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09.06.15

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

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

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

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

  • Hardware

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

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

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

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

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

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Amazon, UPenn sued over student’s cyanide suicide

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

    • Japan lifts evacuation order for town near doomed nuke plant

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

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

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

  • Security

    • How small states prepare for cyber-war

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

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

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

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

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

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

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

    • US launches secret drone campaign in Syria

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

    • CIA Running Anti-ISIS Drone Campaign in Syria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • The CIA’s Drone War Comes to Syria

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

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

    • The Islamic State Conundrum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Forty Years Ago: Allende’s End

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

    • Obama’s Covert Drone War on Syria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Is the Islamic State Winning or Losing?

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

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

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

    • Can we trust Iran? Can they trust us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Andrew Niccol on the Drone Pilot Thriller, Good Kill

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Sanders: I wouldn’t end drone program

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Five dead in new Israeli raid on Syria

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

      [...]

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

    • SA researchers take on threat of autonomous weapons

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

    • More On-Air Shootings to Be Expected

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

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

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

    • In Order To Breathe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • UK plan to join Syria air strikes threatened by Corbyn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Assisting Al Qaeda

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

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

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

    • More than five months of conflict in Yemen

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

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

      Riyadh-led coalition begins offensive

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • 34th Senator Backs Iran Deal, Ensuring Implementation

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

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

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

      [...]

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

    • Nine protesters arrested at Volk Field

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Pakistan condemns US drone strike in North Waziristan

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

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

    • Pakistan: U.S. Drone Strike Kills 6

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

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Researcher Scoffs at Stonewalled CIA Request

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

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

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

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

    • Julian Assange gets paranoid about Harrods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Cryptic Clinton emails may refer to Iranian scientist

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

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

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

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

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

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

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

  • Finance

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Sanders pledges his campaign to save Democratic Party

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

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

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Report: Colombia collecting bulk data without warrants

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Civil Rights

    • US Turns Teen Into ‘Terrorist’ – OpEd

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

    • Former APA President, Cornell Professor Defends Cooperation With CIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Who Is Listening to Dick Cheney?

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Feinstein Slams New Book by Former CIA Officials

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

    • Canada files charges against Syrian officer in CIA rendition case

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

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

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

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

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

    • Mysterious Fuat Avni’s possible CIA ties

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

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

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

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

    • What’s Wrong with Police in America

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

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

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

    • Other Voices: Media is under fire again

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

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

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

    • 290 foreign agents exposed in Russia in 2014 – television

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

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

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

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

    • Death at sea

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

    • Argentina official says doors open to Syrian refugees

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

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

    • Canada less welcoming to refugees under Harper’s leadership

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

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

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

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

      It’s actually a call for unity.

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

      [...]

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Donald Trump’s Shaky Grasp on Immigration

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

    • Inside Ben Carson’s quiet surge

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

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

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

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

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

    • US commentators call for Australian-style gun law reform

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

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

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

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

09.05.15

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source meets bankers’ agility demands

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

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

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

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

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

  • Netflix Open Sources Sleepy Puppy XSS Flaw Detection Tool

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Improving Security for Bugzilla

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

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

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

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

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

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

      • Firefox is coming to Apple’s iOS devices

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

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • Five Ways Open Source Databases Are Best for Business

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

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

  • Education

    • Bringing Python into the classroom

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

    • Did you ever use open source tools in school?

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

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • IT certifications lose their luster among employers

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

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

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Corbyn Came Out Top – Sky Interactive Poll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Abusing Dead Syrian Children

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

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

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

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

    • Netanyahu arrest up for debate as UK petition hits target

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Why Indian nuclear stockpiles are not vexing America

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

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Hillary Clinton refuses to apologize for email choices

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

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

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

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

    • Decoding the current war in Syria: The WikiLeaks Files

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

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

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

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Call It By Its Name: Censorship

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

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

      Yet nobody calls them what they are: censors.

      Or crazy people.

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

  • Censorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Wikipedia founder defends decision to encrypt the site in China

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Putin’s Censorship Regime Now Reaches into the Past

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

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

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

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

    • Associate prof. studies censorship, surveillance on the Internet

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

      [...]

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

    • Terrorist slippery slope

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

    • Case of Vice reporters underlines Turkish crackdown on Internet freedom

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

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

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

    • 5 countries using anti-terror legislation to muzzle journalists

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

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

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

    • Cardiff removes Israeli football exhibition after protests

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

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

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

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Selective Demonisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • Whistleblowers File $100 Million Suit against NSA, FBI

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

    • Snowden: Russia ‘wrong’ to limit human rights

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

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

  • DRM/Wi-Fi

    • Tested: How Flash destroys your browser’s performance

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

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

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

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

    • Ubiquiti UniFi AP Pro

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

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

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

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

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

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

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

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

      • Rightscorp Lures Hollywood With ‘Popcorn Time Protection’

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

09.04.15

Patents Roundup: Apple Versus Android/Linux, Leigh Rothschild Versus Everyone, Patent Lawyers Versus Patent Reform and Progressivism

Posted in Apple, Patents, Samsung at 6:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Leigh Rothschild
Photo source: Intellectual Ventures

Summary: News collated which pertains to software patents, especially those which affect Free/libre software

TODAY’S series of links is divided based on themes, starting with what we deem most important.

Apple’s Attacks on Free Software

Joe Mullin is flabbergasted by Apple’s vicious assault on the Linux-powered platform that reduced the ‘i’ empire to rubble, with at most 18% market share (depending on the source and the geography).

“All that Apple does is dissemination of DRM, maximisation of (weaponised) patents, and exploitation of public ignorance/apathy to ‘sell’ (actually rent) proprietary software on overzealously locked-down hardware.”Android rose to unbeatable levels of dominance despite Apple’s assault (remember that Apple started it 5 years ago) and in one legal case alone there are now “3,200 documents [...] not including exhibits.” Imagine the cost of legal defence here. Apple and Samsung are still fighting in court and “Koh’s recent orders suggest she is fed up with the intense litigation by both parties,” Mullin notes. “The case docket for the first of two Apple v. Samsung lawsuits now has more than 3,200 documents in it, not including exhibits. Last week, Koh issued an order prohibiting the parties from making any further additions without permission.”

This is, at the very least, deterrence. More importantly, it’s Apple greed (it wants billions of dollars from Samsung). Apple is just hoping that companies with pockets less deep than Samsung’s will simply give up and pay Apple for profits made through distribution of Android (Free software). This is clearly an attack on Free software, so anyone still insisting that Apple likes “Open Source” is about as delusional as people who deem ‘i’ products superior and worthy of the high price tags.

Several years ago we openly and unambiguously called for a boycott of everything “Apple”. The company is malicious and it is dangerous to the future of Free software. All that Apple does is dissemination of DRM, maximisation of (weaponised) patents, and exploitation of public ignorance/apathy to ‘sell’ (actually rent) proprietary software on overzealously locked-down hardware.

Rothschild Connected Devices ‘Innovations’

Joe Mullin, covering and citing the original rant from the EFF, expands on Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, which is essentially a patent troll. He provides some details on what Leigh Rothschild, whom the world’s biggest patent troll (Intellectual Ventures, Microsoft-connected) glamourises, has been up to:

Patent-holding company Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations (RCDI) owns US Patent No. 8,788,090, which was granted in 2014 and describes a system where a “remote server” “transmits” a “product preference” via a “communication module.” Using those broad claims, RCDI has sued more than 20 companies for making things that connect to the Internet. The company sued ADT (PDF) over its Pulse product that allows for things like adjusting a thermostat.

The patent relates to an application filed back in 2006 that essentially describes an Internet drink mixer. A consumer can customize products by connecting to a server on “the global computer network, e.g., the Internet,” which can then “provide product preferences of a user to a product or a mixing device, e.g., a product or beverage dispenser.”

This is an example not just of patent trolling but also software patents, which are the weapon favoured among patent trolls. If the latter can be eliminated, much of the former too will vanish (go bankrupt). This is why we emphasise the need to combat software patents (scope), not just “trolls”, however one defines them (definitions tend to vary somewhat as some very large companies act indistinguishably from classic patent trolls or patent sharks).

Changes Afoot

There are more new signs of the US patent system tightening. Yesterday for example Foley & Lardner LLP published an analysis of another criterion (not “abstract”) by which patents can be squashed in US courts, even the notorious Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). To quote the analysis: “As noted in the Federal Circuit decision, Dow Chemical Company asserted selected claims of U.S. Patent No. 5,847,053 and U.S. Patent No. 6,111,023 against NOVA Chemicals Corporation (Canada) and NOVA Chemicals Inc. (Delaware). A jury found the asserted claims to be infringed and not invalid, and the Federal Circuit affirmed, holding, among other things, “that the asserted claims were not indefinite.” The district court then conducted a bench trial for a supplemental damages period through the expiration date of both patents, granted $30M in supplemental damages in the form of lost profits and reasonable royalties, and denied Dow’s request for enhanced damages. NOVA appealed, and Dow cross-appealed.”

Earlier this year we wrote about the Nautilus case. This too is relevant here. “Applying the Nautilus standard,” says Foley & Lardner LLP, “the Federal Circuit held that existence of multiple methods that could lead to different results and the absence of guidance in the patent or prosecution history as to which method should be used rendered the claims indefinite because they “fail to inform, with reasonable certainty, those skilled in the art about the scope of the invention.” The court therefore reversed the $30M supplemental damages award.”

This ought to discourage litigation, filing of new patent applications that are similar in nature to the above, and generally feed back (like in a loop) into the US patent system so as to modify examination guidelines, in very much the same way that Alice has done since last year. See this new article titled “After Alice: A Feedback Loop of Software Patent Invalidity”. The article comes from the pro-patents media (whose audience is patent lawyers) and it’s summarised as follows: “Ever since a major patent decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court last year, patents have seemed to be invalidated right and left. But is that a result of the decision itself, or because of the feedback loop caused by the process by which patents are challenged?”

They are trying to dismiss the legitimacy of the decisions by casting them as an “echo chamber” of sorts. Well, that’s what one might expect from the patent profiteers, even thought some patent lawyers’ blogs already acknowledge that software patents may be on their death throes.

IP Kat, a blog run by patent lawyers (and other monopolies like copyrights, trademarks, etc.), is still openly concerned about voices of reason, or published opinions from people who don’t profit from this corrupt system of protectionism by patent monopolies. Watch this latest dismissal of The Economist‘s pair of articles.

“No,” insist sthe patents proponent, “what these articles are ultimately intended for is to try and set the narrative by which the patent system is discussed. To this end, economics is merely a hand-maiden. In so doing, The Economist joins a long tradition. We have seen the struggle to control the patent narrative played out several times in the recent past.”

OK, so the lawyers are upset at an opposing (not dissenting) view and insist that The Economist is basically trolling (in the Internet troll sense of the word). “No,” continue this particular lawyer (second in this blog this week to write about The Economist‘s articles from one month ago), “this Kat is not an IP Luddite. The patent system and the laws underlying it can certainly be improved. But this is not what the two pieces in The Economist are about.”

It was perfectly clear what The Economist meant to say. Rather than tip-toeing and making decorative, minor changes to a broken system (like all of these proposed ‘reforms’ we keep hearing about) the writers/editors at The Economist wish to just scrap the entire lot, potentially starting from scratch (if at all). Seeing the patent lawyers squirm over this very idea is hardly surprising. Their want their share. They want to tax everything, even if nobody needs them at all. █

“We cannot hope to own it all, so instead we should try to create the largest possible market and insert ourselves as a small tax on that market.”

–Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft at the time (now a patent troll)

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • New Cyber Threat Detection Tool Made Open Source

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

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

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

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

  • We wrote an open source bank parser

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

  • Events

    • Ada Initiative runs out of puff, shuts its doors

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • FossaMail Open-Source Mail Client Launches Update

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

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

  • Databases

    • Five Ways Open Source Databases Are Limited

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

  • CMS

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

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

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open source-distributions for Romanian public administrations

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

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

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

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

      [...]

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

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

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

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

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

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

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

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

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

  • Privacy

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

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

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

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

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

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • There’s still a chance to save WiFi

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

09.03.15

Microsoft’s Vista 10 Still a Failure, So Focus Shifts to Attacks on GNU/Linux, Android

Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 2:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Hopping to the competitor’s side of the fence/gate, just like in Troy

A fence

Summary: Vista 10 adoption is already plateauing (at very low levels considering the zero-cost ‘upgrade’) and Microsoft is trying to assert or exploit (patent) monopolies where adoption and market growth are extremely high (Free software)

Barely anybody is using Microsoft’s ‘new’ (rebranded) browser, according to this article which cites an IDG report, which in turn uses Microsoft-friendly data sources such as Net Applications. That’s despite Microsoft’s dirty and anti-competitive tricks regarding the default Web browser (Microsoft overriding users’ preferences) [1, 2] in Vista 10. Microsoft Emil, who is writing lots of propaganda pieces for Vista 10 over at VentureBeat these days, is trying to give a terribly false impression by passing the gross distortion/illusion that Vista 10 now has majority market share (extreme cherry-picking) while even the most Microsoft-friendly surveys put its market share at under 5%, instantaneousness debunking Microsoft’s unverified claims of 75 million Vista 10 ‘users’ (however Microsoft defines these). Matt Weinberger, in the mean time, comes out with another promotional Microsoft piece advocating a new Microsoft monopoly (because the operating system monopoly has been lost to Android, GNU/Linux, and so on). One Microsoft apologist (very Windows-centric) is now trash-talking GNU/Linux and devaluing privacy in an effort to convince people to adopt Vista 10 and avoid GNU/Linux. How much more blatant can it get? Microsoft doesn’t “love Linux”, it just hates it. The Microsoft boosters truly fear Free software and they’re pretty bad at hiding it.

“Expect Microsoft to continue wielding patents against GNU/Linux and Android (it’s still happening), especially now that Windows is in a state of crisis.”Android is currently being besieged by Microsoft. A site that is affiliated with Microsoft’s MSN (and by its own admission “owns shares of Microsoft”) is trying to promote Microsoft inside Android, a former Microsoft lackey (see her career history, before she scrubbed it off her profile) is promoting Skype on Android, and Ketan Pratap says “Microsoft’s Push Into Google’s Android Is Good News for Users”. That’s almost as foolish or terrible as saying that the Trojan horse was good for Troy.

Microsoft is viciously attacking Google, Android, and ChromeOS using patents. Make no mistake about it, there is extensive evidence of that and not even Microsoft would deny it when asked. When Microsoft approaches Android et al. it’s part of an effort to weaken competitors, not contribute or complement them.

Patents are an ugly business. They’re offensive, not defensive, but tabloids like Gizmodo make gossip out of Google’s patent search, adding a ‘sexy’ angle to it. Google is no fan of patents and it tries combating them using prior art searches.

There is a practice we’ve been covering here in relation to patent attacks to Android. Tim Sparapani calls this “Attack of the Patent Privateers”, alluding to a system of cartels that collude against competitors (assuring one thrives with protectionism, not innovation). As Sparapani puts is, companies like Apple or Microsoft “are becoming more clever about using – or misusing, depending on your perspective – the patent system to extract funds from competitors or thwart others’ growth. This harms America’s best companies and most promising startups.

“One example of this growth is the emergence of so-called patent privateering, which contributes to an ever-greater amount of frivolous or abusive patent litigation. Privateering is a pleasant euphemism for empowering a pirate to attack your competitors for profit. Patent privateering occurs when a company lends or sells a portion of its patents to another litigious company to sue alleged patent infringers who are all too often the competitors of the original patent recipient company that was under the impression it had licensed the entire portfolio.”

That’s what Microsoft is doing to Android and Google, using Nokia‘s patents in MOSAID/Conversant‘s hands, to give just one example. Microsoft even does this more directly with Vringo. Sparapani uses the word “pirate”, not “troll”, to refer to the types of goons whom Microsoft empowers to attack competitors.

Patents are thankfully collapsing with developments such as the Alice determination. Patents on software lose their value, as do their profiteers, based on this latest analysis of the Marathon Patent Group, which (as the name implies), is not a producing company. This is basically nothing but a bunch of goons for hire — people who will use patents to attack by proxy (hence retaliatory litigation becomes an impossibility). To quote the latest on this:

According to Zacks, “Marathon Patent Group Inc. is a patent and patent rights acquisition and licensing company. The Company acquires patents from a wide-range of patent holders from individual inventors to Fortune 500 companies. It serves its clients through two complementary business units: IP Services and IP Licensing and Enforcement business. Marathon Patent Group, Inc. is based in Alexandria, Virginia. “

Expect Microsoft to continue wielding patents against GNU/Linux and Android (it's still happening), especially now that Windows is in a state of crisis. Microsoft will do this not only directly (blackmail using patents) but also indirectly, using entities like the one above (we wrote about several of them before).

Microsoft does not want peace, it wants domination. As long as this remains the case, peace will be reached with Microsoft only when Microsoft is practically dead. █

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

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

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

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

  • Gandi Joins Open Source Initiative Corporate Sponsorship Program

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

  • Building efficiency software available as open source code

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

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

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

  • The True Internet of Things

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

  • Events

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

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

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

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

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

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

        Google released Chrome 45 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android yesterday, and today we’re learning that the Android update includes support for a new feature called Chrome custom tabs. You can download the new Chrome version now from Google Play, but you won’t see Chrome custom tabs right away — today’s news is primarily aimed at developers. That said, Google has partnered with a few apps already — Feedly, The Guardian, Medium, Player.fm, Skyscanner, Stack Overflow, Tumblr, and Twitter will support custom tabs “in the coming weeks.”

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

    • How open-source MySQL keeps Eurovision live

      The European Broadcasting Union, one of the world’s largest broadcasting networks and the organisation behind the Eurovision Song Contest, has sought help to manage the open-source MySQL databases that power its online video and audio streaming services.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.0 review – Good stuff

      I woke up this morning babe, and the Internet was storming, inside of me. And when I get that feeling I know I need some LibreOffice testing. Yes. What happened was, I opened the browser, like, and I was, like, there’s a new, like, LibreOffice, like, and it’s a whole-number version. Yay.

      In all seriousness, LibreOffice 5.0 got me really excited. Yes, I know, it was an almost arbitrary increment of a minor version to a major one, much like Mozilla did with Firefox a few years back. Still, I totally liked the previous version, and for the first time in many years, it showed real, actual potential of being a viable alternative to payware solutions. Let’s see in which direction this latest edition carries the good news and all that hope.

    • Is Office 365 really cheaper than going open source?

      The claim certainly generated plenty of headlines about the benefits of moving from OpenOffice to Office 365. However, it seems that, from the report, some of those savings are tied to the specific scenario facing the local authority in question, while others would diminish over time, as the bulk of the cost difference stems from estimates of lost productivity during years immediately after shifting to OpenOffice.

    • Should I switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice or Microsoft Office? [Ed: yes, it’s Microsoft Jack promoting Microsoft Office again]

  • Sleepy Puppy

  • Funding

    • Open Source’s money issue

      These past years -and months- we have had several examples how lack of funding can cut a project’s ability to develop, patch and maintain its codebase and by project I mean developers not getting adequate money, if no money at all, for what they do. There is really two sides to the same coin here. There’s the one where an entire industry re-uses entire FOSS stacks or components, sometimes without even acknowledging it licence-wise or even just in name. And there’s the other side, where the same industry will not compensate anyone upstream, because the license terms enables simple reuse and distribution of those software components.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD on Beagle Bone Black (with networking)

      I set out to run FreeBSD on my Beagle Bone Black (now dubbed “smurf” by the kids on account of it’s small and blue), for network services. My DSL modem is a crappy under-configurable thing, but I don’t dare to start hacking on it directly because it runs the telephony side of things, too. So I decided to use the Beagle Bone Black to take control of my home network.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Code ninjas earn “belts” with CoderDojo

      But where, one may ask, will we as a global workforce find the next generation of bright young programmers, hardware engineers, and system administrators? This is the problem being addressed—in part—by CoderDojo, an Ireland-based international organization of more than 700 coding clubs worldwide. By engaging young people ages 7-17 in informal, creative environments, independent clubs of youngsters can learn web and application development along with other opportunities to explore technology and learn what excites them. Volunteer adults lead the local clubs, called Dojos, and teams of mentors and helpers are working together to keep the Dojo active and healthy. The kids are usually referred to as Ninjas and can complete activities and earn belts as their skills grow, although most clubs are using color-coded USB bracelets to signify ranks.

    • Stupid RCU Tricks: Hand-over-hand traversal of linked list using SRCU

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Trackpoint falling off Page 10? NOT ON MY WATCH

      Sure, sure the mouse won on desktop and the trackpad won on laptop. IBM’s magnificent Trackpoint is a tiny minority share of the pointer market on both, maybe even headed for extinction. Even Lenovo has been leaving it off some ‘Thinkpads’.

    • Intel GPU memory bandwidth

      Two days ago, I commented I was seeing only 1/10th or so of the theoretical bandwidth my Intel GPU should have been able to push, and asked if anyone could help be figure out the discrepancy. Now, several people (including the helpful people at #intel-gfx) helped me understand more of the complete picture, so I thought I’d share:

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Earth has ‘lost more than half its trees’ since humans first started cutting them down

      The planet of the trees has given way to the planet of the apes. The Earth has lost more than half of its trees since humans first learned how to wield the axe, scientists have found.

      A remarkable study has calculated that there are about 3 trillion trees on the planet today but this represents just 45 per cent of the total number of trees that had existed before the rise of humans.

      Using a combination of satellite images, data from forestry researchers on the ground and supercomputer number-crunching, scientists have for the first time been able to accurately estimate the quantity of trees growing on all continents except Antarctica.

  • Finance

    • Walmart and Walker: Always Low Wages

      What do Governor Scott Walker and Walmart have in common? They talk pay raises in public while cheating their workers of pay.

      When Walmart announced with great fanfare that it was boosting pay for frontline workers, CMD questioned the spin. After all, Walmart is regularly forced to pay back wages between 2007-2012 amounting to an astonishing $30 million according to a U.S. Senate report. This week, Bloomberg reported that Walmart is cutting hours for its workers, robbing many of the benefit of the recent pay hike.

    • The Great Wealth Transfer to the London Elite

      The Guardian has a fascinating piece on house prices which deserves to be read and studied in detail. In London in 2013 the median house price had reached 300,000 while the median salary was 24,600. House prices are 12.2 x salary. That means it is in practice impossible for working people, without inherited wealth, to buy a house.

      But the point is, that it should be equally impossible to rent a house. Landlords look for a rental return of approximately 6% of rental value. So that would put median rent in London at around 18,000 pa, which is a realistic figure. But nobody on a salary of 24,600 before tax can pay 18,000 pa in rent. So we should be at a stage where it is impossible for Londoners who have not inherited homes to live there at all.

    • UK welfare spending: how much does each benefit really cost?

      Benefit spending is constantly in the news but how much do we really know about where the benefits money goes in the UK?

      Well, we have collected the data as part of our annual analysis of UK public spending. It shows how benefit spending dominates the UK’s budget each year – but it also breaks it down in detail.

      What it shows is that the Department for Welfare and Pensions is the biggest spending department in the UK – spending £166.98bn in 2011-12, which is Of that huge sum, £159bn was spent on benefits – an increase of 1.1% on the previous year. That is 23% of all public spending.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Did ‘Ferguson Effect’ Cause Murder Wave? No. Is There a Murder Wave? Unclear

      But there’s a more fundamental problem with the Times story than suggesting that criticizing police violence is (maybe) responsible for a rise in homicides: It’s not clear that the rise in homicides that the story is pegged to actually exists as a nationwide phenomenon.

      The evidence for this supposed murder wave seems to be the responses the Times got when it called police departments across the country. After the story’s lead detailed a rise in homicides in Milwaukee, the story continued: “More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago.” That’s 30 out of a number that the New York Times does not disclose, making it a numerator without a denominator—though the story makes reference to the (steady) crime rate in Newark, which is the 69th largest city in the country, so depending on how thorough the Times‘ survey was, it’s possible that half or more of the cities it contacted did not report any increase in violence.

      And when the story rephrases the data, it’s clear that “increases in violence” is a flexible concept: “Yet with at least 35 of the nation’s cities reporting increases in murders, violent crimes or both, according to a recent survey, the spikes are raising alarm among urban police chiefs.” How many cities actually had a rise in homicides–the statistic that justifies the story’s lead about “cities across the nation…seeing a startling rise in murders”? Remarkably, the Times story doesn’t say.

    • Fox’s Bill O’Reilly Accuses Jorge Ramos Of Enabling Murderers By Opposing His Proposed “Kate’s Law”

      O’REILLY: Now, we want Kate’s Law, which would say, if an aggravated felon — someone convicted of an aggravated felony in the United States is deported and comes back, mandatory five year prison, can get more, all right, in a federal penitentiary. You support that?

      RAMOS: No. Because I don’t think–

      O’REILLY: It’s outrageous. It’s outrageous.

      RAMOS: –you are approaching the problem in a global way. And this is a problem. I’m not here to be defend criminals.

    • Sean Hannity Calls Black Lives Matter A “Racist Group Threatening To Kill Cops And Kill White People”

  • Censorship

    • Twitter Suspends ‘Pirate’ Site Accounts Over Dubious Claims

      Twitter has suspended the accounts of two popular torrent and linking sites in response to dubious takedown notices. The accounts in question didn’t link to any infringing material on Twitter, but were called out because their websites allow people to download pirated movies.

  • Privacy

    • HIV clinic data breach

      “EU needs to finish its work on data protection so that better enforcement and fines of 2% of turnover make this a board room issue for every organisation.”

    • Top HIV Clinic Accidentally Reveals The Identity Of Hundreds Of Its Patients

      The e-newsletter, which contains the latest information about HIV services and treatment, is sent out monthly but normally the details of recipients are hidden. Instead the full list of recipients was visible, therefore revealing the fact that everyone in the address bar is HIV-positive. The clinic then sent an email trying to recall the original one, alerting patients to the mistake, before sending a further email apologising.

    • Judge: Rights of ‘tens of millions violated’ by NSA phone data program

      A federal judge, whose ruling against the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data was overturned by an appeals court last week, maintained Wednesday that he believed the surveillance program violated the constitutional rights of “tens of millions of people every single day.”

      With the case back in his court, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon urged conservative activist Larry Klayman to amend his challenge to the NSA program, suggesting that he would again rule to block the bulk collection before it expires Nov. 29.

    • Episode V: The Snoopers’ Charter Strikes Back!
    • Three French NGOs Challenge French International Surveillance

      Today, the non-profit ISPs FDN and the FDN Federation as well as La Quadrature du Net announced the introduction of two legal challenges before the French Council of State against the Internet surveillance activities of French foreign intelligence services (DGSE). As the French government plans the introduction of a new bill on international surveillance, these challenges underline the need for a thorough oversight of surveillance measures.

  • Civil Rights

    • When the Politics Has to Stop

      There are times when political considerations must give way to the relief of immediate human suffering. The current refugee crisis is one of those times and the UK must take genuine refugees on the same scale as Germany, starting immediately.

    • 6 charts and a map that show where Europe’s refugees are coming from – and the perilous journeys they are taking

      More migrants and refugees are arriving in Europe than ever recorded before as war, persecution and poverty continues to drive people from their homes – and the numbers are still rising.

      One in every 122 people in the world is currently either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum because the “world is a mess”, according to the head of the UN’s refugee agency.

    • Germany raises estimate on refugee arrivals to 800,000 this year

      218,221 asylum applications filed in first half of 2015, and government more than doubles forecast for year from original 300,000

    • British public spreads ‘refugees welcome’ message online

      Yesterday’s tragic images of a young Syrian boy washed ashore on a beach in Turkey have shocked many Britons into using social media to say that those fleeing war and persecution are welcome in the UK.

      People across Britain are calling on the government to address the plight of those trying to escape conflict in their home countries.

    • We asked David Cameron if Britain can do more to help refugees like Aylan Kurdi. His answer? ‘We’re doing enough’

      David Cameron has responded to photographs of a dead Syrian child washed up on a Turkish beach by telling The Independent that Britain is doing enough to help refugees.

      A string of politicians and charities have urged the Prime Minister to do more to improve the desperate plight of those fleeing war-torn countries, following The Independent’s publication of the powerful images of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi.

      Thousands have signed a petition calling on the Government to ensure the UK works with other European Union countries to set and welcome a quota of refugees.

      The pictures were sent to Downing Street, whose response suggests the Prime Minister is content the UK should not do any more to improve the ongoing crisis.

    • Jeremy Corbyn blasts David Cameron for ‘wholly inadequate’ response to refugee crisis after images of drowned Syrian child emerge

      Jeremy Corbyn has hit out at David Cameron over his “wholly inadequate” response to the Syrian refugee crisis, after the emergence of powerful images showing a dead child washed up on beach in Turkey.

      The Labour leadership front-runner said Britain was being “shamed by our European neighbours” by refusing to take in more than just a few hundred Syrian refugees and said we were failing in our duty under international law and “as human beings” to offer those fleeing conflict a place of safety.

    • Refugee crisis: David Cameron is placing himself on the wrong side of history

      Downing Street isn’t saying whether David Cameron has seen the photo of the little boy in the red shirt and the blue shorts. I’m not entirely sure why. Actually, the little boy is still wearing his shoes. I’ve only just noticed that. I think it’s his shoes that make it look like he’s only sleeping.

      Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to look at it. In fact, he shouldn’t have to. None of us should.

      There are lots of very difficult decisions you have to make as prime minister. Whether to go to war. When to make peace. Where the axe of austerity should fall. Where the hand should be stayed.

    • Houston, We Have a Problem: False Equivalencies on Police Violence

      Just as there is no moral equivalence of a rapist and the rape victim, there is none between the police and Blacks. It is nowhere near a 50/50 equivalence of blame between the police and Blacks, though it is not surprising that there may be some Black pastors or some in the NAACP who will equally tell police and Blacks to tone down the rhetoric, or worse tell only Blacks to do so. It is not a school ground situation where a principal may tell two boys who are fighting to just shake hands and make peace.

    • Journalists arrested on terrorism charges in Turkey for using crypto software

      Three journalists working with Vice News have been charged with “engaging in terrorist activity” on behalf of ISIL (ISIS), because one of them used encryption software. A Turkish official told Al Jazeera: “The main issue seems to be that the [journalists'] fixer uses a complex encryption system on his personal computer that a lot of ISIL militants also utilise for strategic communications.” There are no details as to what that “complex encryption system” might be, but it seems likely that it is nothing more than the PGP email encryption software, or perhaps the The Onion Router (TOR) system, both of which are very widely used, and not just by ISIL.

      The correspondent and cameraman for Vice News, who are both British, and their fixer, who is Iraqi but Turkey-based, were arrested last Thursday in Diyarbakir, located in south-eastern Turkey, and an important centre for the country’s Kurdish population. According to The Guardian, the Vice News journalists were covering “recent clashes between Turkish security forces and the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement, the youth wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).”

    • New York TSA agent charged with molesting traveler in bogus search

      A Transportation Security Administration agent at New York’s LaGuardia Airport was arrested after being accused of luring a woman to an airport bathroom under the pretense of a security search and molesting her, authorities said on Friday.

      The suspect, identified by officials as Maxie Oquendo, 40, was wearing a TSA uniform when he brought the 22-year-old traveler to an upstairs bathroom and molested her on Tuesday night, according to Joe Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

  • DRM

    • FCC Fires Wi-Fi Router Salvo in Battle of DRM vs. Open Source

      Digital Rights Management (DRM), the backbone of copyright protection for every form of digital property from games and software to ebooks and music is finally coming to blows with its natural enemy: the open-source software movement.

      The fight is rooted in the longstanding belief of organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that DRM and open source are “fundamentally incompatible” and comes to the fore on an unlikely front: Wi-Fi routers.

TechBytes Episode 89: Chromebooks, Privacy, and Vista 10

Posted in TechBytes at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

TechBytes 2015

Direct download as Ogg (2:14:03, 59.0 MB) | High-quality MP3 (30.7 MB)

Summary: An episode which focuses on the rise of Chromebooks, serious issues pertaining to privacy, media bias, and the demise of Windows

This is the first show to have been recorded this year and hopefully the resumption of TechBytes as a weekly of bi-weekly show. We are hoping to facilitate live broadcasting of the show as well (coming soon). The show officially turns 5 in just 4 weeks from now.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows.

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09.02.15

Links 2/9/2015: Chromebooks and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Rackspace developer advocate on getting started with open source

    There are several reasons. If you have an idea for a utility or framework or whatever, and you would like the support of an entire community of developers, open source is a great way to go. If you want your code “out there” so it can be reviewed and critiqued (which will improve your skills), open source is a good solution. If you are just out of school and want to establish yourself and show off your coding skills, start an open source project. Finally, if you’re altruistic and just want to help the software community at large, yes, please, start an open source project.

  • Open Source Router Makes Production Debut

    Version 2.0 of CloudRouter , an open source router designed for the cloud, is actually two versions, one based on CentOS Linux, for network operators looking for a stable version with long support cycle, and another based on Fedora for rapid iteration of new features, Jay Turner, CloudRouter project lead and senior director of DevOps at IIX , tells Light Reading.

  • CloudRouter Project Brings SDN Services to the Cloud
  • CloudRouter 2.0 now generally available for the enterprise
  • Open Source CloudRouter Goes to Production

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OpenStack: Open source transparency among the clouds

      Being a company with a core value to “Embrace Open Source,” when it came to launching a public cloud service it made sense to want that offering grounded upon powerful, versatile open source software that could deliver scalability, resiliency, and security. Because of that, it was an easy choice to base it upon OpenStack’s open source platform – and here’s why.

    • Hadoop economics is driving big data push into the enterprise, says WANdisco CEO

      More businesses may be trialling Hadoop within their organisations to gain insight into unstructured data, but it is the ability to cut storage costs that will drive mainstream enterprise adoption, according to WANdisco’s CEO.

      David Richards, the chief exec of the company which is co-headquartered between Silicon Valley and Sheffield, says that fast-growing data demands mean that those who do not adopt open source tools such as Hadoop are at a competitive disadvantage.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5.0.1 Open-Source Productivity Suite at a Glance

      Ever since the LibreOffice open-source office suite was forked from the Oracle OpenOffice suite in 2010, its community of developers has been working to improve it. The latest evolution of LibreOffice, version 5.0.1, came out Aug. 27 and provides users with new features and improved performance. LibreOffice bundles multiple components as part of the suite, including the Writer Document, Calc Spreadsheet, Impress Presentation, Draw, Math Formula and Base Database applications. Being able to import and export in multiple formats has always been an important element of LibreOffice’s interoperability capabilities. In LibreOffice 5.0.1, Writer now has improved Apple Pages document import capabilities. For PDF export, the ability to time-stamp a document is now enabled. Manipulating images is now improved across the suite, with the ability to crop an image with a mouse. The Calc spreadsheet now benefits from improved formula handling as well as new conditional formatting capabilities. LibreOffice is typically available as the default office suite in many Linux distributions and is also freely available for Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows applications. Here, eWEEK takes a look at key features of LibreOffice 5.0.1.

  • Education

    • Linux Format 202 – Coding Academy
    • Open Source Learning

      So for this issue that coincides with pupils around the country heading back to school, we’re supplying our own guide to help you and your children get a head start with coding in Python, using the Pi at school, choosing the best languages for the jobs you want to do and taking a first step into developing web applications.

  • Funding

    • How to make money from open source software

      Last month we looked at the argument that the open source business model is flawed because selling maintenance and support subscriptions doesn’t provide companies with enough revenue to differentiate their products from the underlying open source software or to compete with the sales and marketing efforts of proprietary software companies. The argument was advanced by Peter Levine, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.

    • Community Versus Funding: What Open Source Needs Most

      At the recent Open Daylight Summit, Margaret Chiosi, the Distinguished Network Architect said, “We don’t need money. We need participants. We need people to work on use cases and bust things out.” In other words, the open source community is at a point where it needs involvement more than dollars.

      Open source increasingly depends on end-users who will create code, contribute documentation, and innovate to make open source projects relevant and useful. In order for open source to continue its upwards trajectory, fully engaged end-users that together create a vibrant and active community are necessary.

  • BSD

    • LLVM 3.7.0 Officially Released

      LLVM 3.7 along with sub-projects like Clang 3.7.0 have been officially released this afternoon.

      Hans Wennborg announced 3.7.0 a few minutes ago on the mailing list. “This release contains the work of the LLVM community over the past six months: full OpenMP 3.1 support (behind a flag), the On Request Compilation (ORC) JIT API, a new backend for Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF), Control Flow Integrity checking, as well as improved optimizations, new Clang warnings, many bug fixes, and more.”

  • Programming

    • Bloke clicks GitHub ‘commit’ button in Visual Studio, gets slapped with $6,500 AWS bill

      A web developer from South Africa said a bug in a tool for using Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE with code-sharing site GitHub inadvertently exposed his sensitive data – and the error cost him more than $6,500 (£4,250) in just a few hours.

      Carlo van Wyk of Cape Town–based Humankode said he used the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015 to commit one of his local Git code repositories to a private repository on GitHub.

      Unfortunately, however – and unknown to van Wyk at the time – a bug in the extension caused his code to be committed to a public GitHub repository, rather than a private one as he intended.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Blood moon has some expecting end of the world

      There will be blood in September — literally, according to the Internet postings of end-times believers.

      The night of September 27-28 will bring a “blood moon.” To skywatchers, it simply refers to the copper color the moon takes on during an eclipse, but to some Christian ministers, the fourth and final eclipse in a tetrad — four consecutive total lunar eclipses, each separated by six lunar months — fulfills biblical prophecy of the apocalypse. (The first three in the series took place April 15, 2014; October 8, 2014; and April 4, 2015.)

      In promotion for his 2013 book “Four Blood Moons,” Christian minister John Hagee claimed that the tetrad was a sign of the end.

      “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015,” he said.

    • 65 per cent of Europe’s electronic waste is stolen or mismanaged

      Something stinks about Europe’s trash. A two-year investigation into Europe’s electronic waste found that most of it is stolen, mismanaged, illegally traded, or just plain thrown away.

      The European Union has guidelines on how to correctly dispose of unwanted electronics, like IT equipment, household appliances, or medical devices. But, according to a report published Sunday by the United Nations University and INTERPOL, only 35 per cent of electronic waste was disposed of correctly in 2012.

  • Security

    • Sick of memorizing passwords? A Turing Award winner came up with this algorithmic trick

      Manuel Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who won the Turing Award in 1995, has been working on what he calls “human computable” passwords that are not only relatively secure but also don’t require us to memorize a different one for each site. Instead, we learn ahead of time an algorithm and a personal, private key, and we use them with the website’s name to create and re-create our own unique passwords on the fly for any website at any time.

    • Car thieves use ‘mystery device’ to break into vehicles

      A car manufacturer recalled more than a million cars following security concerns about car hacking, as the National Insurance Crime Bureau issued an alert about a “mystery device” being used to break into vehicles by defeating the electronic locking system of later-model cars.

      So-called connected car “convenience technology” could put consumers at risk.

      “Right now, what has happened is the digital key fob has become a way for someone to steal your car,” NICB investigator James “Herb” Price said.

    • Security Considerations When Moving from VMs to Containers

      We recently ran a sponsored series from Fox Technologies on Linux.com. We want to thank the company for its support and for sharing useful information for SysAdmins and developers alike. Fox Technologies is continuing the conversation with a free webinar September 17 that will address security considerations in moving from VMs to containers. More information about this webinar is below.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Man convicted of baking dog in oven back in jail

      A man convicted of a gruesome crime involving a dog is back in jail Tuesday morning.

      Joel Clark was convicted of torturing or mutilating an animal, for baking a dog in an oven.

      Just last week, a judge sentenced him to home detention at Good News Ministries and community service with an animal rescue. Clark was not allowed to have direct contact with the animals.

    • Why wind — and soon solar — are already cheaper than fossil fuels

      Citigroup has published an analysis of the costs of various energy sources called “Energy Darwinism II.” It concludes that if all the costs of generation are included (known as the levelized cost of energy), renewables turn out to be cheaper than fossil fuels and a “benefit rather than a cost to society,” RenewEconomy reports.

      “Capital costs are often cited by the promoters of fossil fuels as evidence that coal and gas are, and will, remain cheaper than renewable energy sources such as wind and gas. But this focuses on the short-term only — a trap repeated by opponents of climate action and clean energy, who focus on the upfront costs of policies.

      Actually, fuel costs can “account for 80 per cent of the cost of gas-fired generation, and more than half the cost of coal,” RenewEconomy says.

    • Experts call for immediate halt to £7,000-per-badger cull

      Three senior scientists who collectively produced two decades of government research on controlling badgers to reduce bovine TB are among a group of eminent experts to call for an immediate halt to the badger cull. The intervention comes as figures reveal the government has spent nearly £7,000 killing each badger so far.

      Professor Lord Krebs, Professor John Bourne and Professor Ranald Munro write of their disappointment that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has extended the controversial cull to Dorset and called on it to immediately reconsider its decision to continue culling badgers.

    • US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia

      On Sunday, the New York Times maintained a long, proud tradition of uncritically repeating official claims that the US—despite having twice the population, eight times the military budget and a nominal economy almost ten times as large—is “lagging behind” Russia on a key military strategic objective…

      [...]

      So here we have it: Pro-NATO think tanks and military brass feed a narrative to the Times, the Times prints it with little skepticism, then these very same forces turn around and use this reporting to justify its military buildup. The crucial question as to whether or not America is objectively “lagging behind” is never really approached critically.

      More importantly, the normative question as to whether the US has any intrinsic obligation or right to maintain parity with Russia in the Arctic is never brought up. The assumption is just taken for granted, and once it is, US military officials and their friendly establishment press are off to the races debating how—not if—they can amass more military brass in another corner of the globe.

      [...]

      This is nothing new, of course. Ominous warnings about “gaps” with the Russians are a decades-long tradition in US and Western media. Over the past few years alone, the US has “lagged behind” the dreaded Russians in the following departments:

      Cyber security

      Online and traditional propaganda

      Space race

      “Military tactics”

      Nuclear technology

      Now let’s remember: Russia’s military budget is one-eighth the size of the US’s—and 1/14th as large as NATO’s cumulative $1 trillion in annual military spending. But we’ve been here before. During the Cold War, the public was constantly told the US was “lagging behind” Russia in developing enough nuclear weapons.

    • WTO Ruling Against India’s Solar Push Threatens Climate, Clean Energy

      The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday ruled against India over its national solar energy program in a case brought by the U.S. government, sparking outrage from labor and environmental advocates.

      As power demands grow in India, the country’s government put forth a plan to create 100,000 megawatts of energy from solar cells and modules, and included incentives to domestic manufacturers to use locally-developed equipment.

  • Finance

    • Putin says dump dollar

      Russian President Vladimir Putin has drafted a bill that aims to eliminate the US dollar and the euro from trade between CIS countries.

      This means the creation of a single financial market between Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and other countries of the former Soviet Union.

    • The Washington Post and the Federal Reserve Cult

      It’s always dangerous when followers of an insular cult gain positions of power. Unfortunately, that appears to be the case with the Washington Post editorial board and the Federal Reserve Board cultists.

      The Federal Reserve Board cultists adhere to a bizarre belief that the 19 members (12 voting) of the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) live in a rarified space where the narrow economic concerns of specific interest groups don’t impinge on their thinking. According to the cultists, when the Fed sits down to decide on its interest rate policy, they are acting solely for the good of the country.

      Those of us who live in the reality-based community know that the Fed is hugely responsive to the interests of the financial sector. There are many reasons for this. First, the 12 Fed district banks are largely controlled by the banks within the district, which directly appoint one-third of the bank’s directors. The presidents of these banks occupy 12 of the 19 seats (five of the voting seats) on the FOMC.

  • Censorship

    • Finnish news sites rein in unruly comment sections

      Editors point to a spike in hate speech and insults in recent weeks, particularly related to immigration and asylum-seeker issues.

      [...]

      Two of Finland’s largest media sites on Tuesday decided to curtail or
      halt public comment on their websites.

    • Lawyer: Turkey Arrested Journalists to Deter Foreign Media

      A lawyer representing two Vice News journalists and their assistant on Tuesday denounced a Turkish court’s decision to arrest them on terror-related charges, calling it a government attempt to deter foreign media from reporting on the conflict with Kurdish rebels.

      The arrests have prompted strong protests from media rights advocates, the U.S. and the European Union.

  • Privacy

    • What Can you Learn from Metadata?

      An Australian reporter for the ABC, Will Ockenden published a bunch of his metadata, and asked people to derive various elements of his life. They did pretty well, even though they were amateurs, which should give you some idea what professionals can do.

    • How your phone tracks your every move

      In the digital age, how much of your life is actually private? To find out, ABC reporter Will Ockenden got access to his metadata. This is what that data looks like.

    • What reporter Will Ockenden’s metadata reveals about his life
    • Wall Street Journal Scores Very Limited Win In Fight With DOJ Over Sealed Surveillance Documents

      Yes, the WSJ has a right to see these files… but not until the DOJ decides these investigations are really and truly over — a determination that has yet to be reached for files zooming past the half-decade mark.

      The oral arguments delivered in June provide a little more insight into the DOJ’s thought processes — mainly that it should be the sole arbiter of document releases. The DOJ went past the constraints of its earlier argument — that “open” investigations are not subject to “common law access” — by claiming that documents used in the course of investigations, even closed ones, are not public records.

    • Ashley Madison Code Shows More Women, and More Bots

      After searching through the Ashley Madison database and private email last week, I reported that there might be roughly 12,000 real women active on Ashley Madison. Now, after looking at the company’s source code, it’s clear that I arrived at that low number based in part on a misunderstanding of the evidence. Equally clear is new evidence that Ashley Madison created more than 70,000 female bots to send male users millions of fake messages, hoping to create the illusion of a vast playland of available women.

  • Civil Rights

    • Hungary Shuts Down Budapest Train Station To Curb Migrant Travel

      The closure of the station appeared prompted in part by pressure from other European Union nations trying to cope with the influx of thousands of migrants flowing through Hungary. Europe has been overwhelmed by a surge of migrants, with over 332,000 arriving so far this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.

    • Massive Right to Water Protest in Dublin as Political Policing of Activists Continues

      Over 100,000 Irish Water protesters turned up on Saturday for another massive show of opposition towards the unfair second tax on the nation’s water supply. The high numbers were a definite message to the unpopular Fine Gael and Labour government. The movement which is made up of many parts, will not be going anywhere until they end their plan to continue with a tax that is one too many under the austerity policy.

    • Former US Secret Service special agent admits Silk Road bitcoin theft

      A FORMER US SECRET SERVICE AGENT HAD ADMITTED to charges relating to the theft of digital currency collected during the investigations into the Silk Road and its criminal activities.

      The Silk Road is, or was, an online bazaar for the sort of things that can be bought in the real world. It was smashed apart by hard working agents in a successful effort that was later revealed to be tarnished.

      Unfortunately two lone, former secret service workers have put their hands up to the theft of bitcoins gathered during the raids, and admitted that this was the wrong thing to do.

    • West Point Prof Who Called For Killing Of Academics Opposed To US Terror War Resigns

      Over the weekend, Spencer Ackerman published a fairly incredible story about a newly appointed West Point professor, William Bradford, who had written a paper, published in the National Security Law Journal, entitled Trahison Des Professeurs, in which he argues (among other things) that US academics who oppose current US anti-terror policy should themselves be targets for killing as a “fifth column.”

    • Fox’s Katie Pavlich Says BLM Is A “Movement That Promotes The Execution Of Police Officers”
    • Criminology Professor Explains To Bill O’Reilly Why It’s Wrong To Link BLM To Murders Of Police Officers

      Dr. Peter Moskos: “There’s Not A Result Of Cops Getting Killed From Black Lives Matter … There Are Fewer Cops Shot This Year Than Last Year. Are You Willing To Give Black Lives Matter Credit For That?”

    • 7 Moments In History When The UK Welcomed Refugees

      The government is coming under increasing pressure to take in more refugees from the war in Syria, with former foreign secretary David Miliband saying on Wednesday that not welcoming more refugees would be “an abandonment of the UK’s humanitarian traditions” of the 1930s and ’40s.

      However, David Cameron has said there is little point taking in “more and more” refugees, adding that it’s more important to bring “peace and stability” to the areas refugees are coming from. So far, 216 people have been accepted under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme, with a further 2,000 asylum applications from Syrians in the 12 months before June.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • TPP Could Block Copyright Fair Use

        The recent leak of the intellectual property chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, currently entering its 7th year of negotiation, shows that New Zealand’s negotiators are doing a good job holding the line against more restrictive copyright laws. Things like allowing righsholders to veto parallel imports, mandatory statutory damages and requiring consent for transient automatic copying of files as they transfer across the internet, which would have taken an axe to our copyright law, now all appear to be off the table. Unfortunately, longer copyright terms and criminalisation of technological protection measures are still there, so not all is won.

        I’ve written before though about some of the things that aren’t even in TPP and which are needed to level the playing field, particularly with the US. One of those things is fair use, a US law defence, which creates a broad and flexible exception to the exclusive rights a rightsholder would otherwise have. So, for example, US cases have held 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s Oh, Pretty Woman, even though it was for commercial gain, was fair use. Links and thumbnails created by search engines have also been held to be fair use. Google also claims that its scanning of tens of millions of books without permission, is fair use. Timeshifting TV programmes for later viewing is fair use. The US Supreme Court has sent Google and Oracle back to the Federal Court in San Francisco to decide if Google’s use of Oracle owned java APIs is fair use. The list goes on. Of course, for a rightsholder, a successful fair use defence can put a big hole in its exclusive rights – that’s why Oracle is fighting so hard in its API case.

      • Why Shouldn’t Copyright Be Infinite?

        Australia National University’s Dr. George Barker suggested that New Zealand could do well by strengthening its copyright legislation. He warned against the fair dealing exceptions that have crept into the law and asked, “Why not have copyright law like property law—i.e. it lasts forever?”

        That is a good question. And it is an important one as New Zealand and other countries consider extending the term of copyright under the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Current New Zealand law maintains copyright in written and artistic works for 50 years after the death of the writer. Copyright in film and sound recordings is shorter, lasting 50 years from the works being first made available. While the text of the TPP is not yet public, it appears that the agreement would extend copyright’s duration to 70 years from the death of the creator.

      • US Govt. Denies Responsibility for Megaupload’s Servers

        The U.S. Government says it’s in no way responsible for the fate of Megaupload’s servers, which were raided and seized as part of the criminal proceedings against the file-sharing site. The authorities reject the proposal that they should buy the servers to preserve user data and other evidence.

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