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11.14.16

Links 14/11/2016: TOP500, Mesa 13.0.1 Released, Debian 9.0 Stretch Installer Updated

Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How Capital One is embracing open source

    I eventually found out that my friends was fed up, the company wouldn’t allow him to contribute to open source. Wow. Even in Silicon Valley.

  • Synacor, Inc.’s Zimbra Open Source Support and Zimbra Suite Plus
  • ARK Platform Is Now Open Source, Announces Bounty Program

    ARK Platform, the innovative blockchain based products and solutions initiative has taken a major step by making the codes completely open source. The platform released the codes on its official GitHub account on November 12, 2016, with the intention of allowing developers from across the world to take advantage of the latest advancements in blockchain technology.

  • GCHQ launches new Stroom software

    GCHQ’s aim is to contribute and create its own open source software as a government department and technology organisation.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla plans to rejuvenate Firefox in 2017

        Mozilla last week named its next-generation browser engine project and said it would introduce the new technology to Firefox next year.

        Dubbed Quantum, the new engine will include several components from Servo, the browser rendering engine that Mozilla has sponsored, and been working on, since 2013. Written with Rust, Servo was envisioned as a replacement for Firefox’s long-standing Gecko engine. Both Servo and Rust originated at Mozilla’s research group.

      • Firefox’s New Quantum Build Promises to Kickstart the Browser

        Back in August, Mozilla delivered a number of updates for its Firefox browser that created a bit of fanfare, but the browser has steadily lost market share to Google Chrome. Still, if you’ve been a fan of open source for any length of time, you are familiar with Firefox’s status as a pioneering browser.

        Now, Mozilla has announced plans to kickstart Firefox innovation with a next-generation browse project called Quantum. Here are details.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • Why We Embraced Open Source For Our Database Needs After A Decade Working With Proprietary Solutions

      After investigating our open source options and due diligence, we picked MariaDB as Teleplan’s new replacement e-TRAC database partner. With MariaDB, we realized significant performance improvements.

      For example, whereas running one particular daily report would take up to 15 seconds to run on Oracle Enterprise, with MariaDB it was running in under a second. We did not have the in-house expertise to work on improving the Oracle performance and found this aspect much easier with MariaDB. We also received excellent support both in terms of value and responsiveness and that, coupled with a highly competitive cost, makes MariaDB a great overall package for our e-TRAC needs.

  • BSD

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • A Portable, Accurate, Low-Cost, Open Source Air Particle Counter

        If you live in a city with poor air quality you may be aware that particulates are one of the chief contributors to the problem. Tiny particles of soot from combustion, less than 10μm across, hence commonly referred to as PM10. These are hazardous because they can accumulate deep in the lungs, wherein all kinds of nasties can be caused.

      • How maker communities align with open source

        The maker movement intersects deeply with open source. When I think of open source I normally think of the most hardcore bleeding-edge software or hardware development. But the maker movement has a long-established sharing culture, which really is nothing less than pure open source.

        The source code is a little different, however. For example, consider Nicole Curtis, the maker celebrity and TV star of Rehab Addict. Nicole routinely shows her fans how to remodel their homes and save a fortune. For example, she redid a bathroom by upcycling what others discarded for $1000, easily a tenth of the cost of putting in a new bathroom. Her videos provide the howtos for anyone with similar problems, so in a sense they represent the “source code” to rehab a house.

      • These Open-Source Designs Let Anyone Build A Better Block (No DIY Skills Required)

        Now anyone can do the work to take ownership of their neighborhood. All it takes is effort and this kit from the Better Block Project.

      • Citizen science in action: open-source air pollution monitoring in Bulgaria

  • Programming/Development

    • Introduction to Eclipse Che, a next-generation, web-based IDE

      Correctly installing and configuring an integrated development environment, workspace, and build tools in order to contribute to a project can be a daunting or time consuming task, even for experienced developers. Tyler Jewell, CEO of Codenvy, faced this problem when he was attempting to set up a simple Java project when he was working on getting his coding skills back after dealing with some health issues and having spent time in managerial positions. After multiple days of struggling, Jewell could not get the project to work, but inspiration struck him.

    • production ready

      A few thoughts on what it means for software to be production ready. Or rather, what if any information is conveyed to me when I’m told that something is used in production. Millions of users can’t be wrong!

      Some time ago, I worked with a framework. It doesn’t matter which, the bugs have all been fixed, and I don’t think it was remarkable. But our team picked it because it was production ready, and then I discovered it wasn’t quite so ready.

    • It’s Been Five Years Since The Open64 5.0 Compiler Release

      This week marked five years since the release of the Open64 5.0 compiler in what is the latest and likely last-ever release of this once-promising code compiler.

      Open64 5.0 was released back in 2011 and unfortunately there hasn’t been a release since. Last year we wrote how the Open64 project vanished. A few days after that article, it was said back on 27 March 2015, “The websites and SVN servers are down for maintenance and will be back soon.”

Leftovers

  • The Dangerous Cult You Didn’t Even Know You Were A Part Of

    There is a multi-billion-dollar cult, propagated by the Hollywood elite, which preys like an engorged leech on the minds and pocketbooks of people seeking a purpose. Oh, I’m sorry, did you think I’m talking about Scientology? Well, think different. I’m talking about a little gadget company you may know as Apple Inc. Of course, I expect the Apple Sheep (or as I like to call them, Shapples) to angrily yet gingerly close their brand-new “rose gold” (Shapple word for “pink”) MacBook Air, take an even angrier sip of their matcha latte, and send off a furious Kimoji.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • NHS bosses ‘tried to keep cuts secret’

      NHS chiefs tried to keep plans to cut hospital services in England secret, an investigation has found.

      Forty-four reviews of local services have been set up across the country and all have now drawn up proposals.

      Some involve closing A&Es or, in one case, a whole hospital, but the details of most have yet to emerge.

      That is because NHS England told local managers to keep the plans “out of the public domain” and avoid requests for information, the King’s Fund suggested.

      One piece of guidance even went as far as to advise managers how to reject freedom of information requests.

  • Security

    • Linux Foundation doubles down on support for tamper-free software

      The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) is renewing its financial support for a project that ensures binaries produced from open source software projects are free of tampering.

      The Reproducible Builds Project provides tools and best practices to software projects to ensure that the binaries generated by a compilation process are identical each time and can be matched to the source code used to build them.

    • 3 encryption tools for Linux that will keep your data safe

      Encryption is an interesting thing. The first time I saw encryption in action was on a friend’s Gentoo Linux laptop that could only boot if the USB key with the boot partition and decryption key was inserted. Cool stuff, from a geek point-of-view.

      Fast forward, and revelations from Edward Snowden and ongoing concerns about government snooping are slowly bringing encryption and privacy tools into the mainstream. Even if you’re not worried about a Big Brother or some shady spy-versus-spy scenario, encryption can still protect your identity and privacy if your laptop is stolen. Think of all the things we keep on laptops: contact information, financial information, and client and company information. All of that data is worthy of protection. Luckily, Linux users have access to several tools for the affordable price of free.

      There are three main methods for protecting the data on your laptop, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

    • The Network Standard Used in Cars Is Wide Open to Attack

      The networked electronics found under the hood of modern automobiles enable a great many useful and cool things, such as fuel-saving engine optimizations, parking assist mechanisms, collision avoidance systems, and myriad further applications most often involving sensing and the passing of data among vehicular systems and human drivers. As is pretty much always the case when electronics become networked, this connectivity also offers hackers new potential exploits.

      According to research presented last month at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Vienna, courtesy of computer scientists at the University of Michigan (and Adrian Colyer’s excellent The Morning Paper), the controller area network (CAN) protocol implemented by in-vehicle networks has a new and potentially quite dangerous vulnerability. The attack, known as a bus-off attack, exploits the CAN’s built-in error handling facilities to potentially nuke both contemporary insecure CANs and future secured versions.

    • Top 5 Rootkit Threats and How to Root Them out

      Rootkits are much in the news lately. They were recently sighted in the Street Fighter V video game, critical infrastructure controls and even Yahoo email servers.

      In the case of Yahoo, the spying tool that the U.S. government ordered the company to install on its servers was a “buggy” rootkit that concealed itself on Yahoo’s systems and provided the government with a backdoor into Yahoo emails, according to an article in Motherboard.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Donald Trump Likely to End Aid for Rebels Fighting Syrian Government

      President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that he was likely to abandon the American effort to support “moderate” opposition groups in Syria who are battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying “we have no idea who these people are.”

      In an interview with The Wall Street Journal that dealt largely with economic issues, including his willingness to retain parts of the Affordable Care Act, he repeated a position he took often during his campaign: that the United States should focus on defeating the Islamic State, and find common ground with the Syrians and their Russian backers.

      “I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” Mr. Trump told The Journal. “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, and now you have Iran, which is becoming powerful, because of us, is aligned with Syria.”

      His comments suggest that once Mr. Trump begins overseeing both the public support for the opposition groups, and a far larger covert effort run by the Central Intelligence Agency, he may wind down or abandon the effort. But there are in fact two wars going on simultaneously in Syria.

    • A Tale of Two Airports

      The folly involved in the United Kingdom continuing to cling on to tiny relics of Empire is underlined by considering two airports. Firstly we have St Helena, where DFID have famously wasted £250 million of taxpayers’ money on an airport which cannot be used because of wind shear.

      [...]

      British attitudes to St Helena were for generations of malign neglect, and the recent laudable attempt to improve things has been destroyed by gross incompetence – for which nobody has resigned or been sacked.

      By comparison, the equally isolated Chagos Islands have an excellent airport, owned by the British Government, on Diego Garcia. The problem here of course is that the British government brutally uprooted and deported the entire local population, and leased the base to the United States, keeping the previous inhabitants away by force.

      [...]

      Personally, I should like to see the US air force removed and the islands demilitarised. But even without that, dual military and civilian use of runways exists in a great many locations all round the world and there is no reason whatsoever why civilian flights could not land. Indeed, passing billionaires are permitted to land their Lear jets already to refuel. But of course, making the islands viable for tourism and a population is not the goal here. The goal is to make them unviable.

      So there we have it, a tale of two airports on extremely remote islands. One built at vast expense which cannot be used, and one perfectly viable which the government will not permit to be used. It is a story which sums up the shame, immorality and international criminality of the UK’s continuing Imperial pretensions.

    • Naomi Klein Delivers Sydney Peace Prize Lecture Against Backdrop of Trump Win

      Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein accepted the 2016 Sydney Peace Prize in Australia on Friday, delivering a searing speech that reflected on Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States and the factors that allowed it to happen.

      “If there is a single overarching lesson in the Trump victory, perhaps it is this: Never, ever underestimate the power of hate, of direct appeals to power over the ‘other’…especially during times of economic hardship,” said Klein, whose books include The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

      Calling Trump the “demagogue of the moment,” Klein went on to identify other lessons to “take from our barely three-day-old reality.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Trump’s conflicts of interest take White House into uncharted territory

      When President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House next year he will bring with him potential conflicts of interest across all areas of government that are unprecedented in American history.

      Trump, who manages a sprawling, international network of businesses, has thus far refused to put his businesses into a blind trust the way his predecessors in the nation’s highest office have traditionally done. Instead he has said his businesses will be run by his own adult children.

      Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s eldest child, has insisted that Trump’s holdings would go into a trust managed by him and his siblings Eric and Ivanka Trump.

      “We’re not going to be involved in government,” Trump Jr told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in September on Good Morning America. “He wants nothing to do with [the company]. He wants to fix this country.”

    • 2016 will be the hottest year on record, UN says

      2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century.

      The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists.

      The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December.

    • 18 state parks to close for deer reduction hunts

      Eighteen Indiana state parks will close temporarily on November 14-15 and again on November 28-29 to allow for controlled hunts to reduce the deer population.

  • Finance

    • MPAA-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership accord dead in wake of Trump win

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed and controversial 12-nation trade pact dealing with everything from intellectual property to human rights, effectively died Friday. Congressional leaders from both parties told the White House they would no longer consider it with a lame duck president, even one who staunchly backed the plan.

    • Congress will abandon Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, White House concedes

      White House officials conceded on Friday that the president’s hard-fought-for Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would not pass Congress, as lawmakers there prepared for the anti-global trade policies of President-elect Donald Trump.

    • Trump Wants to Let Wall Street Scam Customers Again Because of Course He Does

      Donald Trump ran as a populist enemy of the global financial elite. In other news, Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager who has somehow secured a position as a key Trump economic adviser despite being a member of the global financial elite Trump has vowed to crush, tells the Financial Times that Trump will eliminate a rule requiring financial advisers to follow their clients’ best interests. The rule came about in response to a long-standing practice, exposed most blatantly in the wake of the housing crash, by which advisers would dump products onto their clients in order to get them off their own firm’s balance sheet. The Obama rule requires financial advisers to follow their clients’ fiduciary interest.

    • Amazon Has Begun Labeling Some Items Prime-Exclusive (Updated)

      Did you want to buy a Blu-ray copy of Academy Award-winning movie Birdman from Amazon? If you’re not an Amazon Prime member, you’re out of luck. The retailer has begun to restrict sales of some items to its members.

    • Brexit vote drives firms to ditch £65bn of investment

      British businesses have abandoned investment plans worth more than £65 billion since the vote to leave the European Union five months ago.

      A survey of more than 1,000 companies found that uncertainty about the UK’s future in the single market and the falling value of sterling were driving down investment.

    • China threatens to cut iPhone sales if Trump declares a trade war

      China’s state-run newspaper says the government would respond with “countermeasures” if President-elect Donald Trump starts a trade war against the country, warning that the sales of iPhones and US cars would suffer a “setback.” In an editorial published on Sunday, the Global Times said it would be “naive” for Trump to follow through on his campaign promises to implement a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports to the US and to declare the country a currency manipulator.

      Trump repeatedly targeted China during his presidential campaign, vowing to take a tougher stance on trade in the hopes of reviving manufacturing in the US. In its editorial, the Global Times dismissed the notion that Trump alone could implement a 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports, though it warned that any protectionist measure could leave trade “paralyzed.”

    • Theresa May sets out stall for UK’s place in Trump’s world

      Britain must “adapt to the moment and evolve its thinking” to become a global leader in free trade, Theresa May is to say.

      The prime minister will pledge to lead the charge in remaking globalisation, days after Donald Trump was elected US president on the promise of protecting American industry and ending a string of free trade agreements.

      May’s speech will be seen as an attempt to reposition the UK after the Brexit vote and the US presidential election and as a response to Nigel Farage becoming the first UK politician to meet the president-elect over the weekend.

    • Sunset over America: it’s time for the next superpower

      On Thursday morning I was doing some work with the radio on, which was playing In Our Time, the Radio 4 programme which discusses ideas and events from through history. It’s a simple formula: get a topic, get three experts on the topic and a moderator, talk for 45 minutes.

    • Trump win shows UK can’t ignore working class: May

      Donald Trump’s surprise victory shows that Britain has to regain control over immigration and deal with its own “overlooked” communities, Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to say Monday evening, according to London’s the Telegraph.

      In her first major speech since Trump won America’s top office, May will say that the U.S. election stunner — coming close on the heels of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June — is evidence that “change is in the air” and that Britain must do more for the working class and voters on low incomes who feel “overlooked,” the paper reported.

    • citizen campaign asks MEPs to vote against CETA

      CETA, the planned free trade agreement between the EU and Canada has been approved by the EU governments and will be now discussed and voted on in the European Parliament. The vote is scheduled for end of 2016 or early 2017.

      Today (8 November) sees the launch of the final phase of the campaign entitled “CETA CHECK”. Civil society organizations from all EU countries will call on citizens to ask Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to vote against CETA. The campaign is supported by the EU-wide Stop TTIP alliance which, together with the self-organized Stop TTIP European Citizens’ Initiative, collected over 3.5 million signatures against TTIP & CETA.

    • Trump Presidency Could Be Worth $14 Billion to His Troubled Lender

      Donald Trump’s election has likely given a massive lifeline to Deutsche Bank, the German financial firm that has been rocked recently by rumors that they would have to pay a $14 billion fine to the Justice Department over crisis-related mortgage abuses.

      That money is unlikely to ever be imposed, now that one of Deutsche Bank’s biggest borrowers – Trump – will soon be sitting in the White House.

      That conflict of interest is one of the innumerable ones facing Trump as he leaves his life of grifting behind and becomes the nation’s chief executive. While the Justice Department is nominally independent of the White House, I had to stop writing this sentence because of constant laughing. Trump could easily move to protect his personal investments by aiding his business partner Deutsche Bank.

    • Wallonia blocked a harmful EU trade deal – but we don’t share Trump’s dreams

      I could never have imagined it. That an economic and trade agreement between the EU and Canada could turn into a soap opera involving a small region of Belgium. Yet that’s what happened: for two weeks, a four-letter word, Ceta, resonated on factory floors and offices, in homes, schools and cafes the length and breadth of Wallonia, the region I have the privilege to be president of, as our parliament delayed the deal.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Donald Trump Ran on Protecting Social Security But Transition Team Includes Privatizers

      Donald Trump campaigned on protecting Social Security. At the Miami GOP presidential debate in March, he said he would “do everything within my power not to touch Social Security, to leave it the way it is; to make this country rich again.” In August, his campaign told CNNMoney that “We will not cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, but protect them both.”

      But two of the people said to be helming the president-elect’s Social Security Administration (SSA) transition team have a record of hostility to the program.

    • Maine Just Voted for a Better Way to Vote

      On Tuesday, Maine became the first state to challenge America’s first-past-the-post voting system, as voters approved, by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, a referendum instituting ranked-choice voting for state and federal elections. It’s by far the biggest victory for a reform movement that has attracted high-profile endorsements from politicians like John McCain and Howard Dean but had so far failed to gain traction beyond a few progressive American cities. For Maine, it’s a shift that could make third-party voting more viable overnight—by eliminating the ability of third-parties to play spoiler.

    • Soft or hard Brexit: do the UK’s political parties know what they want?

      Scottish Independence activists take part in an Independence 2 rally, outside the SNP conference in Glasgow, mid-October, 2016. Jane Barlow/Press Association. All rights reserved.Amidst the rapidly changing politics of Brexit, and the furore around the Article 50 judgement, it seems that the big division between the government and opposition parties is whether the UK heads towards a ‘soft’ or a ‘hard’ Brexit. But with Theresa May denying she wants a hard Brexit, and Labour and the LibDems not in the same place on what a soft Brexit looks like, the question arises both as to how meaningful the soft/hard distinction is, and whether any of the parties really know what they want.

    • Apparently Trump Draining The Swamp Of Lobbyists & Crony Capitalists Requires A Lot Of Lobbyists & Crony Capitalists

      That swamp is looking mighty damp. And this doesn’t touch on the fact that top execs from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been floated as Trump’s Treasury Secretary. Draining that swamp, huh? Remember Bannon’s quote about how people were sick of Clinton’s ties to Wall Street? Should we remind you that Bannon used to work at Goldman Sachs himself?

      Anyway, let’s just address two responses I’m sure will likely appear in the comments below — perhaps by people so furious that we’re insulting “their guy” that they won’t read this far: Yes, Clinton would have brought in probably just as many lobbyists. Just as President Obama campaigned on stopping the power of lobbyists in DC… and then went ahead and brought a bunch into his administration, it’s almost certain that Clinton would have done the same. But the Trump campaign’s explicit claim was that it would be breaking away from lobbyists, crony capitalists and close ties to Wall Street at the very time it was bringing those people into the campaign.

    • Trump Warms to the Electoral College, 4 Years After Calling It “a Disaster for a Democracy”

      Every four years, the bizarre, undemocratic institution at the heart of American democracy, the Electoral College, gets more vocal detractors. That is particularly the case in years like this one, when the mechanism awards the presidency to the runner-up in the national popular vote, Donald Trump.

      “The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump,” Michael Moore wrote on Facebook post Wednesday. “The only reason he’s president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College.”

      Urged on by Lady Gaga, more than a million people signed a petition on Thursday calling on the electors, when they meet next month, to ignore the current rules, which bind them to voting for the winner of their state and cast their ballots instead for the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton.

    • A White Nationalist Who Hates Jews Will Be Trump’s Right-Hand Man In The White House

      President-elect Donald Trump’s first White House hire tells you everything you need to know about his commitment to his campaign’s bigoted message. Stephen Bannon, an anti-Semite who ran the white nationalist “alt-right” website Breitbart News before taking a leave of absence to become the Trump campaign CEO, will be Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor.

      On November 13, Trump released a statement announcing Bannon’s hiring. The same statement noted that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus would become Trump’s chief of staff. While White House chief of staff is typically the most senior position in the White House, the press release named Bannon first and described the two as “equal partners” in the Trump administration.

    • If Donald Trump Implements His Proposed Policies, We’ll See Him in Court

      Donald Trump has time to alter his proposed policies. But if he doesn’t, the ACLU will fight him every step of the way.

      This morning, Donald J. Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, and the ACLU has a message for him.

      President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.

    • Amid DNC Reckoning, Ellison Emerges as Progressive Antidote to Trump

      Amid the growing post-election call for a “reckoning” within the Democratic Party, Rep. Keith Ellison on Minnesota has swiftly emerged as the favored progressive choice to lead that transition.

    • Marine Le Pen Says She And Donald Trump Are Building “A New World”

      The far-right leader of the French National Front, Marine Le Pen, has hailed Donald Trump’s victory in the US election and claimed they are both part of a “new world” being built in the wake of Brexit.

      Le Pen was interviewed on The Andrew Marr Show on Remembrance Sunday – a move which has angered critics of Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist politics and provoked protests outside the BBC studio.

    • Donald Trump Picks Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff and Stephen Bannon as Strategist

      Mr. Bannon’s selection demonstrated the power of grass-roots activists who backed Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Some of them have long traded in the conspiracy theories and sometimes racist messages of Breitbart News, the website that Mr. Bannon ran for much of the last decade.
      Continue reading the main story

      The site has accused President Obama of “importing more hating Muslims”; compared Planned Parenthood’s work to the Holocaust; called the conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew”; and advised female victims of online harassment to “just log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that point with a picture of a crying child.

    • Mark Zuckerberg Defends Facebook Against Charges of Swaying Election

      Days after dismissing the suggestion that Facebook swayed the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg elaborated on his comments Saturday on his own page on the social network.

      While the Facebook CEO stood firm on the notion that fake news articles were somehow responsible for discouraging its users from voting for Hillary Clinton, he did also say that his company was looking at ways to continue cutting down on the appearance of hoaxes on the platform.

      “We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here,” Zuckerberg wrote.

      The Facebook CEO also made clear, however, that there is a fine line between battling fake news and getting into the murkier territory of deciding what information is factual or not.

    • Trump says social media was key to victory

      Donald Trump says he’ll continue to tweet as president.

      In a preview clip of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview to air Sunday, the president-elect said social media is a “modern form of communication” that played a key role in his election victory.

      “When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story or when somebody other than you and another– a network, or whatever, because of course, CBS would never do a thing like that right? I have a method of fighting back,” Trump told Lesley Stahl.

    • Documenting Trump’s war on science

      During Canada’s nightmarish Stephen Harper years — when an Arctic country with two oceanic coastlines and major freshwater reserves was ruled by a ruthless climate-denier — science librarian John Dupuis did yeoman service documenting and rounding up the assault on science that was an essential part of Harper’s payback to the oil interests he represented.

      Now America is to be governed by man who believes that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy, whose EPA team is led by a man who says climate change is “nothing to worry about,” who campaigned on a promise to revive the coal industry and bring back the Keystone XL Pipeline.

      Dupuis is making ready to document the coming Trump campaign against science. In an era of catastrophic climate change, climate denial means war on science, because reality has a well-known liberal bias and people who observe and document reality are therefore enemies of the state.

    • American Exceptionalism, Under God: Pledging Allegiance to the Homeland

      Among the exceptional things about America is that, along with North Korea, we are one of a very few nations that have our schools begin the day with a pledge of allegiance. Unlike North Korea, however, our pledge also includes a reference to God.

    • Commander-In-Chief Donald Trump Will Have Terrifying Powers. Thanks, Obama.

      When Donald Trump becomes commander in chief in January, he will take on presidential powers that have never been more expansive and unchecked.

      He’ll control an unaccountable drone program, and the prison at Guantanamo Bay. His FBI, including a network of 15,000 paid informants, already has a record of spying on mosques and activists, and his NSA’s surveillance empire is ubiquitous and governed by arcane rules, most of which remain secret. He will inherit bombing campaigns in seven Muslim countries, the de facto ability to declare war unilaterally, and a massive nuclear arsenal — much of which is on hair-trigger alert.

      Caught off guard by Hillary Clinton’s election defeat, Democrats who defended these powers under President Obama may suddenly be having second thoughts as the White House gets handed over to a man they described — with good reason — as “unhinged,” and “dangerously unfit.”

    • Who Will Be President Trump’s Dr. Strangelove?

      The hub of the NSC is the NSC Principals Committee, a kind of super cabinet. Its nerve center is the Situation Room in the West Wing basement. Twelve of the 13 people depicted in the famous White House photo taken in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden operation were connected to the NSC. By law, the Principals Committee includes the president, vice president, and secretaries of defense, state, and, since 2007, energy. The committee’s exact composition varies from meeting to meeting, to be decided by the president and senior White House staff. Within the broad strokes of the original 1947 law, as updated over the years and then amended by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, NSC quite literally makes its own rules, and those rules are set by the president.

    • The Big Split

      Throughout this election I said I didn’t believe Trump wanted to win. And judging from the Podesta emails, the DNC helped engineer the Trump ascension to the Republican nomination. Trump was the only guy (along with Ted Cruz) more repulsive to the public than Hillary Clinton. Which keeps reminding me of Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Two-thirds of the world’s internet users live under government censorship: report

      Two-thirds of the world’s internet users live under regimes of government censorship, according to a report released today. The report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, finds that internet freedom across the globe declined for a sixth consecutive year in 2016, as governments cracked down on social media services and messaging apps.

      The findings are based on an analysis of web freedom in 65 countries, covering 88 percent of the world’s online population. Freedom House ranked China as the worst abuser of internet freedom for the second consecutive year, followed by Syria and Iran. (The report does not include North Korea.) Online freedom in the US increased slightly over the year due to the USA Freedom Act, which limits the bulk collection of metadata carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies.

    • Lessons of History: Rulers would rather kill people than allow them to share ideas freely

      In my last column, I outlined how the Power of Narrative is the biggest power anybody can hold in society, and the civil unrest that follows when it is handed over. I wrote a little bit about parallels between the printing press and today’s Internet in terms of how that power is shifting. However, most people aren’t prepared for just how far rulers are prepared to go to defend their power of narrative: judging by history, they would rather have people killed than thinking freely.

      They say that people who don’t study history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history (and meanwhile, those who do study history are doomed to stand by watching others repeat those same mistakes). Therefore, it is absolutely vital to understand the power struggles around the printing press.

      I wrote in my last column that Martin Luther’s mass-printed bibles in German and French, the so-called Luther Bibles, enabled the common folk to completely bypass the clergy’s reading of bibles in Latin, enabling them to go straight to the source material and cut out a gatekeeper, something that led to a century of civil war.

    • Trump’s Very First Tweet As President Elect Basically Shits On The First Amendment

      Since being declared the winner of the Presidential election, Donald Trump has actually played the part of an actual President-elect quite well. His victory speech was quite gracious and welcoming. His meeting with President Obama appeared to go well. Of course, anyone who’s watched him during the campaign knew it couldn’t last, but perhaps, maybe, he’d actually be presidential for a few weeks or (could we dare?) a few months? But, nope. All it took was about 48 hours and the man who four years ago demanded that people “march on Washington” because President Obama was re-elected, used his very first tweet as the President elect to shit all over the First Amendment.

    • Censoring films unwanted: Adoor Gopalakrishnan

      Veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan has criticised censorship in cinema, saying it is “totally unwanted” and feels television programmes are the ones which should be censored.

      Many television programmes, especially soap operas, are even showcasing crime on prime time after giving prior announcement, the 75-year-old Dadasaheb Phalke awardee said.

      He also questioned the display of anti-smoking and liquor messages on the movie screen and said if smoking and drinking were injurious to health, it should be banned. “There is no need for cinema to bear its burden,” he said.

    • CNN Uses Copyright To Block Viral Clip Of Van Jones’ Impassioned Statement

      This election year may have been something of a clusterfuck for just about everyone… but it was damn good for CNN. The cable news channel that was generally filled with some of the most idiotic and meaningless banter made out like a bandit, apparently bringing in a billion dollars in profit by being the country’s official organ player in a grand circus of political entertainment. The hiring of direct partisans on both sides, the failure to do very much actual deep looking at anything, and the complete pointlessness of whatever a Wolf Blitzer is all seemed to delight in turning anything about issues into horse race he said/she said soundbites.

      And now it’s being an annoying copyright asshole too.

    • WRAL Says It Will ‘Review’ Obscenity Policy In Wake of ‘SNL’ Censorship

      The “SNL” episode was an emotionally charged one, showing comedian and host Dave Chappelle tackle last week’s election of Republican Donald J. Trump with some scathing material that made use of words that are often not utilized on TV. After referring to a vulgar term for the female anatomy, Chappelle quickly apologized to Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of the late-night institution, on the air. The episode opened with cast member Kate McKinnon playing Hillary Clinton singing the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah.” “I’m not giving up, and neither should you,” the character told viewers.

    • North Carolina’s WRAL Censors Parts of Post-Election ‘Saturday Night Live’

      The Raleigh, N.C. affiliate of NBC censored “Saturday Night Live” in nine different parts of last night’s broadcast, citing language used by comedian and host Dave Chappelle and raising concerns on social media of whether broadcasters could become more wary of edgy content under an administration led by President-elect Donald Trump.

    • Facebook forced to apologise for censoring burn victim’s birthday photo
    • Facebook forced to apologize for censoring burn victim’s birthday photo
    • Facebook Apologizes for Deleting Burned Swedish Firefighter’s Photo
    • Facebook slammed for removing a photo of a burn victim who lost his ears hair and eyebrows in explosion
    • Swedish firefighter ‘not surprised’ Facebook twice pulled down photo of his severe burns

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • It’s Too Late For President Obama To ‘Dismantle’ The NSA’s Mass Surveillance

      I should say up front that I’m a big supporter of Fight for the Future and the work they do, and while some may take this post as a slam on them, it is anything but. We’re very much on the same page on nearly everything, but it caught my attention when FftF’s Evan Greer wrote a piece asking President Obama to “shut down” the NSA’s mass surveillance systems before Donald Trump gets control of it all. Specifically the article says “before it’s too late.” While I’d love to see Obama shut down the NSA’s mass surveillance system, it’s time to admit that it is too late. Anything the President does to that effect in this lame duck session can, and will, be reversed on day one of the Trump administration. Perhaps there’s some value in the symbolic gesture, but let’s face the facts: it’s too late.

    • [Older] On-Demand Cell Phone Searches Hurt Teenagers on Parole

      Should law enforcement get an all access, long-term pass to a teenager’s cell phone, just because he or she had a run in with police? That question is in front of California’s highest court, and in an amicus brief filed earlier this month, EFF and the three California offices of the ACLU warned that it was a highly invasive and unconstitutional condition of juvenile parole.

    • [Older] Mass surveillance at public gatherings is why we need oversight policies

      You probably don’t expect the government to log and track your personally identifying information, despite having broken no laws, just because you attended an event at the fairgrounds. That would be preposterous in the Land of the Free.

      But, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal agencies have joined forces with local police to deploy automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology at gun shows, with the aim of collecting attendees’ plate information—without an explicit target. Gun show patrons are typically concerned about their Second Amendment rights, but what about the First Amendment?

      ALPRs are high-speed camera systems that capture the license plates of every vehicle that passes into view. These images are then translated into machine-readable characters that can be run through police and driver databases. The scans are also often added to massive ALPR databases. In aggregate, this data can reveal patterns of behavior, such as when you leave for work, where you sleep at night, what doctors you visit, who you hang out with, and, yes, whether you attend gun shows.

      ALPR is a form of mass surveillance since it captures information on every driver, not just those suspected of involvement in crimes. Most states and local jurisdictions have not enacted any kind of public accountability for these systems.

    • Surveillance Self-Defense Against the Trump Administration

      On Tuesday, Americans handed the U.S. presidency to a racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, climate-science-denying, misogynistic, revenge-obsessed ego-maniac — and with it control over a vast and all-too-unaccountable intelligence apparatus; and in a speech less than three weeks ago, Trump promised to sue all of the women who have come forward with sexual assault accusations against him.

      Trump has repeatedly shown utter disrespect for the rule of law. He doesn’t believe in freedom of religion. He advocates torture. He has said he’ll instruct his Justice Department to investigate Black Lives Matter activists, and it’s likely he’ll appoint Rudy Giuliani, of New York City’s racist and unconstitutional “stop-and-frisk” fame, as his attorney general to do the investigating. The New York Times also reports that “Mr. Trump still privately muses about all the ways he will punish his enemies after Election Day.”

      With Trump eager to misuse his power and get revenge on his perceived enemies, it’s reasonable to conclude there will be a parallel increase in abuse of power in law enforcement and the intelligence community. Activists who put their bodies on the line trying to protect basic rights — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, civil rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, privacy rights — will face the brunt of it.

      Thanks to 16 years of relentless and illegal expansion of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, Trump is about to have more tools of surveillance at his disposal than any tyrant ever has. Those preparing for the long fight ahead must protect themselves, even if doing so can be technically complicated.

      The best approach varies from situation to situation, but here are some first steps that activists and other concerned citizens should take.

    • Long Time Mass Surveillance Defenders Freak Out Now That Trump Will Have Control

      The Lawfare blog, run by the Brookings Institution, has long reliably been a good source to go to for reading what defenders of mass surveillance and the surveillance state are thinking — in a non-hysterical way. While I disagree with much of what’s posted on there, it tends to be thoughtful and interesting reading. Its founder and Editor-in-Chief is Ben Wittes, who’s always good for an impassioned defense of the NSA’s surveillance on Americans, and was all in on forcing tech companies to break encryption. He wasn’t worried, you see, because he was quite sure the NSA would never spy on him. Because, you know, he’s a good guy.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Swedish moves to interview Julian Assange in embassy welcomed by Ecuador

      Representatives from the Swedish prosecutor’s office and the Swedish police will be present while questions are put to the WikiLeaks founder by an Ecuadorian official on Monday.

      Mr Assange has been granted political asylum by Ecuador and has been living inside the embassy for over four years.

      He believes that if he leaves the embassy he will be extradited to the United States for questioning over the activities of WikiLeaks.

      He denies the allegation against him and has been offering to be interviewed at the embassy.

    • Turkey seeks life sentences in pro-Kurdish newspaper trial: state media

      Turkish prosecutors are seeking long jail terms or life sentences for nine staff of a pro-Kurdish newspaper, including prize-winning novelist Asli Erdogan, on charges of belonging to a terrorist organization and harming national unity, state-run media said on Thursday.

      Erdogan, who is not related to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, was jailed pending trial in August after police detained her and two dozen more staff from the Ozgur Gundem newspaper, which was closed by court order on a charge of spreading propaganda of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

    • ‘It’s About Embracing a Different Way of Life’ – CounterSpin interview with Rose Aguilar on reporting from Standing Rock

      What’s happening right now in North Dakota is reflective of many things: the violent desperation of extractive industry and the willingness of the state to act as its enforcers, counterposed with the peaceful power of people gathered in simple defense of the water, land and life of their community and the wider world.

    • Paris attacks suspect more ‘radicalized’ since arrest

      The main Paris attacks suspect, Salah Abdeslam, has become even more radicalized since being imprisoned for his presumed role in the slaughter of 130 people a year ago, his former lawyer has said.

      “He’s got a beard, he’s become a true fundamentalist whereas before he was a kid wearing Nike trainers,” Belgian lawyer Sven Mary told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant’s Saturday edition.

      Belgian-born French national Abdeslam is believed to be the only jihadist survivor of the November 13 attacks in the French capital that Belgian authorities claim were orchestrated by the Islamic State high command.

      After four months on the run, the 27-year-old of Moroccan origin was arrested in Brussels in March and subsequently transferred to France in April.

    • Jail race war: Killers set up sinister hate group Death Before Dishonour to protect themselves against Muslim prisoners

      Jail bosses fear a race war could break out behind bars after ­hardened killers set up protection groups against Muslim convicts.

      The Sunday People can reveal that ­governors have been given an urgent ­security warning about one new network called Death Before Dishonour.

      The group – calling themselves DBD for short – have formed to protect ­themselves against what they claim is an increasing risk from Muslim inmates.

      But it raises the threat of further meltdown in our crisis-hit jails.

      Members of the gangs are being ­recruited from special Close Supervision Centres set up to hold the most dangerous convicts – often violent lifers.

    • British ‘sharia courts’ under scrutiny

      For more than 30 years, sharia courts enforcing Islamic law have been operating quietly across Britain. But two official inquiries have put them in the spotlight amid accusations that they discriminate against women.

      Very little is known about them, even their number, which one study by the University of Reading puts at 30, while the British think tank Civitas estimates there are 85.

      Sharia courts or councils, as they prefer to be called, mainly pronounce on Islamic divorces, which today constitute 90 percent of the cases they handle.

      They range from groups of Muslim scholars attached to a mosque, to informal organisations or even a single imam.

    • Bay Area: Join us 11/16 to talk about infosec for dissidents and citizens

      The eighth episode of Ars Technica Live is coming up next Wednesday, November 16, in Oakland, California, at Longitude! Join Ars Technica editors Dan Goodin and Annalee Newitz with guest Morgan Marquis-Boire for a conversation about infosec, surveillance, and digital authoritarianism.

      Marquis-Boire is a New Zealand-born hacker, security researcher, and journalist. He is the director of security for First Look Media and a contributing writer for The Intercept. Prior to this, he worked at Google. Marquis-Boire is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, focusing on state-sponsored hacking and the global surveillance industry. He currently serves as a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as an advisor to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Amnesty International.

    • A Torture Victim Turned Human Rights Champion Ends His U.N. Run Fighting for Justice

      I don’t think we’re even close to being able to say that we are defeating torture or have eradicated it. It’s hard to make that assessment, however, because in all countries, torture fluctuates for different reasons — sometimes it’s used more extensively, and sometimes it’s used less extensively.

      What I think has happened, however, mostly in this six-year period, but maybe a little earlier as well and hopefully continuing, is an increased awareness of the need to apply the prism of torture to situations that we don’t commonly associate with torture.

      For example, there are forms of imprisonment — like solitary confinement — that undoubtedly are cruel, but that the public does not associate with torture. This also includes the mistreatment of people in settings other than detention or during criminal investigations — for example, in healthcare or social care settings.

      I think we are also making inroads in associating the prohibition against torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment with the prohibition on discrimination of all forms. This gives us more awareness of the need to look at the mistreatment of women and girls — and also LGBT persons and other groups whose mistreatment we typically think of as discrimination — under the prism of torture.

    • [Older] What We’re Scared About This Halloween: Prosecutorial Discretion Under Notoriously Vague Computer Crime Statute

      Should prosecutors have the ability to take advantage of unclear laws to bring charges for behavior far beyond the problem Congress was trying to address? We don’t think so. When not carefully limited, criminal laws give prosecutors too much power to go after innocent individuals for innocuous behavior, like violating a website’s terms of use by using a partner’s password to post something for them or print out a boarding pass. And that’s terrifying. It’s also contrary to a long-held constitutional rule requiring vague criminal statutes to be interpreted narrowly—called the Rule of Lenity—intended to ensure that people have clear and unambiguous notice in the letter of the law itself of what behavior could land them in prison.

      But recently released federal guidelines for prosecutions under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), intended to assist prosecutors in deciding when to bring charges under the notoriously vague federal statute targeting computer break-ins, demonstrate that prosecutors have far too much discretion in applying the CFAA. What’s more, the guidelines all but condone use of the CFAA to prosecute cases for political gain, under the guise of “deterrence.”

    • The Death Penalty Won Big on Election Day, But the Devil Is In the Details

      As it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump was about to win the presidency on Tuesday night, mental health staff were on call at San Quentin Prison and at the Central California Women’s Facility, where anxiety was running high over a separate election result. By the next day the men and women on death row would know whether Californians had voted to spare their lives — by passing Proposition 62, abolishing the death penalty — or hasten their deaths, by passing Proposition 66, aimed to quicken executions. “They are understandably concerned,” California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Terry Thornton told me earlier that day, pointing out that many are already under treatment for mental illness. The results of the ballot initiatives “could be destabilizing.”

      It’s hard to imagine a place more heavily monitored than California’s death row, where isolation, strip-searches, and suicide watch are a fact of life. Yet CDCR counts 25 suicides among the condemned since 1978, the year a ballot initiative dramatically expanded the crimes punishable by execution in California. With the same people responsible for that initiative now campaigning against the death penalty, no one had more at stake in their success on Election Day than the nearly 750 people facing execution in California.

    • [Older] Recording Police Is Protected by the First Amendment, EFF Tells Court

      In an era when bystander recordings of police shootings have shined a much-needed light on law enforcement activities—greatly contributing to public discussion about police use of force—it’s never been more important to establish that citizen journalists have a free speech right to record and share videos of public police activity, EFF told a federal appeals court today.

      “Individuals have the unambiguous right under the First Amendment to record police officers exercising their official duties in public,” said EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “Bystander videos published online have alerted the public to the use of deadly force in numerous cases—Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, the list goes on. These recordings have informed the public and elected officials about what is happening on our streets. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the process of taking these photos and videos is protected by the First Amendment as an inherently expressive activity or as a form of informat

    • U.N. Investigator Talks About the Future of Solitary and the Death Penalty

      Early into your tenure, you conducted a worldwide study that concluded that solitary confinement can amount to torture. You’ve now just released a new report that builds upon that 2011 report and provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of the use of solitary confinement in 35 jurisdictions, including several states here in the U.S. What is your assessment of the state of the campaign to end solitary confinement both worldwide and here in the U.S.?

    • Will America Now Have a Pravda?

      As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take control of the American executive branch, he will have a weapon at his disposal that few if any presidents have enjoyed—a direct connection to a faithful media operation that reaches millions of loyal populist readers in the form of Breitbart, the self-styled honey badger of alt-right journalism.

      Other presidents have had strategies for going around the mainstream media. Franklin Roosevelt had his Fireside Chats on the radio, but his broadcasts were sporadic and rarely ran more than half an hour long. Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed direct lines to the top at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the television networks, where they directed their angry Bat-calls in hopes of manipulating coverage.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • In Wake Of Trump Win, ISPs Are Already Laying The Groundwork For Gutting Net Neutrality

      With Donald Trump now the President elect, all eyes in telecom have turned to what happens now in regards to FCC telecom enforcement generally, and our shiny new net neutrality rules specifically. Trump has proclaimed he opposes net neutrality, despite making it abundantly clear he doesn’t appear to actually know what it is (he appears to falsely believe it has something to do with the fairness doctrine). As such most people believe he’ll work to gut the current FCC, which as we’ve noted has, for the first time in arguably twenty years or so, actually been doing a few things to actually help broadband consumers and sector competition.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • A digital levy on Google and Facebook isn’t the answer to UK newspaper woes

        This is not the only attempt to re-direct money from the Internet giants towards newspapers and magazines. As Ars has reported, the European Commission wishes to introduce a new ancillary copyright for publishers that will last for 20 years. The idea once again is to force big online companies like Google to pay money to traditional publishers.

        Leaving aside the fact that the ancillary copyright idea will cause huge collateral damage to the Internet, it’s the wrong approach for the same reason that the digital levy is wrong. Both seek to punish Google and Facebook for being too successful at gaining online advertising.

        The rancour towards them is made plain in last week’s letter, where “digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook” are described as “amassing eye-watering profits and paying minimal tax in the UK.” Most people would agree that they should be paying their fair share of taxes, but trying to demonise them for their “eye-watering profits” reveals the underlying envy.

      • Take Note: Copyright Troll Gets Stiff Response From Someone It Tried To Bully, Immediately Runs Away

        It should be well-known by readers of this site that copyright trolls are essentially bullies. They send out their settlement threat letters, hoping to extort money from a public that typically doesn’t know better than to be terrified by the legalese claims within the letters. It’s a practice fraught with deception, as the evidence referenced in the letters typically amounts to nothing more than an IP address — which itself may or may not be correct — while the threats themselves can often times include consequences not remotely plausible. Still, the bullying goes on, because it works enough to make it profitable.

        That’s why it’s important to highlight how these bullies tend to respond when a target decides to stand up to them. Much like the bullies we’ve had in our personal lives, they tend to run away as quickly as possible. One recent example of this is James Collins, who received a troll letter from LHF Productions, the company behind the movie London Has Fallen. The company accused Collins of both downloading the movie via BitTorrent, as well as then making it available to others via the same means. Rather than acquiescing, however, Collins got himself a lawyer and had him punch back.

      • “Trolls” Try to Censor TorrentFreak’s Copyright Trolls Coverage…

        DMCA takedown notices are designed to take down infringing content, but they regularly target legitimate content as well. Just recently a local distributor of Dreamworks’ “Trolls” movie tried to have several TorrentFreak links removed from Google for merely referencing “copyright trolls.”

      • Anti-Piracy Movie Competition Entries Are Terrifying

        Aussie movie company Village Roadshow has invited aspiring filmmakers to showcase their work in a competition to highlight the effects of piracy on the industry. Entrants have been uploading their work online unprotected, and it’s fair to say that most think that piracy is a terrifying thing.

      • [Older] Samsung Sets Its Reputation on Fire With Bogus DMCA Takedown Notices

        In our view, Samsung does not have a viable copyright claim against these YouTube videos. Even if Samsung does own a related copyright—perhaps in the design of its logo or in the phone’s screen image—it cannot use that copyright to control all depictions of its phones. Reviews and news coverage need to show images of the phone. And even snarky commentary, like footage of the GTA V mod, is fair use.

        If it doesn’t have a viable copyright claim, why did Samsung send DMCA takedown notices? We asked Samsung’s counsel (the notices were sent on Samsung’s behalf by the 900-lawyer firm Paul Hastings LLP) but received no response. It appears that Samsung took the easy path to removing content it did not like by making a copyright claim where none existed. DMCA takedown notices are, by far, the quickest and easiest way to get speech removed from the Internet. That makes them irresistible for companies, individuals, and even governments eager to censor online speech.

      • [Older] Copyright Office Sets Trap for Unwary Website Owners

        Under a new rule from the Copyright Office, website owners could be exposed to massive risk of copyright liability simply for neglecting to submit an online form on time. The rule could eliminate the safe harbor status that thousands of websites receive under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

11.13.16

Links 13/11/2016: GNOME 3.22.2 Released, Multiple Processes in Firefox

Posted in News Roundup at 10:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Google Pixel Phone Hacked in 60 Seconds at PwnFest 2016

      The brand new Android smartphone launched by Google just a few months back has been hacked by Chinese hackers just in less than a minute.

      Yes, the Google’s latest Pixel smartphone has been hacked by a team white-hat hackers from Qihoo 360, besides at the 2016 PwnFest hacking competition in Seoul.

    • Too Big to Fail Open-Source Software Needs Hacker Help

      The internet runs on free and open-source code. LAMP is shorthand for the basic stack of applications that makes the internet work. It stands for: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Together, those four pieces of software provide the foundation that lets us share both important data and elaborately filtered selfies all over the world. They are also all free and open-source projects, maintained by core teams of developers. These workers are the saints of the information age.

      Open-source has a tendency to be more stable than proprietary code, thanks in no small part to what’s called Linus’s Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Because open-source projects invite anyone to contribute, the idea is that lots of developers and testers will find and fix all the problems. It’s worked well so far, but it’s a theory that gets a bit creakier with age, as we’ve begun to see.

    • Heimdall Open-Source PHP Ransomware Targets Web Servers
    • Infect to Protect

      I’m not one to jump on each and every bandwagon I see. Sometimes that’s a good decision, sometimes it’s better to just wait and see where they go before taking any action.

      Containers are one of those ideas that, while promising and intriguing, were quite clumsy in the beginning, so I ignored them for a good while. It’s sufficiently mature now; so much so that’s quite difficult to ignore them. Time to investigate them again.

      [...]

      While the prototype I built isn’t practical and is of very limited use, I find the idea of sandboxed programs without the need for specialized runtimes very enticing.

      Programs can be still packaged the way they have been packaged in the past decades, without throwing away some of the sandboxing benefits that containers provide, all the while not introducing new concepts for users.

      Of course, something like this – even if properly implemented – won’t be a replacement for containers. Specially if one considers their role as packets ready for deployment, which have a lot of value for devops personnel.

      The code, as usual, is open source, and available from this Git repository.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Obama’s Final Arms-Export Tally More than Doubles Bush’s

      The Obama administration has approved more than $278 billion in foreign arms sales in its eight years, more than double the total of the previous administration, according to figures released by the Pentagon on Tuesday.

      Many of the approved deals — most but hardly all of which have become actual sales — have been to Mideast nations, including key allies in the campaign against Islamic State militants and countries that have been building up their defenses in fear of a nuclear Iran.

    • Reckoning with a Trump Presidency and the Elite Democrats Who Helped Deliver It

      The United States has been plunged into a state of purgatory following the election of Donald Trump. In all political quarters, people are engaged in their own post-mortem analysis of how this happened and what it means, not only for the future of this country, but for the world. Trump ran on a pledge to engage in mass deportations, denying Muslims entry to the US, the stripping of abortion rights and threats to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. Although Trump has staked out conflicting positions on a wide range of issues over the past several years, his campaign centered on an overtly nativist agenda. And his running mate, Mike Pence, is one of the key leaders of the radical religious right contingent of the Republican Party.

      While many Democrats are pointing fingers outside their own ranks to make sense of the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, few are willing to examine how their choice of nominee and the campaign they ran shaped the result. In this podcast, Intercept editor-in-chief Betsy Reed and co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill break down how we got here and what a Trump presidency means for civil liberties, surveillance, war, abortion rights, and other issues. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

    • Paris’s Bataclan Reopens a Year After Massacre

      A concert by British musician Sting at the Bataclan on Saturday night at once honored those who died in the attack a year ago and celebrated the life that the historic theater represents.

    • [Older] The fatal expense of American imperialism

      It may seem tendentious to call America an empire, but the term fits certain realities of US power and how it’s used. An empire is a group of territories under a single power. Nineteenth-century Britain was obviously an empire when it ruled India, Egypt, and dozens of other colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The United States directly rules only a handful of conquered islands (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands), but it stations troops and has used force to influence who governs in dozens of other sovereign countries. That grip on power beyond America’s own shores is now weakening.

    • Michael Sukhoff, Ann Garrison, Michael Parenti, Noah Treanor, and Paulette Moore

      Their first guest is author Michael Parenti, who discusses the nature of American empire.

    • ISIS has reportedly bulldozed two of the world’s most important ancient cities

      As the Iraqi military struggle to reclaim the city of Mosul in northern Iraq from the Islamic State (ISIS), satellite images show that two iconic archaeological sites have been purposefully destroyed – and not necessarily by fighting.

      Both were capital cities of ancient Mesopotamia – the important region where writing, farming, and civilisation as we know it arose. An ancient temple described as “the most spectacular sacred structure known from ancient Mesopotamia” has been bulldozed to the ground.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Mainstream Media: Don’t Mention Wikileaks

      I have been six hours watching “experts” across mainstream channels analyse why their earlier statements were totally wrong. There has been not one single mention of #WikiLeaks – or of social media at all. The clapped out old journalistic hacks are in denial that their mechanisms of control are now irrelevant, and they as greasy cogs in those mechanisms are viewed with contempt. The contrast between the mainstream media political narrative and what people were saying on social media was absolutely stark. People got their information from #WikiLeaks.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Earth’s plants are countering some of the effects of climate change

      IN 1972, on their way to the Moon, the crew of Apollo 17 snapped what would become one of the most famous photographs ever taken. The “Blue Marble” shows Earth as it looks from space: a blue sphere overlaid by large brown swatches of land, with wisps of white cloud floating above.

      But times change, and modern pictures of Earth look different. A wash of greenery is spreading over the globe, from central Africa to Europe and South East Asia. One measurement found that between 1982 and 2009 about 18m square kilometres of new vegetation had sprouted on Earth’s surface, an area roughly twice the size of the United States.

    • Betraying Water Protectors, Obama Set to Approve Dakota Access Pipeline

      Even as water protectors continued to face off against police on Friday in North Dakota, news outlets reported that the Obama administration is set to approve the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as early as Monday.

      Citing “two sources familiar with the timing,” Politico said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could approve a disputed easement within days, which would allow pipeline construction—on hold since September—to continue across the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux’s reservation. The Standing Rock tribe is vehemently opposed to the project, saying it threatens water supplies and sacred sites.

      Amid such opposition, Politico reported, “the prospect of a Monday announcement is raising concerns that nationwide protests planned for Tuesday could turn uncivil.”

    • Climate Change Has Already Altered Nearly Every Ecosystem on Earth

      Climate change is already affecting life on Earth, despite a global temperature increase of just 1°C, according to a new study published in the journal Science on Friday.

      Nearly every ecosystem on the planet is being altered, and plants and animals are being so affected that scientists may soon be forced to intervene to create “human-assisted evolution,” the study, titled The Broad Footprint of Climate Change from Genes to Biomes to People, found.

    • Lash Out at the Darkness and Fight Like Hell

      This newsletter usually describes the many things the Center for Biological Diversity is working on each week.

      Not today. We’re only thinking about one thing right now: stopping Donald Trump from destroying the planet.

      If President Trump carries out the disastrous promises he made while campaigning, the Environmental Protection Agency will be gutted, the Endangered Species Act will be repealed, old-growth forests will be clearcut, hard-fought global climate change agreements will be undermined, and polluters will be given free rein over our water and air.

      There’s no way in hell we’re letting that happen.

    • Trump’s Climate Contrarian: Myron Ebell Takes On the E.P.A.

      The mug-shot posters, pasted on walls and lampposts around Paris by an activist group during the United Nations climate talks last year, were hardly flattering. They depicted Myron Ebell, a climate contrarian, as one of seven “climate criminals” wanted for “destroying our future.”

      But in his customary mild-mannered way, Mr. Ebell, who directs environmental and energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian advocacy group in Washington, brushed it off.

      “I’ve gotten used to this over the years,” he told an interviewer at the talks. “But I did go out and get my photo taken with my poster, just so I have it as a memento.”

    • Tesla’s Future in Trump’s World

      What will Donald Trump actually do?

      It’s a question many Americans are asking themselves now that the U.S. has wrapped up one of its least policy-specific elections ever. The president-elect has offered only the loosest of legislative prescriptions, including whatever plans he may have for the energy industry.

  • Finance

    • MPAA-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal dead in wake of Trump win

      Among the reasons the deal was relevant to Ars readers is because of how it treated intellectual property. The TPP exported US copyright law regarding how long a copyright lasts. For signing nations, the plan would have made copyrights last for the life of the creator plus 70 years after his or her death. That’s basically the same as in the US.

      When the 2,000-page text of the deal was released in November last year—after negotiations were done in secret—the Motion Picture Association of America hailed it. “The TPP reaffirms what we have long understood—that strengthening copyright is integral to America’s creative community and to facilitating legitimate international commerce,” Chris Dodd, the MPAA chairman, said.

      At one point last year, many feared the TPP would require signing companies to mandate that Internet service providers terminate accounts for Internet copyright scofflaws. That, however, never materialized. In the US, many of the top ISPs have a six-strikes consumer infringement program.

    • The Battle Against TPP Isn’t Over, But It Has Shifted

      With President-elect Trump’s victory last night, the last hopes of the Obama administration passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the lame duck session of Congress have evaporated. The passage of the TPP through Congress was dependent upon support from members of the Republican majority, and there is no realistic prospect that they will now pass the deal given their elected President’s firmly expressed opposition to it. Even if they did so, the new President would presumably veto the pact’s implementing legislation.

      Moreover, it’s not possible for the other eleven countries to forge ahead without the United States on board. This is because of a condition that the TPP will not enter into effect unless at least six of the original signatories have ratified the deal, and only if their combined GDP amounts to at least 85 percent of the total GDP of all the original signatories. It is impossible for this condition to be met without both the United States and Japan ratifying the deal.

      We’re calling it: today is the day the TPP died.

      Nevertheless, the battle against the deal is not over. Why not? Because the other TPP countries are still in the process of passing their implementing legislation, which contains all of the worst measures in the TPP that we have been fighting against for the last six years—including the extension of the term of copyright, the strict rules against DRM circumvention, the tough criminal penalties against those who infringe copyright or who leak trade secrets, and the prohibition against mandates to review source code for bugs and backdoors. Countries that continue along the path of passing their implementing legislation will end up in the worst of all possible worlds—having accepted all the US demands on copyright and other digital policies, but without receiving any trade benefits from the United States in exchange.

    • The Lesser of Two Weevils

      Obama was a massive disappointment. Promise of economic change proved empty. It is difficult now to recall what a big emphasis in campaigning he placed on civil liberties, including ending torture and closing Guantanamo. What we got was the opposite. There was no proper legal process for Guantanamo detainees. Those responsible for the policy of torture were promoted and protected. The only CIA officer jailed over torture was John Kiriakou for blowing the whistle on it. Obama’s War on Whistleblowers has been the fiercest in US history. There is no doubt that in Obama’s USA, Daniel Ellsberg would have gone to jail for a very long time. The surveillance state has extended its reach still further, while execution by drone is so routine as to pass without notice. Between drones, bombs and troops on the ground often as “advisers” or “trainers”, there has not been a single day in Obama’s eight years in which US forces have not killed a Muslim in a Muslim country.

      Yet a year from now we are very likely to conclude that things have got much worse since Obama. I fully expect Clinton to be elected. What was for me most interesting about the various WikiLeaks releases was not the mesh of sleaze and corruption. There is no doubt that Hillary was peddling influence in exchange for massive donations to the Clinton Foundation and fees and gifts to Bill and herself, and that the Clintons were able to access the resources of their “Charity” for personal use through a variety of subterfuges, quite probably legal. I knew all of that. Anybody who had not already worked out that the same Saudis who have top western politicians in their pockets are also funding ISIS, is a fool. I have been saying it for years.

    • The Final Bill for TPP May Include Trump
    • ‘What Open Borders Mean for Corporations Is Really About Restricting Workers’ Rights’

      Michelle Chen: “Samsung has found all sorts of creative ways, depending on which regulatory system they’re working under, to evade labor contract law and keep workers on these short-term contracts.”

    • TPP: Trans-Pacific Partnership dead, before Trump even takes office

      Eight years in the making, the giant Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal between Australia, the US and 10 other regional powers is as good as dead after the Obama administration walked away from its plan to put it before the “lame duck” Congress ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president.

      Controversial in Australia because it would allow US-headquartered corporations to sue Australian governments in extraterritorial tribunals and entrench pharmaceutical monopolies and copyright rules, the TPP was the subject of a last-minute plea by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to president-elect Donald Trump in their 15-minute phone conversation on Thursday.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Newsweek recalls 125,000 copies of its souvenir Madam President issue

      Everyone from pollsters to pundits got the result of the US presidential election wrong.

      But few can have made it in such an expensive manner.

      Newsweek and a partner that prints up special commemorative issues has been forced into an embarrassing recall, after it sent out 125,000 copies of its Madam President issue designed to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s win.

    • It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump

      They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

    • Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit

      The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.

      The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.

    • Anti-Trump protests continue across US as 10,000 march in New York

      In New York, where peaceful marches along downtown streets have taken place since Wednesday – the day after Trump’s shock presidential election victory over Hillary Clinton – more than 10,000 people indicated on Facebook that they would attend a noon march from Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters.

      As marchers mustered at East 17th Street and Broadway, organisers estimated the turnout at 2,000. As the march began to move, however, the true figure seemed closer to the promised 10,000.

      Chanting “Not my president!”, the crowd set off up Fifth Avenue under heavy police escort. A call-and-response developed, protesters chanting: “Whose streets? ‎Our streets!”

      Marcher Kim Peterson, 41 and a‎ Brooklyn stay-at-home mom, said: “He may have won the election but I will never accept what he stands for or his beliefs, not for myself or my children.”

    • The Comey Non-Story and the Problem of Meta-Scandals

      Hillary Clinton has been the subject of many scandals—some legitimate, some with a mix of fact and fantasy. But last week a “scandal” emerged that was created by media entirely out of whole cloth.

      On October 28, FBI Director James Comey dropped a “bombshell” on Clinton, informing congressional committee chairs that his agency had found more emails “pertinent to the investigation” of her private email server, and was looking into the matter. Just like that, chaos broke out, and the entire presidential election hung in the balance.

      [...]

      But the Comey letter wasn’t a scandal; the letter didn’t actually say anything new, and certainly nothing damaging to Clinton.

    • Hillary Clinton Blames FBI’s James Comey For Election Loss In Call With Top Donors

      At the end of September 2016, the Indian motion picture producer’s association, India’s largest organisation related to entertainment, announced a ban on all Pakistani artists.

      In retaliation, Pakistan authorities imposed a complete ban on airing Indian content on all its TV channels, including Bollywood movies.

      This cultural war, triggered by the September Uri attacks in Kashmir, is far from new.

    • Dumbass Democrats

      Congratulations, you played yourself!

      Ok, this rant is from my working-class heart, but it is due time for a rant.

      Well, who the hell are the Democrats going to blame now? The degree to which you scapegoat the Green Party or the white working-class is precisely the degree to which you are proving you will never learn a damn thing and are completely unable to lead this country.

      If it wasn’t such a farce, I’d say it is King Lear redux.

      Let’s look at some really basic, I mean high school level politics. Not fair, the average 16 year old is far wiser than the big shots of the DNC.

    • The Establishment’s Massive ‘Intelligence Failure’

      As shocking as Donald Trump’s victory was – and as uncertain as the future is – his victory marked a massive “intelligence failure” of the Establishment, a blow to its arrogance and self-dealing, says ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller.

    • 10 Cartoonists React to Trump Winning the Election
    • Why Trump won

      There are evidently overlapping reasons for these developments, although all the political movements involved are not, by any means, the same. Some are of the right and some of the left. Some have authoritarian streaks which others lack. Some are relatively liberal and outward looking while others are more orientated towards protectionism. All of them, however, share some common features. They are patriotic rather than internationalist. They all have varying concerns about immigration, reflecting the nativism – the feeling that indigenous residents ought to be given more consideration and support than immigrants – of a majority of their supporters. They all exhibit distrust and a measure of contempt for the established political systems.

    • James Comey To Congress: About Those Hillary Clinton Emails I Mentioned Last Week? Meh, Forget About It, Nothing To See

      James Comey continues to be playing by his own ridiculous rules. He was playing by his own rules when he publicly announced that no charges would be sought against Hillary Clinton over her emails back in July. He was playing by his own rules a week ago when he revealed in a letter to Congress that new information had come to light, man. And, he continued to play by his own rules in sending a new letter to Congress saying “ooops, turns out there was nothing.”

    • Washington Post Columnist: If This Democracy Is Going To Stay Healthy, We Need To Start Trusting The FBI More

      Trust and respect aren’t things someone (or something) holds in an infinite, uninterrupted supply. They’re gained and lost due to the actions of the entity holding this extremely liquid supply of trust. Oddly, some people — like Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza — seem to believe trust and respect should be given to certain “venerated institutions,” because to do otherwise is to surrender to something approaching nihilism.

    • Shame on Us, the American Media

      Early this year, when it became clear Donald Trump would become the GOP presidential nominee, but before we knew how Republicans would respond to being overtaken by a racist authoritarian, I argued at length that while Trump was a symptom of deep rot within their party, our other democratic institutions were still strong enough to contain the threat he posed.

      It was obvious by then that Trump’s reckless and illiberal candidacy would be damaging to America’s civic health, just by itself. But those very traits, it seemed, would also make it nearly impossible for him to win the presidency; and in the event of the unthinkable, he would be hemmed in by both the exigencies of governing and the conforming power of imperfect institutions like the legislature, the judiciary, the civil service, and the media, outside the presidency.

    • Marine Le Pen: ‘Not a hair’s breadth’ separates Front National and Ukip

      The leader of France’s far-right Front National has said not a “hair’s breadth” separates her party from Nigel Farage’s Ukip.

      Marine Le Pen said it was “ridiculous” for Farage and his colleagues to pretend otherwise. Pressed on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show about why Ukip refused to associate itself with the FN, Le Pen said: “Sorry, but objectively there is – on the topic of immigration and the European Union – not a hair’s breadth of difference between what Ukip thinks and what the National Front thinks, let’s be truthful.

      “Maybe Ukip is trying to counter the demonisation they are victim of by saying, ‘We are the good guys and the National Front are the bad guys’ – they can do so, but I don’t feel obliged to follow this strategy because, frankly, I feel it’s a little bit ridiculous.”

    • An American Tragedy

      Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus “scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.

    • Why I’m Voting Third Party

      Choosing the lesser of two evils means I am still choosing evil.

      [...]

      A strong showing for third party candidates will be a wake up call to both the Democratic and Republican establishments they have to deal with real desire for change, not ignore voters, or try to scare us into abandoning our conscience and principles by trading (again) short term goals for long term progress.

      For those who truly support Clinton, please, vote that way. But don’t disparage the rest of us for believing we can do better, even if that road is a long. Too many have accepted, election after election, the long con of no third party.

    • How Did Donald Trump Win?

      It’s not about left and right anymore, not about Black and White. It is all about up and down. And it elected Donald Trump via a bumpy road. The next candidate to really figure it out will sweep into power.

      And what it is is stated succiently by former McCain campaign chief strategist Steve Schmidt: jobs, specifically the loss of jobs to technology and globalization, and the changes to our society that that is causing.

      The defining issue of our times, says Schmidt, is the displacement of workers, particularly those who traditionally held working class roles. America is watching a leveling down unprecedented in its history, a form of societal and economic devolution.

    • Another Election Loser: Corporate Media

      Liberals had a good laugh this summer when CNN’s Brianna Keilar (8/17/16) insisted to Donald Trump campaign lawyer Michael Cohen that his team was “down” in the race.

      “Says who?” he asked.

      Keilar snarked back: “Polls. Most of them. All of them?”

      At the time, it was the sickest of all burns. As the polls kept forecasting a clear win for Hillary Clinton, Trump fans went back and forth between complaining about a rigged system and accusing the polls of being dishonest.

      Again, it was a good laugh for liberals—until Election Day.

      As the dust settles and America comes to terms with the election of Donald Trump, it’s time to take a look at the embarrassment of the media class, with the failure of polling only one part of the story. For those who have bemoaned the mediocrity of corporate media, this might appear as a well-deserved comeuppance, but it also brings the uncomfortable upending of decades of common wisdom about media and elections.

    • Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump–but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them

      There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders’ consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. Before, during and after the race was competitive, this was the Vermont senator’s strongest argument: He was out-polling Trump in the general election by an average of 10 or so points, whereas Clinton was only slightly ahead. His favorables were also much higher, often with a spread as much as 25 points.

    • The Day After: How to Renounce Your American Citizenship

      Despite what you may see on TV or in the movies, there is only one way to voluntarily renounce citizenship. You can’t do it by tearing up your American passport, or writing a manifesto. It’s done by appointment only.

      You start by making an appointment at the nearest American embassy or consulate. You technically can complete the renunciation procedures anywhere a properly-empowered American diplomat will meet you abroad, but in reality it is unlikely s/he will drop by your villa, or come by your prison cell.

      At the embassy (the rules are the same at a consulate) you’ll fill out some forms. You can Google and complete, but not sign them, ahead of time if you wish: DS-4079, DS-4080, DS-4081, and DS-4082. Have a look; most of the requested information is pretty vanilla stuff, and is largely to make sure you understand what you are doing and the consequences of doing it.

      The reason for making sure of all that making sure stuff is two-fold.

      One, the State Department, who handles all this, has been sued by people in the past who claim they were tricked or mislead and did not know what they were doing, and want their citizenship back. The other reason is that barring certain highly-specific situations, renouncing citizenship is a one-way street. The U.S. government considers it a permanent, unrecoverable, irrevocable, decision. You gotta get it right the first time.

    • Deal With It: The Democratic National Committee Lost This Election

      There is a meme ripping through the social media of Clinton supporters that her loss is in large part the fault of third party voters. Or the misogyny apocalypse. People, please.

      How about 18 months of unresolved email questions? The destruction of Bernie Sanders by the Democratic National Committee alongside Hillary-friendly media? The lack of outreach to third party voters along with fear mongering that a vote for Johnson or Stein would bring on Armageddon, the ridiculous name calling towards Republicans that should have been courted to crossover and vote against a candidate many did not enthusiastically support, the unresolved questions about the Clinton Foundation and pay-for-play, the unreleased Goldman-Sachs speeches, the changes of position and policy, the untrustworthiness, the empty and depressing strategy of I’m the Lesser of Two Evils, the weasel stuff like Bill on Loretta Lynch’s plane, the grossly negative final weeks of the campaign, the poor turnout in places, the silly accusations that Putin and Wikileaks and the FBI were rigging the election, the sneaky stuff like CNN leaking debate questions to her ahead of time — any of that matter?

      I mean, who could have anticipated a candidate with all that baggage, and some epically bad decision-making skills, might run into problems getting elected?

    • What Now? Post-Election Special

      Much can and will and should be said about the, yes, presidential election of, yes, Donald Trump—including about media’s role. On this first post-election show, we focus on the question of: What now? What now for electoral reform and congressional diversity? For the environment? For Muslim-Americans and others made vulnerable by the so-called “War on Terror” in its domestic and international fronts?

    • Trump’s ‘Unhinged’ Lie About Obama Doesn’t Register as News to Corporate Media

      Now, if we live in a world where descriptions can be true or false, Trump’s account is clearly false. He’s describing the Obama rally as something he’s seen himself, so it’s fair to say that he’s lying about what the president did. (If he actually perceived Obama “really screaming” at a protester, that signifies a break from reality that is if anything more alarming.) Trump didn’t misspeak; he repeated the claim at other events, talking in Tampa of Obama “screaming and screaming and screaming,” for instance.

      So a major-party presidential candidate on the verge of the election repeatedly tells a far-fetched and easily checkable lie about the current president, calling a thing that didn’t happen “a disgrace.” In the 2016 presidential campaign, where political journalists have obsessively covered every utterance of Trump, this surely qualifies as important news the electorate should know about, right?

    • Facebook is being blamed for Trump’s election – but Mark Zuckerberg’s response seems tone deaf

      Half the nation is blaming Facebook for Donald Trump’s election.

      And Facebook feels that’s very unfair!

      The argument is that Facebook now plays a huge role in the distribution of information. Its 2 billion active users may read traditional news sources, like The New York Times and Business Insider. But they aren’t typically visiting those websites directly. Instead, they’re scrolling through Facebook’s news feed and reading articles that get shared by friends.

      The problem is that Facebook users aren’t always good at distinguishing legitimate news sources from satire, propaganda, or just plain false information. And if bad information goes viral, it can negatively influence the public’s opinion.

      The spreading of false information during the election cycle was so bad, that President Obama called Facebook a “dust cloud of nonsense.”

    • Why the White Working Class Rebelled: Neoliberalism is Killing Them (Literally)

      The Democratic Party has been the Establishment for eight years, and the Clintons have arguably been the Establishment for 24 years. Since the late 1990s, members of the white working class with high school or less have seen their life-chances radically decline, even to the point where they are dying at much higher rates than they have a right to expect.

      A year ago Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Princeton University economists, published a study with the startling finding that since 1999 death rates have been going up for white Americans aged 45-54. It is even worse than it sounds, since death rates were declining for the general population.

    • Five unanswered questions after Trump’s upset victory

      Three days after the presidential election, liberals are grappling with the reality of President-elect Donald Trump, while conservatives exult about an unexpected end to Democratic control of the White House.

      Neither side correctly anticipated the outcome on Election Day. And there are still several key questions that have not been definitively answered.

      What happened to Democratic turnout?

      Not every single vote has been counted yet, but the general pattern is clear: Hillary Clinton underperformed President Obama’s showing in 2012 by a dramatic margin.

    • Nine times Donald Trump has already betrayed the US voters who put their faith in him

      Trump railed against Barack Obama’s flagship policy to allow millions of poor Americans to access healthcare.

      Pledging to ditch the policy during the campaign, he said: “We will do it very quickly. It is a catastrophe.”

      Now he says he might simply reform it, keeping the ban on insurers denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and allowing young adults to be insured on parents’ policies.

      Trump said he was persuaded to keep the elements by Mr Obama, who he previously accused of founding the Islamic State.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Swaziland: Self-Censorship At ‘Times’ Newspaper

      The Times of Swaziland, the only independent daily newspaper in the kingdom, censored itself heavily in a report about exploitation of sugar workers to deflect criticism away from the absolute monarch King Mswati III.

      This trend of misinformation has been continuing at the newspaper for years.

      The Times said on Monday (7 November 2016), ‘The new International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) report is called “Swazi gold”‘.

    • IMDb Sues The State Of California Over New ‘Ageism’ Law
    • IMDb Sues to Invalidate California’s Actor Age Censorship Law

      IMDb is suing California Attorney General Kamala Harris to protect its right to post actors’ ages on their profiles.

      A complaint filed Thursday in California federal court aims to overturn Assembly Bill 1687, which requires IMDb.com to remove the ages or birth dates of public figures in the entertainment industry on its site upon request.

      The law was passed in September as an effort to mitigate age discrimination in Hollywood and has been widely criticized as unconstitutional — a point IMDb emphasizes in its suit.

      “IMDb shares the worthy goal of preventing age discrimination,” writes attorney John C. Hueston in the complaint. “But AB 1687 is an unconstitutional law that does not advance, much less achieve, that goal. To the contrary, rather than passing laws designed to address the root problem of age discrimination, the State of California has chosen to chill free speech and undermine public access to factual information.”

    • EU in new attempt to make ISP:s police and censor the Internet

      Freedom of speech and freedom of information will be in the hands of ISP:s who are to be liable for all user uploads. There is good reason to fear that these companies will be overly anxious and cautious – censoring everything with even a remote possibility of being an infringement of copyright.

      This is yet another attempt to get around the eCommerce-directives principle of »mere conduit« stating that net operators can not be liable for what users are doing in their cables.

    • China is the obstacle to Google’s plan to end internet censorship

      It’s been three years since Eric Schmidt proclaimed that Google would chart a course to ending online censorship within ten years. Now is a great time to check on Google’s progress, reassess the landscape, benchmark Google’s efforts against others who share the same goal, postulate on the China strategy and offer suggestions on how they might effectively move forward.

    • The Paradox Of Trump Threatening Documentary Filmmaker While Supporting Citizens United

      I’m not sure if Donald Trump has ever officially weighed in on the famous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but if he did, I’m guessing he would support that ruling wholeheartedly. After all, he recently hired the former President of Citizens United to be his deputy campaign manager. And, I know that people freak out about the term “Citizens United” and some believe it’s the root cause of all evil in American politics today, but that’s wrong. At its heart, that case was a First Amendment free speech case, about whether a group (Citizens United) could show a documentary film heavily critical of Hillary Clinton close to the 2008 election. We can all argue about the evils of campaign finance and dark money and super PACs, but there should be ways to fix that without banning movies.

      Either way, it’s quite ironic that with the former head of Citizens United helping to lead his campaign, Trump is now basically arguing against the very Citizens United ruling by threatening to sue lots of folks associated with a new documentary, called You’ve Been Trumped Too. Unfortunately, the filmmaker hasn’t released the actual threat letters, so we can’t see the details, but he claims that “Trump is threatening to sue movie theatres, reporters or anyone who repeats the allegations made in my new film.” People Magazine claims it’s seen the threat letters but chosen not to post them.

    • Bad Idea From Famed First Amendment Lawyer: Press Should Sue Trump For Libel

      Floyd Abrams is one of, if not the most famous First Amendment lawyers in the country. He gets and deserves a ton of respect. His most famous case was defending the NY Times against the US government when Richard Nixon tried to block the NY Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. And he’s been involved in many other seminal First Amendment cases as well. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t sometimes make mistakes — like the time he insisted that SOPA wouldn’t violate the First Amendment because it was censorship for a good cause (i.e., for his clients at the MPAA). Or the time he falsely accused Wikileaks of indiscriminately leaking information that was actually being more carefully distributed.

      And while I totally agree with Abrams in claiming that Donald Trump is the “greatest threat to the First Amendment since the passage of The Sedition Act of 1918,” I disagree with his thoughts on how to fight it. His argument is that the press that Trump has been insulting should sue Trump for defamation…

    • Censorship: Is it necessary?

      Recently, Eckerd College officials told students and faculty that free speech is welcome on their campus. Eckerd College was not the first to impose this policy, which started with University of Chicago in 2012. Censorship has been debated on college campuses for some time now, causing an uproar with students.

    • India’s Long History of Television Censorship

      The Indian state has a propensity to censor regardless of the government in power. Nevertheless, the ban imposed on NDTV India is a significant escalation against the country’s free press.

    • A sad song of musical censorship in India and Pakistan

      At the end of September 2016, the Indian motion picture producer’s association, India’s largest organisation related to entertainment, announced a ban on all Pakistani artists.

      In retaliation, Pakistan authorities imposed a complete ban on airing Indian content on all its TV channels, including Bollywood movies.

      This cultural war, triggered by the September Uri attacks in Kashmir, is far from new.

    • Facebook slammed for censoring burn victim’s birthday photo
    • Facebook apologises and backs down after it removed a photograph of a Swedish fireman who was disfigured in a blaze
    • Facebook slammed for censoring burn victim’s birthday pic
    • Why does Facebook remove photos of burn victims like Lasse Gustavson?
    • Facebook Apologises For Removing Photo Of Burns Survivor Lasse Gustavson
    • Facebook Bans Burn Survivor’s Photo Twice, Receives Backlash
    • Facebook Apologizes After Banning Picture of Burn Victim on His Birthday
    • Twitter Censorship #USSLiberty #Vanunu
    • Artist Double Diamond Sun Body, Currently Showing At MAMA, Uses Irreverence To Challenge Censorship

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Why did Facebook buy a social analytics tool used by media companies?

      Facebook has repeatedly denied it is a media company. So why did it just go and buy a startup best known for its social analytics platform for media publishers?

      Arriving on the scene in 2011, CrowdTangle has become an indispensable tracking tool for media outlets. Its real-time dashboards, custom notifications, and personalized visualizations help publishers compare their social leverage with their competitors’ and discover trending content. In its own words: “Hundreds of newsrooms and thousands of journalists use the tool every day.”

    • Why the Government Must Disclose Its Exploit to the Defense in the Playpen Cases

      In addition to difficult questions concerning the Fourth Amendment, Rule 41, and the limits of government hacking, the Playpen cases raise an important question about the future of digital rights: whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances the government must disclose to criminal defendants how the government carried out its hacking.

      In the Playpen cases, the government has provided some information to the accused about how the “network investigative technique,” or “NIT,” operated. But, critically, the government refuses to produce the exploit it used to allegedly take control of suspects’ computers.

      That refusal—in addition to all the other problems with the Playpen cases—violates the rights of the accused. And, as at least one court has correctly found, the refusal to disclose the exploit to the defense requires suppression of evidence obtained as a result.

    • Delivering Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere to Mobile Users at WARP Speed

      As people spend more and more time using phones and tablets, privacy and security for mobile browsers has become an acute problem. That’s why we’re excited to see a new Android browser called WARP improving the state of the field. WARP was built by Qualcomm and EMbience, and includes ports of EFF’s Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere tools to bring privacy and security protections to a wider, mobile audience.

      WARP is a patched version of Google’s Chromium codebase. Its built-in features include Web Defender, which is a privacy mechanism that is compatible with EFF’s Privacy Badger 1.0, and Secure Connect, which is a native port of HTTPS Everywhere. WARP may also be used as the basis for customized browsers shipped by wireless carriers and handset manufacturers. However, we recommend that, if you want to use WARP (or any other browser), it’s best to get the version from the Play Store rather than one that may have been modified in undocumented ways by carriers or handset manufacturers.

    • Managing Security Trade-offs: Why I Still Recommend Signal

      Recently, I read a blog post by a developer who also does infosec consulting and training for investigative journalists, helping protect their ability to work in the public interest and communicate with sources unimpeded by surveillance states and other adversaries.

      The post, titled “Why I won’t recommend Signal anymore,” piqued my interest as I spend a lot of time evangelising Signal to virtually anyone I interact with, for reasons which I have spent several years discovering. I immediately thought, “What did this guy discover that I’ve so blatantly missed?” and read through the article.

    • EFF to Supreme Court: Cell Phone Location Data Is Off-Limits to Police Without a Warrant

      Washington, D.C.—Cell phone location data, which can provide an incredibly detailed picture of people’s private lives, implicates our Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches, requiring police to obtain a warrant to gain access, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told the Supreme Court today.

      Weighing in on separate cases where two courts have applied 1970s-era law to digital communications in the information age, EFF urged the nation’s highest court to step in and establish that Americans have the right to expect location data generated from their cell phones is private and protected by the Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures.

    • Fewer Resources, Fewer Choices: A School Administrator in Indiana Works to Protect Student Privacy

      In a rural, partly Amish community in Indiana, the schools are rapidly adopting educational technology from tech giants like Google. Students may be leaving farms in the morning to come to classrooms with Chromebooks at every desk. As technology becomes more and more integrated into modern education, these schools have to draw on scarce resources to protect the privacy of their students.

      Eric M. is the Director of Technology at a public K-12 school district in a rural area of Indiana. The district is relatively small, with about 2100 students. In addition to G-Suite for Education (known as Google Apps for Education until recently), students use software from major publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson. Beyond these core apps, some classrooms also use smaller software like Mobymax, Achieve3000, and Nearpod, as well as publicly available platforms like Prezi and Glogster.

      “It seems like every classroom you look into is using technology,” Eric said. “As a technology director, that makes me both excited and scared.”

    • Appeals court hears arguments in Somali terror case

      The four men in the case are Basaaly Saeed Moalin, a San Diego cabdriver; Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, the imam of a City Heights mosque; Issa Doreh, former president of a nonprofit group aiding the Somali community; and Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud of Anaheim. They were convicted of funneling less than $10,000 to the terrorist group al-Shabab.

      The main evidence in the trial was excerpts of about 1,800 wiretap recordings of phone calls from Moalin to Somalia and to his co-defendants. Prosecutors said the recordings captured the scheme to raise the funds and wire transfer them overseas.

    • Terror-funding conviction in San Diego under fire over NSA phone data collection
    • Autocracy: Rules for Survival

      However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a “normal” politician. There has until now been little evidence that he can be one.

    • Boeing, DISA Develop Mobile Device for Top-Secret Military Communications; Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn Comments
    • The Head Of The NSA Is Testing Boeing’s Self-Destructing Smartphone
    • Trump Election Ignites Fears Over US Encryption, Surveillance Policy
    • Worried about the NSA under Trump? Here’s how to protect yourself

      In January 2017, Donald Trump will become President of the United States of America, and the most technologically advanced surveillance infrastructure in the world will start reporting directly to him.

      When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance regime in 2013, he warned that a new American president could rapidly expand its scope overnight with just a simple change of government policy.

    • President Obama Should Shut Down the NSA’s Mass Spying Before It’s Too Late

      Modern surveillance programs would be a disaster under President Trump

      President Obama has just 71 days until Donald Trump is inaugurated as our next commander-in-chief. That means he has a matter of weeks to do one thing that could help prevent the United States from veering into fascism: declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government’s unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can — before Trump is the one running it.

    • ORG concerned over GCHQ sovereignty under new US president
    • Open Rights Group: Donald Trump presidency is bad news for UK surveillance

      Privacy campaigners at the Open Rights Group (ORG) have warned that Donald Trump running the US National Security Agency (NSA), and therefore working closely with GCHQ, could spell trouble for UK surveillance.

    • Scared About Trump Wielding FBI And NSA Cyber Power? You Should Be

      Americans are understandably anxious about the idea of Donald Trump wantonly wielding “The Cyber” to quiet his enemies, following his election to president today. The fear is manifesting and metastasizing fast on social media…

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • A New Dawn for Hate?

      Aaron, Nik, and Nancy are not alone. A mere three days after the election, reports of harassment and violence directed at people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, Muslims, and others have been pouring in. Shaun King, the senior justice writer for the New York Daily News, has received dozens and dozens of reports of abuse and is chronicling them on Twitter. The Southern Poverty Law Center is also collecting reports of racist harassment, as are various news outlets.

    • Congress Needs To Clarify That Password Sharing Is Not a Federal Crime

      The Internet has been on fire in recent months over two court decisions that threaten to criminalize password sharing. The law at the heart of the cases is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1986 statute meant to outlaw computer break-ins. Congress passed the CFAA after “War Games”—a techno-thriller film about a teen whose computer shenanigans nearly sparked World War III—put the fear of God into lawmakers about the vulnerability of our computer networks. The law—passed years before the advent of the modern Internet—is seriously showing its age.

      How the CFAA, which was originally intended to target criminals for havoc-wreaking computer break-ins and data theft, came to be used to convict people for using someone else’s password is a study in prosecutorial overreach and shows how the law has failed to keep up with technology. Congress needs to step up and overhaul this flawed and outdated law.

      The CFAA makes it illegal to intentionally access a “protected computer”—which includes any computer connected to the Internet—”without authorization” or in excess of authorization. But the law fails to define “without authorization.”

    • Richard Cohen Can’t Help Race-Baiting, Defending Harassment

      Cohen himself was accused of “inappropriate behavior” toward a female staffer in 1996–and later wrote a column (10/25/10) saying that allegations against Thomas should be forgotten, on the grounds that “we all did and said terrible things when we were young.” On the basis of his self-serving rejection of sexual harassment investigations, Cohen’s column is headlined “The Gangs of Washington Are Drawing Their Knives.”

    • Donald Trump May Choose Bush-Era Torture Architect for CIA Chief

      President-elect Donald Trump may choose an architect of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program, Jose Rodriguez, to head the CIA, The Intercept reported Friday.

      The Intercept cites a post-election prediction from Dentons, a law firm where Trump confidante Newt Gingrich (himself a potential secretary of state) serves as an advisor. “Dentons was also retained by Make America Number 1, one of the primary Super PACs supporting Trump’s candidacy,” the outlet writes.

      Rodriguez directed the National Clandestine Service and “helped develop the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of ‘waterboarding,’ the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees,” The Intercept writes.

    • Zimbabwean Hunter Will Not Be Prosecuted Over Cecil the Lion Killing

      A Zimbabwean hunter involved in the killing of Cecil the lion in 2015 will not face prosecution after a high court in the African country threw out the charges against him, according to his lawyer.

      State prosecutors accused hunter Theo Bronkhorst of helping to lure the 13-year-old, black-maned lion out of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park in order for American dentist Walter Palmer to hunt Cecil.

    • The Dutch prison crisis: A shortage of prisoners

      While the UK and much of the world struggles with overcrowded prisons, the Netherlands has the opposite problem. It is actually short of people to lock up. In the past few years 19 prisons have closed down and more are slated for closure next year. How has this happened – and why do some people think it’s a problem?

      The smell of fried onions wafts up the metal staircase, past the cell doors and along the wing. Down in the kitchen inmates are preparing their evening meal. One man, gripping a long serrated blade, is expertly chopping vegetables.

      “I’ve had six years to practice so I am getting better!” he says.

      It is noisy work because the knife is on a long steel chain attached to the worktop.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Court Not Impressed By Airbnb’s Argument Against The City Of San Francisco

      Earlier this year, we noted that a bunch of cities were looking to make Airbnb liable for residents in those cities using the platform without following certain city rules. As we noted at the time, this seemed to pretty clearly violate Section 230 of the CDA, which says that platforms cannot be liable for the actions of their users. San Francisco went ahead with such a law anyway, even though it tried to rework it at the last minute to deal with Airbnb’s points on why it was illegal. The case ended up in court either way — and unfortunately, the initial ruling has sided with San Francisco over Airbnb.

      Now, I know that for a variety of reasons, there are people who just flat out hate Airbnb and think that it’s somehow bad or problematic for cities or rental prices or whatever. I don’t think the data supports this, but either way, you should be concerned about the results here. This isn’t about whether or not Airbnb is “good” or “bad” for cities. It’s about a fundamental principle on which the internet operates — which has allowed the internet to grow and to thrive, and which has protected free speech on the internet, by not making platforms magically liable for what users say or do. But the court here basically doesn’t care about all of that.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Will President Trump Be Tough on Online Piracy?

        At TorrentFreak we have no interest in reporting on politics, except when it’s relevant to copyright issues.

        After the surprising victory of Donald Trump earlier this week, several people asked what this would mean for the country’s stance on piracy and copyright enforcement in general.

        While we would love to dissect the issue in detail, there are no concrete policy proposals yet. Neither Trump nor Clinton have gone into detail over the past few months.

        So what do we know?

        It’s not a secret that Donald Trump made some rather dubious remarks during his election campaign. For example, he suggested that it might be worth considering whether to “close up” the Internet over terrorist threats.

        Extreme or not, we believe that extrapolating these kinds of one-liners into copyright policy proposals goes a bit far, to say the least.

      • Conspiracy Theories Run Amok Over Copyright Office Executive Changes

        Last week, we wrote about the big news in the copyright realm, where the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, removed the Register of Copyrights (the head of the Copyright Office), Maria Pallante, from her job. Technically, Hayden reassigned Pallante to a new job in the Library of Congress, but Pallante rejected that offer and resigned. While we — and some others — pointed out that this was a good opportunity to reshape the Copyright Office away from being a taxpayer-funded lobbying organization for Hollywood, some folks who support ever more draconian copyright immediately jumped on all sorts of conspiracy theories about how this was really Google somehow firing Pallante, including one site that directly had that as a headline.

        To anyone who actually had knowledge of what was going on, this made no sense. Hayden is not connected to Google in any way. This is just out and out tinfoil hat conspiracy theory territory from people who see “Google” behind any policy they dislike. It seemed rather obvious that, like just about any new CEO of an organization, Hayden was clearing out some senior staff for a variety of reasons. And there was a pretty obvious big reason why Hayden would like to reassign Pallante: she has been directly and publicly advocating for Congress to move the Copyright Office outside of the Library of Congress. If you came in to run an organization and one of your direct reports was going over your head to try to transfer an entire division somewhere else, it’s likely you’d fire that person too. It’s kind of a management 101 thing.

11.12.16

Links 12/11/2016: Core Infrastructure Initiative Supports Reproducible Builds, Temer’s Assault on FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Project Imixs-Workflow 4.0 released!

    Imixs-Workflow is an Open Source Workflow Engine for Human-Centric BPM. Human-centric business process management supports human skills and activities by a task orientated workflow-engine.

    The new release includes a number of improvements concerning performance and stability. Version 4.0. is now based on Java 8 and can be run with any Java EE 7 application server. In addition to a long list of improvements, the Lucene search engine technology is now fully integrated into the Imixs-Workflow engine. Thus, the open source framework provides much more flexibility in data access and allows a faster integration into existing business solutions.

  • The digital revolution’s hidden secret: Open-source cloud software

    Buried deep within the heart of the digital revolution is a hidden secret. This secret is open-source software. Open-source software has been key to the transformation of business because it is low-cost, often free, and easy for a young company to modify and deploy. Because of these strong points, open-source software has produced powerful technologies for modern enterprise computing. To guide this explosive community, foundations have appeared, forming an alliance of businesses, startups and developers.

    To gain some insight into one such foundation, John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the KubeCon 2016 conference in Seattle, WA. There, he sat down with Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

  • Can an on-prem-cloud hybrid service solve companies’ open-source quandary?

    Companies wanting to stay on tech’s bleeding edge face a bit of a quandary these days: Most agree that the latest, greatest software is happening in open source; however, the job of curating and operating it is too messy for the IT teams at most businesses. We spoke with one startup co-founder who believes they’ve found a way to serve open-source innovation to customers without choking them with complexity.

    Bich Le, chief architect and co-founder of Platform9, started the company with some fellow VMware alumni. “The opportunity that we saw was open-source software was getting amazing and ruling the world, especially in the infrastructure space for running compute, storage, networking — but what’s defining this software is it’s very complex to operate,” Le told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during KubeCon 2016.

  • Radisys Propels 5G, Contributes Virtual EPC to Open Source Group

    Radisys contributed its evolved packet core (EPC) framework to the open source CORD project to create a virtual EPC (vEPC).

  • Kubernetes and the open-source, cloud-native evolution

    As the movement to further the education and advancement of Docker, Kubernetes and Cloud-Native architectures continues to grow, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation hosted KubeCon 2016 in Seattle, WA, this week to gather leading Kubernetes technologists from multiple open-source cloud-native communities.

    During the event, Jim Walker, VP of Marketing at CoreOS Inc., and Joseph Jacks, senior director of Product Management at Apprenda Inc., spoke to John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. KubeCon is a biannual community conference dedicated to Kubernetes, the open-source container cluster management software project by Google.

    Walker and Jacks spoke to Furrier about what’s going on at KubeCon, as well as in cloud-native and open source as it evolves.

  • Google Announces Code-In 2016 To Encourage Open Source
  • Google Code-in is Coming, Focused on Open Source

    We’re almost done with 2016, and this time of year is when Google announces its annual Code-in contest, which it has just done. Code-in is an an online contest hosted by Google for pre-university students aged 13 to 17. The contest encourages open source and exposes young people to open source.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Anatomy of a Chrome for Android bug: the mixed-up world of mobile browsers

        Security researchers at Kaspersky recently wrote about various Android attacks featuring malware known as Svpeng.

        Svpeng is a whole family of data-stealing and banking-related threats, so this is more than just what Google might glibly try to label Potentially Harmful Software: it’s malware, and you definitely don’t want it near your phone.

      • There are 2 Billion active Chrome browsers across mobile and desktop

        Chrome is installed by default on all Android devices that come from Google’s partners as well as all Chromebook computers. That probably accounts to a lot of devices, without taking into consideration all the Chrome browsers that users choose to install on their PCs and Macs. So it’s not hard to see how the browser could now be running on billions of phones and desktops and actively used on most of them.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • The battle for Apache Cassandra highlights major problem with open source projects

      Developers prefer Apache-licensed software, but the companies involved in Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects should tread carefully. While it’s great to be associated with the the Apache brand, the ASF can seem like “Conan the Barbarian” to project leads who don’t abide by its rules. That’s one lesson to take from the fracas between the ASF and DataStax, the principal developer of the popular Cassandra database.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Public Services/Government

    • US Government Opens Access to Federal Source Code with Code.gov

      So far, the government is emphasizing the release of at least 20 percent of its custom code as open source. That may not be enough from the perspective of an open source community, but Pittenger argues that “20 percent is a good start. We need to balance the benefits from open sourcing code with the risks associated with vulnerabilities. Keep in mind that outsourced code may have been written by the lowest-cost bidder. For example, we don’t know if any secure development practices were followed, such as threat modeling, security design reviews, or static analysis. We also don’t know whether the contractors building the software closely tracked the open source they used in the code for known vulnerabilities. My advice would be to risk-rank the applications covered by these policies, and start by open sourcing the least critical. I would argue strongly against releasing code that manages sensitive taxpayer information or code for defense and intelligence agencies.”

      Read more

    • Brazil to Replace Open Source Software with Microsoft Products [Ed: After the banksters overthrew Brazil’s government and installed Temer et al Microsoft continues its long assault on the country’s digital sovereignty [1, 2, 3, 4]]

      “The Brazilian government is reportedly pondering an en masse transition from open source software to Microsoft products, including here Windows 10 and the Office productivity suite.”

    • Brazilian government plans largest Microsoft procurement to date
    • Brazil Replacing Open Source Software With Microsoft’s Windows 10 And Office

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Programming/Development

    • After a decade, open source Java is still controversial

      Ten years later, the open-sourcing of Java remains a point of contention, with many in the community extolling the importance of an open Java, while others remain critical of its handling, including the belief that Sun Microsystems didn’t go far enough.

      Sun Microsystems officially open-sourced Java on Nov. 13, 2006—a move long pined for by the industry at large. Java’s code had already been accessible prior to that date—a strategy that helped boost the platform from its earliest days, notes Java founder James Gosling.

    • Programming: Windows and Linux Lose Developers to Mac OS

      Both GNU/Linux and Windows have been slowly losing ground among developers. The Linux desktop hasn’t changed much in years and remains a clunky alternative. Windows 10 has made progress, but increasingly developers are choosing to use Macs. The number of developers using a Windows platform for development is expected to drop below 50 percent over the next year.

    • GitHub Enterprise 2.8 adds new workflow options

      The big changes rolled out for GitHub Enterprise 2.8 may seem familiar, but don’t say GitHub is running out of ideas. Instead, the company is adding tools to GitHub Enterprise that enterprises may already know, rather than expand functionality exclusive to GitHub.

      Some new pieces, like the Reviews or Projects functions, will likely draw users because of their tight integration with the product or because they provide the equivalent of a third-party option. But others, like Jupyter support, appeal because they open up GitHub Enterprise to use cases that didn’t exist before or would have been difficult to implement.

    • Tumblr Is The Latest Company Boasting About PHP7 Performance

      We’ve talked a lot on Phoronix about PHP 7 due to the mighty impressive performance improvements found in this major update that was released at the end of last year. Many companies have blogged about their positive performance experiences in upgrading to PHP7, many of which we’ve shared on Phoronix, and Tumblr is now the latest company to boast about their migration from PHP5 to PHP7.

Leftovers

  • The Tech Industry Waits to See Trump’s Tech Policies

    U.S. President-elect Donald Trump isn’t even in office yet, but technology industry associations are already sounding off about what his presidency will mean for tech. Trump laid out a detailed tech policy agenda in advance of the Nov. 8 election, but there are still a lot of questions swirling about his stance toward key tech sectors such as telecom, and there are questions about whether his administration will be as much of a champion for open source technologies as Obama’s was.

    Here are some soundbytes from the discussion.

    BSA | The Software Alliance, which represents companies such as IBM and Microsoft, along with tech advocacy groups such as the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and TechFreedom, have had mostly optimistic things to say, and their leaders are hoping to help mold Trump’s tech policies.

    “There will be a lot of issues the Trump administration will have to confront and deal with, and we hope to play a constructive role in helping them think through those issues,” Robert Atkinson, ITIF’s founder and president, told Bloomberg BNA.

  • Security

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Morning Spin: WikiLeaks emails show Emanuel involvement in Bush-Obama meeting

      Much of the political universe was centered on President-elect Donald Trump’s initial visit and meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday.

      Eight years ago, the same type of meeting unfolded between then-President-elect Barack Obama and then-President George W. Bush. Heavily involved was Rahm Emanuel, who had been picked to serve as Obama’s White House chief of staff, though it had not yet been announced publicly.

      Hacked emails from John Podesta, who co-chaired Obama’s transition team and served as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, show Emanuel’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering on the Obama-Bush meeting. In one of the emails, posted in recent weeks by WikiLeaks, Emanuel complains about a draft of the press statement Obama’s transition team was prepared to release about the meeting.

      “I don’t see how this carries us very far,” Emanuel wrote about the brief statement acknowledging the meeting took place and little more. “It is so devoid of detail and will lead to a lot of freelancing by the press. That’s the danger.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Norway caught in pipeline uproar
    • Kids Win the Right to Sue the US Government Over Climate Change

      A bright speck of climate news was quickly overshadowed by the presidential election this week—America’s children have officially won the right to sue their government over global warming.

      Yesterday, a lawsuit filed by 21 youth plaintiffs was ruled valid by US District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene, Oregon. A group of citizens, whose ages range from nine to 20, charged President Obama, the fossil fuel industry, and other federal agencies with violating their constitutional rights by declining to take action against climate change.

    • For 12 years, plants bought us extra time on climate change

      Plants are our best friends in the fight against climate change, and a new study shows just how important they are. From 2002 to 2014, plants sucked up so much carbon dioxide that they slowed the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, even as human-made CO2 emissions were increasing.

      The findings, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, show how important ecosystems are in regulating the carbon cycle, and also how little we know about the processes contributing to climate change. This information can help scientists and policymakers come up with solutions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Finance

    • Sterling records best fortnight in 8 years after Trump boost

      Sterling hit a five-week high against the dollar on Friday and recorded its best fortnight on a trade-weighted basis in almost eight years, with investors’ focus having turned away from Brexit and towards political risks elsewhere.

      Since Donald Trump’s shock victory in the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, the pound has been the best performer of any major currency, outshining even the dollar, which itself is on track to record its best week in a year against a basket of currencies.

      Sterling rose above $1.26 for the first time since Oct. 6, the day before it plunged as much as 10 percent in a matter of minutes in a “flash crash”, and advanced as high as $1.2673 in European trade. By 1704 GMT it was around $1.2607, up 0.4 percent on the day.

    • Pound sterling value rise: How has it gone from the worst to best performing major currency?

      Traders might be looking at the prospect of destabilising victories for populists in European elections and are upgrading their view of the relative prospects for sterling in that light

    • European Parliament planning to vote in the dark on CETA – Carthy

      Sinn Féin MEP for the Midlands North West, Matt Carthy has harshly criticised the European Commission’s insistence to push ahead with the timeline of their trade deal with Canada, CETA, despite crucial elements of the agreement being reserved for so-called ‘retrofitting’.

      Matt Carthy said:

      “When Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor went to Brussels to sign CETA last month, many assumed that the case was closed. This week, however the European Commission confirmed that crucial elements of the agreement have yet to be agreed in the controversial Chapter on Investment Protection.

    • TPP seen as doomed after Trump victory

      The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal – that would have created the world’s largest free-trade zone – is all but dead, now that the Obama administration has given up hope of a last-ditch effort to ratify it amid a rising tide of protectionism.

      A former senior adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is calling on Canada to shift focus and try to negotiate free-trade deals with Japan and other Asian countries.

    • Obama Administration Gives Up on Pacific Trade Deal

      A sweeping Pacific trade pact meant to bind the U.S.and Asia effectively died Friday, as Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress told the White House they won’t advance it in the election’s aftermath, and Obama administration officials acknowledged it has no way forward now.

      The failure to pass the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership—by far the biggest trade agreement in more than a decade—is a bitter defeat for President Barack Obama, whose belated but fervent support for freer trade divided his party and complicated the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

    • Recoverability of third party funding costs in arbitration

      A significant appeal decision has recently emerged dealing with the recoverability between the parties of third party funding (“TPF”) costs in arbitral proceedings – Essar Oilfield Services Limited v Norscot Rig Management Pvt Limited.

      Essar concerns a long-running ICC arbitration where the successful party, Norscot, further succeeded in an application to recover its costs of litigation funding.
      The case is being hailed as a landmark judgment in some quarters and is expected to encourage more parties to engage in arbitration, especially if they have TPF. The equal and opposite is also true.

    • Middle and low earners pay bulk of taxes in Finland

      Nearly a third of all Finnish income taxes were paid by those earning between 35,000 and 54,999 euros last year. That group pays some 29 percent of all income taxes collected in Finland.

    • Can Trump make ‘trickle-down’ economics work?

      The theory: Lowering taxes for businesses and wealthy individuals leaves more cash in their pockets, spurring more investment and hiring, and the faster growth generates enough new tax income to pay for the cuts. The top tax rate under Reagan was slashed to 28% from 70%, and business deductions became more generous. About 16 million jobs were created during his two terms, and the economy grew as much as 7.3% in 1984.

      Trump proposes chopping the top individual marginal rate to 33% from 40% — as well as more modest cuts for those with low and moderate incomes — and the corporate rate to 15% from 35%. The many small-business owners taxed at the individual rate also would pay 15%.

    • No, Trump Didn’t Kill the TPP — Progressives Did

      If you read the headlines, Donald Trump’s election has killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The headlines have it wrong.

      Donald Trump didn’t kill the TPP. Assuming we see the fight through to the bitter end, it’s the cross-border, cross-sector, progressive “movement of movements” that will have defeated the TPP.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Bernie Sanders would have easily beaten Donald Trump according to new pre-election poll

      Bernie Sanders would have crushed Donald Trump according to new pre-election poll.

      In the wake of the shocking election results, many have wondered what would have happened were the Democratic socialist chosen as the nominee.

      The poll, reported by the Huffington Post, found that the Vermont senator would have likely earned 56 per cent of the vote, while Mr Trump would have only received 44 per cent.

    • Historian who predicted Trump’s win says he’ll be impeached

      A political historian and professor who predicted that Donald Trump would win the presidency has a new bet: Trump will be impeached.

      “I’m going to make another prediction,” Allan Lichtman told The Washington Post Friday. “This one is not based on a system; it’s just my gut. They don’t want Trump as president, because they can’t control him. He’s unpredictable. They’d love to have Pence — an absolutely down-the-line, conservative, controllable Republican. And I’m quite certain Trump will give someone grounds for impeachment, either by doing something that endangers national security or because it helps his pocketbook.”

      Lichtman isn’t the first to predict that Trump could be impeached. University of Utah Law Professor Christopher Lewis Peterson wrote a 23-page article explaining the legal reasons Congress should impeach Trump. And on Friday, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore told MSNBC reporters he predicts Trump will either be impeached or resign before his term is up.

    • “Hitler’s only kidding about the antisemitism” New York Times, 1922

      “Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”

      “You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them.”

    • My Nightmare Trump Prediction Came True—Now What?

      A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece for Vanity Fair outlining what seemed at the time like an improbably absurd argument—how Donald Trump, then a lunatic-fringe candidate with no political credibility, could somehow win the White House. His path to victory, I suggested, ran through traditionally Democratic strongholds such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, where I detected a unique hunger for an outsider. For months, I made a similar argument to my so-called “elite” friends who work in politics, the media, and the financial-services industry. And for months, they all laughed me off. Then, on Tuesday evening, Trump rode a path through the Rust Belt all the way to the White House.

      In retrospect, this elite ignorance was one of the factors powering Trump’s success. Ever since May, the “smartest” people in America, from both parties, seemed to believe that a Trump victory was more or less unthinkable. In fact, Republicans believed this so steadfastly that, as recently as last month, they were protesting for Trump to withdraw from the ticket. Did this result in a certain complacency among the Hillary Clinton campaign and her supporters (perhaps roused belatedly by James Comey’s provocation)? It’s hard to say for sure, but it likely played a role in depressing voter turnout.

    • Electoral college should change its mind and make Hillary Clinton president, say millions of signatories to petition

      There’s only one group of people who can – very theoretically – stop the result of the Presidential election. And millions of people are calling on them to do so.

      A petition arguing that the result of the election should be overturned has been signed by nearly 2.5 million people, all of whom are asking that Hillary Clinton becomes president.

      Those behind the petition are arguing that since Ms Clinton is easily winning the popular vote – by as many as millions of ballots – she should be elected president. It also argues that Donald Trump is not fit to be the president and so shouldn’t be allowed to take his position.

    • Donald Trump could still theoretically not be president because of ‘faithless electors’ and the electoral college

      It’s still theoretically possible for Donald Trump not to become president. But the near-impossibility all depends on the electoral college and the strange US system.

      Donald Trump might have won the election by getting more of the votes in the electoral college than Hillary Clinton did. But strictly and legally, it’s not the election that just happened that matters: it’s the one where the members of the electoral college go and represent their voters and pick their candidate.

      That’s due to happen on 12 December, at meetings in each state where all Republican or Democrat representatives – depending on how each state voted – will cast their vote. And it will almost certainly go one way, with most of the electors casting their ballots for Donald Trump and making him President.

    • Exclusive: Riding Trump wave, Breitbart News plans U.S., European expansion

      The right-wing Breitbart News Network is expanding its U.S. operations and launching sites in Germany and France, its U.S. editor-in-chief told Reuters, as it seeks to monetize the anger and anti-immigrant sentiment unleashed by Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign.

      The planned expansion is one sign of how the right-wing media landscape is shifting in the wake of Trump’s campaign to provide a platform for the more radical views that helped fuel the Republican candidate’s shock election victory on Tuesday.

    • Why we need a new Democratic Party

      As a first step, I believe it necessary for the members and leadership of the Democratic National Committee to step down and be replaced by people who are determined to create a party that represents America – including all those who feel powerless and disenfranchised, and who have been left out of our politics and left behind in our economy.

      The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people’s party – a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican party, which is about to take over all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.

      What happened in America Tuesday should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

    • Spoiled Americans now want to flee what they created

      The reactions of many Americans to the Trump victory is a symptom of their political immaturity.

    • Trump’s victory over Clinton was sealed 40 years ago

      In the afterglow of Donald Trump’s historic presidential victory, the Democratic firing squad is already out, looking for someone to blame.

      It’s time to look in the mirror.

      Despite being a historically weak candidate, Hillary Clinton’s demise wasn’t just about Hillary Clinton.

      Clinton was the final lifeline to a neoliberal bubble built by the Clintons and many others—that finally popped on November 8th, 2016.

    • The U.S. presidential election of 1876: votes, cannabis and intellectual property

      Let’s step back from the supercharged atmosphere of this week’s electoral events and focus on a curious side-show. First, perhaps for the sixth
      time in U.S. electoral history, the winner of the electoral vote did not win the popular vote. Second, several American states were simultaneously holding various ballot initiatives on the legalization of cannabis. This Kat began to wonder: has there ever been a juxtapose between the two in connection with any previous presidential election? Mirabile dictu—the answer is “yes”, the election of 1876. And in this lies a unique tale about Samuel J. Tilden, Tilden’s Extract, and the world of intellectual property during that period.

    • Trump election: Juncker warns president may upset US ties with Europe

      Donald Trump’s election risks upsetting EU ties with the US “fundamentally and structurally”, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has warned.

      “We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works,” Mr Juncker told students in Luxembourg.

      The Commission chief predicted that two years would be wasted while Mr Trump “tours a world he doesn’t know”.

      His remarks contrasted with other EU leaders’ more muted reaction to the Tuesday’s shock election result.

    • Donald Trump blocks press access, in defiance of long standing practices

      Donald Trump is keeping Americans in the dark about his earliest conversations and decisions as president-elect, bucking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on its new leader.

      Mr Trump on Thursday refused to allow journalists to travel with him to Washington for his historic first meetings with President Barack Obama and congressional leaders. The Republican’s top advisers rebuffed news organisations’ requests for a small “pool” of journalists to trail him as he attended the meetings.

    • Trump fills the swamp with more lobbyists

      In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. by, among other things, introducing tough new restrictions on lobbying.

      “I am proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again,” Trump said during the October 17 appearance in Green Bay, Wisconsin where he first used the “drain the swamp” line.

    • The bad news the Government released during the week of the US election

      As the bitter and often fraught presidential battle across the Atlantic – and to the surprise of many, the election of Donald Trump, a billionaire businessman with little experience of the political machinery of Washington – came to a conclusion this week, many of the front pages in the UK and the commentary focused on the drama unfolding in the States.

      But here The Independent looks at some of the news and reports released by the UK Government this week that appear to have slipped under the radar.

      According to Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, ministers have slipped out a deluge of embarrassing announcements because Parliament is in recess. He added: “The Tories might think they can take things for granted while the world looks away, aghast at the election of Donald Trump but my party will be keeping a total focus on them and the damaging policies they are pushing through”.

    • Donald Trump presidency: Memo from an old friend of the US
    • Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook fake news didn’t sway election

      Mark Zuckerberg addressed growing criticism of Facebook’s ascendant power to sway public opinion, saying the “small amount” of fake news that spread on the social network during the election did not influence the outcome.

      “To think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said Thursday evening during the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

      Zuckerberg said people underestimated support for president-elect Donald Trump. “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.”

      His remarks came as Trump’s presidential win prompted Silicon Valley soul searching, with some wondering whether the tools created here had run amok.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • The Spanish Government The Latest To Try To Ban Memes

      It would be sort of fun to watch the more authoritarian governments of the world attempt to combat internet memes with censorship if it weren’t both so damaging to the free speech ideals I hold so dear and if recent, ahem, events weren’t making these stories hit a little closer to home than they would have but a few months ago. Countries like Russia and Indonesia have both taken steps to attempt to make illegal the time-honored tradition of putting up a famous person’s picture and then typing words across it. Despite both governments’ insisting that these legislative attempts are all to do with protecting people’s honor and/or quelling false information about the subjects of these memes, the truth is that the aims behind them are more to do with clamping down on dissident speech and protecting those in power from criticism. That, indeed, is why these laws tend to be worded so vaguely. Vague enough, in fact, that it’s quite clear that they can be used to criminalize pretty much any speech that the ruling government doesn’t like.

    • Angola: Blocking rap concert is state censorship

      Ahead of the planned livestream of a concert this evening in Luanda by Luaty Beirão – also known as Ikonoklasta – and MCK, two well-known rappers and critics of the Angolan government, Tjiurimo Hengari, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director for Southern Africa said:

      “Angolan authorities must ensure that the rappers’ concert takes place without any further interference by the police, who blocked it over the weekend.”

      “The unexplained police intervention has potentially far-reaching consequences for freedom of assembly and artistic expression in the country, and smacks of state censorship of Luaty Beirão and MCK for their criticism of Angola’s government.”

    • Censorship: High School Makes 18-Year-Old Girl Remove ‘Hillary for Prison’ T-Shirt

      Boca Raton High School in Palm Beach County, Florida, trampled an 18-year-old girl’s free speech rights: the school forced her to change out of a T-shirt that bore the political message “Hillary for Prison.”

      The provocative T-shirt drew the ire of student Maxine Yeakle’s classmates, who said they considered all supporters of Donald Trump to be racist, according to The Sun Sentinel. Their criticisms became disruptive, and as a result, Yeakle was sent to the principal’s office. The disrupters were not punished: only the girl whose political advocacy inspired the others to misbehave was punished.

    • Hey UN: leave the media censorship to North Korea

      The United Nations isn’t all that into me.

      While hundreds of journalists have been planning their arrival in Morocco for months to attend its ​fancy-pants ​climate change conference this week, I’ve only just recently been given “permission” to attend because the global organization doesn’t like what I might have to say. It worries I’m advocate, not a journalist, and that maybe my reporting won’t be “helpful” in its fight.

    • The Daily Fix: Censorship should not become the new normal

      On Monday, Information and Broadcasting Minister Venkaiah Naidu decided to put on hold the order requiring NDTV India to go off air for a day on November 9 as a penalty for allegedly revealing strategically sensitive information during its broadcast about the militant attack on the Pathankot airbase in January.

      The decision was taken after the NDTV management asked for the order to be reviewed, Naidu said. He added somewhat belligerently that the decision to take the channel off air for a day was just and proper and dismissed criticism that the government was muzzling those who were critical of it.

    • China’s internet censorship is throttling software development

      If you’ve ever been to mainland China, chances are you’re familiar with the Great Firewall, the country’s all-encompassing internet censorship apparatus. You know the despair of not being able to open Facebook, the pain of going mute on Twitter. But with a good VPN, you can magic many of these inconveniences away – at least temporarily.

      For software developers based in China, however, it’s not that simple. You’re not just censored from certain websites. Basic building blocks that you use for product development are suddenly beyond your reach.

    • China Responds to U.S. Election With Heavy Censorship, Light Schadenfreude

      As news of Donald Trump’s shocking presidential win was reverberating around the world Wednesday, media coverage in China was oddly scant — and not by accident.

      China’s censors had issued advance orders to media outlets to restrict coverage of the U.S. democratic contest. All websites, news outlets and TV networks were told not to provide any live coverage or broadcasts of the election and to avoid “excessive” reporting of the story, a source who was briefed on the official instructions told the South China Morning Post.

      In response, coverage of Trump’s upset was carried only as a secondary story across the Chinese media landscape, with most outlets highlighting a meeting between Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Vladimir Putin instead.

    • UBC Free Speech Club don red “MAGA” hats to challenge censorship on campus

      Yesterday also marked a coming out party for the Free Speech Club at the University of British Columbia. To mark the occasion, members of the club set up a table outside the student commons and proudly wore the now infamous red hats reading Make America Great Again and Make Canada Great Again.

    • Debate on digital age censorship

      “Censorship has been a topic of debate since it was introduced in 1916 – and never more so than it is now. Never before has the public had so much access to audiovisual material via so many channels,” says panel facilitator Diane Pivac of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision.

      “We’ve invited a panel that brings a whole range of viewpoints to the discussion. We’re asking how do new technologies change and challenge censorship? And how equipped are our regulators to meet these challenges?” says Diane.

      “The Government is moving ahead with classification of online entertainment content, but is censorship still relevant?

      “And how do we balance the public’s right to freedom of expression against concern over young people’s ease of access to potentially harmful material?”

      [...]

      The panel debate is part of CENSORED – 100 Years of Film Censorship in NZ – a two-week programme featuring films that were once banned by New Zealand censors, documentaries, censors’ offcuts and discussion.

    • Could The U.S. Soon Be Making Movies To ‘Serve Socialism’ In China?

      China’s new film law may have an impact on the American movie business, which is increasingly influenced by China.

      The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, passed new laws to govern the world’s second largest film market Monday, reports Xinhua News Agency.

    • Azerbaijan reveals conditions for possible military censorship on media

      Azerbaijan can apply military censorship on media upon the declaration of martial law in the country.

      This is according to Article 1.0.3 of the revised Law “On martial law”, the parliament told APA on Thursday.

      Military censorship includes pre-coordination of mass media information by military and state authorities, control on correspondences for the purpose of preventing illegal dissemination of state secrets, on TV and radio broadcast as well as phone and radio talks.

    • Angry Saudi intellectuals brand closure of cafe and cultural space as ‘censorship’

      Students and book lovers in Riyadh have expressed their dismay that a popular artistic spot in the city has been shut down and all its books removed pending an investigation by the Saudi authorities.

      Rawi Cafe located on the campus of South Imam University posted pictures of its previously dark, wooden, library-like interior stripped of all its books to social media last week, alerting customers that the business had been shut down by the Ministry for Culture and Information.

      Rawi had previously been popular with students, researchers, and others in Riyadh’s intellectual community.

    • Top media bodies condemn NDTV India ban, term it arbitrary
    • Dear NDTV, Have You Learnt Your Lesson Now?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Users flock to encrypted email service after Trump win

      Donald Trump’s surprise win has been good news for end-to-end encrypted services. The Swiss company Protonmail announced today that weekly sign-ups had doubled after Donald Trump’s surprise win on Tuesday, although the company did not disclose raw numbers for the jump. “Regardless of which side of the political spectrum you are on, Trump’s control over the NSA is now an indisputable fact, and we think it is worth taking a closer look at what this means,” CEO Andy Yen wrote in an accompanying post.

    • Peter Thiel is joining Donald Trump’s transition team

      In addition to Thiel, Vice President-elect Mike Pence will act as chairman for the transition team, according to the statement. Three of Trump’s children — Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump — will serve alongside Thiel on the committee. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi also made the list, as well as RNC Chairman Reince Priebus.

    • Peter Thiel Said to Join Trump’s Presidential Transition Team

      Thiel, who was one of the few tech industry executives who supported the Republican candidate, will play a role in vetting presidential appointments and selecting which of Trump’s campaign promises will become the policies of America’s 45th president, according to people familiar with the discussions. Thiel’s title and precise role are still being determined, the people said. The Huffington Post earlier reported that Thiel would lead the transition team.

      Speaking for Trump as a delegate at the Republican National Convention this summer and again a week before the election, Thiel echoed what had become a popular refrain among Trump’s electorate: government is broken and outsiders are the only ones who can fix it.

    • Donald Trump Will Have His Eye on You

      Edward Snowden warned us about the abuses of our national security state. Now look who’s in charge of it.

    • Trump and mass surveillance: You were warned

      The danger of all of this one day falling into the »wrong« hands ought to have been obvious from the very beginning.

      It’s naive to claim that Big Brotherism is a problem in just some cases, used by some political forces, with some specific justifications. Mass surveillance is a problem by its very nature and to its core – regardless who is in power. Always.

    • Feds Can Unlock Most Devices They Need To Get Into, FBI Admits

      The FBI is able to unlock or access data on most of the phones and computers it encounters during its investigations, as well as those of local and state cops, according to the bureau’s General Counsel Jim Baker.

      So far in the fiscal year 2016 (from Oct. 1, 2015 until Sept. 30, 2016), the FBI has encountered passwords or passcodes—that is locked phones or laptops—in 2,095 out of 6,814 (31 percent) mobile devices analyzed by its forensic labs, Baker said according to attendants at a public meeting on encryption and the challenges it poses to law enforcement, celebrated in Washington D.C. on Friday.

      And even for those 2,095 devices that were locked, the fed’s investigators were able to break in in 1,210 cases, and couldn’t unlock around 880 devices, Baker reportedly said. In other words, in the vast majority of cases (87%), the FBI was able to access the data it needed.

    • Facebook Bug Tells Users They Are Dead

      It’s a fitting end to a strange week. When many Facebook users logged on to their accounts on Friday afternoon, they discovered the social network had declared them to be deceased.

      The lethal online epidemic is causing Facebook FB to display a small memorial message above users’ regular homepage profile. In the case of my editor, Rachel King, Fortune tech writers who visited her page discovered a “Remembering Rachel King” message, and a wish to remember to remember and celebrate her life.

    • Facebook Is Utterly Dominating America’s Social Media Use

      Social media is playing an increasingly influential role in our lives. Even if given the benefit of the doubt—believing that they are “tech” companies and not “media” companies—people are using Facebook and Twitter to gather news and information about world events, not just to find and follow friends.

    • The RCMP Used Police Databases and Social Media to Track Aboriginal Protestors

      The Royal Canadian Mounted Police used law enforcement databases and social media to identify indigenous protesters and then made their identities known to front-line officers, new documents show.

      “The year 2013 saw an increase across Canada in Aboriginal protests,” an RCMP document from 2015, obtained through an information request by Carleton University professor Jeffrey Monaghan and researcher Andy Crosby, states.

      In March of 2014, according to the document, the RCMP put a call out to its divisions across Canada and local police departments to hand over any information in their databases that might help the RCMP identify and track aboriginal protesters.

      This initiative was known as Project SITKA, and with this data from police and social media, the RCMP identified 313 activists across the country who attended protests “opposing natural resource development, particularly pipeline and shale gas expansion.” Those who attended anti-capitalist protests, and protests regarding missing and murdered indigenous women, were also targeted.

    • People in tech are freaking out about Donald Trump being given control of the NSA

      Last month, Wired published a story with the headline “Imagine if Donald Trump controlled the NSA.” Now there’s no need to imagine.

      Trump overcame all odds on Wednesday when he became the 45th president-elect of the United States. As a result, he’s about to gain control of the US intelligence agencies, including the NSA (National Security Agency).

      Tech workers and security campaigners have been quick to express concerns about handing control of the NSA to Trump.

    • MalwareMustDie closes blog in NSA/CIA spy protest

      MalwareMustDie, the white-hat security research group, has closed its blog in protest of alleged American espionage against friendly countries.

      MMD believes that US spy agencies have been installing backdoors on the servers of universities and other public institutions outside the United States.

      Shadow Brokers, which famously hacked the National Security Agency in the US and released supposed NSA hacking tools for anyone to use, recently published files containing the IP addresses of 49 countries they claim have been hacked by the NSA.

      According to the website SecurityAffairs.co, these hack attacks have been linked back to Equation Group, an NSA espionage group.

    • Trump’s election stokes fears of future NSA surveillance abuses

      They say you reap what you sow. The US is just weeks away from handing over massive surveillance powers to a man who has expressed enthusiasm for the idea of spying on those he sees as adversaries.

      It’s common knowledge that the US collects massive amounts of data on phone and internet communications involving both its own citizens and people abroad. The National Security Agency (NSA) can read text messages, track social media activity and hack into your computer’s webcam. Since Edward Snowden’s revelations on spying in 2013, US president Barack Obama has been criticised by privacy activists for not doing enough to curb such programmes.

      Now, his failure to act threatens to turn into a cautionary tale with a dark moral: don’t build a surveillance state, because you don’t know who will end up in charge of it.

      During his campaign, president-elect Donald Trump railed against Apple when the tech giant resisted unlocking the iPhone of one of the perpetrators of the mass shooting in San Bernadino, California. In July, he invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton and publish her deleted emails.

      He has also spoken in favour of allowing the surveillance of mosques in the US, as New York City did after the 9/11 attacks, and of asking Muslims to register in a federal database and authorising the NSA to collect metadata. “I tend to err on the side of security,” he said last year.

      When Trump takes office in January, how will he decide to wield the government’s surveillance powers? He could try to roll back the reforms that Obama has put in place, such as limitations on when the agency can collect people’s data and how it can be stored. He can decide which countries the US spies on. He might choose to push much harder against companies that decline to build government “back doors” to their technology.

      Trump has also promised to exact revenge on personal enemies, such as the women who accused him of sexual assault. Back when details of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping came to light, analysts were caught snooping on their partners and love interests. Could Trump take similar advantages?

    • Home Monitoring Will Soon Monitor You

      I worry. About my family. My house. My dumb possessions, and my treasured ones. Doesn’t everyone? “Happiness,” Don Draper opines in Mad Men’s pilot, “is the freedom from fear.” Companies sell people solutions to those fears—even if they are contrived ones. Listerine, invented to cure a made-up condition called halitosis. Nike, whose kicks are used for sloth more than athleticism. Apple, whose modernist, glass-and-aluminum shields hide compulsion.

    • Privacy experts fear Donald Trump running global surveillance network

      Privacy activists, human rights campaigners and former US security officials have expressed fears over the prospect of Donald Trump controlling the vast global US and UK surveillance network.

      They criticised Barack Obama’s administration for being too complacent after the 2013 revelations by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, and making only modest concessions to privacy concerns rather than carrying out major legislative changes.

      The concern comes after Snowden dismissed fears for his safety if Trump, who called him “a spy who has caused great damage in the US”, was to strike a deal with Vladimir Putin to have him extradited.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Donald Trump May Select an Architect of Bush’s Torture Program to Run CIA

      Donald Trump may select Jose Rodriguez, one of the primary architects of the George W. Bush torture program, to run the Central Intelligence Agency, according to a law firm with close ties to Trump.

      Rodriguez, the former director of the National Clandestine Service, helped developed the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of “waterboarding,” the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees.

    • Glenn Greenwald: Trump will have vast powers. He can thank Democrats for them.

      Liberals are understandably panicked about what Donald Trump can carry out. “We have a president-elect with authoritarian tendencies assuming a presidency that has never been more powerful ,” Franklin Foer wrote this past week in Slate. Trump will command not only a massive nuclear arsenal and the most robust military in history, but also the ability to wage numerous wars in secret and without congressional authorization; a ubiquitous system of electronic surveillance that can reach most forms of human communication and activity; and countless methods for shielding himself from judicial accountability, congressional oversight and the rule of law — exactly what the Constitution was created to prevent. Trump assumes the presidency “at the peak of its imperial powers,” as Foer put it.

      Sen. Barack Obama certainly saw it that way when he first ran for president in 2008. Limiting executive-power abuses and protecting civil liberties were central themes of his campaign. The former law professor repeatedly railed against the Bush-Cheney template of vesting the president with unchecked authorities in the name of fighting terrorism or achieving other policy objectives. “This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide,” he said in 2007. Listing an array of controversial Bush-Cheney policies, from warrantless domestic surveillance to due-process-free investigations and imprisonment, he vowed: “We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.”

    • The Democratic Party deserves so much of the blame for electing Donald Trump

      Election Day 2016 was a miserable failure for the Democratic Party. When all the votes are counted, it appears that Donald Trump will have won 30 states and at least 300 Electoral College votes. After months of tough talk, Democrats not only lost the presidency, but lost the Senate and continued to lose the House. It was a thorough drubbing. Calling it anything other than that is a damn lie.

      But I must linger there for a while. The Democratic Party has mastered lying to itself and its core constituencies. It claims a progressive identity, but is as moderate and lukewarm as it has ever been on so many issues that matter to everyday people. It claims to be tough on Wall Street, financial corruption and white collar crime, but is awash in donations from lobbyists and executives in the industry. Democrats claim to be the party of working people, but so often seem to be deeply out of touch with their problems and needs.

    • The idea that America ‘doesn’t talk about’ racism is absurd

      As we confront our nation’s election of a man who dwells blithely in stereotype and caricature, many of us are wondering what we are to do as responsible citizens faced with what many of us regard as a political and moral catastrophe. One thing someone opposed to Donald Trump’s unenlightened, “mean boy” perspective on women, nonwhites, the disabled, Muslims, and others might consider doing is to avoid imitating him.

      It may seem perhaps the least likely thing an anti-Trumpian would do, but there’s a word we might consider tempering our usage of in the coming years, given that the way we use it opens us to certain charges involving kettles and the color black. I refer to the word “racist.”

      The Martian anthropologist would recognize no difference between the way those accused of being witches were treated in 17th-century Salem, Mass., and the way many innocent people are being accused of “racism” today. Those appalled by the way people were tarred with the Communist label in the 1940s and 1950s must recognize that America has blundered into the same censorious mob mentality in assailing as “racists,” just recently, people such as Ellen DeGeneres — for Photoshopping herself riding on Jamaican gold medal sprinter Usain Bolt’s back in celebration of his win — and Hillary Clinton — for referring to the black men terrorizing poor black neighborhoods as “superpredators” in describing plans for protecting people in those neighborhoods from such crime.

    • ‘You voted Trump!’: Elderly motorist beaten in street by gang of youths as girl screams abuse

      This shocking footage shows an elderly motorist being beaten in the street by youths as a girl can be heard screaming “you voted Trump!”

      The man is repeatedly punched and kicked in the face by the youngsters in what has been described online as an alleged race attack.

      The incident took place in the middle of the day in Chicago following Donald Trump’s shock victory in the US presidential election.

      The driver struggles to his feet at one point as fists rain down on him and shouts at one of the gang to get out of his car.

    • Woman fabricated story of being attacked and robbed of hijab at Louisiana college by man wearing Donald Trump hat

      A Louisana college student admitted she made up reports of being attacked by two men, one she said was wearing a Donald Trump hat.

      The Lafayette Police department say they are no longer investigating her claims. The University of Louisiana would not disclose whether they were taking disciplinary action against the student, citing federal law prohibition.

      Authorities said the University of Louisiana student reported the alleged robbery Wednesday morning, and claimed one of the apparent attackers wore a white Donald Trump cap, according to The Advertiser.

      Her claim drew on fears of anti-Muslim backlash in the wake of Mr Trump’s election to the US presidency. His campaign stoked fears of Muslim immigration to the US that appealed to much of his predominantly white, nationalistic supporters. Multiple reports of hate crimes against Muslims, Latinos, black people, and the LGBTQ community have already surfaced.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Will Offer a Lower-Quality Video Option But Without a Discount

      After T-Mobile and Sprint introduced lower-cost wireless plans in return for customers accepting lower quality video streaming, AT&T is following suit. Sort of.

      The second-largest wireless carrier said it would introduce a feature starting next year called “Stream Saver” to let customers voluntarily downgrade streaming video from any service—such as YouTube and Netflix—to DVD quality. But AT&T will not lower prices or give a discount to customers activating the lower-quality stream, which would use much less data than watching a typical high-definition video stream. The data used will also still count against a customer’s monthly data allowance.

      AT&T emphasized that the feature, which will be turned on by default, was intended to help customers use less data, essentially stretching their monthly allowance to go further. Customers can opt turn off the feature at any time.

    • Trump and net neutrality: How Republicans can make the rules go away

      The net neutrality rules implemented during Barack Obama’s presidency don’t seem likely to survive Donald Trump’s administration.

      Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler crafted the rules to survive lawsuits filed by Internet service providers, and the strategy worked when a federal appeals court upheld the rules in June of this year. But that doesn’t mean a new presidential administration can’t overturn them.

      The FCC rules say ISPs may not block or throttle lawful Internet traffic or speed up Web services in exchange for payments from online service providers. A similar set of net neutrality rules was previously struck down in court, leading to Wheeler’s decision to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The commission’s Title II authority was enough to put the rules on solid legal ground.

    • AT&T to limit video quality by default—even on unlimited data plans

      AT&T today said it will begin limiting the quality of mobile video for cellular data customers in early 2017. A new feature called “Stream Saver” will throttle video to DVD resolution of about 480p. Customers will be able to opt out of Stream Saver, but it will be enabled by default—even for customers with unlimited data, AT&T told Ars.

      AT&T will notify customers once Stream Saver has been activated and provide instructions for turning it off and back on, the company’s announcement said. Customers on limited data plans may appreciate the feature, as it could help them stay under their data caps. But AT&T’s decision to enable video throttling by default on unlimited plans that were sold without any mention of such limits has little benefit for customers. It could have some benefit only because AT&T reserves the right to throttle unlimited data plans when customers exceed 22GB a month and connect to a congested cell tower. Using less data for video will help keep “unlimited” customers under 22GB.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate Bay Risks “Repeat Offender” Ban From Google

        The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites risk a “repeat offender” ban from Google, but not over copyright infringements. Google has updated its safe browsing service, used by modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, which will now block websites for a minimum of thirty days after being repeatedly marked as harmful.

      • University Bans BitTorrent to Stop Flood of Infringement Notices

        A university in Canada has taken sweeping action in an effort to stem the tide of piracy notices. The University of Calgary says that after banning BitTorrent usage on several networks, infringement notices immediately dropped by 90%. People wanting access to the protocol will now need to apply for an exemption.

      • EU Copyright Directive – privatised censorship and filtering of free speech

        The European Commission’s proposal on copyright attempts something very ambitious – two different measures that would restrict free speech, squeezed into a single article of a legislative proposal.

      • A joint dataset for the EU copyright consultation responses

        In March of 2016, the European Commission asked for your input on two specific issues of copyright reform: Freedom of panorama (the ability to freely share your photos of public places) and extra copyright for publishers.

11.11.16

Links 11/11/2016: Mutter 3.22.2, Slackware Live Edition 1.1.4

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • From Windows to Linux: yes, that is still a thing

    A request from a bank to look at a switch from Windows to Linux has led to UK-based IT specialist Patrick Fitzgerald and his colleagues at British firm i-Layer developing a detailed method for an institution to make the transition.

    Fitzgerald, who gave a talk about it at SUSECon 2016, has been in the IT business for a long time. He and his colleagues only came up with the detailed plan when he had to tackle the task set for him by the Allied Irish Bank.

    “The bank has 900 branches and 7500 teller workstations,” Fitzgerald said. “After the move, just two people are needed to manage the lot.” He added that the smallest branch had just two users, one teller and ran on bandwidth of 128k.

    The bank initially called him in for advice and help when it experienced a shortage of trained staff.

  • A Loopy Non-Interview With Linux Advocate Marcel Gagné

    This week, Roblimo again takes a virtual trip up to the Great White North, that would be Canada for the benefit of the NSA and those of you taking notes at home, and has way too much fun hanging out with Linux advocate Marcel Gagné.

  • Server

    • ​When to use NGINX instead of Apache

      They’re both popular open-source web servers but, according to NGINX CEO Gus Robertson, they have different use cases. And Microsoft? Its web server has dropped below 10 percent of all active websites for the first time in 20 years.

    • Enabling the Digital Revolution: SDN and Beyond

      SDN can create far greater manageability by enabling network managers and developers to access network resources at a programmatic level, treating network resources in much the way they treat other computing resources such as central processing units (CPUs) and memory. It can enable networks to become easier to scale up or down, shorten setup time, increase security, and reduce costs. And SDN can take advantage of programmable network hardware, enabling managers to change the behavior of network devices through software upgrades instead of expensive hardware replacements.

    • Re-Imagining the Container Stack to Optimize Space and Speed
    • Keynote: Blurring the Lines: The Continuum Between Containers and VMs

      Graham Whaley, Sr. Software Engineer at Intel, says there is a continuum of features and benefits across the container/VM spectrum, and you should be able to choose which point on that continuum best suits you.

    • Docker and machine learning top the tech trends for ‘17

      With 2017 fast approaching, technology trends that will keep gathering steam in the new year range from augmented and virtual reality to machine intelligence, Docker, and microservices, according to technology consulting firm ThoughtWorks.

    • AWS Gives Customers On-Premises Linux Option

      Amazon Web Services recently expanded its menu of cloud services to give customers the option of using the Amazon Linux AMI on premises. Customers can use the Amazon Container Image on premises for the purpose of developing and testing workloads, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr explained. The AMI provides a stable, secure and high-performance environment for applications running on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, he said. “It is built from the same source code and packages as the AMI and will give you a smooth path to container adoption.”

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 4.8.7

      I’m announcing the release of the 4.8.7 kernel.

      All users of the 4.8 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at:
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y
      and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

      http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

    • Linux 4.4.31
    • Linux Kernel 4.4.31 LTS Released with Multiple Updated Drivers, Various Fixes

      Immediately after informing the community about the release of Linux kernel 4.8.7, which is now the most advanced kernel you can get for a GNU/Linux distribution, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of Linux kernel 4.4.31 LTS.

    • Linux Kernel 4.8.7 Updates Intel and Radeon Drivers, Improves Wireless Support

      Today, November 10, 2016, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the seventh maintenance update to the Linux 4.8 kernel series, along with the Linux kernel 4.4.31 LTS long-term support version.

      Finally, the release cycle of Linux kernel 4.8 has settled in and it looks like more and more GNU/Linux distributions are adopting it, including the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 and Fedora 25, due for release next week. Rolling release users of Solus, Arch Linux, and openSUSE Tumbleweed are already enjoying the latest Linux kernel 4.8 updates, and soon they’ll receive a new one, Linux kernel 4.8.7, which comes ten days after Linux kernel 4.8.6.

    • The Code To Intel’s New Linux Wireless Daemon Is Now Public

      During this year’s systemd conference there was talk of A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant. At that time the code wasn’t yet public to this new open-source WiFi daemon developed by Intel, but since then the code has now opened up.

    • Hyperledger’s Next Act: A Blockchain Bridge to China

      Immutable, shared ledgers of transactions and goods could come to serve as a reminder that everything we grow, build, buy and sell comes from the same tiny planet.

      But this future is far from guaranteed, and the various blockchain developer groups competing to bring it to life have so far struggled to involve talent from all over the world in this global vision.

      Blockchain consortium Hyperledger, for example, was initially founded with support from companies in almost exclusively Western nations. Yet, the consortium has grown this year to include more than 20 members headquartered in China and 10 from Japan and South Korea, with a spattering of members from other nations represented as well.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • Many Xfce Package Updates Bring Stable GTK3 Support, Notifyd Gets Do-Not-Disturb

      While it’s likely a long time before Xfce 4.14 gets released with full GTK3 tool-kit integration, there are some new Xfce4 package updates available this week.

      Xfce4-settings 4.13 is out and is a development release for the 4.13 series. This initial release marks Xfce Settings being fully-ported to GTK+ 3.x. That’s the main change with this release is the port from GTK2 to GTK3 but some bugs do remain. There are some screenshots via this blog post.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Krita 3.1: third beta released

        Here is the third Krita 3.1 beta! From the Krita 3.1 on, Krita will officially support OSX. All OSX users are urged to use this version instead of earlier “stable” versions for OSX.

      • Qt on the NVIDIA Jetson TX1 – Device Creation Style

        NVIDIA’s Jetson line of development platforms is not new to Qt; a while ago we already talked about how to utilize OpenGL and CUDA in Qt applications on the Jetson TK1. Since then, most of Qt’s focus has been on the bigger brothers, namely the automotive-oriented DRIVE CX and PX systems. However, this does not mean that the more affordable and publicly available Jetson TX1 devkits are left behind. In this post we are going to take a look how to get started with the latest Qt versions in a proper embedded device creation manner, using cross-compilation and remote deployment for both Qt itself and applications.

      • Cutelyst 1.0.0 with stable API/ABI is out!

        Cutelyst the Qt web framework just reached it’s first stable release, it’s been 3 years since the first commit and I can say it finally got to a shape where I think I’m able to keep it’s API/ABI stable. The idea is to have any break into a 2.0 release by the end of next year although I don’t expect many changes as the I’m quite happy with it’s current state.

      • Cutelyst 1.0 Qt Web Framework Released

        Announced today is Cutelyst 1.0 with it reaching a state where the API/ABI can be maintained until Cutelyst 2.0, which will likely come at the end of 2017. Read that announcement if you are interested in this framework and yet another interesting deployment around the Qt tool-kit.

      • Kwave is in kdereview
      • After 18 Years, KWave Sound Editor Is Working Its Way Into KDE Multimedia

        KWave is a graphical sound editor that’s been in development since 1998 and is finally working its way into KDE Multimedia for becoming a proper part of KDE.

        A Phoronix reader pointed out today that KWave is finally working to become formally part of KDE rather than a separate project. KWave is currently in the KDE review process to be a component of KDE Multimedia, as outlined last month via this KDE-core-devel message.

      • KDE Applications 16.08.3 Is the Last in the Series, 16.12 Lands December 15

        Today, November 10, 2016, the KDE Project announced the release and general availability of the third and last scheduled maintenance update of the KDE Applications 16.08 software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktops.

        That’s right, we’re talking about KDE Applications 16.08.3, which lands almost a month after the previous update, namely KDE Applications 16.08.2, bringing the long-term support version of KDE Development Platform 4.14.26 along for the ride. KDE Applications 16.08.3 is here to address over 20 bugs reported by users since then.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • An Everyday Linux User Guide To The Nautilus File Manager

        Nautilus is a very popular file manager so if it isn’t installed for your particular distribution you should be able to find it in the graphical package manager.

        Nautilus is the default file manager within Ubuntu Linux.

      • Mutter 3.22.2
      • GNOME’s Mutter 3.22.2 Ships With Many Wayland Fixes

        Normally GNOME point releases aren’t too worth mentioning over here, but with this morning’s release of GNOME Mutter 3.22.2 it’s a bit of a different story.

        GNOME Mutter 3.22.2 is a worthwhile upgrade particularly if you are running on Wayland. Mutter 3.22.2 has several Wayland crash fixes (two separate bug reports_ plus has at least four bugs fixed around placement issues of windows/elements when running on Wayland. There is also a fix for popup grabs blocking the screen lock on Wayland. There is also a fix for two finger and edge scrolling under Wayland.

      • GNOME Shell and Mutter Get Wayland and Wi-Fi Improvements for GNOME 3.22.2

        As part of the soon-to-be-released second and last scheduled point release of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, the GNOME Shell and Mutter components have received new versions earlier today, November 10, 2016.

        GNOME Shell 3.22.2 and Mutter 3.22.2 are now available for download, and it looks like they bring various improvements to make your GNOME 3.22 desktop experience better, especially of you’re using the next-generation Wayland display server.

        For example, the Mutter 3.22.2 window and composite manager release fixes various placement issues and several crashes on Wayland, and also repairs the functionality that allowed users to switch between edge and two-finger-scrolling on the Wayland session.

  • Distributions

    • Solus Project to No Longer Support openSUSE & Fedora Repos for Budgie 11 Desktop

      While many of us, Solus users, are preparing for the winter holidays, the team lead by renowned developer Ikey Doherty is currently working hard on bringing what might just be the biggest Budgie desktop release so far.

      We can all agree that the current Budgie desktop environment is pretty cool with its GNOME 2-like vibe, and you can even enjoy it on Ubuntu Budgie, Arch Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, SparkyLinux (Debian based), and Manjaro (Arch Linux based). You can also enjoy Budgie on RPM-based distros like openSUSE and Fedora, which currently lies on the Solus Project’s OBS (Open Build Service) repositories.

    • Reviews

      • elementary OS 0.4 Loki

        elementary OS is a Linux desktop distribution that’s based on Ubuntu. The project’s goal is crafting a “fast and open replacement for Windows and macOS”.

        The latest, stable edition, with a core that’s based on Ubuntu 16.04, is elementary OS 0.4, code-named Loki.

        This article provides a walk-through of the distribution’s most important features.

        The distribution’s login screen. By default, a guest account is enabled.

    • New Releases

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • SUSE: A look inside the new SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2

        While out in the streets of DC there was alternately depression and elation, gnashing of teeth and celebration, at SUSECon yesterday, SUSE announced SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 2 designed to power physical, virtual and cloud-based mission-critical environments. The goal with this release is to help SLE users accelerate innovation, improve system reliability, meet ever more challenging security requirements and adapt to the accelerating pace of new technologies. SUSE expressed great pride in the fact that 2/3 of the Fortune Global 100 are currently using SLE.

      • Red Hat ‘spy’ makes appearance at SUSECon

        The attendees at SUSECon 2016, the annual conference of the Germany-based SUSE Linux being held in Washington DC this week, fall into the usual well-known categories: employee, media, analyst, speaker etc.

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed Users Get Latest Linux Kernel, Mesa, and KDE Plasma Updates

        Today, November 10, 2016, openSUSE Project’s Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest updates brought by a total of four snapshots for the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release Linux-based operating system.

      • OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Lands Mesa 13.0
      • openSUSE News: Mesa 13 Arrives in Tumbleweed with New Kernel

        This week has been a bit hectic with dramatic change affecting people around the world, but openSUSE Tumbleweed users who are use to change can find some clarity in the chaos with five snapshots that were released this week.

        These snapshots brought not only a new major version of Mesa but a new kernel and Plasma 5.8.3.

        The newest snapshot 20161108 updated yast2 to version 3.2.3 and added a patch to fix a crash from upstream for Wayland. Lightweight web browser epiphany, which updated to version 3.22.2 in the snapshot, added fixes for adblocker and improved the password form for autofill handling.

      • Highlights of YaST development sprint 27

        This week, during SUSECon 2016, SUSE announced an exciting upcoming new product. SUSE CASP – a Kubernetes based Container As a Service Platform.

        That has, of course, some implications for the installer, like the need of some products (like CASP) to specify a fixed configuration for some subsystems. For example, an established selection of packages. The user should not be allowed to change those fixed configurations during installation.

        We have implemented a possibility to mark some modules in the installation proposal as read-only. These read-only modules then cannot be started from the installer and therefore their configuration is kept at the default initial state.

      • openSUSE Leap Goes Gold, Fedora 25 Delayed a Week

        Today in Linux news openSUSE 42.2 Leap has gone Gold Master in time for next Wednesday’s release. On the other side of town Fedora 25 has been delayed a week, pushing its release to November 22, 2016. Sam Varghese and John Grogan reported on the latest from SUSECon 2016, with one covering a Red Hat spy in attendance. Eric Hameleers released his latest liveslak and ISOs. The Hectic Geek compared Ubuntu 16.10 flavors and Carla Schroder examined Ubuntu’s enterprise chops.

      • SUSE plans container as a service platform

        Germany-based SUSE Linux has announced a container as a service platform that it hopes to release as a public beta in April next year, before the first customer version comes out in July the same year.

        Three of the developers involved — Federica Teodori, project manager for container and orchestration, Andreas Jaeger, senior product manager, and Simona Arsene, product manager — spoke to iTWire about the technology on the sidelines of SUSECon 2016, the company’s annual conference that is being held in Washington DC this week.

        Jaeger said the idea was to have a software-defined infrastructure where containers handled the workloads. The advantage was that containers, which include an application and its dependencies, could be moved around and could run from more than one location.

      • SUSE Deal Includes Ceph Storage Project
      • SUSE Growing Linux Biz Revenue at 18 percent in 2016

        According to Brauckmann, the fastest-growing route to market for SUSE now is the public cloud.

    • Slackware Family

      • More Flash fixes in November
      • Q4 2016 fixes for Java 8 (openjdk)
      • LibreOffice 5.2.3 for Slackware-current

        I wanted the latest LibreOffice in the upcoming Slackware Live Edition 1.1.4 (PLASMA 5 variant) so I have built and uploaded a set of packages for LibreOffice 5.2.3. They are for Slackware-current only.

      • Slackware Live Edition 1.1.4 – based on slackware-current of 4 Nov 2016

        Today I conclude my packaging frenzy with a new release of ‘liveslak‘. Version 1.1.4 is ready with only some minor tweaks. Users of the “iso2usb.sh” script on non-Slackware distros should be happy that the script finds all the required programs now.
        I made a set of ISO images for several variants of the 64bit version of Slackware Live Edition based on liveslak 1.1.4 and using Slackware-current dated “Fri Nov 4 03:31:38 UTC 2016”. These ISO images have been uploaded and are available on the primary server ‘bear‘. You will find ISO images for a full Slackware, Plasma5 and MATE variants and the 700MB small XFCE variant.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Enterprise Linux Showdown: Ubuntu Linux

            Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux is the newcomer in the enterprise Linux space. Its first release was in 2004; the other two enterprise Linux distributions in this series, SUSE and Red Hat, were born in 1992 and 1993. In its short life Ubuntu has generated considerable controversy, supporters, detractors, excitement, and given the Linux world a much-needed injection of energy.

            One of the primary differentiators between Ubuntu, RHEL, and SUSE is Ubuntu unashamedly and boldly promotes their desktop version. RHEL and SUSE soft-pedal their desktop editions. Not Canonical. Desktop Ubuntu has been front and center from the beginning.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu 16.10 Flavors Comparison: Ubuntu vs Ubuntu GNOME vs Kubuntu vs Xubuntu

              As promised in my earlier Ubuntu 16.10 review, I have come up with an Ubuntu 16.10 flavors comparison as well, although, I was planning on coming up with this comparison much sooner (but hey, it’s here!)

              Unlike in my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS flavors comparison which only included two main Ubuntu flavors (Ubuntu GNOME & Kubuntu), this time, I’ve also added Xubuntu 16.10 to the comparison because it was requested by a couple of my readers. The ISO disc image sizes are as follows: Ubuntu 16.10 (1.6 GB), Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 (1.5 GB), Kubuntu 16.10 (1.6 GB) & Xubuntu 16.10 (1.3 GB). And also, I only chose the 64-bit versions of the disc images for the flavors review as well.

              And in this comparison, I’ll only be comparing the performance related data, the stability and hardware recognition of each flavor. I’ll skip new features and whatnot, because you can find information about those features elsewhere, quite easily.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google responds in EU antitrust case: “Android hasn’t hurt competition” [Ed: This is Microsoft pulling EU strings]

          Google—as expected—has dismissed the European Commission’s charge that the ad giant abused Android’s dominance to block its competitors in the market.

          The company is accused of using Android’s position as the dominant smartphone operating system in Europe to force manufacturers to pre-install Google services while locking out competitors.

Free Software/Open Source

  • GitLab, Consumer Driven Contracts, Helm and Kubernetes

    This article will focus on building a workflow driven by Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery for deploying the services on Kubernetes.

    We’ll develop and deliver an Application with two different services that communicate with each other. One service is internal and the other will be accessible from the outside world via Traefik. We’ll want to develop, deploy and evolve each service independently of the rest.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Announcing Rust 1.13

        The Rust team is happy to announce the latest version of Rust, 1.13.0. Rust is a systems programming language focused on safety, speed, and concurrency.

        As always, you can install Rust 1.13.0 from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.13.0 on GitHub. 1448 patches were landed in this release.

        It’s been a busy season in Rust. We enjoyed three Rust conferences, RustConf, RustFest, and Rust Belt Rust, in short succession. It was great to see so many Rustaceans in person, some for the first time! We’ve been thinking a lot about the future, developing a roadmap for 2017, and building the tools our users tell us they need.

      • Rust 1.13 Brings ? Operator, Better Performance

        Rust 1.13 is now available as the latest implementation of this popular and growing programming language.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • How OpenStack Uses Nodepool

      OpenStack is an open-source cloud platform at its core, but it’s also much more. In order to build OpenStack itself, the OpenStack Foundation has needed to build out all kinds of infrastructure management tooling, including an effort known as nodepool.

    • Survey Shows Spark Spreading Out, Heading to the Cloud

      New survey data from nearly 7,000 respondents in the Big Data space are in, conducted by The Taneja Group for Cloudera, which focuses on Hadoop/Spark-based data-centric tools. The new “Apache Spark Market Survey” shows that Spark is set to break from the Hadoop ecosystem and function more and more as an independent data processing tool. It may move from on-premises installations to the cloud in many instances.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5 – Free Office Suite Keeps Getting Better

      LibreOffice is the best office software available, or at least on Linux. LibreOffice is a powerful office suite that comes with a clean interface and feature-rich tools that seeks to make your productive and creative. LibreOffice includes several applications including Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for vector graphics and flowcharts, Base for databases, and Math for formula editing.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming/Development

    • What is hackathon culture?

      That’s the type of culture codeRIT and BrickHack are about. Race, gender, and how much you know about coding software doesn’t matter; what matters is that you want to learn, and you want to better yourself and the world.

Leftovers

  • Microsoft lays out its hopes for a Trump presidency

    As America wraps its head around the result of Tuesday’s election, the tech world is taking stock of what’s about to happen to it, both in the short and long term. We’ve heard how Silicon Valley has reacted with disappointment and uncertainty over what President Donald Trump means for tech-related policy. Microsoft on the other hand has gone into a little more detail about the relationship it wants with the president-elect.

    In a blog post published the day after the election, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, offered his congratulations to Trump while making it clear that there was a great deal of work ahead for both sides.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • WTO Members Discuss UN High-Level Report On Medicines Access That WHO Declined To Discuss

      The World Trade Organization intellectual property committee this week discussed the report of United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on access to medicines which offered recommendations regarding the use of intellectual property in international trade. Developing countries taking the floor accentuated the use of flexibilities under trade rules, and the World Health Organization gave an overview of how its activities follow the panel’s recommendations, and its future projects. Civil society meanwhile criticised the WHO’s decision to dismiss a request by some developing countries to include discussions on the UN report at the next Executive Board Meeting. WHO then used this WTO meeting to make a statement about the UN report.

    • American Women Are Preparing for a War on Reproductive Rights Under President Trump

      Benoit told The Intercept that more than two dozen women reached out to her for advice about the IUD, a small device inserted into the uterus that, depending on the type, works for three to 12 years. “I recommend the IUD right now especially because it’s long term, which with 20 million+ Americans potentially losing their health insurance and potentially right to an abortion, is important,” she said.

    • India Patent Office denies patent for prostate cancer drug sold under brand name Xtandi, generic name enzalutamide

      According to this story, the India Patent Office has denied a patent for the prostate cancer drug sold under the brand name Xtandi (generic name Enzalutamide). Opponents of the patent claimed it was a new form of a known substance, and not eligible in India under Section 3(d) of its patent act.

      According to the Times of India, the Astellas price for 112 pills (a 28 day supply) of Xtandi was 335,000 rupees, or about $5014.60 US Dollars. This is $179 per day or $44.77 per pill, much higher than the $26 per pill price Astellas sells the drug for in Japan.

      According to the World Bank, the 2015 per capita income in India was $1,590 per year, or $4.36 per day.

    • Six Candidates For WHO Director General Lay Out Their Views

      Funding, universal health, multisectoral work and access to medicines were among the issues addressed at the recent candidates’ forum of the World Health Organization in Geneva as part of the process to choose the next director general of the UN health agency. Candidates spoke on how to fund the organisation in its quest for universal health care and response to emergencies.

    • Two Generics Companies Apply For First WHO Prequalification Of Novel Antiretroviral

      Today, the Medicines Patent Pool announced that two generic drug companies applied for the World Health Organization prequalification of an innovative antiretroviral.

  • Security

    • The Future of IoT: Containers Aim to Solve Security Crisis

      Despite growing security threats, the Internet of Things hype shows no sign of abating. Feeling the FoMo, companies are busily rearranging their roadmaps for IoT. The transition to IoT runs even deeper and broader than the mobile revolution. Everything gets swallowed in the IoT maw, including smartphones, which are often our windows on the IoT world, and sometimes our hubs or sensor endpoints.

      New IoT focused processors and embedded boards continue to reshape the tech landscape. Since our Linux and Open Source Hardware for IoT story in September, we’ve seen Intel Atom E3900 “Apollo Lake” SoCs aimed at IoT gateways, as well as new Samsung Artik modules, including a Linux-driven, 64-bit Artik7 COM for gateways and an RTOS-ready, Cortex-M4 Artik0. ARM announced Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33 cores for IoT endpoints featuring ARMv8-M and TrustZone security.

    • GCHQ encourages ISPs to rewrite their software to stop DDoS attacks

      The head of the GCHQ believes that if ISPs were to rewrite their software that they could potentially stop DDoS attacks from affecting their networks.

    • GCHQ thinks ISPs can solve DDoS by taking a good look at themselves

      THE BOSS OF UK SPOOK AGENCY GCHQ reckons that he has the solution to the global problem of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that blight online services: a standard rewrite of the software and code on which ISPs run.

      Ian Levy, technical director of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, told The Sunday Telegraph that the organisation is already planning talks with ISPs like BT about this silver bullet, and he is hopeful that it won’t turn out to be silver-plated bullshit.

    • OpenSSL Security Advisory [10 Nov 2016]

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Is Disclosure of Podesta’s Emails a Step Too Far? A Conversation With Naomi Klein

      There’s an amazing irony here in some sense because I’ve been defending the news value of the WikiLeaks archives over the past several months, not just the Podesta but also the DNC archive. And I’ve defended WikiLeaks in the past, long prior to the Snowden archive. There are a couple of really fascinating nuances that I think set the stage for the kinds of distinctions that you’re urging be drawn.

      When I first started defending WikiLeaks back in 2010, one of my primary arguments was that WikiLeaks, contrary to the way they were being depicted by the U.S. intelligence community and their friends, was not some reckless rogue agent running around sociopathically dumping information on the internet without concern about who might be endangered. And in fact, if you look at how the biggest WikiLeaks releases were handled early on — the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, as well as the State Department cables — not only did they redact huge numbers of documents on the grounds that doing so was necessary to protect the welfare of innocent people, they actually requested that the State Department meet with them to help them figure out what kind of information should be withheld on the grounds that it could endanger innocent people.

      So they were very much an ardent and enthusiastic proponent of that model — that when you get tons of information that belongs in the public eye, you have the corresponding responsibility to protect not only people’s physical security but also their privacy. I used to defend them on that all the time.

      Somewhere along the way, WikiLeaks and Julian decided, and they’ve said this explicitly, that they changed their mind on that question — they no longer believe in redactions or withholding documents of any kind.

    • Reddit users take WikiLeaks to task over email dumps, Russia

      Among the highlights of the AMA, was WikiLeaks revealing it decides to publish information according to its “promise to sources for maximum impact.” WikiLeaks also denied colluding with Trump’s campaign and Russia, and defended the information it dumped and its timing.

    • We are the WikiLeaks staff. Despite our editor Julian Assange’s increasingly precarious situation WikiLeaks continues publishing

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Marrakech climate talks: giving the fossil fuel lobby a seat at the table

      As the world gathers in Morocco for the historic first meeting under the Paris agreement – called “COP22” but now also “CMA1” – it does so with the unprecedented involvement of corporate interests who have fought climate action around the world, funded climate change denial and whose fundamental interest is in extracting and burning as much fossil fuel as possible.

      Earlier this year, desperate moves from countries representing the majority of the world’s population to examine how the UN might identify and minimise conflicts of interest were swept under the carpet by rich countries – especially the US, EU and Australia – who argued they wanted to be as “inclusive” as possible and that the concept of “conflict of interest” was too hard to define.

    • Myron Ebell: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

      Donald Trump is rumored to appoint Myron Ebell, a climate change denier, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

      Ebell serves as the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and he’s currently heading President-Elect Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition process. Politico reports that Ebell himself will likely become the new head of the EPA. While nothing official has been announced by the Trump campaign, the appointment of Ebell would represent a dramatic shift in the United States’ environmental policies.

      Here’s what you need to know about Myron Ebell, the possible next head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

    • Team Trump is already filled with Washington insiders

      To shape his administration, President-elect Donald Trump is drawing squarely from the “swamp” he has pledged to drain.
      Trump’s transition team is staffed with long-time Washington experts and lobbyists from K Street, think tanks and political offices.

      It’s a far cry from Trump’s campaign, which ended only Tuesday night, and message that he would “drain the swamp” in Washington. He has advocated congressional term limits and proposed a “five-point plan for ethics reform” that included strengthening restrictions on lobbying, including five-year bans for members and staff of the executive branch and Congress from lobbying, and expanding the definition of lobbyist to prevent more revolving door activity.
      But he has so far fully embraced lobbyists within his transition, and all signs point to a heavy influence from longtime Washington Republican circles on his transition. And with Trump mostly skipping detailed policy proposals during his campaign, these they can have a powerful impact on his agenda.

    • Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition

      Donald Trump has selected one of the best-known climate skeptics to lead his U.S. EPA transition team, according to two sources close to the campaign.

      Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, is spearheading Trump’s transition plans for EPA, the sources said.

      The Trump team has also lined up leaders for its Energy Department and Interior Department teams. Republican energy lobbyist Mike McKenna is heading the DOE team; former Interior Department solicitor David Bernhardt is leading the effort for that agency, according to sources close to the campaign.

    • Palm oil industry under fire as Indonesia’s haze drama continues

      In August, haze from Indonesian slash-and-burn agriculture enveloped Singapore and wafted into Malaysia and up to Thailand. It was not as bad as last year, however.

      The usual wave of complaints came from Singapore and the diplomatic spat started again.

      Indonesia’s Minister of Environment and Forestry, Dr Siti Nurbaya Bakar, asked that Singapore focus on its own role in addressing the issue instead of “making so many comments”. She said that Indonesia has stuck to its side of the bargain in trying to avoid the recurrence of forest fires and in strictly enforcing the law. She is right.

      Dr Siti has vowed to bring the culprits to justice – mostly palm oil plantation companies, some headquartered in Singapore.

    • What does a Trump presidency mean for climate change?

      Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, has called climate change a “Chinese hoax,” so it’s no wonder climate scientists are freaking out about what will happen to the environment in the years to come.

      Trump has already threatened to pull America out of the landmark Paris climate change accord, eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, repeal environmental regulations, and cut climate funding. He proposed an incoherent energy plan aimed at reviving the coal industry. It’s difficult to know which of these promises Trump will follow through on, but climate scientists warn that his plan is a disaster that would create lasting harm to everything from global biodiversity to food availability.

    • Climate change may be escalating so fast it could be ‘game over’, scientists warn

      It is a vision of a future so apocalyptic that it is hard to even imagine.

      But, if leading scientists writing in one of the most respected academic journals are right, planet Earth could be on course for global warming of more than seven degrees Celsius within a lifetime.

      And that, according to one of the world’s most renowned climatologists, could be “game over” – particularly given the imminent presence of climate change denier Donald Trump in the White House.

  • Finance

    • Even Fans Admit Chances Of TPP Being Ratified By US Soon — Or Ever — Have Just Slumped

      In the wake of the unexpected win of Donald Trump, people in many fields are starting to re-examine their assumptions about what might happen in the next few years. One of the areas impacted by Trump’s success is trade in general, and trade deals in particular. For perhaps the first time, the 2016 election campaign put trade deals front and center. They may even have contributed to Hillary Clinton’s downfall, since many found her sudden conversion to the anti-TPP movement unconvincing, to say the least.

    • Judge rejects Trump bid to bar campaign statements from fraud trial

      A U.S. judge on Thursday tentatively rejected a bid by Donald Trump to keep a wide range of statements from the presidential campaign out of an upcoming fraud trial over his Trump University venture.

      The ruling came in advance of a pretrial hearing later on Thursday where lawyers for the president-elect will square off against students who claim they were they were lured by false promises to pay up to $35,000 to learn Trump’s real estate investing “secrets” from his “hand-picked” instructors.

      Trump owned 92 percent of Trump University and had control over all major decisions, the students’ court papers say. The president-elect denies the allegations and has argued that he relied on others to manage the business.

    • The Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead, Schumer tells labor leaders

      The Senate’s soon-to-be top Democrat told labor leaders Thursday that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal at the center of President Obama’s “pivot” to strengthen ties with key Asian allies, will not be ratified by Congress.

      That remark from Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is expected to be the incoming Senate minority leader, came as good news to the AFL-CIO Executive Council, which met Thursday in Washington. Schumer relayed statements that Republican congressional leaders had made to him, according to an aide who confirmed the remarks.

    • TiSA: Trade in Services Agreement is Bad News for Workers and Communities

      The report sets out how a TiSA agreement would concentrate more power in the hands of multinational corporations, put a stranglehold on vital government regulation, undo the limited progress which has been made on regulating banks and finance conglomerates, and lead to an “Uberisation” of millions of workers’ jobs.

      Sharan Burrow, ITUC General Secretary, said: “While trade deals like TTIP, TPP and CETA are making headlines, government negotiators working hand in glove with corporate lobbyists are hoping to smuggle TiSA through while attention is focused elsewhere. This must not be allowed to happen.

      From what is known about the secret TiSA deal, it would have a profound and negative impact on financial regulation, protections for workers and consumers alike, and across a whole raft of other areas. Governments have still not learned the lesson that putting corporate interests ahead of the living standards and lives of their own people is not only unjust, it is political stupidity.”

    • Theresa May faces Brexit resistance as MPs threaten to vote against Article 50

      Theresa May has been given a fresh indicator of the difficulties she could face if Parliament is given a vote on article 50, as MPs lined up threatening to vote against triggering Brexit .

      Ministers are challenging a High Court ruling that Parliament must be given a say before the formal two-year process can be started by the Government, but if it comes to a Commons vote a number of MPs have indicated they would oppose the measure unless there are major concessions.

      Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said his party would vote against Article 50 unless there was a guarantee that the final Brexit deal with the European Union is put to a fresh referendum.

      He insisted he respected the decision made by voters in favour of leaving the EU but said nobody should have a deal “imposed” upon them.

      Although the Lib Dems only have eight MPs they have more than 100 peers in the Lords, which could spell trouble for the Government if judges rule that a full act of Parliament is required before Article 50 can be triggered, as the legislation would have to clear both Houses.

    • Saudi Arabia owes billions to private firms after collapse in oil revenues

      Saudi Arabia has admiited that it owes billions of dollars to private firms and foreign workers after oil revenues collapsed, the kingdom’s new finance minister said.

      The arrears have left tens of thousands of foreign workers, chiefly in the construction sector, struggling for months while they await back pay.

      “I don’t recall the exact amount now but its billions of dollars,” Mohammed Aljadaan told reporters on Thursday.

    • Your money’s no good: rupee note cancellation plunges India into panic

      Queues of angry, panicked Indians wound around bank buildings in Mumbai, the financial capital, on Thursday morning, two days after the prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced that 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, worth around £6 and £12, would be taken out of circulation.

      In a televised announcement on Tuesday night, Modi had urged Indians not to rush to banks, as they would have until the end of 2016 to deposit cash in their accounts. But with the high-value notes withdrawn from Wednesday in an effort to combat corruption, black-market trade and tax evasion, many were left without cash for day-to-day expenses.

      Banks were closed on Wednesday, and reopened on Thursday morning with a cap on cash withdrawals. ATMs remained closed, so currency was only available from the banks. Newspapers around the country reported long queues at branches, as people scrambled to exchange their high-value banknotes for 100-rupee bills.

    • Trump tapped the viral anger over H-1B use

      President-elect Donald Trump realized early in his campaign that U.S. IT workers were angry over training foreign visa-holding replacements. He knew this anger was volcanic.

      Trump is the first major U.S. presidential candidate in this race — or any previous presidential race — to focus on the use of the H-1B visa to displace IT workers. He asked former Disney IT employees, upset over having to train foreign replacements, to speak at his rallies.

      “The fact is that Americans are losing their jobs to foreigners,” said Dena Moore, a former Disney IT worker at a Trump rally in Alabama in February. “I believe Mr. Trump is for Americans first.”

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Donald Trump could be impeached within weeks, claims legal professor

      Donald Trump could be impeached within weeks, according to at least one legal professor.

      There is a strong case for the beginning of legal proceedings that would stop Donald Trump from being president, says law professor Christopher Peterson.

      A paper from Professor Peterson says that there is ample evidence to charge the new President-elect with crimes that would see him potentially being removed from office.

      Professor Peterson’s analysis was written in September, before Mr Trump became president. But the argument makes it applies after the election, too.

    • Facebook’s failure: did fake news and polarized politics get Trump elected?

      It’s a great quote, but he never said it.

      It typifies the kind of fake news and misinformation that has plagued the 2016 election on an unprecedented scale. In the wake of the surprise election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, pressure is growing on Facebook to not only tackle the problem but also to find ways to encourage healthier discourse between people with different political views.

      Rather than connecting people – as Facebook’s euphoric mission statement claims – the bitter polarization of the social network over the last eighteen months suggests Facebook is actually doing more to divide the world.

    • Why Mark Zuckerberg Is Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year
    • President Trump: How America Got It So Wrong

      “Fuck yourself,” he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He then turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down Fifth Avenue, a hand gently tousling his son’s hair.

      This was before Donald Trump’s historic victory. The message afterward no doubt would have been the same. There’s no way to overstate the horror of what just went down. Sure, we’ve had some unstable characters enter the White House. JFK had health problems that led him to take amphetamine shots during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan’s attention span was so short, the CIA had to make mini-movies to brief him on foreign leaders. George W. Bush not only didn’t read the news, he wasn’t interested in it (“What’s in the newspapers worth worrying about?” he once asked, without irony).

      But all of these men were just fronts for one or the other half of the familiar alternating power structure, surrounded by predictable, relatively sober confederates who managed the day-to-day. Trump enters the White House as a lone wrecking ball of conspiratorial ideas, a one-man movement unto himself who owes almost nothing to traditional Republicans and can be expected to be anything but a figurehead. He takes office at a time when the chief executive is vastly more powerful than ever before, with nearly unlimited authority to investigate, surveil, torture and assassinate foreigners and even U.S. citizens – powers that didn’t seem to trouble people much when they were granted to Barack Obama.

    • Elections, the Internet, and the Power of Narrative

      Once again, the struggle over the Power of Narrative has been laid bare – just as it was in the 1530s and countless other times in history. Once again, a colluding establishment had decided to tell a unified story as The Truth, only to be shattered by new communications technology revealing the collusion and a set of alternative, unapproved talking points. This has happened before, and this will happen again, and it is the biggest power shift that can happen in society – far greater than an election.

      Elections are ultimately about violence. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, far predating modern democracy, states have taken upon themselves to enforce a certain set of rules on their population – with violence, if need be. The territorial governments under the Treaty of Westphalia – loosely what we call “countries” today – therefore have a monopoly on exercising lawful violence against bad people. This mechanism remains with modern voting, which therefore becomes an indirect way of wielding violence against those bad people.

    • How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election

      It was a rough night for number crunchers. And for the faith that people in every field — business, politics, sports and academia — have increasingly placed in the power of data.

      Donald J. Trump’s victory ran counter to almost every major forecast — undercutting the belief that analyzing reams of data can accurately predict events. Voters demonstrated how much predictive analytics, and election forecasting in particular, remains a young science: Some people may have been misled into thinking Hillary Clinton’s win was assured because some of the forecasts lacked context explaining potentially wide margins of error.

      “It’s the overselling of precision,” said Dr. Pradeep Mutalik, a research scientist at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics, who had calculated that some of the vote models could be off by 15 to 20 percent.

      Virtually all the major vote forecasters, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site, The New York Times Upshot and the Princeton Election Consortium, put Mrs. Clinton’s chances of winning in the 70 to 99 percent range.

    • Polls etc.

      Two points which have come up at work and may be generally interesting as everyone picks through the wreckage. Research/marketing stuff, be warned. Also remember I was HIDEOUSLY WRONG about Trump not being like Brexit because I was a straw-clutching idiot. So pinch of salt but…

      1) The Polls. They fucked up, and so did the aggregators (in fact worse, as one of the individual polls (IBM/TPP) did rather well). 538, PEC, etc look like post-meteor dinosaurs. But obviously the individual polls are also in trouble if the business is going to come down to “poll all year and then at the end we see who’s turnout assumptions are best”.

      But the problem actually runs deeper than that – the trouble isn’t “shy Trump voters” which you can often detect using other indicators. It’s Trump voters who barely even get the chance to be shy, because years of declining response rates (down from 25% to 5% or so in the last 20 years) have created an entirely skewed survey-taking universe where the set of people who will take surveys at all is very different from the population. Estimating how many might be missing is pure guesswork: yes, an insurgent electorate is more right wing, but by 2 points? 5? 10? There’s no way of knowing. These people are dark matter. PS the exit polls ARE STILL POLLS this still applies.

    • Tech founders want California to secede

      Shervin Pishevar, an early Uber investor and cofounder of Hyperloop, posted a series of tweets Tuesday night announcing his plans to fund “a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation.”

      And no, he’s not joking.

      “Yes it’s serious,” Pishevar told CNNMoney in an e-mail. “It’s the most patriotic thing I can do. The country is [at] a serious crossroads.”

      Within hours, several other tech founders offered their support for the plan.

      “I was literally just going to tweet this. I’m in and will partner with you on it,” Dave Morin, an investor and founder of private social networking tool Path, tweeted in response to Pishevar.

    • Donna Brazile: I’m sorry only that I got caught cheating with debate questions

      Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, is not only refusing to apologize for giving debate questions to candidate Hillary Clinton. She’s also saying she would do it again if given the opportunity.

      “My conscience — as an activist, a strategist — is very clear,” she said in an interview with talk-radio host Joe Madison that aired on Monday.

      Brazile argued she was simply doing her job as a strategist to know what questions the debate moderators might pose: “You’re doggone right I’m gonna talk to everybody. Joe, I will never go out on TV or go on radio without the facts. I will ask. I will submit things. I will circulate things. And guess what? I also enjoy the exchange that I have with my colleagues.”

    • Everyone Is Sharing Michael Moore’s 5-Point ‘Morning After To-Do List’

      The morning after Donald Trump became the U.S. president-elect felt like something of a hangover for millions of Democrats. With a Republican Senate and House of Representatives to boot, to say nothing of Supreme Court vacancies, many liberals were understandably depressed.

      Maybe that’s why documentary filmmaker Michael Moore’s five-point plan has been shared over 100,000 times since it was posted on Facebook Wednesday morning. It offers a blueprint for how Democrats can get back up and fight for their causes.

    • It’s Still the Same United States

      In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking victory, many liberals woke up Wednesday morning feeling like strangers in their own country, or perhaps, as if they were the familiar ones and it was the country itself that had become the stranger. I heard it in the voices of friends. I read it in texts from family. I found it in newspaper headlines from some of my favorite writers and in tweets and Facebook messages. What kind of a country do I live in? they asked. Something important has changed. This is not the nation I thought I knew.

    • Trump campaign staff redirects, then restores, mention of Muslim ban from website

      President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign staff temporarily redirected the webpage detailing his controversial proposal to temporarily ban Muslim immigration into the United States, one of the most divisive and controversial policy ideas of his campaign, but swiftly sought to restore it after reporter inquiries Thursday.

      The proposal is detailed on a page titled, “Donald J. Trump statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration.” Starting on Election Day, that page redirected to a new page where supporters could donate to the campaign. “Thank you America,” said the banner on the new page. “We showed America the silent majority is no longer silent.”

    • KKK announces North Carolina ‘victory’ parade

      While one report of Ku Klux Klan activity in North Carolina following Donald Trump’s election as president was debunked, the real KKK has announced a rally in the state.

      Trump, a Republican, was officially endorsed by the KKK during his campaign against Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. Trump won North Carolina on his way to winning the presidency, defeating Clinton here by nearly 5 percentage points.

      Details on the rally celebrating Trump’s victory are scarce. It’s being held by The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which is based in Pelham – a small, unincorporated community about 45 minutes north of Burlington, near the Virginia border.

      The group was behind a rally in South Carolina last year protesting the removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol building.

    • Trump’s dystopia is coming – but it will destroy itself

      It means that the reactionary forces of the far-right are resurgent. Trump’s victory is the latest in a global trend which was previously manifest in Britain’s Brexit vote, which saw Britons vote to get out of the European Union. That itself follows a growing wave of popularity for right-wing extremists across Europe.

      It’s no surprise that among the first in Europe to congratulate Trump on taking the White House were far-right leaders like France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders.

      That is because, as I’ve documented elsewhere, Trump’s advisory team has close ties to Europe’s fascist political parties.

      His campaign rhetoric has meant that the forces he rode to victory are hardly a secret.

    • Theresa May still awaiting call from Donald Trump

      The UK’s hopes for a continuation of the much-vaunted special relationship with the US under Donald Trump have suffered an early setback after the new president-elect spoke to nine world leaders in the 24 hours after his election win, without Theresa May getting a call.

      Trump has thus far talked to the leaders of Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, India, Japan, Australia and South Korea, according to various reports.

      A Downing Street spokesman said a phone call between May and Trump was “being arranged now”. He said: “They will speak at the earliest possible opportunity.” The spokesman added that May had sent the president-elect a letter.

    • DNC Staffer Screams At Donna Brazile For Helping Elect Donald Trump

      On Thursday, Democratic Party officials held their first staff meeting since Hillary Clinton’s stunning loss to Donald Trump in the presidential race. It didn’t go well.

      Donna Brazile, the interim leader of the Democratic National Committee, was giving what one attendee described as “a rip-roaring speech” to about 150 employees, about the need to have hope for wins going forward, when a staffer identified only as Zach stood up with a question.

      “Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?” he asked, according to two people in the room. “You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself.”

      Some DNC staffers started to boo and some told him to sit down. Brazile began to answer, but Zach had more to say.

      “You are part of the problem,” he continued, blaming Brazile for clearing the path for Trump’s victory by siding with Clinton early on. “You and your friends will die of old age and I’m going to die from climate change. You and your friends let this happen, which is going to cut 40 years off my life expectancy.”

    • This Photo Of Sad Obama Staffers Isn’t From Trump’s White House Visit

      The photo was taken by European Press Agency photographer Jim Lo Scalzo and shows White House staff listening as Obama spoke from the Rose Garden Wednesday.

    • Obama To Pardon Hillary To Save Her From Jail

      Obama’s last act as president will be saving Hillary from jail by granting her a pardon, despite spending the last months claiming she has done nothing wrong.

      Washington insiders claim an elaborate pardon is being drawn up to protect Hillary from prosecution and jail time.

      The White House is deflecting questions about President-elect Donald Trump’s intent to appoint a special prosecutor to review Clinton’s case, and steadfastly refusing to rule out a pardon.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Users Around the World Reject Europe’s Upload Filtering Proposal

      Users around the world have been outraged by the European Commission’s proposal to require websites to enter into Shadow Regulation agreements with copyright holders concerning the automatic filtering of user-generated content. This proposal, which some are calling RoboCopyright and others Europe’s #CensorshipMachine, would require many Internet platforms to integrate content scanning software into their websites to alert copyright holders every time it detected their content being uploaded by a user, without any consideration of the context.

      People are right to be mad. This is going to result in the wrongful blocking of non-infringing content, such as the fair use dancing baby video. But that’s only the start of it. The European proposal may also require images and text—not just video—to be automatically blocked on copyright grounds. Because automated scanning technologies are unable to evaluate the applicability of copyright exceptions, such as fair use or quotation, this could mean no more image macros, and no more reposting of song lyrics or excerpts from news articles to social media.

    • In The Rush To Blame Facebook, Come The Calls To Suppress Ideas People Disagree With

      In fact, it’s likely to make things even worse. Remember the mostly made up “controversy” about Facebook suppressing conservative news? Remember the outrage it provoked (or have you already forgotten?). Just imagine what would happen if Facebook now decided that it was only going to let people share “true” news. Whoever gets to decide that kind of thing has tremendous power — and there will be immediately claims of bias and hiding “important” stories — even if they’re bullshit. It will lead many of the people who are already angry about things to argue that their views are being suppressed and hidden and that they are being “censored.” That’s not a good recipe. And it’s an especially terrible recipe if people really want to understand why so many people are so angry at the status quo.

      Telling them that the news needs to be censored to “protect” them isn’t going to magically turn Trump supporters into Hillary supporters. It will just convince them that they’re even more persecuted.

      Other than “censoring” certain content, the only other suggestion I seriously heard was someone suggesting that Facebook should force-feed its users opposing views. Like that’s actually going to change anyone’s mind, rather than get them pissed off again. And, once again, this seems like people failing to take responsibility for their own actions. If you don’t have any friends who supported Trump, don’t lump that on Facebook.

      There are legitimate questions about whether you can better inform a populace. But censorship and force-feeding information is general paternalistic nonsense that totally misunderstands the issue and misdiagnoses the problem. As Clay Shirky noted earlier this year, too many Hillary supporters thought that “bringing fact checkers to a culture war” would win out, when that’s never going to happen. Fighting Facebook’s algorithim is more of the same nonsense. It’s based in the faulty belief that those who voted for “the other” are simply too dumb to understand the truth, and if they just got more truth, they’d buy it. It’s not understanding why they voted the way they did. It’s looking for easy scapegoats.

      Facebook’s algorithm is an easy target, but it’s even less likely to solve a culture war than fact checkers.

    • Less Censorship Could Make Independent Film Productions Suffer

      China passed its first comprehensive law governing the film industry on Monday, a move that some said would simplify the process of approving and censoring films. Others, however, worried that it could put more pressure on filmmakers, particularly independent producers.

    • Number of imported films in China reaches record high

      Chinese moviegoers will be spoilt for choice this month, with over 50 films, some of which are highly anticipated, from home and abroad hitting the cinemas in the month.

      November will see the release of 12 foreign films, including Doctor Strange, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Allied, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, taking the number of imported films in the Chinese market to a record high of 39 this year. The number was 34 last year.

      Some domestic films are also highly anticipated, like I am not Madame Bovary, directed by Feng Xiaogang and starring Fan Bingbing, which has already won awards at Toronto International Film Festival and San Sebastian International Film Festival, and was nominated for many other awards.

      Even though most Chinese audiences are already used to overseas blockbusters flushing into the Chinese market in recent years, the cinematic booty of this month is still quite unprecedented.

    • New claims of Facebook censorship in Norway

      Just two months after Facebook found itself in the centre of an international controversy after censoring posts in Norway, the social media giant has banned another prominent Norwegian for posting a photo that included nudity.
      Artist, writer and Dagbladet columnist Kjetil Rolness was banned from Facebook for three days for having shared an article from online newspaper iTromsø.

      Author Tom Egeland, who was at the centre of the ‘Napalm Girl’ Facebook controversy back in August, was the one to bring the new case to light. He did so, naturally enough, on his Facebook page.

    • Polish minister accuses Facebook of censorship over right-wing symbol
    • Poland’s far-right groups protest Facebook
    • Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages
    • Are Mark Cuban’s Reasons For Banning ESPN’s Mavericks Reporters Science Fiction?
    • Mark Cuban turns pro-censorship in latest NBA fit

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Should You Spy on Your Kids?

      In the middle of a long bicycle ride several weeks ago, I pulled over for a rest and took out my iPhone to send a text message to my wife. I had a feeling she might be watching me.

      “If you’re checking my location, I’m not dead,” I wrote to her. “I’m getting coffee on Mercer Island.”

      As it happens, she was not keeping tabs on where I was, but she could have — and has in the past — because I have allowed her to do so using the location-tracking capability in my phone. Whenever she’s curious, she can see me represented as an orange dot on a digital map on her phone. An unmoving dot could be a cyclist husband who got a flat tire, grabbed a beer with a friend or was hit by a car (hence the reassuring text).

      Now and again, I, too, check my wife’s location so I know when she leaves work and can time dinner with her arrival. She and I have both tracked the whereabouts of our 13-year-old daughter using her phone to reassure ourselves that she was on her way home from school or a trip to the store.

    • King County using customer grocery store data to target pet owners, send licensing notices

      A King County letter that ended up in the mailboxes of thousands of pet owners is raising concerns over privacy.

      The letter told pet owners to license their pets or face a $250 fine.

      “It feels weird to me, it feels like they’re kind of snooping around in a place where they shouldn’t be,” said dog owner Chris Lee.

      Turns out for the last four years, King County has been using data companies to target specific taxpayers, or in this case pet owners. That means every time customers swipe those rewards cards, they’re gathering data.

    • Government Needs Access To Big Data To Fight, Uh, Terrierism

      Scummy King County, Washington is using customer grocery store data to target pet owners and send them letters threatening them with a $250 fine if they don’t license their pets.

      Good reason to pay in cash, to avoid linking a “loyalty card” to the real you (Just call me “Mrs. Claus, 1010 North Pole Lane), and to vote out the assholes doing this.

    • The phone so secure even the head of the NSA uses it: Boeing’s secret ‘blackphone’ that can SELF DESTRUCT if tampered with begins testing (and no, you can’t buy one)

      Developed by Boeing and the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Boeing Black phone is designed for secure communication between governmental agencies and their contractors.

      The handset can even self destruct if it is tampered with, destroying all the data on it, and is so secure that Boeing will only sell it to ‘approved’ purchasers.

    • New IBM Platform Brings Watson to IoT

      IBM unveiled today an experimental platform that allows developers to embed Watson functions and cognitive technology into various devices. The platform, dubbed Project Intu, can be accessed through the Watson Developer Cloud, Intu Gateway, and GitHub.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • EU citizenship proposal could guarantee rights in Europe after Brexit

      The European parliament is to review a proposal for an associate EU citizenship open to nationals of a country that has left the union but who want to stay part of the European project and retain some of their EU rights.

      The plan, tabled by a liberal MEP from Luxembourg, could mean British citizens who opt for the new status would be able to continue to travel freely and live on the continent – rights that may no longer be automatic after Brexit.

      “It’s clear the UK is divided, and many people want to remain part of Europe,” said Charles Goerens, who proposed amendment 882 to a draft report by the parliament’s constitutional affairs committee on possible changes to “the current institutional set-up” of the European Union.

      “The idea is simply to guarantee those who want it some of the same rights they had as full EU citizens, including the right of residence in the EU, and to be able to vote in European elections and be represented by an MEP.”

    • Reports of racist graffiti, hate crimes in Trump’s America

      Fears of heightened bigotry and hate crimes have turned into reality for some Americans after Donald Trump’s presidential win.
      Racist, pro-Trump graffiti painted inside a high school. A hijab-wearing college student robbed by men talking about Trump and Muslims.
      While Trump has been accused of fostering xenophobia and Islamophobia, some of his supporters have used his words as justification to carry out hateful acts.
      Here’s what some Americans are dealing with across the country.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Here’s How President Trump Could Destroy Net Neutrality

      Donald Trump’s presidential election victory could have dire consequences for US internet freedom and openness, according to several tech policy experts and public interest advocates surveyed by Motherboard on Wednesday.

      The Republican billionaire will likely seek to roll back hard-won consumer protections safeguarding net neutrality, the principle that all internet content should be equally accessible, as well as a host of other policies designed to protect consumers, ensure internet freedom, and promote broadband access, these experts and advocates said.

      “Everything we’ve accomplished over the last ten years is now in jeopardy,” said Malkia Cyril, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice, a nonprofit group that advocates for digital freedom and inclusion. “From net neutrality to broadband privacy to prison phone reform and the Lifeline expansion, that’s all at risk now.”

    • Trump’s FCC: Tom Wheeler to be replaced, set-top box reform could be dead

      Tom Wheeler’s time as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is nearing an end now that Republican Donald Trump has won the presidency. You can expect Wheeler to step down from his chairmanship on or before January 20, when Trump is inaugurated.

      It’s customary for the chair to step down when the White House shifts to the opposing party. All five FCC commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the US Senate, with the president’s party having a one-vote majority. (The president usually appoints minority party commissioners based on recommendations made by minority party lawmakers.)

      Trump can’t force Wheeler, a Democrat, to leave the commission entirely before his term expires, but the president can designate a new chairperson.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • CJEU rules against Rubik’s Cube shape trade mark

        In the judgment, published today, the five-judge panel said the General Court was wrong in its evaluation of functionality.

        Article 7(1)(e) of the (old) CTM Regulation provides that signs which consist exclusively of the shape of the goods themselves, a shape necessary to obtain a technical result or a shape which gives substantial value are not registrable.

      • CJEU upholds duty to reverse-engineer trade marks in Rubik’s cube decision, but what about the actual v abstract test?

        The role of the graphical representation included in trade mark applications is to let competitors and bodies in charge of the registration know the scope of the requested protection.

        In theory, owners’ exclusive rights are limited to the aesthetic appearance of the sign as represented in the application graphic representation. Thus – according to some – the chance to register a certain sign should be based on the self-contained, easily accessible, and intelligible images that appear in trade mark application.

    • Copyrights

      • Anti-Piracy Group FACT Expands Reach Beyond Hollywood

        The Federation Against Copyright Theft says that it will branch out into new areas of IP enforcement. For decades the anti-piracy group has relied on Hollywood for much of its business but with that work now being carried out by the MPA and others, FACT will offer services to companies outside the audio-visual sector.

      • CJEU says that EU law allows e-lending

        As reported by this blog, this reference arose in the context of proceedings brought by the association of Dutch public libraries which – contrary to the position of Dutch government – holds the view that libraries should be entitled to lend electronic books included in their collections according to the principle “one copy one user”.

        This envisages the possibility for a library user to download an electronic copy of a work included in the collection of a library with the result that – as long as that user “has” the book – it is not possible for other library users to download a copy. Upon expiry of the e-lending period, the electronic copy downloaded by the first user becomes unusable, so that the book in question can be e-borrowed by another user.

      • E-books can be lent by libraries just like normal books, rules EU’s top court

        Public libraries can lend out electronic books, the European Union’s highest court has ruled.

        The judgment confirms the opinion of Maciej Szpunar, advocate general to the the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), who said back in June that lending out e-books should be permitted in the 28-member-state bloc provided authors are fairly compensated in the same way as for physical books.

11.10.16

Links 10/11/2016: Latest Microsoft Attacks on GNU/Linux (by Proxy), F2FS Growing Up

Posted in News Roundup at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 open source dashboard tools for visualizing data

    I’ve always been fascinated by finding new and interesting ways to bring meaning to data with interactive visualization tools. While I’m definitely a geek for numbers, the human mind is simply much better at interpreting trends visually than it is just picking them out a spreadsheet. And even when your main interest in a dataset is the raw numbers themselves, a dashboard can help to bring meaning by highlighting which values matter most, and what the context of those numbers is.

    Figuring out how to best visualize your data can be challenging. Maybe you started out by creating a few graphs in a spreadsheet and are trying to find a way to tie them all together. Or maybe you’re working with an existing analytics tool and want to find a way to make your data more accessible to a wider audience. Or perhaps you’ve go several real-time sources and are trying to find a way to tie them all together.

    Fortunately, there are a number of great open source dashboard tools out there that make the job much easier. On one end of the spectrum are open source business intelligence tools, like BIRT or Pentaho. But for a smaller project, tools like these could be overkill, and in some cases, you might be able to find a dashboard tool that is already designed to work with the kind of data you are dealing with.

  • Events

    • NetBSD machines at Open Source Conference 2016 Tokyo/Fall
    • My First International FOSS Event: FUDCon Cambodia

      It was a privilege to be a speaker at FUDCon, Cambodia 2016. This being my first international FOSS event was ever more exciting. Right from the day I received the invitation from Sirko, I felt extremely privileged. On reaching the place I found that the event was much bigger than what I had expected it to be. There was a bar camp being organised by the university with over 5000 participants. Simply speaking it was a grand and huge occasion.

    • Endace Sponsors Open Source Suricata Conference

      Endace, a world leader in high-speed network monitoring and recording technology, is a sponsor of Suricon, which kicks off on Wednesday November 9th at the Hamilton Crowne Plaza in Washington D.C. Suricon, which draws attendees from around the world (including Suricata project contributors, developers and users), is the annual conference for the community behind the popular open-source intrusion detection (IDS) application, Suricata.

    • Message parsing and community building: All Things Open 2016

      Last week I visited All Things Open, one of the largest open source conferences of the US East Coast. The venue was the monumental building of the Raleigh Convention Center, just two blocks from Red Hat’s headquarters. I was presenting syslog-ng in the Operations track of the conference, but luckily I had a chance to stay for the full two days of the event.

      There were over 2400 visitors at the conference, so registration and check-in already started the day before. Those who leveraged this opportunity could not just avoid the crowd next morning, but also receive a nice t-shirt together with the conference badge:

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 5 – Free Office Suite Keeps Getting Better

      LibreOffice is the best office software available, or at least on Linux. LibreOffice is a powerful office suite that comes with a clean interface and feature-rich tools that seeks to make your productive and creative. LibreOffice includes several applications including Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for vector graphics and flowcharts, Base for databases, and Math for formula editing.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

    • TrueOS Succeeds PC-BSD Desktop-Friendly Unix OS

      The FreeBSD Unix operating system is one of the earliest open-source operating system projects, and it continues to be actively developed. The most recent update is the FreeBSD 11 release, which debuted Oct. 10. While FreeBSD is a robust operating system, it is not a desktop focused platform, which is where the PC-BSD operating system, based on FreeBSD used to fit in. On Sept. 1, PC-BSD was re-branded as TrueOS, providing FreeBSD users with an easy-to-use desktop as well as a new release cadence. In the past, PC-BSD releases followed FreeBSD milestones, providing users with code that had already been included in a generally available release. With TrueOS, the release model is now moving to what is known as a rolling release, with packages constantly being updated as they become available. As such, TrueOS is not based on the recently released FreeBSD 11; instead, it is based on the FreeBSD “current” branch that is the leading edge of the operating system development. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the new TrueOS operating system and what it offers desktop users.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Can America’s two-party system evolve to crowdocracy?

      Since I’ve studied civics and governments, I’ve never thought a two-party system of elected officials in our executive and legislative branches was the best form of democracy. It worked for a time, but now it’s time for change. In the United States, our representative democracy has become polarized and plagued with raising money for re-elections instead of focusing on the issues—issues that are largely influenced by lobbyist and corporate interests.

    • Open Data

      • Who is leading Open Data in Europe? Walking the Open Data talk

        Capgemini Consulting’s Wendy Carrara, project manager for the European Data Portal, discusses the UK’s open data readiness, including ways it could learn from its neighbours and even improve on its open data policy

        Open data – that is, publicly available data that’s free for all to use – is set to have a monumental impact on societies in the next five years. Whether it’s information regarding public transportation, citypolicy or city infrastructures, open data enables public sector bodies, business and citizens alike to make more informed decisions about the things that really matter. While it may sound like a popular buzzword from years gone by, governments across the globe are now developing policies that encourage the release of open government data. However, having policy in place is a far cry from actually getting it done.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Nestlé Just Granted Permit to Double Water Extraction 120 Miles from Flint, MI

      Nestlé is at it again. Recently publicly condemned for pumping 36 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest, paying a meager $524 annually for a permit that expired long ago, the multi-national company is now planning to milk the citizens of Flint, Michigan, to keep their water privatization plan afloat.

      Nestlé was just given a permit to almost double the groundwater they extract from the Michigan area amidst the recent Flint water crisis. This means the company will be taking more than 210 million gallons annually while many Flint residents are still suffering from the long-term effects of lead exposure.

      Nestlé is not even based in the U.S., but the Swiss transnational is taking water from hundreds of local water supplies. The U.S. represents its largest bottled water market. Nestlé also controls more than 70 of the world’s bottled water brands, among them Perrier, San Pellegrino, Ice Mountain, Pure Life, and Vittel.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Pentagon Again Dramatically Under-Reports Civilians Killed in Airstrikes

      Previous reports from Centcom were a dramatic under-count, and that trend continued with this new report, which carefully omitted some of the biggest and most well-documented incidents, which apparently fell into the category of strikes that the Pentagon decided not to investigate at all.

      The most conspicuously absent figures are from mid-July, when a flurry of US airstrikes against the city of Manbij and the surrounding area killed an estimated 200 civilians. At least 56 civilians were killed in one single incident, which at the time the US claimed they “mistook for ISIS.”

      Despite the Pentagon feeling the need to come up with excuses for the Manbij strikes at the time, they not only didn’t include them in the final death toll, but didn’t even hazard an attempt to mention the well-documented incidents in the document.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Now that Trump has won, TransCanada wants to give Keystone XL pipeline another try

      TransCanada said it hopes to persuade a new Trump administration to revive the controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline that President Obama rejected on Nov. 6, 2015.

      Taking advantage of President-elect Trump’s vow to launch a series of major infrastructure programs, Calgary-based TransCanada said it was “evaluating ways to convince the new administration on the benefits, the jobs and the tax revenues this project brings to the table.”

      “TransCanada remains fully committed to building Keystone XL,” the company said.

    • Construction of Dakota Access Pipeline set to begin its final, most contested stretch

      The company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline is preparing to tunnel under Lake Oahe, the body of water at the heart of the protests against the crude oil pipeline. This last phase of construction would join the two already-completed sections of the pipeline, Reuters reports.

      The company, Energy Transfer Partners, announced today that drilling underneath the lake will start in two weeks despite government agencies’ requests to wait, according to The Guardian. The pipeline is expected to be completed by the end of 2016, the company says.

      Protesters, including the local Standing Rock Sioux tribe, have been fighting the the $3.7 billion pipeline since April. They argue that the pipeline, which is intended to carry crude oil from North Dakota to a refinery in Illinois, could pollute water supplies and destroy culturally important land. In September, the US Justice and Interior Departments and the Army Corps of Engineer requested that Energy Transfer Partners voluntarily stop construction underneath the lake.

    • America’s Brief Role as a Climate Leader Is Probably Over

      While America was watching Donald Trump sweep the polls, climate representatives from over 200 countries saw America’s commitments to international climate goals blow away. This week, climate negotiators—along with NGOs, journalists, and other observers—are gathered in Marrakesh, Morroco to flesh out the details of the Paris agreement, newly ratified and enacted by the United Nations to address climate change. And though Trump hasn’t described his climate and energy policies in detail, he has made it clear that he will not honor promises the Obama administration made to combat the intensifying global warming catastrophe.

      The Clean Power Plan. Tax breaks for renewable energy. Cabinet appointees and a Supreme Court seat. Trump has the power to drastically change US environmental policy—and as the soon-to-be-leader of the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, his decisions will change the math for other nations previously committed to climate regulations. Some will follow the US, and dial back (or abandon) their goals. Others will stay the course. And still others might double down on climate goals, potentially gaining global clout as a result. However the 45th president of the US proceeds, his decisions on climate will affect everyone on Earth.

  • Finance

    • Shock as India scraps 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes

      Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says “honest people” have no need to worry about a decision to scrap 1,000 and 500 rupee notes.

      Mr Jaitley said the move would flush out tax evaders, adding that all old notes deposited in banks would be subjected to tax laws.

      The surprise move, announced on Tuesday evening, is part of a crackdown on corruption and illegal cash holdings.

    • Robots Will Take Two-Thirds of All Jobs In the Developing World, UN Says

      It’s a common belief that low-wage workers will be hit the hardest by advanced robots in the workplace. When we take a global perspective on this, the people that will be most affected by widespread automation won’t be workers in North America, according to a new United Nations report—it’ll be people in developing countries.

      Automation stands to reduce opportunities for low-wage workers in North America, the report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development states. But the types of jobs most likely to be eliminated entirely are more prevalent in developing nations. That’s because those same jobs, in sectors like farming and manufacturing, have already mostly dried up in wealthier nations as corporations have moved their operations abroad, in search of higher profits through lower wage costs.

    • Feeling the oil crunch: Saudi Arabia cancels $266bn in projects

      Saudi Arabia’s governing economic body called the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA) has cancelled $266.7 billion in projects, the Saudi Press Agency said, and announced it would be settling much-delayed private-sector payments by year end.

      The projects that have been canceled are the ones that are not expected to accelerate the kingdom’s growth or improve the living standards for its people.

      The cancellations were first considered in September, but at the time, it was noted that only $20 billion in projects would be considered to put on the chopping block.

      The size of the delayed payments—mainly due to severe hits to the kingdom’s oil revenue—remains undisclosed, but it includes delayed payments to construction firms, medical establishments, and foreign consultants. One analyst, according to Reuters, estimated that the amount still owing just to construction firms was US$21 billion.

    • Engineer sold as slave in Saudi Arabia, family wants him back

      An automobile engineer, who went to Saudi Arabia for better job opportunities, has allegedly been “sold” to a Saudi national as a slave to work in his camel farm. The family members of Jayanta Biswas have approached the Ministry of External Affairs for help in bringing him back from Saudi Arabia.

      However, they are yet to receive a word from the ministry. “We appeal to the Indian government to initiate action in order to bring my brother back. We are at our wit’s end,” Gouri Biswas, elder sister of Jayanta, said.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Huffington Post ending editor’s note that called Donald Trump ‘racist’

      The Huffington Post’s editor’s note calling Donald Trump as a “racist” and “xenophobe” is no more, a source in the newsroom tells POLITICO.

      For months, every story on the Huffington Post about Trump came with the following note at the bottom of the article.

    • Vigils and protests swell across U.S. in wake of Trump victory

      Vigils and protests continued into the early hours Thursday as opponents of President-elect Donald Trump expressed dismay with the election results, underscoring the difficult task he faces in uniting a fractured country.

      Despite Hillary Clinton and President Obama urging their backers to accept Trump’s victory and support his transition into power, thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets decrying his crude comments about women and attacks on immigrants.

      Protests were reported in cities across the nation, from major metropolitan centers like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, to smaller cities, such as Richmond and Portland, Ore. Dozens of demonstrators were arrested.

      Even cities in red states, such as Atlanta, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo., saw demonstrations.

      At least two police officers in Oakland, Calif., were injured as protesters took to the streets and chanted slogans against Trump, a police spokeswoman said. A few protesters threw objects at police dressed in riot gear, set off fireworks and started small trash fires.

    • Donald Trump and the Art of the Political Deal

      If you have a quick look at President-Elect Donald Trump’s approach – as a businessperson – to legal obligations, you may see something interesting about his approach to politics.

      Trump sees himself as a master of the “art of the deal”.

      And he certainly has an interesting and artful approach to contract law.

      By way of background, classical contract law is about the sanctity of the agreement: the bargain.

      All parties to a contract agree in advance what to do throughout the period of the contract regarding foreseeable risks. This means that there is a lot of “front-end” thought put into a contract: more time working things out in advance, the fewer problems later.

    • The US Election

      But my main point is the European establishment’s response to the Trump presidential victory. And let us not deceive ourselves here – this was an emphatic victory. The American people wanted a candidate for change, for a push-back against the perceived Washington political elite.

      Perhaps the election could have swung in another direction towards another candidate for change – if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrat nominee. Alas, as we know from the DNC files leaked to and published by Wikileaks, his campaign was undermined by his own party in favour of Hillary Clinton, while promoting Trump as the Republican candidate that Clinton could beat.

    • Canadian immigration site crashes after Trump leads in election

      As the US presidential elections move along, Canada’s informational website for immigration has unexpectedly crashed as Donald Trump currently leads in votes.

    • RNC model showed Trump losing

      The RNC’s sophisticated predictive modeling had Trump losing in the campaign’s last stretch, all the way until the Friday afternoon before the election, according to an embargoed briefing the RNC delivered to reporters at the party’s Capitol Hill headquarters on Friday afternoon.

      At the time of the briefing, the RNC’s model showed Trump finishing 30 electoral votes short of the tally needed to clinch the White House, while losing by various margins to Hillary Clinton in the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

      Trump won all those states, and the Associated Press declared him the winner at 2:31 a.m. on Wednesday — a shocking upset victory that most pollsters struggled to explain.

      [...]

      The briefing was called ostensibly to highlight the RNC’s advances in voter modeling and its heavy investment in the party’s ground game. But it also seemed at least partly intended to prove that the Republican Party gave Trump — and all of its 2016 candidates — the tools to succeed in 2016.

      The suggestion was unmistakable: if Trump loses, the blame should fall on the rookie candidate and his overmatched campaign — and not the party or its chairman Reince Priebus.

      The briefing was conducted by the RNC’s top staff, who asked reporters to agree not to divulge details — or even the existence of the briefing — before the election was called.

      The RNC’s model included 9.8 billion rows of data collected from 26 million phone calls that allowed the RNC to assign scores between 0 and 100 on all manner of issues.

    • [Old] How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

      I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn’t moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I’d be voting for him. I know I would.

    • How Does the Electoral College Work?

      The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. (The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.)

      As voters head to the polls on Tuesday, they will not vote for the presidential candidates directly, in a popular vote. Instead, they will vote to elect specific people, known as “electors” to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population.

    • Trump won – now what?

      In some sort of a reaction against the political elite, a corrupt system, and political correctness – the US has elected Donald Trump as president.

      On the one hand, it is more or less impossible to foresee the president elects politics on IT, mass surveillance, and civil rights. (OK, he has opened up for torture of suspected terrorists – but I’m not sure that he himself will remember or stand by that.)

    • Why TV News Couldn’t Quit Donald Trump

      Donald Trump’s relationship with the news media during his successful run for the presidency was, put politely, complex. A better word might be codependent. Trump lashed out regularly at those whose coverage of his campaign he found unfavorable — tweeting insults, banning and unbanning news organizations, promising to strengthen libel and defamation laws. But free media coverage, particularly from TV news outlets, was also the fuel that powered the Trump machine.

      What television news outlets received in return were outsize ratings. For the four weeks of Oct. 10-Nov. 6, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC averaged 84% more primetime viewers than they did over the same period a year ago. The increased numbers — and accompanying ad dollars — rolled in as the networks handed large swathes of airtime over to live feeds of Trump campaign events. Those same networks were caught by surprise Tuesday night by Trump’s victory. Now they must decide whether the trade-off was worth it.

      “I think they have to examine the amount of unfiltered airtime they gave to the President-elect,” said Katz Television Group’s Bill Carroll. “If you were going to look at any of the cable networks for the last year, often the key phrase would be, ‘And now we go to a rally for Donald Trump.’”

    • The Day After

      So: we wake up the morning after the US election to discover … what?

      Here’s my short term prediction, followed by my long term prediction. (And if you are American, I’m very, very, sorry.)

      Next couple of months: Obama exits. People will feel a strange sad fondness for the utopian era of good governance. (In time, the past 8 years will seem surrounded by a rosy glow, as of Camelot during the days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; they will even come to think kindly of George W. Bush.)

    • Industry, party figures mix with Trump loyalists for cabinet picks

      The US government’s science efforts are split across a variety of agencies. Some are obvious, like the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior, which oversees the national parks and Endangered Species Act. But others are less so. For example, the Commerce Department includes the NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while the National Institutes of Health falls within the Department of Health and Human Services.

      The people who run these agencies will have major say over the US’ research priorities for the next four years, and they’ll determine what role science plays in making policy decisions. So, as the Trump transition team begins the work of vetting potential candidates, the rumored names may say a lot about what we can expect.

      A lot of these rumors are preliminary enough that they essentially tell us nothing. For example, possible candidates floated for Commerce Secretary include everyone from the Republican National Committee finance chair (Lew Eisenberg), to two different business executives, to several of Trump’s former primary opponents like Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Perry. The NOAA keeps one of the US’ two temperature records used for climate monitoring (NASA keeps the other), and it tracks the ocean’s health. (It may also get all of NASA’s earth sciences research.) But it’s hard to guess whether any of these figures would pay much attention to these activities, much less make major revisions in them.

    • WikiLeaks not letting up on Clinton, Podesta

      WikiLeaks on Wednesday published a 36th batch of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, just hours after the presidential election concluded with Donald Trump’s victory over Clinton.

      The release, which includes 225 emails obtained from Podesta’s personal Gmail account, brings the total released by WikiLeaks to 58,660. The organization began releasing the messages in early October, and claimed at the time to have around 50,000 on hand. It isn’t clear how many more the website holds, or how long the releases will continue, but they seemed timed to hurt Clinton’s chances of becoming the next president.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • China’s vast Internet prison

      CHINA’S INTERNET is a universe of contradictions. It has brought hundreds of millions of people online and has become a vast marketplace for digital commerce, yet it is also heavily policed by censors to snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party. Under President Xi Jinping, the censors are working overtime to keep 721 million Internet users under control.

    • China’s new cybersecurity laws could have chilling effect on Tibet

      The Chinese government is to further restrict Internet use by adopting a new law that may have serious consequences for Tibetans who try to communicate with the outside world.

      The regressive measure named the Cybersecurity Law was passed by China’s Parliament on 7 November in order to combat what Beijing said is a growing threat of hacking and terrorism, but it has drawn criticism from the international community, business groups and human rights groups.

      The law aims to strengthen the country’s already restrictive internet controls by forcing companies to censor information the government declares “prohibited” and to support state surveillance requests. This includes requiring them to monitor network activity and provide investigative assistance to security agencies.

    • Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages

      Several far-right Polish groups have protested outside Facebook’s office in Warsaw after the social networking site temporarily blocked their profiles.

      About 120 people demonstrated in the Polish capital Saturday afternoon, denouncing what they said was “censorship.”

      Facebook recently blocked the profiles of far-right nationalist groups ahead of nationalist demonstrations on Independence Day next Friday, Nov. 11. In recent years, extremist groups have clashed violently with police on the annual holiday. Facebook has since unblocked the profiles.

    • When the screen goes blank

      The Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s 24-hour ban on the television channel NDTV India over its Pathankot coverage is being seen as an attempt to muzzle inconvenient live reportage. And worse, a case of selective vendetta. The Ministry has invoked the Cable Television Networks (Amendment) Rules, 2015, on the ground that the channel broadcast “crucial information” which compromised national security. These rules prohibit “live coverage of any anti-terrorist operation by security forces” and restrict media coverage to “periodic briefing” by a designated officer “till such operation concludes”. It is not clear if the channel’s impugned broadcast was ‘live coverage’ or just ‘reportage’.

    • Censorship and ‘censorship’

      AT&T, the communications conglomerate which owns Direct TV, was hauled into the court of public opinion Friday, charged with censorship for pulling the plug on Fox News.

      Irate customers of the satellite television subscriber service took to the internet to voice their suspicions, tar and feathers at the ready.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • A madman has been given the keys to the surveillance state

      When the USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law on October 26, 2001, it erased many of the vital checks and balances that stood between the American people and their government. As Bush supporters cheered the unprecedented power that their people in Washington now held, the civil liberties world warned them: “Your president has just fashioned a weapon that will be wielded by all who come after him.”

    • Facebook built another Snapchat clone specifically for emerging markets [Ed: Facebook comes up with new ways to spy on people people, hoarding more secrets that can be sold]

      We’ve seen this play out before. Twice, in fact. In both instances — first with Poke, then with Slingshot — Facebook’s attempt to create a legitimate Snapchat competitor flopped.

    • Google’s Android Phones Threaten Democracy, ACLU Technologist Warns

      The editors at Businessweek like that approach. In a Halloween post on Bloomberg View, the editors argued privacy would be better served if internet service providers gave consumers the option to pay for it rather than for the FCC to require—as it recently has—that consumers must opt in to corporate surveillance. The editors wrote, “So-called pay-for-privacy policies, in which companies charge users more in exchange for not tracking them, is one promising approach.”

      It turns out that privacy already has a price, and one can roughly find it in a straightforward way, according to Christopher Soghoian, a technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. It runs about $400. That’s the price of the cheapest new iPhone available on the market today.

      In a recently released TED talk, Soghoian said there’s a “digital security divide” between wealthier iPhone users and generally low-income buyers of devices running on Google’s Android operating system. This threatens democracy, he argues, because today’s new civil rights movements run on mobile technology, but most of these new leaders’ followers will receive marching orders on phones that don’t protect them.

    • A Trumped America makes for bad UK surveillance, warns Open Rights Group

      THE OPEN RIGHTS GROUP (ORG) has been quick to express concerns that the new American president, a known reactionary blowhard, now runs the US National Security Agency (NSA) and will therefore work closely with GCHQ.

    • Trump’s torture support could mean the end of GCHQ-NSA relationship
    • Obama has handed a surveillance state and war machine to a maniac

      In a little over two months, Donald Trump – after his shocking victory last night – will control a vast, unaccountable national security and military apparatus unparalleled in world history. The nightmare that civil libertarians have warned of for years has now tragically come true: instead of dismantling the surveillance state and war machine, the Obama administration and Democrats institutionalised it – and it will soon be in the hands of a maniac.

      It will go down in history as perhaps President Obama’s most catastrophic mistake.

      The Obama administration could have prosecuted torturers and war criminals in the Bush administration and sent an unmistakable message to the world: torture is illegal and unconscionable. Instead the president said they would “look forward, not backward”, basically turning a clear felony into a policy dispute. Trump has bragged that he will bring back torture – waterboarding and “much worse”. He has talked about killing the innocent family members of terrorists, openly telling the world he will commit war crimes.

    • President Obama Should Shut Down the NSA’s Mass Spying Before It’s Too Late

      Modern surveillance programs would be a disaster under President Trump

      President Obama has just 71 days until Donald Trump is inaugurated as our next commander-in-chief. That means he has a matter of weeks to do one thing that could help prevent the United States from veering into fascism: declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government’s unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can — before Trump is the one running it.

    • Scared About Trump Wielding FBI And NSA Cyber Power? You Should Be
    • People in tech are freaking out about Donald Trump being given control of the NSA

      Last month, Wired published a story with the headline “Imagine if Donald Trump controlled the NSA.” Now there’s no need to imagine.

      Trump overcame all odds on Wednesday when he became the 45th president-elect of the United States. As a result, he’s about to gain control of the US intelligence agencies, including the NSA (National Security Agency).

    • Could President Trump Really Turn the NSA Into a Personal Spy Machine?

      It’s the nightmare scenario that many worried about: the US elects a president who uses the country’s nearly omnipotent surveillance powers for his or her own gain. Edward Snowden has described the NSA’s spying capabilities as the “architecture of oppression,” with the fear being that it could be deployed by a malicious commander in chief.

      But what could President Trump, a man who has incited hate speech against minorities and threatened to jail his political rivals, actually do with the NSA? Could he turn the NSA into his own personal spying army?

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Girls as young as 12 married off overseas, dropped off at school by 30-year-old husbands

      A Sydney woman, who attended Islamic colleges in Sydney’s west, says girls as young as 12 would be married off overseas and some were dropped off at school by husbands aged in their 30s.

      Iraqi-born Bee al-Darraj, now 24, said she tried to report multiple counts of child marriage among her friends and relatives to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) without success.

    • Erdogan: Don’t heed what Europe says, listen to what Allah says

      Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on his supporters not to heed what “Europe says and care about what Allah says,” on the latest developments in his country which the European Union described as “extremely worrying.”

      Addressing a public gathering in the capital Ankara, Erdogan slammed the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) leaders and lawmakers, 10 of whom Turkish authorities imprisoned since Friday.

      “Those who lean on terrorists will continue paying the price,” said Erdogan referring to a speech by the now jailed HDP co-chair Figen Yuksekdag.

      The HDP co-chair had earlier praised the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) fight against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

      “We lean on the YPG, YPJ, and Rojava,” Yuksekdag had declared in a July 2015 speech to a crowd in the Suruc district of Urfa Province right across the border with the town of Kobani in Syrian Kurdistan.

      Kobani was notably saved from a complete IS takeover earlier in the year by the US-backed Kurdish forces.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Net neutrality is suddenly on the chopping block

      The release of the FCC’s net neutrality rules in 2015 heralded one of the most important progressive changes to the internet in memory. The rules, which barred data throttling and paid fast lanes, were celebrated as a central tenet of Obama-era government regulation. At the time, Obama said the “decision will protect innovation and create a level playing field for the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

      Now it seems possible that next generation won’t see net neutrality in action. Although telecom policy was hardly a central pillar of Trump’s candidacy, he has gone on record against it. “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab,” Trump tweeted in 2014. “Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.” (It’s unclear what Trump means with comparisons to the FCC’s long-eliminated Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to provide airtime for opposing views. Conservative media was also not “targeted” by net neutrality in any tangible way.)

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Troll Backs Down When Faced With Exposure

        Companies that make money from threatening alleged file-sharers are known for their bullying tactics but those who are prepared to fight back can enjoy success. A letter sent by a defense lawyer to the copyright trolls behind the movie London Has Fallen provides an excellent and highly entertaining example.

11.09.16

Links 9/11/2016: Xen 4.6.4 and 4.7.1, Tor 0.2.9.5 Alpha

Posted in News Roundup at 9:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

    • Get Trained and Certified on Kubernetes with The Linux Foundation and CNCF

      Companies in diverse industries are increasingly building applications designed to run in the cloud at a massive, distributed scale. That means they are also seeking talent with experience deploying and managing such cloud native applications using containers in microservices architectures.

    • Kernel Summit + Linux Plumbers 2016

      Last week was the annual kernel summit and Linux Plumbers Conference in Santa Fe, NM. Like other conferences, this involved a bunch of scheduled talks and lots of hallway track (and plenty of Mexican food).

    • Cloud Native Computing Foundation Adds New Project, Grows Membership

      With Kubernetes momentum building, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation adds a fourth project, announces new members and starts a certification program.
      The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which got its start in July 2015 as a vendor-neutral home for the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration platform, is now a broader effort. On Nov. 8, the CNCF announced new members, certification, training and a new project at the inaugural Cloud Native Con, which is co-located with KubeCon in Seattle.

    • Canonical and Others Join Cloud Native Computing Foundation

      When The Linux Foundation announced the Cloud Native Computing Foundation last year, its members already represented some of the most powerful technology and open source leaders around. Right out of the gate, members included AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch SUPERNAP, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks.

    • Thunderbolt Networking Support For Linux Revised Once More

      Back during the summer we last wrote about Thunderbolt networking support for Linux being worked on. Back then the patches were up to its v3 revision while coming out today is the ninth version of these patches, but at least the end might finally be in sight.

    • Graphics Stack

      • HiZ Improvement For Intel Mesa Driver Has Possible Small Performance Gains

        Mesa Git continues to be an exciting place to live for open-source GPU driver fans.

        Landing Tuesday in Mesa Git was a HiZ auxiliary buffer support for Skylake “Gen 9″ hardware and that was followed by support for sampling with HiZ, again something for Skylake and newer.

        With this HiZ-based sampling, performance improvements can be expected in some cases. The Git commit notes of gains between 0.4~2.2% for some OpenGL tests. While their Vulkan driver has taken much focus lately along with completing OpenGL 4.5 compliance, great to see the Intel Mesa driver continuing to receive performance optimizations.

    • Benchmarks

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Q4OS 1.8 “Orion” GNU/Linux Distro Ships with Brand New Trinity 14.0.4 Desktop

        Today, November 9, 2016, the developers of the Q4OS GNU/Linux distribution were pleased to inform Softpedia about the release and immediate availability of the Q4OS 1.8 “Orion” release.

      • Alpine Linux 3.4.6 released

        The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.4.6 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

        This is a bugfix release of the v3.4 musl based branch, based on linux-4.4.30 kernels and it contains important security fixes for the kernel.

      • IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 107 released

        This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 107. It mainly comes with a fix for the Dirty COW vulnerability in the Linux kernel and fixes various issues with the latest DNS proxy update in Core Update version 106.

      • Announcing Rockstor 3.8.15

        I am thrilled to announce the release of Rockstor 3.8.15. It’s been a long release cycle and It’s our 30th release, woohoo! We have entered a new phase of Rockstor community growth with steady patches from dedicated contributors. A total of 43 issues were closed making this a substantial update. Several enhancements were made to the UI, prominently to the dashboard. I’d like to also highlight the big(design and implementation) refactoring of our backend disk management. Last but not least, numerous improvements and bugfixes were committed throughout the stack. Please see the list below for detailed log of all patches that went in.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Red Hat Family

      • Now Available: Red Hat Certificate System 9.1 & Red Hat Directory Server 10.1

        Today we are pleased to announce the release of Red Hat Certificate System 9.1 and Red Hat Directory Server 10.1, both supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3.

        Red Hat Certificate System, based on the open source PKI capabilities of the Dogtag Certificate System, is designed to provide Certificate Life Cycle Management (i.e. to issue, renew, suspend, revoke, archive/recover, and manage the single and dual-key X.509v3 certificates needed to handle strong authentication, single sign-on, and secure communications).

      • Red Hat Named a Leader in Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management
      • Is Red Hat’s channel strategy paying off in Australia?

        Red Hat’s Australian operation is aiming to see a 50/50 split between direct and indirect revenues by the end of the company’s current financial year.

        If the company’s local business does, indeed, reach this equilibrium between channel and non-channel sales, it will have been helped along by the local team’s ongoing efforts to invest time and money into the Australian IT channel.

        “The channel business has been growing consistently now,” Red Hat Australia’s sales and channel director, Colin Garro, told ARN. “From a go-to-market perspective, we’ve deliberately set out to grow our channel business.”

        When Garro began working at Red Hat Australia in 2012, a large part of the open source software vendor’s local revenue was from direct sales, rather than channel-based activities.

      • Fedora

        • Your Last Chance To Test Out Fedora 25

          Fedora 25 is currently scheduled for release next week on 15 November. The Go/No-Go meeting for it is tomorrow so there’s still the chance it could be delayed but a (hopefully) final release candidate is now available for last minute testing.

        • Factory 2.0, Sprint 3 Report

          This was our first full sprint with the new team! Welcome, Jan Kaluza, Courtney Pacheco, Vera Karas, and Stanislav Ochotnicky. We’re glad to have Filip Valder join us in sprint 4 starting today.

          Our top priority in sprint 3 was making sure that the base runtime team isn’t blocked. They have a big job ahead of themselves to curate and build a collection of base modules at the core of the distro, and they need to use our prototype build tooling to do it. Anytime they’re blocked, the Factory 2.0 team is trying to chase down the solution — fixing tracebacks and developing new features. Cheers to Matt Prahl and Jan Kaluza for staying on top of this.

          Meanwhile, we’re continuing apace with the Dependency Chain and Deserialization epics that we originally scheduled for work this quarter. Mike Bonnet has been chasing down difficult technical pre-requisites for the later (message bus enablement), Matt Prahl demoed his dependency chain web UI, and Courtney Pacheco is giving shape to our metrics project (so we can have some confidence that future pipeline changes we make actually improve the state of affairs).

    • Debian Family

      • A few impressions of DebConf 16 in Cape Town

        Firstly, thanks to everyone who came out and added their own uniqueness and expertise to the pool. The feedback received so far has been very positive and I feel that the few problems we did experience was dealt with very efficiently. Having a DebConf in your hometown is a great experience, consider a bid for hosting a DebConf in your city!

      • Derivatives

        • Univention Corporate Server 4.1-4 Simplifies the Migration to Dockerize Apps

          Softpedia was informed today, November 8, 2016, by Univention’s Maren Abatielos about the release and general availability of the fourth point release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.1.

          Shipping with the latest security updates from the Debian Stable (Jessie) software repositories, Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.1-4 adds a bunch of interesting improvements and new features to the Linux-based, server-oriented operating system from Univention. Among these, we can mention the implementation of Samba 4.5.1 for better Active Directory compatibility and DRS replication.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Embedded PC runs Ubuntu on Tegra TX1

            Connect Tech’s “Rudi” mini-PC runs Ubuntu on an Nvidia Jetson TX1 COM with 4GB LPDDR4, eMMC and mSATA, 5x USB, 2x GbE, mini-PCIe, and -20 to 80°C support.

            Like many recent embedded computers. Connect Tech’s 135 x 105 x 50mm Rudi Embedded System fudges the line between mini-PC and a full-fledged industrial PC. Aimed at “deployable computer vision and deep learning applications,” the system ships with a Linux For Tegra R24.2 distribution based on 64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 pre-installed on 16GB of eMMC. Like Connect Tech’s Rosie embedded computer, the Rudi runs Nvidia’s quad-core, 64-bit Tegra TX1 SoC on Nvidia’s Jetson TX1 computer-on-module.

          • Ubuntu Budgie Is Now an Official Ubuntu Flavor

            Just a few moments ago, Softpedia was informed by budgie-remix developers David Mohammed and Udara Madubhashana that their GNU/Linux distribution built around the Budgie desktop environment is now an official Ubuntu flavor.

          • Ubuntu Budgie Becomes An Official Flavor

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Lubuntu 16.10 – enjoyable motley lightness

              Lubuntu is one flavour of the Ubuntu operating system that Linux notes from DarkDuck ignored for quite some time. The blog exists for 6 years now, but the first review of Lubuntu 16.04 was only written in September 2016, 2 months ago.

              Lubuntu 16.10 was released since then, so let’s have a look on this new release now. I have also written a review of Kubuntu 16.10 recently, so I will compare Lubuntu and Kubuntu here and there as we go.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-driven COM/carrier offers mid-range Zynq

      MYIR has launched a COM that runs Linux on a Zynq-7015 ARM/FPGA SoC, and mounts on a carrier with USB, GbE, HDMI, PMOD, and FMC I/O.

      MYIR’s MYC-C7Z015 computer-on-module and MYD-C7Z015 development board are variations on the MYC-C7Z010/20 COM with accompanying MYD-C7Z010/20 baseboard. Instead of offering a Xilinx Zynq-7010 or -7020 SoC, the MYC-C7Z015 provides the Zynq-7015, which has the same dual 667MHz to 866MHz Cortex-A9 subsystem, but offers an Artik 7 FPGA variant that falls in between the -7010 and -7020. The Zynq-7015 features 74k logic cells, 160 DSP slices, 380KB block RAM, and four 6.25Gbps transceivers.

    • First 3.5-inch Apollo Lake single board computers appear

      Aaeon and Avalue each unveiled 3.5-inch SBCs using Intel’s Apollo Lake processors, providing triple display support, wide-range power, and up to 8GB of RAM.

      Aaeon’s GENE-APL5 and Avalue’s ECM-APL are the first 3.5-inch (146 x 101mm) form factor single board computers we’ve seen that support Intel’s 14nm-fabricated “Apollo Lake” Atom E3900 SoCs. The Avalue model is the only one with optional industrial temperature support.

    • Orange Pi PC 2 Is A Cheap Quad Core Linux Computer For $20 That Runs Ubuntu

      A new addition to the community of single board computers is the Orange Pi PC 2. It is a Linux computer which packs a 64-bit quad-core CPU. It can run various Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian, and Android. The tiny computer is available for $20.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Top 3 questions job seekers ask in open source

    As a recruiter working in the open source world, I love that I interact every day with some of the smartest people around. I get to hear about the cool projects they’re working on and what they think about the industry, and when they are ready for a new challenge. I get to connect them to companies that are quietly changing the world.

    But one thing I enjoy most about working with them is their curiosity: they ask questions, and in my conversations, I hear a lot of inquiries about the job search and application process. That makes sense; it’s often opaque, never the same for any two people, and we are bombarded daily with new advice on every platform. So I asked my colleague at Greythorn, Mary Kypreos, to help me determine which questions we get the most often. With her assistance, I’ve answered the three most common questions we get.

  • Open source FIWARE platform creates new IoT business opportunities

    The European-funded IoT open source platform FIWARE has matured significantly in the past two years according to developers, and is now being used in industrial production cases, pilot smart city, and utilities projects. Two projects using the FIWARE platform include a city water quality pilot and an early warning system to identify and prevent pest risks to agricultural crops.

    To further support industry uptake, FIWARE has recently formalized a foundation to lead community efforts. The Foundation is expected to see a new wave of community participation in the open source platform, which already has significant links with other open source projects. For example, FIWARE’s testbed environment—FIWARE Labs—uses a multi-region cloud environment built on OpenStack.

  • Open source needs to deliver diversity

    Tech’s gender gap is no secret. It has been widely discussed for a decade, yet little progress has been made. In the five years between 2010 and 2015, the percentage of women in tech jobs in the UK increased from 17% to just 18%. This figure is underwhelming to say the least, but there is one critical area of technology where the gender gap is even wider.

    Analysis conducted last year by the co-founder of freelance software developer network Toptal found that just 5.4% of GitHub users with over 10 contributions from their sample were female. This indicates that open source software development teams are even less diverse than typical corporate software development teams.

  • Google unveils ‘Code-in 2016′ open source mentor organizations

    Open source software and ideology is critical to the future of technology. As more and more people demand transparency in the programs and applications they use, companies will have to take notice.

    To keep the open source movement going, it must be handed down to incoming developers. In other words, the children are our future, and education is key. Google’s “Code-In” contest is a great program that invites teen students to directly contribute to quality open source projects. Now, the search giant finally announces the projects that will be participating as “mentors”.

  • 4 open source initiatives that need your help

    What makes open source projects special isn’t the software or even the licensing, it’s the pooling of talents and the spirit of free giving around these projects.

    But not all open source initiatives become the object of corporate sponsorship or widespread devotion. And some that get such support don’t always keep it.

  • Another Old Intel Motherboard Gets Picked Up By Coreboot

    If you still are running Intel i945 era hardware, you may be happy to know another motherboard from this time is now supported by mainline Coreboot.

    The newest motherboard supported by Coreboot is the Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2L. This micro-ATX i945 motherboard from the Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Duo days has DDR2-667 support, Intel GMA 950 graphics, SATA 2.0, Gigabit LAN, and Intel HD Audio.

  • Events

  • Healthcare

    • Two Regenstrief innovators win AMIA’s Lindberg Award for open source EHR work in developing countries

      Burke Mamlin, MD, and Paul Biondich, MD, of the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, will receive the 2016 Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association for their work on open source software.

      AMIA’s Lindberg award recognizes individuals for technological, research, or educational contribution that advances biomedical informatics.

      Mamlin, an internist, and Biondich, a pediatrician, are pioneers in the development, testing, and use of open source software to support the delivery of healthcare in developing countries.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Why keep Open States going?

      After the closure of Sunlight Labs, the Open States project is heading in a new direction.

    • Open Data

      • “500,000 data scientists needed in European open research data”

        There is an alarming shortage of data experts both globally and in the European Union. This is partly based on an archaic reward and funding system for science and innovation, sustaining the article culture and preventing effective data publishing and re-use. A lack of core intermediary expertise has created a chasm between e-infrastructure providers and scientific domain specialists.

  • Programming/Development

    • GStreamer and Synchronisation Made Easy

      A lesser known, but particularly powerful feature of GStreamer is our ability to play media synchronised across devices with fairly good accuracy.

      The way things stand right now, though, achieving this requires some amount of fiddling and a reasonably thorough knowledge of how GStreamer’s synchronisation mechanisms work. While we have had some excellent talks about these at previous GStreamer conferences, getting things to work is still a fair amount of effort for someone not well-versed with GStreamer.

Leftovers

  • BSA settles Australian software piracy cases

    Software industry advocacy group, the BSA|The Software Alliance, has settled three court cases in Australia, awarded a total of $58,000 in damages following the unlicensed use of software programmes owned by its members – Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft – in breach of copyright law.

    The first case, Meldan (Vic) Pty Ltd, trading as Granvue Homes, a project home builder, paid $35,000 in damages for the use of unlicensed software, following an audit which revealed use of unlicensed product keys for Adobe Acrobat, Autodesk, AutoCAD and and Microsoft Office software.

    BSA says the Victorian settlement is the first for the state in 2016, following a record number of settlements for Victoria in 2014 and 2015 above any other state, “indicating an increase in Victorian business accountability in 2016 for software compliance”.

    In another case, Sosan Pty Ltd, an architectural model maker in Brisbane, was found to be using Autodesk Building Design Suite in excess of their license entitlements. In addition to paying damages of $18,000, Sosan has purchased the necessary licenses to legalise ongoing software deployments.

  • Croydon tram overturns: ‘Some loss of life’ and two trapped

    There has been “some loss of life” and dozens of people have been injured after a tram overturned in south London, police have said.

    British Transport Police said it was “too early to confirm numbers” following the derailment in Croydon just after 06:00 GMT.

    A number of people were freed but it is believed two people remain trapped.

    The cause of the crash is unclear, with investigators from the Rail Accident Investigation Branch on the way.

  • Science

    • Gus Grissom taught NASA a hard lesson: “You can hurt yourself in the ocean”

      Gus Grissom had just entered the history books. A mere 10 weeks after Alan Shepard made America’s first human flight into space, Grissom followed with the second one, a 15-minute suborbital hop that took him to an altitude of 189km above the blue planet. After the small Mercury capsule’s parachutes deployed, Grissom splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, seemingly bringing a flawless mission to a close.

      Only it wasn’t flawless, nor was it closed. At that moment, Gus Grissom almost drowned.

  • Security

    • Security, Cyber, and Elections (part 1)

      The US election cycle has been quite heavily dominated by cyber security issues. A number of cyber security experts have even stepped forward to offer their solutions to how to keep safe. Everyone has problems with their proposals, that fundamentally they all stem from not understanding the actual threat.

      Achieving security is possible using counterintelligence principles, but it requires knowing what you want to protect, who you want to protect it from, and then implementing that plan. I expect this post to be deeply unpopular with everyone, but I’ll explain my position anyway.

    • DDoS attack halts heating in Finland amidst winter

      A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack halted heating distribution at least in two properties in the city of Lappeenranta, located in eastern finland. In both of the events the attacks disabled the computers that were controlling heating in the buildings.

      Both of the buildings where managed by Valtia. The company who is in charge of managing the buildings overall operation and maintenance. According to Valtia CEO, Simo Rounela, in both cases the systems that controlled the central heating and warm water circulation were temporarily disabled.

      In the city of Lappeenranta, there were at least two buildings whose systems were knocked down by the network attack. In a DDoS attack the network is overloaded by traffic from multiple locations with the aim of causing the system to fail.

    • Communications watchdog: Criminals behind home automation system cyber attack

      The Finnish communications regulator Ficora said it suspects criminal entities of coordinating a web attack that disrupted home automation systems in the southeastern city of Lappeenranta. However the agency said that the real target of the attack may not have been in Finland.

      “According to our information, the systems in question are not the intended targets in this case, but they were compromised in a cyber attack that focused on European entities. In other words, it seems that there was some criminal group behind it,” said Jarkko Saarimäki, head of Ficora’s cyber security centre.

      Officials said that the event bore the hallmark of a denial of service (DoS) strike, which floods a service which so much web traffic that it is unable to provide services normally.

    • Researchers hack Philips Hue smart bulbs from the sky

      Security researchers in Canada and Israel have discovered a way to take over the Internet of Things (IoT) from the sky.

      Okay, that’s a little dramatic, but the researchers were able to take control of some Philips Hue lights using a drone. Based on an exploit for the ZigBee Light Link Touchlink system, white hat hackers were able to remotely control the Hue lights via drone and cause them to blink S-O-S in Morse code.

    • IoTSeeker Scanner Finds Smart Devices With Dumb Credentials

      The IoTSeeker tool from Rapid7 is designed to comb through users’ networks and identify common IoT devices with default usernames and passwords enabled. Those are the devices upon which botnets such as Mirai feed, especially those with telnet exposed on default ports. Mirai searches for devices with telnet enabled and using default credentials and then compromises them and begins scanning again.

    • DDoS Attack and Resiliency Measures

      Recently DDoS has come into the news because of recent attack (by IoT devices) on Twitter. Although DDoS is not a new kind of attack, because of the advent of IoT, the “smart” devices are new victims for web-based attacks, and as per the predictions it is more likely to grow. What makes this situation even more perilous is the rapid growth of IoT devices out there on the market. As per the estimate, there would be around 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.

      The DDoS attacks cannot be mitigated completely but by taking some measures the effect can be minimized. This is the theme of this article. Let’s first understand…

    • Donald Trump’s campaign website ‘hacked’ by little poop emoji

      For a few hours the banner of Donald Trump’s website contained a familar face. The poop emoji.

      Perhaps foreshadowing the state in which we’re in, the little character appeared in the banner of donaldjtrump.com on Tuesday afternoon.

      This was a bug rather than a hack, and it allowed users to write in whatever they wished by adding it into the URL.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • 1 dead, multiple people shot near Azusa polling station as heavily armed man opens fire

      One person was killed and at least three others were wounded Tuesday in an active shooting near a polling place in Azusa.

      Authorities said police were dealing with at least one female suspect who was heavily armed. But several witnesses interviewed by The Times said the shooter was a man.

      “This is an active situation,” said Azusa Police Chief Steve Hunt, adding it’s too early to determine whether the violence was in any way related to the election.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks published 300 more emails from Clinton’s campaign chief

      Although the US presidential election is over, WikiLeaks is continuing to publish the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, who remains a major player in Washington. This is the 36th batch of emails, released in a constant drip over the past month.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Environmentalists Target Bankers Behind Pipeline

      In early August, just as protesters from across the country descended on North Dakota to rally against an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, some of the world’s biggest banks signed off on a $2.5 billion loan to help complete the sprawling project.

      Now, those banks — which include Citigroup and Wells Fargo of the United States, TD Bank of Canada and Mizuho of Japan — have come under fire for their role in bankrolling the pipeline. In an open letter on Monday, 26 environmental groups urged those banks to halt further loan payments to the project, which the Sioux say threatens their sacred lands and water supply.

      In campaigning to reduce the world’s carbon emissions, environmentalists have increasingly focused on the financiers behind the fossil fuel industry — highlighting their role in financing coal, oil and gas projects. It is an expansion of traditional protest efforts, and it has met with some early success.

      Environmental groups have also criticized the Dakota Access pipeline as outdated infrastructure with no place in a world racing to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The 1,172-mile pipeline is expected to carry nearly half a million barrels of crude oil daily out of the Bakken fields of North Dakota, according to the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners.

    • Ecological Impact Assessments Aren’t Protecting Bats from Wind Farms

      Nothing is free in nature and this includes wind power. A particular concern with wind turbines is their effects on bats, which may often be found darting among treetops en masse while on the hunt for bugs to eat. When those treetops turn out to be spinning turbine blades, bad things happen: a bat might be hit directly, or it might wind up with bleeding lungs courtesy of abrupt changes in air pressure around turbines. Dozens of bats may be killed in a single night, only to be found the next morning littered underneath 30-foot turbine blades spinning at up to 80 miles per hour.

      The global standard for predicting such impacts from wind farms—and impacts from energy projects, generally—is the ecological impact assessment (EIA). In North America and Europe, bats are protected species (by the Endangered Species Act and EUROBATS, respectively), which means that such assessments are taken very seriously and are prepared at often great cost to wind farm developers. And, given this cost, we would hope that wind farm EIAs are actually doing something to protect bat populations. Alas, this does not seem to be the case, according to a study published Monday in Current Biology from the University of Exeter in the UK. Simply, the perception of risk revealed in the EIA process was not enough to predict actual bat casualties following construction of wind turbines. Bats are just too random.

    • Iran is back: Total signs $2 billion gas deal

      Foreign oil firms are returning to Iran for the first time since sanctions were eased early this year.

      France’s Total signed an agreement in principle on Tuesday to help Iran develop its giant South Pars gas field, together with Chinese state oil company CNPC.

      “Following Total’s successful development of phases 2 and 3 of South Pars in the 2000s, the group is back to Iran to develop and produce another phase of this giant gas field,” said Total CEO Patrick Pouyanné in a statement.

      Total (TOT) will operate the South Pars project with a stake of 50.1%. CNPC will own 30% and Iran’s Petropars 19.9%.

      The first phase will consist of 30 wells and two platforms connected to existing onshore treatment facilities by two pipelines at a cost of about $2 billion.

  • Finance

    • Taxpayers are still bailing out Wall Street, eight years later

      Eight-years after taxpayers rescued the U.S. financial system, some of the country’s largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, continue to receive billions in bailout money, according to government data.

      Wells Fargo is eligible for up to $1.5 billion in bailout funds over the next seven years. JPMorgan and Bank of America could receive $1.1 billion and $964 million respectively.

      The continuous flow of funds is a remnant of the $700 billion bailout effort, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP, put in place during the financial crisis. Some of that money, about $28 billion, was carved out to help distressed homeowners by paying banks to lower their interest rates and monthly payments.

      The program, the Home Affordable Modification Program, has undergone several revamps over the last few years and fallen short of helping the 3 million to 4 million homeowners the Obama administration initially hoped. But it continues to operate — HAMP will accept its last homeowner application at the end of this year — and big banks continue to be paid based on how many homeowners they help.

    • TPP ratification down to the wire in waning Obama White House

      No matter who prevails in Tuesday’s presidential election, the U.S. ambassador to Canada says President Barack Obama is determined to win an uphill fight to get congressional approval of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership deal during the lame-duck session.

      Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican challenger Donald Trump are opposed to the 12-country global trade deal, which includes Canada but excludes countries such as China and India. Both candidates have criticized the TPP for not being strong enough to provide more jobs to the U.S. economy.

      The intensely debated trade pact goes to a congressional vote at the end of the 2016 session. Congress has granted Mr. Obama “fast-track” authority over the deal, which allows lawmakers only to either reject or ratify it.

    • Obama will push for TPP trade deal in last days of term: ambassador

      President Barack Obama will use every remaining day of his term to win congressional approval for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, says the U.S. ambassador to Canada.

      Envoy Bruce Heyman says that remains the position of the current administration as Americans head to the polls today to select a new president from two protectionist candidates.

      Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump both oppose the 12-country Pacific Rim trade deal that would encompass 40 per cent of the world’s economy.

      Heyman had no comment on the two candidates’ positions on trade, but he made it clear in an interview that Obama will use the remaining time he has left in office to push the pact through Congress.

      There has been much speculation that Obama would use the period between the Nov. 8 election and the Jan. 20 inauguration of his successor to finalize the deal.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Hillary concedes in purple, color of pain, suffering, Last Rites, royalty

      Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded Wednesday while dressed in purple, the liturgical color of pain, suffering, royalty and even death.

      Her black and purple suit matched the tie wore by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and others on the New York hotel stage including running mate Sen. Tim Kaine, his wife Anne Holton, and daughter Chelsea.

      During her much applauded address, Clinton talked about the pain she felt, quoted scripture, and encouraged her younger supporters to carry on her fight.

    • WikiLeaks not letting up on Clinton, Podesta

      WikiLeaks on Wednesday published a 36th batch of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, just hours after the presidential election concluded with Donald Trump’s victory over Clinton.

      The release, which includes 225 emails obtained from Podesta’s personal Gmail account, brings the total released by WikiLeaks to 58,660. The organization began releasing the messages in early October, and claimed at the time to have around 50,000 on hand. It isn’t clear how many more the website holds, or how long the releases will continue, but they seemed timed to hurt Clinton’s chances of becoming the next president.

    • WikiLeaks mocks Dems after election loss

      “By biasing its internal electoral market the DNC selected the less competitive candidate defeating the purpose of running a primary,” the official account tweeted near midnight.

    • White House doesn’t take potential Clinton pardon off the table

      The White House on Wednesday refused to say whether President Barack Obama would consider pardoning Hillary Clinton for her email scandal, but appeared to issue a warning to President-elect Donald Trump, saying powerful people should not exploit the criminal justice system for “political revenge.”

      As the Republican nominee, Trump has repeatedly suggested that Clinton could be thrown in jail during his presidency for mishandling classified materials through the private email server she used as secretary of state. Now that Trump is president-elect, Obama faces the delicate question of whether to issue a pardon to protect his preferred successor.

    • White House open to a Clinton pardon

      The White House isn’t ruling out the possibility of Hillary Clinton receiving a last-minute pardon from President Obama — even though she hasn’t been charged with a crime.

      Asked at Wednesday’s press briefing whether Obama had considered utilizing his unique executive power, press secretary Josh Earnest was cryptic.

      “The president has offered clemency to a substantial number of Americans who were previously serving time in federal prisons,” Earnest said.

      “And we didn’t talk in advance about the president’s plans to offer clemency to any of those individuals and that’s because we don’t talk about the president’s thinking, particularly with respect to any specific cases that may apply to pardons or commutations,” he added.

    • Jill Stein Files Complaint with FEC over Trump & Clinton Super PAC Coordination

      In more election news, Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in Washington, D.C., against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, alleging illegal coordination with their super PACs. These so-called dark money groups are allowed to raise unlimited amounts of funds for candidates, but they are not allowed to coordinate directly with the campaigns. In the complaint, however, Stein argues both Clinton and Trump have illegally coordinated with a handful of their super PACs.

    • Intelligence community is already feeling a sense of dread about Trump

      A palpable sense of dread settled on the intelligence community on Wednesday as Hillary Clinton, the candidate many expected to win, conceded the race to a GOP upstart who has dismissed U.S. spy agencies’ views on Russia and Syria, and even threatened to order the CIA to resume the use of interrogation methods condemned as torture.

    • What does a Donald Trump win mean for UK politics?

      It is 20 January 2017 and a cold wind is blowing across Washington’s Capitol as Donald John Trump raises his right hand and proclaims that he will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.

      As he looks the chief justice in the eye, hundreds of millions of people around the world are wondering what his four-year term will bring.

      Among them are UK civil servants and politicians, pondering – with negotiations for leaving the European Union also soon to begin – what all this means for their country.

      So, how well prepared is the UK for dealing with Mr Trump, who has never previously held elected office, and how is the future looking?

    • WikiLeaks founder Assange writes: ‘The real victor is the US public’

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange defended the decision to publish electronic messages showing “what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself,” saying his anti-secrecy group was not trying to influence the outcome of the election.

      The hacked emails, he said, were a matter of public interest.

      “The right to receive and impart true information is the guiding principle of WikiLeaks,” Assange said in a statement, adding: “Our organization defends the public’s right to be informed.”

      Regardless of who wins the presidential election, he said, “the real victor is the US public which is better informed as a result of our work.”

      WikiLeaks published a trove of emails that revealed embarrassing and sometimes damaging information from within the Clinton campaign. The emails showed that Clinton’s aides struggled to get past the controversy over her use of a private email server and expressed frustration at their candidate.

    • Greg Palast in Ohio on GOP Effort to Remove African Americans from Voter Rolls in Battleground State

      In an on-the-ground report from the battleground state of Ohio, investigative reporter Greg Palast has uncovered the latest in vote suppression tactics led by Republicans that could threaten the integrity of the vote in Ohio and North Carolina. On some polling machines, audit protection functions have been shut off, and African Americans and Hispanics are being scrubbed from the voter rolls through a system called Crosscheck. “It’s a brand-new Jim Crow,” Palast says. “Today, on Election Day, they’re not going to use white sheets to keep way black voters. Today, they’re using spreadsheets.”

    • Revealed: Bill Clinton says Jeremy Corbyn is ‘the maddest person in the room’ in private speech

      Bill Clinton described Jeremy Corbyn as the “maddest person in the room” in a private speech revealed by Wikileaks.

      The former US president, who could be returning to the White House as the husband of the next president, reportedly discussed the appointment of the Labour leader in a private speech at a Hillary for America fundraiser in Maryland in October 2015.

    • “Don’t boo, vote”: This election could be democracy’s last stop

      When I grow up, I want to be Charlie Pierce, who covers politics for Esquire and has toiled in our scrivener’s trade, as far as I can tell, since the late 1970s.

      I know, technically, he’s a couple of years younger than I am, but he writes with the fierce wit and well-aimed anger to which I aspire, and as this wheezing milk train of a presidential campaign clanks into the final station, few have been as perceptive when it comes to trying to figure out just what the hell has happened to America this year.

      Charlie Pierce has done so with great style throughout, but now, thanks to Donald Trump and just before Election Day, he has come to the end of his watchdog rope. He wrote on Saturday that Trump — to whom he refers as El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago — had “managed to exceed even my admittedly expansive limits for political obscenity.”

    • 4chan may have brought down pro-Clinton phone lines the day before the election

      Yesterday, as groups across the country hit the final stretch of their get-out-the-vote campaigns, workers at NextGen Climate noticed some problems with their automated dialer program. As the team started its morning hours, the program used to initiate and monitor voter calls was suddenly clunky, and cut out entirely for crucial hours in the afternoon.

      “It was slower in the morning, and then went down for hours at a time,” says NextGen’s Suzanne Henkels. The tool suffered intermittent downtime throughout the rest of the day. The campaign still made calls throughout the weekend, and was able to switch to backup methods of calling and texting to reach the remaining voters. Still, the attack caused significant trouble for the operation on the eve of Election Day.

      The downtime wasn’t a coincidence. Just after midnight on Sunday night, a post on 4chan’s /pol/ board announced an impending denial-of-service attack on any tools used by the Clinton campaign, employing the same Mirai botnet code that blocked access to Twitter and Spotify last month. One of those targets was TCN, the Utah-based call center company that runs NextGen’s dialer. According to the post’s author, the company was also providing phone services to Hillary Clinton’s offices in Nevada.

    • Understanding what lies behind Trump and Brexit

      As the US elections finish, many people are scratching their heads wondering what it all means. For example, is Trump serious about the things he has been saying, or is he simply saying whatever was most likely to make a whole bunch of really stupid people crawl out from under their rocks to vote for him? Was he serious about winning at all, or was it just the ultimate reality TV experiment? Will he show up for work in 2017, or like Australia’s billionaire Clive Palmer, will he set a new absence record for an elected official? Ironically, Palmer and Trump have both been dogged by questions over their business dealings, will Palmer’s descent towards bankruptcy be replicated in the ongoing fraud trial against Trump University and similar scandals?

      While the answer to those questions may not be clear for some time, some interesting observations can be made at this point.

      The world has been going racist. In the UK, for example, authorities have started putting up anti-Muslim posters with an eery resemblance to Hitler’s anti-Jew propaganda. It makes you wonder if the Brexit result was really the “will of the people”, or were the people deliberately whipped up into a state of irrational fear by a bunch of thugs seeking political power?

    • Trump’s tech plan: tariffs on electronics, ban on skilled tech migrants, cyber-weapons

      The United States Presidential Election has been run and at the time of writing looks almost certainly to have been won by Donald Trump.

      Which means we now have a decent idea of what’s in store for the global technology industry in the next four years. And it looks like a wild ride: Trump’s policies include a clamp down on H-1B visas, which will make it hard for US-based businesses to bring in skilled tech talent from abroad. H-1B critics argue the visas are a way to keep wages low by bringing in foreigners who work for less than American citizens. Supporters say the technology industries have a shortage of workers and therefore need foreigners to both fill seats and keep innovation humming along.

      Trump has also promised tariffs on imported products, especially from China, as part of a plan to ensure more companies manufacture in the USA. Apple shareholders beware: Trump once singled out the company as he feels it should “start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries.”

    • It’s Full-Bore Ahead For FBI’s Clinton Foundation Probe

      FBI agents across the country are continuing to actively pursue a broad political corruption investigation of the Clinton Foundation, a probe that is consuming the resources in the FBI’s Little Rock, Ark., field office where every agent assigned to public corruption matters now is working on the case, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

      “Everybody’s working the foundation in Little Rock,” a former senior FBI official told TheDCNF. There at least 10 agents involved, but it’s possible the Little Rock field office is “pulling bodies from other programs.”

    • Canada’s immigration website just crashed

      The Government of Canada’s immigration website crashed on Tuesday night as the US election results were rolling in.

      The site went down about 10:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and there was intermittent accessibility after that.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Turks Are Flocking to Tor After Government Orders Block of Anti-Censorship Tools

      Turkish internet users are flocking to Tor, the anonymizing and censorship-circumvention tool, after Turkey’s government blocked Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

      Usage of Tor inside of Turkey went up from around 18,000 users to 25,000 users on Friday, when the government started blocking the popular social media networks, according to Tor’s official metrics. To prevent Turks from doing exactly that and connecting to the blocked sites through censorship-circumvention tools such as Tor and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), the government took a step further and ordered internet providers to block those too.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • China adopts cyber security law in face of overseas opposition

      China adopted a controversial cyber security law on Monday to counter what Beijing says are growing threats such as hacking and terrorism, but the law triggered concerns among foreign business and rights groups.

      The legislation, passed by China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament and set to take effect in June 2017, is an “objective need” of China as a major internet power, a parliament official said.

      Overseas critics of the law say it threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors deemed “critical”, and includes contentious requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers in China.

      Rights advocates also say the law will enhance restrictions on China’s Internet, already subject to the world’s most sophisticated online censorship mechanism, known outside China as the Great Firewall.

    • Tim Berners-Lee warns of danger of chaos in unprotected public data

      Hackers could use open data such as the information that powers transport apps to create chaos, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has said.

      “If you disrupted traffic data for example, to tell everybody that all the roads south of the river are closed, so everybody would go north of the river, that would gridlock you [and] disable the city,” he said.

    • “DRM is Used to Lock in, Control and Spy on Users”

      In a scathing critique, the Free Software Foundation is urging the U.S. Government to drop the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions which protect DRM. The foundation argues that DRM is a violation of users’ rights, which under the guise of copyright protection is used to harm, control and spy on people.

    • Tor 0.2.9.5-alpha is released

      Hi, all! There is a new alpha release of the Tor source code, with numerous bugfixes. We’re getting closer to stable, but we still need testing!

      You can download the source from the usual place on the website. Packages should be up within a few days.

      Please remember to check the signature. Please also note that the signature may be with a key you aren’t familiar with. That’s because my PGP key changed a couple of months ago: see https://people.torproject.org/~nickm/key-transition-statement-2.txt.asc for more information.

    • Spyware routinely installed by UK schools to snoop on kids’ Web habits

      Over two-thirds of schools installed special software on school computers to spy on their pupils, responses to Freedom of Information requests have revealed.

      According to a report by Big Brother Watch, “classroom management software” is running on over 800,000 computers, laptops, and mobile phones found in 1,000 secondary schools across England and Wales. A whopping £2.5 million has been spent on the programs.

    • Spain publishes two guides on data protection in re-use of government information

      The Spanish Agency for Data Protection (Agencia Española de Protección de Dato, AEPD) has published two guides that should help Spanish institutions to publish public sector information (PSI) as open data.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • A Liberal Mother of Six Jailed for Challenging Saudi Taboos

      When Souad al-Shammary posted a series of tweets about the thick beards worn by Saudi clerics, she never imagined she would land in jail.

      She put up images of several men with beards: An Orthodox Jew, a hipster, a communist, an Ottoman Caliph, a Sikh, and a Muslim. She wrote that having a beard was not what made a man holy or a Muslim. And she pointed out that one of Islam’s staunchest critics during the time of Prophet Muhammad had an even longer beard than him.

      The frank comments are typical of this twice-divorced mother of six and graduate of Islamic law, who is in many ways a walking challenge to taboos in deeply conservative Saudi Arabia. Raised a devout girl in a large tribe where she tended sheep, al-Shammary is now a 42-year-old liberal feminist who roots her arguments in Islam, taking on Saudi Arabia’s powerful religious establishment.

      She has paid a price for her opinions. She spent three months in prison without charge for “agitating public opinion.” She has been barred by the government from traveling abroad. Her co-founder of the online forum Free Saudi Liberals Network, blogger Raif Badawi, is serving a 10-year prison sentence and was publicly lashed 50 times. Her father disowned her in public.

    • Russia orders inquiry into claims of FGM in Dagestan

      Russia has launched an investigation into claims that tens of thousands of girls in remote mountain areas, some as young as three months’ old, have been forced to undergo female genital mutilation.

      The general prosecutor’s office has acted following allegations that the life-threatening practice has been taking place “unchecked by the authorities” in the republic of Dagestan, Russia’s state-run news agency Tass reported.

    • Islamist ‘Morality Police’ Lurk in Troubled Swedish Suburbs

      Islamic “morality police” have become more active in vulnerable suburban areas across Sweden, which are in effect ghettoes where real police are hardly welcome. Girls’ rights have become heavily restricted when it comes to sporting activities, hanging out with guys or choosing partners, associations working against “honor crimes” stated.

    • These anti-terrorism posters echo Nazi propaganda

      My daily commute takes me through London’s Liverpool Street station. Most days I walk by a tiny touching statue, a bronze of two small children with a suitcase. A sign reads: “Für Das Kind”, meaning for the children. The statue commemorates the Kindertransport that rescued 10,000 child refugees and brought them by train to safety in Britain, escaping the persecution of Jews in Nazi Europe. Few of those children ever saw their families again. Most who could not leave were exterminated.

      Last week, just yards away from the statue, appeared a poster that fills me with horror. A looming, dark, hook-nosed figure dominates the foreground. This man is an object of suspicion, watched apprehensively by a pretty, pale-skinned young woman. This man is instantly identifiable – at least to anyone who knows world war two history – as the caricature Jew of Nazi propaganda posters.

      However inadvertently, the designers have used a horribly familiar antisemitic image. The impact goes far beyond these associations, serious as those are. A friend who was unaware of Nazi iconography revealingly said that she saw on the poster an “evil-looking dark-skinned man”. The image plays on people’s fears of “the other”, and creates anxiety about a suspicious “they” who may be hiding something, in the words of the poster.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • China’s Internet Controls Will Get Stricter, to Dismay of Foreign Business

      In August, business groups around the world petitioned China to rethink a proposed cybersecurity law that they said would hurt foreign companies and further separate the country from the internet.

      On Monday, China passed that law — a sign that when it comes to the internet, China will go its own way.

      The new rules, which were approved by the country’s rubber-stamp Parliament and will go into effect next summer, are part of a broader effort to better define how the internet is managed inside China’s borders.

      Officials say the rules will help stop cyberattacks and help prevent acts of terrorism, while critics say they will further erode internet freedom. Business groups worry that parts of the law — such as required security checks on companies in industries like finance and communications, and mandatory in-country data storage — will make foreign operations more expensive or lock them out altogether. Individual users will have to register their real names to use messaging services in China.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • Bulk block of pirate streaming sites ordered by Italian court

        A court in Rome has ordered that 152 sites involved in the unauthorised streaming of sporting events and films should be blocked by Italian ISPs.

        The request was made by the Guardia di Finanza, the country’s financial police force that has become increasingly involved in tackling online piracy.

      • CBC threatens podcast app makers, argues that RSS readers violate copyright

        The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation publishes several excellent podcasts, notably the As It Happens feed; like every podcast in the world, these podcasts are available via any podcast app in the same way that all web pages can be fetched with all web browsers — this being the entire point of podcasts.

        In a move of breathtaking, lawless ignorance, the CBC has begun to send legal threats to podcast app-makers, arguing that making an app that pulls down public RSS feeds is a “commercial use” and a violation of the public broadcaster’s copyrights.

        This is a revival of an old, dark era in the web’s history, when linking policies prevailed, through which publishes argued that they had the right to control who could make a link to their sites — that is, who could state the public, true fact that “a page exists at this address.”

        But the CBC is going one worse here: their argument is that making a tool that allows someone to load a public URL without permission is violating copyright law — it’s the same thing as saying, “Because Google is a for-profit corporation, any time a Chrome user loads a CBC page in the Chrome browser without the CBC’s permission, Google is violating CBC’s copyright.”

11.08.16

Links 8/11/2016: SUSE Release, Android Distribution Stats

Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Techrights Turns 10 Years Old

    The site Techrights is turning 10 years old. Though now called Techrights, it was best known as Boycott Novell until 2010. It has become an internationally recognized site whose aim has been advocacy of digital rights with the goal of maximizing freedom, reducing surveillance, and generally promoting the sharing of knowledge. This, in turn, requires transparent systems, open licensing terms, no censorship, and active collaboration among parties. Its focus has always included the fight against software patents and in recent years it pays special attention to the goings on and intrigues within the European Patent Office and their attempt to bring by hook or crook software patents into Europe.

  • Desktop

    • Lenovo releases BIOS for loading Linux on Yoga 900, IdeaPad 710S BIOS

      Lenovo took some heat from Linux users a few months ago when it was discovered that some of the company’s recent Windows laptops were configured in a way that blocked them from running Linux or other operating systems.

      Some saw a conspiracy, while others pointed out that it had to do with the lack of Linux drivers for the storage configuration in those laptops. Either way, the end result was that it was difficult, if not impossible to install Linux on a Lenovo Yoga 900 or IdeaPad 710 notebook.

    • After protest, Lenovo brings Linux compatibility to Yoga 900 and 900S [Ed: Techrights started the protest]

      Lenovo created a stir when it said the Yoga 900 and 900S hybrids would work only with Windows, not Linux. The company has now changed its stance, bringing Linux support to those PCs.

      The PC maker earlier this month issued a BIOS update so Linux can be loaded on Yoga 900, 900S and IdeaPad 710 models.

      The BIOS update adds an AHCI (Advance Host Controller Interface) SATA controller mode so users can load Linux on the laptops.

      This is a Linux-only BIOS, meaning it should be used only by those who want to load the OS. If you want to continue with Windows, do not load the firmware.

    • New Laptop / Problems with Windows part 896,324

      I had mentioned previously that I had been forced to purchase a new laptop. I decided that I didn’t want another Thinkpad. The Lenovo ones no longer have the high quality they had in the IBM days and while support is still pretty good by todays dismal standards it’s not worth the premium price. (If I’m buying it with my own money that is.) I had heard good thing about Dells’ Linux support so I looked into their offerings and ended up buying a Precision 7510. Mind you this model came with Windows 7 installed but I didn’t mind. As I wanted to install Debian according to my own specs anyway, I was ok with just knowing that the hardware would be compatible. So I prepared a Jessie USB installation stick (This model doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive.) and shrunk down the Windows installation (but not deleted it altogether for reasons to be explained below.)

  • Server

    • Mitchell Hashimoto talks about new technologies and DevOp tools

      A few weeks earlier, when I’d talked with him to kick off IT Pro’s coverage of ATO, I purposefully didn’t ask him about his upcoming conference talks because I didn’t want to spoil it for him or his audience. That he would talk about DevOps tools was a given. After all, HashiCorp, the company he co-founded and where he’s CTO, is known for tools like Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Consul and Vault, which are designed to help DevOps secure and operate distributed application infrastructures. In this keynote he would be talking about automation tools in general. Later in the day, he’d conduct a workshop that would focus specifically on his company’s products.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Certified Engineer: Alexandre Krispin

      Back in 2005, when I was 18, I met someone from Germany who used SUSE. In 2007 I bought my first computer from Apple, with Mac OS X. When I had to change my computer—maybe 2 years later—I did not have a lot of money and heard that those using Linux had to pay less to get the same quality offered by Unix systems like Mac OS X. I say “quality” because I read at the time that it was hassle-free because there were no viruses, etc. That’s what initially hooked me on Linux (that and Apple products were too expensive). When I finally started using Linux, I experienced the joy of being free to do whatever I wanted with my own computer—the desktop was completely customizable.

    • The Linux Foundation Launches its 2016 Guide to the Open Cloud

      The Linux Foundation has announced the release of its 2016 report “Guide to the Open Cloud: Current Trends and Open Source Projects.” This third annual report provides a comprehensive look at the state of open cloud computing. The foundation originally created the guide in response to market and industry confusion about which projects really stand out.

      According to Libby Clark, writing on Linux.com: “The report aggregates and analyzes industry research to provide insights on how trends in containers, microservices, and more shape cloud computing today. It also defines the open source cloud and cloud native computing and discusses why the open cloud is important to just about every industry.”

    • Linux Foundation Appoints Jeff Garzik to Board of Directors

      Garzik, formerly a 10-year employee at Red Hat, brings a wealth of Bitcoin Core development experience back to the leading open-source software development foundation. The Linux Foundation is spearheading a conglomerate of organizations involved with the Hyperledger Project, of which Bloq is a member. Garzik’s presence on the Linux Foundation’s board should hopefully help to bridge ongoing efforts in the open source, Linux world with advancements in the cryptocurrency space.

    • Move over Bitcoin, the blockchain is only just getting started

      It’s easy to think we’ve reached peak Bitcoin, but the blockchain at the heart of cryptocurrencies contains the seeds of something revolutionary.

      The blockchain is a decentralised electronic ledger with duplicate copies on thousands of computers around the world. It cannot be altered retrospectively, allowing asset ownership and transfer to be recorded without external verification.

      Investors have now realised the blockchain is bigger than Bitcoin. In the first quarter of 2016, venture-capital investment in blockchain startups overtook that in pure-play Bitcoin companies for the first time, according to industry researcher CoinDesk, which has tallied $1.1 billion (£840m) in deals to date.

      Even governments have taken an interest. Sir Mark Walport, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, published a report on the blockchain in January this year, outlining how the massively distributed shared ledger is “a database that tracks who owns a financial, physical or electronic asset”. But it could also, say, monitor driverless cars.

    • Linux Foundation Fumbles

      FLASH? LF webinars depend on FLASH!? This is the 21st century. Folks are using HTML5 and lots of other popular standards. Why is LF trying to hold the world back to a deprecated technology, one that only awkwardly works with their kernel?

    • Linux Foundation ‘Fails’ Linux Mint: Suggests Upgrade to Windows or Mac

      Excuse me if I have a little fun at the Linux Foundation’s expense.

      Linux Foundation failed textThis morning while perusing the day’s tech news, I ran across an article on Linux.com about a free webinar, “Open Source Automotive: How Shared Development Will Drive the Industry Forward,” being hosted on Wednesday by the Linux Foundation. This sounded like something I wouldn’t mind spending an hour watching, so I registered. Afterwards, I clicked a “Test Your System” link, just to make sure that I’d have no problems using the good ol’ FOSS Force machine.

      The results were a big surprise, and hearkened back to the bad ol’ days when open source and the rest of the world usually didn’t work and play well together. Browser, cookies, bandwidth and “Flash Test Video” all passed with flying colors. What didn’t pass? Our Linux Mint operating system.

      “We have detected that your operating system does not meet the optimal webinar specifications for listening to and/or viewing webinars,” the test automation said. “We recommend the following operating systems: Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, and the latest Mac OS X.”

      For an online event being hosted by the Linux Foundation? Really? I understand that the foundation isn’t very interested in desktop Linux, but…

    • Graphics Stack

    • Benchmarks

      • OpenGL vs. Vulkan With AMDGPU-PRO 16.40, Compared To NVIDIA On Linux

        At the end of October AMD released the long-awaited AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 update. For some birthday benchmarking fun today, I finished up a comparison of the AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 stack with its proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan components on various AMD GPUs compared to NVIDIA results using the 375.10 binary driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KaOS 2016.11 Distro Gets KDE Plasma 5.8.3 & Linux Kernel 4.8, AMDGPU by Default

        Today, November 7, 2016, the developers of the KaOS rolling GNU/Linux distribution were pleased to announce the release and immediate availability for download of KaOS 2016.11.

      • KaOS 2016.11

        KaOS is pleased to announce the 2016.11 release. As always with this rolling distribution, you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.27.0, Plasma 5.8.3, KDE Applications 16.08.2 & not yet released ports of KDE Applications. All built on Qt 5.7.0.

      • Krita 3.1 Digital Painting App Gets Closer, Beta 3 Is Out with More Improvements

        Today, November 7, 2016, the developers of the popular, open-source and cross-platform Krita digital painting software have released the third Beta milestone towards the major 3.1 update of the application.

        Krita 3.1 Beta 3 is here exactly two weeks after the announcement of the second Beta development snapshot, in an attempt to polish the upcoming release by patching various annoyances and adding some minor improvements. For examples, several crashes were addresses, and it’s possible to load swatch names in ACO files again.

      • digiKam 5.3.0 Open-Source Image Editor Released for Linux as an AppImage Bundle

        In the last minutes of November 7, 2016, the development team behind the open-source and cross-platform digiKam image editor, viewer and organizer software was proud to announce the release of digiKam 5.3.0.

        digiKam 5.3.0 is the third maintenance update to the stable 5.x series of the software project, bringing a month’s worth of bug fixes and general improvements. However, the biggest new change in digiKam 5.3.0 is the availability of an AppImage bundle that allows Linux users to install the application in virtually any GNU/Linux distribution.

      • digiKam 5.3.0 is published…

        After a 3rd release 5.2.0 published more than one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.3.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces an important common solution to deploy the application under Linux using AppImage bundle.

        AppImage is an open-source project dedicated to provide a simple way to distribute portable software as compressed binary file, that standard user can run as well, without to install special dependencies. All is included into the bundle, as last Qt5 and KF5 frameworks. AppImage use Fuse file-system, which is de-compressed into a temporary directory to start the application. You don’t need to install digiKam on your system to be able to use it. Better, you can use the official digiKam from your Linux distribution in parallel, and test the new version without any conflict with one used in production. This permit to quickly test a new release without to wait an official package dedicated for your Linux box. Another AppImage advantage is to be able to provide quickly a pre-release bundle to test last patches applied to source code, outside the releases plan.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Epiphany 3.22.2 Web Browser Improves Password Form Autofill Handling, Adblocker

        As reported earlier, the GNOME development team is hard at work these days to bring us the second and last point release of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, versioned 3.22.2.

      • Evolution 3.22.2 Groupware Client Released for GNOME 3.22.2 with Many Fixes

        The GNOME Project is preparing to unleash the second and last maintenance update of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, which already started to land in the stable repositories of various GNU/Linux distributions.

      • Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop Environment Now Available with Support for Vertical Panels

        Today, November 7, 2016, Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre tagged the final release of the Cinnamon 3.2.0 desktop environment on the GitHub page of the project, from where users can download the source archive if they want an early taste.

      • Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop Arrives
      • Reaching more FEDORA and GNOME newcomers at UTP

        With Hack Space permitting on November 11, the next Friday at UTP (Universidad Tecnológica del Perú – Technology University of Perú), I am going to present the Free Software Projects: FEDORA and GNOME. The workshop will be focused in installation of FEDORA and then build the jhbuild of GNOME as a challenge for more than 8 hours. Then, the journey will start at 10:00 p.m. and it will finish at 7:00 a.m.

      • GXml 0.13.1 Released

        Now you can convert your GObject classes in XML nodes. This is, you can read and write XML trees directly to object classes’ properties, from basic types to complex like object properties, representing XML element’s attributes, to other child elements, while you can use collection of child nodes.

        This has been easiest to implement than GXml.SerializableObjectModel, which requires you to read an XML tree and then translate to your object properties. This should be slower than new GOM implementation included in this release.

      • About internet comments and aggressive communication

        That made me think about how we usually run conversations through internet. Because I work with GNOME, a thick skin naturally grew. I eventually have people yelling me “y u keep breaking stuff?” or “stop making this piece of crap” or even “ur product is bad, u offend me by releasing it” (and yes, they’re all real comments). After some time, this kind of thing becomes just background noise which we have to work with every day. I can only think that other contributors faced the same kind of top-notch treatment.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Six big projects that went open-source

    Making big software and hardware projects open-source is an increasingly popular thing to do, whether you’re a big company, a small company, or even the government. Here’s a sampling of the latest major projects to hit the open-source realm. Enjoy.

  • Using Apache Hadoop to Turn Big Data Into Insights

    The Apache Hadoop framework for distributed processing of large data sets is supported and used by a wide-ranging community — including businesses, governments, academia, and technology vendors. According to John Mertic, Director of ODPi and the Open Mainframe Project at The Linux Foundation, Apache Hadoop provides these diverse users with a solid base and allows them to add on different pieces depending on what they want to accomplish.

  • AMD Stoney Ridge Support Lands In Coreboot

    It has been a long time since last seeing any new AMD support in Coreboot while that changed this past week with the arrival of the mainline Stoney Ridge support.

  • How to create an internal innersource community

    In recent years, we have seen more and more interest in a variance of open source known as innersource. Put simply, innersource is taking the principles of open source and bringing them inside the walls of an organization. As such, you build collaboration and community that may look and taste like open source, but in which all code and community is private within the walls of the organization.

    As a community strategy and leadership consultant, I work with many companies to help build their innersource communities. As such, I thought it could be fun to share some of the most important principles that map to most of my clients and beyond. This could be a helpful primer if you are considering exploring innersource inside your organization.

  • Open is a means, not a movement

    In the humble beginnings of the GNU and Linux projects, open source was a primitive and narrowly-defined idea. It applied only to programming, and was a largely legal designation that sought to guarantee that source code remained available to users even as others augmented it through subsequent contributions.

    Now, thirty years later, “open” is sweeping the enterprise. On top of “open source,” we also have “open data,” “open management,” “open design,” “open organizations,”—and even just “open,” which we often take to imply something vague about a progressive policy.

  • Showing Code

    Which goes to show that terseness is a demanding constraint; I did not adequately state what I was trying to state in my attempt to limit it to a single tweet. And of course, that meant it became a discussion back and forth.

  • Open-source Sesame! Alibaba promises super-size magic for Java

    Online commerce giant Alibaba is among a crop of “new world” Java users seeking to shape the direction of both language and platform.

    Alibaba, one the world’s largest users of Java, has entered the race for election to the ruling executive committee (EC) of the Java Community Process (JCP). Jack Ma’s ecommerce giant joined the JCP only three months ago – in August.

    Also running for election to Java’s steering group are representatives of end user groups from China, Africa and Germany. One, the GreenTea Java User Group (JUG) in Shanghai, was founded and sponsored by technical staff from Alibaba.

  • Events

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Kubernetes

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The Sorcerer’s Code

      Richard Stallman, a software advocate affiliated with MIT, doesn’t really wear hats, but he’s been known to don tinfoil. In 2005, while attending a U.N. technology summit in Tunisia, he received a photo badge with a radio-frequency identification chip. Disgusted, he purchased a roll of aluminum foil, covered his badge, and handed sheets out to others. Tunisian security nearly blocked him from giving his talk. “By covering our badges,” he later noted, “we could prevent our movements within the summit, and our movements outside, from being scanned; we could also make a visible protest against the surveillance society that many governments are trying to impose.” A fellow delegate blogged that Stallman had “a legitimate gripe, handled with Richard’s usual highly visible, guileless, and absolutely unsubtle style of nonviolent protest.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • US launches website to share open-source software code

      The US government has just launched its latest website, Code.gov with the aim of preventing the replication of code across government agencies in order to conserve valuable time and resources.

      The site, which was launched on Thursday, already contains almost 50 open-source projects from a number of government agencies. Code.gov is the product of the Federal Source Code policy that was first announced in August by the White House.

      The site’s goal is to provide new custom source code that can be reused across government agencies to cut down on replicating code which is a waste of government expenses and time. The public will also benefit as a result of Code.gov since government agencies are required to make some of the software they create available under an open-source license.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open-source tool to put optogenetics in more labs

      The first low-cost, easy-to-use optogenetics hardware platform will let biologists who have little or no training in engineering or software design incorporate optogenetics testing in their labs.

      The Light Plate Apparatus (LPA), which researchers created in the lab of Jeffrey Tabor, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University, uses open-source hardware and software. The apparatus can deliver two independent light signals to each well in a standard 24-well plate and has sockets that accept LEDs of wavelengths ranging from blue to far red.

    • Open Data

      • Identify-org launched to better identify organisations through Open Data

        A group of Open Data standard bodies have launched Identify-org, a new initiative whose goal is to create an open codelist in Open Data to better identify organisations in the world.

        International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), Open Contracting Partnership, 360Giving, Joined Up Data Standards (JUDS) and the Initiative for Open Ag Funding presented the initiative at the Open Data International Conference in Madrid in October.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Lab creates open-source optogenetics hardware, software

        Nobody likes a cheater, but Rice University bioengineering graduate student Karl Gerhardt wants people to copy his answers. That’s the whole point.

        Gerhardt and Rice colleagues have created the first low-cost, easy-to-use optogenetics hardware platform that biologists who have little or no training in engineering or software design can use to incorporate optogenetics testing in their labs.

  • Programming/Development

    • Building code faster and why recursive Make is so slow

      One of the most common reactions to Meson we have gotten has been that build time is dominated by the compiler, thus trying to make the build system faster is pointless. After all, Make just launches subproject processes and waits for them to finish, so there’s nothing to be gained.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Why didn’t PDF die like Flash?

      The British government’s Accessibility department has just published the results of a six-week online survey, quizzing users of assistive technology about what aspects of government publishing might need addressing. Many of the users, according to the section’s blog, find the government’s widespread use of the semi-open Adobe PDF format ‘hard to use’, asking for alternative content in HTML. The government is considering these complaints, but civil and municipal retrenchment into PDF-dependence does seem to make change unlikely…

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Security updates for Tuesday
    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Reproducible Builds: week 80 in Stretch cycle

      Patches to GCC to generate reproducible output independently of the build-path were submitted by Ximin Luo.

    • Security considerations with github continuous integration

      Continuous integration (CI) support in github is a very useful addition. Not only can you utilize existing services like Travis CI, you can utilize the github API and roll your own, which is exactly what we did for libStorageMgmt. LibStorageMgmt needs to run tests for hardware specific plugins, so we created our own tooling to hook up github and our hardware which is geographically located across the US. However, shortly after getting all this in place and working it became pretty obvious that we provided a nice attack vector…

    • The perfect cybercrime: selling fake followers to fake people

      Hackers are recruiting the internet of things into a botnet. But this time they’re not trying to take down the internet. They’re just using them to make fake social media accounts – which they can then sell to online narcissists to make an easy buck.

      Masarah-Cynthia Paquet-Clouston, a criminologist with the University of Montreal, and Olivier Bilodeau, a cybersecurity researcher at Montreal-based company GoSecure, have uncovered a large botnet that recruits everyday devices such as connected toasters, fridges or even your grandmother’s router to help commit social media fraud. They think that this stealthy, lucrative scheme is a glimpse into the future of low-level cybercrime.

    • Yet Another E-voting Machine Vulnerability Found

      We’ve been talking about the ridiculousness of e-voting machines for well over a decade. If a machine doesn’t include a paper trail for backup, it’s suspect. That’s been the case since e-voting machines have been on the market, and many of us have been pointing this out all along. And the big e-voting companies have a long history of not really caring, even as their machines are shown to be vulnerable in a variety of ways. So it come as little to no surprise to find out that security firm Cylance has announced that it’s found yet another set of e-voting vulnerabilities in the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1 voting machine. Sequoia especially has a long history of buggy, faulty machines.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Pundits think Islamic State’s Baghdadi is smart because he’s cruel. That’s nonsense

      Is Abu Bakr Baghdadi, the infamously cruel Islamic State leader, an unusually smart terrorist?

      Terrorism pundits seem to think the answer is “yes” — precisely because he’s turned cruelty into a sort of brand. He gained notoriety in the West for indiscriminately killing civilians and then directing his followers to brag about wanton bloodshed in “Jihadi John” beheading videos. Many would argue that, by leaving a photographic trail of bloodshed in his wake, Baghdadi has surpassed Osama bin Laden, the former Al Qaeda leader. In a Politico article from last year, for example, a prominent Brookings analyst exclaimed that Baghdadi “out-terrorized bin Laden,” who never fully grasped how well “violence and gore work.”

      I see things differently. I think the Islamic State CEO is an unusually stupid terrorist — precisely because he’s turned cruelty into a sort of brand.

      For a decade, political scientists have known that terrorist groups suffer when they exercise too little restraint by attacking civilians. Civilian attacks carry substantial downside risks by strengthening the resolve of target countries, eroding their confidence in negotiations, lowering the odds of government concessions, reducing popular support for the group and, all in all, expediting its demise.

    • Long-range projectiles for Navy’s newest ship too expensive to shoot

      …Navy is canceling production of the LRLAP because of an $800,000-per-shot price tag — more than 10 times the original projected cost. By comparison, the nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $1 million per shot, while the M712 Copperhead laser-guided 155-millimeter projectile and M982 Excalibur GPS-guided rounds cost less than $70,000 per shot. Traditional Navy 5-inch shells cost no more than a few hundred dollars each.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Vancouver Considers Abandoning Parts of the Coast Because of Climate Change

      Vancouver prides itself on being a coastal city, nestled between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. Like every other part of the world, it’s under threat from climate change, as warming temperatures cause sea levels to creep ever-higher. The city is looking at many options to hold back the rising water—and for the first time, retreat from the coast is one of them.

      This week, Vancouver officials put out a report laying out plenty of options to deal with sea level rise, including barriers, dykes, and seawalls. But it also suggests that, at least in some parts of the city, they may want to consider just getting people out of the way. The option of retreat from the coast is on the table in Vancouver, and other cities might soon follow.

    • Palm oil’s green body comes under fire from activists

      Some activist groups are withdrawing support for the palm oil body that provides sustainability certificates for the industry, saying it is biased toward producers and its complaints panel is flawed.

      Aidenvironment, an Amsterdam-based green group, could become the latest to cut ties with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) over what it calls poor handling of a complaint against major palm producer IOI Group.

      RSPO — a body of palm producers, consumer companies, and activist groups — has long faced criticism for weak enforcement standards. Some faith was restored earlier this year when RSPO suspended IOI’s certificates, which then dissipated when RSPO revoked the suspension four months later.

      A withdrawal by green groups, long seen as the conscience of the RSPO, could undermine the credibility of the industry body, especially for consumer manufacturing companies under pressure globally to ensure they have a sustainable supply chain.

    • Poaching is on the rise — most illegal ivory comes from recently killed elephants

      Almost all the world’s illegal ivory comes from elephants that have been recently killed, researchers say. The new study shows that seized ivory isn’t coming from old stockpiles, but from African elephants that have been poached less than three years before the tusks were seized. That means that poaching — one of the biggest threats to elephants — is widespread and may be a bigger problem than we think.

    • Elephant poachers are hard at work in Africa, and carbon dating proves it

      Elephant poaching is alive and well — and the elephants are not. A team of scientists examining seized shipments of elephant tusks from Africa have found that the vast majority of the ivory came from elephants that died within the last three years.

      The sobering results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that the killing of elephants for their ivory is continuing at a disturbing pace — even as elephant populations across the continent are in sharp decline.

      While poaching had been easing for several years, it has returned with a vengeance in the last decade or so, said lead author Thure Cerling, a geochemist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Central African forest elephants have fallen by an estimated 62% from 2002 to 2011. At the Selous Wildlife Reserve in Tanzania, savanna elephants have declined 66% from 2009 to 2013.

      “There’s been a staggering rate of elephant loss every year,” Cerling said.

    • Dakota Access Pipeline CEO Kelcy Warren Should Face the Music

      President Barack Obama foreshadowed more complications for the Dakota Access pipeline this week, as he told an interviewer that “right now the Army Corps is examining whether there are ways to reroute this pipeline.” With hundreds arrested in recent weeks at the Standoff at Standing Rock, North Dakota, the movement to halt construction of this 1,200-mile, $3.8 billion oil pipeline only builds. Musicians are increasingly joining the fray, striking an unexpected chord: pressuring oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, which owns the pipeline. Warren also owns a small music label and recording company, and is the founder and driving force behind the Cherokee Creek Music Festival in Texas. Many musicians, including folk/rock legend Jackson Browne, are banding together to confront Warren and help stop the pipeline.

      In a statement published in September by Indian Country Today Media Network, Jackson Browne wrote: “I met Kelcy Warren on one occasion, when I played at the Cherokee Creek Music Festival, held at his ranch. Later his company, Music Road Records, produced an album of my songs. Though I was honored by the ‘tribute’ and think highly of the versions—which were done by some of my favorite singers and songwriters, I had nothing to do with producing the recordings or deciding who would be on it.”

  • Finance

    • We need a Brexit deal that heals the north-south divide

      It’s official. The north-south divide in Britain is now wider than at any time since the beginning of the industrial revolution – wider than when Charles Dickens was writing about Victorian squalor, and wider than in the depression years of the 1930s, when George Orwell exposed the grinding poverty of northern England in The Road to Wigan Pier.

      Remarkable new evidence from a study by the academic Philip McCann, The UK Regional-National Economic Problem, shows that while economic output per head, measured by gross value added, is near £43,000 a year in London – and as high as £135,000 in inner west London – almost half the UK population lives, in regions where output per head is below £22,325.

      Indeed the regional divide is so vast that, at £13,500 per person, economic output in Gwent, Wales, is a tenth that of one of the wealthiest part of London; and in the Tees and Welsh valleys it has now fallen below that of Lithuania, Slovenia and Slovakia.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Affinity Interviews Jill Stein!
    • Voters Express Disgust Over U.S. Politics in New Times/CBS Poll

      An overwhelming majority of voters are disgusted by the state of American politics, and many harbor doubts that either major-party nominee can unite the country after a historically ugly presidential campaign, according to the final pre-election New York Times/CBS News Poll.

      In a grim preview of the discontent that may cloud at least the outset of the next president’s term, Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are seen by a majority of voters as unlikely to bring the country back together after this bitter election season.

      With more than eight in 10 voters saying the campaign has left them repulsed rather than excited, the rising toxicity threatens the ultimate victor. Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, are seen as dishonest and viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters.

    • Wikileaks releases second batch on Election Eve
    • As Our Revolution’s Former Electoral Manager, This Is How We Keep President Clinton Accountable

      With the right combination of strategies, we can make Bernie Sanders the most powerful senator in the country and keep President Hillary Clinton accountable to the progressive movement. Our best opportunity to accomplish this is right around the corner.

      The Huffington Post points out that Clinton leads in a greater proportion of polls than Obama did in 2008 and 2012. Their model gives Clinton an overwhelming 98.2 percent chance of victory. Clinton’s lead is so substantial that she could lose all seven swing states, a highly improbable outcome, and still have enough electoral votes tucked away in safe states to win the election. In short, Hillary Clinton will be our next president.

      Instead of staying home or turning Clinton’s big lead into a landslide, we should invest our votes into getting the most progressive candidate in the race, Dr. Jill Stein, to the major electoral threshold of 5 percent. Success will qualify the Green Party for official national party status, along with a simplified path to ballot access and about $10 million dollars in federal campaign funds for the next presidential election.

    • EMAILS: Clinton Sent Classified Info To Chelsea After UN Climate Talks

      Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent her daughter an email after the conclusion of a United Nations climate summit that had information later deemed classified by the Department of State.

      Clinton sent an email to her daughter, Chelsea, two days after she and President Barack Obama tried to negotiate an international global warming agreement at Copenhagen in 2009. The email was sent to Chelsea’s alias email account under the name, “Diane Reynolds.”

      Clinton forwarded Chelsea a Dec. 19, 2009 email from top State Department officials and Obama’s global warming “czar” Carol Browner — a long-time Clinton ally — according to emails released by the State Department Friday.

    • WikiLeaks releases election day batch from Clinton campaign chair

      WikiLeaks has released its 35th batch of emails from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, as Americans go to the polls in the presidential election.

    • The 44 Most Damning Stories From WikiLeaks

      WikiLeaks has published tens of thousands of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. This is what The Daily Caller believes are the most important findings from them.

      They expose a corrupt press, Clinton Foundation play for play, cronyism, and the Clintons’ real thoughts on the issues.

    • Bill Clinton branded Jeremy Corbyn ‘maddest person in the room’, leaked speech reveals

      Bill Clinton branded Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn the “maddest person in the room” in a speech he gave explaining the resurgence of left-wing politics in Europe and America.

      Documents released by Wikileaks show the former President joked that when Mr Corbyn won his leadership contest, it appeared Labour had just “got a guy off the street” to run the party.

    • WikiLeaks: Mook Frantic Over Appearance of TPP Support

      It likely will not make a difference in the outcome of today’s presidential election, but WikiLeaks offered more evidence Tuesday that even campaign staff for Democrat Hillary Clinton couldn’t follow her shifting position on trade.

      Clinton had studiously avoided taking a public position on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, which her Democratic primary opponents had been bashing with gusto. On June 14 of last year, at a campaign rally in Iowa, she dipped her toe in the water.

    • Statement by Julian Assange on U.S. Presidential Election

      In recent months, WikiLeaks and I personally have come under enormous pressure to stop publishing what the Clinton campaign says about itself to itself. That pressure has come from the campaign’s allies, including the Obama administration, and from liberals who are anxious about who will be elected U.S. president.

    • The Stakes Are Higher Than You Realize

      In one of the more memorable riffs of the 2016 election, President Barack Obama recently said “My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration – that’s on the ballot right now!”

      I increasingly fear that The West is on the ballot too.

    • THE SECRETS OF THE US ELECTION: JULIAN ASSANGE TALKS TO JOHN PILGER

      What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?

    • A Tale of Three Foundations: Carter, Clinton and Trump

      Seen the latest front-page Jimmy Carter Center scandal? Hear about the six figure fees speaking former president Jimmy Carter pulls in from shady companies and foreign governments? An oil painting of himself he bought with charity money? Maybe not.

      Take a moment to Google Jimmy Carter. Now do the same for Bill Clinton. The search results tell the tale of two former presidents, one determined to use his status honorably, the other seeking exploitation for personal benefit. And then throw in Donald Trump, who of course wants to someday be a former president. Each man has his own charitable foundation. Let’s compare them.

      Three charitable organizations enter, only one emerges with honor. Let’s do this!

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Following scare at Trump rally, life is now different for protester

      Life was fairly normal for Austyn Crites until Saturday night.

      The 33-year-old, Eagle Scout and high-altitude balloon inventor was by his own account a fairly average guy. He wasn’t famous — or infamous — and his face certainly wasn’t plastered all over international media.

      That is, until the Donald Trump rally on Saturday in Reno.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Thinking Like an Intelligence Officer: Anthony Weiner and Russian Spies

      There are many reasons why Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey is interested in the emails on Anthony Weiner’s home computer, emails which may include United States government information pertinent to Hillary Clinton or those communicating with her.

      The majority of those reasons for Comey’s involvement, for good or for bad depending on your political position, have been laid out across the media spectrum.

      But there may be one more reason not yet discussed. Since we seem to be spending so much time this election cycle on the Russians this year, let’s think like Russian intelligence officers. Comey may be looking at an intelligence operation.

    • If GCHQ says it then it must be right, right?

      What happens if GCHQ advice is questionable or goes directly against the direction the majority of industry is heading?

    • France wants a ‘monster’ database of citizens’ info

      The French government’s fairly discreet plan to create a massive database containing personal information of the country’s population has encountered gremlins in the form of growing opposition.

      French government plans to create a new database containing details of almost the entire population suffered fresh blows on
      Monday as criticism grew of the controversial project.

      The Socialist government announced a decree to create the database, which would contain personal information of 60 million people, on a public holiday weekend at the end of October.

      It has led to fears that hackers might target the information as well as anxiety that so much personal data could be misused in the future by the security forces or other government agencies.

    • Can FBI review 650,000 emails in nine days? Absolutely, says Edward Snowden

      GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters are questioning whether the FBI could have sifted through 650,000 emails quickly enough to clear his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, just nine days after they were discovered.

      But the FBI and cybersecurity experts say it can be done with database scanning software – and one of those experts is none other than Edward Snowden, the fugitive whistleblower who’s hoping to get a presidential pardon.

      The debate unfolded today in the wake of FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that a search through a laptop used by Clinton aide Huma Abedin turned up nothing to change “our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”

    • Disable Nvidia Telemetry tracking on Windows

      Telemetry — read tracking — seems to be everywhere these days. Microsoft pushes it on Windows, and web and software companies use it as well.

      While there is certainly some benefit to it on a larger scale, as it may enable these companies to identify broader issues, it is undesirable from a user perspective.

      Part of that comes from the fact that companies fail to disclose what is being collected and how data is stored and handled once it leaves the user system.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Indonesia Police Question Christian Politician in Blasphemy Case

      Police questioned the most prominent Christian politician in this predominantly Muslim country on Monday as they consider a blasphemy charge against him, just three months ahead of an election where he is the leading candidate.

    • ‘Persecuted’ family forced to flee Manningham home as threats escalate

      Mr Hussain converted to Christianity 20 years ago, but says in recent years he has been subjected to harassment and violence by sections of the Islamic community.

      “This extreme persecution by certain people in the Muslim community because we are converts has broken us as a family,” he said.

      “We are fragmented and I do not know how we will recover from this. We haven’t functioned properly for years.”

      He said “serious questions” needed to be answered.

      Last year, Mr Hussain was hospitalised after his kneecap was smashed and his hand broken during an attack outside his home in St Paul’s Road, Manningham.

      Two hooded men, one armed with a pick-axe handle, assaulted him in a vicious attack caught on CCTV.

    • Officials: SA cop fired for attempting to feed fecal sandwich to homeless person

      An officer from the San Antonio Police Department has been fired for allegedly attempting to feed a fecal sandwich to a homeless person, several sources have confirmed.

      The City Council was briefed on the matter during a private session Thursday, sources said. The officer reportedly placed fecal matter between two pieces of bread and gave it to a homeless person.

      “This was a vile and disgusting act that violates our guiding principles of ‘treating all with integrity, compassion, fairness and respect,’ Chief William McManus said in a prepared statement. “The fact that his fellow officers were so disgusted with his actions that they reported him to Internal Affairs demonstrates that this type of behavior will never be tolerated. The action of this one former officer in no way reflects the actions of all the other good men and women who respectfully serve this community.”

    • One woman’s brush with Sharia courts in the UK: “It ruined my life forever”

      The UK government is conducting an inquiry into the operation of Sharia courts which is being boycotted by a number of women’s organisations because its remit is too narrow, and the panel of judges is not seen as ‘independent’ enough.

      Parallel to this, the Home Affairs Committee has also launched an inquiry into whether the principles of Sharia are compatible with British law.

      On 7 November, there will be a public seminar on “Sharia Law, Legal Pluralism and Access to Justice” 7-9pm at Committee Room 12 at the Houses of Parliament. Below, we publish the story of a woman Shagufta (not her real name) who spoke to the campaign group, One Law for All, and described how a brush with the Sharia courts ruined her life forever.

      I am a practising Muslim. My faith is central to who I am. I was born in 1947 in Pakistan and joined my husband in the UK in 1965. I am from a middle-class Pakistani family and found life in England hard. It was a huge culture shock. We settled in the north of England. I supported my husband with his business interests and eventually had my own business running a cookery school and a halal food company. I had six daughters and a son.

    • Hong Kong pro-democracy politicians banned by China as crisis grows

      Hong Kong is facing a severe political crisis after China barred two pro-independence politicians from the city’s legislature.

      In a highly controversial move, Beijing said Yau Wai-ching and Sixtus “Baggio” Leung would not be able to hold office, striking a blow to the burgeoning movement calling for greater autonomy from the mainland.

      The ruling, which amounts to Beijing’s most direct intervention in the territory’s legal system since the 1997 handover to Chinese rule, is expected to spark renewed street protests in the former British colony.

    • Sweden now allowing US Homeland Security officers at Stockholm airport, permanently and with access to own weapons

      In brief: Sweden is now allowing US Homeland Security to station officers at Stockholm airport on a permanent basis, and with access to their own weapons. The US “custom and security controls” in Swedish soil are supposed to stop suspected terrorists, which include “cyber-terrorists”, and other individuals suspected of criminal-behaviour – who appear on lists which may also include whistle-blowers and their publicists, who may be considered to have “stolen information”. The Department of Homeland Security declared in 2013 that “the unlawful disclosure of classified information by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2010 has rightfully renewed the Department’s focus on risk management.”

11.07.16

Links 7/11/2016: NES Classic Linux Computer

Posted in News Roundup at 7:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Stop searching for projects and start searching for bugs

    GitHub has a powerful search engine where you can customize your search in a variety of ways. The easiest way to search is by issue label.

    A lot of open source projects label their issues to conveniently track them, using labels like beginner, easy, starter, good first bug, low hanging fruit, bitesize, trivial, easy fix, and new contributor.

    You can further narrow down your search based on the programming language you’re comfortable with, by adding language: name to your search query. For example, here are all issues labeled as “beginner” in JavaScript.

  • ‘Open source’ is not ‘free software’

    In the open source universe, using terms such as FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) is common and represents a casual conflation of the terms open source and free software, which are often used interchangeably. I would be remiss if I didn’t also admit that I have been guilty of same. I won’t be doing that anymore—or at least I’ll try not to—for a simple reason: Using the terms interchangeably is dangerous to the goals of free software and open media advocates (read “anti-DRM”). To continue this practice is to undermine beliefs that are fundamental to free software and associated movement.

  • RPG Open Source Horse Pulls IBM i Community Plow

    The RPG development community is shrinking. I don’t mean because old programmers are riding into the sunset. I’m talking about collaboration and its ability to guide development that benefits the community by addressing the challenges of next generation applications for IBM midrange shops. Not that a collaborative open source culture is thriving here. But it could and it should. There are efforts to get this under way. And that will figuratively shrink the community.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome Crushing It In The Browser Wars While Edge Continues To Sputter

      Despite all the effort Microsoft is expending in getting Internet users to try out and stick with its Edge browser, Chrome continues to the popular choice. Even worse for Microsoft, Chrome’s popularity is growing—it now accounts for more than half of all desktop browser usage and has nearly double the market share of Edge and Internet Explorer combined.

      Market research firm Net Applications has Chrome sitting pretty with a 54.99 percent share of the desktop browser market, up from 31.12 percent at this moment a year ago, while Internet Explorer and Edge combine for 28.39 percent and Firefox stuck at around 11 percent. Even more interesting is that when Windows 10 launched to the public at the end of July 2015, Chrome had a 27.82 percent share of the market while Internet Explorer still dominated the landscape with a 54 percent share. Now the script has flipped.

    • Chrome

      • Google’s Chrome Hackers Are About to Upend Your Idea of Web Security

        In a show of hacker team spirit in August of last year, Parisa Tabriz ordered hoodies for the staff she leads at Google, a group devoted to the security of the company’s Chrome browser. The sweatshirts were emblazoned with the words “Department of Chromeland Security,” along with Chrome’s warning to users when they visit insecure websites that leave them open to surveillance or sabotage: a red padlock crossed out with an X.

      • Gopass, a Chrome extension for Pass

        Last week I treated myself to some hardware upgrades for my desktop, which will be my main workstation from now on. After installing Ubuntu Gnome, I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of my favorite applications from OSX have a Linux version.

        One application that does not have a native Linux client is 1Password, my (now ex-) password manager. Luckily, there’s Pass.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • Open-source database PostgreSQL powering GOV.UK portal

      The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) has been running PostgreSQL for one year now to power the GOV.UK portal. This open-source database system hosts the central content store underlying the portal, its Content Management System (CMS), and its internal publishing API.

  • Education

    • Hungary seeks nationwide, open source eLearning tool

      Municipalities in Hungary should be able to use modern, web based eLearning tools to train their staff. To make this possible, Hungary’s State Treasury is looking for a service provider to help them run the open source Moodle eLearning solution.

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 11.0

      There were definitely some attractive features in FreeBSD 11.0. I especially enjoyed the changes to the system installer. The ability to set up UFS and ZFS through a series of guided steps was a welcome feature. I also really appreciate that the installer will allow us to enable certain security features like PID randomization and hiding the processes of other users. Linux distributions allow the administrator to set these options, but they often require digging through documentation and setting cryptic variables from the command line. FreeBSD makes enabling these features as straight forward as checking a box during the initial installation.

      I also like how pkg has progressed. I think it has become faster in the past year or two and handled dependencies better than it did when the new package manager was introduced. In addition, FreeBSD’s documentation is as good as ever, though I feel it has become more scattered. There were times I would find what I wanted in the Handbook, but other times I had to switch to the wiki or dig through a man page. The information is out there, but it can take some searching to find.

      Other aspects of running FreeBSD were more disappointing. For example, I had hoped to find boot environments working and accessible from the boot menu. However, progress seems to have reversed in this area as switching boot environments prevented the system from loading. There were some other issues, for example I was unable to login from the graphical login screen, but I could access the Lumina desktop by signing into my account from the command line and launching an X session.

      Hardware was a weak point in my experiment. FreeBSD did not work on my desktop machine at all in BIOS mode and failed to boot from installation media in UEFI mode. When running in a VirtualBox environment, the operating system did much better. FreeBSD was able to boot, play sound and run smoothly, but screen resolution was limited, even after VirtualBox modules had been installed and enabled.

      Perhaps my biggest concern though while using FreeBSD 11.0 was that I could not update the base operating system, meaning it would be difficult to keep the system patched against security updates. Even once I had manually created a /boot directory to fix the boot environment creation issue, freebsd-update and freebsd-version continued to fail to detect the running kernel. This leaves the system vulnerable and means our best chance for keeping up with security updates is to manually install them from source code, not an ideal situation.

      All in all, FreeBSD 11.0 does have some interesting new features, but it also has several bugs which make me want to hold off on using the operating system until a point release has been made available to fix the existing issues.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • The People’s Code – Now on Code.gov

      Over the past few years, we’ve taken unprecedented action to help Americans engage with their Government in new and meaningful ways.

      Using Vote.gov, citizens can now quickly navigate their state’s voter registration process through an easy-to-use site. Veterans can go to Vets.gov to discover, apply for, track and manage their benefits in one, user-friendly place. And for the first time ever, citizens can send a note to President Obama simply by messaging the White House on Facebook.

      By harnessing 21st Century technology and innovation, we’re improving the Federal Government’s ability to provide better citizen-centered services and are making the Federal Government smarter, savvier, and more effective for the American people. At the same time, we’re building many of these new digital tools, such as We the People, the White House Facebook bot, and Data.gov, in the open so that as the Government uses technology to re-imagine and improve the way people interact with it, others can too.

    • People’s Code: The U.S. Government Delivers Numerous Open Source Projects

      When it comes to the U.S. government, most people’s eyes are trained on the Presidential race, and if yours are, you may have missed the substantial work promoting open source software that the government is doing. For example, The Office of Management and Budget recently mandated in a lengthy memo that under the final Federal Source Code policy, federal agencies will have to share internally developed code with each other and release at least 20 percent of their code to the public.

      Now, the government has launched an update of its website, Code.gov, aimed at housing key open source projects.

    • Code.gov is the US government’s open-source software hub

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Deep Dive: Open Access and Transforming the Future of Research

        EFF works to inform the world about breaking issues in the world of technology policy and civil liberties. And one of our best ways of communicating with our friends and members is through our nearly-weekly newsletter, EFFector. Last week, we sent out a very special EFFector: a deep dive, single-issue edition that got into the nitty-gritty of open access and research. To keep the conversation going, we are publishing it here on the Deeplinks blog as well.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • East African Nations Agree Declaration Promoting Regional Pharma Sector Investment

      The three-day conference brings together key stakeholders from EAC Partner States including Ministries of Health, Finance and Industry, National Medicines Regulatory Agencies (NMRAs), National Procurement Agencies (NMPAs), AU-NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency, World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the private sector (local and international pharmaceutical manufacturers) as well as international development partners and investors among others.

    • Indian Generic Pharma Warns Against Government Caving To US Pressure On Data Exclusivity

      The Indian Drug Technical Advisory Board meeting on 7 November is expected to discuss a measure that could lead to opening the way to a 10-year data exclusivity period for originator pharmaceutical companies in India, according to the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance. The alliance submitted a letter to the advisory board to warn against consequences on public health of data exclusivity if the Indian government “succumbs to” pressure by the United States.

      In a letter to the Indian Drug Technical Advisory Board dated 27 October, D G Shah, secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA), explained why data exclusivity, which extends market exclusivity, would delay access to cheaper versions of the medicines.

    • WHO Makes Headway In Hepatitis C Treatment Access Campaign

      A leading cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis, chronic infection by hepatitis C virus (HCV) affects more than 80 million people worldwide, 85% of whom live in low (13%) and middle (72%) income countries. Around 15% of Egypt’s population, for example, is infected – one of the world’s highest prevalence rate – while it is estimated that 12 million people in India have hepatitis C.

      Nearly 700 000 people are killed by hepatitis C yearly, where preventive vaccines are lacking.

      And this occurs at a time when at least 1.2 million people in Japan and three million Americans suffer from hepatitis C, while the infection is a major European public-health challenge (between 0.4% and 3.5% of the population in different EU Member States), as the most common single cause of liver transplantation.

  • Security

    • Free security is the only security that really works

      There are certain things people want and will pay for. There are things they want and won’t. If we look at security it’s pretty clear now that security is one of those things people want, but most won’t pay for. The insane success of Let’s Encrypt is where this thought came from. Certificates aren’t new, they used to even be really cheap (there were free providers, but there was a time cost of jumping through hoops). Let’s Encrypt make the time and actual cost basically zero, now it’s deployed all over. Depending who you ask, they’re one of the biggest CAs around now, and that took them a year? That’s crazy.

    • SQLi, XSS zero-days expose Belkin IoT devices, Android smartphones

      Research director Scott Tenaglia and lead research engineer Joe Tanen detailed the vulnerabilities during their ‘Breaking BHAD: Abusing Belkin Home Automation devices’ talk at the Black Hat Europe conference in London last Friday.

      The zero-day flaws specifically relate to Belkin’s smart home products and accompanying Android mobile application, which is used to wirelessly control the home automation devices.

      The first flaw, a SQL injection vulnerability, enables would-be hackers to inject malicious code into the paired Android WeMo smartphone app, and thus take root control of the connected home automation device.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Evil Russian Propaganda from the Evil Russian Invaders

      The BBC World Service was founded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and funded by them directly for six decades, until a cosmetic change last year. Its specific purpose is to spread British values and the British view of the world abroad. It specifically, on its dozens of different national services, gives an opportunity to dissident voices who cannot get on their mainstream media. The Americans spend hundreds of millions annually on outfits like RFE/RL to do the same. Yet when the Russians do precisely the same thing on a much smaller scale, for example by enabling you to listen to me, this is portrayed as evil propaganda.

      Fortunately we have the Henry Jackson Society to defend you from it. The Henry Jackson Society, supported by Liam Fox, Jim Murphy and pretty well every other right wing enthusiast you can name, is of course a great believer in free markets. And its sense of the market has detected that its old product of a constant stream of Islamophobia is becoming dated, and currently buyers want Russophobia. Whatever your phobia, the Henry Jackson Society will have some to sell you, so here we have their new Manual of Russophobia.

    • Do Wars Make Us Safer? The People Aren’t Feeling It

      A new poll from an unlikely source suggests that the US public and the US media have very little in common when it comes to matters of war and peace.

      This poll was commissioned by that notorious left-wing hotbed of peaceniks, the Charles Koch Institute, along with the Center for the National Interest (previously the Nixon Center, and before that the humorously named Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom). The poll was conducted by Survey Sampling International.

    • Yemen: The man who lost 27 family members in an air strike

      The war in Yemen had been going on for just two months when Abdullah al-Ibbi sat down for a late-night meal with his two wives, their children and grandchildren. It was then, in an instant, that his world shattered.

      The air strike that hit Abdullah’s home killed 27 members of his family. He survived, but only learnt about their deaths six weeks later when he woke up in a hospital bed.

      “If I didn’t fear God, I would have committed suicide at that moment,” he recalls. “I would have jumped off a building… but God gave me patience.”

      The family had lived in the Houthi rebel stronghold of Saada, which has come under intense aerial bombardment by the Saudi-led coalition supporting the exiled President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi.

      The air strike hit their home at around midnight, says Abdullah. Rescuers with bulldozers worked until morning to retrieve the bodies buried under the rubble. Seventeen were children – the youngest, Abdullah’s granddaughter, Inas, was one month old.

      Three of his adult sons also made it out alive.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • NOAA 2017 Tide Tables are Available

      NOAA 2017 tide tables are now available. NOAA tide tables have been in production for 150 years and are used by both commercial and recreational mariners for safe navigation. Printed tide tables provide users with tide and tidal current predictions in an easy-to-read format for particular locations. NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services produce these tide tables on an annual basis.

    • Rose Aguilar on Standing Rock Reporting, Michelle Chen on Samsung Labor and Environmental Abuses

      This week on CounterSpin: In their feature “What to Know About the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests,” Time magazine told readers that “environmental activists say” the pipeline would contribute to man-made climate change; “they insist that fossil fuels—including the vast reserves in the Bakken Shale—need to be kept in the ground to protect the world from the worst effects of climate change.”

    • Adidas is making a million pairs of its much-anticipated sneakers created from recycled ocean plastic

      For more than a year, Adidas has been teasing the release of a shoe made almost entirely from discarded plastic fished out of the oceans. It revealed its first prototype of the sustainable sneaker, created in collaboration with environmental organization Parley for the Oceans, in June 2015. Finally, in mid-November, the first mass-produced quantity—7,000 pairs, to be exact—will go on sale, and according to Adidas, that’s just the start.

      “We will make one million pairs of shoes using Parley Ocean Plastic in 2017—and our ultimate ambition is to eliminate virgin plastic from our supply chain,” Eric Liedtke, an Adidas executive board member responsible for global brands, said in a Nov. 4 statement.

    • Green Party Candidate In 33rd Senate Race Feels Real Issues Have Been Ignored By Major Parties

      Colin Bennett is no stranger to running as a Green Party candidate in the 33rd Senate District. He ran and lost in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2014. The only race he missed in the past decade was in 2012, when he ran for Congress.

      Bennett believes that the issue of climate change is too important not to keep trying to find a way to awaken people to the dangers involved, and if that involves running for office, then so be it, he says.

      “Literally, I feel the world is on the precipice of disaster,” said Bennett. “I’m doing everything in my power to turn that around.”

      Bennett, 37, lives in Westbrook, runs a small used bookstore in Deep River called Bennett’s Books, and has other jobs to make ends meet. In the summer, Bennett works for Sail Connecticut Access, a nonprofit operation that gives people with special needs the opportunity to go sailing.

      The campaign across the 33rd Senate District, which stretches down the Connecticut River Valley from Portland to Old Saybrook, has been dominated by disputes between Republicans and Democrats over Donald Trump and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

    • French Greens pick MEP Jadot for 2017 presidential race

      French MEP Yannick Jadot will be the Green candidate for French president next year after winning a second-round party primary Monday.

      Jadot won 54 percent of the vote against Michèle Rivasi, who also sits in the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament.

      Jadot, a 49-year-old former Greenpeace activist, won the most votes in the primary’s first round in late October with support of 36 percent. Around 13,000 party members and supporters cast their ballot either by mail or online (for French nationals abroad) last week in the second-round of voting.

  • Finance

    • NYT’s Kristof Blames Poverty on Too Many TVs, Not Too Little Money

      Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for giving “voice to the voiceless” on international social justice issues, wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s Times (10/30/16) arguing for increased government action on poverty. His calls for heightened attention to economic deprivation, though, were buried in a larger message that was familiar to longtime Kristof-watchers: that the poor aren’t actually poor because they lack enough money, but because of their own moral failings.

    • CEO’s message a jolt to IT workers facing layoffs

      IT workers in the infrastructure team at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) were notified recently of their layoff. They expect to be training replacements from India-based contractor HCL. The layoff affects more than 500 IT workers, according to the insurance firm.

      This familiar IT story began a little differently. A few days before employees were notified in mid-October of their layoff, HCSC CEO Paula Steiner talked about future goals in an internal, company-wide video.

      Steiner’s comments weren’t IT-department-specific, but the takeaway quote by one IT employee was this: “As full-time retiring baby boomers move on to their next chapter, the makeup of our organization will consist more of young and non-traditional workers, such as part-time workers or contractors,” said Steiner in the video.

      What Steiner didn’t say in the employee broadcast is that some of the baby boomers moving “on to the next chapter” are being pushed out the door.

    • What is a blockchain, and why is it growing in popularity?

      Last year, Ripple Labs, creator of the virtual currency XRP, was fined $0.7 million (~£540,000) by the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for violating regulations concerning money laundering.

      Some observers cite this as the moment cryptocurrencies shaved off their startup hipster beards, put on a tie, and went mainstream. Being fined by a regulator means that you’re part of the financial services industry at last.

      Given that the first and most famous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was launched back in 2009, it has taken the wider industry a relatively long time to warm to it. But now suddenly everyone is talking about Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology as a disruptor of potentially massive proportions: Sweden is trialling a new land registry that uses a blockchain, dozens of startups spanning numerous sectors are poking around at possible uses, and importantly policy makers such as the European Parliament have voted in favour of a more hands-off approach towards blockchain tech regulation.

    • Dutch campaigners gather signatures to derail EU-Canada trade deal

      Activists in the Netherlands have gathered almost two-thirds of the signatures needed to lay the groundwork for a referendum on Europe’s free trade deal with Canada, which they say overly favours the interests of multinational companies.

      The Dutch have twice voted down European Union initiatives in referendums, scuppering a proposed EU constitution in 2005 and in April throwing into disarray plans for closer EU relations with Ukraine.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Art of Spin

      How Hillary Clinton backers deployed faux feminism and privilege politics to divert attention from her destructive policies.

    • Front-Page Election News: More Horserace, More Trump, More Presidency

      Most, but not all campaign stories featured these sorts of empty calories; some dealt with important questions of candidates’ leadership, demeanor and conflicts of interest. One piece (Washington Post, 8/30/16) highlighted Trump’s “us vs. them” strategy, often blaming US problems on minority groups. Another (New York Times, 9/3/16) detailed Clinton’s cozy relationship with and frequent courting of the ultrarich.

      Another 12 percent of front-page election stories were focused on voters. Over half of these stories featured straightforward polling reports, while the others were more detailed looks at voter mood and logic. The New York Times covered voters particularly well; giving voice to their doubts and hopes for the candidates (9/14/16, 9/9/16). The Washington Post (8/22/16) and USA Today (9/13/16) both published some illuminating voter pieces, but many merely regurgitated poll data.

    • Podesta Congratulated on Nevada Fraud

      Nevada was of course one of the most blatant examples of all of the Democratic National Committee rigging the election against Sanders. Firstly the caucuses featured casino owners bussing in coachloads of employees with firm instructions to vote for Hillary. Even with this, Hillary was struggling. Next the Democratic party machine announced to the media on 21 February that Hillary had won, despite it being by no means clear if that were true.

      Finally at the delegate conference, Hillary acolyte and DNC member Roberta Lange in the chair called the state for Clinton on the basis of the most dubious delegate vote imaginable – and denying any recount. What is more, the Clinton camp scored a double whammy by portraying, throughout the controlled corporate media, the precise scenes you see in this video as a violent riot by Sanders supporters. I do ask you to watch this video through and see what you think. It may just change your entire mind on what is really happening in US “democracy”.

    • Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied

      Current and former FBI officials have launched a media counter-offensive to engage head to head with the Clinton media machine and to throw off the shackles the Loretta Lynch Justice Department has used to stymie their multiple investigations into the Clinton pay-to-play network.

    • Franken: FBI’s Comey should face Senate hearings

      Sen. Al Franken called Sunday for the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server. And the Minnesota senator said he thinks Hillary Clinton can rely on his state’s voters despite a last-minute visit from Donald Trump, though he said he’s always “nervous.”

      “I think that there should be hearings, and I’m certain there will be hearings in the Judiciary Committee on this matter,” the Franken told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

      His comments reflected the Democratic frustration with Comey telling lawmakers 11 days before the November 8 election that the FBI was reviewing new emails potentially connected to its investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information.

      [...]

      Franken also defended the Clinton Foundation as Tapper pressed him on whether it should be shuttered if Clinton wins the election.

    • Can The Oligarchy Still Steal The Presidential Election?

      At this point, I would think that the Oligarchy would prefer to steal the election for Trump, instead of from him, rather than allow insouciant Americans to destroy America’s reputation by choosing a person under felony investigations for president of the United States.

    • Not all Americans are Barking Nutters

      The journalists of course attempt to say that to vote for Stein is to let Trump in. Stein sticks strongly to the argument that the “Queen of Corruption” and “Warmonger” Clinton is not in fact a real choice from Trump. This is of course absolutely true, Clinton is a dangerous extremist – she just happens to support the extremism of the right wing establishment and its poodle media.

      I have been fascinated by the apoplexy generated in the pretend left by the notion that people ought not to vote for Clinton. The go-to argument is that not to vote for her is in itself an act of misogyny. I wonder if they will argue the same for Marine Le Pen. The second argument is that a corrupt warmonger is better than the racist bigot Trump. The interesting thing is, close examination reveals an almost 100% correlation between those apoplectic at any lack of support for Clinton, and those who supported Tony Blair. The idea that being an ultra-corrupt warmonger is not a big problem is obviously a fixed principle with these people.

    • Defying the Politics of Fear

      Our only chance to overthrow corporate power comes from those who will not surrender to it, who will hold fast to the causes of the oppressed no matter what the price, who are willing to be dismissed and reviled by a bankrupt liberal establishment, who have found within themselves the courage to say no, to refuse to cooperate. The most important issue in this election does not revolve around the personal traits of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. It revolves around the destructive dynamic of unfettered and unregulated global capitalism, the crimes of imperialism and the security and surveillance apparatus. These forces are where real power lies. Trump and Clinton will do nothing to restrict them.

      It is up to us to resist. We must refuse to be complicit, even in the act of voting, with the fossil fuel industry’s savaging of our ecosystem, endless wars, oppression of the poor, including the one in five children in this country who is hungry, the evisceration of constitutional rights and civil liberties, the cruel and inhumane system of mass incarceration and the state-sponsored execution of unarmed poor people of color in our marginal communities.

      [...]

      The rise of Donald Trump is the product of the disenchantment, despair and anger caused by neoliberalism and the collapse of institutions that once offered a counterweight to the powerful. Trump gives vent to the legitimate rage and betrayal of the white underclass and working poor. His right-wing populism, which will grow in virulence and sophistication under a Clinton presidency, mirrors the right-wing populism rippling across much of Europe including Poland, Hungary, France and Great Britain. If Clinton wins, Trump becomes the dress rehearsal for fascism.

    • US election poll tracker: Who is ahead – Clinton or Trump?

      Americans will vote on 8 November to choose their next president.

      The numbers have begun to tighten as we approach election day amid crises affecting both Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival Donald Trump.

      Use our tracker to follow the contest and scroll down to find some explanation on what the polls show.

    • WikiLeaks Show Washington Post Writer Asked DNC For Anti-Trump Research

      Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank appears to have asked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to do the majority of the research for a negative column he wrote about Donald Trump in April 2016.

      Milbank’s column was titled, “The Ten Plagues of Trump,” and featured a list of “outrageous things” said by Trump. One of the “plagues” listed by Milbank, for example, was “Blood” and centered around a quote from Trump about Megyn Kelly: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

    • WikiLeaks: Chicago mayor used private domain to communicate with officials

      Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel used personal email accounts and a personal email domain to communicate with government officials and political figures, according to a published report based on hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks.

      Emanuel’s personal account information turned up among the thousands of emails from John Podesta, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, the Chicago Tribune reported. Clinton has come under fire for her use of a private email server because doing so potentially jeopardized classified information.

      Emanuel registered his personal email domain, “rahmemail.com,” on May 16, 2011, the day he was sworn into office. The hacked emails also turned up evidence of Emanuel’s personal Gmail account.

    • Chelsea’s husband allegedly used foundation ties to boost hedge fund

      Chelsea Clinton’s husband used his connections to the Clinton family and their charitable foundation to raise money for his hedge fund, according to an allegation by a longtime Clinton aide made public Sunday in hacked documents released by WikiLeaks.

      Marc Mezvinsky extended invitations to a Clinton Foundation poker event to rich Clinton supporters he was courting as investors in his hedge fund, and he also relied on a billionaire foundation donor to raise money for the fund, according to the WikiLeaks documents. They also assert that he had his wife Chelsea Clinton make calls to set up meetings with potential investors who support her family’s political and charitable endeavors.

      The documents — a memo and an email — were written in late 2011 and early 2012, respectively, by ex-Clinton aide Doug Band. They were sent to family confidants including John Podesta, who is now serving as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, and Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton’s State Department chief of staff.

    • Why Historians Must Use Wikileaks To Write The History Of The 2016 Election

      Wikileaks is playing a prominent, if under reported, role, in the 2016 American presidential election. Few understand the importance of Wikileaks in the eventual writing of the history of presidential politics.

      The media write and talk about events as they happen, usually without historical background or context. A good historian writes with retrospection about past events that explain historical outcomes. U.S. Presidential elections leave behind a clutter of accounts of those who were (or claim to have been) eyewitnesses to history – campaign insiders, journalists, pundits, and hangers-on. The best insider accounts pierce some of the veil of campaign rhetoric, PR, talking points, and smoke and mirrors to explain what was really happening behind the scenes.

    • Viggo Mortensen will be voting for Jill Stein on Tuesday, says it’s not a protest vote

      Like most of Hollywood, Viggo Mortensen is solidly anti-Trump in this election, but he’s also no fan of Hillary Clinton.

      Instead the “Lord of the Rings” star — a Bernie Sanders supporter until he dropped out of the race — will be casting his vote for Jill Stein.

      “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and go, ‘You know, I never voted my conscience,’ ” he said at a luncheon for his movie “Captain Fantastic” at the Explorer’s Club.

      “Not really, when it mattered. I don’t want to do that. And I don’t look at it as a protest vote. I’m not voting against something, I’m voting for something. I’m voting my conscience. It’s not a protest, it’s an affirmation.”

    • WikiLeaks: DNC and CNN colluded on questions for Trump, Cruz

      Newly released emails from WikiLeaks suggest that the Democratic National Committee colluded with CNN in devising questions in April to be asked of then-Republican primary candidate Donald Trump in an upcoming interview.

      In an email to DNC colleagues on April 25 with the headline “Trump Questions for CNN,” a DNC official with the email username DillonL@dnc.org asked for ideas for an interview to be conducted by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

      “Wolf Blitzer is interviewing Trump on Tues ahead of his foreign policy address on Wed. … Please send me thoughts by 10:30 AM tomorrow.”

      The sender of the email would seem to be DNC Research Director Lauren Dillon, who was identified in previous reports of DNC emails released by WikiLeaks in July.

    • Chelsea Clinton ‘used Foundation resources to fund her 2010 wedding to Marc Mezvinsky’, according to new Wikileaks emails

      Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea allegedly used resources from the Clinton Foundation for her wedding, a new dump of Wikileaks emails appear to reveal.

      In several emails, Doug Band, a former top aide to president Bill Clinton and a former Clinton Global Initiative board member, complains about Chelsea Clinton (writing ‘cvc’ for Chelsea Victoria Clinton).

      In one email, dated January 1, 2012, Band emails John Podesta, Chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and says Chelsea Clinton was conducting an internal investigation into CGI and the Clinton Foundation, which posed a conflict of interest.

      It is unclear why Chelsea Clinton was investigating her family’s foundation and its dealings with money.

    • DNC staffers prepared CNN anchors Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper for interviews with Trump, new batch of 8,000 WikiLeaks emails reveals

      The Democratic National Committee helped CNN anchors Wolf Blizter and Jake Tapper prepare for interviews with Donald Trump, the latest WikiLeaks email dump has revealed.

      Among the batch of 8,263 emails released on Sunday night, one shows that staff working for the network hosts asked DNC staffers what questions they should put to the Republican candidate.

      They also asked for advice when it came to an appearance from former candidate, Ted Cruz.

      An email dated April 28 entitled ‘Cruz on CNN’ reads ‘CNN is looking for questions. Please send some topical/interesting ones.’

    • Vote Your Conscience, Vote for WikiLeaks and Vote for Dr. Jill Stein

      With Hillary Clinton circumventing yet another FBI investigation, progressives have an alternative to establishment Democrats. If your conscience won’t allow you to side with a person who is advised by Henry Kissinger and neoconservatives like Robert Kagan, then you have a choice on November 8, 2016. You can vote for a future without a media beholden to John Podesta’s dinner parties. You can choose a future without Wolf Blitzer or Donna Brazile colluding with the DNC, and without a Democratic nominee accepting Foundation contributions from countries that fund ISIS. If you envision a world without wars for oil, fracking, the prison industrial complex, and severe breaches in campaign finance laws, then you certainly don’t have to pick Clinton or Donald Trump.

      You can vote for WikiLeaks.

      You can vote for WikiLeaks, and appease your conscience by championing Dr. Jill Stein and the Green Party.

      Every movement has a beginning, and although Jill Stein has been active in politics for years, this year marks a turning point in American history. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have allowed voters to see the inner workings of the Clinton campaign; countering an American media serving essentially as Hillary Clinton’s public relations machine. Instead of a 2005 hot mic audio of Donald Trump (considered to be Pulitzer Prize winning journalism by the The Washington Post) Assange and WikiLeaks have published enough Podesta emails to highlight the long-term implications of a Clinton presidency.

    • Meme warfare: how the power of mass replication has poisoned the US election

      If you use Facebook, or Twitter, have a Wi-Fi connection, watch television or have been to an office Halloween party, you’ve probably encountered them: internet memes.

      These shareable, sometimes pithy and often puerile units of culture have emerged as the lingua franca of the 2016 election, and have given the American people an entirely new way of articulating their beliefs. Clinton’s top tweet is a meme. Trump’s taco bowl became one. Through memes, Ted Cruz was “unmasked” as the Zodiac killer. Jeb Bush’s limp plea for applause got him Vined into oblivion. Bernie Sanders shared a moment with a bird that blossomed into something out of Walt Disney’s long-lost Marxist phase.

      Memes can be fun, or they can be dumb – but as an emerging medium, they haven’t provoked a lot of debate or analysis. In fact, they seem to defy scrutiny.

      And slowly, before anyone can even take note, memes are ruining democracy.

    • WikiLeaks releases latest batch of emails from Clinton campaign chair

      WikiLeaks has published its 33rd tranche of emails from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
      Trends

      The whistleblowing organization has now published more than 55,600 emails in a series of daily online releases which it said were building towards the November 8 presidential election.

    • Democrats advised CNN on interview questions for Donald Trump, according to new WikiLeaks release

      The Democratic National Committee (DNC) apparently helped CNN anchors prepare for interviews with Donald Trump, according to the latest WikiLeaks email dump.

      Included in some 8,263 emails released by WikiLeaks is an exchange that shows DNC staff discussing how to advise CNN on what questions to ask Mr Trump in a scheduled interview ahead of his foreign policy address.

      However CNN defended the practice, saying it had sought the Republicans’ opinions about questions to ask Hillary Clinton in order to “ensure a tough and fair interview”.

      Although the interview with Mr Trump was ultimately cancelled, the emails showed numerous questions were submitted by the DNC.

    • Campaign collusion: Is CNBC’s John Harwood too close to the Clinton operation?

      The following question was asked on Sept. 21, 2015, via email, to the chairman of a major presidential campaign, John Podesta: “What should I ask Jeb?”

      At the time, Jeb Bush was still a leading candidate to challenge Hillary Clinton for the White House — and had more money behind him.

      The question didn’t come from a campaign surrogate or an opinion host — it came from the chief Washington correspondent at CNBC, John Harwood. And just to make sure he hit Bush where the Clinton campaign — which still viewed the former Florida governor as its most likely opponent for 2016 — wanted him to most, Harwood went to Clinton’s campaign chief to do all the thinking for him.

      It should be noted that the title “chief Washington correspondent” means Harwood is not an opinion host or a partisan pundit — he’s one who represents the network as objective and nonpartisan. It also means he cannot consult with opposition campaigns for advice — nor can he provide advice back to a campaign, which Harwood has on several occasions via recent WikiLeaks dumps.

    • Husband Of CNN Exec Tipped Clinton Campaign Off To Network’s Polls Prior To Release

      An email released by WikiLeaks on Sunday shows that the husband of CNN vice president and Washington bureau chief Virginia Moseley tipped the Clinton campaign off to a favorable poll just before its release last September.

      “Good CNN poll coming,” Thomas Nides, Moseley’s husband, wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in a Sept. 20, 2015 email.

      Nides served as deputy secretary of state under Clinton and is currently vice president at Morgan Stanley. His name has been floated for a possible high-level spot in a Clinton White House.

    • A call to progressives: Help build and own the Green Party

      It hasn’t been an easy election year for progressives. Many were crushed when Bernie Sanders failed to pull off a historic upset of establishment pick Hillary Clinton, then outraged when leaked emails proved what they already knew — that the Democratic Party elite had conspired against Sanders’ political revolution the whole time.

      But with the racist, sexist billionaire buffoon Donald Trump leading the GOP, many progressives have resigned themselves to pulling the lever for Clinton in an attempt to keep Trumpismo at bay. But before you accept yet another election year of “lesser evilism,” allow yourself to consider investing your vote in the Green Party

      In a 2006 interview with the editorial board of the Jewish Press in Brooklyn, then-Senator Hillary Clinton shared her opinion on the recent election in Palestine: “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

    • Clinton aide says Foundation paid for Chelsea’s wedding, WikiLeaks emails show
    • Don’t Move To Canada If Your Candidate Loses, Read This

      Regardless of who wins this election, around half of the country is going to have to learn to live under the rule of someone they’ve vilified for the entire election cycle. (That’s two and a half years, but with a RealFeel of untold centuries trapped in the Phantom Zone.) In order to help people from both sides, we’ve put together a few tips in case the other side wins.

    • New WikiLeaks email suggests possible ‘collusion’ between CNBC, Clinton campaign

      CNBC host John Harwood in September 2015 asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, what he should ask then-Republican presidential candidate former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in an upcoming interview, according to new emails published by WikiLeaks.

      Harwood, who faced harsh criticism for his performance as a debate moderator in the third Republican presidential primary debate in October 2015, sent Podesta an email on Sept. 21, 2015, with the subject line, “What should I ask Jeb…” The body of the email read, “…in Speakeasy interview tomorrow.”

    • Chris Hedges: The End of the Election Will Not Mean the End of Public Anger

      It’s impossible to tell you, because it really will depend on the mood, on the emotions of the voters on election day. That’s all these campaigns are about, because they both essentially are neo-liberal candidates who will do nothing to impede imperial expansion and corporate power. The whole campaign has descended to, you know, not surprisingly, to the level of a reality TV show, with presidential debates featuring women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault being brought in by Donald Trump; videos – I’ll go back to the primaries – of the size of people’s genitals. I mean, it’s just appalling, but all of that is emblematic of a political system in deep decay and one that no longer revolves around fundamental issues. We know from the Wikileaks emails, the John Podesta emails that were leaked from Hillary Clinton, that there was a calculated effort on a part of a Clinton campaign to promote these fringe candidates – like Trump, and they particularly wanted Trump, because the difference between Hillary Clinton and a more mainstream Republican candidate, like Jeb Bush, is so marginal. So if you had to ask me, I don’t think Trump will win, but I don’t rule out the possibility that he will win – we have to look at the Brexit polls in Britain…

    • Jill Stein: ‘We Have Crossed the Rubicon in This Election’

      Jill Stein is already looking past tomorrow’s election.

      The Green Party candidate, who is has a polling average of about 2% heading into Election Day, chuckled at the prospect of an outright win Tuesday. She said she’s hoping for 5% in election returns, and beyond that, she’s planning to push for reforms in the presidential debate commission and to help pave the way for future third party candidates with a rank choice voting initiative.

      Stein spoke to TIME on the eve of the election about what she’s seem from voters this year, how women were talked about in the race and why she never takes vacations.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Serbia’s censorship debate

      Is the Serbian government using underhanded censorship methods to control the media narrative or are critics too harsh?

    • FOSS Friendly IBM is Attempting to Destroy OpenLava

      Several years ago Platform Computing (now owned by IBM) released an open source version of LSF (Platform Load Sharing Facility) — their premier software product. LSF is a workload management platform and job scheduler for distributed HPC environments. In recent years that open source product has begun to flourish, and now IBM is using the DMCA in an attempt to erase all progress made on the project since it was first released. I guess if you can’t compete, you call your legal team…

    • Internet Pioneers Slam $750,000 Settlement for the ‘Man Who Invented Email’

      Two early internet pioneers are expressing sadness and disbelief at the fact that Shiva Ayyadurai, a self-described “world-renowned scientist, inventor, lecturer, philanthropist and entrepreneur” who says he invented “email: the electronic mail system as we know it today,” will receive a $750,000 settlement from Gawker Media, the bankrupt publisher that he sued for defamation earlier this year over a series of stories that, his lawsuit claims, “falsely trace the origin of email and call Dr. Ayyadurai a liar.”

      Computer programmer Ray Tomlinson is credited by many experts and historians with developing the technology that we understand today as email. Dave Crocker, who helped write several foundational standards documents about messaging over the internet, told Gizmodo that Ayyadurai’s settlement with Gawker Media represents a victory for a version of the history of email’s development that isn’t supported by evidence. “I grew up being taught that the truth is always a sufficient defense against claims of defamation,” Crocker said upon hearing about the settlement. “Given the extensive documentation about the history of email, I’m sorry to find that that the adage no longer holds true.”

      John Vittal, one of Crocker’s co-authors, seconded his frustration. Vittal is best known in the traditional history of email for being the first person to implement “reply” and “forward” functions. “What’s true is true, and you can’t hide from it, and shouldn’t be able to capitalize on thwarting it,” said Vittal. “To me, it’s a sad day.”

    • Clinton Campaign Also Not A Fan Of Free Speech: Sends Legal Threat Letters Over Trump Ads

      If there’s one thing that the two major Presidential candidates seem to agree on it’s that we have too much free speech and all you First Amendment whiners should quiet down. Just this morning, we wrote about Trump threatening a documentary filmmaker with a cease & desist letter (the latest in a fairly long list of defamation threat letters). And it appears that the Clinton campaign is also ramping up its similar legal threat letter business.

      Last week, it sent cease & desist letters to broadcasters in Florida who were airing Trump ads that used some footage of Michelle Obama back in the 2008 campaign taking something of a swipe at Clinton. And, just today, the campaign supposedly sent out cease & desist letters to broadcasters airing new Trump ads claiming that Clinton is “under investigation by the FBI.”

    • Facebook Blocks Profiles Of Far-Right Polish Groups, Sparks Protests

      Several far-right Polish groups have protested outside Facebook’s office in Warsaw after the social networking site temporarily blocked their profiles.

      About 120 people demonstrated in the Polish capital Saturday afternoon, denouncing what they said was “censorship.”

    • Poland’s far-right groups protest Facebook ‘censorship’ after social accounts removed
    • Far-right Polish groups protest Facebook profile blockages

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • If The FBI Can’t Stop All These Leaks About An Investigation, Why Would it Be Able To Keep Encryption Backdoor Secret?

      In the last 10 days or so, James Comey sent two letters to Congress — the first one notifying Congress of some new information in an “unrelated” investigation that may pertain to Hillary Clinton’s emails. And then the one from yesterday admitting that there was nothing important in those emails. That was effectively all that Comey said officially. Yet, in between all of that a ton of information leaked from the FBI about the investigation. We learned what it pertained to (the Anthony Weiner investigation), heard estimates of the number of emails involved, heard that the FBI found them weeks ago but only told Comey right before he sent the letter, that the FBI didn’t have a warrant to read the emails — and then that it did, and that a whole bunch of people inside both the FBI and DOJ have opinions on both sides of this whole mess.

      Basically, the FBI (and the DOJ) were leaking information like it was the last chance they’d ever have to leak information and their lives depended on who could leak the most.

    • The USA threatens to unleash cyber warfare against Russia
    • A second Privacy Shield legal challenge increases threat to EU-US data flows

      The Privacy Shield transatlantic data transfer deal is now caught in a pincer action: A week after it emerged that Irish digital rights activists had filed suit to annul the deal come reports that a French campaign group has begun its own legal action.

      French civil liberties campaign group La Quadrature du Net filed suit against the European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, on Oct. 25.

      Although the Court of Justice of the EU has not yet published details of the complaint, Brussels-based news agency Euractiv reported Thursday that La Quadrature’s goal is to annul the Commission’s decision that Privacy Shield provides adequate protection under EU law when the personal information of EU citizens is transferred to the U.S. for processing.

    • China Adopts Cybersecurity Law Despite Foreign Opposition

      The Cyber Security Law was passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, and will take effect in June, government officials said Monday. Among other things, it requires internet operators to cooperate with investigations involving crime and national security, and imposes mandatory testing and certification of computer equipment. Companies must also give government investigators full access to their data if wrong-doing is suspected.

      China’s grown increasingly aggressive about safeguarding its IT systems in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. spying, and is intent on policing cyberspace as public discourse shifts to online forums such as Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat. The fear among foreign companies is that requirements to store data locally and employ only technology deemed “secure” means local firms gain yet another edge over foreign rivals from Microsoft Corp. to Cisco System Inc.

    • A Guy Put Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ In Big Mouth Billy Bass’ Body And People Are Rightly Horrified

      So Big Mouth Billy Bass — you know, that animatronic singing fish that was annoyingly popular at the end of the 1990s — was, frankly, already pretty creepy. But one little modification brought it to new, disturbing heights.

      Brian “Wizard of Terror” Kane posted this lil’ video to Facebook on Oct. 27, which features a Big Mouth Billy Bass configured so that the voice of Alexa — Amazon’s voice assistant similar to Apple’s Siri — emanates from the fish’s mouth.

      The video is simply captioned, “the future” ― and it’s a dystopian vision indeed.

    • How to talk with your loved ones in private

      A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end encryption with friends and family. I explicitly asked people not to list options only used in a work setting. The background is the uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as a blog post from Sander Venima about why he do not recommend Signal anymore (with feedback from the Signal author available from ycombinator). I wanted an overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options in a less biased survey later on. So far I have not taken the time to look into the individual proposed systems. They range from text sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging, VOIP and video conferencing. For those considering which system to use, it is also useful to have a look at the EFF Secure messaging scorecard which is slightly out of date but still provide valuable information.

    • Researchers Matched Images on Tattoo Websites to a German Police Database

      For the last year, EFF has been battling to free records from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) regarding an ethically dubious research program to promote the development of automated tattoo recognition technology. The agency is months delinquent in providing a variety of information, most notably the list of 19 research entities who received a giant set of tattoo images obtained from prisoners in custody. This delay is particularly alarming as NIST is currently recruiting institutional participants for the next stage of its expanded research, scheduled to begin on Dec. 1.

      What we’ve discovered so far about NIST’s approach to tattoo identification raises major concerns for privacy, free speech, the freedom to associate, and the rights of research subjects. We’ve also learned that similar tattoo recognition experiments are being conducted in Germany, a country that is usually sensitive to personal privacy.

    • ‘Our Identity Is Often What’s Triggering Surveillance’

      The civil rights director of the Oregon state Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against his employer. It seems the department got a new computer program that lets them search social media, and to test it out, they looked for hash tags related to Black Lives Matter and activism against police violence, turning up a tweet by Erious Johnson, which led his colleagues to start compiling a report on him without his knowledge. Johnson’s lawsuit claims racial discrimination and a hostile work environment for engaging in protected activity.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • 25 Years After Junk Science Conviction, Texas Finally Admits Sonia Cacy’s Innocence

      Twenty-five years after she was first accused of the arson-murder of her uncle, 68-year-old Sonia Cacy on November 2 was finally exonerated by Texas’ highest criminal court, a move that clears the way for her to seek compensation from the state for her decades-long ordeal.

      Cacy’s conviction for a crime that never happened is a prime example of the devastating consequences of allowing junk science into the courtroom, of the need for continuing education of forensic practitioners, and for the robust review of convictions that may have been tainted by outdated, or imagined, science.

      In fact, arguably, it was Cacy’s case that set in motion a series of events that would eventually culminate in a unique partnership between the Innocence Project of Texas and the Texas state fire marshal, designed to review old arson-related criminal cases in order to ferret out convictions based on unsupportable fire science. “Sonia’s case is a lesson to the entire criminal justice system of how important it is to keep bad science out of court,” said Gary Udashen, president of the IPTX and Cacy’s longtime attorney.

    • Officer fired over feces sandwich

      A San Antonio police officer has been fired after an internal investigation determined he tried to give a homeless man a sandwich with feces inside it.

    • Man shot and killed by off-duty officer after ‘road rage incident’ escalated

      A man was shot and killed by an off-duty Chicago police officer Saturday afternoon in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood. The man was riding as part of a funeral procession, his family says, when what officials are calling a “road rage incident” escalated and he was shot and killed.

      During a short press conference, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson described the chaotic scene near 111th and Troy that led to the fatal shooting around 3 p.m. Saturday.

      Johnson said it began as a “road rage incident” between multiple people and a “fire department member.” Then, Johnson said, an off-duty police officer who was in a barbershop across the street saw the fight and headed over, “announcing his office” as he got involved. That’s when “the subject,” identified by his family as 25-year-old Joshua Beal, “displayed a weapon,” according to Johnson.

    • Nigeria frees Muslims accused of murder over blasphemy

      A court in northern Nigeria has freed five Muslim men accused of killing an elderly Christian woman for allegedly blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed.

      The court in the city of Kano discharged the five men on Thursday on the legal advise of the prosecution.

      “The legal advice presented to the court, dated June 24, states that there is no case to answer as the suspects are all innocent and orders the court to discharge all the suspects,” the judge said in his ruling.

    • Fresh attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, houses torched

      In fresh attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh, unidentified miscreants set ablaze some of their houses and damaged two temples in central Brahmanbarhia district where several places of worship of the minority community were vandalised earlier this week, police said.

    • Luxembourg’s Asselborn: Turkey is using Nazi-era tactics

      Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Monday, compared the Turkish government’s dismissal of civil servants to methods used by the German Nazi regime, and recommended that the European Union impose economic sanctions.

      Since the failed July 15 coup that killed more than 240 people, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has detained, suspended or dismissed more than 110,000 public servants as part of a wider crackdown on his political opponents.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Despite ESPN Whining, Nielsen Confirms Historic Subscriber Losses For Channel

      Last week, we noted how Disney and ESPN threw a bit of a hissy fit when Nielsen data indicated that ESPN had one of the biggest subscriber losses in company history last month. According to Nielsen’s data, ESPN lost 621,000 homes in a single month, as well as losing 607,000 ESPN2 households and 674,000 ESPNU homes. That’s of course on the heels of losing more than 7 million subscribers over the last three years or so, thanks largely due to the rise of cord cutting, cord trimming (scaling down your TV package) and the rise of some “skinny bundles” that exclude ESPN from the base channel lineup.

      ESPN demanded that Nielsen withdraw its numbers, insisting they represented a “dramatic, unexplainable variation” that didn’t match ESPN’s own numbers. Nielsen obliged, but after conducting an “extensive” review of the numbers found them to be “accurate as originally released.” Of course, this shouldn’t be a surprise; we’ve noted how everybody but ESPN appears to have seen the writing on the wall. But instead of adapting to the changing times, ESPN responded by denying that cord cutting was real, and suing companies like Verizon for trying to bring some flexibility to the traditional cable bundle.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Clinton v. Trump on copyrights and patents: Reading the platform and the tea leaves

      The hot-button issues this election can be counted on one’s fingers—and for most voters, things like copyright and patent policy don’t make the list. Assigned to a wonkish zone far from the Sunday morning talk shows, intellectual property issues aren’t near the heart of our deeply polarized political discourse.

      Of the two major party candidates in 2016, only the Democratic candidate has a platform that even addresses copyright and patent policies. So today, let’s look at what we know about Hillary Clinton’s plan, and make some informed speculation about what could happen to these areas under a Donald Trump presidency.

      Given that the campaign is focused (as always) on a relatively small group of issues, tech policy watchers who spoke to Ars were surprised to see a presidential platform that mentions IP issues at all. Clinton’s briefing paper on technology and innovation addresses both copyright and patent issues directly, and that in itself is something of a surprise. Trump’s website has no such information, so the best clues to his approach lie in his public statements and the people he has surrounded himself with.

    • Copyrights

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