelligence through its release this week of Adapt, an intent parser engine for embedded devices, as an open source project.

    Mycroft’s main product is a device of the same name that is designed to manage IoT devices in the smart home and office. The chief selling point of the Mycroft is its ability to predict and learn what users want in an intelligent way.

  • Events

    • The Linux Foundation Announces 2016 Events Schedule

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its 2016 events schedule. Linux Foundation events are where the creators, maintainers and practitioners of the world’s most important open source projects meet. Linux Foundation events in 2015 attracted nearly 15,000 developers, maintainers, sysadmins, thought leaders, business executives and other industry professionals from more than 3,100 organizations across 85 countries.

    • International Free Software Conference in Havana Cuba

      The 100 EUR (General Admission) Ticket is for people from economically developed countries (but if you happen to be rich in a poorer country, please stick to this category). The 20 EUR category is for people from economically developing countries (we are naming Africa, Middle- and South America – if you happen to come from another country, please contact us individually).

    • Spotlight! Call for Proposals and Event Suggestions!

      You, and your suggestions and proposals, are the heart of Penguicon’s programming. The deadline for all event proposals and suggestions is February 1st, 2016, in 3 short weeks! This is a great time to tell us what you’d like to present, or suggest ideas our track heads can use, using our forms.

    • Bad Voltage Live in Los Angeles: Why You Should Be There
    • We Need Your Answers
    • Speaking at SCALE 14x

      I’m working on my GIMP talk for SCALE 14x, the Southern California Linux Expo in Pasadena.

    • Developer: Tizen Community Dinner at FOSDEM 2016

      Last year the event attracted 5000+ attendees and its looks like a similar number for this year. There will be a number of Tizen talks and you will have the opportunity to meet and listen to Tizen developers from all over Europe (and further away). There will be a EFL / Tizen booth where developers can learn about the Tizen ecosystem, available devices and also about coding using EFL.

    • Design Hackfest in Rio de Janeiro

      In a week and a half, a bunch of us that are involved in GNOME design will be heading to Rio de Janeiro, in order to spend some time with the good people at Endless. (If you don’t know them yet, Endless are selling computers for the developing world, all of which run a GNOME-based operating system. Their latest device, the Endless Mini has been getting some good press recently.)

    • Shuttleworth at SCALE, Google Rolls Over & More…

      To SCALE or not to SCALE: If you live somewhere within driving distance of Southern California and you’ve been sitting on the fence trying to decide whether to attend SCALE 14X (that’s the Southern California Linux Expo for the jargon impaired), then we’re about to give you a tidbit that might help you make up your mind. FOSS Force has learned from a SCALE official that FOSS rocket man and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth will be giving the keynote address at SCALE on Saturday January 23. Although Shuttleworth’s scheduling has not been posted on the event’s website as we go to press, it’s presumed that he will speak at 10:00 a.m. According to our source, Shuttleworth will most likely discuss Linux on Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

  • Web Browsers

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Third bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.1

      The LibreOffice community is working hard on the next major release of LibreOffice 5.1 – planned for early February – with a bug hunting session focused on new features and fixes for bugs and regressions, to test the second release candidate.

      The session will last 3 days, from January 15 to January 17, 2016. On those dates, mentors will be available from 08AM UTC to 10PM UTC to help volunteers to triage bugs, on the QA IRC channel and via email on the QA mailing list.

    • A first look at Collabora/LibreOffice online (and a little bit of frustration)

      Recently, I read a blog article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols about an initiative from Collabora, an “Open Source consulting” firm, OwnCloud, an Open Source Cloud solution and the well-known LibreOffice office suite (actually a fork of OpenOffice.org, which itself is a fork of StarOffice), to release an online version of LibreOffice. Finally!

  • CMS

    • How to perform Drupal 7 integration tests with Red Test

      The spotlight is back on Drupal with the 8.0.0 release. The successful launch is a testament to the hard work put in by members of the Drupal community, but Drupal 7 still has a huge install base and likely will for many years to come. To support Drupal 7 development, let’s take a look at a testing platform built exclusively for the platform. Red Test is an open source integration testing framework aimed at making life easier for Drupal developers.

    • Drupal sites at risk due to insecure update mechanism

      The update mechanism of the popular Drupal content management system is insecure in several ways, allowing attackers to trick administrators into installing malicious updates.

      Researcher Fernando Arnaboldi from security firm IOActive noticed that Drupal will not inform administrators that an update check has failed, for example due to inability to access the update server. Instead, the back-end panel will continue to report that the CMS is up to date, even if it’s not.

      This can be a problem, considering that hackers are quick to exploit vulnerabilities in popular content management systems like Drupal, WordPress or Joomla, after they appear. In one case in 2014, users had only a seven-hour window to deploy a critical Drupal patch until attackers started exploiting the vulnerability that it fixed.

  • Education

    • How students can get started contributing to open source software

      As a student, getting involved in open source is a great way to improve your programming skills. From my experience, it can even help kickstart your career. But where do you begin? And how do you get involved?

      I started my open source journey during my high school days when I had a lot more free time on my hands (and lived on IRC). It was through that experience that I learned how to contribute to open source through communication media like IRC and Usenet. Open source has grown since those olden days, and there are now more formal ways to get involved with open source as a student.

    • Rapid Router: why Ocado Technology turned to open source

      Ocado Technology has open-sourced its free coding education application to encourage a wider community of contributors.

      The firm’s free Rapid Router coding education resource is teaching 38,500 people across the UK to code.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook and Google Use Open Source To Recruit Developers

      Artificial Intelligence (AI)—technology that is adept at identifying images, recognizing spoken words and translating information from one language to another—is the hottest new topic in Silicon Valley. In fact, as of late, both Google and Facebook have found themselves in a race to secure the most brilliant software engineers to continuously improve upon this technology for their own purposes. Specifically, in an attempt to get a leg up on Google, Facebook recently opened sourced its AI software in an effort to draw in top-level developers.

    • How tech giants spread open source programming love

      “Go is a programming language designed by Google to help solve Google’s problems.” So said Rob Pike, one of the Go language’s designers.

      That may be the case, yet the open source language is increasingly being adopted by enterprises around the world for building applications at large scale.

  • BSD

    • Pre-5.9 pledge(2) update

      In a continuing series of pledge(2) reports, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) gives us the latest update before the 5.9 freeze.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuTLS 3.4.8

      Released GnuTLS 3.3.20 and GnuTLS 3.4.8 which are bug fix releases in the previous and current stable branches.

    • The Licensing and Compliance Lab interviews Guillaume Roguez, Ring Project Director

      Ring is multi-media communication platform with secured multi-media channels, that doesn’t require centralized servers to work. It is developed by Savoir-faire Linux, a Canadian company located in Montréal, Québec. It is a potential free-software replacement for Skype, and possibly more.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Blackpool becomes third NHS trust to get open-source EPR

      Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is the third UK health trust to decide to implement the open-source electronic patient record system (EPR) from supplier IMS Maxims.

      The trust began implementing the EPR in December and aims to go live within the next 12 months.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source Seed — the past meets the future

      Open-source seeds offer farmers and alternative to other types of seeds.

    • The Origins of Totalitarianism: Interlude on The Commons

      One of the primary goals of neoliberals is to take over the commons.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source RISC-V Core Designs, Why Google Cares and Why They Matter

        The CPU is one of the most crucial components of our computers, responsible of performing basic calculations, logical comparisons and moving data around. These simple tasks are the building blocks of any more complex operation, and make running our systems and programs possible.

        How these operations are done is not random: an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) defines what they are and what computer processors are supposed to do.

        An ISA defines supported instructions and features, but not how these instructions are specifically carried out. Think of it like a cooking recipe — let’s say it’s for bagels: while the recipe is the same, each chef will carry it out differently, arranging the sesame seeds differently for instance. The chef cooking based on the recipe is, in our example, the computer processor carrying out instructions as per the defined ISA. The result will always be the same in theory, though: a tasty bagel.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Science

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • North Korea’s Nuclear Ambition and the U.S. Presidential Campaign

      We must demand answers to these questions about the greatest imminent existential threat to our world. We cannot rely on the hope that someone else will take care of this or the notion that I cannot make a difference. In our democracy each of us has a duty and responsibility to be informed and to take action.

    • Media Demonstrate GOP Hypocrisy In Blaming Obama And Hillary Clinton For North Korea’s Nuclear Testing
    • Hillary Clinton Suggests She May Oppose Obama’s $1 Trillion Nuclear Arms Upgrade

      In October, the administration awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to develop next-generation long-range bombers capable of firing nuclear weapons, a project that analysts expect will swell to $80 billion.

    • To End North Korea’s Nuclear Program, End the Korean War

      Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test may be a last-ditch effort to get on the U.S. agenda before Obama leaves office and a hawkish new president comes in.

    • Taking on the Nuclear Goliath

      Say hello to the Marshall Islands, the tiny, heroic island nation in Micronesia, with a population just over 70,000. This former U.S. territory, which still bears the terrible scars of 67 above-ground nuclear blasts between 1946 and 1958, when this country used it as an expendable nuclear test site, has engaged the United States — and, indeed, all nine nations that possess nuclear weapons — in lawsuits demanding that they comply with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and begin the process of negotiating global nuclear disarmament.

    • A lot of chatter about terrorism

      Tim Wilson (TW): Privacy is a human right, but there is a difference between privacy and secrecy. Private information is information that we don’t want publicly disclosed. But some of that information does need to be accessed by third parties such as the government. The issue and the challenge is, if the information is going to be disclosed, who gets to decide that and then who gets to access it, and under what circumstances.

      Think about it in terms of, for example, a data retention regime. If I use my phone now, I go through with my ISP and online content providers. At every point I have voluntarily said the trade-off for accessing information is that I have put out a certain amount of material about myself to these different companies. The question is how they long they store my information for, and who can access and on what terms.

    • New Research Explains Why Immigrants Are Fleeing Latin America

      In 2005, Mexico’s homicide rates was 9.5 homicides per 100,000 people. By 2010, that rate more than doubled to 22 per 100,000. Homicides have not subsided — May 2015 saw at least 1,621 homicides, marking one of the deadliest months since January 2014.

    • Saudi Arabia: the West’s Chosen Islamist Head-Cutters

      The latest executions in Saudi Arabia should make it very clear that the Western powers’ “war on terror” has nothing to do with opposition to chopping off heads and sectarian religious fanaticism. Instead of condemning this crime, the U.S., UK and other Western powers have continued to give the Saudi regime, if not their public political blessing, at least their practical backing – in the name of the necessary alliances they claim flow from that “war on terror”.

    • Why Is North Korea Our Problem?

      Why, then, are 25,000 U.S. troops still in South Korea?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A Look Into the Future at How TPP Could Create Environmental Nightmares

      The TPP makes the rights of companies sacrosanct, including the right to mine. But what about the rights of people who live in the way of proposed mining sites?

    • ‘Environmental’ Comic Strip’s Author Wants Global Warming Believers to ‘Get Real’

      The leading environmental-themed comic strip in the United States, Mark Trail, is apparently written by a climate-change denier.

      The strip’s expanded Sunday editions are intended to be educational, and this week’s (1/3/16) featured a lesson about sulfur dioxide. “Sulfur dioxide is a major cause of acid rain!” the title character, a naturalist, exclaims. He notes that it’s “a byproduct of large-scale farms, power plants and other industries,” as well as “the burning of fossil fuels by large transportation vehicles.”

    • Republicans Are Pushing a Bill That Could Make It Much Harder to Sue Volkswagen

      Volkswagen will likely be spending a lot of time in court over the next few years. On Monday, the automaker was presented with a new lawsuit from the Justice Department over allegations that it had illegally rigged half a million cars sold in the United States to cheat on emissions tests. The suit is the first step the Obama administration has taken to hold VW accountable for the scandal, and it could leave the company on the hook for billions of dollars in fines. Federal criminal charges could also be forthcoming.

      Meanwhile, VW is also facing a torrent of outrage from some of the folks who bought those cars, which include the diesel-powered versions of Jetta and Golf models made since 2009. A court in Northern California is scheduled to decide this month whether to hear a group of more than 350 class-action lawsuits from VW customers who feel they were misled about the environmental benefits of the cars before buying them.

    • Warming fuels rise in methane threat

      Higher temperatures and permafrost thaw could cause an increase of up to 50 per cent in emissions of a key greenhouse gas from northern lakes and ponds by 2100.

    • Calls for Michigan Gov. Snyder’s Arrest as Flint Poisoning Scandal Implicates Top Staffers

      “The source of the Flint Water Crisis leads directly to Gov. Rick Snyder and the fiscal austerity policies that he and his Republican colleagues have been pushing for years on Michigan residents,” said Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan,” in a statement released Thursday. “Families in Flint were forced to drink lead-tainted water while the administration scoffed at their concerns and cries for help. An entire generation of Michiganders now face an uncertain future because of Republican cuts to essential and life-giving services.”

    • How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks

      You know what’s bad? Brain damage.

      Flint, Michigan, is finding this out after it accidentally gave its entire population at least a little bit of lead poisoning when it switched up their water supply. In an attempt to save money for a cash-strapped city, Flint started drinking water from the Flint River — but ended up contaminating children with a poisonous heavy metal. Governor Rick Snyder has declared a state of emergency, and the federal government is investigating.

    • Calls for Michigan Gov. Snyder’s Arrest as Flint Poisoning Scandal Implicates Top Staffers
    • The Geopolitics of Cheap Oil

      There are a number of reasons for the price drop, but it boils down to supply (more of it) and demand (less of it). The United States boosted oil production by 66 percent over the last five years, making it the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world in 2015. Other producers, like Saudi Arabia, also didn’t scale back, in part to stick it to a sanctions-hobbled Iran and snatch up its clients. Meanwhile, greater fuel efficiency and slower economic growth around the world (particularly in China) have reduced demand.

    • How the Koch Brothers’ ‘Bankers’ Snuck an Anti-Wind Op-Ed Past the New York Times

      Since 1997, the Kochs have given more than $79 million to groups that distort climate science and malign renewable energy.

    • TransCanada Goes Legal On US Government Over The Rejection Of Keystone; Will It Wake Obama To The Problems Of Corporate Sovereignty?

      Over the last few years, there’s been a big controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline project, a massive planned project to build an oil pipeline from Canada to the US that many folks had been protesting, and which (after years and years of debate), President Obama finally rejected a few months back. That’s not a topic that we’ve really covered here, other than a single mention when we questioned why the FBI had spied on activists protesting the potential pipeline.

    • The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

      In its NAFTA complaint, TransCanada alleges that “the politically-driven denial of Keystone’s application was contrary to all precedent; inconsistent with any reasonable and expected application of the relevant rules and regulations; and arbitrary, discriminatory, and expropriatory.”

    • Trans-Canada Sue US Government for $15 Billion over Tar Sands Pipeline Cancellation
    • The EPA Finally Admitted That the World’s Most Popular Pesticide Kills Bees—20 Years Too Late

      Bees are dying in record numbers—and now the government admits that an extremely common pesticide is at least partially to blame.

    • Exposing the EPA’s Dark Side

      The federal agency has a broken process for regulating pesticides.

    • It’s Official: 2015 Was America’s Second-Hottest Year on Record

      It’s official. The United States roasted in 2015. All that unseasonably warm December weather that saw flowers blooming in Central Park and shirtless Christmas Day volleyball set a record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which released its year-end findings on Thursday. In fact, 29 states in the eastern half of the country experienced their hottest Decembers on record, a phenomenon that sealed 2015′s fate: It was the second-warmest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

    • Severe cold causing havoc on railway, public transport

      The deep freeze that has descended upon Finland is causing disruptions to train traffic in several areas of the country. On Wednesday night some trains were delayed by hours and problems appear to be continuing.

    • Governor declares state of emergency in connection with California methane leak

      On Wednesday evening, California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles County in connection with a massive natural gas leak that’s ongoing at a Southern California Gas Company storage facility. The leak, which began on October 23, has been spewing methane into the air at a rate of tens of thousands of kilograms (PDF) per hour.

      Governor Brown’s declaration of a state of emergency requires that SoCal Gas and other gas storage facility operators throughout California start conducting daily inspections of well heads and implement infrared imaging technology to detect leaks. Facility operators will have to monitor the wells for mechanical integrity, gas pressure, and safety on an ongoing basis.

      The emergency declaration doesn’t earmark any state funds to help fund a cleanup, but it orders the California Public Utilities Commission to “ensure that Southern California Gas Company covers costs related to the natural gas leak and its response, while protecting ratepayers.”

  • Finance

    • Con man Chancellor George Osborne terrified game is up amid dire economic warnings

      Con man George Osborne screeching “Not me, Gov!” is the whine of a spineless Chancer of the Exchequer terrified the game is up.

      Blaming everything and everybody except himself for Britain’s faltering economic “recovery” – China, oil, Middle East, that big boy with a stick who ran away – is the spineless politics of a dishonest politician.

      Oh my how his tune has changed, not since an election when Osborne deliberately gave the impression we’d be wading knee deep in milk and honey to swindle voters, but also from just before Christmas when, boasted the Treasury chiseller, the country was “growing fast”.

      Spewing out alibis for the gathering storm after statisticians cut growth figures will convince only the criminally gullible.

    • Everything Is (Even More) Awesome!

      As we enter 2016, Americans are still feeling grouchy. Only one-fourth of the public believes the United States is heading in the right direction. The Republican presidential debates have been malaise-a-thons, competitions to portray American decline in the most apocalyptic terms possible, while Bernie Sanders is pursuing the Democratic nomination with a message so depressing that professional curmudgeon Larry David has basically played him straight. A year after I wrote an article only somewhat ironically titled Everything Is Awesome, cable news is an endless Debbie Downer loop of terrorism fears and market jitters, periodically interrupted by a weirdly coifed nativist blowhard promising to Make America Great Again.

    • K12 Inc. Tries to Pivot from Virtual School Failures to Profit from “Non-Managed” Schools

      Big, Big Payouts to Execs at Taxpayer Expense

      In its recommendation that shareholders vote against the pay proposal, the advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co. said K12 exemplifies a “substantial disconnect between compensation and performance results.” Glass Lewis gave the company an “F” for how it paid its executives compared to peers.

      In 2015, K12 CEO Nathaniel Davis was making $5.3 million and CFO James Rhyu was making $3.6 million. Their base salaries were $700,000 and 478,500, respectively, which were dwarfed by additional pay and stock for their “performance.” (See more details on their total compensation in the pdf uploaded below.)

      In all, K12′s five highest paid executives received a total of more than $12 million in compensation last year. That’s one of the reasons CMD has called K12 Inc.’s former CEO, Ron Packard, the highest paid elementary and secondary school educator in the nation.

    • This Map Shows How Student Debt Is Crushing Your Community

      Student debt is an elephant in the room of the American economy. Total educational debt has ballooned from $840 billion in 2010 to more than $1.3 trillion this year, according to the Federal Reserve. And yet the Education Department has been reluctant to share data on the federal government’s student loan portfolio, meaning that, until recently, there has been very little detailed information available on the burgeoning crisis.

    • Denials and devaluation as China’s currency tumbles to five-year low

      The phrase “currency war” speaks to a seemingly phoney battle between the world’s major trading powers over the price of exports. It has all the attributes of an illusory conflict because no one ever agrees that a genuine dispute has taken place. And as long as everyone denies they have drawn swords to slash their currency to compete with rival powers, talk of a war fizzles and dies.

    • Is a $15 an Hour Minimum Wage Adequate?

      Social movements calling for raising the minimum wage to $15/ hour with yearly adjustments for increases in the cost of living deserve support. However, earning $15/ hour will not guarantee a decent standard of living.

      An individual working forty hours a week at $15/ hour for an entire year earns $31,200, an income that is more than two and a half times the 2014 official poverty threshold of $12,316 for one adult. One might readily conclude that this individual is doing well since $15/ hour is also more than twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25/ hour.

    • Making America safer for predatory capitalism

      Forcing customers into arbitration makes it easier to rip them off

    • Bernie Sander’s Plan to Tame Wall Street Riles Team Clinton

      Sanders’ presidential campaign is making history in other ways. Sanders raised more than $33 million in the final three months of last year, $73 million for the year, compared to Clinton’s $37 million in the last quarter for a total of $112 million for the year. But the vast majority of Sanders big bucks came from very small donors. The 2,513,665 donations to Sanders’ campaign broke the record set four years ago by President Barack Obama’s re-election committee.

    • How Corrupt Officials Screwed Up An Extremely Poor Town’s Big Break

      But while the columns hearken back to the town’s prosperous times, Yanceyville has long been one of the poorest places in the country. More than half of the population lived below the poverty line in 2013 and the median household income was $14,500. Poverty falls harder on African-American residents, 64 percent of whom lived below the poverty line, compared to 29 percent of white residents. At the county level, African Americans suffer from an unemployment rate of 18 percent (although as recently as 2011, it was over 20 percent).

    • How Jeb Bush Plans To Destroy Anti-Poverty Programs
    • Turkey Seeks Inclusion in US-EU TTIP Free Trade Deal – Turkish Deputy PM

      Turkey hopes to renegotiate its current trade agreements with the European Union, so it can be included in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal between the United States and EU, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Wash. Post Highlights How Trump’s Media Dominance “Obscure[s]” Ted Cruz’s Extremism — To His Benefit

      The Washington Post’s David Weigel highlighted how Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz “actually benefits from Trump’s full-spectrum dominance of the national media conversation,” which “obscure[s]” Cruz’s extreme positions.

    • Ted Cruz is a Natural Born Citizen

      May lightening not strike me, but I am going to help Ted Cruz now. Ted is a natural-born citizen and he can be president. There is no ambiguity, no legal question. It is very clear.

    • O’Reilly: Trump’s Attack Ad Against Hillary Clinton Is So Vile It Might Have Been Made By Hitler
    • The Problem With Hillary Clinton Using a Progressive Hero to Attack Bernie Sanders

      Hillary Clinton is using a prominent surrogate to attack Bernie Sanders’s emphatic proposals for reforming Wall Street: Gary Gensler, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

      Gensler, who is the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer, has enormous credibility among financial reformers after his aggressive (and lonely) efforts to rein in banks during the early years of the Obama administration.

    • Feminism A Neo-Con Tool

      Catching up on a fortnight’s news, I have spent five hours searching in vain for criticism of Simon Danczuk from prominent or even just declared feminists. The Guardian was the obvious place to start, but while they had two articles by feminist writers condemning Chris Gayle’s clumsy attempt to chat up a presenter, their legion of feminist columnists were entirely silent on Danczuk. The only opinion piece was strongly defending him.

      This is very peculiar. The allegation against Danczuk which is under police investigation – of initiating sex with a sleeping woman – is identical to the worst interpretation of the worst accusation against Julian Assange. The Assange allegation brought literally hundreds, probably thousands of condemnatory articles from feminist writers across the entire range of the mainstream media. I have dug up 57 in the Guardian alone with a simple and far from exhaustive search. In the case of Danczuk I can find nothing, zilch, nada. Not a single feminist peep.

      The Assange case is not isolated. Tommy Sheridan has been pursuing a lone legal battle against the Murdoch empire for a decade, some of it in prison when the judicial system decided his “perjury” was imprisonable but Andy Coulson’s admitted perjury on the Murdoch side in the same case was not. I personally witnessed in court in Edinburgh last month Tommy Sheridan, with no lawyer (he has no money) arguing against a seven man Murdoch legal team including three QCs, that a letter from the husband of Jackie Bird of BBC Scotland should be admitted in evidence. Bird was working for Murdoch and suggested in his letter that a witness should be “got out of the country” to avoid giving evidence. The bias exhibited by the leading judge I found astonishing beyond belief. I was the only media in the court.

    • Wall Street Journal Flip-Flops To Attack Obamacare, Praise GOP

      Reversing on their past condemnation of the use of a budget procedure called “reconciliation,” The Wall Street Journal praised Republicans for using the tactic in their latest attempt to repeal Obamacare. The Journal also bashed, the law falsely claiming the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has resulted in “huge” premium increases, and showed little concern for the millions of Americans who would lose healthcare if the law is repealed.

    • Just Because Donald Trump Says It Doesn’t Mean You Have to Report It

      Stop it, stop it, stop it, STOP IT! Just because Donald Trump says something calculatingly stupid and provocative doesn’t mean it has to be reported as front-page news. Everyone knows that his “Cruz is a Canadian” thing is ridiculous—and he wouldn’t bother saying it if he didn’t know that it was going to get loudly amplified by a media that just can’t say no to him.

    • Washington Post Fact Checker Has A Double Standard On Gun Claims

      Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler ruled that a true statement by President Obama on how guns are sold was inaccurate because it was “confusing,” just weeks after writing that an unprovable claim about mass shootings made by GOP hopeful Marco Rubio was true.

    • Official Member Of Trump Campaign Joins Oregon Militia

      The co-chairman of Donald Trump’s New Hampshire “Veterans for Trump” group has arrived in Burns, Oregon, to assist the small cadre of armed men who are seeking to provoke a standoff with federal officials there.

      That not-quite-standoff began over the weekend when a handful of men led by Ammon Bundy decided to turn a much larger peaceful protest over a decision to send two ranchers back to jail for arson into an armed struggle. The group’s numbers are small – especially compared to the 300 who reportedly joined the peaceful protest of the re-sentencing – but they have now been reinforced by Jerry DeLemus, a former United States Marine living on the opposite side of the country.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • More Needs to be Done to Strengthen Protection of Human Subjects in Scientific Experiments

      The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed a sweeping update to the federal regulations that govern scientific experiments involving human subjects, whether it’s studying behavior, testing biological specimens, or analyzing DNA. While the proposed policy [.pdf] generally moves in the right direction, EFF has filed formal comments outlining several serious concerns about how these rules will impact privacy.

      The “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects”—often referred to as the “Common Rule”—is the ethical framework for biomedical and behavioral research established in the wake of medical scandals that shook the nation, including the now infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which the U.S. government withheld treatment and medical information from rural African-American men suffering from the disease. Much of the Common Rule revolves around two concepts: informed consent and independent review. These principles reflect the need for people need to know the risks and benefits and what will happen to their specimens before agreeing to participate in an experiment and the idea that researchers will make better ethical decisions with the guidance of oversight bodies.

    • Fort Dix Five: Prosecuted by Christie, Muslim Brothers Get Rare Day in Court in FBI Entrapment Case

      In 2008, the Duka brothers—Shain, Dritan and Eljvir—were among five men from suburban New Jersey who were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base. The three are serving life sentences, but their supporters say the men were entrapped by the FBI. On Wednesday, the three brothers appeared in a courthouse in Camden, New Jersey, for a rare court-ordered hearing to determine whether they received a fair trial and effective representation from their lawyers. We bring you voices from a rally organized in support of the three Duka brothers and speak with Robert Boyle, attorney for Shain Duka.

    • As Chris Christie Rises in Polls, Appeal of His Fort Dix Terrorism Case Moves Ahead

      A detailed investigation published last year by The Intercept suggested that the plot against the military base had actually been fomented by highly-paid government informants. Mahmoud Omar, one of the informants, told The Intercept that he believed the Dukas were innocent, describing them as “good people.”

    • U.S. Cops Already Killed More Since Xmas Than UK Cops Have Killed in Five Years

      In all of 2011, British police killed two people. In 2012, one. In 2013, a total of three shots were fired by British police, and no one was killed. In the last two years, a total of three people lost their lives because of British cops, bringing the total number of citizens killed in the UK to all of seven in the last five years.

    • Nebraska routinely holds children in solitary confinement, report finds

      Solitary confinement is a commonplace experience for children held in Nebraska juvenile detention facilities, a report has shown, with minors routinely detained in isolation for days, weeks, even months at a time.

      To varying degrees, in each of the state’s nine juvenile facilities children are placed in solitary confinement for “relatively minor offenses” such as keeping too many books, according to the report compiled by the state’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter. Other infractions triggering the “overused” practice included talking back to staff members or refusing to follow directions.

    • Report: Nebraska Lets Juveniles Be Locked in Solitary Confinement for 90 Days

      As a teenager, Jacob Rusher was detained at the Douglas County Youth Facility in Omaha, Nebraska. After he broke his ankle, he was told that he was being placed in “lockdown” — a form of solitary confinement — for “his own good.” He spent three months there, often pounding against the door begging to be released.

      “It was 23 hours a day alone, no TV or radio. You were in there with one book, a blanket, a mat, and a toothbrush. No art materials, no hobby items — everything was considered contraband,” he told the ACLU of Nebraska. “Nighttimes, you’d get a little crazy. They kept the light on and would wake us up every hour to check on you so you’d never get any good sleep.”

    • Washington’s Multi-Million-Dollar Saudi PR Machine

      Public image isn’t something one can always control, but Saudi Arabia is spending millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists and PR firms to improve the Kingdom’s reputation in the West. The execution of Shiite leader Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by an attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran and the Kingdom’s severing of diplomatic relations with Iran, would seem to offer few upsides for the Saudi government. Riyadh’s behavior comes across as a desperate Hail-Mary pass to isolate Iran at the expense of regional efforts to negotiate a de-escalation of the Syrian civil war and defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

    • Two Years Behind Bars or 20? One Day, a Computer Formula May Have a Say

      Just looking at a defendant’s criminal record to decide a sentence could be racially biased, Ghandnoosh argues. “Criminal history measures criminal justice policies,” she said, adding that “people of color are more likely to be surveilled and arrested and convicted” for crimes, especially less serious ones. The fact that police departments tend to focus more on minorities means minorities are more likely to be arrested, which means members of these groups are more likely to have criminal records in the first place.

    • Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, American War Crimes, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

      Yes, you read that correctly: tiny numbers of Americans live on a different tax planet from the rest of us. They’ve paid for the privilege, of course, and increasingly for the political class that oversees how our country runs. They’ve insulated themselves in a largely tax-free zone that ensures their “equality” before the law (such as it is) and your deepening inequality before the same — and before them. Their actions have garnered them the ultimate in impunity. In this election season in a country of more than 300 million people, for instance, a mere 158 families (and the companies they control) are putting their (largely tax-free) dollars where our mouths once were. By October, they had provided almost half the money thus far raised by presidential candidates in a move meant to ensure that American democracy becomes their system, their creature. (“Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.”)

    • FBI Helps Shut Down Seattle Sex-Work Review Board

      So perhaps the only surprising thing about this Review Board situation is it produced a local TV news report (featuring Reason contributor Maggie McNeill) that doesn’t merely parrot police talking points. Newscasters actually allow sex workers to speak for themselves about the site’s shutdown and how it puts them at risk, while noting that Seattle recently received a $1.5 million grant from the Justice Department to help “eradicate human trafficking” and “end modern slavery.”

    • Don’t Fear the Refugees

      Americans are skeptical and afraid of allowing Middle East refugees into this country. Should they be?

    • The refugee question in Europe: ‘south’ vs ‘east’

      The refugee crisis has triggered a diplomatic row between Greece and certain ‘new’ member-states from Central and Eastern Europe. Does this tell us something about the various shades of Euroscepticism, whether ‘soft’ or ‘hard’, in the peripheries of the EU?

    • Govt Pays Millions in Reparations to 57 Victims of Worst Cop in History – Who Still Receives a Pension

      Former Chicago Police Commander received 13 commendations before his termination for torturing over 200 citizens.

    • Tunisia’s fight against its revolutionary youth

      The threat of terrorism has been exploited to justify anti-democratic laws and an escalation of arrests and detentions, apparently more focused on silencing dissent than anything else.

    • The illusion of security

      Jérémie Zimmermann (JZ): In the last year and a half, four security laws have been adopted in France in the name of combating terrorism. Now would be the right time to question their efficiency.

      Things did not start with Charlie Hebdo: in the last 15 years about fifteen other bills were adopted which closely followed the example of the US and some other European countries after 9/11. The most recent law, prolonging the state of emergency to three months and even renewable for longer, is the most striking because it coincides with the collective emotional shock and disorientation of French society as a whole after November 13. This state of emergency was adopted in an extremely rushed procedure, almost overnight, with no room for debate, so that one might surmise that most of the MPs did not have time to read the bill they voted for. It seems as if the political process has been poisoned by the intelligence agencies, who are given more power with less accountability requested every time they fail, so that this efficiency cannot even be assessed properly. We are in a downwards spiral, where policies that are driven by fear undermine the rule of law and fundamental rights, in favour of an illusion of more security.

    • 7 Myths About Gun Violence in America, Debunked

      On live television Thursday evening, President Barack Obama will hold a town hall meeting about gun violence. He will take questions from participants who support tighter gun laws and from others who want fewer restrictions on guns. It’s a prime-time moment for separating fact from fiction—so here’s a shortlist, with the data to back it up.

    • Wearing the Hijab in Solidarity Perpetuates Oppression

      Saturday night at the Dar Al Noor mosque in Manassas, Va., near Civil War battlefields, a girl of about 7 sat cross-legged in a dimly lit back corner of the prayer hall in the cramped “sisters’ section.” A tinted waist-high glass barrier separated the girl from the spacious “brothers’ section,” where about 50 men listened intently to a Saudi preacher who ignored the “sisters.”

      The girl’s hair was entirely covered by a scarf, per the mosque’s guidelines for “proper Islamic attire, including Hijab for girls, while boys dress modestly.”

      As mainstream Muslim women, we see the girl’s headscarf not as a signal of “choice,” but as a symbol of a dangerous purity culture, obsessed with honor and virginity, that has divided Muslim communities in our own civil war, or fitna, since the Saudi and Iranian regimes promulgated puritanical interpretations of Sunni and Shia Islam, after the 1970s Saudi oil boom and the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

    • Muslim cleric vows to behead anyone who speaks against Islam – Watch

      New Delhi: A Muslim cleric stirred a controversy recently when he announced on live TV that he would behead any person who speaks against Islam.

    • Saudi executions: beyond the numbers

      Freedom is the ability to speak out, including against the ruler, according to one’s opinions and beliefs, even—and especially—if those opinions and beliefs run counter to the ruling class or majority opinion.

    • Tears

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Binge On Lite? Ask for the Truth about T-Mobile Video Throttling

      Now, T-Mobile is on the defensive. John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, is hosting a Q&A on Twitter today, starting at noon Pacific time, in an attempt to quell concerns. That means concerned members of the digital public have an opportunity to discuss the issues directly with Mr. Legere. Just use the hastag #AskJohn.

    • T-Mobile Doubles Down On Its Blatant Lies, Says Claims It’s Throttling Are ‘Bullshit’ And That I’m A ‘Jerk’

      There were a bunch of problems with this, starting with the fact that favoring some partner traffic over others to exempt it from a cap (i.e., zero rating) is a sketchy way to backdoor in net neutrality violations. But, the bigger issue was that almost everything about T-Mobile’s announcement implied that it was only “partner” video that was being “optimized” while the reality was that they were doing it for any video they could find (even downloaded, not streamed). The biggest problem of all, however, was that the video was not being “optimized” but throttled by slowing down video.

      Once the throttling was called out, T-Mobile went on a weird PR campaign, flat out lying, and saying that what they were doing was “optimizing” not throttling and that it would make videos stream faster and save users data. However, as we pointed out, that’s blatantly false. Videos from YouTube, for example, were encrypted, meaning that T-Mobile had no way to “optimize” it, and tests from EFF proved pretty conclusively that the only thing T-Mobile was doing was slowing connection speeds down to 1.5 Mbps when it sensed video downloads of any kind (so not even streaming), and that actually meant that the full amount of data was going through in many cases, rather than an “optimized” file. EFF even got T-Mobile to admit that this was all they were doing.

    • John Legere asks EFF, “Who the f**k are you, and who pays you?”
    • T-Mobile’s John Legere Goes Off The Deep End: ‘Who The Fuck Are You, EFF?’
    • T-Mobile Confirms It Slows Connections to Video Sites
    • T-Mobile CEO to EFF: ‘Who the Fuck Are You?’
    • Friends, Please Tell T-Mobile’s CEO About EFF

      We think the best response comes from the community of people who support our work. As a member-funded organization, EFF exists because of the donations of tens of thousands of regular people. And as an advocacy organization fighting for civil liberties in the digital world, we are able to influence powerful entities—from heads of state to elected officials to tech giants—because so many people stand with.

    • As Its CEO Continues To Claim It Doesn’t Throttle, T-Mobile Spokesperson Confirms Company Throttles

      And yet now the company is admitting that they are, in fact, slowing down YouTube, not “optimizing” it or making the resolution lower. As I said at the time, T-Mobile is flat out lying. And now two statements from the company directly contradict each other, and the company’s CEO is still insisting that the company isn’t doing what the company admits it’s doing.

      I’ve seen some corporate snafu meltdowns before, but this is reaching epic levels — and that’s bad news for a company that had spent so much time building up a reputation as a “straight shooter.” Good reputations are hard to build, but easy to let slip away….

    • Streaming Video Company Drops Out Of BingeOn To Protest John Legere’s Attack On EFF; It Will Still Get Throttled, Though

      Well, this has really turned into quite a week for T-Mobile CEO John Legere, huh? First, his lies about BingeOn throttling were exposed. Then he doubled down on the lie insisting that BingeOn wasn’t throttling despite clear evidence that it is. Then, he attacked EFF for exposing his lie. All the meanwhile, T-Mobile spokespeople were confirming that the company is, absolutely, slowing down all video traffic.

      And it appears the fallout from this keeps spreading. Legere keeps touting the number of partner video companies that have signed up for BingeOn, but it appears that number needs to go down by one.

  • DRM

    • Warner Bros and Intel Sue 4k Content Protection “Stripper”

      Warner Bros. and Intel’s daughter company Digital Content Protection have sued a hardware manufacturer that creates devices enabling consumers to bypass 4K copy protection. The devices, sold under the HDFury brand, can be used by pirates to copy 4k video from streaming platforms as well as other HDCP 2.2 protected content.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Target cleared in Rosa Parks image rights dispute

      Rosa Parks may be best known for her refusal to move from her seat on the bus, but her many years of campaigning for equality places her at the centre of the civil rights movement story in the US.

      And according to a judgment handed down by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit yesterday, January 4, it is important that the story continues to be promoted without too many restrictions.

    • New Year Brings New Faces To IP World, Bids Others Farewell

      The New Year brings some new faces in the intellectual property world as several changes were announced at the end of 2015, in particular at the European Commission, in the private sector and non-governmental organisations. In Geneva, the coordination of the Group of Latin American and Caribbean countries changes, and the UN Plant Treaty is working on intersessional committees. And a leading light in the IP publishing world has retired.

    • Cartoonist Who Claimed ‘Kung Fu Panda’ Ripped Off His Work Might Be Headed To Prison

      Jayme Gordon, the other person to sue Dreamworks for allegedly copying his work has won the Worst Outcome Ever sweepstakes. The cartoonist claimed Dreamworks ripped off his sketches and he seemingly had the evidence to prove this — including a rarity in many of these little-guy-sues-big-studio lawsuits: actual registered works.

      Gordon demanded $12 million and a cut of the proceeds. He survived a motion to dismiss and seemed ready to take a serious run at the studio. Two years after he filed the lawsuit, Gordon suddenly dismissed it with prejudice and received no settlement for doing so.

      [...]

      That’s the bogus part of this prosecution. Sure, perjury is a given, considering the evidence uncovered by Dreamworks’ lawyers. But wire fraud? That’s just charge stacking. This office, however, isn’t exactly shy about trumping up charges to make itself seem more impressive. It’s the same US Attorney’s Office that was behind the investigation and prosecution of Aaron Swartz, so this could go very, very badly for Gordon.

    • Trademarks

      • Australian Federal Court Prevents Registration of the Word ‘Yellow’ As Trade Mark

        Yellow is one of this writer’s least favourite colours. Garish, sickeningly bright, and forever tarnished by its association with both liver disease and the band Coldplay, yellow is highly, highly overrated. But, credit where credit is due, it does tend to make things stand out. For this reason, it is the colour of choice for school buses, road signs, and, for historically anomalous reasons, telephone business directories – commonly known as Yellow Pages. This phrase, as well as its accompanying ‘Walking Fingers’ logo, are registered trade marks in many countries around the world, including the UK, Canada, and Australia – though curiously not the United States.

    • Copyrights

      • NY Public Library Embraces The Public Domain Big Time: Releases 180,000 High Resolution Images

        There’s some wonderful news from the NY Public Library, which has released over 180,000 high resolution digital images of public domain works that it found in its collection. We’ve seen too many organizations, mainly museums, try to claim copyright over public domain works, or otherwise limit access. The NY Public Library, on the other hand, is going the other direction. Not only are they releasing these works and making it clear that the works are in the public domain, but they’re releasing them as high resolution images and actively encouraging people to make use of them.

      • ‘Monkey selfie’ copyright claim rejected

        A US court has dismissed a claim filed by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in which the organisation claimed that the copyright to the ‘monkey selfie’ photograph should belong to a macaque ape.

        Judge William Orrick of the US District Court for the Northern District of California rejected PETA’s claim yesterday, January 6, stating that it is a matter for Congress not the courts.

      • German Publishers Still Upset That Google Sends Them Traffic Without Paying Them Too; File Lawsuit

        Oh boy. Remember VG Media? That’s the consortium of German news publishers who were so damn angry that Google News sends them all sorts of traffic without also paying them. A year and a half ago, they demanded money from Google. That failed, so they went crying to German regulators who laughed off the request. After there were some concerns that a new “ancillary copyright” right regime in Germany might require payment for posting such snippets, Google properly responded by removing the snippets for those publishers, who totally freaked out and called it blackmail.

      • Techdirt Reading Club: The Boy Who Could Change The World: The Writings Of Aaron Swartz

        We’re back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.
        This week we have a brand new book, but one I’m disappointed needs to be a book. It’s the collected writings of Aaron Swartz, called The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz. As I’ve noted in the past, I knew Aaron as we worked in similar circles and interacted on a bunch of occasions, though I didn’t know him well. But, more importantly, I’d actually been following Aaron’s writings on his personal blog and elsewhere from a very early age (I particularly remember following his writings about his experience as a freshman at Stanford). As you probably know by now, Aaron committed suicide almost three years ago, while dealing with a ridiculous federal prosecution for downloading too many academic papers from a computer system at MIT, where the license was clear anyone could download as much as they wanted.

      • The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

        The New York Public Library just digitized and made available more than 180,000 high resolution items, which the public can download for free.

        The images come from pieces in the library’s collection that have fallen out of copyright or are otherwise in the public domain. This includes botanical illustrations, ancient texts, historical maps–including the incredible Green Book collection of travel guides for African American travelers in mid-1900s. They’ve also released more than 40,000 stereoscopes, Berenice Abbott’s amazing documentation of New York City in 1930s and Lewis Hines’ photos of Ellis Island immigrants, as well as the letters of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among other political figures.

01.07.16

Links 7/1/2016: Linux Mint 18 Previews, Android-based Remix OS

Posted in News Roundup at 3:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • 10 Places To Buy A Laptop With Linux Preloaded

      I want a Linux system without having to pay a Microsoft tax. The hardest part of using Linux is to find out the correct hardware. Hardware compatibility and drivers can be a big issue. But where one can find Linux desktops or Laptop for sale? Here are ten places to buy a preinstalled Linux Desktop and Laptop in alphabetical order.

  • Server

    • IBM’s Watson Now Powers AI For Under Armour, Softbank’s Pepper Robot And More

      From its debut to the world as a Jeopardy champion in 2011, IBM’s Watson has made a name for itself as a powerful artificial intelligence platform for large enterprise applications, from medical research through to finance. Now IBM is aiming to take Watson to the consumer.

    • Microservices are not the same thing as components

      Mention cloud, mention DevOps and it won’t be long before microservices enters the discussion.

      But what is, or are, microservices? The name implies something small – but what? Is it a part of a bigger thing or a piece of discrete functionality? And how are microservices different to application components? And why should we care?

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Fotoxx Open-Source Image Editor Gets Its First Release for 2016 with New Features

      Michael Cornelison or Kornelix, the developer of the Fotoxx open source image editor application for GNU/Linux operating systems proudly announced the release of the first Fotoxx version for 2016.

    • 3 open source personal finance tools for Linux

      With the start of the new year, many people take this time to resolve to get a better handle on their personal finances. Whether this means making and sticking to a budget, reducing unnecessary expenses, or simply getting a better understanding of their financial situation, pretty much any approach to person finance is dependent on having a good idea of the numbers inside their bank accounts, where they come, and where they go.

      Which tools allow you to take the best to approach organizing your finances depends a little bit on your situation. Do you primarily make purchases electronically, or do you rely heavily on cash? Is the archiving and organization of receipts going to be important for you come tax time? Do you operate a small business and need a more powerful tool which can manage the more complex finances of sales, customers, employees, and business expenses? Or do you use multiple currencies (perhaps BitCoin?) and want to keep track of those values as well?

    • Longing to bin Photoshop? Rock-solid GIMP a major leap forward

      Despite its relatively obscure version number, GIMP 2.9.2, released recently, represents a major leap forward for the popular image editing suite.

      Like all odd-numbered GIMP releases, 2.9.2 is considered a technical preview, but the features here will form the base of the stable release GIMP 2.10.

      In the mean time, I’ve found 2.9.2 to be very stable, though you will need to compile it yourself in most cases.

    • ownCloud 9 Will Be a Cool Release, Says Frank Karlitschek

      It looks like the ownCloud developers will have a great year in 2016, as the company’s CTO, Mr. Frank Karlitschek, has just announced on his Twitter account that ownCloud 9 is shaping up really nicely and that it will be a cool release.

    • In Search of a Linux Calendar

      When all is said and done, a calendar app is a calendar app is a calendar app. Except for Sunrise’s propensity for sharing secrets with its cloud based parent calendar, there’s not a nickle’s difference between any of these apps; they all do the same thing in basically the same way. I’ve put my affinity for KOrganizer aside for the time being and have settled in with Lightening, mainly because of its tight integration with Thunderbird. Among other thing, that means I won’t have to remember to open it, as it’ll be there automatically as a tab on Thunderbird, so I might even find myself using it.

      I’m not uninstalling KOrganizer however. I might yet change my mind.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • A Quake 2 Game Might Get Ported To Linux

        Berserker@Quake2 has been around since about 2005, but only supported on Windows. Now though the Russian developer behind this game mod has finally published his code in hopes of someone porting it to Linux.

      • PlayStation 4 Linux Hack Now Supports 3D Acceleration, USB Support Coming Soon

        We reported on the last days of 2015 that a group of talented hackers that go by the name of fail0verflow managed to hack Sony’s PlayStation 4 gaming console to run the Gentoo Linux operating system.

        The hack was made possible due to a broken NOP command on the integrated AMD Radeon GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), something that Sony might not be able to fix anytime soon.

      • Feel like fragging? You can do that in your browser with QuakeJS

        Here’s an interesting thing I stumbled upon while I was looking up ioquake3 stuff. QuakeJS is a port of the ioquake3 engine to Javascript and WebGL and it plays original Quake 3 maps.

      • Oculus Rift Pre-Orders Start, But Linux Support Is Still Halted

        Oculus Rift pre-orders opened up this morning for $599 USD and an anticipated ship date of April. However, the Facebook-owned company isn’t yet back to providing Linux support.

        With today’s pre-order launch, I was curious to see whether they would comment on restoring Linux (and OS X) support, but they have not. Oculus suspended Linux and OS X support last year in order to focus on their Windows support with no timeline for when they planned to come back to providing Linux support. However, now that everything is ready to go, they apparently aren’t yet ready to jump back into the VR scene for Linux gamers. There’s also nothing new with regards to Linux via the Oculus developer area.

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • The importance of Keywords for the software center

        So, what do I want you to do? If you have no existing keywords, I would like you to add some keywords in the desktop file or the AppData file. If you want the keywords to be used by GNOME Shell as well (which you probably do), the best place to put any search terms is in the keywords section of the desktop file. This can also be marked as translatable so non-English users can search in their own language. This would look something like Keywords=3D;printer; (remember the trailing semicolon!)

  • Distributions

    • The Linux Setup – Ikey Doherty, Solus

      Ikey is living the dream—he made his own desktop environment. Perhaps even more impressive, he made it for his own distribution! Perhaps most impressive of all, Solus, Ikey’s distribution, is built from scratch, meaning it’s not based upon another distribution. It’s a lot of work, but Ikey doesn’t seem to mind it. Ikey also flags git as his essential tool-of-choice. I’m using git to submit chapters for my book and it’s a pretty amazing piece of software. It’s impacting all kinds of work.

    • New Releases

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • Another look at NetworkManager and Tumbleweed

        I last looked at NetworkManager when it was at version 1.0.0. It is now at version 1.0.6, and with some changes that persuaded me to do some more testing.

        To test, I setup a connection and then did some tests. I repeated this for KDE/Plasma 5, for Gnome and for XFCE. It is also possible to run “nm-applet” and a polkit daemon in Icewm, where configuring the network is similar to what happens with XFCE (which also uses “nm-applet”).

      • Highlights of development sprint 13

        As promised in the previous post on this blog, we’ll try to keep you updated about what is happening in the YaST world. Before Christmas we finished an specially short sprint, interrupted by another successful Hackweek. Although we always reserve some time for bug fixing, the last two sprints has been quite focused in looking into the future, implementing new solutions for old problems and trying to prepare replacements for some legacy stuff we have been carrying on for too long. Here you are the highlights.

      • Suse Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 1 adds full Docker support and extended availability

        Linux firm Suse has released the first service pack for Suse Linux Enterprise 12, adding full Docker support for operating containerised applications and enhanced capabilities to improve uptime and disaster recovery.

        Suse Linux Enterprise 12 is the most recent version of the firm’s Linux distribution for operating mission-critical applications and services, and the Service Pack 1 (SP1) release is the first major update since it shipped in October 2014.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Why Red Hat, Inc. Gained 20% in 2015

        Of course, Red Hat paved the way toward that touchstone moment by building a strong reputation and rising sales over the years.

      • Agree To Buy Red Hat At $65, Earn 8.9% Using Options

        Investors eyeing a purchase of Red Hat Inc (Symbol: RHT) stock, but tentative about paying the going market price of $81.25/share, might benefit from considering selling puts among the alternative strategies at their disposal. One interesting put contract in particular, is the January 2018 put at the $65 strike, which has a bid at the time of this writing of $5.80. Collecting that bid as the premium represents a 8.9% return against the $65 commitment, or a 4.4% annualized rate of return (at Stock Options Channel we call this the YieldBoost ).

      • Red Hat Inc (RHT) Posts Quarterly Earnings Results, Beats Expectations By $0.02 EPS

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) posted its earnings results on Thursday. The open-source software company reported $0.48 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the Thomson Reuters’ consensus estimate of $0.46 by $0.02, ARN reports. During the same quarter in the previous year, the company earned $0.42 EPS. The firm earned $523.60 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $521.66 million. The business’s revenue was up 14.8% compared to the same quarter last year. Red Hat updated its Q4 guidance to $0.47 EPS.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 24 Will Likely Be Delayed

          While we are not even up to the alpha release yet of Fedora 24, there’s a call to already push back the entire schedule by up to a few weeks.

          The current schedule puts the alpha freeze / software string freeze / change checkpoint on 16 February, Fedora 24 Alpha on 1 March, Fedora 24 Beta on 12 April, and the final release on 17 May. However, a proposal being pushed to the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee would end up pushing back all of the F24 milestones by a few weeks: up to three or four weeks.

        • It’s Possible To Run Fedora 23 With A Mainline Kernel On A Tegra K1 Chromebook

          While the Tegra X1 is the latest and greatest NVIDIA SoC out there currently, the Tegra K1 is still a beauty and still blows many other ARM boards out of the water. If you happen to have a Tegra K1 Chromebook, it’s possible to get Fedora 23 Linux running on there with a bit of hacking.

          Fedora developer Kushal Das has written a blog post about getting Fedora 23 running on a Tegra K1 Chromebook. The particular Chromebook is the Acer CB5311. With a bit of work and following the Fedora ARM Wiki for Chromebooks, he was able to get the latest version of Fedora Workstation running on the device. He was also able to build a mainline kernel on the Tegra K1 Chromebook itself for getting the wireless support to work.

    • Debian Family

      • 7 Reasons Why Debian is the Dominant Linux Distro

        I first installed Debian sixteen years ago. Since then, I have tried countless other Linux distributions, and even used one or two regularly for several months, but my main distribution has always been Debian, or at least one of its many derivatives.

        Familiarity probably explains some of my preference. However, most of my preference comes from comparing other distributions unfavorably with Debian.

      • In memory of Ian Murdock

        In an entertaining read on his blog Ian recounts how in the winter of 1992 he met Linux

      • Debian Domination, Unstable Fedora, Simple Elementary

        The loss of Ian Murdock is still making the headlines, but not much new has come to light. The police did issue a public statement, but didn’t really say anything new. They acknowledged Murdock’s arrests and subsequent suicide, but claim there is no connection and Murdock’s injuries were self-inflicted. Murdock’s family is still silent and requesting privacy. The Debian project yesterday posted a second memorial (third if you count the mention in last week’s project news) to Murdock, this time remembering his contributions to Linux and the Open Source philosophy.

      • Debian Founder And Open Source Visionary Ian Murdock Dies At 42
      • Debian Project mourns the loss of Ian Murdock

        The Debian Project sadly announces that it has lost the founder of its community and project, Ian Murdock.

        Debian is only a part of Ian’s legacy but perhaps the one that he is most known for.

        Ian was introduced to computers early in his life, and his curiosity turned to familiarity which led him to start actively programming at nine years of age. Later as a young adult at the Krannert School of Management a mandatory programming class rekindled his fascination with computer programming along with an idea and an opportunity to make something better.

        Ian started the Debian Project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later that same year. At that time, the whole concept of a “distribution” of Linux was new. Inspired as he said by Linus Torvalds’ own sharing of Linux, he released Debian with the intention that this distribution should be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU.

      • Derivatives

        • Debian-Based DebEX GNOME Linux OS Now Includes MATE 1.12.1 and GNOME 3.18.3

          After announcing the release of a new build for his DebEX KDE GNU/Linux distribution, today, January 6, 2016, Arne Exton informs Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of DebEX GNOME Build 160105.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” to Have a New Look and Feel

              The leader of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre, has confirmed today that the name Linux Mint 18 will be “Sarah.”

              The information that Linux Mint 18 was going to be named “Sarah” was revealed a few months ago by Clement Lefebvre in one of his monthly updates, but he didn’t say anything after that. Now, the Linux Mint leader decided to confirm the name, but he also talked a little about what’s coming in the new version.

              One of the things we knew for sure, since the launch of Linux Mint 17.x, was that all new major versions of the OS were going to be based solely on Ubuntu LTS versions. The switch was made with the 17.x branch, which used Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a base. It was obvious that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was going to be the base for Linux Mint 18.x.

            • Linux Mint 18 details revealed — code name, release date, and more!

              When it comes to desktop computing, I love me some Linux. While Ubuntu is my favorite distro of the moment, I use many others from time to time, such as Fedora, deepin, and Linux Mint. My desktop environment preference is Unity or Gnome, but I understand the love for Mint’s Cinnamon or MATE. If you are coming from Windows, and prefer the “Start Menu” approach as an interface, both of those primary Mint DEs will make you comfortable.

            • Upgrade path to 17.3 now open for all editions

              The upgrade path from Linux Mint 17, 17.1 and 17.2 to Linux Mint 17.3 is now open for all editions (Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce).

            • Linux Mint 18: Powered By Ubuntu 16.04, Coming This Summer

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 2015 – Year of Open Source explosion

    Open source software – software freely shared with the world at large – is an old idea, dating back to the 1980s when Richard Stillman started preaching the gospel calling it free software. Then Linus Torvalds started working on Linux in the early 1990s. Today, Linux runs our lives. The Android operating system that runs so many Google phones is based on Linux. When you open a phone app like Twitter or Facebook and pull down all those tweets and status updates, you’re tapping into massive computer data centers filled with hundreds of Linux machines. Linux is the foundation of the Internet.

  • Does Open Source Have a Place in DevOps?

    Open source software (OSS) is generally considered to be an integral part of DevOps, and for a couple of good reasons. It has led to the rapid emergence of innovative tools to meet the requirements of those leading the automation charge, and has also made those tools freely available. DevOps practitioners can adopt solutions to try new ideas and approaches without going through the usual investment justification and procurement process, or even seeking management permission.

  • From emergency fix to business backbone

    The words I hear some clients ask when they first see my Linux set up is: “Is it that unix thing?.” If they know it well-enough to ask that question, I’m usually on the verge of going full geek mode.

    Before I impart words of wonder and inspiration, I think about how awesome it will be to open this person’s eyes to the world of possibilities outside proprietary software, and how excited they will be to discover how Linux and open source software are the foundation of the World Wide Web as they know it. As it turns out, its really difficult to sum up why open source is so great in a single sentence.

    [...]

    Giving back to the open source community is such an important part of what makes open source software amazing and so powerful. Each year we strive to improve our efforts in this area.

  • Mycroft Releases Key AI Component as Open Source

    The Mycroft team has released the Adapt Intent Parser as open source, which is a piece of code that converts natural language into instructions that can be understood by a machine.

    Why is this parser so important? There are at least a couple of reasons why Mycroft chose to release this important piece of code as open source. To make it clearer, the Adapt Intent Parser transforms what the user speaks into something that can be interpreted by an application on a device, like a phone or a desktop.

  • Hour of Code Volunteer: Kids See No Barriers to Open Source Coding

    In December, the Linux Foundation joined many organizations in support of Hour of Code (HoC). This program, which is sponsored by Code.org, provides children with a one-hour introduction to computer science using tutorials designed to explain code in a simple way and show that anyone can be involved. The program offers tools that both teachers and volunteers can use to present basic coding ideas to children. This year’s tutorials aimed to engage young coders using examples from Minecraft and Star Wars, and also featured Anna and Elsa from Frozen.

  • Greenpeace makes 7 shifts toward open

    If you’ve been following Opensource.com and the Open Organization Ambassadors there, then you’ll know that I’ve been working to help Greenpeace internalize the principles of an open ethos. But to do this, we’ve had to distill this ethos into a few concrete principles, actionable items the organization can more easily grasp. On its journey to becoming an open organization, Greenpeace has set seven cultural “waypoints,” some guideposts for its transition to an open organization. In this article, I’d like to explain them.

  • Social Justice Warriors Wreaking Havoc In Open Source Software

    Throughout 2015, social justice warriors were repelled on a number of fronts. Gaming. Sci-fi & fantasy writing. Reddit. One fight that hasn’t been covered yet — but which definitely should be — is the world of open source software development.

  • Two kinds of kernel bugs

    As I am sure many of you are aware, bugzilla generates a lot of email. While the web interface does have some interesting search capability, email is the main method of getting notified of new bugs. The better those initial emails (your bug reports) are worded, the more likely we can have a real understanding of the nature or priority of that bug.

  • NORDUnet announces CrypTech open source web security

    Scandinavian research network NORDUnet has announced the development of CrypTech to improve internet security. It said software developers and electronics designers from around the world are uniting their efforts in the CrypTech project, building open source hardware securing the authenticity of digital content transmitted through the internet. The project allows a maximum donation per donor of USD 100,000 per year to ensure diversity of influence.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla hastily backpedals on SHA-1 ban after impact larger than thought

        The impact of Mozilla’s decision to depreciate SHA-1 at the start of 2016 with the release of Firefox 43 turned out to be larger than it anticipated. As a result, Mozilla hastily released an update on Wednesday that re-enabled support for SHA-1 certificates as it seeks to better evaluate how many users might be affected.

        Firefox 43 was supposed to ratchet up security for its users as part of Mozilla’s roadmap by dropping support only for new SHA-1 certificates, while continuing to support older SHA-1. The rationale behind this move was to present a clear disincentive for certificate providers to move away from SHA-1 without penalizing – as yet – existing SHA-1 certificates that are already in use.

      • Firefox’s ban of SHA-1 certs causing some security issues, Mozilla warns

        Mozilla has warned Firefox users that its decision to reject SHA-1 certificates has caused an unfortunate side effect: some man-in-the-middle devices, such as security scanners and antivirus products, are failing to connect to HTTPS sites.

        The browser maker advised any netizens affected by the interference to install the latest version of Firefox, which reinstates support for SHA-1.

      • Firefox 43.0.4 Fixes Folder Creation on Linux and Brings Back SHA-1

        Mozilla has released a new version of Firefox, 43.0.4, which is just a maintenance release that happens to have an important fix for the Linux platform.

      • Mozilla: 40 Percent of Firefox Users Don’t Have Add-Ons Installed

        According to an internal analysis, Mozilla staff estimates, based on anonymous telemetry data, that around 40% of its userbase does not have add-ons installed on their browser.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • ProphetStor Leverages Mellanox Tech for Next-Gen Cloud Computing

      Today ProphetStor Data Services rolled out a reference cloud computing platform with Mellanox based on the open-source projects OpenStack and Ceph. The solution leverages each company’s respective strength in software-defined-storage, state-of-the-art server hardware, and high-speed networking. Based on ProphetStor Federator SDS, this joint project addresses the key issues of OpenStack’s storage management solution as well as improving the functionality and performance of Ceph, the de facto storage backend for OpenStack.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.1 Arrives in February with Awesome New Features, Here’s What’s New

      The Document Foundation non-profit organization teased users on Twitter about the upcoming features of the LibreOffice 5.1 open-source office suite, due for release in the first week of February 2016.

    • LibreOffice Bug Hunt Organized for Major 5.1 Update

      The LibreOffice community is preparing for the launch of the first major update for LibreOffice 5.x, and they are organizing a bug hunt.

      The LibreOffice bug hunts are done before the launch of each big update for the office suite. They are a sort of development sprint which allows devs to concentrate on the biggest problems or to fix some of the easy-to-identify issues.

  • CMS

    • WordPress 4.4.1 Updates for XSS (and 52 other issues)

      The first WordPress update of 2016 is out and like many other incremental updates, it is being triggered by a security vulnerability. The single security issue being patched in WordPress 4.4.1 is a cross site scripting vulnerability that could have potentially enabled a site compromised.

      From a general usability and bug perspective there are 52 bugs that WordPress developers are addressing in the 4.4.1 update that spans multiple area of the popular open-source content management system including.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD Foundation Takes Right Steps

      First things first: I’m the new kid on the BSD block. While in the process of still figuring things out on PC-BSD — dang that Synaptics! — and finding a place to contribute in the community, I have no real handle on the nuances of the inner workings of the wider BSD community. To my self-promoting credit, I am a quick study and the learning curve is not as difficult as I imagined. On the whole, I like what I see in those contributing to BSD, especially in the way of eagerness to help new users.

      However, when Randi Harper decided to bail on participation in FreeBSD as she outlined in her blog, it raises the question, “Where have we seen this before?” Taking a step back, it raises the question, “Why does this keep happening in FOSS communities?”

      Before we begin to answer those questions — and answers to those questions extend far beyond this commentary — I’m less interested in the “he said, she said” of the past than in finding workable solutions to permanently removing the 500-pound gorilla in the room — the quarter-ton simian of harassment and lack of proper channels to adequately address it.

    • LLVM 3.7.1 Released, Restores API/ABI Compatibility With LLVM 3.6/3.8

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Textbook of the future: Free, open, remixable

        Recently the Office of Educational Technology of the United States Department of Education stated that it believes “creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws, access barriers, or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information.” What’s more, according to the FCC, “the U.S. spends more than $7 billion per year on K-12 textbooks, but too many students are still using books that are 7-10 years old, with outdated material.”

    • Open Hardware

      • Richard Sapper, Designer Of IBM ThinkPad, Has Died

        Richard Sapper passed away at the age of 83 on New Year’s eve. While this German-born Italy-based industrial designer created a variety of products ranging from household goods to cars, he was best known for designing the first IBM ThinkPad in 1992. He served IBM as the chief design consultant for many years.

      • Open-Source Firmware for a Mini Quadrotor

        The Eachine H8 is a typical-looking mini-quadcopter of the kind that sell for under $20. Inside, the whole show is powered by an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, with the programming pins easily visible. Who could resist? [garagedrone] takes you through a step-by-step guide to re-flashing the device with a custom firmware to enable acrobatics, or simply to tweak the throttle-to-engine-speed mapping for the quad. We had no idea folks were doing this.

Leftovers

  • Wall Street thinks Twitter’s 10,000 character plan is ‘desperate’ and so do you

    Good news, Twitter: you’ve finally accomplished the impossible, getting Wall Street and your user base to agree about something.

    Bad news: they both agree you’re acting desperate.

    Twitter is reportedly planning to move beyond the 140 character limit that has defined the social network for nearly a decade as part of a continued effort to re-think its fundamentals and reverse its flailing user numbers. The move was first reported by Re/code on Tuesday and seemingly confirmed later by cryptic (and lengthy) comments by CEO Jack Dorsey.

  • Apple’s Wi-Fi Assist feature blamed for teen’s $2,000 phone bill

    Ashton Finegold didn’t think much of the text message he received from his mobile phone service saying that he was nearing his data limit.

    But the San Francisco teen was shocked when he received a phone bill totaling $2,021.07.

    “I thought my dad was going to kill me,” he told CBS News.

    “It’s usually $250 a month — and this was over $2,000,” the teen’s father, Jeff Finegold, said.

    The outrageous overcharge was due to “Wi-Fi Assist,” a new feature on Apple’s IOS 9 operating system. Wi-Fi Assist automatically switches the phone to draw on cellular service when a user is in an area with a weak Wi-Fi signal.

  • Does Donald Trump Think Paris Is In Germany?

    Presidential hopeful Donald Trump seemingly flunked geography if his latest Twitter gaffe is anything to go by.

    The Republican candidate for the top job was reacting to the news that a man wearing a fake suicide belt was shot dead in Paris while running towards a police station.

    But his rant seemed to mistake the capital of France for another country altogether.

  • Hardware

    • ​CES 2016: Fasetto Link, 2 TB NAS in the palm of your hand

      We all know that there are a lot of silly gadgets at CES. Sometimes, though, we stumble over a small company with a big idea. That was the case with me with Fasetto and its tiny, 48 by 23 millimeter Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, Link.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • This Controversial Pesticide Is Harming Honeybees

      The Environmental Protection Agency has finally begun to answer a major question on honeybee health.

      This week, the EPA released its first findings on neonicotinoids, a widely-used class of pesticides that many think play a role in the staggering honeybee losses over the last few years. The agency examined imidacloprid — one of four neonic pesticides that the EPA plans to assess, and the most commonly-used neonicotinoid in the United States — and found that it is harmful to bees when applied to certain crops, like cotton or citrus, but not when applied to others, like corn and berries.

      That’s because, the assessment found, the main thing that mattered when determining whether or not the pesticide would harm bees was the concentration of the pesticide in the nectar the bees brought back to their hives. If bees returned to their hives with nectar that contained more than 25 parts per billion (ppb) of imidacloprid, it negatively impacted the hive — meaning, as the AP reports, fewer bees and less honey. But if the concentration was less than 25 ppb, the bees fared OK. Some crops contained nectar with higher concentrations than others — while others produce no nectar at all — which explains the difference in danger from crop to crop.

    • Toxic chemical discovered in San Francisco’s fog

      Scientists who studied the fog along the coast of California found that it deposits a neurotoxin called monomethyl mercury — at a concentration about 20 times that of rain — as it sweeps across the city.

      The scientists said the finding reveals a new pathway to land of a compound that comes largely from burning coal and other fossil fuels.

  • Security

    • Twitter Community Helps Create Improved Linux Encoder Ransomware

      November 2015 saw the emergence of Linux.Encoder.1, the first piece of ransomware to target vulnerable Linux web servers. A programming flaw allowed Bitdefender researchers to obtain the decryption key and provide victims with a free recovery utility.

    • Plain cruelty: Boffins flay Linux ransomware for the third time

      Probably the world’s most tragically determined blackhat developers have had their revitalised Linux.Encoder ransomware pwned again by meddling BitDefender whitehats.

      The third iteration of the Linux.Encoder ransomware was unleashed on the world, infecting a paltry 600 servers before a crack team of security analysts returned to rip it apart.

    • Windows and Linux Malware Linked to Chinese DDoS Tool

      Similar-looking malware targeting both Linux and Windows computers has been linked to a DDoSing toolkit sold by Chinese hackers via the ddos[.]tf service, Malware Must Die! reports.

      The malware, codenamed Linux/DDOSTF (or Linux/MrBlack) targets mainly Linux machines running Elasticsearch servers, but it also attacks and infects Windows systems, particularly older Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server instances.

    • Exploiting Silent Circle’s Secure Blackphone

      The highly secure device could have been exploited, were it not for the responsible disclosure by a security researcher.

      Any modern device is made up of multiple hardware and software components, any one of which could represent a potential risk. That’s a reality that secure mobile phone vendor Silent Circle has learned with its Blackphone, thanks to the responsible security disclosure from Tim Strazzere, director of mobile research at SentinelOne.

    • Severe Silent Circle Blackphone vulnerability lets hackers take over

      Researchers have revealed a severe vulnerability in Silent Circle’s Blackphone which could allow attackers to take control of the device’s functions.

      Silent Circle’s Blackphone, born after former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden exposed the intelligence agency’s spying practices on the global stage, is a phone peddled to the privacy-conscious. The Blackphone grants users complete control of app permissions and includes encrypted services such as Silent Phone and Silent Text, designed to prevent surveillance and eavesdropping.

      The device runs on PrivatOS, a custom Android build with a set of security-focused tools.

    • Security Notification and Linode Manager Password Reset

      The entire Linode team has been working around the clock to address both this issue and the ongoing DDoS attacks. We’ve retained a well-known third-party security firm to aid in our investigation. Multiple Federal law enforcement authorities are also investigating and have cases open for both issues. When the thorough investigation is complete, we will share an update on the findings.

    • How Hackers Invaded 30 Million Web Servers On The Internet With A Poem

      From an IP address associated with 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32c3) taking place in Germany, some unknown hackers sent a poetic message to all the IPv4 addresses on the Internet who left with their web servers port open. Later, the hackers said that they didn’t mean to harm anybody and wished to remind the people the importance of keeping the Internet open and decentralised.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Politicians Use North Korea H-Bomb Fears to Pitch Wasteful Missile Defense Projects

      Republican politicians responded almost reflexively to the North Korean nuclear test on Tuesday by demanding more spending on missile defense programs that have historically proved ineffective at preventing an enemy strike — but are built by companies that have lavished policymakers with campaign cash and political support.

      Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., released a statement calling for the country to “reinvest in missile defense and our military presence in the Pacific.” Mike Rogers, R-Ala., called for Obama to “dramatically enhance trilateral missile defense” and declared that Obama should deploy a Lockheed Martin missile defense system in South Korea. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are among his top donors. Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Tex., issued a statement specifically calling for spending on that same program; Lockheed Martin is by far his biggest donor over the course of his congressional career.

      Since the early 1990s, politicians of both parties have cited the threat of North Korea to demand funding for an array of missile defense programs that quickly became monumental examples of government waste. Meanwhile, the contractors involved in these projects, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon, among others, have manipulated the politics around these programs by funding politicians, pundits, think tanks, and lobbyists behind the never-ending spiral of taxpayer spending.

    • Why North Korea’s Nuclear Test Isn’t Business as Usual

      There’s still plenty of doubt about whether North Korea did in fact detonate a sophisticated hydrogen bomb on Wednesday local time, or if the explosion that triggered a 5.1-magnitude earthquake was a nuclear test more akin to previous ones in 2006, 2009, and 2013. Even as the UN Security Council held an emergency session on Wednesday, the White House said initial US findings were “not consistent with North Korean claims of a successful hydrogen bomb test”—something that would have represented a major ramp-up in North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.

      But this test was not business as usual for North Korea in one important way, believes Charles K. Armstrong, a leading expert in Korean history and politics at Columbia University: “It’s not clear that they are really interested in using this as a negotiating tactic.”

    • South Korea says it will resume anti-North broadcasts

      South Korea on Thursday said it will resume cross-border propaganda broadcasts, after its northern neighbor claimed it successfully tested its first hydrogen bomb.

      Seoul said the broadcasts, which North Korea considers an act of war, will begin Friday.

      Cho Tae-yong, deputy chief of South Korea’s presidential office of national security, told reporters that the test is a “grave violation” of a deal reached between the two neighbors in August to defuse tensions after a landmine at the border injured two of the South’s soldiers.

    • FBI Turns 18-Year-Old With An IQ Of 51 Into A Terrorist; Dumps Case Into Laps Of Local Prosecutors

      County Judge Alan Furr set Pruitt’s bail at $1 million and refused to lower it, despite evidence surfacing that the young man is developmentally-disabled (IQ estimated at 52-58, last tested at 51) and the total amount of “support” was “less than $1,000″ — a Class C felony, which normally results in much lower bail amounts. (The guidelines in the state’s criminal procedure rules suggest a $5,000-$15,000 range, although judges are free to depart from this recommendation.)

      Judge Alan Furr must not like alleged terrorist sympathizers. Two accused murderers and a teacher charged with sexual misconduct involving a student who previously faced Judge Furr combined for less than half the amount set for Pruitt ($450,000).

    • Ruqia Hassan Mohammed: The activist and citizen journalist that Isis murdered – and then posed as for three months on social media to entrap other opponents

      Isis jihadists hijacked the Facebook account of a captured female activist in Raqqa in a bid to lure other opponents into a trap, according to a member of Syria’s most prominent anti-Isis resistance group.

      It has emerged that Ruqia Hassan Mohammed, a vocal Isis opponent with a dry sense of humour, was killed by the jihadists three months ago in punishment for her outspoken social media posts. But they continued to operate her social media accounts until very recently.

    • Saudi Arabia funds and exports Islamic extremism: The truth behind the toxic U.S. relationship with the theocratic monarchy

      “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” So advised world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky, one of the most cited thinkers in human history.

      The counsel may sound simple and intuitive — that’s because it is. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. ignores it.

      Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading sponsor of Islamic extremism. It is also a close U.S. ally. This contradiction, although responsible for a lot of human suffering, is frequently ignored. Yet it recently plunged back into the limelight with the Saudi monarchy’s largest mass execution in decades.

    • Why Experts Doubt That North Korea Tested a Hydrogen Bomb

      North Korea claimed on Wednesday that it had tested a hydrogen bomb, the most powerful kind of nuclear weapon. Related Article

      But the yield, or total energy released by the weapon, was close to that of North Korea’s previous three tests of atomic bombs, which are simpler.

      It is possible that North Korea tested a boosted atomic bomb, a weapon whose destructive power is increased by injecting tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. This would be an advance in the country’s nuclear capabilities.

      But a boosted atomic bomb has nowhere near the destructive power of a hydrogen bomb, and it is not considered a thermonuclear weapon. Here is the energy released by two large hydrogen bombs.

    • The single most important fact for understanding North Korea

      North Korea: There is probably no other country on Earth that draws such obsessive fascination from Americans yet is so widely misunderstood.

      You can see it in the (many) portrayals of North Korea in American popular culture. The country and its leader, Kim Jong Un, are almost always presented either as comically ridiculous cartoon villains or as certifiably insane. But neither really makes sense: Cartoon villains and crazy people don’t hold on to power for decades while ruling over a broken economy, a miserable population, and a weak military surrounded by enemies.

      The North Korean system and leadership, as popularly portrayed, would seem to be impossible and doomed. But clearly it’s survived for some time. So what’s going on?

      [...]

      That fact is this: While we typically talk about North Korea as a holdover of Soviet-style hard-line communism, and sometimes we indulge North Korea’s own propaganda that claims it follows a bizarre and unique ideology known as “juche,” neither of those is really correct. In fact, the country is best understood as a holdover of 1930s-style Japanese fascism, left over from Japan’s early colonization of the peninsula.

    • One Map That Explains the Dangerous Saudi-Iranian Conflict

      The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia executed Shiite Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr on Saturday. Hours later, Iranian protestors set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran. On Sunday, the Saudi government, which considers itself the guardian of Sunni Islam, cut diplomatic ties with Iran, which is a Shiite Muslim theocracy.

      To explain what’s going on, the New York Times provided a primer on the difference between Sunni and Shiite Islam, informing us that “a schism emerged after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632” — i.e., 1,383 years ago.

    • Ending the Gun Lobby’s Con Game

      The apologists for the weapons industry—they pass themselves off as the gun rights movement—demonstrate their intellectual bankruptcy by regularly contradicting themselves with a straight face.

    • Knife-wielding man shot dead at Paris police station

      A man wielding a knife and wearing a purportedly fake explosives vest was shot dead by officers Thursday at a police station in Paris on the one year anniversary of the terror attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, French officials said.

      Luc Poignant, a police union official, said the man cried out “Allahu Akbar” or ‘God is great’ in Arabic, as he tried to enter the station in the 18th arrondissement in northern Paris. the Associated Press reported.

      The attack occurred only minutes after French President Francois Hollande, speaking at police quarters in another district, had paid homage to police officers killed in the line of duty, including three police shot to death last January during the Charlie Hebdo attack.

    • Meat cleaver-wielding man shot dead after trying to attack Paris police station
    • Charlie Hebdo anniversary: Paris police shoot man dead

      French officials say the man shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great) outside a police station in Goutte d’Or, near Montmartre, where police shot and killed him.

    • Kosovo: NATO’s Success Story?

      The argument is entirely fallacious. One obvious difference between the NATO bombing of Kosovo in 1999 and the British bombing of Syria today is the contrast in their stated aims. NATO were ostensibly bombing Yugoslavia to achieve a limited goal – the secession of Kosovo. In Syria today, however, the ostensible aim of airstrikes against ISIS is the destruction of ISIS. In other words, whilst the first aimed to force a concession from the force it was targeting; the other apparently aims at the total elimination of its target. Whilst enough punishment might persuade someone to concede a demand, it will not persuade anyone to agree to their own eradication. There is, thus, no parallel in the logic behind the two campaigns, and anyone trying to draw one is being entirely disingenuous.

    • Why Is David Brooks So Very Afraid?

      The conservative columnist and the whole GOP field can’t stop wildly exaggerating the threat of terrorism.

      For 21st century conservatives, “fear” is not an authentic feeling of actual concern for your safety, but an ideological pose struck to justify the darker, more sadistic urges that motivate the Republican base.

      In our day and age, declaring you want war for the pleasure of conquest or that you support racist policies out of unvarnished bigotry is socially unacceptable. So fear is donned as a costume to conceal the hate. The shivering coward is a more sympathetic figure than the snarling bigot, and so no matter how laughably implausible their posture of fear is, conservatives will strike it.

    • Academic activism against the Arms Fair

      Every two years, DSEi sets up shop at London’s ExCel centre, not just tolerated but also explicitly welcomed by the British government, who provide the event with both financial and personal support. This September, 32,000 arms dealers descended on East London for what TripAdvisor reviewer Ian W, giving a mark of 4 out of 5, describes as the ‘Largest display of Big Boys Toys around!’. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon rather more soberly described DSEi as ‘a truly global event… [one that] ensure[s] that the nations represented here can continue to prosper’.

    • Ghost Squad Hackers Hack Ethiopian Websites In Response To Killing Of Protesting Students

      Ghost Squad Hackers group has taken down multiple .gov websites in Ethiopia. The collective has blamed the government for killing “students for opposing the ‘master plan’ to expand the main city Addis Ababa”. Talking to fossBytes, the group has said, “we need the government to stop this madness or we will hack more sites.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • In pictures: Snow in Scotland through the years

      With snow forecast for parts of Scotland tonight, we take a look back at the country’s bigger snowfalls over the years

      There are plenty of jokes made about Scotland and snow, given the country’s reputation as a cold place. But there are also some quite astonishing facts.

    • Police Scotland have issued a warning to Perthshire residents to only travel if it’s essential, as another amber weather warning hits the big county

      Police have advised Perthshire residents in flood affected areas to only travel if it’s absolutely essential, as the area prepares for another period of adverse weather.

      Heavy rain is forecast to fall until around 8am on Friday January 8, with temperatures expected to drop in the next few days.

    • A single gas well leak is California’s biggest contributor to climate change

      The single biggest contributor to climate change in California is a blown-out natural gas well more than 8,700ft underground, state authorities and campaign groups said Monday.

      The broken well at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage site has released more than 77,000 metric tons of the powerful climate pollutant methane since the rupture was first detected on 23 October, according to a counter created by the Environmental Defense Fund.

    • Dear Gov. Snyder: You Have to Go to Jail

      Thanks to you, sir, and the premeditated actions of your administrators, you have effectively poisoned, not just some, but apparently ALL of the children in my hometown of Flint, Michigan.

      And for that, you have to go to jail.

      To poison all the children in an historic American city is no small feat. Even international terrorist organizations haven’t figured out yet how to do something on a magnitude like this.

    • Snyder may request federal aid for Flint water crisis

      Gov. Rick Snyder on Tuesday declared a state of emergency in Flint because of its contaminated drinking water, setting the stage for a possible request for federal assistance in the city’s crisis.

      Snyder’s declaration makes available all state resources in cooperation with local response and recovery operations and authorizes the Michigan State Police, Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division to coordinate the state’s efforts.

    • Oklahoma Fracking Company Defies Plan To Reduce Earthquakes

      Wastewater is an issue across the industry. During fracking, chemical-laced water is injected at high pressure into the ground, allowing pockets of trapped oil and gas to loosen and be captured. The process creates a huge amount of wastewater, which cannot be reused due to the chemical content and contamination from elements in the ground, often including oil itself. It is possible to truck the water to treatment plants, but it is more expensive.

      The SandRidge case could spark the first real test of the earthquake-fracking connection. Another case, in which a homeowner is suing another natural gas company for injuries she sustained in an earthquake, has not yet been heard.

      Some say that finding the companies at fault for damages would be devastating for Oklahoma’s fracking industry, but the industry’s official position is that it supports the commission’s attempts to protect the public.

    • TransCanada Announces It Will Sue U.S. Over Keystone XL Denial

      TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, announced Wednesday it is filing a claim under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saying that the project’s permit denial was “arbitrary and unjustified.” TransCanada is seeking $15 billion in costs and damages due to the denial, and has also filed a separate lawsuit against the U.S. in federal court.

      Under NAFTA, companies can sue governments that put investments at risk through regulation. If it proceeds, the case will go in front of an international tribunal. (A U.S. company sued Montreal in 2013 over a fracking ban, using the same rationale). The tribunal cannot overturn the permit denial, but it can force payment of damages.

  • Finance

    • 10 More Reasons Wall Street Will Hate Bernie Sanders

      Some of Sanders’ suggestions: Break up banks. Tax speculators. Cap interest rates.

      Bernie Sanders has declared war on the biggest players in Wall Street’s financial sector. He says they are overrun with “greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance,” and criticizes his top rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, as being naïve about what needs to happen to create a financial system that “works for all Americans.”

      On Tuesday, he upped the ante. “To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear,” Sanders said in a midtown Manhattan speech. “Greed is not good. In fact, the greed of Wall Street and corporate America is destroying the fabric of our nation. And here is a New Year’s resolution that I will keep if elected president: If you do not end your greed, we will end it for you.”

      Sanders laid out a 10-point program to deeply change the nature of the financial sector, while occasionally digressing to emphasize how much more sweeping his proposals are compared to Clinton’s. As always, he started by recounting how the “20 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans”—and said the finance industry has spent “billions” to get Congress and federal agencies to deregulate almost all areas of the financial industry while weakening consumer protection laws.

    • Bernie Sanders Attacks Hillary Clinton’s Refusal to Take On Wall Street

      In a fiery speech detailing his plan to break up “too big to fail” banks, Sen. Bernie Sanders issued his sharpest criticism of Hillary Clinton yet, pointing to the large fees she has collected giving speeches to a financial industry she is conspicuously reluctant to regulate.

      “My opponent says that as a senator, she told bankers to ‘cut it out’ and end their destructive behavior,” Sanders said of Clinton. “But, in my view, establishment politicians are the ones who need to cut it out. The reality is that Congress doesn’t regulate Wall Street. Wall Street and their lobbyists regulate Congress. We must change that reality, and as president, I will.”

    • Bernie Sanders Attacks Hillary Clinton Over Regulating Wall Street

      Mr. Sanders said that Mrs. Clinton was “wrong” to oppose his plan to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall Act, which would legally separate commercial banking, investment banking and insurances services. And the senator implicitly criticized Mrs. Clinton for being a patron of bankers when he pointed to their huge campaign donations and noted that they “provide very generous speaking fees to those who go before them.”

    • Sen. Elizabeth Warren Cheers Bernie’s Fight to “Hold Big Banks Accountable”

      Sen. Bernie Sanders got a shout-out from big bank critic Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday a day after the presidential hopeful gave a policy speech laying out his tough on Wall Street stance.

    • Ex-Obama Aide Known As “Hedge Funds’ Secret Weapon” Assails Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street Overhaul

      But Goolsbee is hardly an unbiased observer. Since leaving government, he’s become a valuable tool for Wall Street.

      Here are some of his tweets:

      Goolsbee is now a partner at 32 Advisors, a financial strategy and government relations firm that works with Wall Street. He touts, on his company’s website, a 2014 CNBC profile where he was dubbed “hedge funds’ secret weapon.”

    • George Osborne warns of ‘dangerous cocktail’ of economic risks

      George Osborne has re-found his gloomy boots. After a relatively positive Autumn Statement, in which the Chancellor said that the UK was “growing fast”, Mr Osborne will today lay out a litany of risks the UK economy faces over the next 12 months.

      And a Happy New Year to you all, you can almost hear him saying.

      Tensions in the Middle East, slowing growth in China, low prices for commodities such as oil and copper are all weighing on global confidence, he will say in a speech.

    • Iceland Has Jailed 29 Bankers. Why Can’t the UK and US Do the Same?

      Just before Christmas, the former CEO of Iceland’s Glitnir bank and two other senior bankers were sentenced to jail terms of up to five years for market manipulation and breach of fiduciary duties. This brings the total number of senior Icelandic bankers so far sentenced for crimes in the run-up to the 2008 banking crash to 29.

      By contrast not a single senior banking executive in the US or the UK has been jailed for their role in the financial crisis. Whilst banks – such as the five found to be rigging the Libor rate – have been hit with substantial fines, the individual bankers behind the fraud, market rigging and irresponsible lending that led to the economic meltdown have all avoided time behind bars.

      On top of this came news last week that Britain’s financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, has shelved a planned inquiry into the culture of banking. Whilst this inquiry was never going to hold the guilty to account, it was hoped that it might at least provide a level of transparency and analysis to help shape more rigorous future regulation.

    • [Older] Three Icelandic Bankers to Prison

      Former CEO of Glitnir bank Lárus Welding was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison for breach of trust in the so-called Stím Case, RÚV reports.

      Jóhannes Baldursson, former director of capital markets at Glitnir, received a two-year prison sentence, and Þorvaldur Lúðvík Sigurjónsson, former head of Saga Capital, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, both for breach of trust. The sentences were announced in the Reykjavík District Court. The defendants are also to pay defense costs.

    • Detroit Public Schools Face Bankruptcy: ‘We’re Running Out Of Money In April’

      A little over a year after the city emerged from the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history, Detroit’s public schools are still so mired in debt that they are redirecting nearly half of the money they get for students toward paying back creditors.

      And unless something changes soon, even that radical redistribution of cash won’t be enough to save the Motor City’s schools from going broke by the time the class of 2016 graduates.

      In February, the school system must begin paying $26 million per month to service over $260 million in loans taken out to keep schools open over the the past few years. That’s a giant jump from the roughly $15 million in monthly debt payments the district faced last year, according to the Detroit News. It also only covers a sliver of the system’s total debts: $1.5 billion or more that would become Michigan’s responsibility if the school district goes bankrupt.

    • Why Bernie Sanders Deserves More Attention Than Hillary Clinton

      Have the media stopped feeling “the Bern”? Or has the Democratic Party, which should probably be renamed the Clintoncratic National Committee, extinguished the fire?

      It’s both.

      Sen. Bernie Sanders deserves far more attention than he’s getting. The 74-year-old frowzy-haired Democratic Socialist from Brooklyn by way of Vermont raised $33 million in the fourth quarter of 2015. That’s just $4 million less than Hillary Clinton.

      People vote with dollars, as any tearful hater of money in politics will tell you. When it comes to Sanders, lots of folks throw in small amounts of cash. So when he raises $33 million in three months, it means a lot of people care.

      Beyond the fundraising, poll numbers in early primary states justify a much brighter spotlight on Sanders than the media shine.

    • Poor People Really Get Screwed By Ben Carson’s Tax Plan

      There’s still no reason to care about this since Carson is obviously doomed to return to the book promotion racket at this point. Still, just for the record, I figure this deserves a chart to memorialize it for posterity. So here it is.

    • Carl Icahn’s Utterly Dishonest Case for Big Corporations Not to Pay Taxes They Owe

      Corporate predator Icahn is crying poverty for poor superrich chieftains of profiteering giants.

      Carl Icahn, noted corporate predator and takeover specialist who made billions of dollars in corporate deals, has recently begun pushing a charitable cause involving a group of people who, through no fault of their own, are being forced out of America. Syrian migrants who’ve lost everything, you ask? Or maybe Central American children fleeing the horrors of drug wars? Nope, none of those foreign sob stories for Icahn. Rather, he weeps for the incomprehensible suffering of a small tribe of Americans, namely: the CEOs of several U.S.-based multinational corporations.

      You see, Carl is fronting for CEOs of a small group of huge multinational conglomerates who are demanding that Congress drastically slash the taxes they owe on foreign sales of their products. This “reform” would let them escape paying most of the $600 billion in taxes that U.S. law assesses on some $2.6 trillion in profits they’ve been hiding in foreign bank accounts and offshore tax havens. Three-fourths of these hidden profits belong to only 50 enormously profitable corporations.

    • George Osborne warns mortgage holders: Be prepared for interest rates rise this year

      George Osborne has hinted that interest rates could soon rise and warned that the UK must be prepared for the prospect of the first increase since 2007.

    • Why George Osborne is wrong about household debt

      This morning George Osborne, amidst warnings about the ‘dangerous cocktail’ of threats faced by the British economy, claimed this is ‘not a debt fuelled recovery’ and ‘overall levels of household debt have fallen in our country over the last five years’.

      This is not true. A number of reports point to increases in the UK household debt burden over recent years, from the Centre for Social Justice’s report which outlines the ‘growing issues of problem debt’ to the Money Charity’s December 2015 Debt Statistics, which claimed that ‘people in the UK owed £1.456 trillion at the end of October 2015… up from £1.42 trillion at the end of October 2014 – an extra £706.71 per UK adult’.

      The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that these increases will continue over the current parliament, and by 2020 household debt is set to have risen to 167% of household income.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Trump Amazes WaPo Columnist by Drawing 60% Fewer People Than Sanders

      The headline of Cillizza’s Sanders crowd piece is: “20,000 People Came to See Bernie Sanders in Boston. Why Aren’t We Talking More About It?” That’s a good question. Like, why aren’t we talking about it when we’re getting excited three months later about Trump drawing 60 percent fewer people?

      I guess the answer to that is implicit in a piece Cillizza posted a little more than a week later (10/14/15), headlined “Why Bernie Sanders Isn’t Going to Be President, in Five Words.” The five words, if you’re wondering, are “I am a democratic socialist.” And that makes you ineligible to be president, in Cillizza’s view, since only 3 in 10 people say they have a favorable opinion of socialism and 61 percent express an unfavorable opinion of it.

      As it happens, those were almost exactly the favorable/unfavorable numbers for the Republican Party the last time CBS polled about it (10/4-8/15)—32 percent favorable, 59 percent unfavorable—but nobody says that means it’s impossible for a Republican to be elected president.

      The beyond-the-pale status of “socialism” does mean, however, that Sanders comes up in relation to Trump’s crowd numbers only as a reason not to get too excited about Trump’s crowd numbers: “After all,” writes Cillizza (1/5/16), “if crowd size at rallies was determinative, Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, would be the heavy favorite to be the Democratic presidential nominee.”

    • Fox’s Katie Pavlich: If Obama Wants To Do Work On Guns, He Should Work With NRA [Ed: well…]
    • The difficulty of ‘neoliberalism’

      This is not a new critique. ‘Neoliberalism’ is a term that has attracted a remarkable degree of frustration and fury, in politics, the media and within academia. Journalists such as Independent columnist John Rentoul and Newsnight policy editor Christopher Cook have expended some energy on twitter and in print dismissing the term as vacuous. Orthodox economists, who do not encounter the term in their microeconomics training, dismiss it as useless. In academia, ‘neoliberalism’ has been criticised by historians and some social scientists as over-determined. Since Jeremy Bentham, the English tradition of positivism has rested on the notion that only acutely defined terms are politically valid – a premise that can quickly flip into the idea that if I don’t know exactly what you mean, then you are talking nonsense.

  • Censorship

    • Serbia: Independent media increasingly targeted as spies

      It was a Wednesday morning in early November when investigative journalist Slobodan Georgijev opened Informer, one of Serbia’s notorious tabloids. He had just arrived at his office, the newsroom of Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), one of Serbia’s few independent media outlets. When he turned the page he was shocked by what he saw; a picture of his own face amongst two others, in an article calling three media outlets known for critical reporting of the Serbian government, including BIRN, “foreign spies”.

      “It was funny and unpleasant at the same time,” Georgijev recalled, speaking to Index on Censorship. “Funny because I knew that this is just a campaign by Informer to undermine the credibility of independent journalists.” More importantly, he had begun worry about his own safety. “It’s also unpleasant because you never know how people will interpret such defamations.”

    • Stories On Cologne Assaults Face Censorship On Reddit

      Moderators on the link-sharing and discussion site Reddit deleted dozens of links and comments about immigrant gang violence and sexual assault in Cologne, Germany in an apparent attempt to clamp down on “vileness.”

    • German mayor blames victims for sex attacks by 1,000 Muslims: Media coverup

      The Mayor of Cologne, Germany, blamed the victims of a mass sexual assault/rape, saying they should follow a “code of conduct” to ensure they don’t get raped again. Over 90 women have filed police reports so far, saying they were attacked by 1,000 Muslim men of “Arab or North African origin” at a New Year’s Eve celebration in the Cologne city square.

    • Art says rationale for censorship a ‘load of bullshit’

      Lawyer says the Film Censorship Board’s decision to mute the word “binatang” in a documentary for fear it could be a security threat is insulting to Malaysians.

    • Malaysian Censorship Board says good reason to mute word in Singaporean documentary

      The Malaysian Censorship Board (LPF) says the decision to mute the words binatang-binatang (animals) from a scene in a Singaporean documentary was taken to avoid turning it into a controversy.

      LPF chairman Datuk Abdul Halim Abdul Hamid said the censorship board’s decision was in accordance with the Film Censorship Guidelines.

    • Poet Yang Lian: ‘There are cracks and holes in China’s censorship’

      In Hong Kong publishers are going missing, while a book that cannot be published in Beijing may appear in Shanghai. In an interview with DW, Chinese poet Yang Lian discusses the current fight for freedom of expression.

    • US Copyright Office is taking comments about how well the DMCA is working

      The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the law that allows content owners to remove copyrighted material from the Internet, and it’s made just about no one happy. Content owners are bitter that their material tends to keep popping up, even when they’ve asked for it to be removed hundreds or even thousands of times. Internet platforms that host large amounts of user-generated content must cope with millions of infringement allegations, mass-produced by software. When those algorithms make mistakes, it’s often users who pay the price—told they’re copyright scofflaws because there was background music in their home video or they shared a photo of a toy they bought.

    • The Charlie Hebdo Massacre: One Year Later, Still Misunderstood

      Christine Boutin, the head of France’s conservative Christian Democrat Party felt “this tragedy deserved better” than to be sullied by Charlie Hebdo’s current cover art depicting an old, bearded white guy (supposedly depicting the Euro-centric representation of God) strapped with a Kalashnikov rifle, blood on his hands and clothes, crouching beneath the words “One year on: The assassin is still out there.” Boutin wrote that Hebdo’s hostility to religion is “becoming an obsession.”

      [...]

      In both the immediate aftermath of the massacre and throughout the year, the slain journalists were both lionized as free speech martyrs and also vilified as racists and Islamophobes because of their usage of crude and ribald imagery, particularly when it came to the Prophet Muhammad.

    • The truth about Charlie: one year after the 7 January attacks

      Meanwhile, the campaign to support the presentation of the PEN award to Charlie Hebdo was led by Salman Rushdie, who is of Muslim heritage, and whose name is derived from a great 12th century Andalusian Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd who likely would not have been terribly troubled by provocative cartoons, and whose own books on philosophy and theology were burned by Muslim fundamentalists while his Christian followers were slain by the Inquisition.

      So, we must remember that January 7, 2015 was one in a long line of far right attacks on creativity, and part of a history of fundamentalist assaults against artists and intellectuals who have defied them. And, sadly, it was only one of the first armed Islamist salvos of 2015 which will be remembered as the year of endless, expanding jihad. Charlies and Ahmeds, Ceciles and Samiras died in many regions of the world at the hands of those seeking a free ticket to paradise.

    • Charlie Hebdo attack survivor says ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan has been ‘misused’ in year since atrocity

      One of the cartoonists who survived the Charlie Hebdo massacre has said the slogan that united the world in the aftermath of the atrocity has been “misused”.

      Corinne Rey, known as Coco, said “Je suis Charlie” was originally used to express solidarity but has lost its way.

      “It’s a phrase that was used during the march as a sign of emotion or resistance to terrorism,” she told France Inter radio.

    • Permanent State of Emergency? France Seeks Alarming Expanse of Police Powers

      Citing last year’s Paris attacks as justification, the French government is seeking to expand police powers permanently—relaxing rules around the firing of weapons, enabling nighttime raids, and loosening restrictions on searching and detaining suspected terrorists, according to a draft bill seen by the newspaper Le Monde.

    • Occupy-linked DJs dumped as Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK rejects censorship accusations
    • A threat to whom? Some implications of the rise of “extremist rhetoric”

      It is through the use of the nebulous term “extremism”, which remains undefined in the Bill itself, that the oppressive policy logic of the Prevent strategy is grounded. Extremism is identified vaguely in the original Prevent guidance as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. Building on this troubling definition, the guidance goes on to propagate that extremism is not always violent, and not always illegal. In fact, the crux of its argument is that non-violent and legal extremism is what needs to be tackled first and foremost. In fact, the crux of its argument is that non-violent and legal extremism is what needs to be tackled first and foremost. This assertion then provides the rationale for those employed in the education and community sectors to act as an arm of government surveillance. Under the Bill, those working in schools and universities have a duty to “create an environment where extremism cannot operate” and as such to report any students suspected to be “at risk”, with the threat of legal penalties for individual employees if they cannot prove that they are taking steps to do this.

    • One Year After Charlie Hebdo, More Censorship Than Ever In Europe

      It took a week for German authorities to admit Muslim rape gangs were running wild in the streets on New Year’s Eve, and the police are still mumbling about having insufficient resources to follow up on leads, but apparently they’ve got infinite resources to crack down on “hate speech” against the new occupants.

    • Charlie Hebdo anniversary: free-speech groups unite in defence of ‘right to offend’
    • On the anniversary of the attack on Charlie Hebdo we must defend the right to blaspheme
    • On the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre
    • The Mystery Of The Disappearing Book Publishers

      If Chinese authorities kidnapped Lee from Hong Kong, they will have encroached on its independence. Since 1997, Hong Kong and China have been ruled by a “one country, two systems” principle which affords those in Hong Kong civil liberties that those in China do not enjoy. Chief among them is the freedom of expression, which is why many Chinese tourists stocked up on Causeway Bay Bookstore’s scandalous titles while on the island.

  • Privacy

    • NSA Did Not Spy On Congress Members During Iran Nuclear Debate, Top Intel Officials Say: Report

      Top U.S. intelligence officials told the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday that the National Security Agency (NSA) did not spy on Congress members during last year’s Iran nuclear debate, CNN reported. The testimony came in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report that alleged that the NSA had maintained surveillance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other U.S. allies, even though two years ago President Barack Obama had promised to end the practice. It also purported that communications between Congress members and Netanyahu might have also been inadvertently picked up.

    • House Committee to Consider Safeguards for Handling Communications Intercepted by NSA

      The U.S. House Intelligence Committee will consider whether new safeguards are needed for handling communications intercepted by the National Security Agency that involve U.S. lawmakers or other Americans, the top Democrat on the panel said on Wednesday.

    • First on CNN: Top intel officials say NSA didn’t spy on members of Congress

      Top U.S. intelligence officials told the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday that the National Security Agency did not spy on any members of Congress during last year’s contentious Iran nuclear debate.

    • Fingerprints For Food: Venezuela Shows How Not To Use Biometrics

      Venezuela is clearly the country to watch if you want to see how not to use biometrics.

    • Your fingerprint for a kilogram of flour: biometric and privacy in Venezuela

      In Caracas or Maracaibo’ supermarkets and drugstores, buying a kilogram of grain or a pack of cookies has become a complex procedure: it’s required for you to deliver an ID, full name, phone number, address, date of birth and to slide both thumbs in a device: the emblematic “fingerprint scanner”; a device which usage by stores was originally voluntary, but which evolution, months afterwards, is one of omnipresent machinery, kind of a necessary toll for the acquisition of a simple pack of gum in any chain store.

    • Pioneer In Internet Anonymity Hands FBI A Huge Gift In Building Dangerous Backdoored Encryption System

      I first came across cryptography pioneer David Chaum about a decade ago, during the debates about online voting. Many in the technology world were insisting that such things were impossible to do safely, but Chaum insisted he had come up with a way to do online voting safely (he’d also tried to do electronic money, DigiCash… unsuccessfully). Many people disagreed with Chaum and it led to some fairly epic discussions. It appears that Chaum is again making moves that are making many of his colleagues angry: specifically creating a backdoored encryption system.

    • TOR Anonymity: Things Not To Do While Using TOR

      TThe internet is awe-inspiring, but it has its nightmares for the ones who get stalked and harassed in the digital world. They can’t really get away from the predicament, one possible recourse is to go anonymous while using the internet with the help of various tools available. Name it, VPN, TOR, or you can use a proxy server for your anonymity needs.

      Apart from all these available options, clearly, TOR stands out first in the line when we compare the level of anonymity provided by sundry tools. The Onion Router project has been regarded as the best cloak for those people who want to hide on the internet. Edward Snowden, who came into light after he acted as the whistleblower and exposed NSA’s unethical surveillance activities, used TOR browser in order to do so. He was also inculpated by the federal agencies that his disclosure of confidential information was the impetus behind the Paris death massacre.

      The Onion Router has the forte to protect you and hide you from all those stalkers and malevolent minds, who follow you on the internet. Even if you want to be another Edward Snowden, you can very well do so, by using TOR browser. But you just can’t turn a blind eye on the fact, little of your mistake will contribute to divulging your identity on the internet, no matter how secure do you consider yourself. TOR doesn’t magically read your mind and prevent any of the foolish activities that you may perform. So, there are a few things you need to keep in mind and it will help you to be anonymous online.

      [...]

      Don’t use TOR with Windows

      Microsoft’s Windows is the world’s most used operating system for desktops, but it doesn’t seem to do well when you would like to use TOR browser on it. The credits are bagged by the vulnerabilities that exist on the operating system and may reveal your identity even if you are using the TOR to access the internet.

      Linux systems will serve you well for this purpose. Linux distributions like Tails and Whonix are pre-configured with TOR or you can configure it manually on any distribution you may like.

    • Former NSA Official Tells UK Politicians Mass Surveillance Risks Citizen Safety

      What if mass surveillance was not only ineffective, but a potential danger to the safety of citizens?

      That’s the argument made by one former intelligence official. As the UK’s proposed new surveillance law looms, several evidence hearings with experts, government officials and activists have taken place in front of the Joint Select Committee that is vetting the draft Investigatory Powers Bill. In one session on Wednesday, retired NSA technical director turned whistleblower William Binney argued that mass surveillance, and particularly forms of it executed by the US and British governments, is fundamentally flawed, and may even result in the loss of life.

    • Former NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney Warns UK Lawmakers Mass Surveillance Will ‘Cost Lives In Britain’
    • Microsoft shows off just how much data it’s collecting from Windows 10 users

      “The statistics indicate that Microsoft may be collecting more data than initially thought,” writes Brinkmann. “While it is unclear what data is exactly collected, it is clear that the company is collecting information about the use of individual applications and programs on Windows at the very least.”

    • DHS Issues Process and Privacy Guidance on State and Local Drones

      One of the most timely aspects of the best practices is their recognition of the value of encryption. Despite self-serving claims by intelligence officials that encryption represents a threat to national security, DHS’ 2015 guidance on drones explicitly advises local and state authorities to employ encryption to ensure the security of data they collect and retain.

      By recognizing that encryption enhances security, the DHS guidance could undermine half-baked FBI proposals to subvert encryption by mandating back doors for intelligence agencies and instead reinforce a common sense consensus uniting the tech community and privacy advocates.

    • Do you own your phone or does it own you?

      Turning it off is a powerful act of showing who is in charge. If you feel you can’t live without it, then you are putting your life in the hands of the people who expect an immediate answer of their calls, your phone company and the Silicon Valley executives who make all those apps you can’t stop using.

      As security expert Jacob Appelbaum puts it, cell phones are tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. Isn’t that a chilling thought to reflect on the next time you give one as Christmas gift?

    • NSA ‘confident’ in new system at center of Rubio-Cruz fight

      The National Security Agency said on Thursday that it was “confident” in its powers under a new phone records collection scheme, in a claim that backs up assertions from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

      In a post on the influential legal blog Lawfare, NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell addressed the operations of the spy agency’s new program, which began in November following a tough congressional fight last summer.

    • Top Democrat says no evidence of NSA spying on US lawmakers

      A key House Democrat said Thursday there is no evidence the intelligence community was spying on members of Congress, following a report that the National Security Agency swept up some conversations with lawmakers in the course of spying on Israel.

  • Civil Rights

    • Judge Doesn’t Buy CBP’s Argument That Dog Can ‘Smell’ The Difference Between Concealed And Unconcealed Humans

      If there’s an unreasonable, warrantless search happening, there’s a good chance Deputy (literal) Dog is on the case. Cops love their K9 buddies, mainly because nearly any motion or noise a police dog makes can be construed as an “indication” or an “alert.” It’s a blank permission slip, signed with a paw print.

    • Oregon Militia
    • Cologne New Year gang assaults: Mayor says women should have code of conduct to prevent future assault

      The Mayor of Cologne said today that women should adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent future assault at a crisis meeting following the sexual attack of women by 1000 men on New Year’s eve.

      Mayor Henriette Reker attended an emergency meeting with Chief of Police Wolfgang Albers and Wolfgang Wurm to discuss how to deal with the attack, where dozens of women were repeatedly touched and groped, with one case of alleged rape in the center of town.

    • IBM union calls it quits

      After trying since 1999 to turn IBM into a union shop, the Alliance@IBM, a Communications Workers of America local, is “suspending” its organizing efforts.

      “Years of job cuts and membership losses have taken their toll,” said the Alliance in a statement Tuesday.

      The Alliance, which had 400 dues-paying members at its peak, now has about 200. But this figure doesn’t tell the real story about the Alliance’s accomplishments.

    • More religion?

      It is an error for politicians and institutions to invite British Muslims to think about extremism as Muslims, rather than as citizens.

    • An Act of Terror: Deporting a Kurdish Activist Back to Turkey

      In the quaint tourist town of Harbert, Michigan sits an unassuming restaurant that has been owned and operated by a man who is considered a pillar of his community. Cafe Gulistan is owned by Ibrahim Parlak. He is, by almost all appearances, a classic example of the immigrant success story. There is just one problem: The U.S. government is trying to deport him to Turkey, where he has a well-founded fear of imprisonment, torture and possibly death. After a quarter of a century here in the United States, he now has about 75 days left to fight deportation.

      Parlak is Kurdish, born in the region of Turkey called Anatolia, in 1962. His childhood was marred by increasing government repression of Turkey’s Kurdish ethnic minority. Turkey banned the Kurdish language, Kurdish cultural expression, and attempted to forcibly assimilate the Kurdish people to destroy their heritage. Resistance to that assimilation included protests and grass-roots organizing, but also, by the 1980s, armed resistance from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. In the late 1970s, Parlak, as a teenager, was jailed for three months for engaging in peaceful protests. He then moved to Germany to avoid further repression from the Turkish government. He remained active in the movement for Kurdish autonomy, hosting cultural events and raising funds for the political, nonmilitary wing of the PKK, known as the National Front for the Liberation of Kurdistan. After seven years in Germany, Parlak decided he could better support the Kurdish cause back home.

    • Keys Case Spotlights Flaws of Computer Hacking Law

      Old laws can cause confusion and unduly harsh consequences, particularly when courts confront situations Congress did not anticipate. This is particularly true for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030—the federal “anti­hacking” statute prompted in part by fear generated by the 1983 techno­thriller “WarGames.” The CFAA was enacted in 1986, and the government’s current prosecution of journalist Matthew Keys—who faces sentencing on Jan. 20 for three counts of violating the CFAA—illustrates the 30-­year­-old statute’s many problems.

      The CFAA makes it illegal to intentionally access a “protected computer”—which includes any computer connected to the Internet—”without authorization” or in excess of authorization. But the CFAA does not define “without authorization.” This has given overzealous prosecutors broad discretion to bring criminal charges against individuals for behavior that simply doesn’t rise to the culpability Congress had in mind when it passed this serious criminal law, such as doing something on a computer network that the owner doesn’t like. (There is currently a circuit split on whether violations of employer­imposed use restrictions can give rise to CFAA liability, with the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Second, Fourth and Ninth Circuits finding that they cannot, and the First, Fifth, Seventh and Eleventh finding that they can.)

      The Keys case centers on behavior that essentially amounts to Internet vandalism. After being fired from the Tribune Company, Keys shared the username and password of the Tribune Company’s content management system in an online chat room. Another individual then used the credentials to log into the CMS and make some juvenile but relatively innocuous changes to a Los Angeles Times article, including modifying the title of the article to read “Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337″ (from “Pressure builds in house to pass tax­cut package”). The changes were live for only about 40 minutes, after which the Tribune Company restored the original article and effectively blocked outside access to its CMS.

    • State Trooper Who Arrested Sandra Bland Indicted on Perjury Charge

      Brian T. Encinia, the Texas State Trooper who made the initial and violent arrest of Sandra Bland during a routine traffic stop just days before she was found dead in a jail cell last summer, was indicted on charges of perjury by state prosecutors on Wednesday for making false statements regarding his behavior during the incident.

    • BREAKING: Officer Who Arrested Sandra Bland Charged For Lying In His Police Report

      Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Brian Encinia was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday for perjury, based on a statement he made in his report on his encounter with 28-year-old Sandra Bland.

      Encinia’s traffic stop and arrest of Bland went viral after she was found hanging in her cell three days later. Video of the arrest showed Encinia pointing a Taser at Bland yelling “I will light you up!” after he pulled her over for failing to signal a lane change. Encinia got more and more heated after Bland refuses to put out her cigarette, at one point trying to pull her out of the car. Bland can be heard saying “you knocked my head in the ground and I got epilepsy.” “Good,” Encinia responds.

      Before the video went public, Encinia claimed that Bland had assaulted him by swinging her elbows at him and kicking him in the shin. The perjury charge reportedly stems from his statement that he pulled Bland out of her car in order to continue the investigation.

    • The Texas Trooper Who Pulled Over Sandra Bland Was Just Indicted

      Trooper Brian Encinia pulled over Bland in Prairie View on July 20, citing an improper lane change. Dash cam footage later released by county officials showed that the encounter quickly escalated after Encinia ordered Bland out of her car. In the video, Encinia can be heard saying, “I’m going to drag you out of here,” as he reached into Bland’s vehicle. He then pulled out what appeared to be a Taser, yelling, “I will light you up!” Encinia eventually forced Bland to the ground as she protested the arrest. Encinia arrested Bland for “assault on a public servant” and booked her into the Waller County jail, where she was found dead three days later.

    • DHS Immigration Raids Reverse Policy of Deporting Felons, Not Families

      Despite Donald Trump’s ignorant comments to the contrary, it is not possible to detain and deport every undocumented immigrant. It’s not even a simple matter to determine who is deportable and who isn’t – evinced best, perhaps, by the overworked dockets of immigration judges across the country. That’s why there must be sensible prioritization of removals.

    • Oregon Tribal Leaders Say Militant Group Needs To ‘Get The Hell Out’

      The Oregon tribe that once inhabited the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has made its stance clear on the militant group now occupying refuge headquarters: They’re not welcome.

      “We as Harney County people can stand on our own feet,” said Jarvis Kennedy, a member of the Burns Paiute Tribal council. “We don’t need some clown to come in here and stand up for us.”

      Kennedy joined other tribal leaders at a Wednesday press conference representing the 200 tribal members living on the Burns Paiute Reservation, located 30 miles from the refuge.

      “They say they don’t want to bother the community,” he said. “But you know what? Our kids are sitting at home right now when they should be in school.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • With Fixed Costs And Fat Margins, Comcast’s Broadband Cap Justifications Are Total Bullshit

      For a while Comcast tried to pretend that its slowly-expanding usage cap “trials” were about managing network congestion. At least until leaked Comcast documents, the company’s top engineer, and the cable industry’s top lobbyist all confirmed that justification was bullshit (caps don’t really help manage congestion anyway). Since then, Comcast has veered away from any hard technical explanation for the glorified price hike, instead focusing on the ambiguous claim that these new “flexible” pricing models bring “fairness” to the broadband industry.

    • What you need to know about IPv6 in 2016

      Right now, a lot of content and services are only available on IPv4. Content providers haven’t seen demand and they’ve actually been worried about making user experience worse by making content available over IPv6. As IPv6 support in operating systems and applications has increased, and as networks devices start to support it, devices obtain IPv6 addresses automatically. So-called “dual stack” devices with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses are more common, but just because a device has an IPv6 address doesn’t mean that it can reach everywhere on the IPv6 Internet. In these early deployment days, sometimes IPv6 works only on the local network because the ISP or larger enterprise network doesn’t support IPv6. In such scenarios, an application can receive an IPv6 address in a DNS response and try to connect, only to frustrate users with timeouts or other failures.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UN Initiative On Access To Medicines Calls For Contributions

      The United Nations Secretary-General’s newly formed High Level Panel on Access to Medicines launched a call for contributions by stakeholders at the end of December, in an effort it says could transform millions of lives.

      The High-Level Panel seeks to address “one of the greatest public health challenge of our time,” which is “how to promote innovation and increase access to medicines, vaccines, diagnostics and related health technologies in low-, middle-, and high-income countries,” according to a press release.

    • How 3-D Printing Threatens Our Patent System

      Patents will have even more trouble with 3-D copies than copyright law had with digital music sales

    • Copyrights

      • Monkey selfie case: judge rules animal cannot own his photo copyright

        A federal judge in San Francisco has ruled that a macaque monkey who took now-famous selfie photographs cannot be declared the copyright owner of the photos.

        US district judge William Orrick said in a tentative opinion Wednesday that while Congress and the president can extend the protection of law to animals as well as humans, there is no indication that they did so in the Copyright Act.

        The lawsuit filed last year by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sought a court order allowing Peta to administer all proceeds from the photos for the benefit of the monkey, which it identified as six-year-old Naruto.

        The photos were taken during a 2011 trip to Sulawesi, Indonesia, by British nature photographer David Slater, who asked the court to dismiss the case. He says the British copyright obtained for the photos by his company, Wildlife Personalities Ltd, should be honored worldwide.

      • Judge In Nutty PETA Monkey Copyright Trial Skeptical Of PETA’s Argument, But Let’s Them Try Again

        We’d been covering the story of that selfie for years, since first noting that it was almost certainly in the public domain, as copyright law only recognizes human authors. This discussion spurred not one, but two, separate legal threats made against us by representatives of David Slater, the guy whose camera the monkey used. It’s also gotten Wikipedia involved (after Slater asked the site to not allow the image to be used, while Wikipedia agreed with us that the image is public domain).

      • Ninth Circuit Appeals Court Decision On Fair Use And Right Of First Sale Fails To Budge The Needle On Either Issue

        A ruling on fair use, the right of first sale and the limits of trademark protection has been handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel. Normally, I’d proceed the word “ruling” with an adjective like “important,” or “terrible,” or “wonderful.” But this ruling is none of those. It’s a ruling, and I suppose it does set some sort of precedent, but thanks mainly to Adobe’s inept handling of the case, it does very little to clarify any of the above issues.

      • Richard Prince Finally Sued (Again) For Copyright Infringement Over His ‘Instagram’ Art

        Remember Richard Prince? He’s the well-known “appropriation artist” who was involved a few years ago in a key fair use case concerning his artwork. That case involved him taking photographs taken by another photographer, Patrick Cariou, of a bunch of Jamaican Rastafarians, and adding some minor modifications, blowing the images up and selling them as “art.” Whether or not you appreciate Prince’s art, the lawsuit raised some serious questions about whether or not it’s appropriate for judges to determine what is art and what is not. A district court determined that the works were infringing, but, thankfully, the appeals court overturned most of that ruling, declaring that the majority of Prince’s artowrk was fair use. Unfortunately, before the case could go any further, the case settled, so there was some murkiness over the precedent.

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