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12.06.14

Links 7/12/2014: Typhoon Hagupit, AURORAGOLD

Posted in News Roundup at 7:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Separating The Opportunities From The Obstacles In Open-Source Networking

    Open standards have driven the networking market since the earliest days of the Internet. While the use of open source for networking is a more recent phenomenon, it is no less important. A major industry transition to open source for software-defined networking (SDN) is under way, and users and vendors stand to benefit. Some expectations, however, may need to change.

    While the original idea behind SDN — separating the control from the data plane in network switches — has turned out to be just one of many architectural approaches that have emerged, it did catalyze massive interest in software and open source within the networking world. Things like APIs and DevOps tools became relevant to network engineers, and open source movements emerged to fulfill the need for increased automation and flexibility as organizations moved deeper into the cloud.

  • Google’s New Open Source Project Lets You Add Live Streaming to Your App

    The numbers all point to the same conclusion: When it comes to modern communication mediums, videoconferencing is becoming increasingly popular.

  • 11 open source tools to make the most of machine learning

    These 11 machine learning tools provide functionality for individual apps or whole frameworks, such as Hadoop. Some are more polyglot than others: Scikit, for instance, is exclusively for Python, while Shogun sports interfaces to many languages, from general-purpose to domain-specific.

  • Samsung’s strategic commitment to upstream open source development

    The Linux Foundation’s Linux.com website reports that Samsung’s open source group is now “hiring aggressively” and plans to double the size of the group in the coming years.

  • The 10 Coolest Open Source Apps of 2014
  • Open-source tools will benefit military and Wisconsin vehicle makers

    All of the software Negrut’s team develops will eventually be made publicly available through a website. “We believe making it all open source is the best way to ensure this transfer of technology from us to industry, where people can take advantage of the techniques and the software that we develop as part of this project, so as to foster innovation here or elsewhere in industry,” Negrut says.

  • Intel announces new Stephen Hawking speech system will be open source
  • Hawking’s speech software goes open source for disabled

    The system that helps Stephen Hawking communicate with the outside world will be made available online from January in a move that could help millions of motor neurone disease sufferers, scientists said Tuesday.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • HP Steps Up Big Data Game with Cloud-Based Helion Offering

      Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) made another significant move within the Big Data market this week with the announcement of Haven OnDemand, which brings the data analytics and app development features of the company’s Vertica and IDOL platforms to the cloud.

      The tools, which are hosted on the Helion cloud, provide access to Vertica’s data analytics functionality, as well as the capabilities of IDOL, which is designed to assist developers in building apps that leverage big data.

    • Mirantis Targets Developers with Hosted OpenStack Solution

      Mirantis is betting that ease of use and simple documentation will speed OpenStack adoption. That’s the goal behind the new “Developer Edition” of Mirantis OpenStack Express, which the company calls “the fastest and easiest way to get an OpenStack cloud.”

  • Databases

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Reclaiming the PDF from Adobe Reader

      In October, it was discovered that Adobe had removed the link to download Adobe Reader, its proprietary PDF file viewer, for use with a GNU/Linux operating system.

      While it is still possible to install Adobe Reader on GNU/Linux, Adobe’s attempts to hide access to the product for certain users is only one example of its systematic neglect of its GNU/Linux user base, and falls in line with many others as a demonstration of the importance of free software–software that no company or developer can neglect or hide. As the Windows and OSX versions of the software were developed through version 11, the GNU/Linux version was long stuck at version nine. For several years the software has lacked important features, security improvements, and support against malware attacks and other intrusions. Yet, by “locking in” Adobe Reader users and making it difficult for them to migrate to a free software PDF viewer, Adobe has, in effect, degraded the power of the PDF as a free document format, a standard the purpose of which is to be implemented by any potential piece of software and to be compatible with all. The company has abandoned the principle of program-agnostic documents, bringing about a lose-lose situation for all.

      By being led to rely on the proprietary software for tasks like sharing documents and filling out forms without the option to use a free software reader in its place, entreprises, the public sector, and institutions of higher learning have also fallen victim to this neglect, all as Adobe insidiously seeks to maintain a hold on its market share. Within institutions such as government–institutions that ought not to rely on any proprietary software, to begin with–it is concerning that Adobe Reader has often been taken to be the only option for interacting with PDF files and for communicating with the electorate.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Valve and Steam broadcasting, Dolphin emulator, and more

      Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Steam Broadcasting beta, the open source Dolphin emulator, QEMU’s advent calendar, and game releases for Linux.

    • An open source future for synthetic biology

      If the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) tells us something indisputable, it is this: GMO food products from corporations like Monsanto are suspected to endanger health. On the other hand, an individual’s right to genetically modify and even synthesize entire organisms as part of his dietary or medical regimen could someday be a human right.

    • Open-source gadget lets you invent your own Internet of Things

      This is why Ville Ylläsjärvi thinks Thingsee One, the open source, Internet of Things gadget his company is Kickstarting, will have staying power. Thingsee One isn’t just a sensor-stuffed piece of hardware, it’s a developer kit for other hardware makers. “We’re solving the hardware equation for them,” he says. “Startups can develop their solution using Thingsee One, get on with tests and pilots on the field using Thingsee One, and in many cases get their first customers using Thingsee One.”

    • Open Data

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Fox’s John Stossel Thinks Secondhand Smoke Isn’t Deadly

      Fox’s John Stossel claimed that “there is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people,” ignoring years of studies and a 2014 Surgeon General report that determined millions of Americans have died as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke.

    • Monsanto Seeks to Bring GM Corn to the Ukraine

      Monsanto has been making headway toward bringing GMOs (genetically modified organisms) into Ukraine. Former Ukraine President, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a proposed $17 billion loan to Ukraine from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in late 2013, because the loan required the introduction of GMO seeds and Ukrainian law bars farmers from growing GM crops. Long considered “the bread basket of Europe,” Ukraine’s rich black soil is ideal for growing grains, and in 2012 Ukrainian farmers harvested more than 20 million tons of corn.

  • Security

    • Report: 31 percent of detected threats in 2014 attributed to Conficker

      Six years after first being spotted in the wild, Conficker is still making its rounds online, and new research suggests that 31 percent of this year’s top threats involved the worm.

      Conficker capitalizes on unpatched machines that are still running Windows XP, as well as systems operating pirated versions of Windows, according to F-Secure’s Threat Report H1 2014, which identifies the top 10 threats of the first half of 2014. The countries most at risk for the worm are Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Malaysia and France.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • “U.S. Drones Kill 28 ‘Unknowns’ for Every Intended Target”
    • U.S. drones kill 28 innocents for every ‘bad guy’
    • November Drone Report: Strikes Spike in Yemen, Children Reportedly Killed in Pakistan
    • Arithmetic of Precision Drone Strikes: Kill 28 to Eliminate 1 Target
    • The Drone War: Mitigating Collateral Damage
    • A “Precise” U.S. Drone War? Report Says 28 Unidentified Victims Killed for Every 1 Target

      A new report finds U.S. drone strikes kill 28 unidentified people for every intended target. While the Obama administration has claimed its drone strikes are precise, the group Reprieve found that strikes targeting 41 people in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 other, unnamed people. In its attempts to kill al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri alone, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults; al-Zawahiri remains alive. We are joined by Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at Reprieve and author of the new report, “You Never Die Twice: Multiple Kills in the U.S. Drone Program.”

    • Obama’s Drone Campaign: Portrait of a Failed War on Terror

      Murderous US Foreign Policy Only Recruits More Terrorists

    • Shaky drones

      The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes by arguing on grounds of efficiency.

    • The dirty consequences of our clean wars

      The fact that only 25% of airstrikes in Iraq and 5% of airstrikes in Syria are pre-planned, with the vast majority being undertaken by aircraft and drones ‘on the fly’ (i.e. when a ‘target of opportunity’ is spotted) will no doubt impact on the number of civilian casualties killed in this air war.

    • In Yemen, al Qaeda’s Greatest Enemy Is Not America’s Friend

      Locals describe Manasa as a village, but it’s little more than a complex of houses loosely clustered around an earthen courtyard at the end of a bumpy dirt track five hours from Yemen’s capital of Sanaa.

    • Former PM slams US Vice President for comments on M’sian judiciary

      Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (pix) slammed US Vice President Joe Biden for his comment on Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy trial in which he said that the appeal against the conviction was a chance for Malaysia to “promote confidence” in its judiciary.

      “The Vice President needs to look at his own country first. In America, citizens are given life sentences and they do not even know about it, the government sentences them and uses drones to kill them.

      “This is the country that is advising us about the sanctity of law? It seems that they have an ulterior motive for Anwar to become the Prime Minister,” said Mahathir.

      Biden was unusually direct about his remarks on Twitter recently saying that the Malaysian government’s use of legal system & Sedition Act to stifle the opposition raises rule of law concerns.

    • From Ferguson to Yemen: What If We Aren’t So Different After All?

      While saddened by the news out of Ferguson, Missouri this past week, I am not surprised. Once again an unarmed black teen was shot dead by an “other than” black man, and the legal industry was used to exonerate the killer. I say legal industry, because it is no longer a system of due process and equal protection, and no longer seeking justice. It is merely an industry which allows experts and insiders to use the law to further their own agenda.

    • Drone strikes kill nine in Yemen

      A suspected US drone strike in Yemen killed nine alleged al-Qaida militants early on Saturday, a security official said, as authorities continue their search for an American photojournalist held by the extremists.

    • War by media and the triumph of propaganda

      Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

      Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

      These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

      The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

    • Navy Seeks to Practice Using Electromagnetic Radiation Weapons Over U.S. Soil

      It is estimated that enough electromagnetic radiation will be emitted to melt human eye tissue and cause breast cancer, not to mention the damage to the environment and wildlife on lands ostensibly under federal protection. The Growler planes employ electronic technology to jam enemy radar. Navy officials aim to fly training programs over U.S. lands some 260 days a year. As Jamail writes, “What is at stake is not just whether the military is allowed to use protected public lands in the Pacific Northwest for its war games, but a precedent being set for them to do so across the entire country.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • The Vatican has found hundreds of millions of euro “tucked away”

      THE VATICAN’S ACCOUNTS czar said last night that he had stumbled across hundred of millions of euros “tucked away” in various accounts, describing the windfall as a relic of the papacy’s medieval but soon-to-be reformed financial set-up.

      “We have discovered that the (Vatican’s financial) situation is much healthier than it seemed,” the Australian cardinal Pell told Britain’s Catholic Herald.

  • Censorship

    • Russia Threatens To Ban BuzzFeed

      Russia has warned BuzzFeed that it will ban access to the entire site over a post published on Wednesday about a deadly gunfight in the capital of Chechnya.

      BuzzFeed received an email on Friday from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal communications agency, saying that the post “contains appeals to mass riots, extremist activities or participation in mass (public) actions held with infringement of the established order.” It cited statutes laid out by the prosecutor general’s office and said access to the site “is restricted by communications service providers in the territory of the Russian Federation.” It has given BuzzFeed 24 hours to remove the post or face a total ban.

    • Chaos Computer Club on the blocking of our website in UK

      A significant portion of British citizens are currently blocked from accessing the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) website. On top of that, Vodafone customers are blocked from accessing the ticket sale to this year’s Chaos Communication Congress (31C3). [1]

      Since July 2013, a government-backed so-called opt out list censors the open internet. These internet filters, authorized by Prime Minister David Cameron, are implemented by UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). Dubbed as the “Great Firewall of Britain”, the lists block adult content as well as material related to alcohol, drugs, smoking, and even opinions deemed “extremist”.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Green activists from Ecuador harassed by police on way to climate summit

      Activists say their presence at the meeting in Peru would be embarrassing to President Rafael Correa, who wants to drill for oil in the Amazon

    • If Eric Garner’s killer can’t be indicted, what cop possibly could? It’s time to fix grand juries

      Grand juries were designed to be a check on prosecutors and law enforcement. Instead, they’ve become a corrupt shield to protect those with power and another sword to strike down those without. And it’s now all too obviously past time the system was overhauled to fix that.

    • British military base in Bahrain is a ‘reward’ for UK’s silence on human rights, say campaigners

      The Royal Navy will set up a permanent base in Bahrain, to the dismay of human rights campaigners who say the base is a “reward” for the British’s government silence over torture, attacks on peaceful protesters and arbitrary detention in the tiny kingdom.

    • Rookie NYPD officer who shot Akai Gurley in Brooklyn stairwell was texting union rep as victim lay dying

      In the six and a half minutes after Peter Liang discharged a single bullet that struck Gurley, 28, he and his partner couldn’t be reached, sources told the Daily News. And instead of calling for help for the dying man, Liang was texting his union representative. What’s more, the sources said, the pair of officers weren’t supposed to be patrolling the stairways of the Pink Houses that night.

    • SAFE hosts de-hired professor from University of Illinois

      Salaita, who was set to begin a tenured position at Illinois this fall, had his job offer retracted after a number of donors, students and faculty at the school contended that he was anti-Semitic.

    • The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate

      Nobody’s willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that exploded in New York yesterday after yet another non-indictment following a minority death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.

    • Man who filmed Eric Garner in chokehold says grand jury was rigged

      Ramsey Orta — who recorded the July 17 incident in which Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold shortly before he died on his cellphone — told the Daily News the grand jury ‘wasn’t fair from the start,’ and claims his testimony only lasted 10 minutes. ‘I think they already had their minds made up,’ he said.

    • Sunday Explainer: The unprecedented immigration powers awarded to Scott Morrison

      In the words of Motoring Enthusiast Party Senator Ricky Muir, the upper house was faced with a choice between a “bad decision or a worse decision”. He opted for what he decided was the former, and gave the government the final vote it needed for the controversial Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment bill to pass the Senate, 34 votes to 32. The amended legislation was then rushed through the House of Representatives, which was due to have its final sitting day of the year on Thursday, but returned on Friday to pass it into law in just 12 minutes.

    • Stephen Colbert Slams Fox News’ Willful Ignorance On Race Relations

      Colbert: Non-Indictments For Police Shootings Could Be Seen “As Part Of A Larger Troubling Trend. Or, You Could Be Fox News.”

    • Violence erupts in Greece

      A march through central Athens to mark the sixth anniversary of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager quickly turned violent Saturday, as marchers damaged store fronts and bus stations, and set fire to clothes looted from a shop.

      Clashes also broke out between police and demonstrators marching through the northern city of Thessaloniki. At night, police fired tear gas and stun grenades after a crowd of marchers beat up two plainclothes policemen there.

    • As protests mount, Athens braces for the worst

      For more than 20 days now, 21-year-old anarchist Nikos Romanos has been on hunger strike, demanding prison leave to attend lectures after he passed university entrance exams.

    • Theresa May’s child sexual abuse inquiry faces new storm

      Two members of Theresa May’s panel inquiring into child sex abuse are facing calls to resign after being accused of sending threatening or insulting emails to victims who had criticised the inquiry.

      Lawyers for one abuse survivor have written to the home secretary to complain of a string ofunsolicited communications, including an allegedly threatening email sent two days before an official meeting that both panellists and an abuse survivor were due to attend.

    • Body Cameras Worn by Police Officers Are No ‘Safeguard of Truth,’ Experts Say

      Michael Brown’s family, on the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision, called for all police in the United States to wear body cameras.

      Mayor Bill de Blasio, in announcing that some of New York’s police officers would begin wearing them, said “body cameras are one of the ways to create a real sense of transparency and accountability.”

      And on Monday, President Obama said he would request $75 million in federal funds to distribute 50,000 body cameras to police departments nationwide, saying they would improve police relations with the public.

    • Kerry Puts Brakes on CIA Torture Report

      Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.

      [...]

      But those concerns are not new, and Kerry’s 11th-hour effort to secure a delay in the report’s release places Feinstein in a difficult position: She must decide whether to set aside the administration’s concerns and accept the risk, or scuttle the roll-out of the investigation she fought for years to preserve.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

Links 6/12/2014: BioShock Comes to GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 3:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Marines dump Microsoft for Linux OS on Northrop Grumman radar

    Just weeks after Northrop Grumman got approval to begin building a new breed of mobile radar systems for the Marine Corps, the Corps has asked the defense contractor in Linthicum to change the operating system.

    The Department of Defense announced a $10.2 million contract modification Wednesday to change the operator command and control software on its G/ATOR radar system Microsoft Windows XP to a Defense Information Systems Agency compliant Linux OS.

    Ingrid Vaughan, director of the program, said the change would mean greater compatability for laptop computers used to control the system in the future.

    In a statement released Friday, she said Microsoft Windows XP is no longer supported by the software developer and the shift to a DOD approved Linux operating system will reduce both the complexity of the operating system and need for future updates.

  • Server

    • IBM Partners With Docker, Launches Containers Service

      IBM partners with Docker, launches the IBM Containers Service and becomes the first company to sell integrated solutions with Docker Hub Enterprise.

    • Docker Has a New Orchestration Platform but APIs Can’t Come Soon Enough

      The launch also included the first of a set of accompanying open APIs aimed at helping ecosystem partners create products and services that align and integrate with the new Docker orchestration offerings. In high demand from developers, the timeline for future APIs is not for several months, which may disappoint some ecosystem partners who have already been waiting for some time for the “plugin APIs” that will enable them to integrate their ecosystem products with the Docker Engine.

    • Where to Find a SysAdmin Job

      The role of system administrator means candidates “need to operate at a somewhat higher level of abstraction,” as Heikki Topi, a professor of computer information systems at Bentley University and a member of the education board at the Association for Computing Machinery, has put it.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Expands Management Team to Respond to Growth
    • Linux Foundation names Portland’s Steve Westmoreland as CIO

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the Linux open source computer operating system, added to its Oregon staff this week by hiring Portland’s Steve Westmoreland as chief information officer.

    • Open Source: Linux Operating System Introduced in 1991

      In the beginning, software was free, something you needed to make the hardware run. Then Microsoft (MSFT) and others demonstrated that people would pay for proprietary code, and for a long while software wasn’t free. But proprietary code was often clunky, and what worked on one kind of computer had to be re-created on others. Soon people realized there was a better way, and software became free again, sort of. Open-source software is essentially software that’s open to the public for tinkering, and over time that tinkering makes the code stronger. Linux, the classic example, is an operating system that’s been so extensively customized and built upon, versions of it now run everything from data centers, PCs, TVs, and cars to your Android smartphone. Companies still charge for apps and services, but much of the technology we use today is based on building blocks that are free and open to the imagination.

    • Linux Foundation Adds New Leaders, New Events for 2015

      Over the past couple of years, The Linux Foundation has emerged as a very influential organization overseeing not only directly Linux-related initiatives, but important technology efforts including building out “The Internet of Everything.” This week, the foundation made a series of announcements, including the news that it is expanding its leadership team, and news about events that the foundation will sponsor in 2015. Here is more.

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • Linux Benchmarks Of Intel’s Edison Module

        Intel’s Edison Module is a development platform for prototyping wearable computing devices and IoT devices. Here’s some Linux benchmarks with the Intel Edison running on Debian.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • Zorin: That is Flexibility!

      About 2 years ago I tried Zorin 6.0 and have used it and upgraded it on one of my computers since. I especially like the Zorin OS desktop experience because I can change it to look like Windows 7 or like Mac. That is flexibility! I also enjoy the Ubuntu type repository system!

    • Puzzle GNU/Linux: Integrated Pieces Create an Intriguing OS

      Puzzle GNU/Linux is a strange OS distribution that shows the value of open source ingenuity. This Linux distro is built around a hybrid desktop that is highly customizable.

    • Reviews

      • Makulu Linux 6.0 KDE: Guaranteed to make you smile

        Another Makulu Linux distribution was released today, and that’s always good news! This time it is the KDE desktop for the Makulu 6.x series. The Xfce version of this was just released a couple of weeks ago, so I don’t expect for there to be any major surprises: I hope that means this will not be a very lengthy post.

      • Linux Lite 2.2 Review – Consumes Low Memory, But Failed to Wake My PC from Sleep

        ‘Linux Lite’ is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases. It includes the lightweight & fully functional XFCE desktop environment, comes with full support for proprietor multimedia playback & a few applications of its own (software updater, additional app installer, a ‘cleaner’…) that should assist a novice user for easily managing the installed operating system.

    • New Releases

      • Q4OS 0.5.22 version released

        The new version improve font appearance for GTK2 applications and brings more accurate GTK2 styles in both classical and modern Q4OS themes. Lookswitcher, the tool to switch between Q4OS desktop themes, now works flawlessly, it has been fixed to prevent styles mixing on some rare switch attempts. Shortcuts in non-default Kickoff menu have been updated. More internal improvements has been made and several minor bugs has been closed.

    • Ballnux/SUSE

      • CentOS Rolls Along as openSUSE 12.3 Nears EOL

        Karanbir Singh today announced the inaugural release of CentOS rolling builds. CentOS will be releasing monthly respins of CentOS to include “all security, bugfix, enhancement and general updates.” In other news, openSUSE 12.3 nears the end of its support and hit game BioShock Infinite looks to be heading to a Linux machine near you.

      • Tumbleweed is rolling along

        It has been more than a month since the new structure of opensuse Tumbleweed was announced (see my earlier post), and we have seen it in practice for a month.

      • Opensuse linux for education 13.2 — a review

        Overall, this is a nice package. It might be a good place to start for someone wanting to try out opensuse for the first time.

      • openSUSE 12.3 Is Approaching End of Life Fast

        openSUSE 12.3 is now very close to reach End of Life and the support cycle will be terminated in a few weeks time, meaning no more updates will be provided for the aging operating system.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Release for CentOS Linux Rolling media
      • ALERT: A Software Security Transparency Breach Warning

        The example of how the NSA intentionally inserted weakened string constants into Elliptic Curve Cryptography lay hidden for several years, in fact, and was only exposed by a languishing open Red Hat trouble ticket. What was odd was how given the potential seriousness of the incident, no action was being taken to look at the source code and change it. As more comments appended to the ticket, the level of suspicion grew to the point of where NIST was forced to open up an investigation.

      • Red Hat, Huawei Partner on OpenStack for NFV

        The two tech vendors see the OpenStack solution as an ideal platform for telecommunications vendors that want to bring NFV to their networks.

      • Building an analytics cloud on OpenShift

        Communication and collaboration between development and operations can be difficult to achieve in many organizations, especially in larger environments. These two areas have traditionally operated within ‘silos’ separate from each other – something that can lead to delays and miscommunication.

      • Red Hat and Partners Aim to Infuse Open NFV Tools in Telco Data Centers

        As 2014 draws to a close, we’re seeing a lot of action from telecom players and the open source community surrounding Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology. Telecom companies have traditionally had a lot of proprietary tools in the middle and at the basis of their technology stacks. NFV is an effort to combat that, and to help the parallel trends of virtualization and cloud computing stay as open as possible.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Release Critical Bug report for Week 49
      • Slackware, Crux, Pisi, Manjaro, Devuan… Freedom-Fighters Or Luddites?

        Debian is going astray. Unless they wake up, many loyal devotees of Debian will move to other distros that do IT the right way. I’m a little old to be distro-hopping but even I can see the necessity of escaping the entanglement, the single point of failure, and the loss of control that systemd represents.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Meizu MX4 Running Ubuntu Touch Surfaces

            Meizu is really under the spotlight lately. The company has launched their latest handset just recently, Meizu is doing great as far as sales go and everything seems to be in place. This Chinese OEM has big plans, no doubt about that. They have signed an agreement with Alibaba a while back in order to use parts of Alibaba’s YunOS in their own Flyme OS and basically created a partnership between two companies. That’s not the only agreement Meizu signed in the last couple of month, just last month this company has agreed partnership with Canonical, a UK-based company which is known as the creator and developer of Ubuntu operating system some of us are very familiar with. Ubuntu OS has been available for PCs for a long time now, but this company created a mobile version of this OS (Ubuntu Touch) as well and we’ve seen it in action when Canonical showcased it on one of the Nexus handset a while back, I really don’t recall which one was it. Ubuntu was also shown off on Meizu MX3 a while back and it will be arriving on Meizu handsets officially in Q1 2015 according to the agreement which Canonical and Meizu signed.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • KitKat BSPs support TI Sitara and BeagleBone Black

      Adeneo announced Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) BSPs for the TI Sitara AM335x and Sitara AM437x development platforms and the AM335x-based BeagleBone Black SBC.

      Adeneo Embedded is a Platinum Member of the TI Design Network, and has previously released a number of Linux and Android BSPs (board support packages) for Texas Instruments processors and development boards. In Feb. 2013, for example, Adeneo announced an Android BSP for the TI OMAP 5 family of system-on-chips.

    • £50 MIPS is a micro-computer running Android and Linux

      Rapberri Pis are all the rage these days, but now there’s a new kid on the micro-computing block. Unveiled by British chip design company Imagination Technologies, the MIPS Creator CI20 is being dubbed as a rival mini-comp to the venerable Pi.

    • Creator CI20 is an Android or Linux-powered Raspberry Pi competitor

    • Phones

      • Android

        • A video history of Android

          Today, Android is the world’s most pervasive mobile operating system on the planet, powering millions of smartphones, tablets, wearables, and more. But that wasn’t always the case, and Android’s public life started from humble beginnings just about six years ago.

        • Android motorcycle helmet open for pre-order

          Skully announced a limited public pre-order round for its Android-based head-up display motorcycle helmet, available for $1,499 through Jan. 8.

          The “world’s first augmented reality motorcycle helmet,” was a record-breaking $2.8 million Indiegogo success this summer, says Skully. (The frozen Indiegogo page shows a total of $2.44 million, but hey, it’s still a lot of money.) The helmets are now shipping, and beginning Monday, anyone can order the smart helmet, as long as you have $1,499 left in your holiday gift fund.

        • ​Lollipop 5.01 review: The Android release we’ve been waiting for

          Is it finally safe to upgrade to Android 5 after the recent release of Android 5.01? Based on my experiences with my pair of 2013 Nexus 7 tablets, the answer is an unqualified yes.

        • 10 of the best Android apps from November 2014

          November sure was a busy month for new apps and notable updates; from photo recognition, to launchers, to Biz Stone’s new app for sharing random thoughts.

        • Top 10 Android Apps For November 2014

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • You Couldn’t Make It Up

      Tony Blair names Henry Kissinger as his role model.

    • Tony Blair’s wealth estimated at £10m

      Tony Blair has insisted that his much-criticised business dealings with dubious governments round the world have not been as lucrative as people think – as one of his staff suggested his wealth amounted to about £10m.

  • Finance

    • Billionaires Featured Four Times As Often As the Poor on TV News

      In June 2014, Frederick Reese’s Mint Press report highlighted the fact that the advocacy group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a study showing that the three major broadcast newscasts – ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News – featured billionaires almost four times as often as individuals affected by poverty. Poverty is an issue that affects 50 million Americans, a significantly larger number of individuals than the 482 billionaires that these newscasts covered.

    • It’s official: America is now No. 2

      Hang on to your hats, America.

      And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.

      There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

      It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.

      The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • ALEC Fumes: Transparency Threatens Corporate Free Speech!

      After spending hundreds of millions of undisclosed funds on state and federal elections, the corporate members of the American Legislative Exchange Council are demanding that state legislators preserve their “right” to anonymously spend money on politics and curry favor with elected officials, and to thwart shareholder efforts to hold the corporations they own accountable.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

12.05.14

Links 5/12/2014: Image of Meizu MX4, Tizen 2.3 Rev1 SDK, $65 MIPS Development Board, YotaPhone 2

Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Washing, Kali Story, and Fedora RC4

    In the Linuxphere today Adam Williamson announced Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 4. Lifehacker is running an interview with Kali developer Mati Aharoni and the Linux Foundation released a study on Linux usage trends. Patrick Masson discusses “openwashing” and Linux gaming reaches new milestones. In software news Opera 26 was released, Eric Geier presents firewall options, and The Register features 10 “freeware apps” for Linux.

  • Unhappy Node.js users fork the Joyent-run project, creating community-driven io.js

    The Node.js server-side Javascript runtime is today’s hot thing. You might say it’s the Ruby on Rails of the ’10s. Where developers used to code in Perl and PHP, then Ruby/Rails, today’s startup-fueled web-development world is all about Javascript on the server, and Node is the grease that makes it all go.

  • The Ongoing Wars Against Free Tech

    We’re still suspicious of their motives and know they would destroy us tomorrow if they could — but that doesn’t worry us, because they can’t. They have too much on their plate as they fight for survival. But even if they didn’t we still wouldn’t be afraid — not of them, nor of Oracle or anyone else who’d like nothing better than to squish us under their thumbs. We’ve won. As Dwight Merriman, co-founder of DoubleClick – a closed company if ever there was one — told me recently when I asked him about open source in the enterprise, “I think it’s mainstream.” He should know; he’s on our side now.

    These days the future of FOSS is pretty secure; we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. We even seem to be slowly gaining the upper hand on the patent front, with many recent court rulings taking the wind out of the trolls’ sails, if you’ll excuse the cliche.

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Fraudulent apps stalk Apple’s App Store

      The scale of the problem became apparent in an open source project where I volunteer, the Apache OpenOffice community. For several months, the user support mailing list has been bothered with apparently random questions — some very angry — from people seeking support for an iPad app. The community has been confused by these questions, since they have nothing to do with any work at Apache; Apache OpenOffice doesn’t even have an iOS version.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD-Forked Bitrig Finally Sees Its Initial Release

      Back in 2012 OpenBSD got forked as Bitrig and as of this week the initial release is finally available.

      Bitrig launched to focus on supporting modern architectures, a focus on LLVM/Clang rather than GCC, and other modern development focuses compared to OpenBSD carrying a lot of legacy support.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • Become a Conservancy Supporter Today!

      The current Zeitgeist of the broader Open Source and Free Software community incubated his disturbing mindset. Our community suffers now from regular and active cooption by for-profit interests. The Trade Association Executive’s fundraising claim — which probably even bears true in their subset of the community — shows the primary mechanism of cooption: encourage funding only from a few, big sources so they can slowly but surely dictate project policy.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

Leftovers

  • CIOs fight back in battle for control of ICT spending

    CIOs are under pressure from their line-of-business colleagues who are reportedly exerting greater influence over IT purchasing decisions, according to a newly released global study.

    The shift away from CIOs has caused them to change their priorities for their businesses as they turn to new measures to regain control of ICT spending.

  • Science

    • To address tech’s diversity woes, start with the vanishing Comp Sci classroom

      In May 2014 at the all-girls Emma Willard School in upstate New York, nearly a third of the school’s 300+ students were preparing for their final Advanced Placement (AP) exams. But exactly three were studying for the AP Computer Science exam—and they weren’t doing so on campus. The school (full disclosure: my alma mater) completely eliminated its computer science program in 2009.

  • Security

    • Sony Pictures leak shows employees used worst passwords ever

      Everyone is bad at passwords; that’s nothing new. But if you’re working at a high-profile studio like Sony, perhaps you should choose a better password than “s0ny123″ or “password.”

    • Google Can Now Tell You’re Not a Robot With Just One Click

      On Wednesday, Google announced that many of its “Captchas”—the squiggled text tests designed to weed out automated spambots—will be reduced to nothing more than a single checkbox next to the statement “I’m not a robot.” No more typing in distorted words or numbers; Google says it can, in many cases, tell the difference between a person or an automated program simply by tracking clues that don’t involve any user interaction. The giveaways that separate man and machine can be as subtle as how he or she (or it) moves a mouse in the moments before that single click.

    • “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” is as annoying as reCAPTCHA if…

      When completing an online form, proving that you’re not a robot can be very annoying. Sometimes even frustrating, especially if the website uses reCAPTCHA or a similar implementation of a system that asks you to decipher some cryptic text.

      I don’t use reCAPTCHA on this website, but I do encounter it on other websites. So it was heart-warming to learn that Google has released a new implementation of reCAPTCHA called No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA that doesn’t come with reCAPTCHA’s annoying aspects.

      The official announcement has it that “a significant number of users will be able to securely and easily verify they’re human without actually having to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead, with just a single click, they’ll confirm they are not a robot.”

      What’s not to like about that? But is it as simple as that? And how does the system know that the entity completing a form is a human and not an automated script? The simplest way to find out is to try and complete an online form protected from bots by No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA.

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Unhappy Node.js users fork the Joyent-run project, creating community-driven io.js

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas

      After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • A political statement – not a principled plan

      With more money available the prices of houses at the lower end will increase – a bribe to current homeowners with houses valued between £125k and £750k – exactly those swing voters predominantly located in marginal constituencies.

    • Chicago Tribune Ignores Experts On New City-Wide Minimum Wage Increase

      Chicago City Council Voted To Increase Minimum Wage To $13 Per Hour In 2019. On December 2, Chicago’s 50-member city council “overwhelmingly” approved a plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $13 per hour by 2019 with only five alderman opposing the measure. Chicago will raise its minimum wage to $10 next year, and increase the minimum wage “by steps of 50 cents and $1″ until the $13 dollar an hour mark is reached in 2019. Approximately 400,000 workers in the city will be affected by the increase. [Associated Press, 12/2/14]

    • Zero-hours contracts are forcing me out of teaching

      I love teaching. It is what I was born to do. I’m a thirtysomething further education teacher with a first class degree, a PGCE, qualified teacher status and two subject specialisms, who has repeatedly been rated outstanding in my teaching.

      I’m also a parent of a 15-year-old child with an autistic spectrum disorder and straight after I have written this piece, I will be leaving teaching.

      I’m not unusual. I’ve been on zero-hours contracts for some time and it has finally got to me. I’m tired of thinking I’ve secured a future for me and my child, tired of thinking I won’t have to worry about whether we both eat or whether we have heating, tired of worrying how we will cope if my child loses their school coat. As I explained yesterday on 5Live, I’ve decided to leave teaching for a supermarket job that will give me the security of knowing how much I’ll have available to pay my bills each month.

  • Privacy

    • Securing Blockchain.info Users with Tor and SSL

      Over the past couple of weeks there has been a marked increase in the number of man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against Tor users of web based Bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain.info. One user reported 63 bitcoin stolen, and there were many other examples as the thefts continued despite warnings to users. The attacks were so successful that Blockchain resorted to blocking all traffic to the wallet service from Tor exit nodes.

    • Sifting Fact from Fiction with All Writs and Encryption: No Backdoors

      Following recent reports in the Wall Street Journal and Ars Technica, there’s been new interest in the government’s use of a relatively obscure law, the All Writs Act. According to these reports, the government has invoked the All Writs Act in order to compel the assistance of smartphone manufacturers in unlocking devices pursuant to a search warrant. The reports are based on orders from federal magistrate judges in Oakland and New York City issued to Apple and another unnamed manufacturer (possibly also Apple) respectively, requiring them to bypass the lock screen on seized phones and enable law enforcement access.

    • Congress Quietly Decides To Delete Key NSA Reform In CRomnibus Agreement

      You may recall, back in June, that there was a key House vote that took NSA supporters by surprise. An amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill pushed by a bi-partisan team of Thomas Massie, Jim Sensenbrenner and Zoe Lofgren passed overwhelmingly, with a plan to slam the door shut on questionable NSA “backdoor searches” (as described in detail earlier). The House voted 293 to 123, making it a pretty clear and overwhelming statement that Congress did not, in fact, support such practices by the NSA.

    • Use Tor Browser, get your computer blacklisted

      But I was surprised today when I tried to use it from Tor Browser and it failed to generate a short URL. Instead, I got this message: “Your computer is blacklisted; cannot make ur1s!”

  • Civil Rights

    • An ‘Entertaining’ Lesson on How Cops Can ‘Win the Media’ After They Kill

      The class, taught by PR agent Rick Rosenthal, focused on such topics as “Managing the Media When Things Get Ugly (Think Ferguson).” A flyer promoting the class promised, “In addition to the Ferguson case study, this fast-paced class is jam-packed with the essential strategies and tactics, skills and techniques that will help you WIN WITH THE MEDIA!”

      Sound boring? Not at all! “The training is also highly entertaining,” the flyer emphasized. “You will learn a lot, and you’ll have fun doing it!”

    • Many Convicted of Crimes They Didn’t Commit

      Why are people falsely convicted? The reasons include mistaken witness identification, false confession, official misconduct, perjury, false accusation, and false or misleading forensic evidence. As Lavender reports, “The factors involved in a wrongful conviction vary depending on the crime.” In child sexual abuse cases, for instance, over 80% of exonerations involve perjury or false accusation. By contrast, in sexual assault cases, a majority of exonerations hinge on mistaken witness identification.

    • Baggage-theft ring busted at JFK Airport

      Seven contractors were rounded up for swiping electronic items, jewelry and other items from checked baggage at Kennedy Airport’s Terminals 4 and 7 between 2012 and June of this year, officials said. The thieves would then sell the items they stole.

    • In NYT’s Retelling of Eric Garner’s Death, the Officer’s Arm Has a Mind of Its Own

      It’s debatable whether or not you’d refer to Garner as resisting; he’s certainly loudly protesting that he’d done nothing wrong, and he does not appear eager to put his hands behind his back to be handcuffed. But that “resistance” lasted a few seconds before he was choked.

    • NYPD Invokes Notorious Glomar Response

      The Glomar Response dates back to the 1970s, and allows agencies to respond that they can “neither confirm or deny” as a response to requests for information made under the federal Freedom of Information Act, when responding might compromise national security or privacy. As CJ Ciaramella writes, “The Glomar doctrine gives agencies the obvious power to hide the existence of records, but it also allows agencies to short-circuit the appeal process, since requestors can’t file an appeal for records they don’t know exist.” In Abdur-Rashid’s case, the NYPD argued that responding to his request would disclose, in Campbell’s words, “sensitive information about the department’s investigative techniques.”

    • Wash. Post Digs In Its Heels On Botched Immigration Fact Check

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • What Canada can teach the U.S. about net neutrality

      If there are two ways in which the Internet is similar in the United States and Canada, it’s that it’s slow and expensive in both places relative to many developed countries. The big difference, however, is that Canada is looking into doing something about it.

      The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—the northern equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—is in its second week of hearings on how to ensure that Internet subscribers get access to the newest and fastest services at the best prices possible.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • TTIP Update XLIV

      One reason for this hiatus is that there has been a change at the top. Karel De Gucht has relinquished his post, which has been taken by the Swede Cecilia Malmström. She is adopting a very different style, not least in terms of her attitude to the public. Faced by the growing scepticism about TTIP’s benefits, and anger over its complete lack of any meaningful transparency, Malmström has taken a conciliatory approach, promising more openness, some of which has now been announced.

      But Malmström is still trotting out the same old misinformation about TTIP. In a recent opinion piece she published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the paragraph about ISDS is particularly pernicious. Malmström says that European member states have signed a total of 1400 agreements that include ISDS; this is presumably to “prove” that ISDS is completely normal and totally harmless. Neither is true.

    • Copyrights

      • ISPs Must Take Responsibility For Sony Movie Leaks, MP Says

        As the fallout from the Sony hack continues, who is to blame for the leak of movies including Fury, which has been downloaded a million times? According to the UK Prime Minister’s former IP advisor, as “facilitators” web-hosts and ISPs must step up and take some blame.

      • Court Orders French ISPs to Block The Pirate Bay

        The Paris Court has ordered French ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. The legal action, brought by anti-piracy group SCPP, resulted in an injunction ordering local service providers to “implement all necessary measures” to render not only the site inaccessible, but also its proxies.

12.03.14

Links 3/12/2014: Tails 1.2.1, Android for Desktops, Openwashing

Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Openwashing: adopter beware

    It’s great to see where open source software and the communities that support it are today. Many of those who have worked over the years to develop feature-rich applications and enterprise ready systems, that not only compare to, but exceed proprietary options, must feel like pinching themselves.

  • Interview: Apache Software Foundation Elevates Drill to Top-Level Project

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), which stewards more than 200 Open Source projects and initiatives, has announced that Apache Drill has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

    Apache Drill is billed as the world’s first schema-free SQL query engine that delivers real-time insights by removing the constraint of building and maintaining schemas before data can be analyzed.

  • How Can We Get Business to Care about Freedom, Openness and Interoperability?

    At this point in history, arguments for using Linux, FOSS (free and open-source software) and the Internet make themselves. Yet the virtues behind those things—freedom, openness, compatibility, interoperability, substitutability—still tend to be ignored by commercial builders of new stuff.

    For example, US health care, like pretty much every business category, is full of Linux and FOSS, and is to some degree connected on the Net. Yet, it remains a vast feudal system of suppliers that nearly all work to lock doctors, hospitals and labs into dependency on closed, proprietary, incompatible, non-interoperable and non-substitutable systems. I’ve witnessed these up close as a patient. In one case, diagnostic scans by one machine and software system couldn’t be read by computers with software designed to read the output of a different company’s scans. In another case, records kept by one specialty failed to inform another specialty in the same hospital. The first one gave me a case of pancreatitis, and the second one gave my mother a fatal stroke.

  • Samsung’s Open Source Group is Growing, Hiring Developers (Video)

    The open source group is admittedly a small team for such a large company. But it indicates a significant shift in the company’s approach to development – and one that is gaining in popularity among enterprises, in general. Companies start by using open source software, then advance to participating in open source communities, contributing upstream, and adopting open source practices internally.

  • Cisco Goes Open-Source for Big Data Security Analytics

    Cisco is no stranger to the open-source world and is now expanding its efforts with the OpenSOC (Security Operation Center), which is a project that is freely available on Github.

  • Stephen Hawking’s new Intel talking system to be made open-source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 34.0.5 Lands in All Supported Ubuntu Distros

        Canonical has updated the Firefox packages in the repositories for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 14.10. If you have this application installed right now, the next system update should bring the latest version.

      • New tablet UI for Firefox on Android

        The new tablet UI for Firefox on Android is now available on Nightly and, soon, Aurora! Here’s a quick overview of the design goals, development process, and implementation.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Selling a Non-Product: The Multifaceted OpenStack

      When the Rackspace team first created the idea of an open stack, they knew that the opportunity was not just to build public clouds. Rather, the software was to service companies that were using all kinds of cloud or virtualization technologies. It was built with flexibility in mind. “That involved more than just how they might package it and distribute it,” explained Metacloud VP Scott Sanchez.

    • jKool Unveils Open Source SaaS Platform for Spotting Patterns in Big Data
    • Apache Drills into Hadoop

      In a big week for Big Data, Apache Drill becomes a top level project as Hadoop 2.6.0 is released.

      It’s a big week for Big Data and the open source Hadoop ecosystem. The Apache Hadoop 2.6.0 project was released on Nov. 30, and today the Apache Drill project announced it had become a top level project in the Apache Software Foundation.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • Nzega’s Digital Library Becomes a Reality

      We installed the FreeBSD operating system on each of the workstations. FreeBSD is an open source derivative of Unix that is renowned for its speed, customizability and rock-solid stability. We also installed a variety of open source software packages from a repository that we created on the Mini. The second Mini serves as a backup and content mirror, which we aim to sync once per year with new material and as needed.

      For both teachers it was their very first exposure to FreeBSD. They enjoyed the control and customizability of the installation process, as well as the wide availability of open source software packages in the repository (more than 20,000).

    • BSDCan 2015 call for papers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Announcing netdev 0.1

      Netdev 0.1 (year 0, conference 1) is a community-driven conference geared towards Linux netheads. Linux kernel networking and user space utilization of the interfaces to the Linux kernel networking subsystem are the focus. If you are using Linux as a boot system for proprietary networking, then this conference may not be for you.

    • Watch Movies and TV Shows for Free with the Latest Popcorn Time

      Streaming movies and TV shows directly from torrents without having to download them is the main purpose of Popcorn Time. The devs have released a small update for the application and they have fixed a number of small problems that have been reported by the community.

    • Kodi 14.0 Prepares for Massive Release, XBMC to Be Finally Replaced

      Kodi 14.0 RC, the successor of the current XBMC project, has been released and is now available for testing. The famous media hub is preparing for a major name change, but the devs also plan to make the 14.0 branch the best one so far.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Data Loss And Downtime Costs The UK £10.5 Billion Per Year

    78 percent of UK organisations are not confident that they can fully recover after a disruption

    Data loss and downtime cost enterprises $1.7 trillion around the globe in the past year – the equivalent of nearly 50 percent of Germany’s GDP.

  • Science

    • New research suggests that we learned to metabolize alcohol by eating spoiled fruit

      Anyone born after Prohibition (i.e., anyone reading this) was likely taught growing up that alcohol is, at its core, a poison. Really fun poison. Poison that leads to dancing. Poison that makes you drunk-text your co-worker and spend the next six days caked in cold sweat and nauseous from dread.

      Now, new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms that classification. We actually developed our ability to consume alcohol around 10 million years ago when we started to eat rotten fruit.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

      Ask an agribusiness exec about sustainable agriculture, and you’ll likely get an earful about something called “precision agriculture.” What is it? According to Yara, the fertilizer giant, it’s technology that “enables farmers to add the specific nutrients needed for their crop, in exactly the right amount, at the right time.”

    • Ebola Story Puts Old Fears in New Virus

      In other words, Ebola is less a story about a bizarre new disease and its unpredictably disastrous capacities, and more a sad old story about poverty and priorities.

  • Security

    • there are no good constant-time data structures

      Imagine you have a have a web site that people can access via a password. No user name, just a password. There are a number of valid passwords for your service. Determining whether a password is in that set is security-sensitive: if a user has a valid password then they get access to some secret information; otherwise the site emits a 404. How do you determine whether a password is valid?

      The go-to solution for this kind of problem for most programmers is a hash table. A hash table is a set of key-value associations, and its nice property is that looking up a value for a key is quick, because it doesn’t have to check against each mapping in the set.

      Hash tables are commonly implemented as an array of buckets, where each bucket holds a chain. If the bucket array is 32 elements long, for example, then keys whose hash is H are looked for in bucket H mod 32. The chain contains the key-value pairs in a linked list. Looking up a key traverses the list to find the first pair whose key equals the given key; if no pair matches, then the lookup fails.

      Unfortunately, storing passwords in a normal hash table is not a great idea. The problem isn’t so much in the hash function (the hash in H = hash(K)) as in the equality function; usually the equality function doesn’t run in constant time. Attackers can detect differences in response times according to when the “not-equal” decision is made, and use that to break your passwords.

      So let’s say you ensure that your hash table uses a constant-time string comparator, to protect against the hackers. You’re safe! Or not! Because not all chains have the same length, “interested parties” can use lookup timings to distinguish chain lookups that take 2 comparisons compared to 1, for example. In general they will be able to determine the percentage of buckets for each chain length, and given the granularity will probably be able to determine the number of buckets as well (if that’s not a secret).

      Well, as we all know, small timing differences still leak sensitive information and can lead to complete compromise. So we look for a data structure that takes the same number of algorithmic steps to look up a value. For example, bisection over a sorted array of size SIZE will take ceil(log2(SIZE)) steps to get find the value, independent of what the key is and also independent of what is in the set. At each step, we compare the key and a “mid-point” value to see which is bigger, and recurse on one of the halves.

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Security Audit Automation Made Easy with SCAP

      Security automation can be defined as the use of standardized specifications and protocols to perform specific common security functions.

      Which leads us to SCAP – the Security Content Automation Protocol, an industry and government initiative to automate security audits and compliance.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Latest ISIS attack on Kobanê implicates Turkey once more

      Ever since ISIS commenced its attack on Kobanê the town has been cut off from the outside world. ISIS controlled the western, southern and eastern fronts and the hermetically sealed border with Turkey formed an unsurpassable border in the north. The Turkish armed forces (TSK) have maintained a heavy military presence at the border, with dozens of tanks stationed on hills overlooking Kobanê, regular patrols along the border fence and watch towers and outposts every few kilometers.

    • Primary Sources: Emails Show FBI Worked to Debunk ‘Conspiracy Theories’ Following Michael Hastings’ Death

      When journalist Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles last year, rumors immediately began to surface on social media suggesting his death was tied to a federal investigation into his work.

      The claims attracted widespread media interest when WikiLeaks tweeted the day after the crash that Hastings had contacted the anti-secrecy group’s attorney and said that the FBI was investigating him. The FBI was then bombarded by inquiries from journalists who tried to confirm or deny the allegations, and the bureau struggled to come up with a statement to debunk what it referred to as “rampant conspiracy theories.”

      [...]

      VICE News obtained dozens of internal FBI emails that provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the bureau managed the inquiries into Hastings’ death and the rare steps it took to shoot down claims that he was the target of a federal probe. The documents were turned over in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit VICE News jointly filed with Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in FOIA research.

      [...]

      That day, Eimiller also sent out an email to FBI special agents across the country under the subject line “Urgent Media Issue” and linked to a New York magazine report about the growing conspiracy theories surrounding Hastings’ death. She said the reports had attracted the interest of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and the Department of Justice, and that FBI headquarters “would like to debunk growing conspiracy theory if possible (assuming that’s what it is).”

      “Has anyone’s division been contacted in relation to an FBI investigation that may have led to foul play in the car crash death Tuesday of reporter, Michael Hastings,” Eimiller wrote. “There are many reports on the Internet that Hastings was being investigated by the FBI. He died in a car accident in LA on Tuesday. Before his death, according to a tweet, he told others he worried he was the subject of an investigation. None of this is confirmed and the LAPD is reporting no foul play in car crash based on evidence. This is getting the attention of DOJ and the Director’s Office.”

  • Censorship

    • A long list of sex acts just got banned in UK porn

      While the measures won’t stop people from watching whatever genre of porn they desire, as video shot abroad can still be viewed, they do impose severe restrictions on content created in the UK, and appear to make no distinction between consensual and non-consensual practices between adults.

  • Civil Rights

    • ‘There were hundreds of us crying out for help’: the afterlife of the whistleblower

      In his former life, Dr Raj Mattu was an internationally recognised cardiologist. On course for a professorship in London, he nonetheless jumped at the chance to return to his home town of Coventry in 1997, to set up a medical school at Warwick University and help turn the large district Walsgrave hospital into a teaching facility. It was a choice he would live to regret.

    • IGs form front line of war on waste and fraud, but weak links remain

      Allegations against top officials at the State Department were devastating and had to be suppressed, so the agency’s inspector general quickly obliged, delivering what amounted to a cover-up of a cover-up.

      What happened at the State Department is not unusual, recent disclosures show.

    • Big Brother Watch supports campaign to limit pre-charge bail to 28 days

      Living in limbo with no indication as to when a charge may or may not be brought is a form of punishment in itself. The impact on a person’s day to day life, health and mental wellbeing is profound. Your life is simply put on hold with no right to appeal.

    • Columnist Often Called ‘Racist’ Doesn’t Think Police Activists Should Use That Word

      Exhibit A is the fact that members of the audience at a conference laughed when NYPD Police Commissioner William Bratton attributed the drop in New York City’s crime rate to “the cops.”

    • THE AMERICAN DEEP STATE: An Interview with Peter Dale Scott for the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio

      The following is a transcript of a recent interview conducted by Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips for the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. They sat down with noted author and scholar Peter Dale Scott to discuss his latest book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil and the Attack on U.S. Democracy. This wide-ranging discussion examines the “Deep State,” an evolving level of secret government separate from the elected government. Scott looks at the origins of the deep state, its communications and finances, and its involvement in landmark events, from the JFK assassination to Watergate, to September 11th and beyond.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality essential to our democracy

      In May, HBO comedian John Oliver opened his segment on net neutrality by saying, “The cable companies have figured out the great truth of America: If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.” He then delivered an incisive 13-minute monologue that was anything but boring, drawing more than 7 million views on YouTube. Indeed, as Oliver demonstrated so effectively, while net neutrality may seem like a dull subject, protecting it is essential to not only the future of the Internet, but also the future of our democracy.

    • U.S. House subcommittee postpones hearing on net neutrality

      A key House panel has delayed a hearing on the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to write new Internet traffic rules aimed at assuring “net neutrality.”

      The U.S. House of Representatives Communications and Technology subcommittee had been expected on Dec. 10 to quiz all five FCC commissioners about so-called net neutrality rules that would regulate the how Internet service providers (ISPs) manage web traffic that travels through their networks.

    • Net Neutrality: France Is Playing The Telcos’ Game

      Seven months after the historic vote in the European Parliament on Net neutrality, the Council of the European Union could soon bury this fundamental principle. While its inclusion in French law could be debated in the coming months, it is high time for the government to put an end to is doublespeak and supports an uncompromising defense of Net Neutrality in front of its European partners. However, in Brussels, the French government seems in tune with the lobbying of big telecom operators.

12.02.14

Links 2/12/2014: Chromebooks Surge, Android Outselling iOS Sixfold

Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux holiday shopping guide

    Traditionally, finding gifts for the Open Source-loving, Linux-running person in your life has not been terribly easy to accomplish. Not so this year. It seems the world is filled with Linux-powered gadgets and gizmos galore. What follows are my personal recommendations (ranging in price from $35 to well over $1,000) that, I feel, most Linux enthusiasts would be stoked to receive – and every single one is powered by one Linux-based system or another.

  • December 2014 Issue of Linux Journal: Readers’ Choice

    I love the Readers’ Choice issue. I jokingly say it’s because all the work is done by the community, but honestly, it’s because I love hearing the feedback from everyone. Year after year, I inevitably learn about a new technology or application, and I’m usually surprised by at least one of the voting results. It’s also an “unthemed” issue, which means our articles can be from any discipline in the Linux world. Welcome to the Readers’ Choice issue of Linux Journal.

  • Learn to reprogram your BigTrak in RasPi issue 5
  • Coolest Things You’ve Done with Linux
  • Friendship & the Linux Community

    Linux is a global community…a quarrelsome community, I will give you that, but a community nonetheless. We are richer by many degrees for our links to each other within this community. We are friends within the Linux community. A community where real friendships do in fact begin.

  • Desktop

    • Now crowdfunding: A laptop that protects your digital rights

      Do you have any idea what your laptop is doing deep down? Is there any way to find out? Usually, the answer is no. Anything could be in there, and as Edward Snowden’s revelations have disclosed, plenty of people in official positions want to make sure that “could be” becomes “is.”

      Until now, if you wanted a laptop where you or someone you trust could inspect all the source code needed to use it, you had to build it yourself. But a new crowdfunding campaign wants to make a laptop that’s designed to use open source software and comes with open source-licensed code to everything, even the firmware.

    • The impact of the Linux philosophy

      All operating systems have a philosophy. And, the philosophy of an operating system matters. What is the Linux philosophy and how does it affect the community? How has it changed software development for the ages?

      Whether we know it or not, most of us have some sort of philosophy of life. It may be as simple as, “Be kind to others,” or it might be a very complex life philosophy.

    • Google Chromebooks Outsell iPads in U.S. Schools

      Chromebooks from vendors such as Acer, HP, Samsung and Dell edged out iPads in sales to U.S. schools during the third quarter, according to new data from IDC.
      Google’s low-cost Chromebook laptops have for the first time overtaken Apple’s iPads in sales to U.S. schools.

  • Server

    • Docker, Part 2: Whoa! Spontaneous industry standard! How did they do THAT?

      Today, Docker is powered by Libcontainer, rather than the more widespread LXC. The switch has some very real implications for the future of Docker, for its potential adoption and for its interaction with the community.

    • Cavium Debuts 48-Core ARM Server Chip

      From an operating system perspective, Cavium’s MontaVista software division worked on optimizing its Linux distribution for the new ThunderX SoC. Chugh also noted that Cavium’s other distribution partners, including Canonical and Red Hat, have been working on enabling Linux on ThunderX.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE (in) Austria
      • Interview with Esfir Kanievska

        I guess it was back in 1999 or so, I just installed my first Photoshop ever. I had no clue what a graphic tablet is, so I grabbed the mouse to create my worst digital painting ever.

      • The QML State Machine

        The Qt 5.4 release is coming closer and it brings a whole lot of nice things: high DPI support, Qt WebChannel, and much more. One of these very cool, yet maybe slightly inconspicuous, new features is the QML State Machine. It brings a fully featured state machine to the QML world, which is a finite automaton consisting of states, transitions that define on which event to transit from one state to another, and event handlers that are called when a stated is left or entered.

      • Google Code-In 2014 is ON!

        Google Code-In 2014 just started and I chose KDE as my main organisation for the 3rd time I am on this contest. For those who are not familiar: GCI is an open-source development competition for students all around the world, held by Google every year. This year we have 12 organisations: Apertium, BRL-CAD, Copyleft Games, Drupal, FOSSASIA, Haiku, KDE, Mifos, OpenMRS, Sahana, Sugar Labs and Wikimedia Fundation. Everything there is around tasks, these do include:

  • Distributions

    • Best distro of 2014 poll

      This poll will be open for two weeks. Do your best. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I will include your responses as a separate entry in my best distro article. I must tell you, in advance, that the result of this poll will not affect my own decision, but it will be quite interesting to see what you think, and whether our options coincide in some strange way. Now, off you go. See ya.

    • Reviews

      • Living free with Trisquel GNU/Linux 7.0

        Trisquel’s system installer is essentially the same installer Ubuntu uses, but with a few minor changes to the appearance and some of the options. The installer asks us to select our preferred language and provides us with a link to view the distribution’s release notes. Next we are given the chance to download software updates while the installer is running. The following screen asks if we would like Trisquel to automatically divide up our hard disk for us or if we would like to manually partition our hard drive. Manual partitioning is quite straight forward and I found it easy to navigate the disk partitioning screen. Trisquel gives us the option of working with Btrfs, ext2/3/4, JFS and XFS file systems. I opted to install Trisquel on a Btrfs partition. While partitioning the disk we can also choose where to install the distribution’s boot loader. The following screen gets us to select our time zone from a map of the world. Then we confirm our keyboard’s layout and create a user account for ourselves. We can decide to encrypt the contents of our home directory. The installer copies its files to our hard drive and then asks us to reboot the computer.

    • New Releases

      • Q4OS: Debian Stable with the Trinity Desktop Environment

        Q4OS is like Exe GNU/Linux a distribution using the Trinity desktop and based on Debian Stable. In fact I could have picked Exe as well for review but Q4OS just had a new release and it looks cleaner from the start. It was simply the novelty factor that pulled me towards it and it’s got a few nice touches of its own as we shall see. Version 0.5.20 was just released on 11/11/2014 and is available both for the mainstream 32 (i386) and 64-bit architectures. The images are a modest 314MB and 337MB respectively which makes for a speedy download and will definitely fit on your CD or even older USB sticks.

    • Screenshots

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Marye Anne Fox to Leave Red Hat Board of Directors Next Summer

        For more than a decade, Fox has played an invaluable role on Red Hat’s Board of Directors, bringing passion, insights and wisdom to Red Hat and its shareholders.

      • CoreOS is building a container runtime, Rocket

        Rocket is a new container runtime, designed for composability, security, and speed. Today we are releasing a prototype version on GitHub to begin gathering feedback from our community and explain why we are building Rocket.

      • CoreOS issues its own open-source container technology, amid all the Docker hype

        CoreOS, a startup building a server operating system in the shadow of enterprise giants like Red Hat, has ridden the coattails of Docker and its trendy container technology for deploying and running applications. Now CoreOS has come out with its own standard.

      • CONTAINER WARS: CoreOS blasts Rocket rival at Docker

        CoreOS, the lightweight Linux distro based around Linux containers and Docker, will develop its own application container tech to compete against Docker.

      • Fedora

        • Who matters in the Server Working Group ? You do!

          At the last meeting Miloslav raised the issue that some people feel that not being a voting member of the working group is perceived as not having their opinion valued and may discourage participation. Luckily for us we have quite a few participants that didn’t get that nonexistent memo and are providing great contributions to the Fedora Server project.

    • Debian Family

      • SSD adventures and fun times!

        In June, I bought a new laptop, and a new SSD for it. I used that model of SSD before (Samsung 840 Evo), although not for a long time, so I wasn’t expecting anything unusual.

        Since the laptop is a slower one, I installed Debian as follows: connect SSD to my workstation, do an install on it (via Virtualbox connected to the raw device), disconnect and install in the laptop. First sign of trouble was that the SSD didn’t boot reliably. I said – maybe my Virtualbox method (new method) wasn’t right – so I reinstalled on the laptop, and everything was mostly OK.

      • Debian Gets Forked

        A group of Debian developers have announced that they are forking the Debian source code to start a new Linux project, which they have dubbed Devuan (pronounced “DevOne” in English). The group, which calls itself the Veteran Unix Admin (VUA) collective, is alarmed about the drift of most major Linux distos toward the systemd service manager daemon. A service manager is the first process that starts on a Linux system, and it has the role of starting other processes. The init tool served as a universal service manager for Linux and for many Unix systems until recently, when several Linux vendors became concerned that the init code was too slow and not versatile enough for modern systems.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch for Mobile Devices Almost Ready

            Canonical still hasn’t finished “converging” Ubuntu Linux across PCs, servers, phones and tablets, but it’s now closer than ever with a new development release of Ubuntu Touch, which partners Meizu and Bq are using to build the open source mobile devices that should appear in the new year.

          • Unity 8 Has Received Improvements For Desktop Usage

            Now, Unity 8 looks pretty much like an oversized tablet, but Canonical has assured the Ubuntu fans that Unity 8 for desktop will not be a desktop optimized clone of Ubuntu Touch’s Unity 8, but a more modern Unity 7-like interface.

          • CompuLab launches Utilite2: Tiny ARM-based Ubuntu/Android PC

            CompuLab is updating its Utilite line of tiny, low-power desktop computers. The new Utilite2 is 30 percent smaller than last year’s Utilite. But the company says the new model offers up to twice the performance, thanks to a more powerful processor.

          • Tiny mini-PC boasts quad-core Cortex-A15 SoC

            CompuLab unveiled a second-gen Ubuntu and Android ready Utilite2 mini-PC based on a quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600, that shrinks to 3.4 x 3.4 x 1.1 inches.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 394
          • Fanless Android/Linux ”desktop” pairs Snapdragon quad with mSATA storage

            Embedded PC maker CompuLab has created a tiny Linux “desktop” based on ARM hardware. The Utilite2 crams a Snapdragon SoC along with a surprising selection of goodies into a die-cast aluminum chassis that measures just 3.4″ x 3.4″ x 1.1″. Linaro-based Linux builds will support the machine, which will also be offered with a Google Play-approved version Android 4.4.3 KitKat.

          • UbuTab: An Ubuntu Tablet With A Terabyte Hard Drive

            The UbuTab is an Ubuntu tablet that was announced last week as a “1TB Ubuntu tablet for media lovers.” Nearly all consumer tablets ship with solid-state storage but the UbuTab is packing in a 7mm thick 1TB spinning hard drive for offering the greater storage capacity at a reasonable price.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Hands-on with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE

              The final rease of Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and MATE was announced this weekend. I have picked up both versions, and I have installed them on a number of computers around here, with both legacy (MBR) and UEFI boot. The results have been very good, as expected.

              As anyone who has been around Linux much probably knows, Linux Mint (numbered) is derived from Ubuntu. However, starting with Mint 17 the releases no longer track the latest Ubuntu releases. Mint is now based on the Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases and will update their own distribution as they see fit.

              That means that although Ubuntu recently released 14.10, this Mint release is still based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and the new Mint numbering system indicates that (this is 17.1, not 18), although the name change is a bit contrary to that (17.1 is called Rebecca rather than Q…, but I guess Q-names are not easy to come up with.

            • Setting up Linux Mint 17.1 for the first time

              Given a choice between a DVD disc and a USB stick, I’d go with the USB option. Mint, and any other operating system, will install and run much faster from it.

            • Linux Mint 17.1 released

              The final release of Linux Mint 17.1 is now available to download. You can opt for the Cinnamon or MATE versions of Linux Mint 17.1, depending on which desktop you prefer to use. MATE now has support for the Compiz window manager, and Cinnamon has had numerous improvements including performance tweaks and additional polish.

            • Systemd to Free BSDs, Mint 17.1, and Coolest Things

              Today was another busy day in Linuxland. Linux Mint 17.1 was released over the weekend and a couple of reviews have emerged already. Katherine Noyes says some Linuxers are thinking of heading towards the free *BSDs and Shawn Powers has a list of some of the coolest things folks do with Linux. Jasper St. Pierre explains what’s wrong with package managers and Dedoimedo.com is running a best distro of 2014 poll. Ian Sullivan explains how to “De-Chrome” laptops and Bryan Lunduke has a holiday shopping guide.

            • Linux Top 3: Linux Mint 17.1 Goes GA, Fedora 21 Goes RC, Devuan Forks Debian

              Linux Mint has emerged in recent years to become one of the most popular Linux distributions, thanks in no small part to its focus on creating the best possible desktop experience for users.

            • Linux Mint Project Releases Mint 17.1

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Tiny i.MX6 COM and dev kit offer triple camera inputs

      E-con released a Linux-friendly i.MX6 based COM with optional eMMC, WiFi, BLE, Ethernet, and -40 to 85°C support, plus a dev kit with triple camera inputs.

    • New FUZE Tribute Special Edition

      The FUZE is an all-in-one computing workstation that houses the Raspberry Pi and comes with the easy-to-learn FUZE BASIC language and electronic components (LEDs, buttons, a light sensor, resistors, etc). Fun and simple to use for both parents and children.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Introduction to Tizen IVI Webinar

          Do you want to learn more about the exciting world of Tizen IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment)? As part of their webinar series, Geoffroy Van Cutsem from Intel’s Open Source Technology Center presents a Tizen IVI session. In this 40-minute session Geoffroy discusses some of the challenges for the automotive industry such as multi-user requirements and security. You can learn how Tizen IVI addresses Automotive requirements, Architecture overview, Tizen IVI roadmap and more.

      • Android

        • Google Nexus 6 review: A larger Moto X with fewer Motorola enhancements

          The Nexus 6 is the best Nexus ever and for once a Nexus device is not lacking in any specification. The price reflects the high-end nature of the Nexus 6, but the competition in the Android marketplace is also much stiffer than it was in the past. I still need to use the Nexus 6 a bit more with my T-Mobile SIM to convince myself it isn’t the device for me. I enjoy large screen smartphones, but find other offerings to be more compelling.

        • Android’s Material Design reaches into Linux

          A new OS has been proposed, based on Linux and Android’s Material Design specifications. Jack Wallen opens up his hat of supposition to imagine the possibilities this platform could bring to life.

        • Jack And Jill Are Google’s New Compilers For Android App Developers

          Android has gone through quite a few changes during its short 6 years of life. The Android that drives most of the world’s smartphones of today would be almost unrecognizable to what was launched in late 2008. We’ve seen massive visual changes, expansion to almost every conceivable form factor, and a completely fleshed-out content ecosystem for multimedia and apps. As the operating system matured, some elements have successfully grown with it, and others have become dead weight. Naturally, progress calls for the replacement of those pieces that haven’t scaled well. We’ve seen an excellent example of this when ART came to replace Dalvik as the standard Android runtime. With the release of Lollipop, a similar project emerged that promises to replace a part of the existing app development toolchain with a pair of new compilers called Jack and Jill.

        • Google Glass will return in 2015 with Intel inside, says WSJ

          2015 will see Google launch a new model of its Glass headset, which will be powered by an Intel chip and offer longer battery life than the current Explorer Edition, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google Glass has already been through a couple of small iterative upgrades — one to add compatibility with prescription lenses and another to double the RAM — but the shift to a new processor could signal a more thorough overhaul of the entire wearable.

        • The Android 5.0 Lollipop Review

          Google has been very busy with their expansion of Android as a platform this year. At Google IO we saw the announcement of endeavors like Android TV and Android Auto. But the stars of the show were a preview of the next version of Android, code named Android L, and Google’s new Material Design principles for interface design across all of their products. In the years since Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich released, we’ve seen the launch of Jellybean and KitKat, but both of these versions were very iterative improvements upon 4.0 and had equally iterative version numbers with Jellybean being major versions 4.1 through 4.3 and KitKat being 4.4. Lollipop is given the major version number of 5.0, and it’s quite fitting as it’s arguably the biggest advancement to Android in a long time. It comes with an entirely new interface based on Material Design, a new application runtime, and many new features that I could not hope to summarize in this paragraph.

        • More Android Apps Arriving for Chrome OS and Chromebooks

          Just a few years ago, before Android marched to its dominant position in the mobile market, there was much speculation that Google might merge Chrome OS and Android. Early last year, I wrote a post on why that won’t happen.

          However, an interesting corollary trend is now appearing. Following an initial round of Android apps that can run on Chrome OS, more and more are arriving. The news was announced on a Chrome G+ page, bringing the total number of apps available across Chrome and Android to more than 40.

        • Android Devices Driving Shipment Volumes, iOS Drives Revenues

          Llamas noted Apple does not appear to have a huge play in the low-end of the market like Android, and until it does, the main battle for Apple is at the high-end of the market.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Open Leadership Has Become Essential

    Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, “a community for individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software,” took me through his thoughts on those principles during a conversation at the HATCH experience.

  • 10 Open Source Security Tools from Google, Facebook, Netflix and Cisco

    Choice has long been a defining feature of the world of free and open source software, and the constellation of options only gets bigger every year. Often it’s brand-new projects causing the increase, but sometimes the growth happens in another way, when tools that were developed for a company’s internal use get opened up for all the world to see, use and improve.

    That, in fact, is just what has been happening lately on a grand scale in the security arena, where numerous major companies have been opting to open the doors to their own, in-house tools. Google, Facebook and Netflix are all among the companies taking this approach lately, and it’s changing the security landscape significantly.

  • SD Times blog: Surveys show open source makes for faster secure development

    One of the things we see a lot of here at SD Times is surveys. It’s a great idea for your company to survey its customers, and the resulting information can be really useful—not just to your company, but to those of us who track the industry and its trends.

    Thus, I was fairly disturbed by the results of a recent survey by Mendix that found that enterprise developers are having a very hard time giving the business folks what they’ve asked for. Gottfried Sehringer, vice president of marketing at Mendix, painted a fairly bleak picture of the state of enterprise development.

  • Why there’s no open-source standard-bearer for the network

    Open-source software plays an increasingly prominent role in many areas of modern business IT – it’s in servers, databases and even the cloud. Vendors like Red Hat, Canonical and others have managed to graft open-source principles onto a profitable business model. The former company became the first open-source-centered business with $1 billion in annual revenue in 2012.

  • Why change is hard for any open source community

    A lightning talk recap about how the Apache Foundation has always done things a certain way at ApacheCon Budapest by Rich Bowen.

    As you know, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has a number of open mottos that we like to use. Like, “Community Over Code,” and “No Jerks Allowed.” Another popular motto recently has been “We’ve Always Done It That Way.”

  • Gngr Begins Open-Sourcing Their Web Browser Code

    When Gngr was originally announced as a privacy-minded web browser, they said the code would be opened up after the initial release. In the past few days though, some of the Gngr components are being published on GitHub.

  • 8 ways to contribute to open source without writing code

    Talking to developers and reading about open source I often get the feeling that the general notion is that open source is just about code and commits. Put another way, “If you don’t make commits for a project you are not contributing to it.” Or so they say. That notion is far from the truth in my eyes. Let me tell you why.

  • Nginx 1.7.8 Updates Open-Source Web Server

    Today a new incremental version of nginx was released with the 1.7.8 milestone update.

  • Stephen Hawking unveils ‘life changing’ new voice technology in London

    Intel said they planned to make the system open-source and free for users.

  • Intel reinvents Stephen Hawking’s voice systems and will open source the software
  • Stephen Hawking’s speech software goes open source for disabled
  • Stephen Hawking’s new speech system is free and open-source

  • Events

    • Zenoss Survey Shows the Momentum of Open Source Clouds

      There is now no question that countless IT departments are turning to open source cloud computing platforms instead of proprietary ones. Several recent roundups of survey results have illustrated that, and I recently covered cloud survey results from IDG Enterprise here.

    • Defining Software Defined Networking: Part 1

      Over the next several weeks we will run a seven-part series about software defined networking (SDN). The stories serve as education resources and as a way to help better understand what SDN means to people developing and managing new stack infrastructures.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • 5 Open Source Business Intelligence Tools

        It’s impossible to imagine making good business decisions without the right information to back up the decision making process. Business intelligence (BI) tools help by making it easy to extract and understand the information that you need from the mass of business data that you collect and store. In other words, they can help turn piles of data into meaningful insights that help you run your business.

  • Funding

    • Open source Hadoop distributor Hortonworks sets terms for $78 million IPO

      Hortonworks, which develops and supports open source distribution of Apache Hadoop for enterprises, announced terms for its IPO on Monday. The Palo Alto, CA-based company plans to raise $78 million by offering 6 million shares at a price range of $12 to $14. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Hortonworks would command a fully diluted market value of $659 million.

  • BSD

    • Is It Time to Give BSD a Try?

      It’s never easy to stand by and watch a relationship in trouble, but that’s just how things have been feeling here in the Linux blogosphere of late.

    • How did you get into BSD?

      We’ve got a fun idea for the holidays this year: just like we ask during the interviews, we want to hear how all the viewers and listeners first got into BSD. Email us your story, either written or a video version, and we’ll read and play some of them for the Christmas episode. You’ve got until December 17th to send them in (that’s when we’re prerecording).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Tin Whiskers Brewery bucks the trend of secret recipes

      If there’s one business that values secrecy it’s brewing beer. Most breweries hold their cards very close to their chests. They keep their recipes and techniques away from the prying eyes of competitors to retain a competitive advantage.

    • Nature makes all articles free to view

      All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

    • Bill Gates and the True Nature of Open Access

      ReadCube is available for Windows, Macintosh and the iPhone – but not GNU/Linux, so this is a retrograde step purely in terms of platforms: PDFs may be clunky, but at least they can be read on most systems. And of course, in order to prevent people from downloading or printing a paper, ReadCube wraps PDFs with DRM. Again, that is making publishing less open than it is now. It also shuts out the visually-impaired, who will be unable to use their screen-readers if the files are locked up in a proprietary format on the ReadCube site: that’s a huge kick in the teeth for a community that has enough problems to content with.

    • The WASP Resurrection System Provides an Open Source Stop and Save System for 3D Printers

      Living in Florida, we experience thunderstorms on a daily basis in the summertime. Literally our power goes out for a few seconds at a time and this happens at least a few times a week. This makes running a 3D printer during the months of May, June, July, August and September almost impossible, unless you have it hooked up to a battery backup. Even then, there are times when the power is out longer than that battery can handle. Up until now, there really has not been a reliable method to recover a print job if the power running that 3D printer were to go out.

  • Programming

    • Network clock examples

      Way back in 2006, Andy Wingo wrote some small scripts for GStreamer 0.10 to demonstrate what was (back then) a fairly new feature in GStreamer – the ability to share a clock across the network and use it to synchronise playback of content across different machines.

    • Why developers love and hate PHP

      PHP, the venerable server-side scripting language, is famous for its use in Web development. First released in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf, it has been leveraged by the likes of WordPress and Facebook and reportedly is used in 82 percent of websites whose server-side programming language is known, according to W3Techs. The language is slightly behind Java in the PyPL Popularity of Programming Language index, and it ranks sixth in the rival Tiobe index. A high-performing upgrade, PHP 7, is due in 2015.

    • Google’s Go 1.5 To Feature Many Improvements

      The updates due for Google’s Go 1.5 programming language implementation are aplenty and should better position this promising language.

    • New features in Git 2.2.0

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Now HTML 5 is finished, W3C boss Jeff Jaffe discusses what comes next

      The development of HTML 5 has been the major driver for web standards for the past five years or so, and it was finally sent as a Recommendation to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the end of October. Does that mean it’s finished and done with? If so, what comes next?

Leftovers

  • Science

    • That Takeout Coffee Cup May Be Messing With Your Hormones

      Most people know that some plastics additives, such as bisphenol A (BPA), may be harmful to their health. But an upcoming study in the journal Environmental Health finds that entire classes of plastics—including the type commonly referred to as styrofoam and a type used in many baby products—may wreak havoc on your hormones regardless of what additives are in them.

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Black Friday Now Just Another Opportunity to Mock the Poor

      But O’Neil has a point, and it’s one that irks me as well. It’s similar to my irkitude over loyalty cards. Some of this, I’ll admit, is just my own personal brand of curmudgeonliness, but mainly it’s because the discounts they provide have become so damn big in recent years. For me, loyalty cards are optional if I feel like being cranky about it, but most people no longer have that luxury. If you’re living on a working-class income, you flatly can’t afford to give up a 10 or 15 percent discount on your food every week. You have to fork over your loyalty card number, and that means everything you buy is sliced, diced, tracked, and sold to every marketer in the world. Don’t like it? If you’re poor, that’s tough. Your privacy is no longer even an option.

    • Full Show: The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy

      From luxury skyscrapers — taller, more expensive and exclusive than ever before — the dark shadows of plutocracy are spreading across the commons of democracy.

    • Report: ‘FIN4′ hackers are gaming markets by stealing insider info

      Cybercriminals have been discovered hacking more than 100 companies to access insider information about mergers and other business deals that could affect stock prices.

      The group, dubbed “FIN4” in a report from the cybersecurity company FireEye, is targeting top executives, lawyers, consultants and others with private information about mergers and acquisitions, especially in the health-care and pharmaceuticals industries.

    • Lawyers targeted in sophisticated email hack attack seeking insider-trading info, consultant says

      Often, attempts to get email recipients to click on bogus links are easily recognized because of grammar and spelling errors or ridiculous claims about vast sums of money a stranger is seeking the recipient’s financial backing to obtain.

      But that isn’t true of a year-long scheme to hack into the email of health-care industry executives, general counsel, corporate law firms, scientists and others likely to know of information that could affect the price of stock in pharmaceutical companies, a security consultant says.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

    • “Right To Be Forgotten”: Privacy Watchdogs Turning Censors of the Net

      “The guidelines published by European privacy watchdogs underline the serious issues raised by the EU Court of Justice decision of the right to de-indexation. The Right To Be Dereferenced puts in jeopardy freedom of expression and access to information. By entrusting search engines and administrative authorities with the responsibility to arbitrate between the right to privacy and freedom of speech, the Court’s decision worsens the dangerous drift towards an extra-judiciary regulation of the Internet. Now, these guidelines sanctify this decline of the Rule of Law rather than inviting the legislator to clarify the law in order to strike an appropriate balance between privacy and freedom of expression. If nothing is done, the CNIL (French DPA) will condone private censorship of the Internet, increasing confusion of roles created by the recent law on terrorism1, which already gives it authority over the administrative blocking of websites.” said Philippe Aigrain, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net.

  • Privacy

    • MegaSync Your Cloud Data for True Internet Privacy

      You may recall, the take down of Kim Dot Com’s MegaUpload by the U.S. Government. Kim Dot Com said it was “a death sentence without a trial”.

      Mega with MegaSync client changes all that.

      Now, Mega can reliably claim what is legally termed ‘plausible deniability’ for what clients store on their site, by virtue of how this method of encryption works.

    • Privacy as Innovation Interview

      A recent inter­view I gave while in Stock­holm to the Pri­vacy as Innov­a­tion pro­ject:

    • Keynote at Internetdagarna, Stockholm, November 2014
    • Microsoft Buys Email App Acompli For $200M, Will Still Support Gmail And Other Competitors

      Just before Thanksgiving here in the U.S., a Microsoft blog post accidentally leaked the company’s intention to buy mobile email application Acompli. Though the blog post itself was pulled down, the URL still revealed the forthcoming acquisition. Today, the two companies are officially confirming the news, with the Acompli team of around two dozen joining Microsoft as a part of a $200 million+ deal.

    • Lions, Tigers, Bears, and FBI Warnings, Oh My!

      It really has grown to a fever pitch lately.

      What stuck in my craw today was a Bloomberg report Exclusive: FBI warns of ‘destructive’ malware attack in the wake of the SONY attack.

      Like, I should be mortified maybe? Do these ‘brainiacs’ remember StuxNet?

      Would it help to revisit the topic? I’d rather not, thank you very much. Please feel free to read the Wikipedia link on the subject.

      It was the perfect road-side billboard if there ever was for why Microsoft Legacy (x86) Windows should be abandoned on grounds of National Security.

      Sadly, the software industry hasn’t changed and quite frankly isn’t going to as long as ‘big business’ is married to a security-flawed ‘by design’ operating system.

  • Civil Rights

    • Iranian Opportunity

      Iran has undoubtedly improved, but remains a theocratic state with an appalling human rights record, where the persecution of gays is particularly horrifying. There are only two countries in the world with systems of government so appalling as to have seats reserved for clerics in the legislature. One is Iran. The other is the United Kingdom.

    • Social media T&Cs branded as ‘meaningless drivel’

      Its report on the responsible use of social media data, published today, has condemned internet companies for making users sign up to long, incomprehensible legal contracts and calls for an internationally recognised standard or kitemark to identify sites with clear terms and conditions.

    • If You Don’t Mind A Little Perjury, You Can Convict Two People For The Same Crime

      So, the police had a suspect convicted for this burglary. And the corroborating video showed that Greenlee performed the criminal act on her own. But that wasn’t enough. They brought charges against Smith “for committing the same December 19 burglary of the Dollar General store.”

      This double-charging obviously presented an issue. The state prosecutor’s case hinged on Greenlee’s testimony, something that (a) contradicted her previous testimony during her guilty plea and (b) the surveillance recording of the incident. None of that deterred the state from attempting to achieve the impossible. The state prosecutor warned the jury that it was going to have to come to terms with the fact that the State was willing to use perjury to achieve its goal of putting two people in jail for the same criminal act. Of course, it worded it a bit differently.

    • Brazen Young Facebook Pimpette Nabbed By Police After She Bragged About Her Crimes On Facebook

      I’m always amazed at how often social media plays a role in the attempted exploits of dumb criminals. Whether it’s posing with the merchandise they recently stole, posting a video of the crime itself, or sharing the police’s bulletin seeking their arrest, our idiot bad guys just seem to love posting dumb stuff to Facebook in particular. But even correcting for a younger criminal, it’s difficult not to judge someone unbelievably stupid in the era of online surveillance when they elect to run their underage prostitution ring on Facebook and coordinate their illicit business via Facebook’s messaging app.

    • Police arrest 2 teens for prostitution ring

      Venice police arrested a second teenager in a prostitution ring going around three Sarasota County high schools.

      Police say the ring leaders were a 17-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy.

    • St. Louis Police Claim It’s Their ‘First Amendment’ Rights Not To Protect Football Players Who Supported Protestors

      It’s been pretty obvious that law enforcement in the St. Louis area has a rather tenuous grasp on the concept of the First Amendment. Obviously, they’ve done a fairly terrible job recognizing the right to “peaceably assemble” for quite some time, even having a court declare its “5 second rule” approach unconstitutional. They’ve also ignored the freedom of the press by repeatedly arresting journalists. And, remember, the local prosecutor has claimed that it was really all those people speaking out on social media who were to blame.

    • U.N. investigators urge Obama to release CIA report
    • ‘Being homeless is better than working for Amazon’

      I am homeless. My worst days now are better than my best days working at Amazon.

      According to Amazon’s metrics, I was one of their most productive order pickers – I was a machine, and my pace would accelerate throughout the course of a shift. What they didn’t know was that I stayed fast because if I slowed down for even a minute, I’d collapse from boredom and exhaustion.

      During peak season, I trained incoming temps regularly. When that was over, I’d be an ordinary order picker once again, toiling in some remote corner of the warehouse, alone for 10 hours, with my every move being monitored by management on a computer screen.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Kim Dotcom Plans U.S. Internet Party After New Zealand Failure

        “I’m not a pirate. I’m not a fugitive. I’m not a flight risk,” Dotcom tweeted today. “I’m your Internet freedom fighter and Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016.”

      • Kim Dotcom Announces United States Political Party

        Kim Dotcom will launch a political party in the United States next year. Run by American citizens, Internet Party US will feature “celebrity founders” from the music, movie and Internet sectors. Dotcom will be its PR man and is already warning that “Hillary” faces her “worst nightmare” in 2016.

      • US Efforts to Jail Dotcom Fail as Kim Walks Free

        Efforts by the United States government to have Kim Dotcom put back behind bars have failed. Arguments that the Megaupload founder poses a flight risk ahead of his extradition battle next summer were rejected by the Auckland District Court and the entrepreneur walked away a free man.

      • Kim Dotcom at liberty after US copyright corps lose court battle

        KIM DOTCOM remains at liberty despite the best efforts of the copyright corps and cops to strip him of his possessions and right to roam.

        Dotcom admitted that he is personally stoney broke thanks to a combination of legal fees and sanctions.

        The Mega business is still running, but is in the hands of his family, and Dotcom said that his finances have been eviscerated by a legal team that, from the sounds of it, did some work and then swaggered off in their alligator shoes when the money ran out.

      • Eagles Sue Concert Footage Archivist Over Bootleg Performances

        Glenn Frey and Don Henley seek the Shelley Archives’ entire vault after theatrical showing of unlicensed Eagles footage

12.01.14

Links 1/12/2014: Linux 3.18 RC7, Devuan Debated

Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • China’s Nicaragua Canal Could Spark a New Central America Revolution

      Many of those who’ve come together here to protest have been loyal supporters of President Daniel Ortega since he was part of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) junta that overthrew the Somoza dynasty in 1979. They backed him when the Sandinistas tried to establish their own Cuban-inspired dictatorship. They backed him in his war against the CIA-trained Contra rebels in the 1980s. And when the country started holding legitimate elections in the 1990s, they backed him in his bid to build the FSLN into a powerful political party that eventually returned him to the presidency—a position he does not look like he’ll give up any time soon. But right now these Sandinistas are absolutely enraged by plans to evict them from their lands to make way for his latest and by far most grandiose project: the Interoceanic Canal.

    • Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret

      When 28 civilians were killed in Athens, it wasn’t the Nazis who were to blame, it was the British. Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith reveal how Churchill’s shameful decision to turn on the partisans who had fought on our side in the war sowed the seeds for the rise of the far right in Greece today

    • Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo and the Rights of the Serbian Minority: Ten Years After The “March Pogrom 2004″
    • Jordanian’s comic book tales counter terrorist ideologies

      Bakhit, 36, is a Jordanian comic book author and entrepreneur who creates Middle Eastern stories that are an alternative to terrorist ideologies. His field research has included surveys of children in poor neighborhoods in and around the Jordanian capital of Amman and in Syrian refugee camps.

    • The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes

      The US has always dodged questions about the legality of its drone strikes by arguing on grounds of efficiency. These targeted strikes, it claims, always kill the intended targets and minimise civilian casualties. This rationale, as many suspected, has turned out to be false. According to research done by NGO Reprieve, drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen have ended up killing 28 unknown people for every targeted militant. This will come as no surprise to critics of drone strikes who have always maintained that poor intelligence all but guarantees that many civilians will end up being killed by these supposedly pinpoint weapons. The US has tried to elude its responsibility for civilian deaths by classifying any male of military age as a militant unless it is specifically proven he is a civilian. This is a kind of casual racism which assumes anyone in the tribal areas of Pakistan got what they had coming. For the US, Fata is packed with militants and anyone it targets there must surely be a militant. It has bombed wedding parties and funerals but always claimed that its precision strikes went after only militants.

    • US flies roughly 85 percent of airstrikes against Islamic State, in complex mix of tactics, politics

      U.S. fighter planes and drones have conducted 819 strikes, compared to 157 from the 10 other countries, states the detailed report obtained last week by FoxNews.com.

    • Nigeria: Kano mosque blasts death toll above 102

      Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan vowed to track down the perpetrators of the bomb blasts that killed more than 100 people at the central mosque in the city of Kano.

    • Intervention feeds terrorism

      The “Global Terrorism Index,” published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, reported last week that fatalities due to terrorism have risen fivefold in the 13 years since the 9/11 attacks, despite the U.S.-led “war on terror” that has spent $4.4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and anti-terrorist operations elsewhere. But it’s not really “despite” those wars. It’s largely because of them.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • We may never have another coldest year in history

      A surge of Arctic air has left much of the continental U.S. shivering in unusually bitter November cold. But this early foray into winter weather is just a small blip in the overall global picture, which is of a warming world that is still on track to see 2014 set the mark for hottest year on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.

  • Finance

    • The Meaning of Black Friday

      When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths.

    • “Even it Up”: Inequality Spirals out of Control

      Since the financial crisis of 2009, the number of billionaires has more than doubled, to 1,645, showing that while those at the top have recovered quickly, the benefits of economic growth are not being reaped by the vast majority. Even more staggering, the world’s richest 85 people hold the same amount of wealth as half the world’s poorest population. The consequences of extreme inequality are harmful to everyone. It not only deprives millions of people better life chances, it fuels crime, conflict, and corruption. “Failure to tackle inequality will leave hundreds of millions trapped in poverty unnecessarily.”

    • 90-Year-Old Florida Man Charged for Feeding the Homeless Again, Still Won’t Stop
    • Europe feels sting in the tail of Russia sanctions

      At a technology fair in Moscow last month, European executives faced the new reality of doing business in Russia since the West imposed sanctions: the number of companies at the international showcase had shrunk by half from a year ago.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Corporate and Financial Sectors Dominate the Boards of Public TV Stations

      In October 2014, Aldo Guerrero of Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR) reported that individuals with connections in the corporate and financial sectors dominate the executive boards of public television stations. FAIR conducted a study to determine trustee occupations, specifically to discover their corporate connections. They researched the boards of five major public television stations in the United States: WNET of New York City/Newark, WGBH of Boston, WETA of Washington, DC, WTTW of Chicago, and KCET of Los Angeles. The study reveals that 84% of the boards’ 182 members have corporate backgrounds, and 138 members are “executives at elite businesses.” The report also provides the percentage of corporate and non-corporate board members for each television station. WTTW and WNET had the highest percentage of corporate members, 92%.

  • Privacy

    • The Snowden Effect, Quantified

      The failure of the USA Freedom Act in the Senate earlier this month was a disappointment to many in favor of reforming the National Security Agency. The bill, far from perfect, and certainly incomplete in its scope was thought of by some as a possible first step. To others, it was a way for Congress to pass something that merely looked like reform.

    • THE US/UK CAMPAIGN TO DEMONIZE SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES AS TERRORIST ALLIES

      In May, 2013, a British Army soldier, Lee Rigby, was killed on a suburban London street by two Muslim British citizens, who said they were acting to avenge years of killings of innocent Muslims by the British military in, among other places, Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the attackers, Michael Adebolajo, had also been detained and tortured in 2010 in Kenya with the likely complicity of Her Majesty’s Government. The brutal attack on Rigby was instantly branded “terrorism” (despite its targeting of a soldier of a nation at war) and caused intense and virtually universal indignation in the UK.

    • Deconstructing the Jeremy Becker troll network

      The former Twitter account @JbJabroni10 has a long history of harassment on Twitter against people involved in the net freedom movement, and notably against myself (@puellavulnerata) and Tor developer Runa Sandvik (@runasand). Over the last four and a half months, some ‘journalists’ from Pando have been whipping up a harassment campaign against us, relying heavily on getting a cluster of associated trolls to make the most unsupportable accusations they are unwilling to make themselves, and then retweeting them. The target of this doxxing, @JbJabroni10, was a prominent member of that network, and has been frequently retweeted by the Goebbelsesque propagandist @YashaLevine in recent weeks. Since he has deleted all his accounts and certain other members of the Pando mob have been pretending he is some sort of fallen hero (see fig. 1, 2), this is being written to document the evidence against him, all his known sockpuppets and as much of his history as it has been possible to recover.

    • The Pando Tor conspiracy troll

      The military and government throws research money around with reckless abandon. That no more means they created Tor than it means they created the Internet back in the 1970s. A lot of that research is pure research, intended to help people. Not everything the military funds is designed to kill people.

      There is no single “government”. We know, for example, that while some in government paid Jacob Appelbaum’s salary, others investigated him for his Wikileaks connections. Different groups are often working at cross purposes — even within a single department.

      [...]

      Dissidents use Tor — successfully. We know that because the dissidents are still alive. Even if it’s a secret conspiracy by the U.S. government, it still does what its supporters want, helping dissidents fight oppressive regimes. In any case, Edward Snowden, who had access to NSA secrets, trusts his own life to Tor.

    • New Facebook Rules Will Sting Entrepreneurs

      Chrisy Bossie built a $100,000-a-year gemstone e-commerce business by sharing information about her products on her company’s Facebook page several times a week.

    • White House Push To Allow FBI Phone Hacks Could Hurt Intelligence Gathering

      Through public speeches and secret meetings, FBI Director James Comey has been pushing to stop companies like Apple and Google from encrypting users’ phone data. Two former Navy SEALs say that the policy that the FBI and the Justice Department are pursuing would hurt men and women in uniform and possibly even our allies by forcing them to use insecure devices and services for communication.

    • The FBI’s Desired Encryption Back Doors Could Harm Intelligence Gathering, Military Operations

      While FBI director James Comey discusses all the inevitable horrors encrypted phones are poised to wreak on the nation’s youth, those in the encryption business are pointing out how encrypted phones make things safer for our nation’s military.

    • UK Government Brings In Yet More Counter-Terrorism Measures — Including Internal Exile

      The UK has the sad distinction of leading the way in the West when it comes to playing up the terrorism threat to justify the introduction of disproportionate surveillance laws. One of the favorite rhetorical tricks employed here is to invoke the “capabilities gap”: this refers to the fact that the security services are unable to capture all communications in the same way they once could. But it’s a misleading comparison.

      [...]

      The parallels between the UK and Soviet Russia become more painfully apparent by the day.

    • German loophole allows BND spy agency to snoop on own people

      The revelation comes after a BND employee was arrested in July on suspicion of selling secret documents to a CIA contact. Rather than report the contact to their allied German counterparts, the US spy agency was reported to have paid the agent €25,000 (£20,000) for 218 documents classified as confidential or top secret.

  • Civil Rights

    • VIP paedophile ring ‘abused teenage boy INSIDE Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle’

      A teenage boy working at Buckingham Palace revealed he was groomed and sexually abused by a VIP paedophile ring there.

      The lad was also assaulted at the Royal Family’s Scottish retreat Balmoral, according to shocking Home Office files, reports the Sunday People.

      In a heartbreaking note, the boy – then just 16 – told how he was the victim of “exploitation of the highest order”.

      The chilling claims could now be the subject of a police investigation into ­historic allegations of child sex abuse in the 1970s and 80s – linked to MPs and powerful figures.

    • UN Report Documents Torture, Police Violence in US

      There are some significant revelations. The committee notes that the US government had filed reservations to the Convention on Torture at the time of ratification, indicating that some practices condemned by the treaty would continue, and that the Obama administration has refused to alter this “restrictive interpretation” of the anti-torture treaty or introduce a prohibition of torture into federal law.

    • The UN Just Issued a Scathing Critique of America’s Justice System

      A new report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture released Friday expressed “deep concern at the frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals,” as well as “the alleged difficulties to hold police officers and their employers accountable for abuses.”

    • British spies ‘bugged Scotland Yard’: Letter claims conversations with Met over Libyan case intercepted

      Britain’s security and intelligence agencies were last night rocked by claims that they bugged Scotland Yard detectives who were investigating the agencies’ own alleged malpractice.

      A Yard spokesman yesterday confirmed that police are investigating the allegations – which stem from documents disclosed in court by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

      If substantiated, the claims – set out in a letter to Met commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe from Cori Crider, a director of the human rights charity Reprieve – would mean that one arm of the State supposed to keep the country safe from terrorism spied on another, the Metropolitan Police.

    • Britain’s GCHQ monitored Irish internet traffic

      Britain’s surveillance body, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), could be tapping underwater cables connecting Ireland to the global web, according to a new document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and released by German media.

    • Active Duty and Veteran Military Families Must Use Food Pantries to Meet Basic Needs
    • The OTHER Government Revolving Door: Sheriff’s Departments, State Troopers Provide New Homes For Bad Cops

      It’s not just our nation’s legislators that enjoy a “revolving door” — one that moves them from Congress to the private sector and back again, to the mutual benefit of legislators and certain industries… not so much the rest of America.

    • Officers who left LPD after complaints find jobs with sheriff, patrol

      John McGahan, the Lincoln Police Department’s 2013 Officer of the Year who resigned this year after Internal Affairs accused him of using excessive force, is now working at the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office.

    • The Legality of the Voting Rights Act: An Equal Vote for Natives

      It has been over 50 years after the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and Native Americans (both Indians and Alaska Natives) still do not possess equal access to voting polls, as Stephanie Woodward reports for In These Times.

      Unequal voting access has produced lower voting turnout among Natives for two distinct reasons. The first being that voting polls lie off of reservations. This creates a myriad of extra costs including travel funds and loss of income. Many natives cannot afford the gas money needed to get to these polls as well as taking a half day off of work. The other sanction upon Native voting is fear. There have been accounts of numerous hate crimes, murders, and even police brutality against Natives in the surrounding areas off of reservations. This along with the language barrier cause the few Natives who can afford the travel expenditures to avoid voting for fear of the repercussions.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It’s Important

      Cuban also offered up a Q&A session with the Washington Post because, Post writer Nancy Scola informs us, “there’s nothing that Cuban dislikes more than untested conventional wisdom” (aka the need for net neutrality rules). Most of us by now know the U.S. broadband market isn’t free or functional — it’s a broken duopoly, slathered in a layer of regulatory capture, preying on a captive audience incapable of voting with their wallets.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Sony films ‘Fury’ and ‘Annie’ said stolen in studio cyberattack

        The recent picture “Fury,” a Brad Pitt war movie, and the yet-to-be-released “Annie” and “Still Alice” have appeared on file-sharing sites, said the person, who sought anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter. The website TorrentFreak, a news site on file-sharing, said “Fury” was the second-most-downloaded film at one site.

      • Kim Dotcom beats US bid to get him thrown back in jail

        Kim Dotcom has successfully fended off an American government bid to put in him back in a New Zealand jail for allegedly violating his bail.

        “That was a good win today, but also another attempt by the US government to get my liberty removed—it’s unbelievable,” Dotcom told Ars by phone late Sunday night.

      • Torrent Site Admin Sentenced to Five Months Prison

        Following an initial investigation and complaint filed by Rights Alliance in 2012, this week the admin of a Sweden-based torrent site learned of his fate. Dismissing claims that the site had been sold four years earlier, a court sentenced the 40-year-old to a five month jail sentence.

      • Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Picks Up Fight for a Free Internet

        Former Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde was released from prison earlier this month. Today he looks back at his tough time in prison and to the fights ahead, including the battle for a free and open Internet. Peter sees data as the oil of the 21st century and likens the fight against piracy to the invasion of Kuwait.

      • YouTube Briefly Shuts Down Blizzard’s Own YouTube Channel For Copyright Infringement

        YouTube’s ContentID system gets mocked quite frequently for bogus takedowns, which happen with unfortunate frequency. The latest, as pointed out by YouTube star Total Biscuit is that Blizzard’s own damn YouTube channel for World Championship Series StarCraft, WCSStarCraft, was down for at least 40 minutes earlier today.

11.30.14

Links 30/11/2014: Debian Fork, New Mint Linux Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 3:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Issue 10 Out Now!

    Once we’ve finished boasting about the prowess of Linux, we search out the best light-weight distro, look into the murky world of patent litigation, uncover the secrets of systemd, play with Google Cardboard, add more forms of input to a Raspberry Pi and program autonomous battle droids.

  • Server

    • Docker: Sorry, you’re just going to have to learn about it. Today we begin

      Containers aren’t a new idea, and Docker isn’t remotely the only company working on productising containers. It is, however, the one that has captured hearts and minds.

      Docker started out with the standard LXC containers that are part of virtually every Linux distribution out there, but eventually transitioned to libcontainer, its own creation. Normally, nobody would have cared about libcontainer, but as we’ll dig into later, it was exactly the right move at the right time.

  • Kernel Space

    • Nasty Lockup Issue Still Being Investigated For Linux 3.18

      When Linux 3.18-rc6 was released last Sunday, Linus Torvalds noted in the release announcement that a “a big unknown worry in a regression” remained. Nearly one week later, kernel developers are still figuring out what’s going on with this regression that can cause frequent lockups. Worse off, it looks like it might affect the Linux 3.17 kernel too.

    • Generic TrustZone Driver Proposed For Linux Kernel

      ARM’s security extensions are in the process of being bettered on Linux.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa Git Yields Performance Improvements For Newer AMD GPUs

        Earlier this week I published some benchmark results showing Mesa 10.5-devel delivering Intel performance changes compared to Mesa 10.3 as found in Ubuntu 14.10. The next logical step to this testing is looking at the AMD Radeon graphics results for the R600g and RadeonSI drivers using multiple graphics cards while seeing what the open-source Radeon Linux driver has to offer if upgrading past what’s shipped in Ubuntu 14.10 and other recent Linux distribution releases.

    • Benchmarks

      • OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 vs. Fedora 21 vs. openSUSE Factory

        This week I posted some OS X 10.10 vs. Ubuntu 14.10 performance results that were quite interesting and showed Ubuntu Linux largely dominating over OS X Yosemite with a Haswell-based MacBook Air. For those curious how other Linux distributions compare in this performance showdown, here are some results when also testing Fedora 21 in its near-final state and also openSUSE in its rolling-release form.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Google Code In 2014 : Call for Participation

        The Google Code-in is a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software development possible. The contest runs from December 1, 2014 to January 19, 2015. For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first introduction to open source development.

      • KDE at LISA 2014 conference

        KDE was one of about 50 exhibitors at the LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference November 12th and 13th in Seattle. The expo was part of the week-long conference for system administrators that has been held annually since 1986. Expo participants included big name tech companies and smaller niche organizations offering products and services to this audience of professional technical people. As we discovered, KDE is well known among this audience.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Distributions

    • Material Design Adorns Desktop Thanks to a Custom Linux OS

      Google introduced the clean new design language this year naming it Material Design. The design ideology of Material Design was loved by many thanks to its clean and simple UI. If you too are one of those in love with Lollipop’s Material Design, chances are you will soon be able to get the design for your desktop. Currently being developed by Michael Spencer, this upcoming Linux distribution is being called Quantum OS (previously Quartz OS).

    • Red Hat Family

      • [Red Hat JBoss Unified Push] Now Available on Openshift

        The Unified Push Server allows developers to send native push messages to Apple’s Push Notification Service (APNS) and Google’s Cloud Messaging (GCM). It features a built-in administration console that makes it easy for developers to create and manage push related aspects of their applications for any mobile development environment. Includes client SDKs (iOS, Android, & Cordova), and a REST based sender service with an available Java sender library.

      • Fedora

        • To Do

          OK, there are endless to-do list applications, each with its own plusses and deltas. I tried the emacs todo without a lot of joy. I more or less settled on using bugzilla since it allowed me to not only capture relationships and estimates, but also to keep notes on various projects or bits of projects. I tend to have lots of things that I need to do “right now”, but even more things that I would like to do if I ever get one of them round tuit thingies. BZ works well for this in terms of capturing things, and especially capturing thoughts on those things I want to get around to some day.

        • It’s a good thing they pay me to break stuff

          Yesterday’s was triggered by me messing up the Fedora kernel package git repository – whoops. I keep Fedlet’s kernel as a branch that only exists in my checkout; it’s not pushed anywhere (I should just push it out on my git server now I have one, but I keep forgetting). I accidentally ran git push from that branch yesterday, and it promptly pushed all the changes on it to master, effectively turning Fedora’s kernel into the Fedlet kernel for a few glorious hours until Josh reverted it.

        • [Test-Announce] Fedora 21 Final Release Candidate 1 (RC1) Available Now!

    • Debian Family

      • Systemd fallout: Debian fork Devuan set up

        A group styling itself as veteran UNIX administrators has announced that it has set up a fork of the Debian GNU/Linux project.

      • Fork Debian Project Announces the Systemd-less OS Devuan

        A group of unknown developers have proposed a while ago to fork Debian in an effort to create a parallel project that would go on without Systemd. It seemed ridiculous at the time and many have thought that it was just just some kind of pressure, but it looks like the project is real enough.

      • Debian Forked, Ubuntu MATE Fabulous, and Fedora 21 RC1

        Everybody went back to work today and there is so much news I hardly know where to start. The top story tonight is bound to be the official forking of Debian. In other news, Dediomedio.com says Ubuntu 14.10 MATE is “almost fabulous” and the Free Software Foundation released their 2014 gift buying guide. Mint 17.1 is almost here and a Fedora 21 release candidate has been released. Carla Schroder has an exclusive on Linux.com about being a maker instead of a user and, finally, a bunch of too-good-to-resist tidbits.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Meizu’s first Ubuntu phones coming in early 2015
          • Ubuntu powered Meizu smartphones could arrive in early 2015
          • A Ubuntu Phone will finally go on sale next year

            Fans of Ubuntu have been waiting patiently for a phone running Canonical’s mobile OS to make its way to retail shelves. Thanks to Chinese OEM Meizu, they may only have a few more months to wait.

          • Ubuntu 14.10 MATE edition – Almost fabulous

            Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn with the MATE desktop environment is a very cool distro. It suffers from two big problems, one of which has been inherited from its Unity parent, and that would be the inability to format old partitions, created by previous versions of Ubuntu. This is somewhat worrying. Samba printing is another disappointment. There was no screenshot problem like with some other distros, though.

            Besides these issues, everything else was perfect. Familiar, friendly, extremely productive. Super fast and super stable, too. There was nothing out of ordinary, no problems. Suspend and resume worked without any issues, the system blazed at the speed of light, and with maybe ten minutes of work, you can transform it into anything you want. Docks, menus, new fonts, new themes, all there, just waiting for you. Total freedom and fun.

            There can’t be a perfect score, because the associated problems do not allow it. But assuming you had this distro given to you, and someone bothered to install the needed Samba package that normal people require, it would be an excellent alternative to many other mainstream releases. Highly polished, slick, and almost overwhelmingly simple and easy to use. The grade is something like 9.0/10, but it can do better. I demand it. For you, this is an excellent test bed. Go for it.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 17.1 `Rebecca` Available For Download

              Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” has been released and is available as usual in two main editions: MATE and Cinnamon. Let’s take a look at what’s new!

            • Just a few more days before 17.1

              The ISO images for the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” just passed QA testing and were approved for a stable release. This release should go public in the coming days.

              If you are running Linux Mint 17.1 RC, you do not need to wait for the stable release, and you do not need to reinstall. You can simply use the Update Manager to install any level 1 update you haven’t installed already.

            • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon released!
            • Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” MATE released!
            • Do you smell the minty goodness? Linux Mint 17.1 ‘Rebecca’ is finally here!

              Christmas is coming, which means lots of festivities are about to happen. For me, however, the holiday is all about one thing — smells. No, I’m not crazy, although many will disagree. What I mean to say is, the smells of Christmas resonate with me more than any other aspect. Of course, the smell of pine trees conjure images of decorated trees with gifts underneath, but don’t forget the smells of cookies baking and grandma’s perfume. All of these scents comes together to culminate Christmastime.

            • Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon Is Out and the Best So Far – Screenshot Tour

              Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” Cinnamon has been released and is now available for download. The new version of the operating system features a major update for the desktop environment, along with a multitude of other upgrades.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Imagination brings virtualised Linux security to the Internet of Things

      IMAGINATION TECHNOLOGIES has announced the creation of a tiny hypervisor rig to power its MIPS-based CPUs.

      The joint venture with Japanese firm Seltech saw the Fexerox hypervisor embedded firmware from Seltech paired with an Imagination MIPSM5150 CPU to create a virtualised environment, allowing multiple operating systems to run independently off a single unit packed into a tiny space.

    • Rugged box-PC runs Linux on quad-core 2.1GHz Core i7

      An MPL spokesperson confirmed in an email that the “PIP39 as well as all other MPL CPU products are fully Linux supported.” Although a specific version was not mentioned, the PIP39 presumably is supported with the same Debian Linux distribution that’s available with the company’s CEC10 system.

    • Hands-on with the Raspberry Pi Model B+

      There have been a several interesting new hardware announcements from the Raspberry Pi Foundation this year. Sometimes I wonder how they do it all – with so much involvement in education, development of new hardware and software, and the many Pi user groups and events. It really is quite impressive.

    • Raspberry Pi and Coder by Google for beginners and kids

      Coder is an experiment for Raspberry Pi, built by a small team of Googlers in New York. It converts a Raspberry Pi into a friendly environment for learning web programming. It is ideal for beginners and requires absolutely no experience with coding.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

      • Android

        • Preview: Office for Android tablets is like Office for iPad, but on Android

          Google’s Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps are a lot of things—they’re fast, they’re convenient, and they’re available on both iOS and Android—but you couldn’t call them “powerful.” Even the Web versions of Google’s productivity software are pretty basic compared with the feature-stuffed behemoth that is Microsoft Office, and the mobile apps are minimalist by comparison.

        • CuBox-i4Pro: A whole lotta Linux or Android for not a whole lotta cash

          I recently reviewed the Hummingboard, an excellent, low-priced single board computer that competes in the same market as the the Raspberry Pi. Recently the manufacturer of the Hummingboard, SolidRun, sent me one of their new products to check out: The CuBox-i4Pro.

        • 35 Android Apps for Pure Fun

          Why, yes, of course you have apps on your Android phone and tablet. But most of these Android apps are for work or purely practical reasons, right? All work and no play not only makes you dull but it’s actually bad for your health. (Isn’t there a study somewhere that supports that?) So, in the interest of health and the joy of nonsense, here are 35 Android apps that have only one purpose: fun!

Free Software/Open Source

  • Robocoin Bitcoin ATMs Can Now Run Lamassu Open Source Software

    Robocoin Bitcoin ATM operators now have a new attractive alternative to abiding by Robocoin’s new compliance standards. In response to Robocoin’s move to enforce AML/KYC compliance for all of its ATM operators (even non-American ones), some Bitcoin enthusiasts have banded together to port Lamassu’s open source Bitcoin ATM software to run on Robocoin’s hardware.

  • Enjoy the New ReactOS Explorer

    The new ReactOS Explorer is much more compatible, stable, and comes with more features than the current (and now old) explorer. We expect it to be a big quality jump in terms of usability, and the rockstar feature of the upcoming 0.4 release. Just keep reading to discover more about it!

  • India’s offline mobile internet is going open source

    “By giving away the source code, we can ignite the creative energies of the entire developer community and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the SMS market. Customers can benefit from world-class technology advancements, the development community gains access to a whole new market opportunity and Innoz core businesses benefit from licensing it with telecom operators.”

  • Events

    • LinuxDay 2014 Dornbirn

      Again the Fedora Project was present at the LinuxDay at Dornbirn (a small linux event near the German, Swiss, and Austrian border beside the Lake Constance). I arrived some minutes before the event started. Matthias Summer was already there and prepared the booth. Well, there was not much to prepare.

    • Learn about open source software in Bernardsville

  • Web Browsers

    • 4 Cutting Edge Web Browsers

      The usage share of web browsers is dominated by a few mature applications. Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera account for around 95% of all desktop web browsing activity. However, there are a myriad of other web browsers that are worth investigating.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Open Cloud Alliance Rallies Open Source Community

      To assist with maintaining the interoperability of open source software, IBM and Univention have formed the Open Cloud Alliance (OCA), a consortium that is dedicated to reducing the cost of open source interoperability of open source software deployed in cloud computing environments.

  • BSD

    • Failed attempts to dual-boot PC-BSD 10.1 with Windows 8

      So it appears that the installation attempt failed at that point because the correct gpart option was not specified. The -i option is used to run gpart interactively, but why it’s necessary to use it in the graphical application? In any case, I’ll be logging a bug report.

    • FreeBSD Plans For The Next Ten Years

      Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and CTO of iXsystems, gave a talk at this month’s MeetBSD California 2014 conference about the next ten years of FreeBSD.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The 2014 Giving Guide is here!

      Today, we’re launching the 2014 Giving Guide, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) guide to smarter gifts, compared with their restrictive counterparts.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Pigs can’t fly: Passenger escorted off US flight after 80-pound ‘emotional support’ hog is disruptive

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Letter: US military’s drone policy worth fighting

      “(My husband Michael Pike died in September of Agent Orange related cancer.) My husband was Special Forces in Vietnam and came to regret his role in the war and what the U.S. government did. I am here today in loving memory of that fine man to ask you to stop your role in the kill chain which uses the Northrup Grumman Global Hawk drone to identify human targets for extrajudicial execution. This is neither lawful (international and higher law) nor moral and you must know that. Horrible acts, like drone strikes, lead to the atrocities we see now. Inhumanity engenders inhumanity.

    • Egyptian Judges Dismiss Charges Against Mubarak
    • Obama’s dangerous embrace of war

      The fact that the U.S. today is increasing its military action in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, after a decade of intense warfare in the region, should be a reason for American officials and the public alike to ask some serious questions about how they use their military power around the world. The biggest problem that we see confirmed again this week is that American military action in distant lands usually only turns those lands into chaotic, dysfunctional, ungoverned and violent places. In the chaos that follows such warfare a new danger now steps in – militant Islamist killers such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

    • In Congo, peacekeepers at war

      Since Congo’s civil war broke out in 1994, it has become the world’s deadliest conflict, pitting neighboring governments and dozens of local warlords in a free-for-all over the prodigious profits to be made in eastern Congo’s mines. According to demographers, 5.4 million Congolese died during just one stretch from 1998 to 2006.

    • New Australian terrorism bill to facilitate targeted military killings

      …Australian Senate has signed off another “counter-terrorism” bill that grants unprecedented powers to the intelligence and military apparatus.

    • £120m deal to promote a form of terror

      The International Business Times reported this month that British and French governments have signed a £120 million pound deal to develop a military drone – aka unmanned combat air system – following a two-year feasibility study. The combat drone could be deployed from 2030.

    • “Global” Terrorism

      Sure enough, there are now half a dozen Canadian planes bombing ISIS jihadis in Iraq (although it’s unlikely that either of the Canadian attackers, both converts to radical Islam, had any contact with foreign terrorist organizations). But Harper has got the logic completely backwards.

      The purpose of major terrorist activities directed at the West, from the 9/11 attacks to ISIS videos, is not to “cow” or “intimidate” Western countries. It is to get those countries to bomb Muslim countries or, better yet, invade them. The terrorists want to come to power in Muslim countries, not in Canada or Britain or the US. And the best way to establish your revolutionary credentials and recruit local supporters is to get the West to attack you.

    • Terrorists actually welcome attacks from the West
    • Giving terrorists what they want
    • Why terrorists love Western intervention

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Icelandic hacker says guilty of stealing money from Wikileaks

      An Icelandic computer hacker and former associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange unexpectedly pleaded guilty on Wednesday to embezzling 30 million Icelandic crowns ($240,000) from the organization.

    • Siggi “The Hacker” ad­mits guilty to all charges

      The case against Siggi “The Hacker” has un­der­gone a sharp turn-around. Siggi has de­cided to change his plea to “Guilty”. Charges against him amount to thirty pages of em­bez­zle­ment and fraud amount­ing to thirty mil­lion kro­nas.

      Orig­i­nally Siggi pleaded “Not Guilty” and the main trial was to take place in Reyk­janes dis­trict court next week. His lawyer, Vil­hjál­mur H.Vil­hjálms­son said at court to­day that “Af­ter go­ing over the charges thor­oughly and speak­ing with my client he has de­cided to plead guilty to all charges.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Oil Price Fall: Saudi Arabia Targets U.S. Shale Oil, Iran, Iraq, Russia

      It is clear that among the major losers in the fall in the price of Brent crude petroleum from $115 a barrel last summer to about $75 a barrel today are Russia, Iraq and Iran. Petroleum sales are 50% of Russia’s income, and are also central for Iran and Iraq.

      But the big loser will likely be shale oil producers and prospectors in the US, who probably cannot make a profit if the price falls into the 60s.

      The cause of the fall, by $40 a barrel, in petroleum prices since last summer is almost completely on the demand side. Asian economies, especially China, are dramatically slowing, and won’t be requiring as much petroleum to fuel trucks, trains and cars to deliver people and goods around the country. Most petroleum is used to fuel transport. Some is used for heating or cooling, as in Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, but that practice is relatively rare. US journalists seem to feel it obligatory to mention US shale oil production as a contributor to the price fall, since prices are a matter of supply and demand, and US supply has increased by a couple million barrels a day. But frankly that is a minor increase in world terms– global production is roughly 90 million barrels a day. Between Iran, Iraq (Kirkuk), Libya and Syria, enough oil has gone out of production to more than offset the additional American oil. It isn’t that there is more oil being pumped, it is that the world doesn’t want it as much because of cooling economies.

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • China writer goes on trial for media censorship protest after long delay

      The long-awaited trial of a prominent Chinese writer and activist resumed in southern China on Friday, more than two months after his lawyers boycotted an earlier hearing with Beijing showing little sign of easing its clampdown against rights campaigners.

    • Chinese Activists Go on Trial for Protesting Media Censorship; Lawyers Claim Human Rights Violation

      Feixiong, whose original name is Yang Maodong, was charged for ‘gathering crowds to disturb public order’ after he organized protests outside the office of the Southern Weekly newspaper last January. Activist Sun Desheng, who was part of the protest, was also arrested.

    • Censorship distortion of ‘comfort women’

      The U.S. Occupation censored Taijiro Tamura’s 1947 story “The Life of an Alluring Woman” (Shunpu den) for describing Korean prostitutes in a war zone. The Civil Information and Education Section with censorship power decided that identifying the nationality of the prostitutes constituted “criticism” of that nation.

    • Lessons On Censorship From Syria’s Internet Filter Machines

      Organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, or the Open Net Initiative periodically report on the extent of censorship worldwide. But as countries that are fond of censorship are not particularly keen to share details, we must resort to probing filtered networks, that is, generating requests from within them to see what gets blocked and what gets through. We cannot hope to record all the possible censorship-triggering events, so our understanding of what is or isn’t acceptable to the censor will only ever be partial. And of course it’s risky, even outright illegal, to probe the censor’s limits within countries with strict censorship and surveillance programs.

      This is why the leak of 600GB of logs from hardware appliances used to filter internet traffic in and out of Syria is a unique opportunity to examine the workings of a real-world internet censorship apparatus.

    • Council member objects to museum’s “pornographic” photo

      A nude photo of a pregnant woman at a local art museum has drawn the ire of a Jacksonville council member.

      Emails obtained by First Coast News shed light on the nude photo that has city council member Clay Yarborough calling for the City of Jacksonville to pull nearly $233,000 worth of funding designated for the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art.

    • The Story Behind Iran’s Censorship Redirect Page
    • Morehshin Allahyari’s Art on Iranian Censorship Will Soon Be Out of This World
    • Europe wants Google to expand ‘right to be forgotten’ censorship to global search

      Google should start applying the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” to its global, .com domain, European privacy regulators say.

      European data protection authorities in the so-called Article 29 Working Party (WP29) have compiled a set of guidelines detailing how search engines should apply a court ruling that gave Europeans the right to be forgotten by search engines. As of the May decision, EU citizens have the right to compel search engines to remove search results in Europe for queries that include their names if the results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.”

    • EU demands “right to be forgotten” goes international
    • EU wants ‘right to be forgotten’ applied globally

      Privacy watchdogs in Europe say the controversial ruling, which affects only local European versions of Google’s search engine, should be applied more broadly.

    • When (if ever) is media censorship justifiable?

      How does one measure the degree to which content is ‘inappropriate’ or ‘harmful’? Are there cases where media censorship is justifiable?

    • Russia’s Freest Website Now Lives in Latvia

      Moscow-based Editor in Chief Galina Timchenko was fired for ‘extremism’ after running an article on Ukraine. So she and her staff packed up shop and moved west.

  • Privacy

    • Germany Signs No-Spy Deal with BlackBerry

      Germany has approved BlackBerry’s purchase of encryption firm Secusmart after signing a “no-spy” agreement with the Canadian smartphone maker.

      Duesseldorf-based Secusmart provides special smartphones to German government officials that are meant to be safe from eavesdropping.

    • Big Data Ethics and Your Privacy [INFOGRAPHIC]

      But access to data is not the only important aspect of Big Data ethics. The fact that our privacy is not for granted any more became quite clear after the NSA files were made public in the summer of 2013. All of a sudden it was public knowledge that the governments basically had unlimited acces to all of your data. But not only governments have access to your data. Many of the largest organisations that you interact with every day know probably more about you than you do yourself. Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn know a lot about you, because you provide that information to them. Although Facebook just released a new, simpeler, privacy policy that does not mean that they collect less data about you. On the contrary; they want to collect a lot more data about you.

    • UK spy base GCHQ tapped Irish internet cables

      New documents released this week via the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden outline how Irish subsea telecommunications cables have been targeted by British intelligence.

      The documents detail a whole series of underwater cables – essentially the backbone that connects Ireland to the globe – that are being tapped.

    • Europe’s next privacy war is with websites silently tracking users

      The pan-European data regulator group Article 29 has issued new opinion on how websites and advertisers can track users and the permissions they require.

      The new opinion dictates that “device fingerprinting” – a process of silently collecting information about a user – requires the same level of consent as cookies that are used to track users across the internet.

    • The UK’s Real Intelligence Failure

      That is, the Home Office wants CSPs based outside the UK (Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.) to co-operate with the UK government in the same way as UK-based ones by handing over any requested information. But the Home Office itself admits that any US company doing so would breach the US Wiretap Act. Which means that the Home Office seriously expects US companies and their officers to risk punishment by the US government just because the UK wants easy access to information.

    • No Halt to the Sharing of Medical Records

      Despite uncovering thousands of cases of patient information being wrongly disclosed to third parties a recent review into the sharing of medical records with private sector companies endorses the practice.

    • NHS to carry on selling patient records to insurers

      The National Health Service will continue to sell medical data to insurers and other third parties despite an investigation that has discovered tens of thousands of patient records were unlawfully sold.

      Fears were raised earlier this year that patient records were being misused and sold to insurers, and the Government amended the law to restrict access to data.

      The report from an eight-month inquiry has found tens of thousands of records were wrongly passed to third parties.

    • Germans end investigation into Merkel phone tapping
    • How to stop NSA from snooping on you

      The first thing to know about securing your phone is that you can’t secure your phone.

    • Panel probing NSA surveillance finds legal loophole that lets German intel spy on own citizens

      German lawmakers probing the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency have uncovered a legal loophole that allows the country’s foreign intelligence agency to spy on its own citizens.

      The agency, known by its German acronym BND, is normally forbidden from eavesdropping on Germans or German companies.

      But a former BND lawyer told Parliament this week that Germans aren’t protected while working abroad for foreign companies.

      The government confirmed Saturday to The Associated Press that work-related calls or emails are attributed to the employer. If the employer is foreign, the BND can intercept them.

    • Edward Snowden Revelations Not Having Much Impact on Internet Users

      Despite the shocking revelations by Edward Snowden about the degree of surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA), most internet users across the world do not appear to be taking proper measures to be safe online.

    • The bigger the haystack, the harder the terrorist is to find

      The UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee report this week into the murder of Lee Rigby described British intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ multiple failures to prevent the terrible crime.

      Rigby’s killers together had figured in seven prior surveillance operations during the course of which officials learned that one of them had travelled to Kenya in an attempt to join the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab.

      The shocking failures and bungling that ensued in the years the two men were tracked is, tellingly, chalked up to the “extreme pressure” brought on by the fact that at any one time, MI5 is investigating several thousand individuals suspected of links to Islamic extremist activities in Britain.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Global net neutrality pact hopes to silence European malcontents

      THE ELECTRONIC FREEDOM FOUNDATION has announced a worldwide coalition of organisations dedicated to the fight for net neutrality.

      The Global Net Neutrality Coalition defines the term thus: “Net neutrality requires that the internet be maintained as an open platform, on which network providers treat all content, applications and services equally, without discrimination.”

      Comprising 25 organisations from 19 countries, the coalition will use its site as a repository for information regarding net neutrality laws and legislation in given territories, along with advice on petitioning the relevant authorities to preserve an equal internet for all.

  • DRM

    • Buy from Amazon and Apple and it’s you that ends up owned

      Readers of Nick Hornby’s debut novel High Fidelity will remember that much of it takes place in a record shop on Holloway Road called Championship Vinyl. Not surprisingly, Hollywood deemed Holloway a postcode too far when it adapted the 1995 book. The studio installed John Cusack and his music-buff sidekick in a sunny gaff in Chicago. At least, in 2000, Hornby’s obsessive blokes still sold rotating plastic discs. A decade later, the film business would have treated any story set in a music or bookshop as an antique period piece to feature (if at all) alongside samurai yarns or Roman sword-and-sandal epics.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Music publishers finally pull the trigger, sue an ISP over piracy

        BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music have sued Cox Communications for copyright infringement, arguing that the Internet service provider doesn’t do enough to punish those who download music illegally.

        Both BMG and Round Hill are clients of Rightscorp, a copyright enforcement agent whose business is based on threatening ISPs with a high-stakes lawsuit if they don’t forward settlement notices to users that Rightscorp believes are “repeat infringers” of copyright.

      • Cox Communications Sued For Not Disconnecting Pirates

        Cox Communications, one of the largest telecoms companies in the U.S., is being sued by a pair of music publishers for refusing to disconnect persistent music pirates. Evidence in the case is being provided by Rightscorp, who say that ISPs lose their safe harbor protections if they fail to take action against repeat infringers.

11.28.14

Links 28/11/2014: Debian Fork, Fedora 21 RC, Git 2.2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Meet Feminist Hacker Barbie, avenger of girl nerds

    So great: Feminist Hacker Barbie, a viral response to the total sexist disaster that was the Barbie “computer engineer” book. Follow the hashtag.

  • get GNU/Linux!

    Well, the site would be just about perfect if they recommended Debian GNU/Linux but they recommend Ubuntu GNU/Linux. I think a site emphasizing freedom should mention that Debian gives the users more control of everything than Ubuntu. Debian has a few defaults I don’t like but at least I have the option of changing them at installation. Good luck doing that with Ubuntu’s installer. You may get one or two options Debian doesn’t have but you don’t get to choose desktops at all. It’s disUnity or nothing. Ubuntu hides choices from the newbie just like M$. Of course, newbies may not know much about desktop choices but an installer could give some hints.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 22nd June 2014
      • Qt 5.4 Release Candidate Available

        I am happy to announce that Qt 5.4 Release Candidate is now available.

      • KWayland Server Component Coming For KDE Plasma 5.2

        KWayland was introduced last month with the KDE Plasma 5.1 release but it lacked the server-side code. With the upcoming release of Plasma 5.2, that will change with the server component to KWayland having been merged.

      • Season of KDE

        This is my first SoK and hence I am equally excited and motivated to make a niche for myself with my work. The task allotted to me was to finish test.kubuntu.co.uk . My task was to use a WordPress theme and finish the site but I am not a big fan of WordPress themes. So I decided to make my own theme and thankfully my mentor , Jonathan Riddell was on the same page with me. Thus began the first lap , thinking and coming up with a new design.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK+ Inspector Gains More Features Ahead Of GNOME 3.16

        For those doing much development in GTK+, the GtkInspector integrated debugger continues making much progress and will offer a wealth of more development and debug capabilities with GNOME 3.16.

        GtkInspector officially premiered in GNOME 3.14 while Matthias Clasen of Red Hat and other GNOME developers continue making this interactive debugger even better for the GNOME 3.16 release due out in March.

      • GNOME 3.15.2 Released

        GNOME 3.15.2 incorporates GTK+ Inspector improvements, more GTK+ OpenGL support (including GTK+ OpenGL support for the Mir back-end), support for Epiphany to open web page sources in the default text editor, improved thumbnail handling for the GNOME Desktop, updated themes, numerous improvements to GNOME Boxes, various enhancements to GNOME Maps, many bug fixes, and the usual assortment of translation updates.

      • Python 3 Support Added To The GNOME Shell

        The GNOME Shell 3.15.2 release fixes some visual glitching, improves the layout of the extension installation dialog, supports the CSS margin property, and offers other bug fixes and minor enhancements. Most notable to GNOME Shell 3.15.2 though is there’s finally Python 3 support.

  • Distributions

    • 5 Distros, 11 Tools, 800 Games, and 32 Bits

      Today in Linux news, Swapnil Bhartiya features five distributions you might like. OMG!Ubuntu! found eleven utilities to beef up your Ubuntu experience and Steam now has over 800 Linux games. Larry Cafiero says he’s “a 32-bit guy in a 64-bit world” and Docker users are urged to upgrade due to new found vulnerability.

    • Q4OS Is the Perfect Distro for People Who Want a Windows OS, Only Safer – Gallery

      Q4OS is a Linux distribution built to offer a similar experience to Windows XP. It’s been around for a long time and now the developers have released yet another update for the operating system.

    • Quantum OS Promises a Prettier Linux, Based on Google’s Material Design

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • Let’s say goodbye to Mageia 3

        It’s been a great run, but all good things must end. Or at least, upgrade to a greater thing.

        Since Mageia 3 was released in May 2013 our packaging and security teams have provided hundreds of updates (actually 1136 source packages in the Core repository, that accounts for almost 9000 binary packages), all of them tested and validated by our QA team.

    • Red Hat Family

      • ClearOS Community 6.6.0 Beta 2 Released

        ClearOS Community 6.6.0 Beta 2 has been released! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, the 6.6.0 Beta 2 release introduces WPAD, QoS, YouTube School ID support, and an upgrade to the Intrusion Detection engine. Some of the server-based apps introduced in beta 1 have been added to the ClearOS 7 roadmap. The PHP/MySQL/Web Server stack is more modern in ClearOS 7 and these server-based apps will run better on the new platform.

      • Server temp error

        I’m running windows 2012 hyper-v on the server, and it’s only since I’ve been running this that I’ve been getting the error. When I was using CentOS/KVM everything was ok. It could just be coincidence but I’m going to try an experiment. I’ve moving back to CentOS/KVM to see if it makes any difference. Perhaps MS is just over working the server and CentOS doesn’t? If it makes no difference that’s fine, it’s just an experiment and seeing as I backup my servers, converting from vhdx to qcow2 isn’t going to be much of a problem.

        Any one else had similar issues? Can it be that MS does cause the system to work harder than CentOS?

      • How packages are added to EPEL-7

        I’ve seen a number of people ask things like: “Foo is in EPEL-6, why isn’t it in EPEL-7?” so I thought I would share a detailed answer:

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Council election results

          The votes are in! Two seats were open on the newly formed Fedora Council, and we had five candidates to fill them. The new Fedora Council members are Rex Dieter and Langdon White.

          Matthew Miller sent out the election results quickly after the election ended on 26 November at 00:00 UTC.

          The election was held from 18 November to 26 November, and 192 Fedora contributors voted. (The June 2013 Fedora Board election had 157 voters, and the December 2012 election had 202 voters.)

        • FAD Phnom Penh 2014 Report

          Over one week ago, I attended FAD Phnom Penh 2014 in Cambodia. This Fedora Activitiy Day event was for APAC ambassadors to discuss budget planning, event planning, swag production and so on. Below is my full report of the two-day event.

        • Join Fedora Workshop Phnom Penh II
        • Fedora 21 RC Is Out and Ready for Testing

          The Fedora project has announced that Fedora 21 RC is now available for download and testing, for all the new flavors, Workstation, Server, and Cloud.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • IMP Launches As Another Open-Source Computer Attempt

      “Open-source computers” seem to be the latest promoted concept up for funding on popular crowd-funding sites.

    • Make Your Mark on the World With Linux

      Linux and FOSS have already changed the world, and we’re just at the beginning. This is a great time to learn to be a maker, in contrast to being a mere consumer. Clicking buttons on a smartphone is not being tech-savvy; hacking and building the phone is.

      Some people give Make Magazine the credit for launching the Maker Movement. Whether they launched it or just gave it a name, it is a real phenomenon, a natural evolution of do-it-yourselfers, inventors, and hackers in every generation. Remember Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Hands-On (for Shopsmith projects), photography magazines, woodworking magazines, electronics…remember Heathkit? Remember when Radio Shack was still an electronics store? How about Edmund Scientific? That is still a wonderful playground of anatomical models, microscopes, telescopes, dinosaurs, prisms, lenses, chemistry sets, lasers, geology stuff, and tons more. All of these still exist, and have moved online like everything else. It’s a feast of riches, plus we have all the cool new stuff that Make Magazine covers. This is absolutely the best time to be a curious tech adventurer.

    • Raspberry Pi and Coder by Google for beginners and kids

      Coder is a fantastic resource for learning programming. It simplifies the process of getting started, requires very inexpensive components, and provides fun and engaging activities. If you are planning on gettting a Raspberry Pi for the holidays, (or already have one), Coder is a great addition to get extra fun and learning from that little board.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android 5.0 Lollipop Test Firmware Leaks For The Sprint Galaxy S5

          If you’re willing to throw caution to the wind and void your warranty, you can have Android 5.0 on your Sprint Galaxy S5 right now. An early build of Lollipop for this device has leaked on XDA, and it’s flashable with Odin. Expect bugs, but hey, it’s Lollipop.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mokotów real estate dept.: ‘Open source encourages innovation’

    The Department of Real Estate Management of Mokotów, a district of the city of Warsaw (Poland), is increasingly turning to free and open source software solutions to providing flexible, innovative new ICT services. “Our management values innovations, and so supports the use of open source software,” says Jacek Wolski, the IT department’s team manager, “this encourages the IT department to implement new solutions and tools.”

  • Open source projects that warrant data center managers’ attention

    When you’re making the case to a data center manager about tech that is worthy of her consideration, make sure these three open source options are on your list.

  • GenodeOS 14.11 Now Supports Intel’s Wireless Hardware

    Released today was version 14.11 of the Genode OS Framework, an interesting open-source OS research project we’ve been following for a few years now.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Getting OpenStack Ready for the Enterprise

      OpenStack is gaining popularity as the cloud platform of choice for IT organizations. This was reflected in a 2013 IDG survey that found as much as 64 percent of IT managers including OpenStack in their technology roadmap. In the current fast-paced IT market, the massive scalability and flexible, modular architecture of OpenStack can help give organizations the agility they need.

    • OpenStack Has Its Issues but it’s Worth a Fortune

      The OpenStack user survey published earlier this month shows the frailties of the project and why customers using it become reliant on vendors. These issues stretch across different aspects of OpenStack, discussed in detail at the Kilo Design Summit at the OpenStack Summit in Paris. Full details of the user pain points can be found here.

    • Inside Cisco’s OpenStack Cloud Strategy

      Cisco first got involved with the open-source OpenStack cloud platform in 2011 with the Bexar release and initially was focused mostly on networking. Over the last several years, Cisco’s OpenStack involvement and product portfolio have grown beyond just networking.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • ‘Where is the nearest?’: Spain shares code for web map-tool

      The government of Spain is making available as open source the code for Ciudadania Europea, a web site that pointed citizens to the nearest embassies and consular services in European countries. That service was closed this summer, but the code is now freely available for other similar projects.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Docker Security Flaw Found

      The Docker Linux container format has a major exposure that could allow malicious code to assume unassigned privileges with the host server and order the extraction of files that are not intended to be accessible to the container’s code.

    • Thanksgiving security updates
    • CBC, NHL websites briefly affected by Syrian Electronic Army hack

      In the past, the Syrian Electronic Army has claimed responsibility for hacking into Twitter accounts and posting pro-Assad messages, has redirected popular websites to their own pages, and defaced some sites with their own text and images.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell Lied to Dutch Court About Oil Spills in Nigeria

      The significance of the Newsweek article is therefore threefold: firstly Shell appears to have misled the court in the Hague which from a reputational perspective is extremely damaging (hence the headline of the article), secondly the case will now return to court for a retrial, and thirdly the lawyers and witnesses in the original case may be subject to legal action by the Dutch authorities.

    • Shell Lied to Dutch Court About Oil Spills in Nigeria, Say Friends of the Earth

      The oil company Shell lied to a Dutch court about steps taken to minimize the risk of oil spills during a court case brought against the multinational oil and gas company by four Nigerian farmers and Friends of the Earth, lawyers acting for the claimants alleged today.

  • Finance

    • Why You Never Need to Shop on Black Friday Again

      The erosion of Black Friday started several years ago, when major retailers started opening their doors to shoppers on Thanksgiving Day. That meant the big sales started early, giving less importance to Friday. This year, many stores, including Toys R Us, Best Buy and JCPenney, will open for business at 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving.

    • The Odious Smith Commission

      No, this was the very worst kind of deal-making by callous political operatives, where party interests came first, second and last. I do not give a fig for the result. Income tax devolution is of minimal use if other major taxes are set from London and most income still comes from a Westminster “grant”. Revenue from oil and whisky will still be treated in government accounts as “UK” rather than arising in Scotland. It is far short of the quasi Federal powers which No voters were promised and the Lib Dems pretend to believe in.

    • ‘Wild west’ taxi drivers face tough new rules

      Stockholm taxis have a reputation for being among the most expensive in the world, but new regulations designed to make costs more transparent have been agreed on by Stockholm’s Traffic Committee.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • On Israel/Palestine, NYT’s Public Editor Seems Reluctant to Heed Own Advice

      This is what you call “working the refs”: The Times had gotten so much criticism that “they show the suffering of Palestinians only” that it was afraid to accurately report that Palestinians were, in fact, enduring far more suffering. So they added the false “symmetry” of a rocket count–false not only because Israeli weapons were far more lethal, but also because when Israel “struck” a “target” in Gaza, it often did so with far more than a single weapon. One could have as accurately conveyed the “symmetry” of a massacre of a Native American tribe by comparing the number of arrows fired with number of US Army cannon.

    • Vloggers must clearly tell fans when they’re getting paid by advertisers, ASA rules

      Advertising Standards Authority rules that video paid for by Oreos brand that featured YouTube stars broke advertising code

    • Legislation Targets Advertisers That Deploy ‘Weapons of Mass Perfection’

      In March 2014, Rep. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) introduced the Truth in Advertising Act of 2014, which calls on the Federal Trade Commission to regulate and reduce altered images of bodies in advertising. As Elizabeth Zwerling reports for Women’s E-News, the bill (HR 4341) has the potential to positively impact the self-perceptions of women and men everywhere. “We need to give young people the tools they need to distinguish fact from fiction,” said U.S. Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) who is cosponsoring the bill with Rep. Ros-Lehtinen and Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL). “This bill is a first step.”

  • Censorship

    • UK Piracy Blocklist Expands With Demonoid, Isohunt, IPTorrents and More

      The UK website blocking bonanza continues with the High Court adding 32 “pirate” sites to the country’s unofficial ban list. The new order requires six major ISPs to block access to public and private torrent sites, warez sites and streaming portals.

    • Censoring the Web Isn’t the Solution to Terrorism or Counterfeiting. It’s the Problem.

      In politics, as with Internet memes, ideas don’t spread because they are good—they spread because they are good at spreading. One of the most virulent ideas in Internet regulation in recent years has been the idea that if a social problem manifests on the Web, the best thing that you can do to address that problem is to censor the Web.

      It’s an attractive idea because if you don’t think too hard, it appears to be a political no-brainer. It allows governments to avoid addressing the underlying social problem—a long and costly process—and instead simply pass the buck to Internet providers, who can quickly make whatever content has raised rankles “go away.” Problem solved! Except, of course, that it isn’t.

  • Privacy

    • Let’s Encrypt Partnership Promises Open, Better Web Security

      There’s a good chance the software that runs your cloud, stores your data and serves your websites is open source. Soon, the SSL/TSL certificate that encrypts it can be, too — or something close to it, at least, if Let’s Encrypt, an initiative back by Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai and others to build an open certificate authority, succeeds.

    • Reaction to the Home Secretary’s speech to RUSI on the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

      Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The Home Secretary’s speech today highlights that the “snoopers charter” is anything but dead and buried.

    • BRIEFING NOTE: Counter Terrorism and Security Bill and IP address matching

      The Government has announced that it will bring forward proposals to enable IP address matching. The measures would require internet firms to keep records of customer information, to enable law enforcement bodies to decipher who was using a device, such as a smart phone or computer, at a given time.

    • Counter Terrorism and Security Bill

      The Counter Terrorism and Security Bill is due to be published today, making it the seventh major counter terrorism law introduced in Britain since 9/11. The Bill can be accessed here.

    • Reaction to the Intelligence and Security Committee Report

      Renate Samson, Chief Executive of Big Brother Watch, said: “The conclusion that a failing of an unnamed technology company should determine future legislation, whilst the catalogue of errors by the intelligence agencies is all but excused, is of grave concern.

    • Murder-for-hire suspect gets new ACLU ally in battle against phone spying

      In a new court filing, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has jumped into the criminal case of a man who federal prosecutors allege orchestrated a murder-for-hire earlier this year in Baltimore, Maryland.

      Specifically, in its 29-page amicus (friend of the court) brief filed on Tuesday, the ACLU supports the defendant’s earlier motion that the government be required to disclose information about how it used a stingray, or cell-site simulator, without a warrant, and therefore the court should suppress evidence gathered as a result of its use.

    • Social network Twitter has revealed it will make a list of every app on a user’s phone or tablet

      In a post on its help centre web page, Twitter said it would target people who use its app on all mobile devices that run Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems.

      “To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in,” the company said.

    • Facebook can gain direct access to your mobile and take pictures or make videos at any time, MPs warn

      The MPs on the Science and Technology select committee called for the Government to draw up new guidelines for websites and apps explaining clearly how they use personal data, warning that laws will be needed if companies fail to comply.

    • The Internet of Things Is Far Bigger Than Anyone Realizes (Part 2)

      Last week I talked about how people are thinking too small when they think about the Internet of Things (See Part 1). When we truly consider the ramifications of connecting a vast array of data-gathering sensors, devices, and machines together, what’s important to realize is that information will be translated into action at a rate that we have never seen before. We are closing in on a world with infinitesimal reaction times, immediate responses to changing conditions, and unparalleled control in managing assets and resources.

    • GCHQ’s ‘jihad on tech firms’ can only fail

      Some will have assumed this week’s headlines blaming Facebook for Lee Rigby’s murder were just the usual spin, diverting the attention from the agencies’ own incompetence. Yet it is part of a growing pattern.

    • ISC report on Woolwich attack gets its maths wrong

      We have reviewed the whole report by the Intelligence Security Committee on the killing of Fusilier Rigby, and found the conclusion that only Facebook is to blame very difficult to justify.

    • Guest Post: NSA Reform — The Consequences of Failure

      In the absence of real reform, people and institutions at home and abroad are taking matters into their own hands. In America, the NSA’s overreach is changing the way we communicate with and relate to each other. In order to evade government surveillance, more and more Americans are employing encryption technology.

    • Obama facing uphill battle in curbing NSA snooping

      With the lame-duck Congress failing to advance bipartisan surveillance-reform legislation, President Obama faces an uphill climb next year with his plans to end the National Security Agency’s mass collection of phone records.

    • LAWMAKERS SEEKING NSA REFORM COULD USE THE PATRIOT ACT AS LEVERAGE

      Privacy advocates, facing an uphill battle in a Republican-controlled Congress next year, will have to make a difficult choice.

    • BND spied on Germans living abroad

      The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, spied on some citizens living abroad, a former lawyer for the spies told MPs on Thursday.

    • Book review: Australia Under Surveillance, by Frank Moorhouse

      ASIO has for long had a negative reputation among Australians old enough to remember the Cold War, to have seen their file, and to know if they lost a job, a promotion, or a government grant because of its contents, accurate or not. Younger Australians, however, may approach Moorhouse with reasonable, contemporary questions: if I have nothing to hide, why should I fear ASIO surveillance? If others plan acts of violence, shouldn’t ASIO intercept them by whatever means? If national security is endangered, isn’t it appropriate to reverse the onus of proof onto the suspect? Doesn’t ASIO need to operate in secrecy?

    • Briefing on Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill

      The legislation is being rushed through on a fast-track timetable, as the government similarly rushed through the DRIPA legislation on an emergency timetable. The subject matter of this legislation deserves comprehensive parliamentary scrutiny.

    • Europe passes vote to break up Google to stop search monopoly

      THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT has voted in favour of breaking Google into separate companies to put an end to the online firm’s dominance.

      In a vote on Thursday, 384 members of the European Parliament voted in favour of taking drastic measures to stop Google’s dominance in online search results and enforcing a split between its search business and other services. Around half that number, 174, voted against the measures.

    • Police Brutality Towards Black People Has Historically Gone Unchecked

      Professor Gerald Horne and civil rights organizer Kevin Alexander Gray say the Ferguson grand jury decision is in line with U.S. history, and discuss whether a Department of Justice investigation would yield different results

    • How the West plays good cop, bad cop

      The West is trying to split the BRICS while also trying to weaken individual members.

    • GCHQ Former Boss Issues Smartphone Data Warning

      “I don’t know what happens to my personal data when I use it on a smartphone,” Sir John was reported by the BBC as telling MPs. “If you go to an ATM and put in your credit or debit card, that system is supervised by the bank in some way,” he said in evidence to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, which is examining the use of biometric technology.

    • THE SNOWDEN EFFECT CONTINUES

      NSA reform died in the U.S. Senate two weeks after the 2014 midterm election. The lame duck Democratic majority and Libertarian minded Republicans produced 58 of the 60 votes needed, agonizingly close to collaring an agency that has clearly run amuck. This seeming ideological dividing line is a bit puzzling, given the broader effects Snowden‘s revelations have had on the U.S. defense industry.

    • Study finds those aware of leaker-at-large harden up and surf smarter

      A good deal of folk aware of NSA leaker Edward Snowden have improved the security of their online activity after learning of his exploits, a large survey has found.

      Researchers from think tank The Centre for International Governance Innovation collected responses from 23,376 users between October and November and found 60 percent had heard of Snowden.

  • Civil Rights

    • Obama’s Record on Defending Civil and Constitutional Rights Abysmal

      Michael Ratner and Paul Jay discuss Obama administration’s policy towards Ferguson, Guantanamo, the NSA and torture

    • DC Police Department Budgets Its Asset Forfeiture Proceeds Years In Advance

      Asset forfeiture may be the greatest scam perpetuated on the American people by their government — and it’s all legal. For the most part, assets seized translate directly to monetary or physical gains for the agencies doing the seizing, an act often wholly separated from any American ideals of due process.

    • Man arrested for pointing a banana at deputies

      A man is facing a felony charge of menacing for allegedly pointing a banana at two sheriff’s deputies in western Colorado.

    • ‘Has the “Libertarian Moment” Finally Arrived?’

      “Gillespie likes to point out that unlike the words ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican,’ ‘libertarian’ should be seen as a modifier rather than a noun-an attitude, not a fixed object. A cynic might assert that this is exactly the kind of semantic cop-out that relegates Gillespie’s too-cool-for-school sect to the margins. Not surprisingly, he begged to differ. ‘It’s wedded to an epistemological humility,’ he told me, ‘that proceeds from the assumption that we don’t know as much as we think we do, and so you have to be really cautious about policies that seek to completely reshape the world. It’s better to run trials and experiments, as John Stuart Mill talked about. The whole point of America-and this is an admixture of Saul Bellow and Heidegger and Jim Morrison lyrics-is that it’s in a constant state of becoming, constantly changing and mongrelizing. We’re doing exactly what free minds and free markets allow you to do. Part of why I’m a libertarian is that if you restrict people less, interesting stuff happens.’”

    • Cornel West: The Age of Obama Is Over

      On CNN Wednesday, leftist Professor Cornel West, given the chance to bloviate about the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown, decided to impart his perspective with a vengeance, even targeting President Barack Obama and blurting that the Ferguson affair signaled the “end of the age of Obama.”

    • Coming soon: Murder by Internet

      Security experts believe the Internet of Things will be used to kill someone

    • The Decline of the CIA

      CIA director John Brennan is promoting a reorganization scheme at the Central Intelligence Agency that will make it more likely that intelligence analysis will be politicized to support the interests of the White House and senior policymakers. The organizational change that he favors would abolish the directorates of intelligence and operations, which were designed to maintain a bureaucratic wall between intelligence analysis and clandestine actions, in order to create regional and functional “centers” that would place analysts and operatives side-by-side. There is no doubt that such centers would do great harm to the production of strategic intelligence and would increase the likelihood of politicizing all intelligence production.

    • Karl Wagner, CIA officer who questioned Watergate-related spy activities, dies at 90

      The mission was later revealed to be the staged break-in of the office of Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a former Pentagon official who had angered the Nixon administration by leaking the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the Vietnam War, to the media.

    • UN rights experts urge US President Obama to release report on CIA torture allegations

      The United States must rise to meet the high human rights standards it has set for itself and others around the world, a group of United Nations human rights experts urged on Wednesday, as they called on President Obama to support “the fullest possible release” of a report detailing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogation practices.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Torrent Site ‘Hijacks’ MPAA’s Movie Search Engine

        The MPAA’s search engine for movies and TV-shows “WhereToWatch” can now be upgraded with torrents, thanks to PopcornCab. The deviant torrent site, run by former U.S. Pirate Party leader Travis McCrea, decided to add torrent support so it can reach a wider audience.

      • Kim Dotcom Leaves Bail Hearing a Free Man, For Now

        Following an all day hearing in the Auckland District Court, Kim Dotcom left the building a free man today. Officially broke and unable to comment on his case due to a news blackout, the Megaupload founder will have to wait until tomorrow to discover if he’ll be put back behind bars.

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