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11.24.16

Links 24/11/2016: OpenBSD Foundation Helped by Smartisan, US Vote Recounts

Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Security Made Simple

    From the revelations of Edward Snowden to the potential problems with the Internet of Things and the latest malware, security and privacy are constantly in the news. The trouble is, while everyone is concerned about security and privacy, few know what to what to do about them. Fortunately, Linux has endless tools to address these problems without requiring that everyone become an expert.

  • Desktop

    • The miracle of Lubuntu for older computers

      When it comes to Linux distributions you generally don’t hear a lot about Lubuntu. However, this Ubuntu spin can be a great help to users with older computers who need a light-weight distribution that requires minimal hardware resources.

  • Server

    • Cumulus ‘Evolves’ CLI to Help Network Engineers Access Linux

      Cumulus Networks recently announced the availability of its Cumulus Linux Network Command Line Utility (NCLU) to help network engineers access the benefits of Linux, using software similar to Command Line Interface (CLI) that they’re accustomed to.

      This all may seem counterintuitive to Cumulus’ stated goal of making switches behave more like servers. By creating its NCLU, it seems to be adjusting its own operating system to behave more like a Cisco switch.

    • Helm: The Kubernetes Package Manager

      Back on October 15th 2016, Helm celebrated its one year birthday. It was first demonstrated ahead of the inaugural KubeCon conference in San Francisco in 2015. What is Helm? Helm aims to be the default package manager for Kubernetes.

    • Kompose: a tool to go from Docker-compose to Kubernetes

      At Skippbox, we developed kompose a tool to automatically transform your Docker Compose application into Kubernetes manifests. Allowing you to start a Compose application on a Kubernetes cluster with a single kompose up command. We’re extremely happy to have donated kompose to the Kubernetes Incubator. So here’s a quick introduction about it and some motivating factors that got us to develop it.

    • Docker Joins Eclipse, Updates Commercial Platform

      Docker Inc, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Docker application container technology, is working hard trying to help all of its DevOps constituents, including both developers and enterprises, that use Docker in production.

  • Kernel Space

    • Introducing the Linux Hardware Guide

      The Linux-Hardware-Guide tests and rates all types of hardware for their Linux compatibility for the knowledge base. A test report is created for each investigated hardware component and, if necessary, additional Linux configuration help is provided. Furthermore, Linux users can add their own hardware to the database and transmit hardware details and test results with a dedicated scan software. This allows creating a broad data basis and semi-automatic filling of the knowledge base. The Linux-Hardware-Guide is not limited to a single Linux distribution but instead tries to support all distributions and as many Linux users as possible. Currently, it supports 27 different Linux distributions. Additionally, the Linux-Hardware-Guide facilitates the knowledge transfer between Linux users who have exactly the same hardware under operation, because problem finding and solving often is much easier if someone else with exactly the same hardware is available.

    • My Lightning Talk from All Things Open 2016: 25 years of Linux in 5 minutes

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA On Linux With OpenGL & Vulkan

        With Croteam recently having released an updated Talos Principle with better Vulkan performance and the NVIDIA 375.20 and AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 both having come out recently, here is a fresh OpenGL and Vulkan graphics API performance comparison when using Valve’s Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, both of which games on Linux offer both graphics API renderers.

        This article is a look at the latest NVIDIA vs. AMDGPU-PRO performance with the newest drivers for both OpenGL and Vulkan. A follow-up article will include results when testing the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan driver code too. A fresh Windows vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance comparison is also being worked on as thanks to our readers this holiday season. This is all thanks to those that support Phoronix via viewing the site without ads, making a holiday tip, or joining our premium program, such as through this week’s Thanksgiving event. Plus a number of other exciting unrelated Linux graphics articles coming out in the days ahead.

        • ‘

      • Intel Graphics Installer for Linux 2.0.3 Supports Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 24

        One of our readers informs us about the general availability of the Intel Graphics Update Tool 2.0.3 for Linux-based operating systems, which finally brings support for the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases.

        Previously known as Intel Graphics Installer for Linux, the Intel Graphics Update Tool is designed to let users install the latest graphics drivers for their Intel HD GPUs. It’s specifically made for Ubuntu and Fedora distributions, and the latest version finally adds support for Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) and Fedora 24, though Fedora 25 is out.

      • AMDGPU Gets RPM Fan Info, Clock/Power-Gating Improvements & More For Linux 4.10

        Last month AMD sent out their big feature pull to DRM-Next for staging ahead of Linux 4.10 while now a secondary feature pull request has been sent in of more material for this next kernel development series.

        Last month’s Radeon/AMDGPU DRM-Next 4.10 code had support for multiple virtual displays, a new VM manager, support for UVD power-gating on more hardware, power management improvements, more fixes, and other fun.

      • Intel Skylake OpenGL vs. Vulkan Numbers With The Latest ANV Mesa Changes

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Evolution 3.24 Email and Groupware Client to Support XZ Compression for Backups

        Yesterday, we reported on the availability of the second development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, and we promised we’d cover the most important application updates pushed as part of this unstable branch.

      • GNOME Shell, Mutter to Handle Three-Finger Touchpad Pinch Gestures in GNOME 3.24

        Today we’re continuing our reports on the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment with what landed for the GNOME Shell user interface and Mutter window and composite manager as part of the GNOME 3.23.2 development release.

      • GNOME Shell & Mutter Land New 3.24 Development Releases, NVIDIA Wayland Support

        They missed Tuesday’s GNOME 3.23.2 release, but available as of Wednesday evening is Mutter 3.23.2 and GNOME Shell 3.23.2.

        Mutter 3.23.2 now stacks docks below other windows on full-screen windows, supports touchpad pinch gestures with more than two fingers, implements drawing tablet support on X11, fixes some Wine games starting minimized, fixed switching between scrolling modes on Wayland, support for EGLStream/EGLDevice, and other bug fixes and improvements. The EGLStream/EGLDevice support is what allows the mainline NVIDIA Wayland on GNOME support.

      • I’m going to the Core Apps Hackfest

        In this exact moment, I’m packing up my stuff to attend the Core Apps Hackfest organized by Carlos Soriano and kindly hosted by Kinvolk. It’ll happen in Berlin, German.

      • A tale of cylinders and shadows

        Like I wrote before, we at Collabora have been working on improving WebKitGTK+ performance for customer projects, such as Apertis. We took the opportunity brought by recent improvements to WebKitGTK+ and GTK+ itself to make the final leg of drawing contents to screen as efficient as possible. And then we went on investigating why so much CPU was still being used in some of our test cases.

        The first weird thing we noticed is performance was actually degraded on Wayland compared to running under X11. After some investigation we found a lot of time was being spent inside GTK+, painting the window’s background.

  • Distributions

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed Gets Linux Kernel 4.8.9, CMake 3.7, Firefox 50 & Mesa 13.0.1

        Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling distribution should be happy to hear that the repositories were flooded this week with hundreds of updated packages.

      • SUSE Releases The First Official 64-bit Linux OS For Raspberry Pi 3

        SUSE has released the first official 64-bit Linux-based operating system for Raspberry Pi 3. This release is basically a version of Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 that supports Raspberry Pi 3. The users need to visit SUSE’s website, make an account, and download the OS image.

      • YaST Team visits Euruko 2016

        As promised in previous posts, we want to share with you our experience and views from this year annual Ruby conference Euruko. Maybe “our” is too much to say, since we only sent one developer there. So to be precise, these are Josef Reidinger’s experience and views on the conference.

        This year Euruko took place in Sofia, capital of Bulgaria. It turned out to be a great conference place. Public transport works very well, everyone speak English and even when it uses Cyrilic alphabet, almost everything is written also in Latin one.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian stretch on the Raspberry Pi 3

        The last couple of days, I worked on getting Debian to run on the Raspberry Pi 3.

        Thanks to the work of many talented people, the Linux kernel in version 4.8 is _almost_ ready to run on the Raspberry Pi 3. The only missing thing is the bcm2835 MMC driver, which is required to read the root file system from the SD card. I’ve asked our maintainers to include the patch for the time being.

      • Debian miniconf in Cambridge

        I spent a few days in Cambridge for a minidebconf. This is a tiny version of the full annual Debconf. We had a couple of days for hacking, and another two days for talks.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu to Reject SHA-1-Signed Repos by Default in APT Starting January 1, 2017

            Today, November 24, 2016, Debian developer and Ubuntu member Julian Andres Klode announced that he plans on turning off SHA1 support for APT repositories starting January 1, 2017.

            As you might know, or not, the long-awaited deprecation of the SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) encryption, which is used to verify digital content, CRLs (certificate revocation lists), and digital certificates, is set for the first day of January 2017 worldwide, which might affect your Internet browser.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Cinnamon 3.2.2 Desktop Out Now with Workspace Switcher and Sound Applet Fixes

              We reported the other day on the official availability of the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, which you can now install on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 16.10 machines, and it looks like the second point release is already out.

              That’s right, we’re talking about Cinnamon 3.2.2, which arrived a few hours ago with lots of improvements and bug fixes, such as the ability to show a separator on applets’ context menus and a new mechanism for highlighting applets that have open menus, as well as better keyboard navigation for the Menu applet with some specific keys.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • microG on Jolla

        I am a incorrigibly in picking non-mainstream, open smartphones, and then struggling hard. Back then in 2008, I tried to use the OpenMoko FreeRunner, but eventually gave up because of hardware glitches and reverted to my good old Siemens S35. It was not that I would not be willing to put up with inconveniences, but as soon as it makes live more difficult for the people I communicate with, it becomes hard to sustain.

        Two years ago I tried again, and got myself a Jolla phone, running Sailfish OS. Things are much nicer now: The hardware is mature, battery live is good, and the Android compatibility layer enables me to run many important apps that are hard to replace, especially the Deutsche Bahn Navigator and various messengers, namely Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Threema and GroupMe.

      • Handset Installed Base Passed Tipping Point. Now More than Half of All Mobile Phone Handsets in Use are Smartphones

        We have passed a significant milestone for the planet’s digital connectivity. As of last quarter, we passed the tipping point where now there are more smartphones in use, than dumbphones (aka ‘featurephones’). The new sales of smartphones has been more than dumphones for three years but with the installed base, worldwide, it takes this long for the trends to catch up. And as smartphones now sell more than 4 out of every 5 new phones, this trend will go to its logical conclusion. In five years we’re at the point where all new phones sold are smartphones; and by middle of the next decade, the last dumbphones will quietly disconnect from their networks for the last time.

      • Tizen

        • New Photo Editor Apps Instatags and Monograph added to the Tizen Store

          A couple of the most wanted apps by Tizen users is a photo editor app has been added to the Tizen store last month. The apps named Instatags and Monograph are created by Arrie Affanto. Both apps are easy to use, have some good features, and don’t take much storage space.

        • Black Friday Deals, get money off the Gear S3 / S2 and other Tizen Tech

          As part of it’s Black Friday offerings Samsung has some great discounts on quite a bit of its latest Tizen tech. So if you’re looking for a fridge that has Family hub Integrated in it, the latest smartwatch, or a Tizen smart TV then they might have something that will sway you to part company with your hard earned cash.

        • Register Now – First ever Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV comes to Russia, 2016

          For the first time we have a Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV Russia 2016, taking place from November 30 – December 1, 2016. The event will be held in Moscow at the “Marriott Hotel Novy Arbat”.

          As the name suggests this will be a Tizen Developer Conference for Smart TV that will Introduce app developers to the exciting world of TV apps and educate them to the Tizen TV platform and architecture. You will be able to learn all the features and possibilities of SmartTV including multitasking, instantOn, preview, checkout on TV, etc.

      • Android

        • Android 7.1 Nougat Features: What To Expect With Its New Upgrade?

          If you have one of the devices that’s eligible for this developer preview and you have been signed up for the Android Beta Program, then Google will automatically send an over-the-air (OTA) update to your device. The update will be over the coming week, according to Dave Burke, Google vice president of engineering. You can still sign up for the Android Beta Program if you want to test this latest OS release before it becomes available to everyone. And if you’d like, you can download images and flash them onto supported devices.

        • Nokia Android Phone Tipped to Have Zeiss Lens, 2K Display

          New details of the upcoming Nokia Android phone, expected to be unveiled at the MWC 2017 in Barcelona, have surfaced online. According to a tipster based in China, the upcoming Nokia Android phone will feature a 5.2-inch or 5.5-inch screen size. The rumours claim that the smartphone will sport 2K (QHD) display, which means that the handset may belong to the high-end category.

          Additionally, the Nokia Android phone is said to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC which may seem slightly dated considering all new smartphones are now featuring Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 under the hood. One of the highlight feature of the upcoming Nokia Android phone is said to be the Zeiss lens for the primary camera, something that has been seen on earlier Nokia devices.

        • Android TV home screen bloat and how to fix it
        • How to see Wi-Fi passwords on an Android phone
        • Samsung Galaxy S7 May Update To Android 7.0 Nougat Starting In December
        • OnePlus 3T review: Picking up where the Google Nexus left off

          Startup phone maker OnePlus has a new flagship Android smartphone. Well, tweaked phone might be more accurate.

          Less than six months after it released the $400 OnePlus 3 to critical acclaim (Mashable’s included), OnePlus is back with the OnePlus 3T — a faster and longer-lasting OnePlus 3.

        • The OnePlus 3T makes one of Android’s best bets even better

          OnePlus has always been a people pleaser. It’s an impulse grown, in part, from the hardware startups close connection to a tight-knit fanbase. As other new entrants like Le Eco on the smartphone scene push to be the biggest and flashiest, the company has been producing excellent handsets from the very beginning, devices capable of taking on the top flagships at a fraction of the price.

          But the 3T is a bit of conundrum. It’s certainly in keeping with OnePlus’s focus on quality, but for those who went all in with the company’s last flagship a few months back, the phone may feel like a small-scale betrayal, upping the specs and entirely replacing the phone half-a-year after its introduction.

        • 10 Ways to Trick Out Your Android Home Screen

          One of the advantages of choosing a shiny new Android phone over those Apple handsets is the extra scope for home screen customization. If you’re stuck for inspiration or wondering how to get started, here are 10 ways of tricking out your home screen and other parts of the Android OS.

        • Huawei Leapfrogs Samsung to Become World’s Most Profitable Android Device Maker

          The explosive woes of Samsung’s defective Galaxy Note 7 franchise have helped catapult China’s Huawei past the South Korean conglomerate as the most profitable Android smartphone manufacturer in the world. Apple aapl continues to remain the most profitable of all smartphone makers with a staggering 91% operating profit market share.

        • This is the ‘Glossy Black’ Galaxy S7 Edge, coming soon

          A couple of days ago we told you about the possibility of a “Glossy Black” Galaxy S7 Edge in the works. Just 48 hours later and the first images of that upcoming device have now appeared on Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. The photos show a very shiny, very sexy S7 Edge that’s quite similar to the Olympics Games edition, but without the accents.

          The baby blue version of the Galaxy S7 Edge is now available across all U.S. carriers, but the new shiny black version is expected to arrive in December sometime. We would expect it to arrive as early as possible though, to give it the best chance of being snapped up in time for the holiday buying frenzy.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Are you powering your business with open source tech? Here’s why you should

    If open source is not already an integral part of your IT strategy, then it’s time for a re-think. Today’s open source solutions are just as secure and feature rich as the proprietary offerings in the market and come with many added benefits.

    Of course some might espouse the cost efficiencies of open source but for many organisations, the decision to adopt open source technologies has more to do with capability and community. For starters, open source is inherently flexible, removing vendor lock-in and providing code which can be customised or extended to meet a particular need. This flexibility is essential for rapid innovation and also adding new capabilities within already complex IT environments.

  • Nextcloud: an Open-source Dropbox, Google Drive Alternative

    Nextcloud is a cloud software alternative that gives you full control over your data. It’s designed for both individuals and organizations with many users. It’s a relatively young project, being a fork of the similar ownCloud project, which is also worth checking out and comparing.

  • Securing open source

    Open source software is on the up and up. More companies, software development houses and individual developers are making use of it. But, isn’t the very concept of open source inimical to security? It could be argued both ways, but the reality is that if it is being used – and it is – then companies had better have a good understanding of the implications for their system, and how to secure it.

    First of all, some basics of the open source world. It is important to understand the difference between free and open source software. Free software is software that can be used without paying a licence fee – think of Adobe Acrobat Reader or Winzip – whereas open source software allows users to access the source code itself.

  • Keynote: Fujitsu’s Open Source Journey – From Consumer to Apprentice Contributor
  • Fujitsu’s Open Source Journey — From Consumer to Contributor

    About a year ago, Fujitsu created the Open Service Catalog Manager (OSCM), their first full software project contribution to the open source space. Ries describes this a “winding road” where they moved through several different steps to ultimately release the OSCM as an open source project. They started with “Consensus Ridge” to decide whether Fujitsu should even do this as an open source project, which was easily answered because so many of their customers and the industry are demanding open source solutions.

  • Get emotional: Tips for open source communities

    Humans are driven quite a bit by emotions. You may be a rational human being, but your emotions will still drive many of your choices. You can be excited, angry, interested, or sad about things—it doesn’t matter—you’ll react to those emotions and you’ll very often leak that into your communications.

    You’ll likely leak your emotions, and so will other members of the community. If you think humans should suck it up and act like nothing is happening, I’m afraid you are living in a bubble. That is not how humans operate. That’s not how humans interact.

    Some humans know this and these humans should make sure other humans know this as well: Emotions matter and they affect our daily tasks. Emotions take control over us many times during our day and they determine how our day will go. Being thick skinned doesn’t really matter. It just means you can control your emotions a bit more than others, but you still react to them. You react in a different, perhaps more controlled, way but you still react to your emotions.

  • Making open source fashionable

    In March 2015, the leadership of Berlin-based Zalando gathered the company’s entire tech team in a hip underground techno club (it’s Berlin, after all) and announced a new way of working—something called “Radical Agility.” Inspired by Daniel Pink’s Drive, Brian Robertson’s Holacracy system and the agile movement, Radical Agility emphasizes Drive’s call for autonomy, mastery and purpose as the pillars of the company’s tech strategy and culture.

  • Will Open Source Drive Blockchain Interoperability?

    Blockchain technology matured a lot this year. Sure, it’s still unclear why banks should use it — needs vary by company. But it is clear blockchains provide more value if they can interact with each other.

    Competing blockchain vendors have worked hard to differentiate their products and sell them to banks. In the process some players have begun open-sourcing their software — following the same path as operating-system programmers and architects of the internet.

  • Pay the Price for Open Source

    Fast forward a few dozen years and here we are, Open Source is now an ecosystem, not a user group that you and five friends attend, or a magazine to which you subscribe. The problem is that most of us have stopped talking about the different types of open source, we just assume it is both. Most of the projects in our corner of the world – PHP – actually is both. The PHP license – a derivative of the BSD license – is very open about giving you freedom with very few responsibilities. Other projects use GPL, MIT, Apache, and other licenses. Each developer or group has the right to select whatever license they feel most comfortable with for their code. If you use their code, it is your responsibility to abide by the restrictions and responsibilities of their license.

  • Events

    • 2017 Community Leadership Events: An Update

      This week I was delighted to see that we could take the wraps off a new event that I am running in conjunction with my friends at the Linux Foundation called the Community Leadership Conference. The event will be part of the Open Source Summit which was previously known as LinuxCon and I will be running it in Los Angeles from 11th – 13th Sep 2017 and Prague from 23rd – 25th Oct 2017.

      Now, some of you may be wondering if this replaces or is different to the Community Leadership Summit in Portland/Austin. Let me add some clarity.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Kicking off the 2016 End-of-Year Fundraiser

      Thanks to a single staff member, ten volunteer board members, and dozens of interns, volunteers, and members, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) protects and promotes open source software, development and communities, championing software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition, and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement. Although primarily known for our role in certifying open source licenses, today OSI’s mandate includes, fiscal sponsorships for emerging projects, hosting of open source working groups, and cross-discipline community building, all in an effort to extend the reach of open source in education, government, nonprofits, and business. In order to move forward with our work, we are asking members and open source contributors and enthusiasts to take the next step and donate to the OSI. Join us in our work for the next year by donating to the OSI today!

  • BSD

    • openbsd changes of note 2

      Things happened, stuff changed.

      X550 support among other ix changes and cleanup.

      Ongoing switch work. Better OpenFlow compat. You know it’s serious when tcpdump gets an update.

      Loongson 3A support.

      [...]

    • FreeNAS 10, World’s Most Popular Software-Defined Storage OS, Gets New Beta

      The day of November 23, 2016, brought us the second Beta development release of the upcoming FreeNAS 10 open-source storage NAS (Network Attached Storage) operating system based on FreeBSD, just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday.

      FreeNAS 10 Beta 2 comes almost three months after the first Beta milestone, and the devs are proud to say that the upcoming operating system, which will be a total rewrite, is now feature complete, and there are many GUI enhancements for the Dashboard, Volume UI, Accounts, System, Services, Networking, Calendar, Console, and Peering. Also, it looks like feature-parity with the FreeNAS 9.10 is in place now.

    • OpenBSD Foundation Welcomes First Iridium Donor: Smartisan

      Today’s big news comes from the OpenBSD Foundation, via director Ken Westerback.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Government in France “a mini-revolution”

      “In five years, France has progressed from an “empty chair” policy to that of an observer and to then become a member of OGP and its vice-president”, declared Axelle Lemaire, France’s Secretary of State in charge of Digital Affairs, at the Paris Open Source Summit, speaking about the country’s Open Government policy.

    • Open Data

      • EU-US Transatlantic Open Data Partnership publishes data access library

        This month, the eu.us.opendata library was published on GitHub. The software provides developers in the statistical programming language R with a universal way to access economic data from the EU and the USA.

        The library was developed as part of the EU-US Transatlantic Open Data Partnership, a collaboration between the US Department of Commerce and its Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on the one hand, and the EC’s DG Connect and Eurostat on the other.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open Source Pancakes

        [drtorq] promises more hacking on the printer in the future, so this is just step one. We expect the mods will be a lot like a typical 3D printer, except the heated bed is absolutely necessary on this model. The printer is more like a CNC engraver than a 3D printer since it is basically an XY carriage with a nozzle that flows batter instead of polymer.

  • Programming/Development

    • Quick Read: The JS Foundation

      In recent years, JavaScript has seen a staggering number of libraries and frameworks come and go. In can be difficult to make important decisions about which software to use in your projects, as there is always the risk of depending on a library that the maintainer will not be able to support and, at worst, may end up abandoning.

      To try and tackle some of the issues surrounding the support and development of the JavaScript ecosystem, the well-known jQuery Foundation and the Dojo Foundation have decided to join forces and fuse into the JS Foundation, a project backed by the Linux Foundation (if only I had a cent for every time someone says “Foundation”!).

    • Math in V8 Is Broken; How Do We Fix It?

      JavaScript has become increasingly more popular, especially with the introduction of Node.js, which has allowed full-stack JavaScript development. As this 20-year development language continues to rise, a group of individuals began to notice something: Math in V8 (a JavaScript engine) is broken.

      In advance of Node.js Interactive, to be held Nov. 29 through Dec. 2 in Austin, we talked with Athan Reines, software engineer at Fourier, about the importance that JavaScript Math library has to the overall community; how they discovered underlying implementations were not accurate; and why a group of individuals are working to fix this.

    • Resolving Conflict

      If you want to be successful (whether as a leader or a senior engineer), you need to be someone who can look at the big picture, assess how to move forward, and then get everyone working on the same page again. That is true leadership and what most managers value in great employees.

    • Git Behind the Curtain: What Happens When You Commit, Branch, and Merge

      This is the script for a talk that I gave at BarCamp Philly. The talk is a “live committing” exercise, and this post contains all the information needed to follow along, as well as some links to relevant source material and minus my pauses, typos, and attempts at humor.

    • How to build your code club on GitHub

      While not essential, a repository for real-life tasks or issues in a club can be a helpful planning tool. It also makes it easy for people to see what the club or group is working on. This promotes the idea of transparent and open leadership. You can use labels to tag issues for specific types of work or committees. Milestones are useful for deadlines or goals the group is working towards. The new Projects feature may also be useful in a repository for real-life task management.

    • Zapcc Still Aiming For “Super Fast” Compiler Performance

      It’s been a while since last covering Zapcc as a new, super-fast C/C++ compiler yet it has evolved and now the latest beta is reporting to show even more impressive performance gains.

      Zapcc is a compiler based on LLVM/Clang that has routinely strived for maximum performance not just for compile-time performance but also the resulting performance of the compiled binaries.

Leftovers

  • Secessionists Formally Launch Quest for California’s Independence

    Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general’s office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.

    Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.

  • Science

    • Presidential Medal of Freedom awards go to top computer scientists

      On Tuesday, President Barack Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to several luminaries in the arts, sports, and sciences.

      Of those, the class of 2016 included two women who played crucial roles in American computer science in the 20th century: Margaret H. Hamilton and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was given the award posthumously.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Malware Found on New Windows Computers (Not What You Think)

      It appears that the office supply giant, Office Depot, isn’t adverse to tarnishing its reputation if there’s a buck or two to be made in the process.

      KIRO TV in Seattle reported on November 15 that it had taken brand new out-of-the-box computers that had never been connected to the Internet to Office Depot stores, both in Washington state and Portland, Oregon, and told the repair desk staff that “it’s running a little slow.” In four out of six cases they were told the computer was infected with viruses and would require an up to $180 fix.

      After declining the “fix,” they took the “virus laden” machines to a Seattle security outfit, IOActive, which reexamined the machines. “We found no symptoms of malware when we operated them,” an employee with the firm, Will Longman, said. “Nor did we find any actual malware.”

      In the two cases where undercover reporters weren’t told that their computers showed evidence of an infection, they were advised to install antivirus software. In one of the two stores, a technician evidently noticed that the machine was new and told the reporter to “ignore the test results.”

    • How Unikernels Can Better Defend against DDoS Attacks

      On the episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Dell EMC CTO Idit Levine, an EMC chief technology officer at the cloud management division and office of the CTO, discussed how unikernels are poised to offer all of the developer flexibility afforded to containers, while striving for better security and integrations with many of today’s top container platforms. She spoke with SolarWinds Cloud Technology Lead Lee Calcote at KubeCon 2016:

    • Exploit Code Bypasses Linux Security Features Leaving Systems Vulnerable
    • Researcher writes codeless exploit that bypasses Linux security measures

      If you’re a Linux administrator, then you’re likely aware that even being fully up to date on all of the patches for your Linux distribution of choice is no guarantee that you’re free from vulnerabilities. Linux is made up of numerous components, any of which can open up an installation to one exploit or another.

    • FBI Hacked into 8,000 Computers in 120 Countries Using A Single Warrant

      The FBI hacked into more than 8,000 computers in 120 different countries with just a single warrant during an investigation into a dark web child pornography website, according to a newly published court filings.

      This FBI’s mass hacking campaign is related to the high-profile child pornography Playpen case and represents the largest law enforcement hacking campaign known to date.

      The warrant was initially issued in February 2015 when the FBI seized the Playpen site and set up a sting operation on the dark web site, in which the agency deployed malware to obtain IP addresses from alleged site’s visitors.

    • The FBI Hacked Over 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries Based on One Warrant

      In January, Motherboard reported on the FBI’s “unprecedented” hacking operation, in which the agency, using a single warrant, deployed malware to over one thousand alleged visitors of a dark web child pornography site. Now, it has emerged that the campaign was actually an order of magnitude larger.

      In all, the FBI obtained over 8,000 IP addresses, and hacked computers in 120 different countries, according to a transcript from a recent evidentiary hearing in a related case.

    • curl security audit

      I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing the bill for it. The auditing company is called Cure53.

    • Personal data for more than 130,000 sailors was breached, Navy says

      The Navy was notified in October by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services that a computer supporting a Navy contract was “compromised,” and that the names and social security numbers of 134,386 current and former sailors were accessed by unknown persons, the service said in a news release.

    • Your headphones could be spying on you

      JUST WHEN you thought you couldn’t possibly be carrying any more tracking devices, it looks like you can add another one to the mix.

      A team of researchers in Israel have discovered that with a little hardware hackery, your headphones can be used to listen in on you when plugged into your computer.

      It’s been known for a long time that if you plug a microphone into a speaker jack, it can sometimes make a tinny speaker (if you blast the volume). But what about the other way around?

      Ben Gurion University researchers have discovered that with a simple malware program which they’ve christened SPEAKE(a)R, Realtek codecs, which provide the built in sound on most motherboards, can be reassigned to turn the headphone jack into a microphone.

    • How to create heat maps to show who’s trying to connect your router

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Arabs Celebrate Israeli Fires as Haifa Blaze Spreads

      However, the impression that the fires were deliberately set as acts of terrorism was reinforced by a report by the NRG news site, which presented dozens of social media posts in Arabic that expressed happiness over the fires. On one forum discussing the proposed law to prevent mosques from broadcasting their call to prayer in the early morning hours, one post said that the Israelis “tried to prevent the mosques from conducting prayers, now they are burning up.” Another post said that “this is our land, and Israel will continue to burn until we return free to it.” A social media tag in Arabic, “Israel is burning,” was trending on Thursday.

    • Watch: Haifa up in flames

      Security forces are dealing with a wave of fires breaking out all over the country. According to official estimates, terror squads are igniting the fires in various areas, and efforts are being made to locate these squads.

      Firefighters are working to subdue four fires around the city of Haifa.

      Police have ordered the residents of 11 neighborhoods in Haifa, constituting thousands of people, to evacuate their homes and reach the Bat Galim Community Center or the old Qiryat Eliezer soccer stadium.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Bolivia Declares Water Emergency, El Niño Blamed

      Bolivia is deep in the middle of a punishing drought, likely caused by the El Niño system in the Pacific last winter. It’s gotten so bad that taps have dried up, and the president has declared a national emergency.

      The El Niño, a system of unusually warm water in the Pacific, significantly alters weather patterns over the fall and winter when it hits land, causing drier conditions in Central America and wetter conditions in North America and parts of South America.

      “We have to be prepared for the worst,” Morales said at a press conference, the Guardian reported. He also told press the country will use this drought as an opportunity to invest in strategies to adapt to climate change impacts.

    • Saudi Arabia’s Sway in OPEC Limited by Resurgent Iraq and Iran

      Iraq and Iran, shaking off shackles of sanctions and war, have raised oil output to record highs and are asserting themselves within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Together they produce more than 8 million barrels of oil a day, almost a quarter of the oil pumped by the group, and both want to boost their output further.

    • Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’

      Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

      Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

  • Finance

    • Sweden’s flag company Ericsson paid millions SEK to a Costa Rica’s President while competing for telecom deal

      I have recently reported in ‘The Indicter’ and ‘Global Research’ of a payment made by Swedish giant corporation Ericsson, to the Clinton foundation. I have also reported separately the intervention of this company in Haiti – which had disastrous consequences for that country’s economy, as reported in a US Embassy cable from Port-au-Prince to the State Department [see document-excerpt below].

      The revelations regarding unethical transactions in a variety of corruption investigations around Ericsson indicate, in my judgement, that this Swedish flag company might have pursued systematic bribery, internationally.

      The new exposures are in relation to previous Costa Rica President Miguel Angel Rodriguez over the tendering process for a major telecommunications contract in that nation. The revelations are partly based on the testimony of a former employee at the company, Liss Olof Nenzell, who was in charge of “sensitive payments”. The report adds that government ministers as well as executives of Telecom companies received Ericsson’s payments.

      Reports of the exact sum allegedly sent by Ericsson to Miguel Angel Rodriguez vary in the Swedish media. While ‘Swedish Radio’ puts it at $750,000 [See graphic above], ‘The Local’ (Carl Bildt’s megaphone) mentions the significantly lower amount of $271,245. Rodriguez denies the existence of bribes; he admits, nevertheless, “having links” to the mentioned bank account in Panama. Former Costa Rica’s president Rodriguez was a staunch supporter of the UN invasion in Haiti. Following that invasion, Ericsson obtained extended credits in Haiti; that, according to a document declassified by the US State Department, contributed significantly to the decline of the economy of that country.

    • TPP Dead, TTIP Dying, But The EU And Canada Seem Determined To Ram Through CETA Deal Without Proper Scrutiny

      The death of TPP has now been confirmed by Donald Trump himself in a short video posted to YouTube. As Mike wrote recently, the other huge trade deal, TTIP, is now in limbo, probably dying, and there are rumors that even the low-profile Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) has been put on ice pending instructions from the new President. Doubtless attempts will be made to revivify them, and if those fail, there will certainly be further so-called “trade” deals — which actually go way beyond trade — that seek to bring in all the bad things that Techdirt has been warning about for years.

      But alongside TPP, TTIP and TISA, there is one deal that is teetering on the brink of success. CETA is a smaller-scale agreement between the EU and Canada, but it’s more important than it looks. It allows US companies with subsidiaries in Canada to use the agreement’s corporate sovereignty provisions to sue the EU — and there are 42,000 such companies according to one analysis (pdf). As a result, CETA has been called “TTIP by the backdoor,” since it would provide a handy way for US companies to put pressure on EU nations even if TTIP suffers the same fate as TPP.

    • India’s Cash Ban Is the Best Thing to Happen to Digital Payments [Ed: absolutely devastating to privacy]

      Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Twitter feed has come alive these past two weeks. From a roadside egg-seller in Bhopal to a soda hawker in Bangalore, the founder of Paytm has posted snapshots of the unusual array of merchants who ply the teeming streets of India — and are now turning to his digital payments startup for help.

      Those fishmongers, vegetable vendors and rickshaw drivers count among the thousands who’ve signed onto India’s largest digital payments service since Prime Minister Narendra Modi triggered a nationwide cash crunch when he scrapped the country’s two largest note denominations. While the aim was to vanquish “black money,” it could end up being the best thing to happen to its nascent online finance industry and haul its antiquated economy into the 21st century by making digital payments mainstream.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Trump’s grandfather ‘kicked out of Germany for avoiding military service’

      Donald Trump’s grandfather was kicked out of his native Germany for failing to do his mandatory military service there, a historian has claimed.

      A local council letter from 1905 informed Friedrich Trump — who had become a United States citizen — that he would not be granted his German citizenship back and that he had eight weeks to leave the country or be deported, German historian Roland Paul told CNN Tuesday.

      He also claimed that Trump had illegally left Germany, failing to notify authorities of his plan to immigrate.

    • US election recounts campaign—citing hack attacks—raises $3M in one day

      Citing the dangers of hacked voting machines, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein said on Wednesday that she intends to raise more than $2 million by Friday to initiate vote recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

      “After a divisive and painful presidential race, reported hacks into voter and party databases and individual e-mail accounts are causing many Americans to wonder if our election results are reliable,” Stein said. “These concerns need to be investigated before the 2016 presidential election is certified. We deserve elections we can trust.”

      In her statement, Stein claims that some election machines used in Wisconsin were banned in California because they were “highly vulnerable to hacking and malicious reprogramming.”

    • Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots

      You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons manually checking ballots is an essential security safeguard (and includes some incorrect numbers, to boot). Let me set the record straight about what I and other leading election security experts have actually been saying to the campaign and everyone else who’s willing to listen.

    • Alex Halderman Clarifies: Not Sure If Election Was Hacked, But, Uh, Shouldn’t Someone Be Checking To Make Sure?

      So lots of people have been discussing the story claiming that some e-voting experts believe the Clinton campaign should be asking for a recount in certain battleground states, where it’s possible there were some e-voting irregularities. As we noted in our post, the story would barely be worth mentioning if one of the people involved wasn’t Alex Halderman, a computer science professor we’ve been talking about for nearly a decade and a half, going back to when he was a student. Halderman is basically the expert on e-voting security — so when he says something, it’s worth paying attention.

      Halderman has now posted something of a follow-up to the NY Magazine article clarifying his views and what he’s suggesting. He’s not saying there’s evidence of a hack, but basically saying that no one knows if there was a hack or not, and because of that, there should be a recount as a way to audit the results to see if there were any irregularities.

    • Hacked or Not, Audit This Election (And All Future Ones)

      After an election marred by hacker intrusions that breached the Democratic National Committee and the email account of one of Hillary Clinton’s top staffers, Americans are all too ready to believe that their actual votes have been hacked, too. Now those fears have been stoked by a team of security experts, who argue that voting machine vulnerabilities mean Clinton should demand recounts in key states.

    • Hillary Clinton Supporters Call for Vote Recount in Battleground States

      Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote is growing. She is roughly 30,000 votes behind Donald J. Trump in the key swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin — a combined gap that is narrowing. Her impassioned supporters are now urging her to challenge the results in those two states and Pennsylvania, grasping at the last straws to reverse Mr. Trump’s decisive majority in the Electoral College.

      In recent days, they have seized on a report by a respected computer scientist and other experts suggesting that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the keys to Mr. Trump’s Electoral College victory, need to manually review paper ballots to assure the election was not hacked.

      “Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack?” J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan who has studied the vulnerabilities of election systems at length, wrote on Medium on Wednesday as the calls based on his conclusions mounted. “Probably not.”

    • Jill Stein hopes to request election recounts in battleground states

      Jill Stein, the Green party’s presidential candidate, is prepared to request recounts of the election result in several key battleground states, her campaign said on Wednesday.

      Stein launched an online fundraising page seeking donations toward a $2.5m fund she said was needed to request reviews of the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

    • Jill Stein pushes for recount in 3 swing states over hacking concerns

      Failed Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday announced plans to force a recount of votes in three crucial swing states — a longshot move that could help vanquished Democrat Hillary Clinton, who remained mum on the subject.

      Stein, who garnered a dismal 1 percent of the national vote, said challenging the tallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was needed to answer questions about a possible cyber-attack on electronic-voting machines.

      She appealed for $2 million-plus in donations to pay for the effort, which would have to be started by Friday, the deadline for filing papers in Wisconsin.

      An online counter showed just over $285,000 in donations by late Wednesday afternoon, and a Stein campaign lawyer notified the Wisconsin Elections Commission it intended to seek a statewide recount, a commission spokesman said.

    • Experts Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States

      Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

      Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

    • Donald Trump Skips TV for YouTube to Offer Brief Transition Update

      Hours after scolding TV-news executives in a meeting, president-elect Donald Trump decided to make a brief address Monday on YouTube updating the nation on where his transition efforts stand.

      In one of the few appearances he has made in the two weeks since he defeated Hillary Clinton for the U.S. presidency, Trump devoted the two-and-a-half-minute clip to an overview of his priorities, from interviewing cabinet members to his policy plans in the first 100 days.

    • Acts of Quiet Desperation: Wisconsin Recount Edition

      It is quite sad to see so many well-meaning and otherwise intelligent Americans embarrassing and deluding themselves that Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the election held over two weeks ago.

      I hear many using words like mourning, markers of the kind of feelings that follow an actual death. If that is the case, then it is time to move on into some form of acceptance.

      In addition to the clueless bleating about the electoral vote not matching the popular vote (you win at baseball with more runs, not more hits), Hillary Clinton is now being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump. The story, somehow, despite the scientists not speaking on record and only to the Clinton team in private, has gone viral across the same media (HuffPo, Vox, you know them) that never saw the flaws in Candidate Clinton and still doesn’t.

    • Republicans were wildly successful at suppressing voters in 2016

      Last week, the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the federal Voting Rights Act propelled Donald Trump to the White House.

      Trump will assume the presidency because of the Electoral College’s influence — nearly a million more people cast ballots for Hillary Clinton as of November 15. The election was also marked by low turnout, with tens of millions of eligible voters choosing not to participate at all. Yet there has been relatively little discussion about the millions of people who were eligible to vote but could not do so because they faced an array of newly-enacted barriers to the ballot box.

    • Study: most students can’t spot fake news

      If you thought fake online news was a problem for impressionable adults, it’s even worse for the younger crowd. A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn’t identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two thirds of middle school kids didn’t see why they shouldn’t trust a bank executive’s post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn’t question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it.

    • This is the single most dangerous thing Donald Trump said in his New York Times interview

      Donald Trump said lots (and lots) of eyebrow-raising things during his sitdown with the New York Times on Tuesday. On climate change. On prosecuting (or not) Hillary Clinton. But one statement – in response to a question about the various conflicts of interest between his eponymous company and his status as the soon-to-be president of the United States – was truly eye-popping.

      Trump’s statement carried considerable echoes of Richard Nixon’s famous/infamous line to interview David Frost three decades ago: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Facebook wants to get into China so badly it created a censorship tool

      The Times adds that the tool may never be used and that it’s just one of the ideas Facebook is throwing around to get into China. The report also notes that if the tool is eventually used in the country, Facebook itself probably wouldn’t be suppressing posts; rather the tool would be given to a third party in charge of censorship.

    • ISIS publishes a ‘how to’ outfox Twitter guide

      Islamic State’s presence on social media is here to stay even as it loses ground in Iraq and Syria and after a serious crackdown by Twitter. The terrorist entity has published a guide on how to outfox Twitter’s efforts, according to an advance copy of a report by the Jihadi Websites Monitoring Group of IDC’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism obtained by The Jerusalem Post.

    • Sweden to outlaw… what, exactly?

      For years, online hate speech and cyber-bullying have been on the political agenda in Sweden. Now there will be some new laws, covering a wide range of actions and statements.

    • Opera Browser Asked to Blacklist Pirate Sites in “Turbo Mode”

      The Opera web browser feature ‘Turbo Mode’ is designed to speed up browsing. As a side effect, it also bypasses website blocks, something popular with pirates. However, it appears that the company has been in talks to integrate a blacklist which could stop access to blocked domains.

    • Facebook ‘made China censorship tool’

      Facebook worked on special software so it could potentially accommodate censorship demands in China, according to a report in the New York Times.

      The social network refused to confirm or deny the software’s existence, but said in a statement it was “spending time understanding and learning more” about China.

    • The War on the First Amendment Didn’t Start Last Week

      For those who woke a week ago to discover the First Amendment is under attack, I lost my job at the Obama/Clinton State Department in 2012 for writing We Meant Well, a book the government did not like, and needed the help of lawyer Jesselyn Radack and the ACLU to push back the threat of jail.

      My book was critical of actions in Iraq under both the Obama and Bush administrations. One helped protect the other.

      Braver people than me, like Thomas Drake, Morris Davis, and Robert MacLean, risked imprisonment and lost their government jobs for talking to the press about government crimes and malfeasance. John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, and Jeff Sterling went to jail for speaking to/informing the press. The Obama administration tried to prosecute reporters from Fox and the New York Times for stories on government wrongdoing.

      Ray Maxwell at the State Department went public with information about Clinton’s email malfeasance before you had even heard of her private server. The media called him a liar, an opportunist, and a political hack and he was pressed into retirement.

    • Facebook, China, Fake News And The Slippery Slope Of Censorship

      Well, I guess it’s time to complete the circle. Last week, we were warning that the rush to demonize Facebook for allowing “fake news” to be distributed and shared via its platform would lead to calls to suppress and censor certain view points. And then, this week came the news that China is strategically and opportunistically using the hubbub over “fake news” to push for greater censorship of the internet — claiming it’s necessary to stop fake news and keep people “better” informed (rather than the opposite).

      And to top all of that off, comes a story from the NY Times about how Facebook has been working on a tool to allow the Chinese government to censor stories on Facebook as a condition of entering the market. It’s no secret that Facebook has been trying for a really long time to figure out a way to get into China. There are over a billion potential users there that Facebook really wants on its platform. And that’s not a bad thing. But, of course, China has a heavily censored internet. And while Facebook has been mostly blocked in China, there have already been reports from last year of stories being suppressed to appease the Chinese government.

    • Facebook’s Chinese takeaway could see certain posts silenced

      FACEBOOK HAS REPORTEDLY developed software that will stop certain posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, namely China.

      The social network has been banned in China since 2009, not because the country was sick of baby pictures and mundane gossip, but because of the government’s strict censorship rules.

      Like many other US technology firms, Facebook would like to reenter the market, which is home to more than 1.4 billion potential pocket-liners for Facebook.

    • Facebook developed secret software to censor user posts in China, report says

      Facebook has developed censorship software in an effort to get China to lift its seven-year ban on the world’s largest social network, according to reports.

      The social network developed the software to suppress posts from appearing in users’ news feeds in specific geographies with the support of the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, according to the New York Times. The posts themselves will not be suppressed, only their visibility.

      A Facebook spokesperson said: “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country.

    • We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned

      A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

      We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Google warns journalists and professors: Your account is under attack

      Google is warning prominent journalists and professors that nation-sponsored hackers have recently targeted their accounts, according to reports delivered in the past 24 hours over social media.

      The people reportedly receiving the warnings include Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Stanford University professor and former US diplomat Michael McFaul, GQ correspondent Keith Olbermann, and according to this tweet, Politico, Highline, and Foreign Policy contributor/columnist Julia Ioffe; New York Magazine reporter Jonathan Chait; and Atlantic magazine writer Jon Lovett. Reports of others receiving the warnings are here and here. Many of the reports included banners that Google displayed when account holders logged in. Ars spoke to someone who works for a well-known security company who also produced an image of a warning he received. The person said he was aware of a fellow security-industry professional receiving the same warning.

    • Wednesday’s papers: Supo wants more powers, Finland’s electric car ambitions, Alko opens online shop

      While the agency said that it had no reason to update Finland’s current terror threat assessment, it did say that the relatively high number of Finnish nationals joining Isis is concerning.

      According to the agency more than 300 people currently under Supo surveillance because of suspected ties to jihadist extremism, the papers write.

    • Tech firms seek to frustrate internet history log law

      Plans to keep a record of UK citizens’ online activities face a challenge from tech firms seeking to offer ways to hide people’s browser histories.

      Internet providers will soon be required to record which services their customers’ devices connect to – including websites and messaging apps.

      The Home Office says it will help combat terrorism, but critics have described it as a “snoopers’ charter”.

      Critics of the law have said hackers could get access to the records.

      “It only takes one bad actor to go in there and get the entire database,” said James Blessing, chairman of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (Ispa), which represents BT, Sky, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and others.

      “You can try every conceivable thing in the entire world to [protect it] but somebody will still outsmart you.

    • Monument to Privacy: Is This Manhattan Skyscraper a NSA Listening Post?

      Many have walked by and wondered what purpose this vast, windowless skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan serves. 33 Thomas Street, also known as the “Long Lines Building” (LLB), is an impenetrable monolithic fortress amid canyons of glass and steel. Ostensibly an AT&T telecoms building, the New York Times have recently reported (based on investigative work by The Intercept) that this “blank face[d] monument to privacy” may in fact be a NSA (National Security Agency) listening post, hidden in plain sight.

      Designed by San Franciscan John Carl Warnecke—an architect who worked closely with the Kennedy administration, and designer of the late President’s mausoleum—the Brutalist tower was completed in 1974. Built to withstand a nuclear attack on New York or, at the very least, a devastating loss of power to the city, the 550 foot-tall (169 meters) structure is supported by systems that allow it to provide enough food, water and fuel to sustain 1,500 people for two weeks completely removed from public infrastructure.

    • How can I protect myself from government snoopers?

      The UK has just passed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, at the third attempt, and it will become law by the end of the year. The bill was instigated by the then home secretary, Theresa May, in 2012. It is better known as the snooper’s charter.

      Jim Killock, the director of Open Rights Group, described it as the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”. It more or less removes your right to online privacy.

    • Moment of truth: Web browsers and the SHA-1 switch

      The long-awaited SHA-1 deprecation deadline of Jan. 1, 2017, is almost here. At that point, we’ll all be expected to use SHA-2 instead. So the question is: What is your browser going to do when it encounters a SHA-1 signed digital certificate?

      We’ll delve into the answers in a minute. But first, let’s review what the move from SHA-1 to SHA-2 is all about.

    • Who can view my internet history?

      Last week, whilst most of us were busy watching the comings and goings at Trump Tower and Ed Balls on Strictly, Parliament quietly passed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (a.k.a. the Snoopers’ Charter). It’s been described as the most intrusive system of any democracy in history and a privacy disaster waiting to happen.

      The Act makes broad provisions to track what you do online. Amongst a raft of new surveillance and hacking powers, it introduces the concept of an internet connection record: a log of which internet services – such as websites and instant messaging apps – you have accessed. Your internet provider must keep these logs in bulk and hand them over to the government on request, whether you want them to or not.

    • Your data is for sale

      Seminar: The consequences of the commercial use of consumer data

    • What Would Trump’s Plan to Fire Federal Workers Mean for Intelligence Employees?

      President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers want him to take on government bureaucracy the same way he approached his reality show: cut the fat and fire more federal employees.

      Civil service laws were written to prevent freewheeling firing sprees and to protect federal employees’ rights, though many complain it prevents speedy removal of ineffective workers, creating the “forever” government bureaucrat. However, large segments of the intelligence community, including DIA, CIA, NSA, and most of the FBI are not entitled to these same protections, and some attorneys who represent those employees are particularly concerned.

      “[Intelligence community] employees have little protection,” wrote Mark Zaid, an attorney who often represents members of the national security and intelligence spheres, in a tweet. He noted that some clients, blowing off steam and making dark jokes, threatened to leave the U.S. to hand over secrets to agents of foreign powers “because of mistreatment.”

    • A message to tech entrepreneurs from Edward Snowden: “We can build something better”

      In a climate of global instability, one of the world’s most renowned whistleblowers has put the onus on tech companies to step in when people’s basic human rights are not upheld by governments or the law.

      Shortly after Donald Trump added the United States presidency to his portfolio, Startpage.com hosted a live interview with Edward Snowden, who believes Trump’s election is a “dark moment” in US history.

    • Protect the whistleblowers: The case for pardoning Snowden

      Critics of Edward Snowden have long maintained that the young whistleblower could have legally and safely worked within the system to reform the NSA, but instead recklessly went rogue.

      This simply is not true.

      Snowden’s actions can only fairly be judged when considered against a backdrop of Washington power plays, diminishing rights for intelligence community contractors like Snowden, and retaliation against those who did speak up through institutional channels.

    • Obama: No Pardon For Edward Snowden

      President Barack Obama has never taken kindly to whistleblowers, and it seems he hasn’t changed his stance even in the twilight of his administration.

      Asked about the possibility of pardoning Edward Snowden, the American who leaked thousands of documents from the National Security Agency, Obama said it’s not going to happen.

      “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves, so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point,” Obama told Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper.

    • President’s stance on Snowden pardon

      On Nov. 18, Der Spiegel, a German weekly magazine which is one of Europe’s largest publications of its kind, interviewed President Obama. On the question of whether he would pardon Edward Snowden, Obama replied “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves …”

    • Obama won’t pardon Snowden

      Despite Edward Snowden and his lawyers presenting a case for Barack Obama to free Edward Snowden of his charges for espionage, the House Select Committee has issued a letter to the President saying he should not be pardoned.

      13 Republicans and nine Democrats argued that the crimes Snowden had committed were inexcusable and he should not be let off.

    • Trump’s CIA pick would reinstate US collection of phone data

      The federal government’s long-hidden authority to sweep up records of all phone calls made in the U.S. was repealed last year in a bipartisan vote of Congress. But President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to head the CIA has called for reinstatement of the data haul and said its elimination was part of “Edward Snowden’s vision of America.”

      Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, revealed in 2013 that the NSA had been collecting bulk data on U.S. phone calls without a warrant for more than a decade. President George W. Bush’s administration had ordered the collection unilaterally after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, then obtained approval from a secret intelligence court in 2006.

    • Snowden Fires Back at Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

      Despite President Obama‘s (incorrect) claim that he is unable to pardon Edward Snowden because the whistleblower hasn’t gone before a court, that hasn’t stopped Snowden from continuing to troll the NSA and Obama Administration.

    • Obama claims he can’t pardon Snowden

      The campaign to have President Barack Obama pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden has run aground.

      Not only has the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and nine Democrats, sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. “He is a criminal.” Obama himself has said it is impossible.

    • Edward Snowden doesn’t care about Trump administration stepping up efforts to arrest him

      Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Monday downplayed the importance of President-elect Donald Trump and again defended his decision to leak documents showing massive surveillance of US citizens’ communications.

      “Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden told an internet conference in Stockholm, speaking via a video link from Russia, where he has been living as a fugitive.

    • Edward Snowden Latest: Trump ‘Is Just The President,’ NSA Whistleblower Says

      Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden made light of Republican Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on Monday during an internet conference in Stockholm.

      “Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden reportedly said at the conference speaking via a video link from Moscow where the 33-year-old fugitive has been living since 2013.

    • Trump is ‘just the president’, says defiant fugitive Snowden

      Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden on Monday downplayed the importance of President-elect Donald Trump and again defended his decision to leak documents showing massive surveillance of US citizens’ communications.

      “Donald Trump is just the president. It’s an important position. But it’s one of many,” Snowden told an internet conference in Stockholm, speaking via a video link from Russia, where he has been living as a fugitive.

    • German Court Rules that Snowden Invitation is Permitted
    • Court ruling means Edward Snowden may give evidence in Germany

      The possibility of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden being brought to Berlin to give evidence before a parliamentary committee has risen after a top appeals court ruled the German government cannot block him.

      The committee investigating US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance in Germany has wanted to call Snowden as a witness to detail what he knows but the government has said it cannot guarantee his safety.

    • Court ruling means Snowden may testify in Germany

      The possibility of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden being brought to Berlin to testify before a Parliamentary committee has risen after a top appeals court ruled the government cannot block him.

      The committee investigating NSA surveillance in Germany has wanted to call Snowden as a witness to detail what he knows but the government has said it can’t guarantee his safety. Snowden is wanted by the U.S. on espionage charges.

      But in a ruling announced Monday, the Federal Court of Justice said the government needs to “establish the preconditions” including “effective protection of the witness.”

    • Court Ruling: Snowden Must be Brought to Germany to Answer US Spying Questions

      The German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has ruled that the German government must make plans to bring former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to Berlin to answer questions from a parliamentary committee looking into US intelligence agency spying.

    • Snowden can testify in Berlin, govt must provide ‘effective protection’ – court

      A top German appeals court has ruled that the government must “establish preconditions” for US whistleblower Edward Snowden to come to Berlin, in order for him to testify before a parliamentary committee investigating NSA surveillance in Germany.

      The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) ruling, made on November 11 but only announced on Monday, came after the Greens and the Left Party requested that the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor be questioned by German MPs. Snowden is wanted by the US on espionage charges.

    • Opinion: Wonderful Snowden Verdict

      The decision by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice in favor of parliamentary minority rights – specifically in the Edward Snowden whistleblower case – is a good, solid verdict, writes Marcel Fürstenau.

    • Snowden can be asked to testify in person in German NSA probe
    • Snowden can be invited to meatspace in German NSA probe, court rules

      Germany’s government has been told that it should make suitable arrangements for that to happen. It has been refusing to invite Snowden to give evidence personally since it would need to guarantee that he would not be handed over to the US—a promise the German authorities say would risk damaging the political relations between the two countries.

      Instead, it has called for him to give evidence via a video link, or for German officials to interview him in Moscow, both of which Snowden turned down.

    • High court: Snowden must come to Berlin

      The Federal court of Justice (BGH) has ruled that the government must bring US whistleblower Edward Snowden to Berlin to answer parliamentary questions on the NSA, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Governments see social media as “a new front in warfare”

      Propaganda, psychological warfare, and real-time surveillance were all on the agenda at the Sixth Annual Conference on Social Media Within the Defence and Military Sector.

    • Journalist who criticised burka flees country after rape and death threats

      The journalist spoke about how a Bosnian soldier offered a bounty on his social media account for anyone who would sexually assault her.

      She said: “He publicly called for my rape offering money to anyone who is willing to rape me.”

      A Ministry of Defence investigation has stalled despite nearly two months of investigating the incident.

    • Arabia Moves to Bosnia: The implications of the Middle-Eastern influx into Central Bosnia

      And Iran was not alone. In the 1990s Saudi economic aid to Bosnia had a religious agenda. Their money was almost exclusively devoted to building (and rebuilding) mosques and madrassas. According to their own claims the Saudis spent $1 billion (US) on “Islamic activities” in Bosnia between 1992-1998. When Alija Izetbegovic was once asked why Saudi monies were not used to bolster the economy, he replied that the Saudis “would not give money for building factories . . . They would only support building mosques.”[ii] Saudi officials now claim that they gave more than $6 billion (US) to Bosnia over the past twenty years.[iii]

    • Trump registered eight companies in Saudi Arabia during campaign: report

      President-elect Donald Trump registered eight companies during his presidential campaign that appear to be tied to hotel interests in Saudi Arabia, according to a report in The Washington Post.

      Trump registered the companies in August 2015, shortly after launching his presidential bid, according to The Post.

      The companies were registered under names such as THC Jeddah Hotel and DT Jeddah Technical Services, according to financial disclosure filings.

    • Water Protector in Critical Condition After DAPL Police Grenade Blew Apart Her Arm

      Sunday night’s no-holds-barred offensive by police from multiple agencies against unarmed water protectors opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline on Highway 1806’s Backwater Bridge — in which at least 167 suffered injuries — sent two elders into cardiac arrest, left a 13-year-old girl injured by a rubber bullet to the head, and now, one woman will almost certainly lose her arm.

      Sophia Wilansky stood among the crowd of around 400 water protectors as the police launched an all-out assault, firing ‘nonlethal’ projectiles, tear gas, mace, LRAD sound cannons, and concussion grenades — one of which reportedly exploded on her left arm, tearing through flesh and exposing bone, and leaving her facing possible amputation.

    • ‘Sharia police’ street patrols did not violate law, German court rules

      A German court has ruled that a group of Islamists did not break the law in forming “sharia police” street patrols and telling people to stop drinking, gambling and listening to music.

      The ultra-conservative Muslim group around the German Salafist convert Sven Lau sparked public outrage with their vigilante patrols in the western city of Wuppertal in 2014, but prosecutors have struggled to build a case against them.

      The city’s district court ruled that the seven accused members of the group did not breach a ban on political uniforms when they approached people while wearing orange vests bearing the words “Sharia Police”.

      Judges said there could only be a violation of the law – originally aimed against street movements such as the early Nazi party – if the uniforms were “suggestively militant or intimidating”, a court spokesman said.

    • Happy Thanksgiving and Moving Forward in a Pluralistic America

      As leading lawyers we obviously play an important role in ensuring that racism and some kind of white-nationalism does not again become acceptable and normal. One of my friends who is openly gay here in Missouri was leaving his house last week and a passenger in a passing vehicle yelled-out “faggot” and targeted him with an open soda bottle. As with Bill Lee, Tracy noted that he had not experienced this type of open vitriol for decades. These incidents are These incidents are not supposed to happen here, but they are happening. As Dan Rather writes “now is a time when none of us can afford to remain seated or silent. We must all stand up to be counted. . . . I believe there is a vast majority who wants to see this nation continue in tolerance and freedom. But it will require speaking.”

    • Kazakh politicians want to rename capital after president

      If Kazakh politicians get their wish, the capital city will be renamed to honour the country’s first and only president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

      The suggestion to rename Astana was buried in a declaration unanimously passed by both chambers of parliament on Wednesday.

      On the surface, the declaration was to mark the forthcoming 25th anniversary of Kazakhstan’s independence. But reading past the tributes to Nazarbayev’s “outstanding service”, the declaration’s final paragraph calls for renaming the capital and other important facilities across the country after theleader of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

    • Posters appeal to save controversial Swiss mosque

      The posters in support of the An‘Nour mosque were seen around town on Tuesday but promptly removed by Winterthur authorities, who said they had not been pre-informed of the posters, reported news agencies on Wednesday.

      Associations and communities are allowed to use free publicity sites around the town but must inform the authorities and have their posters checked beforehand, they said.

      According to the newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the posters called for donations aiming at saving a mosque and referenced a bank account belonging to An‘Nour.

      The mosque in question is an increasingly controversial presence in Winterthur.

      It is currently suspended by the Zurich Federation of Islamic Organizations (Vioz) after its imam and three others were arrested in a police raid at the beginning of November.

      The raid followed a tip off about a sermon given by the imam in late October in which he “called for the murder of Muslims who refuse to participate in communal prayer”.

    • Britain has “turned a blind eye” to abuse of women by sharia ‘courts’

      Powerful testimony from Muslim women has been published by MPs on the Home Affairs Committee as part of their investigation into sharia, while activists have warned that its approach so far has favoured those who support sharia councils.

      Submissions received from Muslim women on their experiences of sharia ‘law’ have now been published by the Committee. The evidence was gathered by One Law For All, who sent the personal testimonies to the committee for their investigation into sharia ‘law’ in the UK.

      One woman whose evidence was included for the Select Committee’s consideration is Habiba Jan who was trapped in an abusive Islamic ‘marriage’ and was unable to escape without a sharia ‘divorce’. Jan ended up being referred to Anjem Choudary for a ‘divorce’, without knowing who he was.

    • Areas of concern regarding Home Affairs Select Committee on Sharia

      We refer to recent emails from the Home Affairs Select Committee to Southall Black Sisters and the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation requesting us to help find Muslim women who have ‘used’ Sharia Councils, to attend an event in Whitechapel, East London, on 24 November 2016 in connection with your inquiry.

      We are a coalition of organisations who have an immense track record in providing front line services and in campaigning for the human rights of black and minority women. Our coalition includes Southall Black Sisters, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, Centre for Secular Space, One Law for All, British Muslims for Secular Democracy and the Culture Project: we represent some of the most marginalised groups in our society. Between us, we have over 100 years of combined experience of working with women from all faith backgrounds, the majority of whom come from a Muslim background.

    • Mainstream Media MIA as DAPL Action Is Met With Water Cannons and Mace

      Outside a triage tent at the foot of the Oceti Sakowin Camp, frantic chatter and whirring generators fused with the familiar drone of police surveilling in the night sky.

      “We have seen four gunshot wounds, three of them to the face and head,” said Leland Brenholt, a volunteer medic.

      By gunshots, he insinuated that rubber bullets had been used on hundreds of people clashing with police. Conflict erupted again over the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, Sunday night.

      “This is still not on mainstream media,” Brenholt sighed. “I’d like to know why,” he sang in a facetious sing-song voice.

      The video account of Brentholt was one of dozens posted on Facebook. They helped to piece together the night’s events, an evolving scene repeatedly described as a war zone by many testifying via livestream.

      Tensions flared when police say around 400 protesters, or ‘water protectors,’ attempted to dismantle a police-enforced barricade on State Highway 1806. Around 6 p.m., demonstrators say they used a semi-truck to remove burnt military vehicles that had been chained to concrete barriers. Since October 27th, traffic has been blocked at the center of the Backwater Bridge, a crossing not far from the encampments where thousands of pipeline resisters have occupied since April.

    • Mob of 30 schoolchildren ambush and beat up two Met Police officers

      Police said a 15-year-old male was arrested at the scene on suspicion of actual bodily harm and has since been bailed to a date in mid-December.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Trump hires two net neutrality opponents to oversee FCC transition

      President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two outspoken opponents of net neutrality rules to oversee the Federal Communications Commission’s transition from Democratic to Republican control.

      The appointees announced yesterday are Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison. Eisenach is director of the Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), while Jamison is a visiting fellow at the same institution. Eisenach previously worked on behalf of Verizon and other telecoms as a consultant, and Jamison used to manage regulatory policy at Sprint.

    • Make companies pay full cost of breaches to restore trust in the internet, says ISOC

      Fake news, online banking thefts and data breaches: It’s no wonder that trust in the internet is at an all-time low. But don’t worry: The Internet Society has a five-step plan for restoring faith in the network of networks.

      The first step is to put users first, according to ISOC, which published its 2016 Global Internet Report on Thursday. That involves being more transparent (step two) about risk and the incidence of data breaches and prioritizing data security (step three) to ensure breaches don’t happen.

    • Experts to Congress: IoT regulation may be inevitable

      In Nov. 16 testimony before a joint subcommittee meeting of the House of Representatives, cybersecurity experts debated whether the internet of things should be regulated by government.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Apple’s ebook store bans books that use Apple trademarks in unapproved (but legal and accurate) ways

        Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz’s must-read new book The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (read an excerpt) is not for sale in the Apple ebook store, and won’t be until they agree to change their text to refer to Apple’s ebooks as “iBooks” rather than “iBook.”

        The petty editorial dictate is a little-known aspect of the agreement that publishers must sign onto in order to put their products in Apple’s bookstore, which demands that Apple trademarks be used as “adjectives, not nouns.” But even this injunction doesn’t actually cover the sin that Perzanowski and Schultz committed in their book.

        Rather, Apple is objecting to the authors’ use of iBook (the name of a discontinued line of Apple laptops) to refer to the ebooks sold in Apple’s store, which they do three times in the text — Apple wants these items referred to as “ebooks from the iBooks store.”

    • Copyrights

      • Viacom 18 Obtains Court Order to Block 1,250 ‘Pirate’ Sites

        In India, a court has gone to extreme lengths to protect a new movie distributed by Viacom 18. A so-called John Doe order filed against at least 40 ISPs instructs them to block a minimum of 1,250 websites that might make the newly released Force 2 available to the public.

      • 4shared: Copyright Holders Abuse Google’s DMCA Takedown System

        Popular file-hosting service 4shared is a true piracy haven, according to some copyright holders. Following numerous complaints the site has had more than 50 million of its URLs removed from Google’s search index. However, according to 4shared many of these are the result of abusive takedown requests.

11.23.16

Links 23/11/2016: Fedora 25 Officially Released

Posted in News Roundup at 12:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mastodon is an open source, decentralized version of Twitter

    So, you want to share your thoughts on social media, but you’re tired of the way apps like Facebook and Twitter monopolize your posts and feed. It might be time to try an entirely new alternative: Mastodon.

    Mastodon bills itself as a free, open-source social media server. Like Twitter, it’s a microblogging platform. Unlike Twitter, it’s non-commercial and not centrally owned, so you don’t have to worry about what will happen to your account or your posts if it gets acquired by another company.

  • The Power of Open Source in the Foundation Framework

    CSS frameworks are among the most actively used tools in web design and development. If you’ve been involved in the industry, at some point you would have heard, seen or used a CSS framework or library before. What many developers do not realise is that these frameworks flourish thanks to the open source movement.

    Frameworks like Bootstrap and ZURB’s Foundation offer a platform for rapid prototyping, getting your site up and running by providing all of the common building blocks. Bootstrap and Foundation are just two popular examples, there are hundreds if not thousands of great frameworks out there that aim to make your job easier and speed up your development work.

  • How Your Company Can Benefit from Contributing to Open Source

    Open source is the antithesis of proprietary software. It’s the free lovin’ hippie amid a sea of corporate profiteers. Defined as software for which the source code is freely available to view, modify, and redistribute, open source software has benefited hardened coders and layman consumers alike. But just because it’s free doesn’t mean profit-driven companies can’t use open source to their advantage.

  • Free as in Puppy — Open Sourcing Your JavaScript Code

    Open Source is much more than making something available to the public. It is not only about your code, it is also about licenses, understanding participation and herding cats a.k.a. dealing with community issues. In this article we will briefly look at the benefits of open sourcing your code and the pitfalls to avoid.

  • Disney’s best releases may be its open source tools

    While most people associate Disney with Mickey Mouse, animation, and amusement parks, the company is forging a path in the open source software realm, encouraging contributions from its developers and releasing software of its own.

    Not surprising, several projects involve images, such as the OpenEXR high-dynamic-range image file format developed by Disney subsidiary Industrial Light and Magic. Others are less image-focused, including Munki, a set of tools to help MacOS X admins manage software installs and removals.

  • Tools for collecting and analyzing community metrics

    Thus far, we’ve discussed the importance of setting goals to guide the metrics process, avoiding vanity metrics, and outlined the general types of metrics that are useful for studying your community. With a solid set of goals in place, we are now ready to discuss some of the technical details of gathering and analyzing your community metrics that align with those goals.

    The tools you use and the way in which you collect metrics depend heavily on the processes you have in place for your community. Think about all of the ways in which your community members interact with each other and where collaboration happens. Where is code being committed? Where are discussions happening? More importantly than the where, what is the how? Do you have documented processes for community members to contribute? If you have a solid understanding of what your community is doing and how it is doing it, you’ll be much more successful at extracting meaningful data to support your goals.

  • Entertainment Giants Offer a Slew of Useful Open Source Tools

    Nowadays, open source efforts are going on not only at big technology companies, but at big companies that leverage technology. Two prime examples exist in the entertaintment industry: Both Netflix and Disney have robust open source programs and have contributed mighty tools to the community. Here is a peek at what they have contributed.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Firefox Focus Browser Protects Your Tracks Online

        If you’ve used incognito browsing features, or even the Tor anonymity tool, you’re already familiar with the concept of avoiding online trackers. Now, Mozilla has launched a browser for iOS users that offers security features that block unwanted trackers.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • CMS

    • A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding and Open Content Management Solution

      In case you missed it, open source content management systems (CMS) have come of age. With free CMS tools, you can manage a blog, manage content in the cloud and much more You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including Drupal (which Ostatic is based on) and Joomla. As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue.

      The good news is that free, sophisticated guides for evaluating CMS systems have flourished, as well. We’ve covered many of the best guides for getting going with a good CMS system. Here, in this newly updated post, you’ll find several additional, good resources.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Microsoft’s Embrace of Linux Draws Ire

      “I am really disappointed that The Linux Foundation accepted Microsoft as a member in the Linux ecosystem, especially considering its own mission to promote, protect and advance Linux,” added another. Rather than expanding its membership to include established commercial vendors, the contributor said the group should be focused on “standardization, stable programming API’s, more use of inherent safe programming languages and less fragmentation of developer effort.”

    • Microsoft’s Warning — “Don’t Change Linux Files In Windows”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Russia kicks out IBM, Microsoft and Oracle

      The State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, is working on a law to reduce government dependence on IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. According to Bloomberg, Russian government agencies will be restricted in buying proprietary software, and will have to prefer open source software instead.

      This step further pushes proprietary vendors out of Russia. Russian companies are increasingly buying software from domestic providers like Diasoft and New Cloud technologies, or deploying open source packages like PostgreSQL and Linux, instead of purchasing licensed packages from companies like Oracle, Autodesk and Siemens.

    • Russia Makes The Right Moves For The Wrong Reasons

      Whatever the motivations, the end result will be the same, a ramping up of utilization of FLOSS in Russia, a good thing. It’s too bad Russia did not make these moves a decade or longer ago which would have caused the move to be completed by now. Too bad Putin isn’t as reasonable in his other dealings with the West.

  • Licensing/Legal

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • 4 tips for creating a Wikipedia article

        It is human nature to want to share the enthusiasm you have for a subject or project with others. Wikipedia is a great place for that, where you can record your expertise and create a fact-based touchpoint for your interest. The site’s mission is altruistic, and it has been my experience that Wikipedia administrators zealously guard against content that has an obvious agenda, is not relevant to today’s Zeitgeist, or does not provide the references and citations needed to prove accuracy.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Open-V, The First Open Source RISC-V Microcontroller

        Open Source software has been around for decades. Over these decades, Open Source software has been the driving force behind most of the Internet, and all of the top-500 supercomputers. The product of the Open Source software movement is perhaps more important than Gutenberg’s press. But hardware has not yet fully embraced this super-charging effect of openness. Being able to simply buy an open source CPU, free of all proprietary bits and NDAs is impossible.

      • Open-source hardware makers unite to start certifying products

        Four years ago, Alicia Gibb was trying to unite a fragmented open-source hardware community to join together to create innovative products.

        So was born the Open Source Hardware Association, which Gibb hoped would foster a community of hardware “hackers” sharing, tweaking, and updating hardware designs. It shared the ethics and ethos of open-source software and encouraged the release of hardware designs — be it for it processors, machines, or devices — for public reuse.

        Since then, OSHWA has gained strength, with Intel, Raspberry Pi, and Sparkfun endorsing the organization. Its growth has coincided with the skyrocketing popularity of Arduino and Raspberry Pi-like developer boards — many of them open source — to create gadgets and IoT devices.

      • 3D printed QuadBot Kickstarter combines open source robotics and STEM education
      • Crowdfunding Watch: QuadBot, making robotics fun
      • Manchester Graduates Hoping to Inspire With Their DIY Walking Robot

  • Programming/Development

    • Pyston 0.6 released

      We are excited to announce the v0.6 release of Pyston, our high performance Python JIT.

      In this release our main goal was to reduce the overall memory footprint. It also contains a lot of additional smaller changes for improving compatibility and fixing bugs.

    • Pyston 0.6 Drops Memory Usage, Better NumPy Performance

      For those interested in greater Python performance, the Dropbox team responsible for the Pyston project that’s interpreting Python using JIT techniques with LLVM, has announced a new release.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • UN Secretary-General Urges Action On High-Level Panel Report On Medicines Access

      United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today issued a message praising the “milestone” report of a High-Level Panel on access to medicines he set up a year ago to address the continuing problem of medicines prices being too high for many in the world to afford, and the lack of access to quality medicines for many. In his message, he called on governments to review the report and its recommendations, and to chart a way forward to address the problem of lack of access to medicines and health technologies.

    • WHO Director Candidates Nabarro, Szócska Speak On Medicines Prices And IP

      Candidates from around the world vying to be the next director general of the World Health Organization in recent weeks have presented their views to member states on a range of public health issues. Two of the six candidates answered a question put to them by Intellectual Property Watch relating to medicines prices, innovation and intellectual property. Here are their answers.

      The question by IP-Watch to candidates was: For a long time, WHO has worked without success on addressing alternative models of financing for R&D and more affordability/accessibility of medicines for poor populations. Recently, the issue has become a mainstream concern with high prices in developed countries too, while questions of incentivizing innovation come into play. What would be your vision of how to address this problem?

    • Eduardo Pisani To Step Down From IFPMA’s Helm In January

      The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations today announced that its Director General is stepping down, but will stay at the helm of the organisation until the end of January.

  • Security

    • Elegant 0-day unicorn underscores “serious concerns” about Linux security [Ed: Molehill becomes mountain in the hands of Dan Goodin]

      Recently released exploit code makes people running fully patched versions of Fedora and other Linux distributions vulnerable to drive-by attacks that can install keyloggers, backdoors, and other types of malware, a security researcher says.

    • Researcher writes codeless exploit that bypasses Linux security measures

      If you’re a Linux administrator, then you’re likely aware that even being fully up to date on all of the patches for your Linux distribution of choice is no guarantee that you’re free from vulnerabilities. Linux is made up of numerous components, any of which can open up an installation to one exploit or another.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • One of Trump’s Top Military Advisers Played a Key Role in the Disastrous Iraq Occupation

      Over the past two days, President-elect Donald Trump has put together a national security team that will move US foreign policy far to the right. The most shocking appointment, announced Thursday, was retired Army General Michael Flynn, a fanatical opponent of radical Islam, as his national security adviser. On Friday, Trump named Kansas GOP Representative Mike Pompeo to run the CIA. Pompeo is a member of the House Intelligence Committee who strongly opposed the Iran nuclear deal as well as the post-Snowden “reforms” of US intelligence.

      But so far, little attention has been paid to a retired Army lieutenant general, Joseph “Keith” Kellogg, one of Trump’s closest military and foreign-policy advisers. Kellogg is a former contracting executive who is considered a front-runner for a senior position at the Pentagon. He has been among the small group of advisers seen entering and leaving Trump Tower this week.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • WikiLeaks does good work. It’s not Assange who’s gone off the deep end, it’s us

      So, you think Assange is a prick? Well tough shit. History-making rebels aren’t meant to be sweethearts.

      What, the world’s most ardent defenders of freedom want to know, has happened to Julian Assange? Just a few years ago, he was such an earnest fellow, who spoke all truth to power. Well-known liberals gave him airtime, centrist trade organisations gave him membership and middle-brow humourists gave him plaudits and harbour. Now, all that the honourable can offer him is their disgust. He’s a Russian collaborator, a spiteful traitor, a pussy-grabbing narcissist whose leaks on Clinton place him in precisely the same deplorable basket that emits the stink of Trump.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • An astounding 102 million trees are now dead in California

      Forest managers have never seen anything like it. Across California, an astounding 102 million trees have died over the past six years from drought and disease — including 62 million trees in 2016 alone, the US Forest Service estimates. Once-mighty oaks and pines have faded into ghastly hues of brown and gray.

      The biggest worry is that these dead, dry forests will become highly combustible when California’s annual fire season rolls around next summer. The south and central Sierra Nevada regions, where most of the dead trees are located, are at particular risk of severe wildfires…

  • Finance

    • Support for the EU on the rise since Brexit vote … even in the UK

      Support for the EU has risen across Europe, including in the UK, since the British people voted to leave.

      Pro-EU sentiment has grown in five of the six largest member states, according to a survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation. These were the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy. The only large state to see a fall in support for the EU was Spain.

      “The looming Brexit seems to have been the best advertisement for the EU,” said Aart De Geus, of the Bertelsmann Foundation, Germany’s largest NGO.

      In the UK referendum on 23 June, the country narrowly voted to leave the EU, with 52% voting leave while 48% supported remain.

      But the Bertelsmann survey, completed in August against a backdrop of confusion about the British government’s Brexit strategy, showed that 56% of British citizens wanted to stay in the EU, compared with 49% when a similar survey was conducted in March.

    • Loud calls in Parliament for ending EU membership talks with Turkey

      With relations between the EU and Turkey already deeply strained, a broad coalition of members of the European Parliament Tuesday called for ending EU membership talks with Ankara as punishment for a trampling of democratic freedoms and human rights by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan following a failed coup attempt last July.

      The fraying of ties comes at a particularly sensitive time for Brussels, with the EU relying on Turkey to keep up its end of an agreement on the return of migrants who have sought refuge in Europe.

      While an unraveling of that deal could create acute political problems in capitals across the Continent, many members of Parliament called for ending the arrangement, saying Erdoğan was using it as a tool of “blackmail.” Leaders of the biggest factions in the Parliament also called for ending the discussions with Turkey about EU membership.

    • Swedish company Ericsson denounced of payed bribes to a Costa Rica’s President

      I have recently reported in The Indicter and Global Research on the payment done by the Swedish giant corporation Ericsson to the Clinton foundation, and also on the intervention of the company in Haiti – which resulted in disastrous consequences for the Haiti economy, as reported in a cable from the US Embassy in Port Au Prince to the State Department.

      New exposures referring unethical transactions of the Swedish company, indicates that Ericsson would have even bribed the then Costa Rica’s President Miguel Angel Rodriguez while competing for a major telecom contract.

      The exposures are partly based on a testimony by a former employee at the company, Liss Olof Nenzell, which was in charge of “sensitive payments”. The report adds that also ministers in the government as well as executives of the Telecom companies have received the Ericsson’s payments. Reports regarding the exact sum allegedly sent by Ericsson to Miguel Angel Rodriguez vaies in the Swedish media. While the graphic in Swedish Radio names $750,000, The Local (Carl Bildt’s megaphone) reduced it to $271,245.

      Former Costa Rica’s president Rodriguez was staunch supporter of the UN invasion in Haiti. Later, Ericsson obtained extended credits in Haiti, which according to a document declassified by the US State Department would have caused a deterioration in the economy of Haiti.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Trump won’t pursue charges against Clinton

      President-elect Donald Trump won’t subject Hillary Clinton to a criminal inquiry — instead, he’ll help her heal, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.

      “I think when the president-elect who’s also the head of your party … tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members,” Kellyanne Conway told the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who first reported that the president-elect would not pursue his campaign pledge to “lock up” Clinton, his Democratic opponent.

      “Look, I think, he’s thinking of many different things as he prepares to become the president of the United States, and things that sound like the campaign are not among them,” Conway, who is now on the Trump transition team, said in her interview.

    • Donald Trump Seems to Retreat on Some Promises

      President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tempered some of his most extreme campaign promises, dropping his vow to jail Hillary Clinton, expressing doubt about the value of torturing terrorism suspects and pledging to have an open mind about climate change.

      But in a wide-ranging, hourlong interview with reporters and editors at The New York Times — which was scheduled, canceled and then reinstated after a dispute over the ground rules — Mr. Trump was fiercely unapologetic about repeatedly flouting the traditional ethical and political conventions that have long shaped the American presidency.

    • Jill Stein’s Post-Election Interview – Green Party Candidate Shares Why She Thinks Hillary Clinton Lost the Election

      This is a powerful moment in U.S. history. Disappointment in Donald Trump’s victory has brought thousands of people onto the streets, chanting “Not my president!” Trump and Clinton were not the only people who ran for president; the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein and 27 other people were also on the ballot. Johnson won 3.3% of the vote, while Stein took 1% (1.3 million votes). Neither Johnson nor Stein made as great an impact as the polls suggested or as they had hoped. If they had attained the 5% threshold, their parties would qualify for public campaign funding.

      As the results of the election began to sink in, I spoke to Jill Stein about the election and about what might come from a Trump presidency.

    • Emails: CIA Official Reviewed Parts of Times Reporter’s Book Before Publication

      New York Times reporter David Sanger worked extensively with former deputy CIA director Michael Morell during the reporting of his book Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power—even arranging to provide Morell with access to an entire unpublished chapter for his review—according to documents obtained by Gizmodo.

    • Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming

      Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)

    • Study: 80 percent of students can’t tell the difference between an ad and a news story

      Young doesn’t necessarily equal web savvy, at least according to a recent Stanford study. More than 80 percent of students were unable to tell an advertisement — labeled as sponsored content — from a news story.

      The study attempted to judge news literacy among students and examine how they might respond and evaluate to stories gathered from Facebook and Twitter feeds, photographs, reader comments on news sites, and blog posts. All told, researchers collected some 7,804 responses from students in 12 US states.

    • Why Did Donald Trump Take Money From This Sketchy Ukrainian Oligarch?

      Almost $600,000 per hour.

      That’s the fee Donald Trump’s charity got for recording a video on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch.

      It’s a payment that could be in violation of tax laws, legal experts told The Daily Beast. When Hillary Clinton’s foundation received money from the very same billionaire, Donald Trump blasted her as “crooked.”

      Ukrainian steel magnate Victor Pinchuk’s foundation was the single largest outside donor to Donald Trump’s private charity in 2015, according to new IRS filings filed by the organization. The $150,000 gift amounted to 20 percent of the foundation’s total donations during that time, the documents showed. The filings also affirmed Trump violated tax laws by using his private foundation to self-deal, or enrich himself and his businesses instead of fulfilling a charitable mission.

      Pinchuk’s gift was given in conjunction with a short video Trump made for the Yalta European Strategy annual meeting, held in Kiev in September of 2015, according to The Washington Post.

    • Trump Foundation Took Donations from Controversial Ukrainian Clinton Donor

      A Ukrainian steel magnate who was one of the largest donors to the Clinton Foundation has surfaced on newly filed tax records for Donald Trump’s charitable foundation, raising alarms from some of the Clinton’s most vocal critics.

      “I think is troubling,” said Peter Schweizer, author of the book Clinton Cash, which documented the blending of the Clinton’s charitable and political interests. “He’s somebody that donated to the Clinton Foundation, and this is a problem…I think there’s no other way to read it other than they are hoping to get some favor in return.”

      Pinchuk’s $150,000 donation, first reported by The Washington Post, was to the Trumps’ family-run charity, far smaller and more intimate than the vast Clinton Foundation. In total, the Trump non profit took in $780,000 in contributions last year.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Donald Trump Personally Blasts the Press

      The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump—the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory—should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.

      First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News reporter Katy Tur’s coverage of him to a photograph the news network has used that shows him with a double chin. Why didn’t they use “nicer” pictures?

      For more than twenty minutes, Trump railed about “outrageous” and “dishonest” coverage. When he was asked about the sort of “fake news” that now clogs social media, Trump replied that it was the networks that were guilty of spreading fake news. The “worst,” he said, were CNN (“liars!”) and NBC.

      This is where we are. The President-elect does not care who knows how unforgiving or vain or distracted he is. This is who he is, and this is who will be running the executive branch of the United States government for four years.

      The over-all impression of the meeting from the attendees I spoke with was that Trump showed no signs of having been sobered or changed by his elevation to the country’s highest office. Rather, said one, “He is the same kind of blustering, bluffing blowhard as he was during the campaign.”

    • ‘Christians feel they are being censored’: Index on Censorship CEO

      Christians in Ireland feel unable to express their opinions on same-sex marriage, the CEO of free speech group Index on Censorship has said.

      Jodie Ginsberg, speaking in a debate on religious freedom, emphasised the need for tolerance of those with non-mainstream views, and their freedom to express those views.

    • UK to censor online videos of ‘non-conventional’ sex acts

      Web users in the UK will be banned from accessing websites portraying a range of non-conventional sexual acts, under a little discussed clause to a government bill currently going through parliament.

      The proposal, part of the digital economy bill, would force internet service providers to block sites hosting content that would not be certified for commercial DVD sale by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).

      It is contained within provisions of the bill designed to enforce strict age verification checks to stop children accessing adult websites. After pressure from MPs, the culture secretary, Caroline Bradley, announced on Saturday that the government would amend the bill to include powers to block non-compliant websites.

      In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch.

    • Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China

      Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has cultivated relationships with China’s leaders, including President Xi Jinping. He has paid multiple visits to the country to meet its top internet executives. He has made an effort to learn Mandarin.

      Inside Facebook, the work to enter China runs far deeper.

      The social network has quietly developed software to suppress posts from appearing in people’s news feeds in specific geographic areas, according to three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity because the tool is confidential. The feature was created to help Facebook get into China, a market where the social network has been blocked, these people said. Mr. Zuckerberg has supported and defended the effort, the people added.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • President Obama Will Soon Turn Over the Keys to the Surveillance State to President-Elect Trump

      On January 20, President Obama will hand Donald Trump the keys to the surveillance state. Not only will Trump have the NSA’s incredibly powerful technological tools at his disposal, but he’ll also have the benefit of the overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance authorities embraced by the Obama administration — authorities that give tremendous discretion to executive branch officials.

      These spying powers have long been cause for concern because they violate our core rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. But when wielded by a man who invited Russia to hack his political opponent, who reportedly eavesdropped on his own hotel guests, and who has called for expanded surveillance of Americans and especially American Muslims, they are all the more frightening. Fortunately, there are several ways to fight back against the surveillance state, including concrete steps you can take to protect yourself and your communications.

    • The UK is about to wield unprecedented surveillance powers — here’s what it means

      The legislation in question is called the Investigatory Powers Bill. It’s been cleared by politicians and awaits only the formality of royal assent before it becomes law. The bill will legalize the UK’s global surveillance program, which scoops up communications data from around the world, but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. UK spies will be empowered to hack individuals, internet infrastructure, and even whole towns — if the government deems it necessary.

    • Senior defence officials called for NSA director’s removal

      The Washington Post reported on 19 November that Defence Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper Jr made the recommendations to President Obama, now serving out the final days of his term.

      Clapper and Carter, Rogers’ two bosses, reportedly have problems with Rogers’ performance in the role. There have have apparently been “persistent complaints from NSA personnel that Rogers is aloof, frequently absent and does not listen to staff input”. His tenure as NSA director has been marked by several significant security breaches. The most recent example was the arrest of NSA contractor Harold T. Martin III, whose garage was found filled with terabytes of classified data on removable storage devices.

    • Britain’s Snoopers charter threatens your privacy

      There is a global siege on privacy. Governments all over the world have introduced legislation (sometimes secret) which forces email, internet or data storage providers to track what you do and make that data available to their governments. This, of course, also means third parties who gain access to the storage systems can see and abuse it. And because so many of us have put so much of our data at just a few providers, we’re at great risk as events like last week’s shutdown of hundreds of Google accounts did show.

      While Google, Dropbox and others lure customers in with ‘free’ data storage and great online services, governments benefit from centralized data storages as it makes it easy for them to hack in or demand data from these companies.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Albuquerque police illegally deleted, altered videos of police shootings: report

      The Albuquerque Police Department is coming under fire after former records supervisor, Reynaldo Chavez, gave a sworn affidavit claiming officers altered and deleted body camera videos.

      According to New Mexico In Depth, after at least two police shootings, videos were deleted or edited so they didn’t show the incident.

      In the case of 19-year-old suspected car thief Mary Hawkes in April 2014, the videos were partially deleted in spots or altered. In a separate incident, surveillance camera video from a nearby salon showed APD officers shooting law enforcement informant, Jeremy Robertson. That video too was altered. Chavez explained the June 2014 video had “the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted. One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”

    • 31 authors urge Obama to pardon Edward Snowden

      Thirty-one authors have signed an open letter to President Obama, urging him to pardon Edward Snowden, the former U.S. government contractor charged with violating the Espionage Act for leaking National Security Agency documents to journalists.

      Writers who signed the letter include Michael Chabon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Cheryl Strayed, Neil Gaiman, Teju Cole and Joyce Carol Oates.

      “Throughout American history, the pardonable offense and the pardon privilege itself have functioned together as a uniquely direct system of check-and-balance between the individual citizen and the executive branch,” the letter reads. “Both can be understood as extreme actions undertaken to mitigate the harm caused by judicial and legislative insufficiency; by courts that would rule unfairly, and by laws — like the Espionage Act — whose vagaries and datedness would make their application too severe or too broad.”

    • When Doctors First Do Harm

      President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday expressed reservations about the use of torture. But he did not disavow the practice, or his promise to bring it back. And if he does, C.I.A. doctors may be America’s last defense against a return to savagery. But they’ll need to break sharply with what they did the last time around.

      Buried in a trove of documents released last summer is the revelation that C.I.A. physicians played a central role in designing the agency’s post-Sept. 11 torture program. The documents, declassified in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, show in chilling detail how C.I.A. medicine lost its moral moorings. It’s long been known that doctors attended torture as monitors. What’s new is their role as its engineers.

      The documents include previously redacted language from a directive by the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services telling physicians at clandestine interrogation sites to flout medical ethics by lying to detainees and collaborating in abuse. This language also reveals that doctors helped to design a waterboarding method more brutal than what even lawyers for the George W. Bush administration allowed.

    • Oakland Activist Cat Brooks on President Trump: ‘My Revolutionary Prayer’

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Trump Formally Picks Two Net Neutrality Opponents To Head FCC Transition

      Trump this week formally selected two staunch opponents of net neutrality to oversee the incoming President’s FCC transition team. Economist Jeff Eisenach and former Sprint Corp lobbyist Mark Jamison both have deep-rooted ties to the broadband sector, and both played major roles in helping the industry fight passage of the U.S.’s net neutrality rules last year. We had already noted that incumbent ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been getting excited by the possibility of a hamstrung FCC and the roll back of numerous consumer-friendly policies made under the tenure of outgoing FCC boss Tom Wheeler.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Convicted Felon Ask Google To Delist Multiple Government Websites Because His Name Is Protected By ‘Common Law Trademark’

        You don’t often see the FBI’s website targeted by a DMCA takedown notice, but when you do, you can be sure there’s someone with a criminal record behind it. The last time we saw this happening, it was convicted fraudster Sean Gjerde, who thought he could perform his own reputation management by copy-pasting the FBI’s press release onto his own website as part of a “book” he was “writing,” and then begin issuing bogus takedown notices targeting content he didn’t create. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for all the reasons he was NEVER GOING TO GET AWAY WITH IT.

        Enter Anthony Lewis Jerdine, someone with a bit of reputation to clean up. Over the past decade, Jerdine has been imprisoned for bank fraud, made the US Marshals fugitive list, been sanctioned for unauthorized practice of law, been called a vexatious litigant by the Ohio court system, and, lest we forget, formed a trust in his own name.

    • Copyrights

      • Resale Royalty Right: A Way To Redress Imbalance In Copyright Revenue, WIPO Told

        When visual artists sell their work, they usually perceive a price for that work. If it is resold at a much higher price, some countries provide for a resale right, providing artists with resale royalties. In other countries, such a right does not exist, putting visual artists in a disadvantageous situation, particularly indigenous artists, whose work can become very valuable on the international art markets.

11.22.16

Links 22/11/2016: Many Linux Stable Releases, GTK+ 3.89.1

Posted in News Roundup at 10:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Finding a Non-Mac Alternative to Microsoft

      A. If you do not care for Windows 10 but want to stick with Microsoft Office, the Mac and the macOS version of Office would probably provide the most familiarity. But if the Mac option is too expensive and you dislike Windows 10 enough to avoid it completely, you might consider switching to an alternative operating system, like a computer running Linux or a Google Chromebook. These systems often have the advantage of being less expensive than standard PC or Mac hardware, but they may require an internet connection to perform many functions.

  • Server

    • [Older] The End of the General Purpose Operating System

      Containers as the unit of software

      Hidden behind my hypothosis, which mainly went unsaid, was that containers are becoming the unit of software. By which I mean the software we build or buy will increasingly be distributed as containers and run as containers. The container will carry with it enough metadata for the runtime to determine what resources are required to run it.

      The number of simplying assumption that come from this shared contract should not be underestimated. At least at the host level you’re likely to need lots of near-identical hosts, all simply advertising their capabilities to the container scheduler.

    • DatArcs Is Aiming For Dynamically-Tuned, Self-Optimizing Linux Servers

      DatArcs is a new software start-up aiming to provide software to dynamically tune Linux servers for maximum performance and energy efficiency in the data-center. The DatArcs optimizer analyzes the server’s workload over time and optimizes the server “several times per minute” to achieve better performance or lower power use.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • A tale of cylinders and shadows

        Like I wrote before, we at Collabora have been working on improving WebKitGTK+ performance for customer projects, such as Apertis. We took the opportunity brought by recent improvements to WebKitGTK+ and GTK+ itself to make the final leg of drawing contents to screen as efficient as possible. And then we went on investigating why so much CPU was still being used in some of our test cases.

      • Code review in open source projects: Influential factors and actions
      • GNOME Days in Bucharest

        From Wednesday up to Saturday we had the pleasure of hosting some very interesting events related to GNOME and open-source.

        First of them was the GSoC presentation where previous GSoC students shared their experience with those eager to try it next summer. We had a lot of people interested, thus we nearly filled a whole amphitheater.

      • This week in GTK+ – 25
      • GTK+ 3.89.1 Released As First Development Step Towards GTK4

        Matthias Clasen tagged the release today of GTK+ 3.89.1 as the first development snapshot leading towards GTK+ 4.0.

      • GTK+ 3.22.4 Improves CPU Usage Under Wayland, Enables HiDPI Support on Windows

        A new maintenance update for the GTK+ GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit has been announced this past weekend, versioned 3.22.4, bringing many Wayland improvements and lots of bug fixes.

        GTK+ 3.22.4 is now the latest stable and most advanced version of the GUI toolkit, which is the core of the GNOME desktop environment. This version is released for the GNOME 3.22.x desktop series, and it looks like it adds many improvements for the next-generation Wayland display server.

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Endless OS 3.0.5

        Endless OS is a Linux-based operating system which seeks to provide a streamlined, simplified user experience. A large part of the user experience is provided by a custom desktop environment (EOS Shell) which is a fork of GNOME 3.8. The distribution is available in two editions, a 1.5GB Basic edition and a larger (approximately 13GB) Full edition. The Basic edition offers a small number of applications and is suitable for most situations where the user has an Internet connection. The Full edition ships with a large collection of software and is therefore more suited to off-line installations.

        The Endless OS website mentions that support for audio formats, such as OGG and MP3, are built into the operating system, but most video formats are not supported. Video codecs and Netflix support are available for purchase through the Endless on-line store.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • Kubuntu Cautiously Good, openSUSE 42.2 Upgrade Smooth

        Today in Linux news, the Fedora project discussed some upcoming features in version 25, headed up by GNOME 3.22. Dedoimedo test drove Kubuntu 16.10 and found Plasma to be its greatest shortcoming, mirroring what I thought of the latest openSUSE. Speaking of which, Neil Rickert blogged his thoughts on the openSUSE 42.2 experience and Jim Dean imparted a bit of information for Korora users.

        [...]

        As I read the Kubuntu review, I was struck by how much his Plasma experience mirrored my own while testing openSUSE 42.2 this weekend. Konsole crashed on me early on when it was just sitting there idle. WTH? The taskbar pop-ups are large, ugly, and intrusive. The menu is slow and the desktop applets don’t fit properly. For example, the weather applet is scrunched up and cut off with no window size adjustment available. There are very few applets and, most annoying, no dictionary app/applet! And, indeed, that new screenshot tool was very disappointing, cumbersome and awkward. The desktop as a whole was sluggish and jittery. I was considering openSUSE 42.2 as my next full-time workhorse, but alas, Plasma 5(.8.2) is still too rough and incomplete to use. openSUSE 42.2 itself is gorgeous from boot to reboot, but Plasma 5 just ruins it.

      • Fedora & openSUSE: what is common in the latest releases?

        The second half of November brought us two exciting new Linux distribution releases: openSUSE Leap 42.2 and Fedora 25. While both of them are based on the RPM packaging format and cover everything from embedded through desktops to servers, there are also considerable differences.

      • The transition to openSUSE Leap 42.2

        I downloaded the DVD installer, using “aria2c”. I then “burned” that to a USB. I then booted that USB to install on my main desktop.

        This was a clean install. I kept the previous 42.1 on a separate disk area. That way I can boot either.

        After installing, I was switching between 42.1 and 42.2. I needed to tweak the new install to suit my needs. And booting to 42.1 allowed me to get my work done. By Thursday, I had completed the switch, and I am now running 42.2.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Great Debian meeting in Seville

        Last week we had an interesting Debian meeting in Seville, Spain. This has been the third time (in recent years) the local community meets around Debian.

        We met at about 20:00 at Rompemoldes, a crafts creation space. There we had a very nice dinner while talking about Debian and FLOSS. The dinner was sponsored by the Plan4D assosiation.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • How to Create Bullet Proof Ubuntu Install

            Installing Ubuntu is an extremely simple process. If you can “read and click next,” setting up a new Ubuntu installation is actually quite easy. But once the distro is installed, how do you keep the data safe? – By creating a bullet proof installation. This article will share my approach to protecting your data while allowing you to restore to a working system should the unthinkable happen.

          • In brief: Canonical hires Wildfire for Ubuntu Core brief, Dexcom appoints Lewis, Wild West enters Bristol

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Cinnamon 3.2 released!

              On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 3.2!

            • Cinnamon 3.2 Desktop Officially Released
            • Zorin OS 12 Is A Linux-Based Alternative For Windows 10

              We understand that it can be difficult to wean yourself off Windows. It’s a ubiquitous operating system that most people are used to. But Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows 10 has had some persistent privacy concerns. So if you’re looking for an alternative but can’t bear to give up the familiar user interface (UI), you could try out the Linux-based Zorin OS. The latest release is made to look and feel like Windows 10. Here are the details.

              There have been numerous attempts to replicate the Windows UI on Linux operating systems (does anybody remember Lindows?). In recent years, Zorin OS has become a popular choice for those who want to run Linux but didn’t’ want to give up the Windows UI.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Trends in the Open Source Cloud: A Shift to Microservices and the Public Cloud

    Cloud computing is the cornerstone of the digital economy. Companies across industries now use the cloud — private, public or somewhere in between — to deliver their products and services.

    A recent survey of industry analysis and research that we conducted for our 2016 Guide to the Open Cloud report produced overwhelming evidence of this.

    Forty-one percent of all enterprise workloads are currently running in some type of public or private cloud, according to 451 Research. That number is expected to rise to 60 percent by mid-2018. And Rightscale reports that some 95 percent of companies are at least experimenting in the cloud. Enterprises are continuing to shift workloads to the cloud as their expertise and experience with the technology increases.

  • How to strengthen your agile heartbeat with powerful retrospectives
  • Python versus R for machine learning and data analysis

    Machine learning and data analysis are two areas where open source has become almost the de facto license for innovative new tools. Both the Python and R languages have developed robust ecosystems of open source tools and libraries that help data scientists of any skill level more easily perform analytical work.

    The distinction between machine learning and data analysis is a bit fluid, but the main idea is that machine learning prioritizes predictive accuracy over model interpretability, while data analysis emphasizes interpretability and statistical inference. Python, being more concerned with predictive accuracy, has developed a positive reputation in machine learning. R, as a language for statistical inference, has made its name in data analysis.

  • Geode: The Latest Apache Big Data Project to Graduate to Top-Level Status

    In recent months, we’ve steadily taken note of the many projects that the Apache Software Foundation has been elevating to Top-Level Status. The organization incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, and has squarely turned its focus to Big Data and developer-focused tools in recent times. As Apache moves Big Data projects to Top-Level Status, they gain valuable community support. Only days ago, the foundation announced that Apache Kudu had graduated as a Top-Level project.

  • Open Source Week at SitePoint

    At SitePoint, we are proud supporters of Open Source. Regular SitePoint readers may have noticed that! Open is in the DNA of many topics we cover by design; GitHub alone is evidence enough, as it’s pretty much a standard tool for most developers nowadays.

  • Education

    • Education management with Moodle: The beginning, middle, and today

      Moodle is the de facto standard in open source learning management systems. It is described as “a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments.” Plus, Moodle is free software, licensed under the GPL.

      Martin Dougiamas, Moodle’s founder and lead developer, generously took time from his busy schedule to have a good, long talk with me about why he created it, where it is today, and what’s next in open education.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • BSD

  • Public Services/Government

    • The “open” in France has moved forward

      “Things have changed. I believe that this government can be credited with being the one that has carried more than ever the stake of the Open in our country”, said Axelle Lemaire, France’s Secretary of State in charge of Digital Affairs, at the Paris Open Source Summit 2016, last week

    • Free software in administrations: sharing IT requirements is complicated

      Pooling resources is in the DNA of free software, yet French local administrations fail to group their software purchases.

    • Hackathons and bite-sized procurement requests

      Public administrations that want to work with open source communities should organise hackathons and other meetings on software development. They should also publish calls for tender that can be answered by individuals and small businesses. These are some preliminary recommendations from the OSOR workshop at the Paris Open Source Summit last Wednesday.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Last batch of ColorHugALS

        I’ve got 9 more ColorHugALS devices in stock and then when they are sold they will be no more for sale. With all the supplier costs going recently up my “sell at cost price” has turned into “make a small loss on each one” which isn’t sustainable. It’s all OpenHardware, both hardware design and the firmware itself so if someone wanted to start building them for sale they would be doing it with my blessing. Of course, I’m happy to continue supporting the existing sold devices into the distant future.

  • Programming/Development

    • Programmers are having a huge discussion about the unethical and illegal things they’ve been asked to do

      Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It’s called “Code I’m Still Ashamed Of.”

      In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.

      He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.

Leftovers

  • Facebook Finds More Broken Metrics, Metrics Industry Rejoices

    Well, one thing is clear: fixing Facebook metrics is going to be a huge boon… for the metrics and marketing industries. Big new contracts for metrics companies! Executive jobs on Facebook’s new council! A new strut to prop up the ersatz monster of Nielsen ratings! Millions of dollars will be spent fixing and refining these metrics — which Facebook emphasizes are only four of over 220 it collects. Wow, 220! But online advertising still almost universally sucks, so you’d almost think the quantity of metrics isn’t helping, and might even be optimizing in the wrong direction…

  • New Cars Are Getting Harder To See Out Of

    Citizens of the internet, we need to speak on a subject. Call me old fashioned, but one of the things I look for most in any car is the ability to see out of it when I’m driving it. It doesn’t seem like the designers of new cars these days share my feelings.

    As I strolled the show floor of the Los Angeles Auto Show during the media days and sat in a bunch of different cars, I was struck by how many of them have abhorrent rearward visibility.

  • Science

    • State says literacy not a right in Detroit

      Attorneys for Gov. Rick Snyder and state education officials say no fundamental right to literacy exists for Detroit schoolchildren who are suing the state over the quality of their education.

      The lawyers are asking a federal judge to reject what they call an “attempt to destroy the American tradition of democratic control of schools.”

      Timothy J. Haynes, an assistant attorney general, made those statements in a 62-page motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed against Snyder and state education leaders in September by seven Detroit children who allege decades of state disinvestment and deliberate indifference to the city schools have denied them access to literacy.

      The motion was filed last week in U.S. District Court in Detroit.

      Haynes says claims laid out by plaintiffs — including deplorable building conditions, lack of books, classrooms without teachers, insufficient desks, buildings plagued by vermin, unsafe facilities and extreme temperatures — go far beyond mere access to education.

  • Hardware

  • Health/Nutrition

    • UNAIDS Report: Less Deaths From HIV But Growing Resistance Creates Great Risk

      A new report from UNAIDS shows that antiretroviral therapy is now accessed by 18.2 million people living with HIV, and fewer people are dying from the virus infection. However, there is stalled progress on HIV prevention among adults, and growing antiretroviral drug resistance among people living with HIV over a long time.

      The UNAIDS report [pdf] released today is titled, “Get on the Fast-Track,” and addresses the life-cycle approach to HIV. It looks into differences of prevention, treatments and access in different ages.

    • Michigan’s Water Wars: Nestlé Pumps Millions of Gallons for Free While Flint Pays for Poisoned Water

      As Flint residents are forced to drink, cook with and even bathe in bottled water, while still paying some of the highest water bills in the country for their poisoned water, we turn to a little-known story about the bottled water industry in Michigan.

      In 2001 and 2002, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality issued permits to Nestlé, the largest water bottling company in the world, to pump up to 400 gallons of water per minute from aquifers that feed Lake Michigan.

      This sparked a decade-long legal battle between Nestlé and the residents of Mecosta County, Michigan, where Nestlé’s wells are located.

      One of the most surprising things about this story is that, in Mecosta County, Nestlé is not required to pay anything to extract the water, besides a small permitting fee to the state and the cost of leases to a private landowner. In fact, the company received $13 million in tax breaks from the state to locate the plant in Michigan.

    • Michigan Government Fights Judge’s Ruling to Deliver Water to Residents in Need, Calling it an ‘Unnecessary Burden’

      The Michigan state government is hoping to wiggle its way out of a court-ordered mandate handed down by a judge last week requiring both the city and state to deliver bottled water to Flint residents without verified home water filters.

      In a motion filed earlier this week, Michigan Gov. Rick Synder’s administration argued that the court-ordered requirement placed an ‘”insurmountable” burden on the state. Officials even likened the mandated water deliveries to a “Herculean” military operation that would cost the state government roughly $10.4 million a month and $125 million annually.

    • Nestlé bottled-water company seeks to take more Michigan water

      Nestle Waters North America’s plans to increase its Michigan groundwater withdrawal by more than 2 1/2 times would unravel an accord reached with environmentalists seven years ago that was aimed at protecting the water table and wildlife.

      Nestlé announced a $36-million expansion at its Ice Mountain bottling operations in Stanwood, in Mecosta County, on Oct. 31. The addition of two water-bottling lines — the first to begin operation next spring; the next opening by 2018 — is expected to add 20 jobs to the plant, which employs more than 250 people.

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Monday
    • Fast security is the best security

      DevOps security is a bit like developing without a safety net. This is meant to be a reference to a trapeze act at the circus for those of you who have never had the joy of witnessing the heart stopping excitement of the circus trapeze. The idea is that when you watch a trapeze act with a net, you know that if something goes wrong, they just land in a net. The really exciting and scary trapeze acts have no net. If these folks fall, that’s pretty much it for them. Someone pointed out to me that the current DevOps security is a bit like taking away the net.

    • Detecting fraudulent signups?

      I run a couple of different sites that allow users to sign-up and use various services. In each of these sites I have some minimal rules in place to detect bad signups, but these are a little ad hoc, because the nature of “badness” varies on a per-site basis.

    • Reproducible Builds: week 82 in Stretch cycle

      What happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday November 13 and Saturday November 19 2016…

    • Beware: ScanGuard Scam

      My wife called this to my attention; a web site called “smartwebuser.org” (I refuse to post a link) that warned “If you live in Canada and have a Linux computer which is over 6 months old, then we advise you to keep reading.” What followed was a puff piece for something called ScanGuard. It sounded suspiciously to me like all those “cleanup” apps that are advertised in email and occasionally on TV, that promise to protect your PC from viruses and malware, and make it run a zillion times faster. It sounded like a scam to me.

    • The Urgency of Protecting Your Online Data With Let’s Encrypt

      We understand that online security is a necessity, so why is only 48.5% of online traffic encrypted? Josh Aas, co-founder of Let’s Encrypt, gives us a simple answer: it’s too difficult. So what do we do about it? Aas has answers for that as well in his LinuxCon North America presentation.

      Aas explains how the Achilles heel of managing Web encryption is not encryption itself, but authentication, which requires trusted third parties, and secure mechanisms for managing the trust chain. He says, “The encryption part is relatively easy. It’s a software stack…it comes on most operating systems by default. It just needs to be configured. Most Web servers tie into it directly and take care of things for you. Your biggest challenge is protecting your private key. The authentication part is a bit of a nightmare, and it has been for a while, so if you want to authenticate, the way this works on the web is you need to get a certificate from a certificate authority, and it’s complicated, even for really smart people like my friend Colin here at Cisco.”

    • Is encrypted e-mail a must in the Trump presidential era?

      With Donald Trump poised to take over the U.S. presidency, does it make sense for all of us to move to encrypted e-mail if we want to preserve our privacy? Encrypted e-mail provider ProtonMail says yes, indeed.

    • New IoT botnet behind fake Instagram, Twitter and YouTube profiles

      Hackers have created thousands of fake accounts on popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Periscope, via an IoT botnet, using the Linux/Moose malware. Security researchers claim that fake social media accounts are created by hackers to randomly follow people and browse content, in efforts to make the bots seem more “human” and avoid spam filters.

      According to security researchers, the Linux/Moose botnet is a “new generation” IoT botnet that operates on embedded systems such as routers, rather than computers. This makes the bot much more difficult to detect. The botnet can function on even limited computational power and specialises in “social media fraud”.

    • Great. Now Even Your Headphones Can Spy on You

      Cautious computer users put a piece of tape over their webcam. Truly paranoid ones worry about their devices’ microphones, some even crack open their computers and phones to disable or remove those audio components so they can’t be hijacked by hackers. Now one group of Israeli researchers has taken that game of spy-versus-spy paranoia a step further, with malware that converts your headphones into makeshift microphones that can slyly record your conversations.

    • Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

      If you don’t watch where you’re going on the internet, you might be headed down a dark alley before you know it.

      Like a lot of big websites, we use Google Analytics to keep track of traffic on TNW. A few weeks ago, however, we spotted something that looked a bit out of the ordinary.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • My friend James Foley was murdered by Isis reporting the truth. Too few are left to shed such light on the Middle East

      It was a relief that the documentary about Jim Foley did not show his murder, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forced to kneel on the desert sand before being beheaded by a masked terrorist; the scene from the grotesque Isis video which has been shown repeatedly across the world.

      Those of us who are his friends had often thought about what he was going through in those terrible last moments. But we would rather have memories of his life rather than his death: working alongside him covering conflicts; remembering someone who, as well as being a great photojournalist, was also brave and modest, and always retained sympathy for those whose suffering he chronicled.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Readers prefer Julian Assange over Donald Trump as TIME Person of the Year: Poll

      Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has overtaken President-elect Donald Trump for the lead in the online poll of who readers think should be TIMEs Person of the Year in 2016. As of 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, Assange and Trump were deadlocked with 9 per cent of all the “yes” votes cast by participants, but Assange pulled ahead to 10 per cent shortly after noon, Time reported.

    • Trump, WikiLeaks and Sweden

      Personally, I would like to emphasize that WikiLeaks’ publication did not intend to favour a particular candidate, but to strengthen the democratic process as a whole. In times of political confusion in which the rulers arrogate for themselves secret prerogatives on secrecy, corruption or usurping power given to them by popular mandates, to pursue other than public good objectives, the opening by WikiLeaks of government’s Pandora box has been a lifeboat sent to Democracy. [2]

      I have recently answered a questionnaire sent by journalist Anna Khalitova on behalf of Russian newspaper Izvestia regarding the issue. Some of my statements were quoted in this Izvestia article, [3] and after appeals for a translation I received on Twitter, I decided to publish here the full text of my replies to Izvestia; putting it in context and adding the sources I used. The questions of the Izvestia interview dealt with the interrogation of Assange in London done by a Swedish prosecutor on Monday 14 November 2016, Julian Assange’s health status, and the prospect of the case in Sweden against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s election in the US.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Dakota Access pipeline: 300 protesters injured after police use water cannons

      Twenty-six people were hospitalized and more than 300 injured after North Dakota law enforcement officers trained water cannons, teargas, and other “less-than-lethal” weapons on unarmed activists protesting against the Dakota Access pipeline in below-freezing weather on Sunday night, according to a group of medical professionals supporting the anti-pipeline movement.

      The Standing Rock Medic & Healer Council said that injuries from the “mass casualty incident” included multiple bone fractures from projectiles fired by police, a man with internal bleeding from a rubber bullet injury, a man who suffered a grand mal seizure, and a woman who was struck in the face with a rubber bullet and whose vision was compromised.

      The majority of the patients suffered hypothermia, a result of being soaked by water cannons, the group said.

    • Will Russian Oil Break America’s ‘Marriage’ To Saudi Arabia?

      For years, Saudi Arabia was a close American ally, while Russia was a distant enemy.

      That’s why America purchased a lot of oil from Saudi Arabia and very little from Russia. For the period 1973-2005, America’s oil imports from the Saudi kingdom remained steady, in the range of one to 1.5 million barrels per day. Over the same period, America’s oil imports from Russia fluctuated widely, rising from next to nothing in the 1970s and 1980s to a couple of hundred thousand barrels a day in the early 2000s, before falling back to less 38 thousand in 2015.

      At times, America had to pay a steep price for excessive reliance on Saudi oil and the OPEC oil. Like back in 1970s when the kingdom imposed an oil embargo on the US.

    • Global Trumpism Seen Harming Efforts to Reduce Climate Pollution

      Populism is drawing momentum from environmentalism in the U.S. and Europe, threatening the world’s effort to rein in climate change.

      Donald Trump’s election in the U.S., the U.K. Independence Party and Marine Le Pen’s ascent in France all represent a break with political leaders who made the environment a priority. All three are skeptical climate change is happening and are resistant to international projects like the United Nations global warming talks.

      Envoys from more than 190 countries gathered by the UN made progress this weekend in their work to contain fossil-fuel emissions and keep a lid on temperature increases. Two weeks of discussions in Marrakech, Morocco, were overshadowed by the election of Trump, who has called climate change a hoax. Many delegates left the city concerned about the forces working against them.

  • Finance

    • Trump camp denies he sought favor in Argentine call

      President-elect Donald Trump’s spokesman denied Monday an Argentine news report that Trump sought a business favor when that nation’s president called to congratulate him on his Nov. 8 election victory.

      “Not true,” Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller told USA TODAY in an email.

      Trump’s Buenos Aires office building project has been delayed by a series of issues, including financing and permitting requirements. When Argentine President Mauricio Macri called Trump to congratulate him on his election victory, Trump asked Macri to address the permitting issues, according to Jorge Lanata, one of the country’s most prominent journalists.

    • Argentine leader: Ivanka joined call with Trump

      Macri and Donald Trump first met through the former’s father Francisco, who sold a defunct real estate development project to Donald Trump in the 1980s.

      Donald Trump’s extensive business background has raised concerns about conflicts of interest between his future White House and his private enterprises.

    • Trade after Trump

      The one policy issue that was an unambiguous loser for Clinton was trade[^1]. Her grudging move to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, choice of Tim Kaine as running mate and some unhelpful remarks from Bill Clinton meant that Trump had all the running. How should we think about trade policy after Trump? My starting point will be the assumption that, in a world where Trump can be President of the US, there’s no point in being overly constrained by calculations of political realism.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Election offered poor choices
    • Which PR Firms Lose Ground After Trump Victory?
    • KING: The alt-right movement goes full Nazi as Steve Bannon prepares to enter the White House

      Steve Bannon was recently appointed as Chief Strategist for President-elect Donald Trump. It was simply a promotion for Bannon, who served as CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign.

      Bannon, though, was not an experienced political strategist. He was the head of Breitbart News. Just a few months ago, he openly bragged that under his leadership he transformed Breitbart into “the platform of the alt-right movement.” Those are his words — not from some distant past, but from this past July.

      I’ve said it many times, but the alt-right movement is simply the KKK without the hoods. They are skinheads with suits and ties. They simply chose a new name, but are fueled by the same hate and the same philosophy as previous white supremacist and Neo-Nazi movements.

    • Museum Condemns White Nationalist Conference Rhetoric

      The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is deeply alarmed at the hateful rhetoric at a conference of white nationalists held on November 19 at the Ronald Reagan Building just blocks from the Museum.

    • ‘Hail Trump’: Alt-right Nationalists Celebrate Trump Victory, Quote Nazi Propaganda

      Speakers at an event of the white supremacist think tank the National Policy Institute quoted Nazi propaganda and said the media protects Jewish interests in an event that has garnered condemnation from Jewish groups and even the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

      A video published by The Atlantic shows parts of a speech delivered by Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist within the alt-right movement, at the National Policy Institute’s annual conference to celebrate Trump’s victory in DC over the weekend.

    • ‘Hail Trump!’: White Nationalists Salute the President Elect

      “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”

      That’s how Richard B. Spencer saluted more than 200 attendees on Saturday, gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”

      Spencer has popularized the term “alt-right” to describe the movement he leads. Spencer has said his dream is “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”

      For most of the day, a parade of speakers discussed their ideology in relatively anodyne terms, putting a presentable face on their agenda. But after dinner, when most journalists had already departed, Spencer rose and delivered a speech to his followers dripping with anti-Semitism, and leaving no doubt as to what he actually seeks. He referred to the mainstream media as “Lügenpresse,” a term he said he was borrowing from “the original German”; the Nazis used the word to attack their critics in the press.

    • The Washington Post vs. ‘Fake News’: Pot, Meet Kettle

      “Freedom of expression is a bedrock of American democracy,” the Washington Post‘s editorial board writes in a November 18 jeremiad, “but its irresponsible exercise can distort and destabilize our politics.”

      The Post‘s editors, mining the bottomless pit of mainstream media excuses for not predicting Donald Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election, think they’ve hit the mother lode with their newfound focus on “fake news” stories going viral in social media.

      The Post coming out against “fake news?” That’s rich, especially given the last few months, during which the Post‘s reporters went all in for Hillary Clinton even to the extent of manufacturing “news” that Trump, and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, were in bed with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

      Neither the Post nor its sources have publicly revealed so much as a crumb of actual evidence for the assertion. The case for the claim consists entirely of rumor and innuendo. But since doing so seemed to benefit Clinton’s campaign, the Post unreservedly ran with that rumor and innuendo, helpfully packaged for it by the Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee.

    • How Julian Assange hijacked the American media

      Six years ago, in cooperation with prestigious news organizations like The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, WikiLeaks began dumping the first of 251,287 pilfered cables that revealed the inner workings of American diplomacy. And a month before that, WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs: 391,832 field reports documenting, among other things, the deaths of 66,081 Iraqi civilians.

      The Iraq War Logs arguably should have been more shocking than the Pentagon Papers. But the main response from Americans was a depressed shrug. Even The Washington Post shared that sentiment, observing that “many of the insights gleaned from the documents are not surprising by themselves.”

      It was clear that Americans didn’t need a trove of leaked documents to give them a dim view of their government’s transparency and honesty. It was also clear that, for the most part, they weren’t going to bother to read much of what WikiLeaks published anyway.

    • Slain DNC staffer’s parents: Help us find killer

      The parents of murdered Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich are calling on D.C. residents help catch the killer, who shot Rich, 27, multiple times in the back on July 10 in Bloomingdale.

      “We need the public’s help, we need everybody’s help, and I know Seth knew the right thing if everybody helps us, we will find these murderers and we will make that neighborhood a lot safer,” Mary Ann Rich, his mother, said during a news conference in Washington Monday, according to ABC 7 WJLA.

      “We need help,” Rich’s father, Joel, added. “We need people who know what was going on who may know somebody, we need help from whomever can give the police some more information on what might have happened.”

    • Help Wanted, Apply Now!

      You may have seen the stories last week — President-elect Donald Trump was shocked to learn he needs to hire over 4,000 political appointees by January 20, or that people in Washington may refuse to work in a Trump administration, or that Trump, as a newcomer to politics, may not know enough people to get down to the business of hiring. I doubt any of those statements are true, and the task is easier than you think.

    • Trump transition provokes cries of nepotism – but can anything be done?

      President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to bring his children into his inner circle, alongside far-right adviser Stephen Bannon, has provoked concerns about nepotism, ethics and national security, and experts worry he will go unchecked in office.

      Trump can easily ignore calls to act otherwise, experts say, and critics will have few options even after he assumes the Oval Office.

      [...]

      Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs executive and CEO of the far-right, conspiratorial Breitbart News, was only the first of several highly controversial cabinet appointments. On Friday Trump nominated Senator Jeff Sessions to be attorney general, and the retired general Mike Flynn to be national security adviser, leaving progressives and ethics watchers reeling.

      Norman Eisen, a former special counsel and ethics adviser to Barack Obama, accused Trump of acting “like something out of a tin-pot oligarchy”. Writing in Fortune, he said “this is not the way we behave” in America.

      But there is no evidence that Trump intends to heed such criticism, nor that he could have to confront it legally.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Fighting For The First Amendment Is Going To Be A Priority: Help Us Do It

      Throughout the campaign, we noted how Donald Trump’s views on the First Amendment and free speech were horrific. While some of his supporters insist that he’s wonderful for free speech because he’s not “politically correct,” in almost every way he’s positioned himself as an enemy of free speech and the First Amendment (even the whole “political correctness” thing is misleading, because if you mention certain other words, Trump supporters seem to get just as worked up as the “PC police”). He (along with Clinton) promised to censor the internet and brushed off the free speech concerns about doing so, calling people who bring up free speech in that context to be “foolish people.” And, then of course, there is the long list of threats to sue his opponents for their ads, news organizations for their articles and other critics as well. Those are all protected speech. It didn’t help matters that his very first post-election tweet complained about protesters exercising their First Amendment right to assemble and protest, and the press for supposedly “inciting” them to protest.

      In the past few days things haven’t gotten much better. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway threatened Harry Reid with legal action for criticizing the President-elect. Sure, Reid’s statement was hyperbolic and a bit ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than stuff that Trump himself said on the campaign trail. You don’t go and threaten people for expressing their opinions — especially when its people from opposing parties. That’s what dictatorial strongmen do, not those in a country that has the First Amendment.

    • New Cybercrime Regs Would Open Back Door to Censorship

      An online right advocate pointed out Monday that the latest proposed changes to the Computer Crime Act and its supporting laws would provide the authorities with direct access to deleting things from the internet.

      In the latest draft of the controversial act and its related regulations made public Friday, the new Ministry of Digital Economy and Society would set up a central system to manage the removal of online content. It would be connected to the systems of cooperating internet service providers so authorities could directly remove content.

    • Mainstream Media Uses ‘Fake News’ to Censor Conservative Views
    • Facebook’s Plan To Stop “Fake News” Borders On Censorship
    • How Zuckerberg’s changing his mind on Facebook’s fake news dilemma
    • Need to resolve Maharashtra theatre censorship: Palekar

      Panaji: Maharashtra, which has an especially strong tradition of reform movements and an active theatre community, is also the state with pre-censorship laws for theatre. “As per the laws, the State can control the writers’ script before it is even performed. This does not happen anywhere else in India,” said filmmaker and actor Amol Palekar at the Dakshinayan Rashtriya Parishad here on Sunday.

    • Can’t portray reality by bypassing reality; our censorship laws archaic: Sharmila Tagore

      Former CBFC chief and veteran actor Sharmila Tagore will be speaking at Times Lit Fest Delhi, November 26-27. She spoke about the journey of Indian cinema over the past 70 years to Himanshi Dhawan , explaining why colonial-era censorship laws need to be changed, how filmmakers remain a soft target and why she thinks Indian cinema — with a few exceptions — still remains simplistic in its worldview.

    • How Facebook Should Handle Its Fake News Problem

      Depending on whom you believe, the problem of fake news on Facebook is either one of the most important issues facing mankind, or an over-blown controversy pumped up by the mainstream media. And in a way, that dichotomy itself points out the problem with defining—let alone actually getting rid of—”fake news.”

      When someone uses that term, they could be referring to one of a number of different things: It might be a story about how Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered several top-level Washington insiders, or it might be one about how Donald Trump’s chief adviser is a neo-Nazi, or it might be one about how the most important election issue was Clinton’s emails.

    • ‘They Treated Us Like Garbage’: Former Trending News Writer Slams Facebook

      On Monday, a woman identifying herself as a former writer for Facebook’s trending section took to Twitter to criticize the social media giant, saying the solution to the site’s current fake news problem is the editorial team it fired with “no grace, no notice, no care” earlier this year.

    • Onlinecensorship.org launches second report, “Censorship in Context” (PDF)

      Onlinecensorship.org is pleased to share our second research report, “Censorship in Context: Insights from Crowdsourced Data on Social Media Censorship.” The report draws on data gathered directly from users from April to November 2016, and covers six social media platforms: Facebook, Flickr, Google+, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. In the report, we also look at the increasing number of media stories surrounding this issue.
      Our latest report also closely examines key issues related to online censorship, from the importance of considering context in content moderation to the effects of privatized enforcement of legal statutes by companies.

      We have aggregated and analyzed our data across geography, platform, content type, and issue areas to highlight trends in social media censorship.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • FBI’s Dark Web Child Porn Investigation Stretched to Norway

      Nearly two years after its inception, more details about the largest known law enforcement hacking campaign are still coming to light. According to local media reports, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation provided information to Norwegian authorities from its large-scale investigation into child pornography site Playpen.

      The case highlights the FBI’s use of malware to search computers overseas, as the US prepares to usher in new powers for judges to authorize hacking operations, which experts have described as the broadest expansion of extraterritorial surveillance power since the FBI was created.

      Late last week, Norwegian police said they had arrested 51 people on suspicion of child pornography crimes as part of its own “Operation Dark Room.” Authorities have taken 150TB of material, making it one of the largest seizures in Norwegian history, the announcement reads.

    • Creepy new website makes its monitoring of your online behaviour visible

      IF YOU think you are not being analysed while browsing websites, it could be time to reconsider.

      A creepy new website called clickclickclick has been developed to demonstrate how our online behaviour is continuously measured.

      Dutch media company VPRO and Amsterdam based interactive design company Studio Moniker are the masterminds behind the site, which observes and comments on your behaviour in great detail.

    • Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.

      I’m a millennial computer scientist who also writes books and runs a blog. Demographically speaking I should be a heavy social media user, but that is not the case. I’ve never had a social media account.

    • Nokia to develop drone system for United Arab Emirates
    • Just how partisan is Facebook’s fake news? We tested it
    • Facebook says it will hire an extra 500 people in the UK when it opens a new London office next year
    • Facebook to increase UK employees by 500 in 2017
    • NSA Chief Michael Rogers Talks Cybersecurity [Ed: filled with revisionism and lies]

      Cyberattacks represent an expanding and perilous front line for companies and the government. What do we do about a borderless war that has impacted business across the world and even a presidential campaign?

    • NSA head: DNC hack didn’t affect election outcome
    • NSA: The DNC Email Hacks Didn’t Cost Clinton The Election
    • Why GCHQ needs to fix its diversity problem
    • GCHQ may be forced to respond to FoI requests after European court ruling

      European citizens have a right to information from public authorities under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), it has been ruled—in a decision that may force GCHQ to respond to Freedom of Information requests.

      The judgment was made by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and was described by the UK Campaign for Freedom of Information as a “landmark decision.”

      The case concerned a dispute between Hungary’s government and an NGO, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, over a freedom of information request filed by the latter. However, such was the wider importance of the case that others were permitted to submit their views to the court: the UK government, and a group of international privacy organisations, including the Campaign for Freedom of Information.

    • President Obama Will Soon Turn Over the Keys to the Surveillance State to President-Elect Trump

      On January 20, President Obama will hand Donald Trump the keys to the surveillance state. Not only will Trump have the NSA’s incredibly powerful technological tools at his disposal, but he’ll also have the benefit of the overbroad and unconstitutional surveillance authorities embraced by the Obama administration — authorities that give tremendous discretion to executive branch officials.

      These spying powers have long been cause for concern because they violate our core rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and freedom of association. But when wielded by a man who invited Russia to hack his political opponent, who reportedly eavesdropped on his own hotel guests, and who has called for expanded surveillance of Americans and especially American Muslims, they are all the more frightening. Fortunately, there are several ways to fight back against the surveillance state, including concrete steps you can take to protect yourself and your communications.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Obama’s ‘Factually Incorrect’ Edward Snowden Remarks: Game Over for a Pardon?

      President Barack Obama told German journalists last week that he can’t pardon Edward Snowden unless he physically submits to U.S. authorities. Those familiar with American law know there’s no such restriction and interpret “can’t” as meaning “won’t.”

      The answer irked some Snowden backers, who launched a push this year to win the whistleblower a prison-free return from Russia, where he’s lived since U.S. officials canceled his passport in 2013, extending for years a Hong Kong-to-Latin America layover.

      “Obama’s claim that he cannot pardon Edward Snowden is misleading and factually incorrect,” says Evan Greer of the advocacy group Fight for the Future, which co-organized a large pro-Snowden rally near the U.S. Capitol in 2013.

      “He has the power to do it, and he should,” Greer says.

      Jesselyn Radack, an attorney for Snowden, says Obama picked his words strategically.

      “Obama can certainly grant a pardon to Snowden but does not want to upset the millions of Americans who support a pardon for Snowden by outright denying it,” Radack says. “By avoiding a decision, however, Obama is effectively denying a pardon.”

    • Sweden should promise Julian Assange will not be extradited if he faces justice, Ecuador’s FM says

      Ecuador’s Foreign Minister says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should receive guarantees that he will not be extradited to the US if he faces justice in Sweden after four years of living in the South American nation’s embassy in London.

      Mr Assange, who enraged Washington by publishing a flood of secret US diplomatic cables, fled to the embassy fearing that Sweden could end up sending him on to the United States where he could face prison for leaking US secrets.

    • “RepressIntern”: Russia’s security cooperation with fellow authoritarians

      The formal and informal links between Eurasia’s security services pose deadly risks for opposition activists abroad.

    • European Parliament resolution: check legality ISDS/ICS in CETA

      Members of the European Parliament want the EU’s Court of Justice to check whether a parallel legal system in the trade agreement with Canada (CETA) is compatible with the EU treaties. The parallel legal system, known as ISDS / ICS, is only accessible to foreign investors. Eighty-nine members tabled a resolution. The Parliament will vote next week, Wednesday 23 November 2016.

    • Obama will not pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden

      On his final trip to Europe as the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama indeed had plenty to talk about in his interview with Germany’s largest newspaper, Der Spiegel.

    • Obama: Snowden has to face trial

      President Barack Obama isn’t going to talk about whether he’ll pardon Edward Snowden.

      That’s because Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked government documents to journalists, has to return to the US to face trial, Obama told Der Spiegel and German broadcaster ARD in an interview published Friday.

      “I can’t pardon somebody who hasn’t gone before a court and presented themselves,” Obama said in an interview with the two news organizations, “so that’s not something that I would comment on at this point.”

    • Let’s Perp-Walk That Honor Student For Cutting A Peach With A Toddler’s Utensil Set Knife

      And this is the best. The Pembroke Pines cops have turned the case over to the State’s Attorney.

      Hmm…do you think she should be sentenced to life without parole? Maybe the electric chair?

      For the record, I took a knife to school probably on most days. A sharp little apple paring knife. I have yet to stab anything but food.

      Yes, that’s right. Even with all that access to dangerous weaponry, I remain merely hostile, not violent.

    • Trump’s Hamilton tweetstorm: calculated distraction from fraud settlement, or fragile mediocrity?

      Yesterday, Donald Trump’s news cycle was dominated by two stories: first, that the president-elect of the United States of America had a well-developed sense of the sanctity of the theatre, such that any on-stage politicking shocked his conscience to the core; second, that he had settled a lawsuit over Trump University, handing $25,000,000 to people whom he had defrauded.

      The Hamilton story certainly played well: it was above the fold on the New York Times print edition (the fraud story was below the fold), and if we attribute to Trump a measured media savvy, then we could call his twitterstorm a master-stroke of distraction at a moment when the press and the world could have been extremely interested in the news that the new president had paid $25,000,000 in hush-money after a well-publicized fraud perpetrated against desperate American workers who were hoping to get retrained to survive in the new economy — the very same people who are widely credited with handing Trump the election.

    • Police clash with North Dakota pipeline protesters, arrest one

      Hundreds of protesters opposed to a North Dakota oil pipeline project they say threatens water resources and sacred tribal lands clashed with police who fired tear gas at the scene of a similar confrontation last month, officials said.

    • Police defend use of water cannons on Dakota Access protesters in freezing weather

      Authorities on Monday defended their decision to douse protesters with water during a skirmish in subfreezing weather near the Dakota Access oil pipeline, and organizers said at least 17 protesters were taken to the hospital — including some who were treated for hypothermia.

      Protesters trying to push past a long-blocked bridge on a state highway late Sunday and early Monday were turned back by authorities using tear gas, rubber bullets and water hoses.

    • Dakota Access Pipeline clashes turn violent

      Police and about 400 people who were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline clashed Sunday evening as demonstrators set cars on fire and law enforcement officers fired rubber bullets, tear gas and water at the crowds.

      A live stream from the site near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, showed a chaotic, loud scene, with people screaming and car horns honking.

      Protesters were attempting to cross the Backwater Bridge and go north on Highway 1806, according to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, which described Sunday’s events as an “ongoing riot.”

    • Water Cannons and Tear Gas Used Against Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters

      Reuters photographer Stephanie Keith recently traveled to North Dakota to cover the ongoing protest against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a $3.8 billion oil pipeline meant to carry crude oil from the Bakken oil fields through the Dakotas and Iowa, to Illinois. Protesters from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, hundreds of other Native Americans and their supporters are now encamped near the Backwater Bridge, with law enforcement stationed behind a roadblock on the opposite side. According to Reuters, last night hundreds of protesters made attempts to force their way through the barricades, reportedly setting dozens of fires. They were met with water cannons, pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets, resulting in dozens of injuries. Below are images from last night, and some from the previous several days at the protest site.

    • Pope Francis indefinitely extends priests’ ability to forgive women who have abortions

      Pope Francis has said all priests will be able to forgive abortion, extending indefinitely a temporary measure he had put in place for the Vatican’s jubilee year.

      “I henceforth grant to all priests, in virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve those who have committed the sin of procured abortion,” the Pope wrote in a letter marking the end of the “Holy Year of Mercy”.

      “The provision I had made in this regard, limited to the duration of the Extraordinary Holy Year, is hereby extended, notwithstanding anything to the contrary,” he wrote.

    • ‘Biggest invisible thing on earth?’ – It’s called Indonesia, and it’s waking up

      Looking for fun on a rainy afternoon? Try this: take a blow-up globe down to your nearest public space – a shopping mall, perhaps, or a train station – and ask people to find Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation.

      I’ve tried it in London, New York and Rio. The response: “Uuuuuuuhh …”

      Much stroking of chins and scratching of heads. “Somewhere around here, maybe,” accompanied by vague hand gestures towards Indochina or south Asia.

      If you’re in Melbourne or Sydney you may have more luck. But even there, interest in Indonesia per se is muted. In the words of an editor at Penguin Australia: “Despite [Indonesia] being a profoundly important near neighbour of ours, I feel our market would need an Australian angle on the country.”

    • Indonesia’s got a drinking problem – Muslim hardliners who want to ban alcohol

      In all my half-century of drinking, I have only once encountered a pub with no beer. Ironically, that was the Macbeth Arms in the small Scottish village of Lumphanan, where my hallowed ancestor was slain by Malcolm III in 1057.

      There was a reason, of course. It was inconveniently closed for renovations.

      Imagine my horror then, when on a road trip along the northern Java coast to cover Indonesia’s 2014 presidential elections, I inadvertently stopped for the night at what turned out to be a TOWN with no beer.

      Demak (Pop: 33,700), the site of one of Indonesia’s oldest mosques, is one of a growing number of towns and cities across populous Java that have quietly banned the sale of alcohol.

    • Muslim Aversion to Non-Muslim Rule and the Jakarta Riots

      Violence between protesters and police in Jakarta broke out Friday night, November 4, 2016, when an estimated 200,000 Muslims emerged from Friday prayers in mosques to rally outside the Indonesian president’s palace. Clashes with police led to tear gas being used on demonstrators, and Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, had to postpone his planned visit to Australia to deal with the crisis.

      The crowd was calling for the arrest of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, the ethnic Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta, which is Indonesia’s capital and the largest city in the world’s fourth most populous nation.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Trump Names Two Opponents of Net Neutrality to Oversee FCC Transition Team

      President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two new advisers to his transition team that will oversee his FCC and telecommunications policy agenda. Both of the new advisers are staunch opponents of net neutrality regulations.

      Jeff Eisenach, one of the two newly appointed advisers, is an economist who has previously worked as a consultant for Verizon and its trade association. In September 2014, Eisenach testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee and said, “Net neutrality would not improve consumer welfare or protect the public interest.” He has also worked for the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and in a blog post wrote, “Net neutrality is crony capitalism pure and simple.”

    • Why Oracle Paid More Than $600 Million for Dyn

      Business software titan Oracle paid somewhere between $600 million and $700 million to acquire Dyn, a source close to the deal told Fortune.

      Earlier on Monday, Dan Primack reported that Oracle paid “north of $600 million” for the Manchester, N.H.-based company. Oracle and Dyn announced the deal, without financial details, Monday morning.

11.21.16

Links 21/11/2016: New Linux RC, Zorin OS 12 Receives a Lot of Press Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • In memoriam: Pieter Hintjens

    Former FFII President, erstwhile OFE collaborator, and personal friend, Pieter Hintjens, passed away last month at the age of 53. Pieter was a programmer, an influential thinker, and a prolific writer who inspired many. While we did not always agree, I always appreciated the intelligence and passion he brought to everything he did. He will be much missed.

  • Best open source management tools

    Open source software provides an attractive alternative to more costly commercial products, but can open source products deliver enterprise-grade results? To answer this question we tested four open source products: OpenNMS, Pandora FMS, NetXMS and Zabbix. All four products were surprisingly good. We liked Pandora FMS for its ease of installation and modern user interface. In general, we found configuration to be easier and more intuitive with Pandora than the other contenders. NetXMS came in a close second with a nice user interface, easy to configure rules and a solid user manual. Overall, we found all four products suitable for enterprise use, particularly in small-to-midsize environments

  • Pandora FMS wins open-source management shootout

    Doing more with less remains an ongoing challenge for IT execs. Making sure everything keeps humming along to meet service-level agreements can be challenging for resource-stretched IT departments. For all but the smallest shops, effective monitoring requires tools that provide a meta view of the entire infrastructure with drill-down capabilities.

  • 4 ways to open up your project’s infrastructure

    Open source isn’t just about opening up your code—it’s also about building a supporting infrastructure that invites people to contribute. In order to create a vibrant, growing, and exciting project, the community needs to be able to participate in the governance, the documentation, the code, and the actual structures that keep the project alive. If the overall “hive” is doing well, it attracts more individuals with diverse skills to the project.

  • Minoca, it’s ‘another’ lightweight OS for IoT

    New on the scene is recent times is Minoca OS, a general purpose open source operating system written specifically to conserve power, storage and memory.

  • Events/Outreachy

    • Speak at The Linux Foundation’s Invite-Only Open Source Leadership Summit

      The Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit (formerly known as Collaboration Summit) is where the world’s thought leaders in open source software and collaborative development convene to share best practices and learn how to create and advance the open source infrastructure that runs our lives.

      The Linux Foundation is now seeking executives, business and technical leaders, open source program office leaders, and open source foundation and project leaders to share your knowledge, best practices and strategies with fellow leaders at OSLS, to be held Feb. 14-16, 2017, in Lake Tahoe, CA.

    • LLVM Developer Meeting 2016 Videos Posted

      The videos from the LLVM Developer Meeting 2016 conference that took place at the beginning of November are now online.

    • Outreachy Winter 2016 Projects/Participants Announced

      The accepted participants and their projects for the Outreachy Winter 2016 session were announced earlier this month for helping females and other under-represented groups engage in free software development.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

    • Early Stage Startup Heptio Aims to Make Kubernetes Friendly

      Two Former Google staffers the built the original Google Compute Engine and helped to create Kubernetes are launching their own company to fill a perceived gap in the container orchestration market.

      Heptio was officially announced on Nov. 17, as yet another company in the ever-growing landscape of vendors aiming to support the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system. Heptio is noteworthy in that it was recently founded and led by the same two Google staffers, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, that originally created Kubernetes in the first place.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • GLobjects 1.0.0 Released For OpenGL Aide

      GLobjects 1.0.0 has been released as an open-source library designed to make OpenGL usage “modern, less cluttered, and less error-prone.”

      GLobjects 1.0 is derived from glbinding and OpenGL Mathematics and provides a object-oriented C++-based interface.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Linux versus Unix hot patching

      There has always been a debate about how close Linux can get to the real operating system (OS), the core proprietary Unix variants that for two decades defined the limits of non-mainframe scalability and reliability.

      But times are changing, and the new narrative may be when will Unix catch up to Linux on critical reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features such as hot patching?

      Hot patching, the ability to apply updates to the OS kernel while it is running, is a long sought-after but elusive feature of a production OS.

      It is sought after because both developers and operations teams recognise that bringing down an OS instance that is doing critical high-volume work is at best disruptive and at worst a logistical nightmare. Its level of difficulty also makes it somewhat elusive.

      There have been several failed attempts and implementations that almost worked, but they were so fraught with exceptions that they were not really useful in production.

    • Can I interest you in talking about Security?

  • Defence/Aggression

    • US Implicated in Targeting Yemeni Civilians

      Since March 2015, Yemen has been ravaged by armed conflict between the incumbent administration headed by President Abdrahbuh Mansour and the religious-political Houthi insurgency, sometimes linked to terrorist organization Al-Qaeda. The US had prioritized its anti-terrorism efforts in the Middle East following the rise of Musab al-Zarqawi (the founder of ISIS). But, in becoming preoccupied with hunts for other high-profile terrorist targets, the US let the internal socio-political state of Yemen fall to the wayside. To make up for past neglect, the Obama administration began backing Yemen’s Mansour administration and implementing “strategic” bombings. Today, Yemen is neck deep in a war they did not ask for, facing an enemy that is not identifiable.

      On August 15, 2016, “Abs Hospital, located in the country’s Hajjah governorate and supported by the international medical charity, was hit at 3:45 p.m. local time.” According to a statement released by Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières [MSF]), nine individuals were killed on impact, including an MSF volunteer. Teresa Sancristóval, the MSF emergency program manager, claims that all military authorities were well informed regarding the GPS coordinates of the humanitarian hospital site, but failed to acknowledge it when planning the strike. There is still no information released on behalf of who was targeted by the strike.

    • 9/11, Permanent War, and the Transnational Capitalist Class

      Globalization of trade and central banking has empowered private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control some $100 trillion dollars of wealth.

    • Could David Petraeus, Rumored Candidate for Secretary of State, Get a Security Clearance?

      After months of criticizing Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information while serving as secretary of state, Donald Trump is reportedly considering David Petraeus for the same job, even though the four-star general and former CIA director pled guilty to passing classified information to his former lover and biographer.

      The Guardian reported on Thursday that Petraeus is in the running for secretary of state in the Trump administration. The anonymously sourced report could not be confirmed, but Petraeus reportedly met with Trump just before the election, and has since been complimentary about the president elect.

      On German cable news, Petraeus called Trump a “dealmaker,” and said, “He’s right to criticize Washington over its partisanship and its inability to forge compromises.”

      Petraeus resigned as CIA director in 2012 after the FBI discovered he was having an affair with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. The resulting investigation revealed that he had given her highly classified information, and Justice Department prosecutors wanted to indict Petraeus on felony charges.

      According to his 2015 plea deal, Petraeus intentionally gave Broadwell access to eight “Black Books” filled with highly classified information, including “the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions,” and even Petraeus’s conversations with the president. He also admitted that he had misled the FBI during the investigation.

    • THE COMING WAR ON CHINA – A NEW PILGER FILM FOR TV AND CINEMA

      John Pilger’s new film – The Coming War on China – will be in UK cinemas from Monday 5 December 2016 and on ITV at 10.35pm on Tuesday 6 December.

    • British Navy fires warning shots at Spanish vessel off Gibraltar

      The British Navy on Sunday fired flares at a Spanish research vessel after it ignored requests to leave the waters at Gibraltar’s coast and attempts to contact the crew failed, the Guardian reports.

      The boat, operated by Spain’s state Oceanographic Institute, entered the British waters several times within 48 hours, but ignored requests to leave.

      “The Royal Navy challenges all unlawful maritime incursions into British Gibraltar territorial waters. We back this up by making formal diplomatic protests to the Spanish government,” a spokesperson for the ministry of defense told the Guardian.

      Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s chief minister, said he was “satisfied” with the tactical decisions taken, AFP reports. Gibraltar says similar “provocative” incidents with Spanish vessels take place in its territorial waters, but it is rare for the Navy to fire flares.

    • Former NSA Director Doesn’t Think Michael Flynn Is Up To The Job

      Former National Security Agency director and CIA director Michael Hayden expressed concern about President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, saying Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, would be “stretched a bit” by his new role.

      “But by and large he’s been successful at the tactical operational level,” Hayden said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” “This is a strategic global job. And so I think he’ll be stretched a bit by this.”

    • A New Documentary Explores the Devastating Effects of Drone Warfare on Victims and Whistleblowers

      On the night of February 21, 2010, a group of families driving a convoy of vehicles through the valleys of Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan came into the sights of a Predator drone crew operating out of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

      “That truck would make a beautiful target,” one of the operators says. The crew analyzes the convoy, debating whether children are present. “I really doubt that child call, man. I really fucking hate that shit.”

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Exploring Tidal Marsh Resilience to Sea Level Rise

      The NOAA-sponsored National Estuarine Research Reserve System released a national assessment of tidal marsh resilience in the face of rising sea levels. This assessment establishes a national monitoring baseline for estuarine climate change impacts.

      Using data from the reserve’s system-wide monitoring program, the study was conducted at 16 sites in 13 coastal states. The results indicate that Pacific coast tidal marshes are more resistant to rising seas levels from climate change than marshes in the Atlantic. Of the areas evaluated, one marsh in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, and another in Massachusetts’ Waquoit Bay were found to be the most vulnerable.

    • How Important is the Ocean to U.S. Island Territories?

      A new report allows readers to better understand the importance of the ocean to the economies of two U.S. territories in the Caribbean. For people who manage, protect, and make use of the resources in these special places, more accurate economic data about ocean use are key to good decision making. And good decisions will help keep our ocean healthy and resilient—supporting livelihoods for future generations. Shown here: St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.

    • San Francisco Bay And Outer Coast Sentinel Site Cooperative

      Rush Ranch, part of San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. The tidal marshes at Rush Ranch and nearby China Camp serve as research sites for scientists; classrooms for teachers, land managers and naturalists; and inspiring places for Bay Area residents to visit. Credit: Tom Muehleisen.

      The region is a major urban and economic center and a unique ecological treasure. It is home to over seven million people, and retains some of the largest and most important natural areas along the west coast, including three National Marine Sanctuaries (Greater Farallones, Cordell Bank, and Monterey Bay), the Point Reyes National Seashore, the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, and the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex. The estuary serves as a major hub of commerce and supports the most intact Mediterranean-climate wetlands in North America.

      The San Francisco Sentinel Site Cooperative Management Team is currently comprised of representatives from NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management (OCM), the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR), NOAA’s Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary (GFNMS), and California Sea Grant. The management team guides the development of the Cooperative and assists with engaging partners and linking existing efforts related to our focus areas, and expanding collaborations in the region.

    • Why “Climate Change” Must Become a Promise to Decolonize

      Like the racist policing we witnessed at the Dakota Access pipeline (and have been witnessing throughout the nation), climate change was, as feminist philosopher Chris J. Cuomo reminds us, “manufactured in a crucible of inequality.” Specifically, it is “a product of the industrial and the fossil-fuel eras, historical forces powered by exploitation, colonialism and nearly limitless instrumental use of ‘nature.’”

    • What we choose to resist

      I was standing in a crowded room filled with plaid and free cider. The student-run events space of Oxford Hub buzzed with a collective though rather timid optimism. Standing on a table with a foaming beer in his hand was Achim Steiner, Director of the Oxford Martin School and former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme. He was delivering the first of the celebratory speeches.

      “In terms of global cooperation, the Paris Agreement was perhaps the most vital moment of sanity,” said Steiner. “Paris alone will not save us, but imagine if it had not happened.”

      In his words, the Agreement has forged an opportunity to deal with two key climate issues: legacy and equity. It has created the space to begin tackling the challenges of per-capita and historical CO2 emissions, and disparities such as the impacts of climate change on small island states and developing regions.

      As Steiner continued with his speech, however, he didn’t mince his words. Every syllable carried weight. “I have heard it all before,” he said, when referring to resistance to climate action and energy transitions. “We can’t do it. We don’t have the grid. It will affect our bottom line. It’s not possible. But the shareholders…”

    • English village strives for carbon neutrality

      South of Manchester, Ashton Hayes is a collection of tweed cottages and pretty houses, nestled between green fields and trees. But for the past 10 years, this small village has been showing world leaders how to save the planet.

      “I switched things off, wore more jumpers, changed how I used electricity – for example, I never used it after that for heating water,” says local Kate Harrison, as a way of explaining how she managed to cut her energy consumption by a whopping 60 percent over a short period of time.

      “Eventually I replaced my boiler for a much more efficient one – and just threw myself into the project, really.”

    • ‘Unprecedented’: More than 100 million trees dead in California

      California’s lingering drought has pushed the number of dead trees across the state past 100 million, an ecological event experts are calling dangerous and unprecedented in underlining the heightened risk of wildfires fueled by bone-dry forests.

      In its latest aerial survey released Friday, the U.S. Forest Service said 62 million trees have died this year in California, bringing the six-year total to more than 102 million.

    • Fiji’s Prime Minister Pleads With Trump: ‘Save Us’ From Climate Change

      Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has pleaded with Donald Trump and the American people to help save his slowly sinking nation. At this year’s global climate talks in Marrakech, he said that climate change was no hoax, and invited the President-elect to come visit Fiji and see the damage first hand.

      Mr. Bainimarama made his remarks on Friday, the last day of this year’s Conference of the Parties, a yearly meeting where UN signatories of the Paris Climate Agreement meet to discuss and plan its implementation.

      The spectre of a Trump administration and what that could mean for the climate agreement hung like a pall over the talks in Marrakech, and Mr. Bainimarama—slated to be president of next year’s meeting—addressed the worry directly on the closing day of the conference. His tiny island nation of Fiji is already under serious pressure from rising seas—a product of climate change.

  • Finance

    • German citizenship is ranked the most valuable in the world

      Not only do Germans have the most powerful passports in the world, they also have the highest quality of citizenship, according to a new report. The consultancy Henley & Partners’ first Quality of Nationality Index (QNI) ranks the value of 161 nations’ citizenship on a scale of 0 to 100%.

    • Sanders, Warren Not ‘Genuine Progressives’–Says Washington Post

      In standard theory, the people in the developing world buy their own stuff, with rich countries like the US providing the financing. It actually did work this way in the 1990s, up until the East Asian financial crisis in 1997. In that period, countries like Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia were growing very rapidly while running large trade deficits. This pattern of growth was ended by the terms of the bailout imposed on these countries by the US Treasury Department through the International Monetary Fund.

      The harsh terms of the bailout forced these and other developing countries to reverse the standard textbook path and start running large trade surpluses. This post-bailout period was associated with slower growth for these countries. In other words, the poor of the developing world suffered from the pattern of trade the Post advocates. If they had continued on the pre-bailout path, they would be much richer today. In fact, South Korea and Malaysia would be richer than the United States if they had maintained their pre-bailout growth rate over the last two decades. (This is the topic of the introduction to my new book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer; it’s free.)

      It is also important to note that the Post is only bothered by forms of protection that might help working-class people. The United States prohibits foreign doctors from practicing in the United States unless they complete a US residency program. (The total number of slots is tightly restricted, with only a small fraction open to foreign-trained doctors.) This is a classic protectionist measure. No serious person can believe that the only way for a person to be a competent doctor is to complete a US residency program. It costs the United States around $100 billion a year ($700 per family) in higher medical expenses. Yet we never hear a word about this or other barriers that protect the most highly paid professionals from the same sort of international competition faced by steelworkers and textile workers.

    • TPP: A Post-Mortem

      The death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that EFF called last week has since been confirmed by White House officials. This marks the end of a long-running campaign against the secretive agreement that EFF began back in 2012.

      Make no mistake; although the proximate cause of the TPP’s demise was the U.S. Presidential election result, the TPP faced long odds in Congress even if the election had gone the other way. This in turn was due to broad opposition to the agreement from many sectors of society across the political divide, including from members of the digital rights community. So as we survey the fallout from the TPP’s demise, EFF and its supporters are entitled to feel proud of the part we played.

    • NYC Lawmakers Push For Audits of Landlords Who Pocket $1.4 Billion Tax Break

      New York City’s biggest housing subsidy may finally get more scrutiny just as state lawmakers are about to consider a massive expansion of the controversial program.

      The $1.4 billion-a-year program, known as 421-a, is designed to wipe away most of the property taxes owed by real estate developers who agree in return to limit annual rent increases in new apartments they have constructed. For buildings in Manhattan as well as expensive neighborhoods in other boroughs, a certain percentage of units must also be set aside for low-income renters.

    • Federal Court Holds That the Government Can’t Lock Up Immigrants for Being Poor

      Cesar Matias, a gay man, fled to the United States from Honduras more than a decade ago to escape the persecution he suffered because of his sexuality. He worked as a hair stylist and in a clothing factory in Los Angeles and rented a small, one-bedroom apartment.

      In March 2012, immigration agents arrested him; locked him up in the city jail in Santa Ana, California; and put him in deportation proceedings. He applied for asylum, and an immigration judge found him eligible for release while his case was being decided. He then spent the next four years of his life in prison — not because of any crime, but because he couldn’t afford to pay the $3,000 bond set by the judge.

    • For the poor, Texas’ justice system is a maze with no exit

      Dee Arellano had just parked her car in downtown Houston when she was approached by a police officer on horseback. The officer cited her because her vehicle registration had lapsed, a common infraction.

    • A ‘trade war’ is already going on in cyberspace

      After the initial shock-and-awe reaction to the surprise Trump victory, the markets rejoiced last week… a lot.

      “The Dow closed at an all-time high on Thursday, while the S&P and the Nasdaq were flirting with their record highs entering Friday,” reported CNBC.

      Others were less thrilled with the election result. Some experts claimed Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on China, withdraw from NAFTA, and otherwise stop globalization in its tracks would surely set off a trade war and hurt the markets.

      I disagree.

      I think Trump can’t start a trade war because we are already in one. It’s been going on for years, right under our noses… and it’s happening in cyberspace.

    • Economist’s research reveals poverty should be measured by more than income

      Since social scientists and economists began measuring poverty, the definition has never strayed far from a discussion of income.

      New research from Georgia Tech economist Shatakshee Dhongde shows there are multiple components of poverty that more accurately describes a household’s economic condition. Dhongde looks at “deprivation” more than simply low income, and her work finds that almost 15 percent of Americans are deprived in multiple dimensions.

      “This study approaches poverty in a new way,” said Dhongde, who recently published “Multi-Dimensional Deprivation in the U.S.” in the journal Social Indicators Research.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • ‘None of the old rules apply’: Dave Eggers travels through post-election America

      It was different in 2008. Knowing that Michigan was securely in Obama’s column and Ohio was on the bubble, Rob and Jenny went to Toledo to knock on doors in trailer parks and housing projects. Foreclosure signs were common. When they introduced themselves as canvassers for Obama, the residents, all of them white, were welcoming and chatty. “The interactions were long,” Mickey said. “The people were worried and they wanted to talk.” Ohio’s 18 electoral votes went to Obama in 2008 and 2012.

      “This campaign wore a lot of people down,” Mickey said. “The state was bombarded by pro-Clinton ads, but she failed to offer any sustained and coherent economic message. She said, ‘I’m not crazy’ and ‘I’m not a sexist racist pig’, but for working class whites that’s not enough. I would say that of the people who slammed their doors on me, most of them didn’t vote for either candidate.”

    • Lashing Out at ‘Identity Politics,’ Pundits Blame Trump on Those Most Vulnerable to Trump

      Over the past two weeks, pundits from all ends of the spectrum have been scrambling to explain Clinton’s unexpected loss, with reasons spanning from the plausible to the highly dubious; WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, fake news, Jill Stein, Russia, bad algorithms and the FBI have all been accused of having sole or part responsibility. Lately, however, a new, entirely bogus culprit has emerged from center and center-left circles: “identity politics” and its close cousin, “political correctness.”

    • Those Damn Emails

      Clinton supporters were surprised the emails mattered at all, because they had been fed a regular and often fully-factually wrong diet by the majority of the media. There was some good reporting on what the emails meant, and how classification works, but it was almost all on right-of-center websites Clinton people did not read, and blithely dismissed as biased when the sites were brought to their attention. And yeah, sometimes things got a bit too partisan in tone, but the facts were also there.

    • Hamilton vs Trump

      “Apologize!” was President elect Donald Trump conclusion of two messages he wrote to the cast of Hamilton, one of the most successful Broadway musicals in recent times. He was thus responding to the incident in which actor Brandon Victor Dixon, that played Vice President Aaron Burr, addressed the audience of the show.

      At the end of last Friday’s performance, noting that Vice President-elect Mike Pence was in the audience, he used the opportunity to thank Mr. Pence for attending the show and told him, “We hope you will hear us out.”

      And then Dixon added, “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us. Again, we truly thank you for seeing this show, this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds and orientations.”

    • For Many Americans, A Day to Forget
    • A Victory for ‘White’ America

      My reaction four days out from the moral tragedy of Donald Trump’s election as President is this: we are two nations, not one nation. On Nov. 8, 2016, one nation, a very white, very gerrymandered nation, braced by feeble voter turnout, conquered the other.

      The conquest will continue for at least a generation since it includes control of the U.S. Supreme Court. Mid-term elections may bring minor relief (or possibly not because Senate Democrats have far more seats to defend than Republicans) but the conquering nation knows that the Supreme Court and other judges pipe the tune to which all must dance.

    • Trump Can’t Hear What the Cast of “Hamilton” Tried to Tell Him

      The message, written by the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, with input from the cast and crew, certainly reached Trump Tower, less than a mile away from the Richard Rodgers Theater, since it inspired a fit from the man whose divisive campaign stirred the alarm and anxiety the cast described, Donald Trump.

      Despite the intensely civil tone of this act of dissent, Trump inaccurately claimed that Pence “was harassed” by the cast of the play, and then described their plea for tolerance as “very rude,” before demanding an apology.

    • We Cannot “Give Trump a Chance”

      In the ten days since the election, several thousand people have phoned and emailed my Seattle City Council office in their fury over my call to shut down Donald Trump’s agenda with massive peaceful protests on Inauguration Day.

      Many messages were from middle- and working-class people who had voted for Trump because they hated corporate Democrats and Hillary Clinton, and mistakenly believed that Trump was going to stand up for the ordinary Americans. Many were also racist and misogynist, saying things like, “You don’t belong here with the bull***t you spew from your c***su**er,” or “Drop dead and go back to turbanville.”

      Call after call, while having zero tolerance for bigotry and threats, my staff patiently explained to the more reasonable Trump supporters that we agree working people have been sold out by corporate politicians. That we completely oppose the bipartisan, big business policies of “free trade” deals like the TPP and NAFTA, corporate tax handouts, and the close ties of both parties to Wall Street. Callers were surprised to learn that while I fiercely oppose Trump, I did not back Hillary Clinton (I campaigned for Bernie Sanders, and later Jill Stein). Many were simply not reachable, as they spewed hate on all those protesting their president-elect. They will have to experience Donald Trump’s policies in office to see him for what he is: a con man and representative of the billionaire class who sold the lie that he will bring back the American Dream.

      My first grim thoughts as I saw some of the horrifying emails was that I will be far from the only person targeted after the dangerous rise of Donald Trump. Bigots are feeling emboldened. Already a surge in bullying and hate crimes has taken place, and the KKK felt confident to hold a rally in North Carolina to celebrate Trump’s victory.

    • Trump Assembling Team of ‘Swamp Creatures,’ Says Ellison

      Forget “draining the swamp,” President-elect Donald Trump is building a cabinet full of “more swamp creatures than ever before,” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

      Appearing on the morning show, the progressive lawmaker, who is running to chair the Democratic National Committee (DNC), said, “Donald Trump has already proven where he’s going with this thing,” based on the nominees thus far.

      “He has lobbyists and big-time investment bankers,” Ellison continued, pointing to the recent Politico article, “Why Wall Street is Suddenly in Love with Trump.”

      “He’s not doing what he’s said he’s gonna do for average working Americans,” he added.

    • Meet the Candidate For Attorney General Who’s Hunted Quail with Corporate Donors

      While Donald Trump was running for the White House, he bashed politicians who courted the billionaire Koch brothers as “puppets” and vowed to “drain the swamp” in Washington by squelching cozy relationships between lobbyists and elected officials.

      Take, for example, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who is reportedly on the short list to become Trump’s attorney general.

      Last month, Kobach was among a group of Republican secretaries of state who spent the weekend hunting pheasant and quail and shooting clay pigeons with corporate donors at a Kansas lodge, a getaway funded by industry groups.

      The attendees included Allen Richardson, a lobbyist for Koch Industries, who joked about keeping the guest list secret. “The Koch brothers out with the Republican secretaries of state — that’s a news story I don’t need,” he said, unaware that a ProPublica reporter was in attendance.

    • Switzerland not so neutral with Clinton Foundation donation

      An agency overseen by the Swiss foreign ministry made a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation — at the same time the US and Switzerland were in the midst of a diplomatic struggle over tax evasion.

      The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation shelled out about $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2011, money earmarked for a program that sought to lower mortality for mothers and infants in Liberia, the Schweiz am Sonntag newspaper discovered on Sunday, according to The Local.

      The payment was made when the US government was pressuring Swiss banks to hand over customer info, after allegations arose that Swiss banks were being used to help avoid US taxes.

    • The Dark Money Cabinet

      uring the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.

      Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”

    • What Student Protests Tell Us About America Under Trump

      There is little doubt that Trumps’ campaign and subsequent election have brought trauma into public education at all levels.

      “The country has elected a man who threaded racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic messages and mockery of disabled people through his campaign,” writes Emily Bazelon for the New York Times.. “Donald J. Trump’s victory gives others license to do the same,”

      Bazelon, a Times staff writer and author of a highly regarded book on bullying explains that characteristics Trump targeted for insults and inflammatory rhetoric – being non-white, gay, or disabled – describe students who are most apt to be bullied and abused in schools. She cites numerous examples of harassment and racist displays in schools since the election.

      An article for Mother Jones reports, “Bullying in schools is out of control since the election,” and cites examples of racist incidents and actions in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Oregon.

    • Who’s to Blame for President Trump?

      First, as Wikileaks has proven without a shadow of a doubt, it is clear that the DNC colluded with the Clinton campaign as well as with highly placed sources at CNN to fatally undermine and sabotage the progressive insurgency campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

    • Swedish company Tetrapak linked to Clinton Foundation Haiti Operations. More on Ericsson

      This article reports the link found between the Swedish company Tetrapak (also know as Tetra Pak) with the Clinton Foundation, as it is indicated in a document newly released by the US Department of State to the organization Judicial Watch, after a federal order (details down below). I am also reporting, based in document I found at the Freedom of Information Act, on the economic consequences for Haiti due to expanded credits given to the giant Swedish company Ericsson.

    • President-elect: I had to settle Trump University case ‘to focus on our country’

      President-elect Donald Trump sounded off on his $25m payout to students who accused him of fraud on Saturday, as he prepared for a meeting with former foe Mitt Romney, tipped as a possible nominee for secretary of state.

      On Friday the US president-elect settled class-action fraud lawsuits relating to his Trump University for $25m, avoiding the public embarrassment of having to testify in court, despite having previously vowed to fight the cases to the end.

      On Saturday he sought to explain in a tweet: “I settled the Trump University lawsuit for a small fraction of the potential award because as President I have to focus on our country.”

    • Ivanka isn’t the only reason these photos of Trump meeting Abe are problematic

      Trump also hasn’t done much to reassure the public about potential conflicts of interest: As many pointed out, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner feature prominently in photos of the diplomatic meeting.

      Presidential family members often interact with foreign leaders at state dinners, but Ivanka is more than family—she represents Trump’s private business interests. While part of Trump’s transition team, she is one of three Trump kids slated to run his private business after Jan. 20. Her own business recently was forced to apologize for turning media appearances about her father’s presidency into a sales opportunity.

    • Lucy Kellaway to leave the Financial Times to become a teacher

      Lucy Kellaway, the columnist and associate editor of the Financial Times, is leaving the newspaper after 31 years.

      From next summer, she will begin a new career as a maths teacher in a “challenging” London secondary school. In so doing, she will be acting as a pioneer for the charity Now Teach, which she co-founded earlier this year.

      It was set up to encourage high-flying professionals in the business world to retrain as teachers and help to address the shortage of maths and science teachers.

      Kellaway said: “I’ve had one of the nicest jobs in journalism by writing a column for 22 years. I love it, but I don’t want to spend my entire life doing it.

      “I think teaching is hugely important and I’m in the luxurious position of being able to take on the task. My mother was a teacher. One of my daughters is a teacher. It’s in the family, and I’m very excited about making this move.”

      Kellaway’s columns, poking fun at modern corporate culture, have long been regarded as a jewel in the FT’s crown. Editor Lionel Barber describes her as “a unique voice for the business community.”

    • Extreme Center Goes After Anti-Trump Protesters

      After Donald Trump’s surprise victory last week, protests against his pending presidency—and against the racism, misogyny and xenophobia he embodies—popped up from New York City to Portland to Kansas City to Austin to Nashville. Thousands of protesters gathered under the banner of #NotMyPresident, expressly rejecting the Trump administration’s agenda of, among other things, forced deportations, Muslim bans and attacks on women’s reproductive rights.

      On cue, several center and center-left pundits jumped in to call into question and concern-troll this exercise of dissent and its sometimes “violent” excesses of property damage.

    • TV Pundits Eager to Make Trump the New ‘Normal’

      After wrongly predicting the election, political pundits are returning to TV talkshows to explain what will happen under a Trump presidency. But these predictions aren’t like TV anchors predicting the weather; these forecasts have a profound impact on the public reception to the Trump administration and the future course of US politics.

      The danger is that by normalizing Trump—a candidate distinguished by an embrace of political violence and open appeals to ethnic nationalism who boasted of getting away with sexual assaults—these commentators will make racist and sexist bullying an acceptable way to run for public office.

    • 2016 the year everyone got interested.

      Some people wondered why the “losing” side to Brexit or the US Elections complained, moaned and did not accept the result. This is quite simple when you boil it down to the fact both were only a binary choice question, this is clearly going to be divisive by nature!

    • Sanders Draws Massive Crowds as Progressives Prepare to Fight Trump

      The election of a right-wing, repressive government led by President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican-dominated Congress has the American left searching for ways to mount a resistance and regain ground in future elections.

      Many have found an answer in progressive figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), it seems, as crowds of young people are once again gathering to hear the senator speak.

      The senator has spoken out multiple times in the days since Trump’s election, arguing that the Democratic party needs to make greater efforts to reach working-class people and overhaul its leadership; vowing that progressives will “not go silently into the night”; and promising to resist Trump’s repressive, right-wing policy plans.

      The Democratic Party, which spurned Sanders’ campaign during the primary, has elevated the senator to a leadership position within the party.

    • Resisting Despair: Speaking Truth in the Face of Trump

      The attacks keep coming. A few blocks from my apartment in Michigan, a white man threatened to light a Muslim woman on fire if she did not remove her hijab. In California, my friend comforted a mother whose high-school-age daughter and her friend got yelled at in the grocery store parking lot by a man screaming, “Get out of here, lesbian bitches, you know Trump is president and that isn’t going to be allowed anymore.” My heart sinks with each new report of anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ attacks involving direct references to Trump and his campaign slogans. As we countenance a president who has embraced a curator of white supremacist propaganda as his chief White House strategist, and who plans to enact xenophobic attacks on a mass scale, I see Truthout’s role as twofold. First, we must resist the normalization of state-sanctioned violence and white supremacy. We can do so by publishing investigative reports and analyses that center the words of people directly affected by this violence. Second, we must resist despair by reporting on concrete acts of mass resistance that can be joined and copied by others. As a commissioning editor, I will be seeking out these stories in the days and months to come.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Acclaimed Brazilian film makes splash despite political battles and cries of censorship

      An internationally acclaimed Brazilian film received the equivalent of an X rating, perhaps because of a political stand taken by the cast. But despite the controversy and alleged censorship surrounding Kleber Mendonca Filho’s “Aquarius,” it has made a big splash at the box office in a large and growing market that usually has more conservative tastes.

    • Germany Wants To Hold Facebook Criminally Liable If It Doesn’t Find & Delete ‘Hate’ Speech

      We’ve been pointing out that in the rush to claim that Facebook is a media company that must take responsibility for the content that is posted and shared on the site, there’s really an implicit call for blocking content that is somehow deemed “bad.” People keep acting like Facebook, rather than its users, has the responsibility to edit what is on the site. That’s dangerous — and for yet another example of how, we’ve now got a German official saying that Facebook has to be classified as a media property and be held criminally liable if it doesn’t magically delete “hate speech.”

      This is really, really dangerous. Yes, we know that Germany has much stricter hate speech laws, but if you have to have them, at least hold the proper party responsible: those doing the speaking (and, yes, as we’ve pointed out repeatedly, hate speech laws are almost always abused by governments to silence and punish people they don’t like). Facebook, to some extent, has brought this on itself. In the past, it’s made promises, to Germany in particular about how it will help curb “hate speech” on the site. And, eventually, the government is going to get upset and say “you’re not doing enough.” Earlier this year, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, and Twitter) tried to appease European bureaucrats by signing an agreement to respond to complaints of hate speech within 24 hours. But now officials want more. Because once you give governments the power to censor speech, they’re always going to want more.

    • Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s fake news: We’re working on it

      Buzzfeed found that the most-shared Facebook stories have been bogus pro-Trump articles, some of them produced by a fake-news mill run by Macedonian teenagers. A man who makes $10,000 a month writing bogus news opened up to a Washington Post reporter about his conflicted feelings. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) suggested the media take note of “paid rioting”—referring to the persistent, yet evidence-free idea that anti-Trump activists were bused-in, paid protesters.

    • Citizen Lab uncovers censorship across Chinese live-streaming apps

      The Citizen Lab, a research centre based at U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs, has published a report following a year-long investigation into censorship practices concerning Chinese live-streaming applications Sina Show, YY, and, 9158.

      Citizen Lab’s research was done by reverse-engineering the applications in order to examine the scripts that facilitate censorship, such as keyword bans which were on the client-side and therefore completely accessible to researchers after the reverse-engineering process.

      The popularity of live-streaming using these applications has risen exponentially, with people using them to perform and share glimpses into their everyday lives.

    • NYT Advocates Internet Censorship

      The New York Times wants a system of censorship for the Internet to block what it calls “fake news,” but the Times ignores its own record of publishing “fake news,” reports Robert Parry.

    • A moment of truth amid the fake news for Mark Zuckerberg

      r

      Well, the election is over; now we’re knee-deep in postmortems. Every mainstream publication and every corner of the blogosphere is full of autopsies. Many of these investigations have an anguished “How could this have happened?” tone. American students in a university department adjacent to mine have decorated the trees outside with hundreds of distraught but determinedly forward-looking messages. “Love WILL Conquer!” says one. “Knowledge not Ignorance,” says another.

      I don’t propose to add to this genre. If you want an informed, dispassionate analysis of the campaign that has given Trump the keys to the kingdom, look no further than an essay by Professor Charlie Beckett of the LSE on that institution’s Polis blog. It’s worth reading in full, but for those who are pressed for time, the gist is: “Trump had the better politics. Tactically, strategically, personally, policy-wise. He won partly because the Democrats and Hillary Clinton got most of that wrong, but mainly because he did best what you are supposed to do in an election: convince people to vote for you. They (and he) knew what they were doing.”

    • According to Snopes, Fake News Is Not the Problem

      The day after the election, news began swirling around social media that New York Times columnist David Brooks had called for President-elect Donald Trump’s assassination. Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski had a feeling it was fake. Because, come on now, would a prominent columnist for a reputable news outlet really make that kind of comment?

      Snopes has made its business out of correcting the misunderstood satire, malicious falsehoods, and poorly informed gossip that echoes across the internet — and that business is booming. Traffic jumped 85 percent over the past year to 13.6 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. The site supports itself through advertising, and in the last three years it has made enough money to quadruple the size of its staff.

      Sure enough, a bit of Snopes reporting revealed that Brooks had written a column saying Trump would likely resign or be impeached within a year. A news item published on The Rightists claimed Brooks had then said in an interview for KYRQ Radio New York that Trump should be killed. Snopes found The Rightists doesn’t even pretend to traffic in truth. In the site’s “about” section, it describes itself this way: “This is HYBRID site of news and satire. part [sic] of our stories already happens, part, not yet. NOT all of our stories are true!” What’s more, the story’s facts didn’t add up. For example, the site claimed Brooks had made the comments on a radio station — KYRQ — that didn’t exist.

    • What Peter Thiel’s Appointment Could Mean For Freedom Of Speech

      As Donald Trump commences his ghastly slouch toward Washington, a coterie of sycophants snatches at his coattails: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie—we knew this particular trio would scurry after heightened relevance and authority. Unsurprisingly, all three have slavered their way to the president-elect’s transition team, and possibly into the Cabinet. Less expected, perhaps, was billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s recent appointment to the same advisory committee. And yet, an alliance between Trump and Thiel, however appalling, seems so fitting that hindsight renders it almost preordained.

      We can surmise that Thiel’s explicit relevance to the team resides in his connection to Silicon Valley. Fervently supportive of President Obama, the technology hub does not regard Trump with the same beam of approval; on the contrary, it’s deeply dismayed by his ascendance to the presidency. Apart from his evident love affair with Twitter, Trump oscillates in his position on technology’s consequence to modern life. He has also threatened to renegotiate international trade agreements beneficial to the tech industry. Apple, in particular, fears that it will be barred from overseas production (this might not be a bad thing, considering the working conditions of so many foreign factories).

      Theoretically, Thiel will forge a more congenial relationship between his Silicon Valley colleagues and the incoming executive administration. He has previously claimed that his outlier status as a Trump-supporting libertarian has not blighted his business relationships. That said, it’s difficult to conceive of Thiel as possessing much social capital or political influence amid such a staunchly liberal community. And, in any case, would Silicon Valley be cajoled into cooperation with Trump? That remains to be seen.

    • UK Piracy Blocklist Silently Expands With Hundreds of Domains

      UK Internet providers have added close to 500 URLs to the national pirate site blocklist. The expansion follows a request from copyright holders who frequently add new proxies for sites that have previously been barred. Despite this mass-update, the ongoing blocking whack-a-mole is far from over.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz

      Do you panic easily? Do you often feel blue? Do you have a sharp tongue? Do you get chores done right away? Do you believe in the importance of art?

      If ever you’ve answered questions like these on one of the free personality quizzes floating around Facebook, you’ll have learned what’s known as your Ocean score: How you rate according to the big five psychological traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You may also be responsible the next time America is shocked by an election upset.

      For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.

      Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Leave” side of the Brexit campaign. In the United States it takes only Republicans as clients: Senator Ted Cruz in the primaries, Mr. Trump in the general election. Cambridge is reportedly backed by Robert Mercer, a hedge fund billionaire and a major Republican donor; a key board member is Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who became Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman and is set to be his chief strategist in the White House.

    • Obama declines comment on reports of possible removal of NSA chief

      U.S. President Barack Obama declined on Sunday to comment on media reports that senior defense and intelligence officials in his administration had requested the removal of National Security Agency chief Mike Rogers.

      Obama called Rogers a “terrific patriot” during a news conference at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima, adding he did not generally comment on personnel matters.

    • Former GCHQ spy suspended because of work ‘incident’ found dead in bath

      A FORMER GCHQ spybase worker who had once been suspended because of an “incident” at work was found drowned in his bath – and the front door of his flat was unlocked, an inquest heard yesterday.

    • Theresa May’s Terrible Instincts

      Everything you do on the web is now stored for twelve months by the security services. They can hack into your laptop or phone to see what is on there without any conditions at all. Not only do they not need to convince a judge you are suspected of a crime, they do not need to even pretend to actually suspect you of anything at all. They can just decide to target you and go fishing. The UK has now zero right to online privacy and the most vicious security service powers of any democracy. Indeed when you combine powers with capability (and the security service are recruiting tens of thousands more staff to our stasi state) the UK is now the most authoritarian country in the world. The legislation. passed this week, was framed by Theresa May as Home Secretary and received no significant opposition from the UK’s complicit political class.

    • Self-censorship dangerous for journalism and democracy: Joseph [Ed: surveillance is made to induce exactly that]

      Veteran investigative journalist Josy Joseph today said self-censorship, which had become the norm across newsrooms, was dangerous for both journalism and democracy.

      “Once journalist gets a job, he has a bank loan and has to pay EMI. So his concern is to protect his salary. So, he starts self-censorship within himself,” he said.

      “Then when once he goes into newsroom, the editors bring in their vested interest. So there is large and very powerful self-censorship that rules newsroom and I think it is dangerous for both democracy and journalism,” said Joseph, whose book on corruption in India released recently.

      He was speaking during a discussion on “Investigative journalistic stories that never saw light of the day” at Tata Lit-fest here.

      Joseph’s book “A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India” examines and documents the corruption within the Indian democracy.

    • Battle erupts as Trump considers NSA chief for top intelligence post
    • Intelligence battle erupts as Trump considers NSA chief for top intel post

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Congress Needs More Information Before the Government’s New Hacking Powers Kick in [Ed: Older but relevant]

      The federal government is set to get massively expanded hacking powers later this year. Thankfully, members of Congress are starting to ask questions.

      In a letter this week to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, 23 members of Congress—including Sens. Ron Wyden and Patrick Leahy and Rep. John Conyers—pressed for more information and said they “are concerned about the full scope of the new authority” under pending changes to federal investigation rules.

      The Department of Justice kickstarted this process by proposing changes to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which governs how the government obtains search warrants from federal magistrate judges. Specifically, the changes to Rule 41 would let judges grant warrants allowing the government to remotely hack into and search computers and other devices when those devices are part of a “bot-net” or when the government isn’t sure where the devices are located.

    • President Obama Claims He Cannot Pardon Snowden; He’s Wrong

      There may be reasons why the President doesn’t wish to grant a pardon to Snowden, but his stated reasons are completely bogus.

    • Trump’s Picks For AG & CIA Happy To Undermine Civil Liberties, Increase Surveillance

      This is (unfortunately) not a huge surprise, but it appears that a Trump administration is going to be much worse for civil liberties and surveillance. Earlier today, Donald Trump named his choices to head the CIA — Rep. Mike Pompeo — and to be the next Attorney General — Senator Jeff Sessions — and both have terrible records on surveillance, civil liberties and whistleblowing. They also are problematic in other areas, but in the areas where we cover, it’s not looking good.

    • Chagossians Have No Right of Self-Determination

      The debate starts at 10.34 – if you put the cursor to the bottom of the picture a slider appears. It is excruciating to watch. In an unusually full House of Commons (not a high bar) there is indignation and real anger on all sides, with even Tories describing the decision to continue the eviction of the Chagos islanders as “dishonourable”.

      The government argues that the Chagossians are not “a people” distinct from the Mauritians, therefore they do not have a right of self-determination. This piece of sophistry is designed to answer the obvious question of why the Chagossians have less rights than the Falkland Islanders or Gibraltarians. The actual answer – that the Chagossians are not white – is not one the government wishes to give. It also begs the question, if the Chagossians are Mauritians, why are the islands not a part of Mauritius?

      The government produced a paper on prospective resettlement, imposing arbitrary conditions on where and how the Chagossians could live designed to make life as difficult as possible. Those conditions included that there could be no civilian use of the airstrip – which I am glad to see Alex Salmond challenged in the Commons. Chagossians could work at the US airbase, but only on condition their partners and children would not be permitted to be with them. Fishing – their traditional activity – will be banned by the UK government’s marine reserve.

    • Spinning Bannon as ‘Provocateur’ Who ‘Relishes Combativeness’

      There’s a difference between bad news and bad reporting. We’re seeing a lot of both these days, as each Trump Cabinet choice hurls us deeper into dystopia.

      For example: How do you describe a man who propagates white supremacy, misogyny and antisemitism? If you’re the New York Times, you call him a “provocateur.” If you’re the AP, you say his hire is evidence of Trump’s “brash, outsider instincts.”

      Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign chief executive and recently named “Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor” for the Trump White House, has declared of Breitbart, the website he still heads, “We’re the platform for the alt-right”—that being, by Breitbart’s own description, a coalition of advocates of “scientific race differences” with those who “believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved” and online traffickers in racist and antisemitic stereotypes and harassment, along with a significant admixture of pro-Hitler neo-Nazis.

    • CBS Evening News Provides Platform For White Nationalist To Spin, Without Pressing Him On Racist Views

      CBS News provided alt-right white nationalist Richard Spencer with a platform to normalize his racist political movement and praise President-elect Trump without pressing him on his racists comments and stances.

    • Kica Matos on Immigration, Sue Udry on Civil Liberties–Under Trump

      This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump spent his entire campaign demonizing immigrants as dangerous, job-stealing criminals. While denouncing that, media sometimes dismissed it as mainly campaign rhetoric. Will they take the story seriously enough as a Trump administration tries to turn those ideas into policy? We’ll hear from Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change.

    • Jewish historians speak out on the election of Donald Trump

      As scholars of Jewish history, we are acutely attuned to the fragility of democracies and the consequences for minorities when democracies fail to live up to their highest principles. The United States has a fraught history with respect to Native Americans, African Americans and other ethnic and religious minorities. But this country was founded on ideals of liberty and justice and has made slow, often painful progress to achieve them by righting historic wrongs and creating equal rights and opportunities for all. No group has been more fortunate in benefiting from this progress than American Jews. Excluded by anti-Semitism from many professions and social organizations before the Second World War, Jews in the postwar period became part of the American majority, flourishing economically and politically and accepted socially. There are now virtually no corners of American life to which Jews cannot gain entry. But mindful of the long history of their oppression, Jews have often been at the forefront of the fight for the rights of others in this country.

      In the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, it is time to re-evaluate where the country stands. The election campaign was marked by unprecedented expressions of racial, ethnic, gender-based, and religious hatred, some coming from the candidate and some from his supporters, against Muslims, Latinos, women, and others. In the days since the election, there have been numerous attacks on immigrant groups, some of which likely drew inspiration from the elevation of Mr. Trump to the presidency of the United States.

    • Career Racist Jeff Sessions Is Donald Trump’s Pick For Attorney General
    • Grassroots Digital Rights Alliance Expands Across U.S.

      Observers around the world are scrutinizing the President-elect’s transition team and prospects for digital rights under the incoming administration. Trump’s campaign statements offered few reasons to be optimistic about the next administration’s commitments, making the unrestrained domestic secret surveillance regime that President Trump will inherit an even greater threat not only to privacy, but also dissent, individual autonomy and freedom of conscience, and—ultimately—our democracy.

      At EFF, we have committed ourselves to redoubling our efforts to defend digital rights. We know, however, that it will take the concerted actions of our supporters to help our goals find their reflection in law, policy, technology, and culture.

      That’s why we launched the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA), a network of grassroots groups taking action in their local communities to promote digital rights.

    • Troubling Study Says Artificial Intelligence Can Predict Who Will Be Criminals Based on Facial Features

      The fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning are moving so quickly that any notion of ethics is lagging decades behind, or left to works of science fiction. This might explain a new study out of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which says computers can tell whether you will be a criminal based on nothing more than your facial features.

      The bankrupt attempt to infer moral qualities from physiology was a popular pursuit for millennia, particularly among those who wanted to justify the supremacy of one racial group over another. But phrenology, which involved studying the cranium to determine someone’s character and intelligence, was debunked around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and few outside of the pseudo-scientific fringe would still claim that the shape of your mouth or size of your eyelids might predict whether you’ll become a rapist or thief.

      Not so in the modern age of Artificial Intelligence, apparently: In a paper titled “Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images,” two Shanghai Jiao Tong University researchers say they fed “facial images of 1,856 real persons” into computers and found “some discriminating structural features for predicting criminality, such as lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the so-called nose-mouth angle.” They conclude that “all four classifiers perform consistently well and produce evidence for the validity of automated face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy surrounding the topic.”

    • Officer Put on Leave After Video Shows Him Punching Woman in Face During Eviction

      An officer with the Flagstaff police department in Arizona has been put on leave following the release of video footage taken by an eye witness that showed him punching a woman in the face during an arrest earlier this week.

    • Hey, Trump Told, ‘Get Your Daughter the F$%k Out of State Meetings!’

      U.S. News & World Report writes that “Ivanka Trump’s presence at the meeting was only made public when the Japanese government released photos, as the Trump team has continued to bar journalists from witnessing all but the most superficial aspects of the transition.”

      CBS News describes her presence, along with that of her husband, Jared Kushner, as “a reminder of potential conflicts of interest between Donald Trump’s businesses and the White House” as well as his adult children’s future roles in the White House.

      Ivanka and Kushner are on the Trump transition team’s executive committee.

      “Their involvement raises a host of ethical questions,” Emily Jane Fox writes at Vanity Fair, as “it appears to violate the 1967 nepotism law put in place after John Kennedy installed his kid brother Bobby as attorney general.” There’s also the fact that Ivanka, along with her two brothers, will reportedly run the real estate mogul’s business empire in a “blind trust.”

      “Which, as you hardly need to be sharp-eyed to point out, makes it a bit odd that she’s sitting in on presidential state business,” Marine Hyde writes at the Guardian.

      Hyde added, “Before you could say ‘conflict of interests’, America’s most dysfunctional family have already begun blurring the lines between politics and business”

    • Killing Dylann Roof Wouldn’t Help Racial Injustice

      The impact of race on criminal justice is one of the hottest topics of our time. Today’s police-shooting videos have not revealed something new, they have revealed, in a new way, a legacy of racial hatred and violence that is embedded in our nation’s DNA, and more and more Americans are waking up to that fact. So, if we are ready to address the impact of racism in the criminal justice system, what do the remedies look like?

      Let me tell you one thing that will not work—sentencing Dylann Roof to death. Jury selection for his federal death penalty case in the Charleston shooting last summer starts on Nov. 7.

    • Donald Trump’s Mass Deportations Would Cost Billions and Take Years to Process

      And while the president-elect’s comments, rhetoric, and choice of advisers, have fueled panic among immigrant communities across the country, many are quick to point out that he is only going to exacerbate a broken system that’s already been defined by rogue enforcement agencies and rampant abuse for years.

      “Obama built a horrible machine already,” said Danny Cendejas, an organizer with Detention Watch Network, a group that fights immigration detention and deportations nationwide. “Trump will just take it, and take it to a much more horrifying level.”

      In fact, what Trump is proposing is not very different from what has already been happening under the Obama administration, which has prioritized the deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions. But there simply aren’t two to three million of them. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the number of undocumented people with criminal records is closer to 820,000, and even then many of those people are not the “rapists” and “criminals” Trump would have us believe but are guilty instead of “status crimes,” like driving without a license in states that won’t allow undocumented people to get one, or entering the country illegally.

    • As Schools See Hate-Fueled Attacks Rise, Millions Demand Trump Speak Out

      And while Trump “spoke against bullying, intimidation, and hate crimes” during his “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, his appointment of alt-right “hero” Stephen Bannon to chief strategist “sends the exact opposite message,” the letter charges.

      “The presidency is about many things,” it concludes. “Chiefly, it is about setting an example through your leadership. You have said that you will be the president for all Americans, Mr. Trump. We ask that you keep your promise by loudly, forcefully, unequivocally, and consistently denouncing these acts and the ideology that drives them. We ask you to use your position, your considerable platform, and even your tweets to send a clear message that hate has no place in our public discourse, in our public policy, or in our society.”

    • None of This Is Normal. All of It Is Un-American.

      Journalists who investigated Trump, his businesses, family and associates have been mailed anti-Semitic screeds or threatened with violence and even death. Women who have reported on Trump have been sent the vilest sexist epithets. Kshama Sawant, the socialist city council member from Seattle who recently urged protests at Trump’s inauguration in January has been targeted for email and phone attacks, some of which have suggested that she kill herself.

      Just about everyone I know has a story or two or three from the last week and a half. My friend Deana tells of a part-Asian co-worker swung at by a white male who mistook him as being from the Middle East, of a friend’s boyfriend who was told to “Go back to Africa” on his Facebook page, of another friend’s middle-school-aged daughter and other girls who were pushed around by boys in her class, some wearing Trump T-shirts and shouting hateful things about women.

    • Digital Security Tips for Protesters

      After the election, individuals took to the streets across the country to express their outrage and disappointment at the result of the U.S. presidential election. Many protesters may not be aware of the unfortunate fact that exercising their First Amendment rights may open themselves up to certain risks. Those engaging in peaceful protest may be subject to search or arrest, have their movements and associations mapped, or otherwise become targets of surveillance and repression. It is important that in a democracy citizens exercise their right to peaceably assemble, and demonstrators should be aware of a few precautions they can take to keep themselves and their data safe. Here we present 10 security tips for protesting in the digital age.

      [...]

      If you’re really concerned with the data stored on your device, don’t bring it at all and pick up a prepaid mobile phone. These lower-end devices can be purchased along with a SIM card at most large retail stores, and current federal regulation does not require you to show your ID (but your state may). Let your friends know your temporary number, and use this to coordinate activities. Remember that the location of mobile devices can be determined by the cell towers they connect to, so if you don’t want your identity known, turn off your prepaid device before going home or anywhere that might lead to your identity. Using GPS should be safe, since GPS is a receiver and does not transmit any information, but your device may store your coordinates. For this reason, we suggest you turn off location services. When you’re done with the phone, it can be safely recycled or discarded from a location that is not linked to you. Keep in mind that if you carry both your regular device and a prepaid one with you, the location of these devices can be correlated as a way to compromise your anonymity.

    • Clemency Applicants Urge Obama to Act Before Trump Presidency Crushes Hope

      When Brigitte Barren Williams realized Donald Trump had won the presidential election, “it felt like somebody let the air out of a balloon,” she said. Her brother, David Barren, is locked up at a federal prison in West Virginia, serving life plus 20 years on federal drug conspiracy charges. Now in his 50s, Barren has served almost 10 years of his sentence — the minimum portion required before he is eligible to seek a commutation under President Obama’s clemency initiative.

      Tens of thousands of people convicted of nonviolent federal drug crimes have sought mercy under the program, which was announced in April 2014. Obama ramped up his commutations in advance of the election, and Williams prayed with each clemency announcement that her brother’s name might be on the list. After the last round came out, on November 4, Williams was forced to hope that if Obama didn’t grant her brother clemency, perhaps his successor might.

      But the chances of that almost certainly dissolved on election night. Trump has called the clemency recipients “bad dudes,” warning one audience this summer that “they’re walking the streets. Sleep tight, folks.” After winning the White House on such fearmongering rhetoric — and promptly naming a white supremacist to his cabinet — Trump chose Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as his attorney general, an opponent of criminal justice reform and defender of mandatory minimums. There is little reason to believe President Trump will show mercy to people like Barren.

      Yet Williams remains steadfast in her belief that her brother will come home. “We are a family of very strong faith,” she said. Besides, her fight does not end with his freedom. There are too many others in his position. “We have to continue making sure people care.”

      Williams spoke over the phone from Washington, D.C., where she had traveled from Pittsburgh for a series of public events under the theme “Hope for the Holidays.” The advocacy group #cut50, which aims to slash the incarcerated population in half, had organized the series, where participants urged Obama to commute as many sentences as possible in the remaining weeks of his presidency.

    • Installing a Torture Fan at CIA

      President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo, an open aficionado of torture practices used in the “war on terror,” to be CIA director shows that Trump was serious when he said he would support “waterboarding and much worse.”

      Earlier, there had been a sliver of hope that that, while on the campaign trail, Trump was simply playing to the basest instincts of many Americans who have been brainwashed – by media, politicians, and the CIA itself – into believing that torture “works.” The hope was that the person whom Trump would appoint to head the agency would disabuse him regarding both the efficacy and the legality of torture.

    • Obama says he can’t pardon Snowden

      A campaign to pardon NSA leaker Edward Snowden, launched in combination with a fawning Oliver Stone film about him, hasn’t made any headway. The request spurred the entire membership of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, 13 Republicans and 9 Democrats, to send a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. “He is a criminal,” they stated flatly.

    • A country with perfect law enforcement based on perfect surveillance will stop dead in its tracks

      Britain passed the Snooper’s Charter, as expected. Legislators worldwide are making the crucial mistake of seeing privacy as an individual luxury, instead of as a collective necessity: a country that increases its surveillance reduces its pace of progression and competitiveness, and does so at its peril, even disregarding the human rights angle.

      The United Kingdom, on its third attempt, just passed the worst mass-surveillance legislation seen in a democracy – the so-called “Snooper’s Charter”. There is a belief that such intrusion is necessary for the development of society, and that privacy is an individual luxury. Nothing could be further from the truth: privacy is a collective necessity, for society does not develop without it.

    • Rail bosses wanted to spy on sex lives of people who opposed controversial route

      The information gathered would include details of their sex lives, mental health and political views.

      An extraordinary document was published by HS2 detailing how they would access and “process personal data” including details of individuals’ sexual orientation, trade union affiliation, criminal record as well as information about their physical and mental health.

      As part of the company’s Privacy Notice, HS2 said it could collect this information on a number of people, including staff and suppliers but also complainants and litigants, which would include those claiming compensation or objecting to the scheme.

    • Student jailed after blackmailing schoolgirl, 14, with ‘abuse’ video

      A student has been jailed for blackmailing a 14-year-old schoolgirl into handing over family jewellery after threatening to release a video of her being ‘abused’ on Facebook.

      The young victim claimed she was targeted for sexual exploitation by Mohammed Luqman, 18, over a period of months.

      The Birmingham college student allegedly recorded her being sexually abused and later threatened to release the videos on social media, unless she stole from her family for him.

    • Monkey incident sparks clashes in southern Libyan city of Sabha, 16 dead

      At least 16 people died and 50 were wounded in Libya in four days of clashes between rival factions in the southern city of Sabha, a health official said on Sunday.

      According to residents and local reports, the latest bout of violence erupted between two tribes after an incident in which a monkey that belonged to a shopkeeper from the Gaddadfa tribe attacked a group of schoolgirls who were passing by.

      The monkey pulled off one of the girls’ head scarf, leading men from the Awlad Suleiman tribe to retaliate by killing three people from the Gaddadfa tribe as well as the monkey, according to a resident who spoke to Reuters.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Turning Promises Of Marrakesh Treaty For Visually Impaired Into Reality

        With the recent entry into force of the Marrakesh Treaty providing copyright exceptions for persons with visual impairments, a panel convened alongside last week’s World Intellectual Property Organization copyright committee meeting explored ways to transform the treaty’s promises into reality.

        The WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) met from 14-18 November. The 15 November side event was organised by the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC), which is hosted by WIPO.

      • [Old] EFF to Copyright Office: It’s Time for Real Reform of DMCA 1201

        Over 11,000 People Join EFF’s Call to Protect Security Research and Repair

        San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the U.S. Copyright Office today to protect the public’s right to research and repair everything from phones to refrigerators to tractors, to support the right of people with print disabilities to convert media into an accessible format, and to restore users’ rights to make fair and lawful uses of the software and media they buy.

        EFF’s comments are part of the Copyright Office’s ongoing study into whether the “anti-circumvention” provisions of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) are working for the public. Section 1201 bans anyone from accessing a copyrighted work when a technology like digital rights management software (DRM) is in place to block access. The law is meant to stop illegal copying, but instead, companies use digital locks in all sorts of products to obstruct those who want to look inside for any reason—blocking competition, innovation, security research, and other legal activities. To vindicate these activities, the public must resort to a burdensome exemption process that allows the digital locks to be broken in certain cases. EFF and a host of other public interest organizations must repeatedly plead for temporary exemptions that expire every three years. Moreover, the law expects users to figure out for themselves how to circumvent digital locks to take advantage of exemptions: no one is allowed to give them the technology to do so.

11.20.16

Links 20/11/2016: Linux Bug Fixes, GNUnet of Autonomous Things

Posted in News Roundup at 8:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • GNU/Linux – portrait

    Here is a personal ‘portrait’ artwork. A bit unusual compare to my previous portraits and probably a bit more ‘digital’ than ‘painting’ this time. But it’s a concept I had in mind since a long time and wanted to paint it on this rainy Sunday afternoon at home.

  • Desktop

    • System76 brings 4K display Ubuntu Linux laptop for Pro users

      Finally, some good news for Apple fans who crashed System76 website a few days back. Apple makes a good laptop. However, they lack the option to add additional RAM or ports or graphics card. The new System76 Oryx laptop has a 4K HiDPI display. If you are a sysadmin, DevOps, or developer, give it a try to System76.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Portable system services

      In the refereed track of the 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference, Lennart Poettering presented a new type of service for systemd that he calls a “portable system service”. It is a relatively new idea that he had not talked about publicly until the systemd.conf in late September. Portable system services borrow some ideas from various container managers and projects like Docker, but are targeting a more secure environment than most services (and containers) run in today.

      There is no real agreement on what a “container” is, Poettering said, but most accept that they combine a way to bundle up resources and to isolate the programs in the bundle from the rest of the system. There is also typically a delivery mechanism for getting those bundles running in various locations. There may be wildly different implementations, but they generally share those traits.

    • Kernel 4.8.7 fixes Realtek card disconnects!

      Ladies and gentlemen, this is the day worth remembering. The long outstanding problem with the disconnects on a variety of Realtek Wireless devices, my RTL8723BE included, which has shown problems time and again in pretty much every single distro out there, has been finally resolved. Word.

      A reader emailed me a few days back and said the new kernel 4.8.7 fixes the issue. I decided to test this, and completed a long and arduous set of checks in Manjaro 16.10, which has the kernel 4.8.7 available in its repos. One of the perks of bleeding-edge Arch-based distros. The Manjaro review is still a few weeks away, but we can at least focus on this burning issue. Let me proudly and happily elaborate.

    • Making WiFi fast

      The result of all this work is WiFi latencies that are less than 40ms, down from a peak of 1-2 seconds before they started, and much better handling of multiple stations running at full rate. Before the changes, a test involving 100 flows all starting together collapsed entirely, with at most five flows getting going; all the rest failed due to TCP timeouts caused by excessive buffering latency. Afterward, all 100 could start and run with reasonable latency and bandwidth. All this work, in the end, comes down to a patch that removes a net 200 lines of code.

      There are some open issues, of course. The elimination of the queuing discipline layer took away a number of useful network statistics. Some of these have been replaced with information in the debugfs filesystem. There is, he said, some sort of unfortunate interaction with TCP small queues; Eric Dumazet has some ideas for fixing this problem, which only arises in single-station tests. There is an opportunity to add better air-time fairness to keep slow stations from using too much transmission time. Some future improvements, he said, might come at a cost: latency improvements might reduce the peak bandwidth slightly. But latency is what almost all users actually care about, so that bandwidth will not be missed — except by Ham the monkey.

    • Enhanced File Stats Being Worked On For The Linux Kernel

      Red Hat has been working on a new statx system call for the Linux kernel to provide “enhanced” file information.

      This new statx() system call would be able to return the file’s creation time, data version number, and other new attributes not currently provided. These new attributes wouldn’t work for all file-systems, but would work for a subset of them such as CIFS, NFS, and others that track such information.

    • Btrfs Heatmap – visualize your filesystem
    • RAID5/6 scrub race fix

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Now Has Patches For Fast Clears

        Building off the input attachments work earlier this week for the Intel open-source Vulkan driver (covered in More Intel ANV Vulkan Code Hits Mesa Git, Other Patches Pending), there are now patches up for review to implement support for fast clears.

        Jason Ekstrand at the Intel Open-Source Technology Center who has been leading the “ANV” Vulkan driver effort wrote this Saturday, “This little series builds on top of the input attachment series I sent out earlier this week and adds support for fast clears in Vulkan. I’ve tested it on both Sky Lake and Haswell and it has no regressions over the input attachments series.”

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Kubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak – Cautiously good?

        Let us draw the verdict. It’s a strange one. Oddly, this is probably the best Kubuntu that I’ve tested in a long time. Sadly, that’s like saying losing one finger in a freak chainsaw accident is better than losing two fingers. Not the best measure stick. Not something to be proud of. There are many, many problems in Yakkety Yak Plasma, including but not limited to the application stack, stability, performance, package management, and the ability to customize. That’s not a happy list.

        Brave face on, we also have a lot of goodies to focus on. A very decent – and FIRST for Plasma – smartphone support stack and multimedia playback as they should be. Lots of old bugs have been fixed. If only we had Samba printing support out of the box, and the network card driver was given a little bit of love, this might be a reasonable distro.

        Kubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak is nothing to be proud of, but it is an okay Plasma release that has redeemed a whole generation of failed distributions in the past year or so. It’s funny how it’s gone from being my favorite to a pariah, and now it’s slowly recovering. Such a waste of effort. And why? There was really no need for this whole regression saga. Anyhow, the road to success is still a long and perilous one. It will take a lot more before Kubuntu becomes a recommended household item again. But at the very least, 16.10 is showing a little of that promise. 7/10, if I’m being generous, more like 6/10, but you might want to give it a spin and see what gives. QED.

      • fill bug reports!

        Everything starts with a good idea or a bug report. Someone asked for an app icon for claws mail (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=371914) and Jens Reuterberg make one. As I don’t think that every application need an breeze specific app icon, I’m look more for a consistent look of the applications so I made an claws breeze icon theme. You can download the icon pack from the claws webpage and dont’t forget to give me feedback cause I don’t use claws.

      • Cutelyst benchmarks on TechEmpower round 13

        Right on my first blog post about Cutelyst users asked me about more “realistic” benchmarks and mentioned TechEmpower benchmarks. Though it was a sort of easy task to build the tests at that time it didn’t seem to be useful to waste time as Cutelyst was moving target.

      • KDE Applications 16.12 branches created
      • KSyntaxHighlighting – A new Syntax Highlighting Framework

        This year, on March 31st, KDE’s advanced text editor Kate had its 15th birthday. 15 years are a long time in the software world, and during this time Kate won the hearts of many users and developers. As text editing component, Kate uses the KTextEditor framework, which is used also by applications such as KDevelop or Kile.

        The KTextEditor framework essentially is an embeddable text editing component. It ships everything from painting the line numbers, the background color, the text lines with syntax highlighting, the blinking cursor to code completion and many more features. One major feature is its very powerful syntax highlighting engine, enabling us to properly highlight around 275 languages.

        Each syntax highlighting is defined in terms of an xml file (many examples), as described in Kate’s documentation. These xml files are read by KTextEditor and the context based highlighting rules in these files are then used to highlight the file contents.

      • KStars 2.7.2 for Windows is released

        Less than a month from the release 2.7.0, KStars v2.7.2 for Windows 64bit is now available for download on KStars website! Get it now and give it a go.

      • Multiple notifications across multiple monitors in KDE Plasma 5?

        I have 3 monitors, and on each monitor, I have a Plasma panel at the bottom. When any notification pops up, I get 3 notifications on each monitor. I have a full fledged panel on each monitor with everything including task bar and system tray.

      • Interview with Katharina

        I love the professionality of Krita. It really does not need to hide behind the big guys in business. You can use your photoshop or whatever brushes and formats and many more, there is no “Meh, that brush is not made by us, you can’t use it!“. The user interface is smart and chic, the brushes work smooth and I never had any problems with my hardware. It simply combines everything I need, without the need to check a manual too often. It feels effortless to use it! And also it is nice to find other Krita artists randomly on the internet, it is always a nice way to start a conversation.

      • Wiki(1.0), what’s going on? (Part17)
      • Minuet in KDE Applications 16.12: code convergence, tablet UX and Windows release

        Yesterday was the feature freeze for KDE Applications 16.12 and that’s the time where you look forward for all the new awesome features will land at users devices at 15th December. As for the Minuet land, I’d like to disappointingly let you know no new features are coming but that doesn’t mean things are not progressing. After some days of quite intense work ‒ trying to find some spare time between daily job, my fluffy 10 month old baby love, and the work on the KDE e.V. board ‒ I’m right now enjoying some booze while writing these words about recent advances in Minuet.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • This week in GTK+ – 24

        In this last week, the master branch of GTK+ has seen 46 commits, with 1541 lines added and 3471 lines removed.

  • Distributions

    • This Week In Solus – Install #39

      We recently announced our partnership with Unixstickers to provide high-quality Solus stickers for our community and fans. If you have yet to read about it, click here.

    • Solus Announces Partnership With Unixstickers

      The Solus project is happy to announce a partnership with Unixstickers, providers of high quality apparel and accessories for operating systems, programming languages, and software. This quality craftsmanship and their continuous support of the open source community made it the obvious choice for us while determining the best provider for Solus-related merchandise.

    • Reviews

      • Storing files with NAS4Free 10.3.0.3

        A phrase I find myself repeating over and over, to family, friends and clients is “Make backups of your data.” If a file is not backed up then it is one electrical storm, hardware failure or accidental key press away from no longer existing. This naturally leads people to wonder where copies of their data should be stored. There are any number of solutions from optical media to external hard drives, cloud storage to backup tapes. This week I want to talk about a network attached storage (NAS) solution which uses the NAS4Free operating system to manage disks.

        [...]

        Most of the NAS operating systems I have used in the past were built around useful features. Some focused on making storage easy to set up and manage, others focused on services, such as making files available over multiple protocols or managing torrents. Some strive to be very easy to set up. NAS4Free does pretty well in each of the above categories. It may not be the easiest platform to set up, but it’s probably a close second. It may not have the prettiest interface for managing settings, but it is quite easy to navigate. NAS4Free may not have the most add-on services and access protocols, but I suspect there are more than enough of both for most people.

        Where NAS4Free does better than most other solutions I have looked at is security. I don’t think the project’s website or documentation particularly focuses on security as a feature, but there are plenty of little security features that I liked. NAS4Free makes it very easy to lock the text console, which is good because we do not all keep our NAS boxes behind locked doors. The system is fairly easy to upgrade and appears to publish regular security updates in the form of new firmware. NAS4Free makes it fairly easy to set up user accounts, handle permissions and manage home directories. It’s also pretty straight forward to switch from HTTP to HTTPS and to block people not on the local network from accessing the NAS’s web interface.

        All in all, I like NAS4Free. It’s a good, general purpose NAS operating system. While I did not feel the project did anything really amazing in any one category, nor did I run into any serious issues. The NAS ran as expected, was fairly straight forward to set up and easy to manage. This strikes me as an especially good platform for home or small business users who want an easy set up, some basic security and a solid collection of features.

    • Arch Family

      • [manjaro] [Stable Update] 2016-11-19 – Mesa, LibDRM, Kernels, KDE Framework, Grub, Firefox

        With KDE Freamework 5.28.0 for example syntax-highlighting got introduced. Also the Wayland support got enhanced with this framework update. For our xorg-stack we updated libdrm and pushed some more updated haskell packages out. Since we are on the move to use alpm hooks also for our kernels, we updated grub to do the same. Additionally we have a lot of rebuilds, some newer kernels, updated Mesa, php and Eric plus the latest Firefox to check out.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

    • Slackware Family

      • [Slackware] Java 7 (openjdk) gets a security update

        Many people who have a need for Java, will already have switched to Java 8. Nevertheless there are still many places where Java 7 is preferred or even required. So, I am riding on the Q4 security updates for OpenJDK and used the recently released icedtea 2.6.8 to compile OpenJDK 7u121_b00 or “Java 7 Update 121 Build 00”. As always, there is a JDK and a JRE package.

    • Red Hat Family

      • RHEL 7.3 Firewalld new features.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Fedora – retiring xorg-x11-drv-synaptics

          The Fedora Change to retire the synaptics driver was approved by FESCO. This will apply to Fedora 26 and is part of a cleanup to, ironically, make the synaptics driver easier to install.

          Since Fedora 22, xorg-x11-drv-libinput is the preferred input driver. For historical reasons, almost all users have the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package installed. But to actually use the synaptics driver over xorg-x11-drv-libinput requires a manually dropped xorg.conf.d snippet. And that’s just not ideal. Unfortunately, in DNF/RPM we cannot just say “replace the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package with xorg-x11-drv-libinput on update but still allow users to install xorg-x11-drv-synaptics after that”.

        • OCaml 4.04, RISC-V, S/390, POWER and more …

          And talking about Fedora/RISC-V, it took a month, but the mass-rebuild of all Fedora packages completed, and now we’ve got about ⅔rds of all Fedora packages available for RISC-V. That’s quite a lot:

        • FUDCon 2016 Phnom Penh, Cambodia

          FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) is an important event in the world of free software that is held in different parts of the world organized by Fedora Organization. The FUDCon comprised of sessions, talks, workshops and hackfest in which project participants worked on specific initiatives. FUDCon Phnom Penh was conducted at Norton University, Phnom Penh along Barcamp ASEAN. Around 50 speakers from around the world gave talks related to entrepreneurship and open source software. I was traveling with one my friends, Abhinand N, who also got selected to deliver a talk on Mediawiki. Looked like, we were the only two undergrads who were invited to deliver talks.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • N900: 2016 Week 47

          On November 8, 2016, the proto_v2 schematics were updated to the current version. We finished the last few improvements and our layouter is scheduling the layout to start in one week. We repeat our invitation to give the schematics a peer review: it’s your last chance to peel your eyes on these schematics and be picky about details that our engineering team might have missed.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Unity 8 snap rev 178
          • Get A Live Preview Of A Window From Another Workspace With WindowSpy (Unity)

            WindowSpy is a new Unity AppIndicator that allows displaying a small live (well, almost) preview of a window on another workspace.

          • Recent Notifications Indicator Lets You Access Missed Desktop Notifications

            Recent Notifications is an Ubuntu Indicator that collects desktop notifications, displaying them in its menu. This is useful if you missed some important notification for various reasons, like being away from the computer, etc.

          • Making your snaps available to the store using snapcraft

            Now that Ubuntu Core has been officially released, it might be a good time to get your snaps into the Store!

          • MacBuntu 16.10 Transformation Pack for Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety

            MacBuntu (Macbuntu Yosemite/El Capitan) transformation pack is ready to take off and land on your Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak. It offers two themes for GTK (which supports: Unity, Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce), one theme for Gnome Shell, one for Cinnamon, two icon packs, and cursors. Unlike last time we are not sharing boot/splash for macbuntu and theme for lightdm-webkit because there are some issues within the Ubuntu 16.10. Slingscold which is known as launchpad, it does work on some desktops but it may don’t work for some users and you may see blank launcher. We are using and recommending Plank dock with this pack because it is lightweight and works with all desktops without any issues. Also credit goes to Jared for helping us with this transformation pack. By following these instructions you can change look of your Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety to look like Mac. In previous packs we used LightDM webkit theme which looks quite similar to Mac OS X login screen, this time we aren’t offering, because we experienced a lot of issues after installing it (like: not able to login/blank screen). Also Bootscreen has some issues.

          • Adding Sega Genesis to EmulationStation on Ubuntu

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Busting Major Myths Around elementary OS

              The open source desktop landscape is complicated. There are many distros, many desktop environments, and so many things to know about each of them. We often see folks fall into some of the same pieces of misinformation when reporting on or commenting about elementary OS. So here’s a look at some of the major myths around elementary OS and what the actual facts are.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Minoca OS — An Interview With One Of The Engineers Of Open Source Operating System

    Everyone benefits in some way when a new operating system comes out, especially when that operating system is open source. Minoca OS is a case of just that, and what’s more is that it has been written entirely from the ground up, further contributing to the software landscape.

    Evan Green is the CEO of Minoca Corp, the organization currently maintaining Minoca OS, as well as a co-founder and engineer of Minoca OS. Evan has was kind enough to answer some questions about Minoca OS for us.

  • Open source and the problem of pure maintenance

    One of the things that people using open source often wish loudly for (via) is software that’s stable and only gets bug fixes, including security updates, with no other changes at all. Oh, and they want this for free as part of an open source project.

    As you may have guessed, there is a fundamental problem with this. Indeed it is a classical fundamental problem in software development in general, namely that doing only maintenance is boring and very few people want to do it (especially for free, such as with open source software). This is why it’s really quite hard to find anyone who does a good job of maintenance, especially over the long term and most especially for free. There are people who will provide you with well maintained systems that stay carefully stable for years, but generally they want money (often a fair amount of it).

  • List of RSS Feeds of GNU/Linux & Free Software/Open Source Related Websites

    There are so many websites, planets, or blogs related to Free Software/Open Source (FLOSS) and GNU/Linux in English. It is difficult for someone to grabs many of their RSS feeds one by one. To solve this, I try to collect many URL of RSS feeds of them here. This is not complete by now (November 15th 2016) but I planned to complete the missing links below as soon as possible. I hope this list helps anyone in free software community worldwide.

  • Databases

    • 8 Major Advantages of Using MySQL

      MySQL is a free-to-use, open-source database that facilitates effective management of databases by connecting them to the software. It is a stable, reliable and powerful solution with advanced features like the following…

  • Microsoft ‘Loves’ Linux

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming/Development

    • Under the (Linux) Hood

      We’ve often heard that you don’t need to know how an engine works to drive a car, but you can bet that professional race car drivers know. By analogy, you can build lots of systems with off-the-shelf boards like Raspberry Pis and program that using Python or some other high-level abstraction. The most competent hackers, though, know what’s going on inside that Pi and what Python is doing under the hood down to some low level.

      If you’ve been using Linux “under the hood” often means understanding what happens inside the kernel–the heart of the Linux OS that manages and controls everything. It can be a bit daunting; the kernel is simple in concept, but has grown over the years and is now a big chunk of software to approach.

    • How to contribute to an open source project on GitHub

      A step by step guide that will show you how to contribute to an open source project on GitHub, one of the most popular and used git repository hosting services.

      GitHub is the home of many popular open source projects like Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Docker, Go and many others.

      The way people (usually) contribute to an open source project on GitHub is using pull requests. A pull request is basically a patch which includes more information and allows members to discuss it on the website.

      This tutorial will guide you through the whole process to generate a pull request for a project.

    • The code I’m still ashamed of

      The more software continues to take over every aspect of our lives, the more important it will be for us to take a stand and ensure that our ethics are ever-present in our code.

      Since that day, I always try to think twice about the effects of my code before I write it. I hope that you will too.

    • Not only coders are hard to recruit

      The problem with technical positions such as programmers or system administrators is that there is an actual difference between knowing an algorithm/programming language/software and actually implementing it. For instance, Johnny found it hard to differentiate between someone who said he knows about Apache web server and someone who can actually administer it. Johnny said ( this later became our headline):

    • PHP 7, LessPass, addrwatch, tmux, bash, PackPack & more!

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Is SVG 2 really on life support?

      Between SVG 1.1 W3C Recommendation and SVG 2 in its current form, people have raised kids and sent them off to the college. And yet SVG 2 might arrive sometime in the future without quite a few useful features that have been already developed and tested. What’s up with that?

Leftovers

  • Danish high court declares Uber an illegal service

    The ruling upheld a previous decision by the Copenhagen City Court that was thought to be a death blow to the popular ride-sharing service.

    The Danish courts have ruled that that Uber’s profit motive means it is not a true ridesharing programme but instead is akin to an illegal taxi service.

    Six Uber drivers were found guilt by Copenhagen City Court in July and Friday marked the first decision against divers who appealed against the initial ruling.

    The High Court’s decision against the 28-year-old male driver now paves the way for the Copenhagen Public Prosecutor Office (Statsadvokaten) to bring a case against the San Francisco based company.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Government quietly privatises the NHS’s in-house agency staff provider

      The Government is to privatise the NHS’s in-house, publicly-owned provider of agency staff, ministers have announced.

      NHS Professionals, the health service’s main staffing agency, provides 90,000 health workers to around a quarter of NHS trusts, covering two million shifts a year.

      In a written statement issued on Thursday as most MPs headed back to their constituencies, the Government announced it would sell off a majority stake in the orgnaisation to the private sector with the aim of “creating a profitable business model”.

  • Security

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Fear of Putin and a Baltic War Intensifies With Trump’s Victory

      War has been a buzzword for some time on both sides of the frontier between Russia and the Baltic states. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and as relations between Moscow and Washington deteriorated—over the annexation of Crimea, the war in eastern Ukraine, the catastrophe in Syria, and charges the Kremlin tried to influence the U.S. election—these three small countries found themselves caught in the middle.

      But now there’s a different reason for worry. Campaign proclamations by Donald Trump that NATO states must pay more for defense, his ambivalence about Crimea, and allusions to how America may not defend members against Russian military action had already unnerved many before Nov. 8. Now that this self-professed fan of Vladimir Putin is headed for the White House, the wonder on both sides of the border is what happens next.

    • How the Iranian-Saudi Proxy Struggle Tore Apart the Middle East

      Behind much of the Middle East’s chaos — the wars in Syria and Yemen, the political upheaval in Iraq and Lebanon and Bahrain — there is another conflict.

      Saudi Arabia and Iran are waging a struggle for dominance that has turned much of the Middle East into their battlefield. Rather than fighting directly, they wield and in that way worsen the region’s direst problems: dictatorship, militia violence and religious extremism.

      The history of their rivalry tracks — and helps to explain — the Middle East’s disintegration, particularly the Sunni-Shiite sectarianism both powers have found useful to cultivate. It is a story in which the United States has been a supporting but constant player, most recently by backing the Saudi war in Yemen, which kills hundreds of civilians. These dynamics, scholars warn, point toward a future of civil wars, divided societies and unstable governments.

  • Finance

    • Brexit and Trump have exposed the left’s crucial flaw: playing by the rules

      I know which I’d bet on. Next, imagine what would have happened if, as a result of that narrow win for remain, a gaping hole in the public finances had opened up as the economy reeled, and even leading remainers admitted the machinery of state could barely cope. Farage and the rest would have denounced the chaos, boasting that this proved they had been right all along, that the voters had been misled and therefore must be given another say.

      As we all know, reality did not work out this way. Next week the chancellor will deliver an autumn statement anchored in the admission that, as the Financial Times put it, “the UK faces a £100bn bill for Brexit within five years”. Thanks to the 23 June vote, the forecast is for “slower growth and lower-than-expected investment”.

    • TPP nations eye a future without the US with Trump in the White House

      Leaders of the Trans-Pacific Partnership nations are openly considering going it alone, without the United States, in a so-called ‘TPP minus one’ in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

      The 12 countries are meeting on the margins of the 21-strong Apec meeting in Lima, Peru.

      Talking to reporters shortly after arriving in the Peruvian capital, Prime Minister John Key made it clear the grouping faced a critical crossroads with Trump’s election.

    • Facebook approves $6 billion stock buyback

      The social network’s board has approved a plan to buyback as much as $6 billion of its stock starting in the first quarter of next year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

      “The timing and actual number of shares repurchased will depend on a variety of factors, including price, general business and market conditions, and alternative investment opportunities,” the company said in its filing.

    • Facebook to Buy Back Shares for the First Time

      Facebook Inc. said it will buy back as much as $6 billion in shares, its first repurchase program, in a bid to appease shareholders awaiting the results of big investments in potentially risky new growth areas.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Wasserman Schultz: ‘If I was trying to rig the outcome of the primary, trust me, I could have’

      Wasserman Schultz stepped down as party leader during the Democratic National Convention, where she was booed by angry Sanders supporters. She was replaced by Donna Brazile, who is serving on an interim basis, until March, when an election for a new party chairman will take place.

    • Breitbart wants to fuel another Trump-like upset in France

      During the 2016 presidential campaign, Breitbart News emerged as a haven for far-right factions that actively pushed for the election of Donald Trump. Its executive editor, Steve Bannon, played an instrumental role as CEO of the Trump campaign, and was recently appointed chief strategist for the president-elect’s administration. Now, the controversial news site is turning its attention to France, where the far-right politician Marine Le Pen hopes to pull off a Trump-like upset in next year’s presidential election.

    • Neoliberalism’s epic fail: The reaction to Hillary Clinton’s loss exposed the impotent elitism of liberalism

      By the time last week’s presidential election was finally called for Donald Trump during the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the initial disbelief felt by the millions of Americans who had been assured of a Clinton victory by the media had turned into shock and panic — if not yet full-blown despair. As pollsters collectively changed their predictions and news pundits started to resemble confused and dejected children, the fight-or-flight response kicked in for countless viewers. Hearts pounded, stomachs turned and some of the more privileged liberals started seriously considering whether to flee the country in the face of a national nightmare that had just become a reality (privileged, because the average American doesn’t have the resources to just pack up and run at will).

      The surreal night concluded with Canada’s immigration website crashing from too much traffic, as if every alt-right Twitter troll’s fantasy had come true.

      Although the instinct to flee from a Trump presidency is understandable, it reveals a great deal about the impotence of modern liberalism and its monumental failure to stop an unhinged and thoroughly unqualified demagogue like Trump.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • How Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, restricted advertising for Trump’s campaign

      We had an “upfront deal” with Twitter, which is a common setup where we commit to spending a certain amount on advertising and in exchange receive discounts, perks, and custom solutions.

    • Facebook announces new push against fake news after Obama comments

      Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced new steps to counter fake news on the platform on Saturday, marking a departure from his skepticism that online misinformation is, as Barack Obama said this week, a threat to democratic institutions.

      “We take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Saturday. “We know people want accurate information. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.”

      Zuckerberg said that the company has “relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not”, citing a tool to report false links and shared material from fact-checking sites. “Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize [misinformation] in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread,” he wrote.

    • Mark Zuckerberg Outlines Plans for Fake News Controls on Facebook

      Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook will develop “stronger detection” for fake news

      In a post late Friday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined a bevy of new initiatives to crack down on fake or misleading news. Facebook has faced intense criticism in the wake of the November 9th election, primarily from left-leaning critics arguing that huge volumes of false news spread on the site influenced the electorate, perhaps contributing to Donald Trump’s victory.

    • Facebook fake news row: Mark Zuckerberg is a politician now

      I’ve long suspected that Mark Zuckerberg, who often refers to himself as the “leader” of Facebook, has dreams of high office.

      This week, a taster of what that might be like has been knocking at his door in the wake of the US election result.

      While Donald Trump’s visit to the White House was an apparently sobering experience about the level of responsibility he’d soon inherit, Zuckerberg has had a brutal political awakening of his own.

      Facebook’s “fake news” crisis has had the normally stoic 32-year-old visibly irritated, and that’s because for the first time he is being treated like a politician, rather than just a tech CEO.

    • When students at the country’s top university for journalism start banning newspapers we know we’ve hit peak censorship

      I am a self-identified feminist, liberal, pro-immigration left-leaning alumna of City University’s journalism department.

      And today, I read the news that City University’s student union – an institution renowned for its media courses – voted to ban certain right-wing newspapers with frustration and dismay.

      Let me say right off the bat – when those students argue that papers like the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Sun demonise refugees and minorities, or fan a frenzy of Islamophobia, or are “inherently sexist”, I agree.

      But because I believe this, I take those papers very, very seriously. I would advise all other City journalists in the making to do the same.

    • China says terrorism, fake news impel greater global internet curbs
    • Facebook Fake News Stories: China Calls For More Censorship On Internet Following Social Media’s Alleged Role In US Election
    • World Internet Conference closes in E China
    • Alibaba, Tencent back Chinese cyber law facing overseas critics

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Snooper’s Charter passed into law this week – say goodbye to your privacy

      This week a law was passed that silently rips privacy from the modern world. It’s called the Investigatory Powers Act.

      Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the British state has achieved totalitarian-style surveillance powers – the most intrusive system of any democracy in history. It now has the ability to indiscriminately hack, intercept, record, and monitor the communications and internet use of the entire population.

      The hundreds of chilling mass surveillance programmes revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 were – we assumed – the result of a failure of the democratic process. Snowden’s bravery finally gave Parliament and the public the opportunity to scrutinise this industrial-scale spying and bring the state back into check.

      But, in an environment of devastatingly poor political opposition, the Government has actually extended state spying powers beyond those exposed by Snowden – setting a “world-leading” precedent.

    • Manhattan D.A. reopens encryption battle with Apple

      A top law enforcement official wants to turn back the clock on iPhone security.

      Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that he wants Apple’s encryption to go back to how it was in early 2014. Back then, police could basically extract any information they wanted after getting a warrant.

      “Doing nothing about this problem will perpetuate an untenable arms race between private industry and law enforcement,” Vance said on Thursday. “Federal legislation is our only chance to lay these arms aside.”

    • Canadians want judicial oversight of any new digital snooping powers for police: Poll

      Most Canadians feel strongly about their right to privacy online, but a new poll shows the vast majority are willing to grant police new powers to track suspects in the digital realm — so long as the courts oversee the cops.

      Nearly half of the respondents to an Abacus Data survey of 2,500 Canadians agreed that citizens should have a right to complete digital privacy. But many appeared to change their mind when asked if an individual suspected of committing a serious crime should have the same right to keep their identity hidden from police.

    • Senior U.S. officials recommend removal of NSA director – sources

      The heads of the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community have recommended to President Barack Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, be removed from his position, sources familiar with the matter said on Saturday.

      The recommendation by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, first reported by The Washington Post, was delivered to the White House last month.

      [...]

      U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and a Republican, said later on Saturday he had written to Carter and Clapper asking them to testify to the committee about the matter.

      The Obama administration wants to split leadership at the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, arguing that the job of leading two agencies with differing missions is too much for one person.

      But some members of Congress, led by Republican Senator John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, oppose that plan, saying that Cyber Command needs access to the NSA’s resources to do its job effectively.

    • NSA turmoil could threaten chief’s job – and expand Trump’s power

      A potential structural change to the US surveillance apparatus has thrown the tenure of the National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers, into doubt and increased the likelihood that Donald Trump will have a chance to substantially reshape the US intelligence agencies.

      Even before Trump’s presidential victory, which Rogers last week said followed efforts by “a nation-state” to influence the electoral outcome, US intelligence was roiled by FBI director James Comey’s unprecedented interference in the election. US intelligence is experiencing internal turmoil just as Trump is placing hardliners in key national security roles.

    • NSA director Rogers is top candidate for DNI under Trump: WSJ

      U.S. National Security Agency Director Admiral Mike Rogers is the leading candidate to become President-elect Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing two unnamed people familiar with the matter.

    • Pentagon and intelligence community chiefs have urged Obama to remove the head of the NSA

      The heads of the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.

      The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month, was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Barack Obama will not pardon Edward Snowden unless he goes to court – while Trump’s CIA pick wants him executed

      There is very little chance President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden before his final term is up – leaving his fate to an unforgiving Trump administration and an incoming CIA director who had called for his execution.

      Mr Snowden has lived in Russia since he leaked documents revealing a secret surveillance programme helmed by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies. The Department of Justice charged Mr Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

    • Turkey: Thousands protest against proposed child sex law

      Thousands have protested in Istanbul in Turkey against a bill that would let off men who assaulted underage girls if they marry their victims.

      The government insists the legislation is aimed at dealing with the widespread custom of child marriage, but critics say that it will legitimise child rape.

      Protesters clapped and chanted: “We will not shut up. We will not obey. Withdraw the bill immediately!”

    • Turkish bill clears men of statutory rape if they marry

      A bill which would allow men accused of raping underage girls to be cleared if they marry the girl has been preliminarily backed by Turkish MPs.

      The bill would pardon men only if they had sex without “force or threat” and if they married the victim.

      Critics say it legitimises rape and child marriage, and lets off men who are aware of their crime.

      Violence against women in Turkey has increased in the past decade – 40% of women report sexual or physical abuse.

    • When is rape not a crime? Turkey considers proposal for controversial sexual abuse law

      Turkey’s ruling AK Party has been widely condemned for a proposal that would, critics say, legalise rape in some cases.

      The suggested law would see people who have been convicted on charges of sexual abuse against girls have their sentences indefinitely postponed if they agree to marry the victim.

    • Appeals Court To Cops: If You ‘Don’t Have Time’ For ‘Constitutional Bullshit,’ You Don’t Get Immunity

      A disabled vet with PTSD accidentally called a suicide prevention hotline when intending to dial the Veterans Crisis Line. Within hours, he was dealing with DC Metro’s finest, dispatched to handle an attempted suicide. This brief quote from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals opinion [PDF] — part of veteran Matthew Corrigan’s first conversation with responding officers — sets the tone for the next several hours of Constitutional violations.

    • ‘Extreme surveillance’ becomes UK law with barely a whimper

      A bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law with barely a whimper, meeting only token resistance over the past 12 months from inside parliament and barely any from outside.

      The Investigatory Powers Act, passed on Thursday, legalises a whole range of tools for snooping and hacking by the security services unmatched by any other country in western Europe or even the US.

      The security agencies and police began the year braced for at least some opposition, rehearsing arguments for the debate. In the end, faced with public apathy and an opposition in disarray, the government did not have to make a single substantial concession to the privacy lobby.

      US whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted: “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”

      Snowden in 2013 revealed the scale of mass surveillance – or bulk data collection as the security agencies prefer to describe it – by the US National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ, which work in tandem.

    • British woman arrested after reporting alleged gang rape in Dubai tells of ‘nightmare’ ordeal

      Ms Stirling added that she personally would not report a rape in the UAE, saying: “There’s so much manipulation when it comes to criminal accusations over there – I wouldn’t report a rape there if I were raped myself.”

      After posting an online appeal for help, the woman’s mother wrote: “Please help my daughter. She was raped while on holiday. She reported this to the police and now she is being held on the grounds of sexual activity outside marriage.

      “We are not a rich family and cannot afford to pay for the defense she so desperately needs. I am going out of my mind with worry.”

      A Foreign Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said: “We are supporting a British woman in relation to this case and will remain in contact with her family.”

    • US-bound passengers travelling via Stockholm may soon be subject to pre-clearance formalities

      Travellers from Finland heading to the US via Stockholm may experience delays in the future owing to a new agreement between Sweden and US that will see US Customs and Border Protection pre-clearance operations at Arlanda Airport. As for Finnish airport authority Finavia, it says that after previewing pre-clearance formalities, it’s not keen on introducing the system at Helsinki Airport.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pirate App Store Operator Convicted for Criminal Copyright Infringement

        Four years ago the FBI took down several pirate Android app ‘stores’ and later arrested several people connected to the sites. This week one of the SnappzMarket operators, Joshua Taylor, was found guilty. During a bench trial, Judge Timothy C. Batten, Sr. convicted Taylor for conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. .

      • Rightscorp Only Has Enough Cash to Last Until December

        Rightscorp’s dream of turning piracy into profit continues to be a nightmare. In its latest quarterly filing the anti-piracy outfit reports revenue down 35% over the same period last year, alongside a loss of $385,433. Year to date, the company has lost almost $1.4m and only has enough money to last until December.

11.19.16

Links 19/11/2016: KDE Applications 16.12 Beta, Zorin OS 12

Posted in News Roundup at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Ubuntu Mate, Windows 10 and macOS Sierra: A marriage of 3 OSs

      I gave myself a little gift recently and revisited Ubuntu Mate by virtue of a transplanted hard disk.

      In my case, Mate was a gift that was giving and giving until it wasn’t.

      When the eMachines T6528 went belly up due to leaky logic board capacitors, I parted this tank of a tower out, half-heartedly vowing to get back to this low-footprint Linux distribution as soon as I could.

      Fast forward several months and with some precious free time on my hands, I was finally able to make good on the promise.

  • Server

    • Cloud Native: Service-driven Operations that Save Money, Increase IT Flexibility

      I obsess about operations. I think it started when I was a department IT manager at a financial services institute. It was appallingly difficult to get changes deployed into production and the cost of change was spectacularly high. It felt like there had to be a better way, and most every decision I have made professionally since 2008 has led me to work on technology that makes that guy or gal’s life easier.

    • Planning Microservices: Know the Tradeoffs With Monolithic Design

      By now, you no doubt understand the advantages of using a microservices architecture, especially in greenfield applications and in new organizations that need to achieve efficiencies wherever they can. But what about your legacy code and applications? Do you totally rewrite the monolith or do you chip away at it with new functionalities, added as microservices, over time?

    • Docker Containers and Synnex Distribution? Oh My

      In a quiet corner at the Synnex Varnex conference, Rob Moyer is pulling back the curtain — just a bit — on the Synnex CloudSolv strategy for channel partners. The conversation with ChannelE2E includes some familiar themes. But there are also some surprises — including a serious bet on container technology and Docker.

      Synnex CloudSolv is a management and deployment platform that helps channel partners to activate cloud solutions for their end-customers. Moyer, VP of software and cloud services at Synnex, isn’t pursuing a toe-to-toe cloud marketplace battle against Ingram Micro, Tech Data and other distributors. Instead of vetting hundreds of software and SaaS solutions for online distribution, Moyer discreetly but purposely made a few strategic bets — including Docker, Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite (particularly for education) and Red Hats.

    • 5 Common Myths about Containers

      Containers are faster. Containers work only on Linux. Containers are insecure. These are all examples of myths about Docker and other container platforms that continue to persist.

      Some of these misconceptions reflect popular misunderstandings of containers. Others are based on information that was once accurate, but is no longer true. Either way, these myths are important to clear up if you want to deploy containers effectively.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Ships Beta of KDE Applications 16.12

        Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of KDE Applications. With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.

        Check the community release notes for information on new tarballs, tarballs that are now KF5 based and known issues. A more complete announcement will be available for the final release

        The KDE Applications 16.12 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We’re counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the team by installing the beta and reporting any bugs.

      • KDE Applications 16.12 Enters Beta Testing, Final Release Arrives on December 15

        Today, November 18, 2016, KDE announced the availability for public testing of the Beta build of the upcoming KDE Applications 16.12 software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.

        As reported last week, the KDE Applications 16.08 series reached end of life with the third and last maintenance update, versioned 16.08.3, which means that work begun on the next major branch, KDE Applications 16.12, which you can now take for a test drive using today’s Beta release.

      • KDE Applications 16.12 Now In Beta

        KDE Applications 16.12 is now in beta while this collection of KDE software is under a dependency and feature freeze ahead of next month’s official release.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Zorin OS 12 Core and Ultimate Are Here: Our Biggest Release Ever

        We’re proud to announce the availability of the Zorin OS 12 Core and Ultimate–the biggest release in the history of Zorin OS. With this new version, we’ve introduced an entirely new desktop experience that will make your computer more useful, more powerful and more enjoyable to use.

      • Zorin OS 12 Officially Released, the Biggest Release Ever of the Linux Distro

        The guys behind the Ubuntu-based Zorin OS Linux operating system were proud to announce the general availability of the final release of Zorin OS 12, which comes in both Core and Ultimate flavors.

        Zorin OS 12 is the result of many months of hard work, and it looks like it’s the project’s biggest release ever. The GNU/Linux distribution is now based on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, and ships with the Zorin Desktop 2.0 desktop environment.

    • OpenSUSE/SUSE

      • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2016/46

        Now this is a week I call fully rolling. There was a full 7 snapshots since the last review – which is about the maximum we can do in a week with one snapshot per day (or we have to change the versioning to not be only ‘date’ based). So, this review is about the snapshots {20161110..20161116}.

      • When Trying Out Tumbleweed, It’s Easy To See Why OpenSUSE Leap Disabled Nouveau

        I’ve been running some fresh benchmarks of the recently released openSUSE Leap 42.2 compared to the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed and friends. Those benchmarks will be posted shortly, but after using the Nouveau experience on Tumbleweed I found the need to comment.

      • OpenSUSE 42.2 Merges Best Features of Enterprise, Community Models

        In the world of Linux distributions, users are often faced with the option of choosing an enterprise-grade distribution or a community distribution. With the openSUSE Leap approach, SUSE is attempting to merge the best of both the enterprise and community models into a new type of Linux distribution. In the pure community-first model the upstream open-source code is packaged in a distribution, which can then be further hardened to eventually produce an enterprise-grade Linux product. The open-source openSUSE Leap 42.2 Linux distribution became generally available on Nov. 16 and takes a different approach. Code from the SUSE Linux Enterprise Service Pack 2 release, which debuted on Nov. 8, is now in the freely available openSUSE Leap 42.2 update. As part of its enterprise community stability focus, openSUSE Leap benefits from the Linux 4.4 Long Term Support Kernel (LTS). SUSE expects to support openSUSE Leap releases for 36 months. The new release also includes the latest in open-source application packages with LibreOffice and Firefox as well as developer and graphics tools. This slide show eWEEK takes a look at some of the features in the new openSUSE 42.2 Linux operating system release.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Permabit pulls on Red Hat, opens arms for a Linux cuddle

        The Mad Hatter of Linux is getting Alice in Wonderland style physical space virtualisation with thin provisioning, compression and deduplication courtesy of Permabit.

        Building on its June 2016 Linux availability announcement, Permabit and Red Hat have a go-to-market partnership based on the former’s Albireo deduplication and HIOPS compression technology being added as a kernel module to Red Hat Linux. Up until now dedupe and compression have largely been storage array features, and then appearing in software-only storage running on servers and direct-attached disks, SSDs or JBODs.

      • Red Hat CEO on Microsoft, Google, and Cutting Edge Software

        Even among technology companies, Red Hat has to stand out as one of the geekiest firms in the business.

        The enterprise company offers services and support around the Linux open-source operating system, which non-techies can think of as a free equivalent of Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s MacOS. Developers and IT operators, however, regard Linux as more than just a free service: It’s the underpinning of some of the most popular apps and software used today.

        For instance, if you’ve ordered a car ride from Uber or bought digital storage from Amazon, it’s likely Linux OS was in a corporate data center somewhere along the line, making sure the appropriate software was chugging along.

      • Finance

      • Fedora

        • Introducing Fedora Hubs

          The goal of the Fedora Hubs project is to provide a consistent contributor experience across all Fedora teams. Hubs serve as an “intranet” for the Fedora Project. The many different projects in Fedora each have different processes and workflows. Hubs will be a single place where contributors can learn about and contribute to these projects in a consistent way.

          Hubs is also a social tool for Fedora contributors. It’s designed to help you keep up with everything and everybody across a big open source project in ways that aren’t currently possible. Hubs solves obstacles so new contributors can get in touch with experienced ones.

          Do you want to learn more about the history behind Hubs? Fedora Design team lead Máirín Duffy wrote a few blog posts on the progress of Hubs.

        • Fedora Loves Python at SeaGL 2016

          The Seattle GNU/Linux conference, SeaGL, intentionally attracts a variety of attendees, students from Seattle Central College, local Linux enthusiasts, curious neighbors, and programmers from big software companies, indies and start-ups. About 500 people attended the exhibits and talks on the two days. The exhibit area was closed for the keynotes so I saw Corey Quinn tell us the Art of Personal Failure and Allison Randal presented Free as in Freedom. Bill Wright received the Cascadia Community Builder Award for his efforts building LinuxFest NorthWest.

        • Flock Stories 2016, Episode 4: Matthew Miller

          Today’s guest is Matthew Miller (mattdm)! He’s a long-time Fedora user and contributor, as well as the founder of Boston University Linux. However, perhaps most important of all, he is the current Fedora Project Leader! In this interview, we ask Matthew questions like…

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Tails 3.0 Anonymous Live OS to Be Based on Debian 9 “Stretch”, Require 64-bit PC

          A few days after the announcement of Tails 2.7, the development team behind the popular amnesic incognito live system based on Debian GNU/Linux unveiled a few technical details about the next major release.

          Yes, we’re talking about Tails 3.0, which is now in development and appears to be the next major update of the anonymous live OS that ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden used to protect his identity online. Tails is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution built around the popular Tor anonymity network and Tor Browser anonymous browser.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • This Ubuntu Linux laptop packs a 4K display and Nvidia’s beastly GeForce GTX 1070

            System76’s Ubuntu-based Oryx Pro is a Linux laptop loaded with features also found in some of the fastest Windows laptops.

            The Oryx Pro can be the ultimate Linux gaming laptop. It can be configured with a 15.6-inch 4K screen and Nvidia’s latest Pascal GeForce GTX 1070 GPU.

            The laptop with those features starts at $1,987, and goes higher as more storage and memory are added. The ultimate 4K Oryx Pro configuration with 9TB of SSD storage prices out at $7,012. It comes preloaded with Ubuntu 16.04 or 16.10.

          • Ubuntu Core 16 Enables Snappy IoT

            Ubuntu Core 16 is now available. It is a tiny, transactional implementation of Ubuntu Linux that targets embedded applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT). It uses a new packaging system with modules called snaps that include metadata about their connectivity and interface requirements (Fig. 1).

            A snap can have one or more interfaces that are either a plug or a slot providing connections between snaps. A snap exists as a read-only, immutable, compressed squashFS blob, while an instance also includes a private, writeable directory. Communication with the operating system services uses the interface mechanism. Snaps can be given access to other directories.

          • Ubuntu Core [Comic]

            Nowadays, Linux processes are forever in conflict. Is there somewhere out there for them to live together in harmony… perhaps by separating them via full resource isolation?

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source Solves and Supports Today’s Business Needs

    Open source is free software that developers make available to benefit the community. The original developer of the software benefits from making their code freely available because doing so increases the number of end users with the ability to enhance the software. These enhancements can make the software more valuable for all. Some examples of open source software include Android, Wikipedia, Mozilla Firefox, WordPress and Drupal.

  • Calendar sharing in the XXIth century

    But the point is this one: It is 2016 and shared calendars that should be simple and straightforward are both complex and obscure. People should not think twice about what to use: they should be able to share their calendars seamlessly, post it online, move from one provider to another with very little hassle. Instead of this most are locked in and when they want to move to another provider the notion that they should learn about the various calendar sharing protocols is simply outlandish.

  • Can Node.js Scale? Ask the Team at Alibaba

    Alibaba is arguably the world’s biggest online commerce company. It serves millions of users and hosts millions of merchants and businesses. As of August 2016, Alibaba had 434 million users with 427 million active mobile monthly users. During this year’s Singles Day, which happened on November 11 and is one of the (if not the) biggest online sales events, Alibaba registered $1 billion in sales in its first five minutes.

  • Five Tenets of Thriving with Open Source without Risking Your Business

    Vendors, university researchers, students, and developers find that open source is a very effective tool for validating a solution to a particular problem. However, these solutions are often born within the context of a specific company’s use case or a specific research problem. Therefore, these projects are similar to code built in the context of a professional services engagement and often don’t have the polish and finish of an enterprise product. Some may not even have solved basic enterprise requirements like availability, resilience, security, and so on.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • A New Tool for LibreOffice

      Tony Get, my colleague, showed me an interesting tool available in Android: it’s an app to turn your Android device into a remote control to work with your LibreOffice Impress presentations. It is called Impress Remote and it is very easy to use.

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • GDS Appoints Anna Shipman As Open Source Lead

      The Government Digital Service (GDS) has appointed its first open source lead, with the goal of driving the use of open source platforms and frameworks throughout Whitehall and beyond.

      Anna Shipman, who has been at GDS for several years will step into the role, having worked extensively with open source as the development lead for GDS’s open source infrastructure provisioning project vCloud Tools.

      Shipman also has experience working with open source projects outside of GDS with her work on government-as-a-platform, the GDS objective to create a range of open and reusable digital components that can be used to create digital services without the need for costly, bespoke systems.

    • Director’s Forum: A Blog from USPTO’s Leadership

      Improving the way the government delivers information technology (IT) solutions to its customers isn’t just a goal, it’s our mission. We at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office know that by publishing our open source code, the public can help us come up with new and better IT solutions. In advance of the new Federal Source Code Policy and in support of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative, we have been publishing content on Github for over a year, and it now includes source code for a mobile application for trademarks.

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Choosing Your Open-Source Licenses

      Open-source development covers a lot of bases. There’s everything from documentation to development that is freely available on the web. It’s rather magical to know that you’ve got access to the code that drives some of the industry’s most widely used platforms like OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, and much more.

      As a purveyor of some open-source goodness myself, I’ve started to become more aware of the nuances of each of the various open-source licenses. There is much more to these licenses than many of us may realize. It is a legal contract, so it is important to be aware of the differences in each license.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Data Pipeline goes open, changing business models, and more open source news

      The world of open source software is a busy place. Sometimes keeping up with all of the news, announcements, and cool things to be discovered can be difficult. Here’s a look at some of what we’re reading today.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • AMD announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform

        AMD announced a new release of Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) featuring software support of new Radeon GPU hardware, new math libraries, and a rich foundation of modern programming languages, designed to speed development of high-performance, energy-efficient heterogeneous computing systems. AMD also announced planned support of OpenCL™ and for a wide range of CPUs in upcoming releases of ROCm, including support for AMD’s upcoming “Zen”-based CPUs, Cavium ThunderX CPUs, and IBM Power 8 CPUs. The advances further cement ROCm’s position as the most versatile open source platform for GPU computing.

      • AMD Goes Open Source in Newest ROCm Platform Update

        Processor maker is going all in for developing and sharing GPU-related hardware and software for high-end computing use cases.
        In days gone by, one rarely heard of IT companies getting involved in the open sourcing of hardware blueprints. It was always about software. This is happening more frequently all the time and making a significant impact in many enterprises. It’s yet another seismic change that has hit the larger-picture IT world.

        This is relevant now because companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Brocade, Cisco Systems and a number of others through the Open Compute Project are now dedicated to designing and open sourcing items such as new-gen servers, racks, routers, switches, specialized teleco equipment and storage appliances, in addition to offering previously proprietary expertise to others in how to build new-gen IT hardware.

      • RusEFI open-source engine-control hardware now working in the real world

        RusEFI isn’t anywhere near a works-right-out-of-the-box system, even now. It’s hardware for the expert user who is comfortable doing everything from soldering to writing code, and it’s all absolutely open-source, on both the hardware and software sides. The advantage of this? According to RusEFI developer Andrey Belomutskiy, “You are free to criticize/change software and hardware without being yelled/threatened/banned, in the spirit of open source.”

Leftovers

  • Science

    • What Electronics Can Do to Your Infant’s Brain

      Have you ever watched a baby stare at a TV? The TV is huge, flashing and mesmerizing, and you’ll notice that while watching, infants do not turn their heads – they just sit and stare straight ahead. Because infants become so transfixed on the screen, they stop doing anything and everything else and ultimately, they miss out on human interaction and the opportunity to explore their new and exciting world.

      The same is true of certain electronic toys. The graphics and sounds are mesmerizing and hold a child’s attention for longer than a traditional toy. Studies have shown that during the time kids are watching a screen or playing on an electronic toy, they are not interacting and learning as much as they could with other types of toys. Electronics also change how we interact with our children – sometimes the toy becomes the babysitter, and parents do not have to interact.

    • We Should Think of American Education as a National Security Issue

      The election of Donald Trump to the White House left great segments of the US population elated, and others feeling deflated and terrified. It still isn’t clear what he will do after he’s inaugurated, although certain policies and approaches are beginning to take shape. But as observers take stock of how a novice politician who’s never held elected office snagged the highest one in the land, something has become abundantly clear—America is divided, and one of the starkest divisions is around education.

      People voted along lines that reflect levels of education. While Hillary Clinton led college graduates by nine points (52/43 percent), Trump led non-college graduates by eight (52/44 percent). According to Pew Research, this is the widest gap in support between college-educated and non-college educated voters recorded in exit polls since 1980.

      To hold Trump, or any president, accountable to the people they represent, the US needs an informed electorate. According to some experts, this is literally an issue of national security. More uniformly educated populations are better equipped to resolve chronic policy problems, bolster economic growth, and keep pace with rapidly shifting geopolitical dynamics, which contributes to stability at home.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Michigan Officials Seek to Block Court-Ordered Bottled Water Delivery in Flint

      State officials in Michigan asked a federal court in Detroit on Thursday to block a court order requiring bottled water deliveries to homes in Flint, Michigan, where residents are still waiting for clean tap water two years after municipal water supplies were contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

      The state’s motion requests the court to temporarily block the water delivery order while officials appeal the requirement. The order was issued by a federal judge last week and requires city and state officials to deliver bottled water to Flint residents unless they have a functioning faucet filter or refuse the delivery service.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Friday
    • Serious Linux Vulnerability Found By Just Holding Down The Enter Key For 70 Seconds

      Security researchers have found a rather frightening vulnerability in Linux that could ultimately allow an attacker to copy, modify, or destroy the contents of a hard drive, along with with configure the network to exfiltrate data. That in and of itself is cause for concern, but the real harrowing part about this is how easy it is to activate—an attacker need only boot up the system and hold down the enter key for 70 seconds.

    • Open Source Software: Secure Except When It Isn’t

      There is still a flaw in the open source security model which the Core Infrastructure Initiative only partly addressed. Remember the thousands and thousands of eyes looking for vulnerabilities in the code? While that may be true in a generalized sense, there are some small but important projects that are flying under the radar and don’t seem to be getting the necessary attention.

    • Adobe Fined $1M in Multistate Suit Over 2013 Breach; No Jail for Spamhaus Attacker

      Adobe will pay just $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by 15 state attorneys general over its huge 2013 data breach that exposed payment records on approximately 38 million people. In other news, the 39-year-old Dutchman responsible for coordinating an epic, weeks-long distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam provider Spamhaus in 2013 will avoid any jail time for his crimes thanks to a court ruling in Amsterdam this week.

      On Oct. 3, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story that Adobe had just suffered a breach in which hackers siphoned usernames, passwords and payment card data on 38 million customers. The intruders also made off with digital truckloads of source code for some of Adobe’s most valuable software properties — including Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop and ColdFusion.

    • Half of companies have been hit with ransomware in the past year

      MORE TERRIFYING SECURITY RESEARCH has discovered that almost half of a collection of firms surveyed admitted that they have been the victim of a ransomware attack.

      Endpoint security outfit SentinelOne said that the ransomware attacks do not just go after monies these days, but have darker aims and can be used to threaten and terrorise people.

      “[Our] results point to a significant shift for ransomware. It’s no longer just a tool for cyber crime, but a tool for cyber terrorism and espionage,” said Tony Rowan, chief security consultant at SentinelOne, in the firm’s Ransomware Research Data Summary (PDF).

    • Security Of FLOSS

      I’ve worked with IT since the 1960s. I’ve seen systems that fell down just idling. I’ve seen systems that were insecure by design. Their creators just didn’t seem to care. I’ve seen systems that were made to get you. Their creators wanted to own your soul. I’ve also used FLOSS.

  • Defence/Aggression

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Attribution of Russia in DNC hack has curtailed Kremlin’s hacking, Clapper says

      In what might be viewed as a slight disagreement in assessment, or at the very least, semantics, Clapper told the committee Thursday that there was not strong evidence of a connection between WikiLeaks, which provided a frequent drip of leaked emails from top Democratic officials aimed at damaging the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and the Russian hacking campaign against Democratic party entities and individuals, for which many believe provided WikiLeaks the stolen contents for their leaks.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • New peatland coalition targets cutting climate change, saving thousands of lives

      A new global initiative, launched today at the climate meeting in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of lives by protecting peatlands – the world’s largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

      The Global Peatlands Initiative will mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in a targeted effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

      Greenhouse gas emissions from drained and burning peatlands account for up to 5 per cent of anthropogenic carbon emissions. These emissions are rising due to increasing peat degradation and loss from agriculture and fires, and driving the world closer to a dangerous tipping point.

      Rising temperatures can cause a chain reaction in which thawing permafrost switches boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gas. Peat carbon stocks are equivalent to at least 60 per cent of all atmospheric carbon, meaning they hold the potential to send climate change spiraling out of control.

    • New UN initiative aims to save lives and cut climate change by protecting peatlands

      A new global initiative was launched today at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 22) under way in Marrakech, aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and save thousands of live by protecting peatlands – the largest terrestrial organic soil carbon stock.

      According to the UN environment Programme (UNEP), the Global Peatlands Initiative seeks mobilize governments, international organizations and academia in an effort to protect peatlands, which contain almost 100 times more carbon than tropical forests.

      If global temperatures continue to rise, this could lead to thawing permafrost, switching boreal and Arctic peatlands from carbon sinks to sources, resulting in huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and potentially causing climate change to spiral out of control.

      Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment stressed that despite the Paris Agreement, global temperatures will rise over 3 degrees Celsius this century. “This will cause misery and chaos for millions of vulnerable people, so we cannot afford to let any opportunity to reduce emissions slip by,” he added.

    • 69 Million People Exposed to ‘Killer Haze’ During Wildfire in Indonesia

      Latest study from Scientific Reports reveals that massive wildfires in Indonesia and Borneo had produced unhealthy air pollution, exposing 69 million people and causing thousands of cases of premature deaths.

      The wildfire greatly affected the forests and peatland of Equatorial Asia during the autumn of 2015. Experts have found that a quarter of people living in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia were severely exposed to the killer haze between September and October 2015.

      In an article by Eureka Alert, the lead author of the study, Dr. Paola Crippa, from Newcastle University, UK, said: “Our study estimated that between 6,150 and 17,270 premature deaths occurred due to breathing in the polluted air over that short two month period. To put this into perspective, we estimate that around 1 in 6,000 people exposed to the polluted haze from these fires died as a result. The uncertainty in these estimates is mostly due to the lack of medical studies on exposure from extreme air pollution in the area.”

    • Why It Matters That Trump’s Attorney General Pick Is a Climate Change Skeptic

      Jeff Sessions, the ultra-conservative Republican senator from Alabama, has been a controversial political figure for decades. His early career as a US attorney was threatened by allegations of racist remarks in the 1980s, but he remained popular in his home state and managed to carve out a congressional career for himself as a staunch opponent of, among many other things, consensus climate science.

      But Sessions is about to get a whole lot more influential to the lives of all Americans: President-elect Donald Trump has picked him to be the next attorney general of the United States.

      In what’s become a daily routine during the Trump transitionary period, the president-elect’s pick of Sessions has been met with exasperated outcries. Civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union are preparing for a long period of conflict under the Trump Administration, and Sessions is sure to be a part of it.

  • Finance

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Why Anti-Trump Protests Matter

      Since election night, U.S. cities and towns have rung with protest. Hundreds of thousands of people, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Columbia, South Carolina to Salt Lake City, Utah took to the streets en masse to protest the election of a man who promised, among other things, to force Muslims to register and to repeal a health care bill that helps some 20 million people get health insurance, and who has been accused of sexual assault by at least 13 women. Hand-scrawled signs declared “Not My President,” “No To Bigotry,” “Trump Puts My Life In Danger,” and “Protests Are Patriotic.”

    • Anna Soubry: ‘What’s happened to our country? We’ve lost the plot’

      The Tory MP was one of David Cameron’s modernisers, and campaigned to remain in the EU. Now she is angry at everyone – at Labour, her own party, the Daily Mail, even herself – but feels she must vote for article 50 regardless

    • Donald Trump Agrees to Pay $25 Million in Trump University Settlement

      Donald J. Trump has reversed course and agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign.

      The settlement was announced by the New York attorney general on Friday, just 10 days before one of the cases, a federal class-action lawsuit in San Diego, was set to be heard by a jury. The deal, if approved, averts a potentially embarrassing and highly unusual predicament: a president-elect on trial, and possibly even taking the stand in his own defense, while scrambling to build his incoming administration.

      It was a remarkable concession from a real estate mogul who derides legal settlements and has mocked fellow businessmen who agree to them.

      But the allegations in the case were highly unpleasant for Mr. Trump: Students paid up to $35,000 in tuition for programs that, according to the testimony of former Trump University employees, used high-pressure sales tactics and employed unqualified instructors.

      The agreement wraps together the outstanding Trump University litigation, including two federal class-action cases in San Diego, and a separate lawsuit by Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. The complaints alleged that students were cheated out of thousands of dollars in tuition through deceptive claims about what they would learn and high-pressure sales tactics.

    • Who Will Advise Trump on Science?

      In 1976, President Gerald Ford appointed physicist H. Guyford Stever as the first Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Having previously advised the military during World War II, and directed the National Science Foundation for four years, Stever became the first of a long line of advisors who counseled the White House on matters of science and technology—everything from disease outbreaks to climate change to nanotechnology.

      [...]

      But amid that certainty, there is also lots of room for variability. (Buckle up; here be acronyms.) Holdren currently wears many different hats. He’s also the president’s Science Advisor or, to quote the formal title, the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. He co-chairs (with Obama) the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)—a group of leading scientists and engineers who offer policy recommendations on everything from the reliability of forensic science to preparing for a biological weapons attack. And he sits on the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), a group that coordinates research and development efforts across all federal agencies; it is chaired by the president and includes the vice-president and several cabinet secretaries.

      So Holdren’s a busy guy. But of these jobs, only the OSTP directorship is a non-negotiable Senate-confirmed post. The rest are essentially optional, and depend on the president’s attitudes to science and willingness to continue the legacy of past offices. Trump might not convene the PCAST or the NSTC; both are established by Executive Order. He could appoint an OSTP Director and never seek advice from them.

    • The End Of Trump’s Reign Could Be Way Sooner Than You Think

      So that election sure was pretty crazy, huh? There are lots and lots and lots of really pissed-off people right now, and since we’ve said quite a bit on the subject, I won’t add more to that here. What I will tell you is that you absolutely have a real-world, tangible way to fight. And I’m not talking about having to wait four years for the next presidential election.

    • Michael Moore’s to do list for a revolution: an intervention for liberals

      We have a new leader in America. Known for his distinct regional accent and often seen wearing a baseball cap at rallies, he starred in a show on NBC, and holds strong opinions about guns and the NRA. He may not be the leader you saw coming, but you’re going to see a lot more of him: Michael Moore. The documentary filmmaker shuns the activist label he is often given. In a recent LA Times interview Moore asserted, “I’m not an activist, I’m a citizen. It’s redundant to say I’m an activist. We all should be active.” Moore has been very active, and has made films that take on some of America’s most complex and controversial topics — globalization, gun violence, 9/11, our healthcare system, the economy, war, and most recently, Donald Trump, someone he did see coming. Unlike the Democrats.

      Moore tried to warn the left in July, when he wrote a piece titled simply “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win. In it, he did not mince words: “Go ahead and say the words, ’cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: ‘PRESIDENT TRUMP.’ Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.” With his midwestern directness and efficiency, Moore then proceeded to list how and why Donald Trump was going to win.

      A week after Trump’s election, Democrats and progressives are still raw with shock and grief. The agony is acute. The mood of over half the country? Political satirist Barry Crimmins nailed it in a tweet, saying “We’re now kids trapped in the back of our blowhard, road-raging, shitty-driver, dad’s car for a 4-yr trip and he’s issued a “No Talking” edict.”

    • Donald Trump daughter Ivanka pictured in meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

      Donald Trump’s daughter has been pictured attending a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, heightening concerns the President-elect’s family will wield unprecedented influence over his political duties.

      Ivanka Trump, who features in handout photos of the impromptu gathering, plays a significant role in managing Mr Trump’s businesses, along with his other adult children.

      Unlike other presidents, Mr Trump’s children are part of his transition team, which has been beset by problems since its inception.

    • In Their Coastal Citadels, Democrats Argue Over What Went Wrong

      Republican America is now so vast that a traveler could drive 3,600 miles across the continent, from Key West, Fla., to the Canadian border crossing at Porthill, Idaho, without ever leaving a state under total GOP control.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Dunja Mijatović: Online threats of killing, rape and violence everyday reality for too many female journalists

      No job comes without sacrifices, but how many downgrading comments, criticism or even threats can one person take before it becomes too much?

      Just consider the experiences of a female journalist that I know:

      She had her phone number shared on dating websites, her email and other accounts were hacked, she received death threats on Skype, the website publishing her articles was hacked and a sex video was posted with the implication that she had participated in an orgy. Anonymous articles with lies about her and her family were also posted online.

      Imagine being forced to shut down your accounts on social media platforms because of such massive attacks with detailed images of rape and other forms of sexual violence.

      At one point, you would probably be inclined to ask yourself if it is really worth it. Is this a career I want to continue to pursue?

      In the past few years, more and more female journalists and bloggers have been forced to question their profession. Male journalists are also subject to hate speech and online abuse, but research findings suggest that female journalists face a disproportionate amount of gender-based threats and harassment on the internet. They are experiencing what Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, has described as a “double attack”: they are being targeted for being both a journalist and a woman.

      How do these attacks affect female journalists’ lives, their work and society in general? Journalists are used to being in the frontline of conflict and they often deal with difficult and even dangerous situations. But what if you cannot shield yourself from these threats? What if the frontline became your own doorstep, your office or your computer screen?

    • European Union Orders British Press NOT to Report when Terrorists are Muslims

      So, according to the ECRI and scholars of Teesside University, when Muslim jihadists murder people and the press reports that killers are Muslims, the press, and not Islamists, is encouraging “Islamophobic incidents” in Britain. According to ECRI Chair Christian Ahlund, “It is no coincidence that racist violence is on the rise in the UK at the same time as we see worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech in the newspapers, online and even among politicians.”

    • More dialogue needed on censorship: Singapore International Film Festival chief

      Yuni Hadi has been promoting independent Singapore films for many years. She has helmed the film programme at The Substation Centre for the Arts, creating milestone projects such as the annual Fly-by-Night Video Challenge and the Singapore Short Film Festival. She also helms Objectifs Films, a Singapore-based international film distributor. She is also the co-producer of award-winning Singapore film Ilo Ilo which saw its box-office takings in Singapore surge, after it attained international accolades.

      Today, she is executive director of the Singapore International Film Festival which takes place from No 23 to Dec 4.

      She went “On the Record” with 938LIVE’s Bharati Jagdish about censorship and growing the local film industry. They started by talking about the perceived bias against local content.

    • Junk Scientist Greets Skepticism With Legal Threats, Sues Blogger For Criticizing Him And His Work

      There’s nothing those operating on the fringes of science hate more than people questioning their means, methods, and conclusions. To question is to be sued, unfortunately. Ken White has again fired up the Popehat signal in hopes of securing a skeptical blogger some legal assistance in fighting off a clearly bogus defamation suit by a junk scientist offended by the blogger’s dismantling of his junk science.

    • Bhutan journalist hit by defamation suit for sharing Facebook post

      It is known as the land of gross national happiness, a country that puts contentment before the trappings of wealth and power. But discontent is growing in Bhutan after one of the country’s best-known journalists was hit with a defamation suit for sharing a story on Facebook.

      In a case that will test the boundaries of freedom of speech in the tiny Himalayan kingdom, independent journalist Namgay Zam, a former presenter on the state-run broadcaster Bhutan Broadcasting Service, faces imprisonment or a fine equivalent to 10 years’ salary if she is found guilty of defaming a prominent businessman.

    • Rap star handed five YEARS in jail after Sharia court says his songs are blasphemous

      A Sharia court convicted the 29-year-old singer after he was banned from performing due to the nature of his music.

      Amir Tataloo’s fans reacted furiously to the news that he had been apprehended while walking down a street in the capital Tehran in August.

      He has been held in custody until his trial this week and will now be forced to endure physical punishment after defying the Ministry of Culture.

      According to reports Mr Tatoloo refused to leave the country he was born in and defied orders to stop performing.

    • The Failure of Facebook Democracy

      In December of 2007, the legal theorist Cass R. Sunstein wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the filtering effects that frequently attend the spread of information on the Web. “As a result of the Internet, we live increasingly in an era of enclaves and niches—much of it voluntary, much of it produced by those who think they know, and often do know, what we’re likely to like,” Sunstein noted. In the piece, “The Polarization of Extremes,” Sunstein argued that the trend promised ill effects for the direction—or, more precisely, the misdirection—of public opinion. “If people are sorted into enclaves and niches, what will happen to their views?” he wondered. “What are the eventual effects on democracy?”

    • It’s time to get rid of the Facebook “news feed,” because it’s not news

      In the wake of the US election, critics have blamed Facebook for bringing about—at least in part—Trump’s surprise win. A BuzzFeed report showed that Facebook users interacted far more with “fake news” stories about both candidates than they did with mainstream news outlets before the election. This wouldn’t seem like such a big deal if it weren’t for a Pew Research Center survey showing that 44% of Americans rely on Facebook to get all their news.

      But proving whether fake news influenced the election more than the usual political propaganda is impossible. What’s certain is that fake news on Facebook is a symptom of a larger problem: the company is trying to play contradictory roles as both trustworthy news publisher and fun social media platform for personal sharing. The problem is that it cannot be both—at least not without making some changes.

    • James Woods Quits Twitter Over ‘Censorship’ of Alt-Right After Suing User Who Called Him a Coke Addict
    • Actor James Woods quits Twitter, citing censorship
    • ‘Buh-bye’: Twitter zaps ‘dramatic b*tch’ James Woods for quitting site over ‘censorship’ of racists
    • I QUIT! James Woods to leave Twitter over alt-right ban and censorship
    • Conservative Actor James Woods Quits Twitter Over Censorship Concerns
    • He’s done! Fed-up James Woods bids Twitter a not-so-fond farewell over political censorship
    • How attacking the alt-right only adds to the flames

      What blissful days these must be for the alt-right.

      Their preferred candidate for president is transitioning into the White House.

      Their champion, Steve Bannon, formerly CEO of the most mainstream media platform for alt-right voices on the internet, Breitbart.com, has secured a place in the West Wing at elbow’s length from the new president.

      And the conventional media seem to be stumbling around trying to decide whether to explain the alt-right, ignore it, censor it or refuse to even speak its name.

      Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, fears the very term “alt-right” is a sinister “branding move” to give cover to racists. Instead, he suggests journalists should use phrases such as “the alt-right, a white nationalist, anti-Semitic movement.”

    • 60 percent of Russians think Internet censorship is necessary, poll finds

      Sixty percent of Russians believe that Internet censorship — in particular, the banning of certain websites and material — is necessary, according to a new poll.

      Just 25 percent opposed the idea; the rest of the respondents didn’t know or declined to answer.

      The poll was conducted by the Levada Center, an independent polling firm, which asked Russians questions about trust in media and censorship between Oct. 21 to 24. On the subject of political censorship, 32 percent of Russians said that denying access to certain websites would infringe upon the rights and freedoms of activists, while 44 percent said it did not and 24 percent could not answer.

    • Russia starts blocking LinkedIn network
    • U.S. says concerned over Russia blocking access to LinkedIn
    • LinkedIn Blocked In Russia; Government Says It Threatens Russian Online Censorship Drive

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Argentina Orders Telecoms To Create A Permanent Database Of All Mobile Phone Users

      Even one is a problem, for reasons that Edward Snowden and Andrew “bunnie” Huang pointed out earlier this year: a mobile phone is “the perfect tracking device.” The new register may indeed help tackle the theft of mobile phones in Argentina. But it will also create a powerful and dangerous new resource that the authorities will surely be unable to resist dipping into for other purposes.

    • Look Inside the Windowless New York Skyscraper Linked to the NSA

      Since publishing a story about an apparent National Security Agency surveillance site in New York, The Intercept has obtained several previously unseen photographs from within the building, offering a rare glimpse behind its thick concrete and granite walls.

      On Wednesday, we reported that top-secret documents indicate there is an NSA spy hub inside the massive, windowless skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, used by AT&T to route communications across the world. The 550-foot tower contains equipment that covertly monitors phone calls, faxes, and internet data, according to the documents. But with the exception of employees who have worked at the building, few people have ever been allowed inside the iconic brutalist structure, which was built to withstand a nuclear attack amid the Cold War.

      Stanley Greenberg, a 60-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, shared a series of photographs he took in September 1992 while visiting 33 Thomas Street. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks, security was not as tight. At the time, Greenberg was carrying out research for a book, Invisible New York, and AT&T granted him access. The photographs never made it into the book, but Greenberg revisited his photo archive this week and sent the pictures to The Intercept after reading the revelations about the building’s apparent role as an NSA site, code-named TITANPOINTE.

      [...]

      One of Greenberg’s photos (featured at the top of this article) clearly shows some of AT&T’s “4ESS switch” equipment that is used to send phone calls across networks. The NSA’s documents describe the TITANPOINTE facility as containing a “RIMROCK access,” which is what the agency calls the 4ESS switches that it taps into. By 2004, at least one of these was an “international gateway” used to route foreign calls to and from the U.S., a former AT&T engineer has said.

      Another photograph taken by Greenberg (below) shows a room full of large batteries, which were likely used as a back-up energy source for the building in the event of a power failure. Original planning documents for 33 Thomas Street state that it would have enough emergency power to last two weeks, enabling it to become a “self-contained city” in the event of a catastrophe.

      [...]

      Klein later moved to California, where he continued his work for AT&T. In 2006, he alleged in a sworn court declaration that the company had maintained a secure room in one of its San Francisco offices, which he stated had been equipped with NSA technology to spy on phone and internet traffic. Klein told The Intercept that he didn’t know of any NSA presence at 33 Thomas Street, but it did not surprise him to discover its apparent role as the TITANPOINTE surveillance site.

      “I always assumed and gathered information back then that there were numerous other offices like the one in San Francisco,” he said. “I was only aware of the ones on the West Coast, from talking to people. But logically I assumed there had to be some in places like New York or Chicago, the major telecom centers.”

    • ‘National Bird’ Confronts Perils Of Becoming Drone Whistleblower

      President Barack Obama’s administration institutionalized a drone program that involves a targeted assassination policy for individuals put on kill lists. It not only devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in countries, like Afghanistan, but it traumatizes the military officers, who are part of the system which makes strikes possible. But for them, there is little to no support for the depression, suicidal ideations, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) they develop as a result of the horrible things they are asked to do.

      As the documentary, “National Bird,” shows, the officers struggle with the morality of their actions, but they face a presidential administration, which has criminalized more whistleblowers than all other previous presidential administrations combined. Officers who speak out about the drone program face the prospect of harsh prosecution under the Espionage Act, as if talking about what they saw as officers is treasonous. That weighs heavy on veterans of the drone program and makes them terrified to be labeled whistleblowers because they know how the government could destroy their lives if they become known to the public as whistleblowers.

    • Law updating GCHQ’s power passes final hurdle in Parliament

      A new law giving GCHQ increased powers is set to become law.

      The Investigatory Powers Bill has been passed by peers in the House of Lords and there only remains some discussion of possible amendments in both houses of Parliament before Royal Assent by the Queen makes it law.

      Privacy campaigners have criticised the bill as ‘Snooper’s Charter II’ after the 2012 Draft Communications Bill which was blocked by Liberal Democrats in the coalition government.

    • Trump’s CIA Director Pick Thinks Using Encryption ‘May Itself Be A Red Flag’

      Donald Trump announced on Friday that he’s chosen Congressman Mike Pompeo to run the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the premiere spy agency of the United States.

      Pompeo, a Republican lawmaker from Kansas and a former Army officer, has little-to-no experience in the world of intelligence (other than being part of the House Intelligence Committee), but he’s distinguished himself for being a strong supporter of mass surveillance and for thinking that using encryption, by itself, might be a sign that you’re a terrorist.

      “Forcing terrorists into encrypted channels, however, impedes their operational effectiveness by constraining the amount of data they can send and complicating transmission protocols, a phenomenon known in military parlance as virtual attrition,” Pompeo wrote in an op-ed published in January by The Wall Street Journal. “Moreover, the use of strong encryption in personal communications may itself be a red flag.”

    • TfL to track Tube users in stations by their MAC addresses

      Transport for London is to start a four week trial of reading Wi-Fi connection request data from London Underground passengers’ mobile phones.

      The trial, which will last four weeks from 21 November, “will help give TfL a more accurate understanding of how people move through stations, interchange between services and how crowding develops,” according to the transport authority.

      The idea is to develop a more accurate picture of how passengers make interchanges on the Tube network.

      Data available to TfL at present only records where people enter the London Underground and where they leave it, meaning figuring out their movements in between those points is a matter of educated guesswork.

    • Local Muslims express concerns about Flynn being tabbed as NSA director

      The selection of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn for National Security Adviser has local Muslim leaders concerned about what it could mean for their community members.

      There’s already been some talk of a Muslim registry under a Trump administration, but the appointment of Flynn is adding to the concerns of Muslims in south-central Wisconsin.

      Flynn has been outspoken in his opposition to radical Islam, but that is not the part that bothers local Muslim leaders.

      He’s also taken aim at the religion as a whole, tweeting in February – “Fear of Islam is RATIONAL.”

    • NSA pick Flynn a critic of Muslim militancy, culture

      Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence officer who is Donald Trump’s pick to serve as his national security adviser, is a harsh critic of Muslim extremism and the religion itself, calling “radical Islam” an existential threat to the United States.

      In strident speeches and public comments, including a fiery address at the Republican National Convention, Flynn has aggressively argued that Islamic State militants pose a threat on a global scale and demanded a far more aggressive U.S. military campaign against the group.

    • No Snoopers’ Charter – Donate
    • Top US intelligence official: I submitted my resignation
    • Clapper, US intel chief, resigns
    • Intelligence Director James Clapper Resigns
    • Next for the DNI
    • Intelligence chief to leave as Trump arrives
    • World Briefs: US spy chief resigns, to leave in January
    • Trump weighs dismantling top spy agency: report
    • Donald Trump Is Plotting to Eliminate a Cabinet-Level Position: Report
    • Adm. Michael Rogers Leading Candidate to Be Trump’s Director of National Intelligence
    • Donald Trump Hopes to Abolish Intelligence Chief Position, Reverse CIA Reforms

      Donald Trump’s national security team is discussing plans to dismantle the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the organization that was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, according to an adviser to the president-elect and a former senior intelligence official. The news comes as the current director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced his resignation Thursday.

      The Trump national security team has been meeting in recent days, planning the removal of the cabinet-level position and assessing how to fold parts of the organization into the 16 federal intelligence agencies it oversees, according to both people with knowledge of the plans. If the restructuring is accomplished, it would undo legislation passed by Congress in 2004, dismantle the biggest American intelligence bureaucracy created since the end of World War II, and roll back a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission.

    • Police Just Found Phone & USB Stick Belonging To Paris Suicide Bomber, After Misplacing It For Almost Two Years

      Remember how, right after the Paris bombings, people started blaming encryption for the attacks, despite the fact it was later revealed that most of the planning was done in the open and communication occurred via unencrypted SMS messages? As we noted, it seemed pretty clear that the bombings were an intelligence and law enforcement failure rather than an encryption problem.

      Now, just to add more evidence to that conclusion in the most ridiculous way possible, apparently Brussels police just found a mobile phone and USB stick that had belonged to one of the suicide bombers in the Paris attacks, Brahim Abdeslam. The police had seized the phone and USB stick during a drug raid back in February of 2015… and promptly misplaced them entirely. They were found under a stack of papers. Really.

    • Mystery death of former spy worker found drowned in bath with his front door unlocked

      A former GCHQ employee once suspended from work because of an “incident” was found drowned in his bath with his flat’s front door unlocked, an inquest heard.

      Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed any suicidal thoughts to those closest to him and was actively seeking a new job at the time of his death.

    • SPY BATH DEATH RIDDLE Mystery surrounds case of GCHQ worker, 28, left face down in bath for up to three weeks
    • Mystery surrounds the death of a former spy worker, 28, who was found drowned in the bath with his front door unlocked

      A former GCHQ worker who was looking for a new job was found drowned in his bath with the front door of his flat unlocked by his parents.

      Tomas Bleszynski, 28, had never expressed suicidal ideas and seemed ‘completely normal’ when he last saw his parents a couple of months ago, an inquest heard.

      They found him laying face-down in his bath when they went to his Cheltenham flat – near the spy base – on April 17 because they had been unable to contact him.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • U.S. allowed Italian kidnap prosecution to shield higher-ups, ex-CIA officer says

      A former CIA officer has broken the U.S. silence around the 2003 abduction of a radical Islamist cleric in Italy, charging that the agency inflated the threat the preacher posed and that the United States then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from responsibility for approving the operation.

    • New CIA Director Mike Pompeo on torture, Muslims, terror, Iran, NSA spying

      Pompeo on Guantanamo Bay:

      “GTMO has been a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism. I have traveled to GTMO and have seen the honorable and professional behavior of the American men and women in uniform, who serve at the detention facility,” Pompeo said in a statement on Nov. 18. “The detainees at GTMO are treated exceptionally well – so well that some have even declined to be resettled, instead choosing to stay at GTMO. It is delusional to think that any plan the president puts before Congress to relocate radical Islamic terrorists to the U.S, and potentially Fort Leavenworth Kansas, will make our country safer. The reality is that this proposal will ultimately put Kansans and Americans in danger.”

    • Stopping Turnkey Tyranny: What The Obama Administration Can Do About The NSA On The Way Out

      Last week, I was a little unfair to our friends over at Fight for the Future in noting that it was too late for President Obama to “dismantle the NSA” as was suggested in a Time article written by FftF’s awesome campaign director Evan Greer. I was focusing on why the President should have limited the NSA much more seriously earlier on (like way earlier…), but some interpreted it to mean that I was suggesting that FftF had only just jumped on the bandwagon to stop mass surveillance. That’s clearly not true — as it’s been one of the leading voices in the fight to get the President to scale back mass surveillance since the group took on that issue many years ago.

    • Barack Obama will not pardon Edward Snowden unless he goes to court – while Trump’s CIA pick wants him executed

      There is very little chance President Barack Obama will pardon Edward Snowden before his final term is up – leaving his fate to an unforgiving Trump administration and an incoming CIA director who had called for his execution.

      Mr Snowden has lived in Russia since he leaked documents revealing a secret surveillance programme helmed by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies. The Department of Justice charged Mr Snowden with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

    • Obama suggests Snowden pardon unlikely
    • Obama: Pardon for Snowden Couldn’t Be Contemplated Until US Court Appearance
    • Snowden Fields Questions at Pen Int’l Session Dedicated to Imprisoned Writers
    • Amal Clooney told the UN they did nothing to help Isis sex slaves. Now she’s asking women to help instead

      After appearing before the United Nations for the first time and telling delegates she was “ashamed” to stand before them while they did nothing to prevent the rape and abuse of Yazidi women, Amal Clooney stood before a conference of women and urged them to join the fight for women’s rights in countries where they are most under threat.

      The renowned human rights lawyer gave the keynote speech at the Texas Conference for Women on Tuesday, where more than 100 leading women from different sectors also delivered talks.

      In September, Clooney condemned world leaders for their inaction over the persecution of the Yazidi community, a religious minority in northern Iraq who have been targeted by Isis. In her speech on Tuesday, Clooney spoke more about the plight of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was trafficked by Isis as a sex slave and now advocates on behalf of Yazidi women.

    • Trump’s Choice For Attorney General Is A Fan Of “Civil Asset Forfeiture”

      Civil asset forfeiture is victimization by government — removing any possibility of a defense. It’s taking without any sort of proof of wrongdoing by the person whose money has been hoovered up by the government; it’s the antithesis of our legal standard, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

      It turns citizens who have been convicted of nothing into victims of greedy law enforcement workers and officials, who typically get to keep the proceeds or part of the proceeds from stopping somebody on the road who’s carrying some cash and declaring it the result of ill-gotten gains…sometimes simply because people who are in the drug trade use a road and sometimes without as much as a bullshit excuse like that.

    • Jeff Sessions’ Nomination as Attorney General Alarms Civil Libertarians

      President-elect Donald Trump has nominated US Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama to be his administration’s attorney general, a move that civil liberties advocates are decrying as a likely catastrophe for privacy and immigration.

      While many of Trump’s forthcoming nominations will amount to little more than inside-the-Beltway gossip, Sessions stands out. He’s an advocate for surveillance and an enemy of encryption; an opponent of criminal justice reform; and a hardliner on immigration. First elected to the US Senate in 1996, he has long stood to the right even among his conservative Republican colleagues as a champion of security above all. As Attorney General, Sessions would have the power to radically recast the Obama administration’s definition of civil liberties online and off.

      The Senate Judiciary Committee must still approve Sessions’ nomination. But civil rights groups are already sounding the alarm over the possibility that he could become the most powerful law enforcement officer in the land. Sessions’ track record also suggest he’s also going to find himself at sharp odds with the tech industry’s liberal and libertarian-leaning leadership.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Facebook’s detailed open-source maps show the gaps in global internet connectivity

      The open-source maps were created in collaboration with the Columbia University Center for International Earth Science Information Network and World Bank statistics to create datasets that incorporate population demographics, infrastructure development and existing internet penetration to identify the connectivity gaps and how to fix them. Making them open source means NGOs, innovators or companies can access them. They plan to release more maps over the coming months.

    • Say good-bye to net neutrality

      In the wake of a Donald Trump’s upset victory, telecom industry players are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of eviscerating Barack Obama’s fledgling net neutrality rules.

      It was one of the crowning achievements of Obama’s administration when the FCC passed rules that barred broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic, or providing paid “fast lanes” for select content. The rules enshrined the principal that all data traveling through ISPs’ pipes had to be treated equally.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Tech Companies Urge Trump To Protect DMCA Safe Harbors

        Donald Trump isn’t in the White House yet is but already under pressure from people hoping to benefit from his influence. Among them Google, Facebook, and Twitter, which have written to the president-elect hoping that he’ll uphold the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA to prevent service providers from being held liable for user-uploaded content.

      • Librarians, Archivists, Call On WIPO Members To Create Safe Harbour Against Copyright Liability

        The age of digitisation has opened new doors to distribution of information including for libraries and archives. However, librarians and archivists are often confronted with risk of liability for copyright infringement, nationally and in cross-border activities. This week, they asked the World Intellectual Property Organization copyright committee to provide them not only with some exceptions to copyright, but with protection against liability.

11.18.16

Links 18/11/2016: Apache at 17 (Years), GNU Octave 4.2

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Jim Zemlin: Why Open Source is Professionalizing, and How to Stay Ahead

    If it is true that software is eating the world then it is also true that open source is eating software. The very fabric of our digital society increasingly runs on software built and supported collectively by hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. And not just traditional technology companies. As we move towards a world defined by digital experiences carmakers, retailers, banks, hospitals, movie studios and so many more are becoming involved in building and underwriting this work—in reality they are becoming software companies themselves.

  • How Open Source and InnerSource are changing the IT Landscape
  • The Tragedy of Open Source
  • Open Source and Trends shaping it
  • Managing the Opportunities and Challenges of Open Source Innovation
  • Open Source is all about Community
  • Open Source Development at the UK Government

    New code developed for the UK government is open by default. Coding in the open enables reuse and increases transparency, which results in better digital services, said Anna Shipman, technical architect at Government Digital Service (GDS). She spoke about open sourcing government at GOTO Berlin 2016.

    Our job is to change the way the government works, said Shipman. The UK government wants to provide digital services which are so good that people want to use them; services which are leading to better interaction between the government and citizen.

    Software development at the UK government used to be done with yearly big bang releases. Over the years this has changed with many teams doing several code updates every day.

  • ‘Podling’ Apache projects are spending longer in the incubator

    Stewards of the Apache Software Foundation are mildly concerned that many nascent projects are spending longer in the incubator, putting pressure on limited mentoring resources.

    In the 12 months up to November 2016, ASF oversaw 30 new “podling” incubator projects, of which four were retired and just seven graduated. Jim Jagielski, director and co-founder at ASF, said the graduation rate has fallen compared to previous years, causing him to ponder why so many projects were apparently stuck.

  • Apache: 17 years on in the open source community

    Apache is a public charity based in the US that facilitates the development of open source projects for the public good in a vendor neutral environment.

    This week the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) hosted ApacheCon in Seville, Spain to celebrate not only it’s 17 year old ‘birthday’ but to further instill this open source community’s core principles that have been with it since the beginning: the ‘Apache Way’.

  • AT&T’s Chris Rice Upskills on SDN & Open Source

    One key advantage SDN provides is the ability to directly program the network by rapidly adding on-demand applications on top of the SDN controller. Service providers are increasingly turning to open source software as a viable alternative to proprietary automation tools, but concerns such as cost, security, standards and whether the software is “carrier-grade” remain front of mind.

  • Transforming scientific research with OpenStack

    A cloud-based approach is often heralded as the natural way forward when it comes to improving agility. And whilst many traditional enterprises have turned to the technology, other types of organizations are seeing the benefits too.

  • Open Source vs Proprietary Cloud: Choose Wisely

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 51 To Enable WebGL 2 By Default, FLAC Audio, Skia Content Rendering On Linux
      • Introducing Firefox Focus – a free, fast and easy to use private browser for iOS
      • Privacy made simple with Firefox Focus

        Today we launched Firefox Focus, a brand new iOS browser that puts user privacy first. More than ever before, we believe that everyone on the Internet has a right to protect their privacy. By launching Firefox Focus, we are putting that belief into practice in a big way.

        How big? If you download Firefox Focus and start to browse, you will notice a prominent “Erase” button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. If you tap that button, the Firefox Focus app erases all browsing information including cookies, website history or passwords. Of course, you can erase this on any other browser but we are making it simple here – just one tap away.

        Out of sight too often means out of mind. Burying the tools to clear browsing history and data behind clicks or taps means that fewer people will do it. By putting the “Erase” button front and center, we offer users a simple path to healthy online behaviors — protecting their online freedom and taking greater control of their personal data. To further enhance user privacy, Firefox Focus also by default blocks advertising, social and analytics tracking. So, on Firefox Focus, “private” browsing is actually automatic, and erasing your history is incredibly simple.

  • SaaS/Back End

    • AtScale Takes its BI Platform Beyond Hadoop

      As it began to develop, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–remained an enterprise-only story, but now businesses of all sizes are evaluating tools that can help them glean meaningful insights from the data they store. As we’ve noted, the open source Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend, and has given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Conference 2016: First videos online

      Here at The Document Foundation we’ve been really busy since the LibreOffice Conference in September, running our Community Weeks and the Month of LibreOffice. But finally we’ve started putting videos online from presentations at the conference.

      Don’t miss this opening presentation, the State of the Project, and then scroll down for more talks and demos.

  • Funding

    • Kubernetes founders launch Heptio with $8.5M in funding to help bring containers to the enterprise

      For years, the public face of Kubernetes was one of the project’s founders: Google group product manager Craig McLuckie. He started the open-source container-management project together with Joe Beda, Brendan Burns and a few other engineers inside of Google, which has since brought it under the guidance of the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

      Beda became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners in late 2015, Burns left Google for Microsoft earlier this year and McLuckie quietly left Google to start a new venture a few weeks ago. McLuckie and Beda have now teamed up again to launch Heptio, a new pure-play Kubernetes company.

  • BSD

    • openbsd changes of note

      mcl2k2 pools and the em conversion. The details are in the commits, but the short story is that due to hardware limitations, a number of tradeoffs need to be made between performance and memory usage. The em chip can (mostly) only be programmed to write to 2k buffers. However, ethernet payloads are not nicely aligned. They’re two bytes off. Leading to a costly choice. Provide a 2k buffer, and then copy all the data after the fact, which is slow. Or allocate a larger than 2k buffer, and provide em with a pointer that’s 2 bytes offset. Previously, the next size up from 2k was 4k, which is quite wasteful. The new 2k2 buffer size still wastes a bit of memory, but much less.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Faster unified capabilities and open source code on DISA’s plate for 2017

      The Defense Information Systems Agency is trying to speed up the delivery of its voice, video and data services to Defense Department and military employees.

      DISA currently has its Unified Capabilities (UC) contract award date set for the fourth quarter of 2018, but the IT agency thinks it can push the award to the left and have it finished by the first quarter. The contract, called Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS), would integrate things like voice, video, email, content management and other communication devices into one seamless, unified client.

      However, DISA’s Enterprise-wide Services Division Chief Brian Hermann, thinks DISA can award and set up UC faster.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • 4 tips for DIY makers

      First, I take a picture of the postcard and upload it to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, usually Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 International. These two licenses allow anyone to use the image of my artwork for both non-commercial and commercial purposes, modify and remix them. And uploading to Wikimedia Commons puts my artwork in a place where many people will see it.

  • Programming/Development

    • LLVM’s LLD Linker Looking At Enabling Multi-Threading By Default
    • You Are Not Paid to Write Code

      “Taco Bell Programming” is the idea that we can solve many of the problems we face as software engineers with clever reconfigurations of the same basic Unix tools. The name comes from the fact that every item on the menu at Taco Bell, a company which generates almost $2 billion in revenue annually, is simply a different configuration of roughly eight ingredients.

      Many people grumble or reject the notion of using proven tools or techniques. It’s boring. It requires investing time to learn at the expense of shipping code. It doesn’t do this one thing that we need it to do. It won’t work for us. For some reason—and I continue to be completely baffled by this—everyone sees their situation as a unique snowflake despite the fact that a million other people have probably done the same thing. It’s a weird form of tunnel vision, and I see it at every level in the organization. I catch myself doing it on occasion too. I think it’s just human nature.

    • Eclipse Che cloud IDE joins Docker revolution

      Eclipse Che 5.0 is making accommodations for Docker containers and Language Server Protocol across multiple IDEs. The newest version of the Eclipse Foundation’s cloud-based IDE and workspace server will be available by the end of the year.

      The update offers Docker Compose Workspaces, in which a workspace can run multiple developer machines with support for Docker Compose files and standard Dockerfiles. In the popular Docker software container platform, a Compose file is a Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) file defining services, networks, and volumes; a Docker file is a text document with commands to assemble an image. Che also has been certified for Docker Store, which features enterprise-ready containers. In addition, Docker is joining the Eclipse Foundation and will work directly with Che.

Leftovers

  • Are Office Depot workers pushing unnecessary computer fixes?

    1116-ctm-officedepotinvestigation-jones-1181439-640×360.jpg
    KIRO-TV

    The retailer says it helps about 6,000 customers per week with its free PC health checks, and that it does not condone any of the alleged conduct we uncovered. But CBS affiliate KIRO-TV’s undercover cameras showed how employees used the service to sell customers expensive computer repairs that weren’t there, reports KIRO’s Jesse Jones.

    Office Depot’s technicians repeatedly told us our computers were infected.

    “It’s got malware symptoms in there,” one said.

    They said they could fix them — for a hefty fee.

    “It actually looks like it’s $180 right now,” the technician estimated.

    The only problem? All the PC’s were brand new and fresh out of the box. The computer security firm IOActive also gave them a clean bill of health.

    “We found no symptoms of malware on these computers when we operated them,” said Will Longman, IOActive VP of Information Technology and Security.

    We even purchased one of the new computers at Office Depot. But when we brought it to technicians at a different store, a technician said, “Malware symptoms were found in the machine.”

  • Science

    • Blast Off With the Amateur Rocketeers of the Mojave Desert

      An event called “Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships” doesn’t bring to mind a day of peace and quiet. If nothing else, a field packed with amateur rocketeers blasting things toward the heavens is raucous to say the least. But Sean Lemoine found it all very … zen. “It’s very serene out there, just watching the rockets,” he says.

      Large, Dangerous Rocket Ships is among the world’s biggest amateur rocketry events. Some 250 rocketeers from as away as the UK and Argentina gathered on a cracked lakebed in the Mojave Desert, where the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the airspace for miles around. That’s essential, because these folks launch rockets capable of reaching 17,000 feet and making Elon Musk smile.

  • Hardware

    • Hard Drive Stats for Q3 2016: Less is More

      In our last report for Q2 2016, we counted 68,813 spinning hard drives in operation. For Q3 2016 we have 67,642 drives, or 1,171 fewer hard drives. Stop, put down that Twitter account, Backblaze is not shrinking. In fact, we’re growing very nicely and are approaching 300 petabytes of data under our management. We have fewer drives because over the last quarter we swapped out more than 3,500 2 terabyte (TB) HGST and WDC hard drives for 2,400 8 TB Seagate drives. So we have fewer drives, but more data. Lots more data! We’ll get into the specifics a little later on, but first, let’s take a look at our Q3 2016 drive stats.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Thursday
    • Reproducible Builds: week 81 in Stretch cycle
    • Security-hardened Android, bounties for Tcl coders, and more open source news

      In a blog post yesterday, the Tor project announced a refresh of a prototype of a Tor-enabled Android phone aimed at reducing vulnerability to security and privacy issues. Combining several existing software packages together, the effort has created an installation tool for hardening your phone. While designed for a Nexus 6P reference device, the project hopes to expand to provide greater hardware choice.

    • Linux flaw exposed in a minute by pressing enter key

      Researchers have discovered a major vulnerability in the Cryptesetup utility that can impact many GNU/Linux systems, which is activated by pressing the enter key for about 70 seconds.

    • Chinese IoT Firm Siphoned Text Messages, Call Records

      A Chinese technology firm has been siphoning text messages and call records from cheap Android-based mobile smart phones and secretly sending the data to servers in China, researchers revealed this week. The revelations came the same day the White House and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued sweeping guidelines aimed at building security into Internet-connected devices, and just hours before a key congressional panel sought recommendations from industry in regulating basic security standards for so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices.

    • Google security engineer slams antivirus software, cites better security methods

      Google senior security engineer Darren Bilby isn’t a fan of antivirus software, telling a conference in New Zealand that more time should be spent on more meaningful defenses such as whitelisting applications.

      Speaking at the Kiwicon hacking conference, Bilby said that antivirus apps are simply ineffective and the security world should concentrate its efforts on things that can make a difference.

      “Please no more magic,” Bilby told the conference, according to The Register. “We need to stop investing in those things we have shown do not work. Sure, you are going to have to spend some time on things like intrusion detection systems because that’s what the industry has decided is the plan, but allocate some time to working on things that actually genuinely help.”

      Antivirus software does some useful things, he said, “but in reality it is more like a canary in the coal mine. It is worse than that. It’s like we are standing around the dead canary saying, ‘Thank god it inhaled all the poisonous gas.’”

    • Dutch government wants to keep “zero days” available for exploitation

      The Dutch government is very clear about at least one thing: unknown software vulnerabilities, also known as “zero days”, may be left open by the government, in order to be exploited by secret services and the police.

      We all benefit from a secure and reliable digital infrastructure. It ensures the protection of sensitive personal data, security, company secrets and the national interest. It is essential for the protection of free communication and privacy. As a consequence, any vulnerability should be patched immediately. This is obviously only possible when unknown vulnerabilities are disclosed responsibly. Keeping a vulnerability under wraps is patently irresponsible: it may be found simultaneously by others who abuse it, for example to steal sensitive information or to attack other devices.

    • How To ‘PoisonTap’ A Locked Computer Using A $5 Raspberry Pi

      White hat hacker Samy Kamkar has come up with a way of to hijack Internet traffics from a password-protected computer.

      Serial white hat hacker Samy Kamkar has developed a new exploit for breaking into a locked computer and installing a persistent web-based backdoor on it for accessing the victim’s online accounts.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • David Petraeus in the running to be Trump’s secretary of state

      David Petraeus – the former US army general and CIA director who was prosecuted for mishandling classified information – has entered the race to become Donald Trump’s secretary of state, diplomatic sources said on Thursday.

      Petraeus resigned in November 2012 after the FBI discovered he had had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and had shared classified information with her. He eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for mishandling the information. People who have seen him recently say he is anxious to return to public life and has privately refused to rule out serving in a Trump administration.

    • You say pro-NATO, I say pro-peace

      So the NATO Secretary General’s second justification of the organisation’s continued existence is not exactly what one would call compelling. But I suppose he had to try, when Juncker’s threatened folie de grandeur that is the EU army is even less inspiring.

      So, back to President-elect Donald Trump. What will he do, faced with this mess of competing western military/security interests and Euro-bureaucrat careerists? Perhaps his US isolationist position is not so mad, bad and dangerous to know as the wailings of the western liberal press would have us believe?

      American “exceptionalism” and NATO interventionism have not exactly benefited much of the world since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps the time has indeed come for an American Commander-in-Chief who can cut deals, cut through the sabre-rattling rhetoric and, even unintentionally, make a significant contribution to world peace.

      Stranger things have happened. After all, outgoing President Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace a mere eight months after his inauguration….

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Assange ends testimony to prosecutors

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has “co-operated fully” with prosecutors questioning him over a Swedish rape allegation and hopes the case against him will now be dropped, his lawyer Jennifer Robinson says.

      But she told reporters outside Assange’s refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Tuesday that even if Swedish authorities drop the case he will still have to stay inside the embassy while a US investigation into WikiLeaks’ release of secret US government documents continues.

      In the embassy where he’s been holed up since mid-2016, the 45-year-old Australian on Tuesday finished two days of giving testimony on an allegation he raped a woman in Stockholm in 2010.

    • Why the World Needs WikiLeaks

      My organization, WikiLeaks, took a lot of heat during the run-up to the recent presidential election. We have been accused of abetting the candidacy of Donald J. Trump by publishing cryptographically authenticated information about Hillary Clinton’s campaign and its influence over the Democratic National Committee, the implication being that a news organization should have withheld accurate, newsworthy information from the public.

      The Obama Justice Department continues to pursue its six-year criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, the largest known of its kind, into the publishing of classified documents and articles about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and Mrs. Clinton’s first year as secretary of state. According to the trial testimony of one F.B.I. agent, the investigation includes several of WikiLeaks founders, owners and managers. And last month our editor, Julian Assange, who has asylum at Ecuador’s London embassy, had his internet connection severed.

    • What Will Be the Costs of Whistleblowing in Trump’s America When They Were Already Extreme Under Obama?

      It was around four in the morning when I received the phone call. “I was raided by the FBI,” said a trembling voice on the other end. “I need help.”

      I was immediately alarmed. I was in the middle of production of a highly risky investigation into the U.S. drone war, and I had gained exclusive access to film with two whistleblowers who wanted to go on the record about their experiences in the drone program. The voice on the phone belonged to one of them, and my research would later become the documentary film “National Bird.”

      When I answered the phone, I was at a veterans’ convention near Denver and had just established contact with a third whistleblower.

    • How Will Trump Deal with FOIA?

      President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that the media is incompetent, biased, and vindictive. He was also the first candidate in modern US history to refuse to release his tax returns.

      Taken together, the inbound Trump administration doesn’t look like it’s going to be particularly forthcoming or transparent with reporters. But how will his administration deal with the Freedom of Information Act, one of the most powerful tools reporters, activists, and researchers have to gain insight into the inner workings of government?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Indonesian fires exposed 69 million to ‘killer haze’

      Wildfires in Indonesia and Borneo exposed 69 million people to unhealthy air pollution and are responsible for thousands of premature deaths, new research has shown.

      The study, published today in Scientific Reports, gives the most accurate picture yet of the impact on human health of the wildfires which ripped through forest and peatland in Equatorial Asia during the autumn of 2015.

      The study used detailed observations of the haze from Singapore and Indonesia. Analysing hourly air quality data from a model at a resolution of 10km – where all previous studies have looked at daily levels at a much lower resolution – the team was able to show that a quarter of the population of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia was exposed to unhealthy air quality conditions between September and October 2015.

    • Britain ratifies Paris climate agreement

      Britain said on Thursday it had ratified the Paris Agreement, the global deal to combat climate change.

      The Paris Agreement came into force on Nov. 4 when more than 55 countries representing more than 55 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions ratified the deal.

      “The UK is ratifying the historic Paris Agreement so that we can help to accelerate global action on climate change and deliver on our commitments to create a safer, more prosperous future for us all,” Nick Hurd, Minister of State for Climate Change and Industry, said.

    • Largest bank in Norway pulls its assets in Dakota Access pipeline

      A press release from Greenpeace Thursday says the largest bank in Norway, DNB, sold its assets in the Dakota Access pipeline. They say this decision was the result of 120,000 signatures from Greenpeace Norway and others to DNB, urging the bank and other financial institutions to pull finances from the project.

  • Finance

    • EU set to ask Ukip group to repay almost £150,000 in ‘misspent funds’

      Ukip is likely to be asked to repay tens of thousands of euros by European parliament finance chiefs who have accused the party of misspending EU funds on party workers and Nigel Farage’s failed bid to win a seat in Westminster.

      The Alliance for Direct Democracy in Europe, a Ukip-dominated political vehicle, will be asked to repay €173,000 (£148,000) in misspent funds and denied a further €501,000 in EU grants for breaking European rules that ban spending EU money on national election campaigns and referendums.

    • We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail

      Let it be said at once: Trump’s victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.

      Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote.

    • Angela Merkel suggests TTIP trade deal won’t be concluded under Barack Obama’s presidency

      Angela Merkel has said the TTIP trade deal will not be completed now Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States.

      Speaking at a joint press conference with US President Barack Obama, the German Chancellor said the United States represents an important trading partner for both Germany and the European Union.

      “I’ve always come out strongly in favour of concluding a trade agreement with the United States of America,” Ms Merkel said.

      She added: “We have made progress, quite a lot of progress, but they will not be concluded now.

      “But we will keep what we have achieved so far, and I’m absolutely certain one day we will come back to what we have achieved and build on it.”

    • Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here

      The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians.

      The Bush and Clinton dynasties were destroyed by the media-saturated lure of the pseudo-populist billionaire with narcissist sensibilities and ugly, fascist proclivities. The monumental election of Trump was a desperate and xenophobic cry of human hearts for a way out from under the devastation of a disintegrating neoliberal order – a nostalgic return to an imaginary past of greatness.

      White working- and middle-class fellow citizens – out of anger and anguish – rejected the economic neglect of neoliberal policies and the self-righteous arrogance of elites. Yet these same citizens also supported a candidate who appeared to blame their social misery on minorities, and who alienated Mexican immigrants, Muslims, black people, Jews, gay people, women and China in the process.

      This lethal fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating brought neoliberalism to its knees. In short, the abysmal failure of the Democratic party to speak to the arrested mobility and escalating poverty of working people unleashed a hate-filled populism and protectionism that threaten to tear apart the fragile fiber of what is left of US democracy. And since the most explosive fault lines in present-day America are first and foremost racial, then gender, homophobic, ethnic and religious, we gird ourselves for a frightening future.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Daily Report: The Increasingly Tectonic Force of Social Media

      Social media has been in the glare since the election for its perceived harmful qualities, such as the spreading of hate speech and the false information.

      But the effect of social media on world affairs is much larger than just misinformation and mean tweets, Farhad Manjoo writes. In his new State of the Art column, he argues that social media — now collectively used by billions of people worldwide through services like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, WeChat and Weibo — has grown to a point where it is increasingly influencing the course of global events.

    • Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’

      What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common? For starters, they’re all make-believe — and invented by the same man.

      Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he’s British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. “South Park” lawsuit last year.

      But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump’s son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner’s faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google.

    • The fact fake news ‘outperformed’ real news on Facebook proves the problem is wildly out of control

      BuzzFeed is reporting that at the end of the US presidential election, the top malicious fake news stories actually outperformed the most popular legitimate news stories shared by media companies.

      According to data from a Facebook-monitoring tool, the top 20 fake news stories collectively got more engagements – shares, likes, comments – than the top 20 factually accurate news stories shared by mainstream news outlets.

    • [Older] Did Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald Use Threats and Bribery to Silence a Young Journalist?

      In retrospect, it sounds preposterous: A nationally recognized journalist publishes an article alleging a conspiracy between the Republican candidate for President of the United States and Russia, and, when his hyperbole is exposed in an email from a young journalist, allegedly attempts to intimidate and bribe that journalist in exchange for his silence. Nevertheless, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

    • Here’s Your 2016 Election Explained from 2013

      Here’s an excerpt from my book Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. I wrote the passage below in 2013. Nobody wanted to read it then, nobody thought it meant anything. Well, maybe it makes more sense now. And, yeah, I’m a little bitter about that.

      “Yep. Thirty years on the big bucket, pouring out two hundred tons of steel a day. Lookit my right arm—muscle’s twice as thick as on the left ’cause of that lever I pulled every day. I got that job right after Korea in fact. My old man sent me to see the foreman while I was still wearing my uniform.”

      “How’s it up there now? I heard the president say he’s creating more jobs, so I was considering moving up.”

      “Moving on isn’t a bad idea. I wished I had done it at your age. Hell, I wished I’d done it last month.”

      “So there’s work where you’re from?”

      “Same there as it was four years ago and four years before that. Every four years the president comes back into western Pennsylvania like a dog looking for a place to pee. He reminds us that his wife’s cousin is from some town near to ours, gets photographed at the diner if it’s still in business, and then makes those promises to us while winking at the big business donors who feed him bribes they call campaign contributions. I’m tempted to cut out the middleman and just write in ‘Goldman Sachs’ on my ballot next election.”

    • ‘Yesterday We Were Stunned, Today We Organize’ – CounterSpin special report on what comes next after Trump’s election

      So, much to come, but for this week, 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? We’ll hear from Rob Richie and Cynthia Terrell from FairVote, from author and professor Deepa Kumar, from Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, and from Patty Lovera from Food and Water Watch. They’re all coming up, but first a brief look back at recent press

    • How Trump’s ‘Chief Strategist’ Provided a ‘Platform for the Alt-Right’

      Stephen Bannon, the Trump campaign chief executive and the announced “Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President” in the Trump administration, has declared of Breitbart, the website he still heads, “We’re the platform for the alt-right.” What did he mean by that?

      Well, the alt-right, by Breitbart‘s own description, is a coalition of advocates of “scientific race differences”; people interested in “the preservation of their own tribe and its culture” who “believe that some degree of separation between peoples is necessary for a culture to be preserved”; online traffickers in racist and antisemitic stereotypes who “feel a mischievous urge to blaspheme”; and a significant fringe of hardcore, pro-Hitler neo-Nazis.

    • Neo-Liberalism Under Cover of Racism

      The first, and highly successful method is to convince people that it is not the massive appropriation of resources by the ultra-wealthy which causes their poverty, it is rather competition for the scraps with outsiders. This approach employs pandering to racism and xenophobia, and is characteristic of UKIP and Trump.

      The second approach employs the antithesis to the same end. It is to co-opt the forces marginalised by the first approach and rally them behind an “alternative” approach which is still neo-liberalism. This is identity politics which reached its apotheosis in the Clinton campaign. The Wikileaks releases of DNC and Podesta emails revealed the extreme cynicism of Clinton manipulation of ethnic group votes. Still more blatant was the promotion of the idea that Hillary being a corrupt neo-con warmonger was outweighed by the fact she was female. The notion that elevating extremely rich and privileged women already within the 1% to top positions, breaks a glass ceiling and benefits all women, is the precise feminist equivalent of trickledown theory.

      That the xenophobic strand rather than the identity politics strand won will, I predict, prove to have no impact on continued neo-liberal policies.

    • You Are Still Crying Wolf

      Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

      Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on.

    • Barack Obama on fake news: ‘We have problems’ if we can’t tell the difference

      “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” he said during a press conference in Germany.

      Since the surprise election of Donald Trump as president-elect, Facebook has battled accusations that it has failed to stem the flow of misinformation on its network and that its business model leads to users becoming divided into polarized political echo chambers.

      Obama said that we live in an age with “so much active misinformation” that is “packaged very well” and looks the same whether it’s on Facebook or on TV.

    • The Electoral College Was Created to Stop Demagogues Like Trump

      Trump promises to bring to the presidency precisely the ‘tumult and disorder’ that Hamilton warned against

      Since Nov. 9, Donald Trump has been described as our “President-elect.” But many would be shocked to learn that this term is actually legally meaningless. The Constitution sets out a specific hurdle for Trump to ascend to the presidency. And that will not happen until Dec. 19 when the members of the Electoral College meet in their respective states to vote for the President.

    • Senator Boxer Introduces Bill to Eliminate Electoral College

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • From Hate Speech To Fake News: The Content Crisis Facing Mark Zuckerberg

      Mark Zuckerberg — one of the most insightful, adept leaders in the business world — has a problem. It’s a problem he has been slow to acknowledge, even though it’s become more apparent by the day.

      Several current and former Facebook employees tell NPR there is a lot of internal turmoil about how the platform does and doesn’t censor content that users find offensive. And outside Facebook, the public is regularly confounded by the company’s decisions — around controversial posts and around fake news.

      (Did Pope Francis really endorse Donald Trump? Does Hillary Clinton really have a body double?)

    • Facebook’s Problem Is More Complicated Than Fake News

      In the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected victory, many questions have been raised about Facebook’s role in the promotion of inaccurate and highly partisan information during the presidential race and whether this fake news influenced the election’s outcome.

      A few have downplayed Facebook’s impact, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said that it is “extremely unlikely” that fake news could have swayed the election. But questions about the social network’s political significance merit more than passing attention.

    • Six Monarchs, 140 Dissidents, One Rule: Keep Your Mouth Shut

      Bahraini human rights activist Zainab al-Khawaja, known to her 47, 900 Twitter followers as @angryarabiya, faced trial in a courtroom in Manama in October 2014. The charges related to an incident two years earlier when she had ripped up a photo of Bahrain’s King Hamad in an act of protest. If the judge was expecting contrition, he was in for a shock. Al-Khawaja proceeded to pull out another photo of the king, ripped it up, and placed it in front of a bemused judge, who promptly adjourned the hearing and stomped off.

    • Why Twitter’s Alt-Right Banning Campaign Will Become The Alt-Right’s Best Recruitment Tool

      If there are two points worth hammering home on matters of free speech, they are that defenders of free speech must be willing to defend speech they don’t like and that the solution to bad speech is more good speech. I would argue that Western democracy as a whole can be defined as a political version of the Socratic Method, by which the electorate engages in public debate, constantly questioning the other side, in order to produce the most optimal thoughts. For those that value this method of discourse, it’s instantly recognized that it only works if you have opposing views. To that end, it’s imperative that we not only allow, but feverishly welcome, different points of view.

      But this kind of thinking is currently under assault in America, and from both sides. The latest example of this is Twitter’s recent decision to carpet-ban an entire slew of accounts linked to the so-called “alt-right” movement.

    • Mark Zuckerberg Continues to Miss the Point on Facebook as a Media Entity

      Zuckerberg says he “cares deeply” about the company’s fake news problem

      As critics slam Facebook for the role they believe it—and in particular its penchant for fake news stories—played in the election of Donald Trump, CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to resist any attempt to pin some of the blame on his company. But in doing so, he misses the point.

      Over the weekend, the Facebook co-founder took to the site to respond to some of those criticisms. He said he “cares deeply” about the fake news problem and wants to get it right. But he also said that he doesn’t believe fake news contributed to the election’s outcome.

    • Kim Jong Un Gets New Mean Nickname After Chinese Censors Block Fat Jokes
    • China censors search reuslts for Kim Jong Un’s ‘Fatty’ nickname
    • China clamps down on Kim Jong-un ‘fatty’ jokes
    • China Really Doesn’t Want Anyone to Call Kim Jong-Un a ‘Fatty’

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • UK Joins Russia And China In Legalizing Bulk Surveillance

      The highly-intrusive Investigatory Powers Bill has been passed by the UK’s House of Lords, and will come into force within weeks.

      The move gives the British government the power to spy on its citizens to an extent that’s virtually unprecedented anywhere in the world – only Russia and China have comparable regimes.

      It legalizes activities that the GCHQ spy agency had been illegally carrying out for years, including the bulk collection of personal communications data. It also allows both the security services and the police the power to hack into and bug electronic devices from smartphones to baby monitors.

      Meanwhile, internet and phone providers will be required to record and store for a year their customers’ phone and web activity. This will include the websites they’ve visited and the communications software they’ve used, along with every mobile app and more.

    • Your mobile phone records and home address for sale

      Corrupt insiders at offshore call centres are offering the private details of Australian customers of Optus, Telstra and Vodafone for sale to anyone prepared to pay.

      A Fairfax Media investigation can reveal Mumbai-based security firm AI Solutions is asking between $350 and $1000 in exchange for the private information, but even more if the target is an Australian “VIP, politician, police, [or] celebrity”.

    • Chinese tourist town uses face recognition as an entry pass

      Who needs tickets when you have a face? From today, the ticketed tourist town of Wuzhen in China is using face-recognition technology to identify people staying in its hotels and to act as their entry pass through the gates of the attraction.

      The system, which is expected to process 5000 visitors a day, has been created by web giant Baidu – often referred to as the “Chinese Google”.

      Wuzhen is a historic town that has been turned into a tourist attraction with museums, tours and traditional crafts. When people check in to hotels in the tourist area, they will now have their pictures taken and uploaded to a central database. If they leave and re-enter the town, the face-recognition software will check that they are actually a guest of a hotel there before allowing them back in.

    • UN privacy chief: UK surveillance bill is ‘worse than scary’

      Joseph Cannataci, the UN’s special rapporteur on privacy, attacked the government’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill, saying he had never seen evidence that mass surveillance works. He also accused MPs of leading an “absolute offensive” and an “orchestrated” media campaign to distort the debate and take hold of new powers.

      The comments came during a live streamed keynote presentation at the Internet Governance Forum in Brazil, where leading experts from around the world have gathered to discuss the future of the internet and web policy.

      In a wide-ranging presentation and discussion panel Cannataci — who has previously said the UK’s digital surveillance is similar to George Orwell’s 1984 — discussed the state of surveillance and privacy around the world. Pausing to briefly talk about the Home Office’s new bill, but without going deeply into detail, Cannataci said: “The snoopers’ charter in the UK is just a bit worse than scary, isn’t it.”

    • Google Unleashes its Machine Learning Group [Ed: Human learning at Google (spying, dossiers, classification, surveillance etc.) as “Machine Learning” ‘group’]
    • Companies Keep Asking Us To Track You; We’d Rather You Be Protected From Tracking
    • James Clapper, who led America’s digital mass surveillance efforts, has resigned
    • Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Resigns
    • James Clapper, the US intelligence chief, resigns
    • James Clapper, of NSA-scandal fame, is stepping down
    • America’s Top Spy Talks Snowden Leaks and Our Ominous Future

      Public appearances don’t come easily to James Clapper, the United States director of national intelligence. America’s top spy is a 75-year-old self-described geezer who speaks in a low, guttural growl; his physical appearance—muscular and bald—recalls an aging biker who has reluctantly accepted life in a suit. Clapper especially hates appearing on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress wait to ambush him and play what he calls “stump the chump.” As he says, “I rank testimony—particularly in the open—right up there with root canals and folding fitted sheets.”

    • Lawmakers Want To Halt Changes That Would Allow Trump Wider Hacking Abilities

      A group of senators are making a last-ditch effort to delay proposed changes to a federal rule that would greatly expand the government current hacking powers.

      The Review the Rule Act would delay the proposed changes to Rule 41, officially known as the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41, from going into effect until July 1, 2017. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court approved proposed changes to Rule 41, giving Congress until Dec. 1 to modify, reject, or postpone the changes established by the court before they become law.

      Broadly speaking, Rule 41 deals with circumstances in which the government is allowed to tap into citizen’s computers.

      The bipartisan group backing the bill includes Democratic Senators Chris Coons, Steve Daines, Ron Wyden, and Al Franken and Republican Senator Mike Lee, together with Representatives John Conyers Jr., and Ted Poe, a Democrat and Republican respectively.

    • Britain has passed the ‘most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy’

      The new law, dubbed the “snoopers’ charter”, was introduced by then-home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and took two attempts to get passed into law following breakdowns in the previous coalition government.

      Four years and a general election later — May is now prime minister — the bill was finalized and passed on Wednesday by both parliamentary houses.

      But civil liberties groups have long criticized the bill, with some arguing that the law will let the UK government “document everything we do online”.

      It’s no wonder, because it basically does.

      The law will force internet providers to record every internet customer’s top-level web history in real-time for up to a year, which can be accessed by numerous government departments; force companies to decrypt data on demand — though the government has never been that clear on exactly how it forces foreign firms to do that that; and even disclose any new security features in products before they launch.

    • Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden threatens to filibuster if Trump goes after encryption

      Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who was re-elected last week, told VICE News in an exclusive interview that he is willing to cross the aisle to work with President-elect Donald Trump, but that he is also poised for battle on civil liberties.

      Wyden is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and has gone up against the NSA and the CIA. He thinks national security will play a prominent role in the Trump administration. And even though his party is in the minority in Congress, he intends to hold Trump accountable should the president try to weaken protections surrounding encryption.

    • Privacy is the only working antidote against echo chambers

      Echo chambers are causing real harm to developing a coherent discourse in any subject, but those echo chambers all depend on identity. Replace the identity with privacy, and the echo chamber cannot function, instead allowing for a diverse range of unidentified opinions and viewpoints.

      The term “echo chamber” has gotten a revival lately, and especially after the recent US presidential election: the dangers of only speaking to, and hearing, likeminded people – being in an “echo chamber” where your own opinions are echoed back at you. Facebook is cited as one of the worst echo-chamber environments, and for good reason.

      Wall Street Journal’s “Blue Feed, Red Feed” demonstration really highlights how bad the phenomenon is: you only see news stories that reinforce your existing opinions. (If you haven’t seen the demo, it’s worth seeing.) Since Facebook is a for-profit company, it tries to keep us happy, and part of keeping us happy is confirming that we’re right about basically everything we believe.

    • Why the Investigatory Powers Act is a privacy disaster waiting to happen

      On Thursday, the Investigatory Powers Bill, colloquially known as the Snoopers’ Charter, completed its final stage and is set to become law. The legislative process began in March of this year, and has been rather overshadowed by the Brexit referendum and its shambolic aftermath. As a result, the UK government has had a comparatively easy ride over what are some of the most extreme surveillance powers in the world.

    • Snooper’s Charter is set to become law: how the Investigatory Powers Bill will affect you

      After more than 12 months of debate, jostling and a healthy dose of criticism, the United Kingdom’s new surveillance regime is set to become law.

      Both the House of Lords and House of Commons have now passed the Investigatory Powers Bill – the biggest overhaul of surveillance powers for more than a decade.

      Now the bill has been passed by both of these official bodies, it is almost law. Before it officially is adopted, however, it will need to receive Royal Assent, which is likely to be given before the end of 2016 (to match the government’s intentions and ahead of existing surveillance laws expiring).

    • Burner Phones and Email Encryption: Protecting Documentary Sources in a Surveillance State

      I bought a burner phone in cash and felt like a criminal. Earlier, as I was spreading the dollar bills on the counter, I asked myself, “Am I completely paranoid?” It was not the first time during the production of my drone warfare documentary, National Bird, that this thought crossed my mind, and it was certainly not the last.

      But I was not paranoid – and neither were the protagonists of my film, three whistleblowers who had worked in the U.S. drone program with top-secret clearances. Less than 24 hours prior to my phone purchase, one of them had had their home raided by the FBI and was now being investigated for espionage. I needed to contact my lawyer, an expert on First Amendment rights, and given the recent turn of events, using my own phone did not seem like a good idea.

      When I started my research for National Bird, I knew I was entering dangerous territory loaded with sensitive information. My goal for the film was to speak to the people directly impacted by the drone war, not to some pundits in suits in front of bookshelves. I wanted to gain access to the people on the inside who were fighting this high-tech war, and to the victims and survivors in the target countries. This was a risky project from the outset and it became necessary to work with lawyers to reduce the risks for everyone involved.

    • iPhone call history can be extracted from an iCloud account

      APPLE USERS are having their call records stored in the company’s iCloud servers in a way that can be extracted by third parties.

      Russian software house ElcomSoft has revealed that it has found a way to extract the data in near real time, for anyone targeting a phone with iOS 9 or above.

      The company has released an app called ElcomSoft Phone Breaker 6.20, capable of performing its nefarious mischief even on a locked, PIN-protected phone.

    • Apple logs iPhone, iMessage and FaceTime calls in iCloud

      Despite Apples’ apparent strong stance on security, its user’s iCloud Drives are frequently accessed by legal authorities.

      Even in the now famous case of the case of the San Bernardino shooter, Apple revealed it had already handed over access to the shooters iCloud. That data includes email logs and content, text messages, photos, documents, contacts, calendars, bookmarks and iOS device backups.

    • Apple Uploading Call Data, Including From Third-Party Call Apps, To Users’ iCloud Accounts

      Plain vanilla call records aren’t that difficult to obtain. They’ve long been considered third-party records and can be obtained without a warrant. The Intercept quotes a former FBI agent as saying this is a “boon” for law enforcement because the four-month retention period is longer than most service providers’.

      That doesn’t seem to be correct at all. The EFF’s Nate Cardozo points out that most service providers retain call logs for at least a year, with some retaining records for as long as a decade. Kim Zetter, who wrote the piece for The Intercept, believes it might be a misunderstanding. Providers may retain content (messages, etc.) for a shorter time frame than the four months of records Apple automatically uploads, but former agent Robert Osgood (quoted in The Intercept’s piece) clearly states he’s referring to call logs.

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Christians sentenced to 80 lashes by Sharia court for drinking communion wine

      Yaser Mosibzadeh, Saheb Fadayee and Mohammed Reza Omidi will be flogged in public after being arrested at a house church gathering in Rasht, Iran, earlier this year.

      The trio spent weeks in prison before finally being released on bail, but will now be subjected to the cruel and degrading punishment after being found guilty by Islamist judges.

      Security agents also raided the home of their pastor Yousef Nadarkhani and his wife Fatemeh Pasandideh and arrested them at the same time, but they were not detained.

    • Amnesty criticises Indonesia for blasphemy probe against Governor Ahok

      Amnesty International has asked Indonesia to drop the blasphemy probe against Jakarta’s Chinese Christian Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama.

      Ahok was in the limelight in the last few weeks after hardline Islamist organisations demanded his ouster and held a rally in capital Jakarta that turned violent.

    • Briton who reported rape in Dubai could face jail for extramarital sex

      A British woman who reported being raped by two men is “petrified” after being told she faces jail in Dubai for extramarital sex.

      The 25-year-old tourist claimed she was attacked by two men while on holiday in the United Arab Emirates and reported the incident to police.

      But officers then charged the professional from Cheshire with extramarital sex and, despite being bailed, she is not allowed to leave the country. Her passport has been confiscated and UK-based UAE legal experts Detained in Dubai said she could face a prison sentence if found guilty.

      The family of the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, have set up fundraising pages online to raise money to cover her legal costs. She is currently residing in a safe house.

      The woman’s father wrote online that his daughter had met the two men in her hotel who raped her. He claims the alleged attack was filmed. He added: “She is stranded, is not allowed to leave the country, and is alone scared, and in a dreadful situation, as you can imagine.”

    • Turnkey Tyranny: Jamming the Lock on the Way Out

      For six years—from 2006 to 2013—I worked inside the intelligence community to enforce laws and policies that protect privacy and civil liberties. My tenure spanned the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The surveillance policies of both administrations enlarged the powers of the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies and put considerable strain on privacy.

      Edward Snowden’s disclosures of mass surveillance programs, beginning in 2013, led to a course correction in the late Obama years. Changes included a substantial transparency drive, limits on signals intelligence collection that apply to foreigners, and reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that include the end of bulk collection of metadata under that law. I have argued that the Snowden reforms forced the NSA to become “more transparent, more accountable, more protective of privacy—and more effective.”

      Still, we delude ourselves if we think they have made the NSA tyrant-proof. In Snowden’s first interview from Hong Kong, warned against “turnkey tyranny.” One day, he said, “a new leader will be elected” and “they’ll find the switch.” With Donald Trump’s election, it is important that this warning not be proved prophetic. While the United States has a robust system of intelligence oversight—the strongest in the world—it still largely depends on the good faith of Executive Branch officials.

    • Trump’s Torture Promise Hits A Deep Nerve For The People Who Worked To Ban It

      President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to bring back enhanced interrogation techniques — including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” — is rattling the tight-knit community of government officials and activists who have worked for a decade to forbid it.

      “I cannot believe we are honestly having this convo,” one anti-torture advocate, who has helped shape interrogation policy during Obama’s tenure, wrote to BuzzFeed News in an email. “This is so fucking depressing.”

      Trump first promised back in February, months before he won the Republican nomination, that he would revive the use of Bush-era interrogation tactics — like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and rectal feeding — that have since been outlawed and labeled torture. After his win, Republican lawmakers are coming out of the woodwork and endorsing his plan. Sen. Tom Cotton said Wednesday night that he had faith in Mr. Trump to “make those tough calls” to bring back waterboarding.

      For this small community — made up of a smattering of human rights groups, activists and former national security officials — that rhetoric threatens to invalidate nearly a decade of anti-torture efforts and void the marginal, but significant, successes under the Obama administration. While Obama has been fiercely criticized for failing to prosecute Bush-era officials for the CIA’s now-defunct torture program and for aiding the CIA’s obfuscation on the issue, there has been slow, but significant effort to close off pathways for the US to torture in the future, including policies that have passed through Congress.

    • Chelsea Manning Formally Petitions Obama to Commute Her Sentence

      Last week, Chelsea Manning formally petitioned President Obama for clemency, asking him to reduce the remainder of her 35-year sentence to time served. According to the New York Times, Manning, who pleaded guilty in 2010, has been imprisoned for longer than any other whistleblower in American history.

      In a statement accompanying the petition, a copy of which was provided to Jezebel, Manning said she took “full and complete responsibility” for leaking the secret military and diplomatic documents. “I have never made any excuses for what I did. I pleaded guilty without the protection of a plea agreement because I believed the military justice system would understand my motivation for the disclosure and sentence me fairly. I was wrong.”

    • The United Kingdom is a Malign Entity that Must Be Broken – Indefensible Chagos Decision

      I have no doubt the majority of people in the UK would be horrified by the deportation of the Chagos Islanders. But the entire political and economic structure of the UK state is such that it is inevitably a satrap to United states Crimes, be it in Diego Garcia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or elsewhere. The only remedy is for the United Kingdom and its worldwide imperial pretensions to be ended as a state. I express this view succinctly here:

    • UK Home Secretary Agrees To Turn Over Accused Hacker Lauri Love To US Government

      Accused hacker Lauri Love is headed to the United States to face prosecution, thanks to an order signed by UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd. The Home Office felt that — after “all things” were “considered” — the best place for an Asberger’s sufferer with suicidal tendencies is the US prison system, most likely segregated from the general population.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Music torrent site What.cd has been shut down

        What.cd, an invite-only music torrent website first launched in 2007, has been shut down after a raid by French authorities. The private tracker offered free (and often illegal) access to a massive, deeply thorough collection of music and was popular among audiophiles for its strict rules around quality and file formats. The site was created after the shutdown of another well-known torrent website, Oink, which operated between 2004 and 2007. Though its primary focus was music sharing, What.cd also permitted torrents of computer software, ebooks, and other content.

      • World’s largest music torrent site goes dark, disputes report about server seizure

        It took nearly 10 years, but authorities have finally targeted and taken down What.cd, which had risen to become the Internet’s largest invite-only, music-trading torrent site.

        The news was confirmed by the tracker’s official Twitter account on Thursday via two posts: “We are not likely to return any time soon in our current form. All site and user data has been destroyed. So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

      • BREIN’s New Torrent Piracy Crackdown Results in First Settlement

        Last year, Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN announced a broad crackdown on torrent pirates, which resulted in the first settlement this week. The person in question paid 4,800 euros for sharing 12 TV-show episodes. According to BREIN, hundreds of thousands of pirates are now at risk of receiving similar treatment.

      • Mega Compromised by Hackers (Updated)

        Mega, the cloud storage site originally founded by Kim Dotcom, was compromised by hackers this week. Outsiders gained access to part of the site’s infrastructure and released some source code, claiming to have user details as well. Mega confirmed the hack of their seperate blog/help centre system but says that no user data was compromised

11.17.16

Links 17/11/2016: OpenSUSE Leap 42.2, Microsoft E.E.E. on Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • What’s important in open source today

    Jono mentioned that it’s his goal in life to “understand every nuance of how we build predicable, productive, and accessible communities.” He says we are surrounded by communities. We have Wikipedia, the maker movement, and the public becoming the VC for crowdfunding. The data backs up this trend. Community growth participation is growing across industries. Using a commercial software methodology, it would cost over $10 billion to build Wikipedia and/or Fedora. Open source is not just a passing phase.

  • How to Avoid Burnout Managing an Open Source Project

    Regardless of where you work in the stack, if you work with open source software, there’s likely been a time when you faced burnout and other unhealthy side effects related to your work on open source projects. A few of the talks at OSCON Europe addressed this darker side of working in open source head-on.

  • Netflix’s Chaos Monkey Open Cloud Utility is Worth A Look

    Not many organizations have the cloud expertise that Netflix has, and it may come as a surprise to some people to learn that Netflix regularly open sources key, tested and hardened cloud tools that it has used for years. We’ve reported on Netflix open sourcing a series of interesting “Monkey” cloud tools as part of its “simian army,” which it has deployed as a series satellite utilities orbiting its central cloud platform.

    Netflix previously released Chaos Monkey, a utility that improves the resiliency of Software as a Service by randomly choosing to turn off servers and containers at optimized times. Then, Netflix announced the upgrade of Chaos Monkey, and Chaos Monkey 2.0 is now on github. Now, in an interview with infoQ, Netflix Engineer Lorin Hochstein weighs in on what you can get out of this tool.

  • Google Collects Open Artificial Intelligence Demos, Invites You to Contribute
  • Why design and marketing matter and what to do about it

    Rachel Nabors started off the second morning of All Things Open with a great talk about the need for designers in open source.

  • How to make your own ‘unexpected’ number generator

    I don’t generally use word processors or WYSIWYG applications, because they all tend to assume that you’re designing for a single output. However, for this project I was designing for a specific output; I wanted to produce a file that would be printable on a single US Letter and A4 sheet of paper, which would then be folded into a PocketMod, and carried in one’s wallet, or used as a bookmark in a gaming book. Having used it for professional print work at a former job and for some community conferences, I knew that Scribus was the tool for the job.

  • ARK Announces Official Open Source Release of ARK Blockchain Code on GitHub

    This is a paid press relase. CoinTelegraph does not endorse and is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy, quality, advertising, products or other materials on this page. Readers should do their own research before taking any actions related to the company. CoinTelegraph is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in the press release.

  • An introduction to open source GIS – Part I

    Geospatial information system (GIS) solutions make sense of location-aware data, turning it into usable insights in industries as diverse as energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, finance, and all levels of government

  • ReactOS 0.4.3 Released

    The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of another incremental update, version 0.4.3. This would be fourth such release the project has made this year, an indication we hope of the steady progress that we have made. Approximately 342 issues were resolved since the release of 0.4.2, with the oldest dating all the way back to 2006 involving text alignment.

  • ReactOS 0.4.3 Released, Fixes Over 300 Issues

    ReactOS 0.4.3 is now available as the newest version of this open-source OS that seeks to re-implement the interfaces of Windows.

    As described earlier, ReactOS 0.4.3 has a ton of changes. ReactOS 0.4.3 has many fixes/improvements to its kernel, less crashes in the Win32 subsystem, file-system fixes, a USB audio driver has been started, a basic filter driver added, TCP/IP fixes, improvements to kernel-mode DLLs, a rewritten WinSock 2 DLL, and much more.

  • ReactOS 0.4.3 Officially Released with New Winsock Library, over 340 Bug Fixes

    Today, November 16, 2016, the development team behind the ReactOS free and open-source computer operating system designed to be compatible with Windows applications and drivers, announced the release of ReactOS 0.4.3.

  • How to Choose Between Closed-Source and Open-Source Software

    When it comes to commercial and open source tools (i.e., paid and free software) the debate as to which category of software is better continues, leaving egos, careers, and forums in ruins. I personally think that it’s impossible to definitively prove that one class of software is the best for every situation. The best source code scanning tool in the world may not do a thing for you if it doesn’t run against your code.

  • Events

    • Blender enthusiasts gather for the 15th annual conference

      This year marks the 15th Blender Conference, held in Amsterdam around the last weekend of October every year. I’ve attended quite a few of these conferences, and each year feels better than the one before. If you’ve never attended the Blender Conference, allow me to set things up for you: By open source conference standards, it’s a pretty small event. But for events focused on a single open source program, the Blender Conference is pretty impressive. I think attendance this year clocked in right around 300 people, and tickets were sold out more than a month in advance.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Back End

    • Has Linux got OpenStack licked? The Vanilla ‘Plus’ strategy

      No man is an island, nor is OpenStack removed from the fates of two of its – until recently – best-known names.

      Hewlett-Packard Enterprise was once the largest single contributor to OpenStack. Now, HPE is getting rid of its OpenStack engineers as it turns over responsibility for its OpenStack work to MicroFocus under a deal announced in September.

      The ascent of OpenStack-consulting wunderkind Mirantis experienced a hiccup with its decision to unload 100 OpenStackers and reallocate another 100. Mirantis is understood to have let go devs working on the Solum platform-as-a-service and Savanna Hadoop-as-a-service projects it started in 2013.

  • Education

    • Moodle: An Open Source Community To Protect, Improve And Sustainably Benefit From

      Open Source communities are as vibrant as the participants within them – as with any community, your return is proportional to your investment. An example of someone who is intuitively aware of this is Bas Brands. In an interview for Moodlerooms’ E-Learn Magazine, he tells his experience of sustaining a lifelong relationship with Moodle’s Open Source community, while makes a name for himself and a learning company with alluring prospects.

  • Funding

    • Sauce Labs Raises $70M for Application Testing

      Open-source based testing vendor looks to accelerate its business with new funding.

      Before any company deploys any web or mobile app, it needs to test, and that’s where Sauce Labs fits in. Sauce Labs announced on November 15 that it has raised a $70 million series E round of funding. The new capital will be used to help Sauce Labs expands its go-to-market and engineering efforts.

      The new round of funding was led by Centerview Capital Technology, IVP and Adams Street Partners. Total funding to date for Sauce Labs now stands at $101 million.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • NVIDIA GCC Backend Gets Ready For OpenMP Offloading

      While GCC 7 feature development is officially over, one of the late patches to land for GCC 7.1 in trunk are improvements to the NVIDIA NVPTX back-end.

      The big code that landed today in GCC are all of the prerequisites for supporting OpenMP offloading with the NVPTX back-end. PTX is the IR used in NVIDIA’s CUDA that is then consumed by the proprietary graphics driver for converting this representation into the actual GPU machine code. The NVPTX back-end has been part of GCC for a while now as part of OpenACC offloading and now the recent focus on OpenMP offloading.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing/Legal

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • EFSA models transparency with open source ‘Knowledge Junction’

        The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has made all its models from the last 15 years available on an open source platform called the Knowledge Junction, which also encourages external submissions of data, images and videos that could go on to be used by EFSA in its risk assessments.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Editorial: Groups make Strides with open source textbooks

        With college being as expensive as it is, the high price of textbooks has always been a problem for students. Books can increase the cost of college by thousands of dollars, which can be troublesome for those already struggling to make ends meet. However, groups on campus are making efforts to alleviate this problem and make affordable textbooks a reality. The UConn bookstore recently donated $30,000 towards addressing this concern. In addition, the Undergraduate Student Government has been working along with UConnPIRG to provide open source textbooks for the student body.

        The first major initiative was undertaken with chemistry professor Dr. Edward Neth, who teaches CHEM 1124, 1125 and 1126. Working with a $20,000 donation from the student government, Neth edited an existing open access textbook and adapted it for his classes. Other chemistry professors have begun using open source textbooks as well, and this has already saved students thousands of dollars.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Cypress Has Begun Publishing Broadcom Datasheets

        Earlier this summer Cypress semiconductor acquired Broadcom’s wireless “Internet of Things” business. With that associated IP, Cypress has begun making public NDA-free data-sheets on associated chipsets.

  • Programming/Development

    • Farewell to Rob Collins

      We would like to share with you the sad news, that Rob Collins has passed away earlier this month, on November 2nd, after a short but intense illness.

      Many of you may know Rob from the sponsored massage sessions he regularly ran at EuroPython in recent years and which he continued to develop, taking them from a single man setup (single threaded process) to a group of people setup by giving workshops (multiprocessing) and later on by passing on his skills to more leaders (removing the GIL) to spread wellness and kindness throughout our conference series.

    • Examining ValueObjects

      When programming, I often find it’s useful to represent things as a compound. A 2D coordinate consists of an x value and y value. An amount of money consists of a number and a currency. A date range consists of start and end dates, which themselves can be compounds of year, month, and day.

      As I do this, I run into the question of whether two compound objects are the same. If I have two point objects that both represent the Cartesian coordinates of (2,3), it makes sense to treat them as equal. Objects that are equal due to the value of their properties, in this case their x and y coordinates, are called value objects.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Touch Bar MacBook Pro teardown finds some unpleasant surprises [Updated]

      Apple is selling two new computers that it’s calling MacBook Pros: one model without the new Touch Bar and one model with a Touch Bar. But according to a teardown of the Touch Bar model by iFixit, the differences don’t stop there. The Touch Bar has an entirely different motherboard, cooling system, and internal layout. Unfortunately some of those changes make it even more difficult to repair than its cousin.

      The Touch Bar MacBook Pro has a much larger cooling system than the non-Touch Bar model—it uses two fans instead of one, and the symmetrical and vaguely mustache-shaped logic board wraps around both of them. The odd layout (plus the need to make additional room for extra chips like the Apple T1 and the second Thunderbolt 3 controller) leaves less room for other things, and as a result Apple has soldered the SSD to the motherboard in the Touch Bar MacBook Pros, much as it has in the 12-inch MacBook.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Panel Explores Relation Between Plant Breeders’ Convention And Plant Treaty

      When countries belong to several international instruments, some aspects of those instruments may run contradictory to one another. A symposium held recently by the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) sought to explore the interrelations between the convention and the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Farmers’ rights lie at the intersection of the two treaties and while some find the treaties complementary, some others view them as contradictory on farmers’ rights. Meanwhile, farmers themselves have been blocked from participating in deliberations.

  • Security

    • Evolution of the SSL and TLS protocols

      The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol is undoubtedly the most widely used protocol on the Internet today. If you have ever done an online banking transaction, visited a social networking website, or checked your email, you have most likely used TLS. Apart from wrapping the plain text HTTP protocol with cryptographic goodness, other lower level protocols like SMTP and FTP can also use TLS to ensure that all the data between client and server is inaccessible to attackers in between. This article takes a brief look at the evolution of the protocol and discusses why it was necessary to make changes to it.

    • Press the Enter Key For 70 Seconds To Bypass Linux Disk Encryption Authentication
    • How to fix the Cryptsetup vulnerability in Linux

      Linux enjoys a level of security that most platforms cannot touch. That does not, in any way, mean it is perfect. In fact, over the last couple of years a number of really ugly vulnerabilities have been found — and very quickly patched. Enough time has passed since Heartbleed for those that do to find yet another security issue.

    • Get root on Linux: learn the secret password
    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • The Web-Shaking Mirai Botnet Is Splintering—But Also Evolving

      Over the last few weeks, a series of powerful hacker attacks powered by the malware known as Mirai have used botnets created of internet-connected devices to clobber targets ranging from the internet backbone company Dyn to the French internet service provider OVH. And just when it seemed that Mirai might be losing steam, new evidence shows that it’s still dangerous—and even evolving.

      Researchers following Mirai say that while the number of daily assaults dipped briefly, they’re now observing development in the Mirai malware itself that seems designed to allow it to infect more of the vulnerable routers, DVRs and other internet-of-things (IoT) gadgets it’s hijacked to power its streams of malicious traffic. That progression could actually increase the total population available to the botnet, they warn, potentially giving it more total compute power to draw on.

      “There was an idea that maybe the bots would die off or darken over time, but I think what we are seeing is Mirai evolve,” says John Costello, a senior analyst at the security intelligence firm Flashpoint. “People are really being creative and finding new ways to infect devices that weren’t susceptible previously. Mirai is not going away.”

    • This $5 Device Can Hack Your Locked Computer In One Minute

      Next time you go out for lunch and leave your computer unattended at the office, be careful. A new tool makes it almost trivial for criminals to log onto websites as if they were you, and get access to your network router, allowing them to launch other types of attacks.

      Hackers and security researchers have long found ways to hack into computers left alone. But the new $5 tool called PoisonTap, created by the well-known hacker and developer Samy Kamkar, can even break into password-protected computers, as long as there’s a browser open in the background.Kamkar explained how it works in a blog post published on Wednesday.

    • Wickedly Clever USB Stick Installs a Backdoor on Locked PCs

      You probably know by now that plugging a random USB into your PC is the digital equivalent of swallowing a pill handed to you by a stranger on the New York subway. But serial hacker Samy Kamkar‘s latest invention may make you think of your computer’s USB ports themselves as unpatchable vulnerabilities—ones that open your network to any hacker who can get momentary access to them, even when your computer is locked.

    • How does your encrypted Linux system respond to the Cryptsetup bug?

      In all three case, the encrypted system partition is still encrypted, so you data is still save. However, as detailed in the bug report, unencrypted partitions, like ones mounted at /boot and /boot/efi (on UEFI systems) might still be open for exploitation. But how far can an attacker go on such system, when the system partition is still encrypted? Not far, I hope.

      A bug always has a solution, and in this case, the authors provided an easy-to-apply workaround. I’ve expanded on it a bit in the code block below. If after applying the workaround you discover that it does not work, welcome to the club. It didn’t work on all the encrypted systems I applied it on – Ubuntu 16.10, Manjaro 16.10, and Fedora Rawhide. By the way, all three distributions were running either Cryptsetup 1.7.2 or 1.7.3.

    • Holding down the Enter key can smash through Linux’s defenses
    • 7 open source security predictions for 2017

      Everyone uses open source. It’s found in around 95 per cent of applications and it’s easy to understand why. Open source’s value in reducing development costs, in freeing internal developers to work on higher-order tasks, and in accelerating time to market is undeniable.

      The rapid adoption of open source has outpaced the implementation of effective open source management and security practices. In the annual ‘Future of Open Source Survey’ conducted earlier this year by Black Duck, nearly half of respondents said they had no formal processes to track their open source, and half reported that no one has responsibility for identifying known vulnerabilities and tracking remediation.

      The flip side of the open source coin is that if you’re using open source, the chances are good that you’re also including vulnerabilities known to the world at large. Since 2014, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has reported over 8,000 new vulnerabilities in open source software.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Vladimir Putin orders Russia to withdraw support for International Court amid calls for Syria air strikes investigation

      Vladimir Putin has signed an order to have Russia withdrawn from the International Criminal Court (ICC) amid calls for his military to be referred over air strikes backing President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the annexation of Crimea.

      The President instructed Russia’s foreign ministry to notify the United Nations of the country’s refusal to be subject to the body’s activity on Wednesday, following the same move by Gambia, South Africa and Burundi.

    • Anifah to attend emergency OIC meeting on Saudi Arabia missile attacks

      A Malaysian delegation led by Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman will be attending the Emergency Meeting of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers to be held in Makkah, Saudi Arabia tomorrow (Nov 17).

      The Foreign Ministry said the Yemeni Houthi missile attacks on Saudi Arabia on Oct 9 and 27 was up for discussion in the Emergency Meeting.

      “Malaysia’s participation at this meeting is an affirmation of its solidarity with Saudi Arabia in the wake of the missile attacks.

      “Malaysia hopes that the ongoing conflict in the region will be resolved through peaceful means,” the ministry said in a statement today.

    • Netanyahu Advances Submarine Deal – and His Lawyer Represents the Germans Behind It
    • Damn the torpedoes
    • Report: Netanyahu’s personal lawyer said to be behind German submarine deal
    • NSA undoes media spin on submarines
    • Iran deal critics to Trump: Please don’t rip it up

      President-elect Donald Trump spent much of his campaign railing against the Iran nuclear deal, even raising the possibility of scrapping the agreement immediately upon taking office.

      But many of the deal’s most ardent critics are now saying: “Slow down.”

      As the reality of Donald Trump’s White House win sinks in among nuclear deal opponents, some are insisting that pulling out of the agreement is unwise. Instead, they say, Trump should step up enforcement of the deal, look for ways to renegotiate it, and pursue measures to punish Iran for its non-nuclear misbehavior. Such a multi-pronged, get-tough approach may even give Trump cover to fend off any criticism he may get for keeping the deal.

    • Trump could face a nuclear decision soon

      I was the former nuclear missile launch officer who in October appeared in a TV advertisement for Hillary Clinton, saying: “The thought of Donald Trump with nuclear weapons scares me to death. It should scare everyone.” The ad featured various quotes from Trump’s campaign rallies and interviews, in which he says, among other things: “I would bomb the shit out of ’em,” “I wanna be unpredictable,” and “I love war.” As I walked through a nuclear missile launch center in the ad, I explained that “self-control may be all that keeps these missiles from firing.”

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Guy FOIAs NSA for Area 51 Docs, Finds Diner

      Area 51 will probably always be a part of science folklore, even if the truth about the legendary site is probably much more boring than many anticipate.

      Turns out, when the intelligence community is talking about Area 51, it’s actually referring to a military dining facility, according to years long Freedom of Information Act request with the NSA.

      “3 years to declassify Area 51 Intellipedia entry—and I discover it’s a dining hall at [Fort] Bliss?” the owner of The Black Vault, an online depository of FOIA requests, tweeted on Tuesday.

    • WIPO To Use Creative Commons Licences For All Of Its Publications

      The UN World Intellectual Property Organization, the foremost international body for intellectual property rights, today announced that it will make all of its publications available under Creative Commons licences – which said it helped to develop along with other organisations. The move, made along with a wide range of other major international organisations, is an effort to make its publications as widely accessible as possible, an indirect nod to the limiting nature of copyright.

    • WIPO study shows growth of women inventors [Ed: way to distract from WIPO’s horrible abuse of women and men]

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Opponents of Dakota oil pipeline protest across USA

      Opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline protested in Canada and cities around the USA on Tuesday, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.

      Tuesday was recognized as a “Day of Action” by opponents of the 1,172-mile, 30-inch diameter underground pipeline planned to deliver crude oil from production areas in North Dakota to Patoka, Ill. The pipeline would cross through land considered sacred by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and environmentalists worry about how the pipeline might affect water quality.

      Former Democratic presidential candidate and independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders joined demonstrators outside the White House on Tuesday evening. In a tweet, he encouraged President Obama to “stop this pipeline anyway you can. Declare Standing Rock a national monument.”

    • Trump Has Declared Climate War. But My Generation Will Win.

      Donald J. Trump’s positions on climate change amount to a declaration of war on young people like me. But millennials have a stronger position in this fight than it may first appear.

      There is no way to sugarcoat the consequences of what happened on Election Day. Mr. Trump is a disaster for the planet. His plan to “cancel” America’s adherence to the Paris climate agreement and accelerate fossil fuel production threatens to destroy global momentum on climate change. At the international climate talks now taking place in Marrakesh, Morocco, American environmentalists cried upon learning of Mr. Trump’s victory.

      “Without U.S. action to reduce emissions and U.S. diplomatic leadership, implementation of Paris will surely slow,” Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton, told The Associated Press. Keeping the increase in global warming to below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which most scientists believe is the tipping point for catastrophic changes to the earth’s natural systems, “would become impossible,” Professor Oppenheimer said.

    • Are We All Screwed If the US Leaves the Paris Climate Agreement?

      The Paris climate agreement, a historic international treaty to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, has only been in effect for 12 days. But if President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his campaign promise to “cancel” the agreement, America’s participation in the pact could be halted before it begins.

      In the wake of the election, there’s been a lot of speculation as to what could happen if the US reneges on their promise. Like all presidents before him, not everything Trump promised on the campaign trail will come to pass. But when a man who has said climate change is a hoax created by the Chinese government (a comment he later said was a joke) is elected to the White House, you might want to take his stated intentions on a major climate agreement seriously.

    • Saudi Arabia And Russia To Meet Ahead Of OPEC Meeting

      Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih and his Russian counterpart Alexander Novak are said to be heading to Qatar later this week for an unscheduled meeting, according to industry sources quoted by Reuters. The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) is meeting in Doha, and though OPEC’s de factor leader Saudi Arabia is not a member of the gas forum, OPEC’s Algeria, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, the UAE, and Venezuela are.

      According to Reuters sources who had spoken on the condition of anonymity, the Saudi minister was expected to meet other OPEC ministers, and maybe Russia’s Novak, this coming Friday.

    • Saudi Arabia Warns Trump Not To Block Oil Imports

      Saudi Arabia has had a bad week: the kingdom, having spent tens of millions in “donations” to fund not only the Clinton Foundation which is now irrelevant, but also allegedly to sponsor 20% of Hillary’s presidential campaign, has suddenly found itself with no “influence” to request in exchange for its “generosity.” Instead, it is forced to engage in something it loathes: open diplomacy.

      As a result, its first attempt at engaging with the US president-elect, amounts to what is effectively a thinly veiled threat wrapped as a warning. As the FT reports, “Saudi Arabia has warned Donald Trump that the incoming US president will risk the health of his country’s economy if he acts on his election promises to block oil imports.”

    • Oil Fades After Iraq, Iran And Nigeria Oil Ministers All Decide To Skip OPEC Doha Meeting

      In yet another sign that behind the frequently blasted OPEC headlines meant to suggest a sense of OPEC unity yet which do nothing more than incite a short squeeze (as even Morgan Stanley has now admitted), there is far less cohesion, moments ago we learned that Nigeria’s Oil minister Emmanuel Kachikwu is the latest to skip this week’s Doha meeting scheduled for November 17 and 18. Earlier today we found that Iraq’s oil minister would likewise bypass the energy talks this week in Qatar, where rival producer Saudi Arabia plans to hold talks with Russia on possible collective action to limit production. Earlier today Bloomberg reported that his Iranian counterpart is also said to be giving the meeting a miss.

      Iraq and Iran both want exemptions from any OPEC cuts in output, putting pressure on Saudi Arabia, the producer group’s biggest member, to bear the brunt of a possible reduction. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has yet to find a way to finalize a preliminary deal it reached in September to curtail supply, ending a two-year policy of pumping without limits.

    • Climate change a Chinese hoax? Beijing gives Donald Trump a lesson in history

      China has rejected Donald Trump’s claims that climate change is a Chinese hoax, urging the US president-elect to take a “smart decision” over his country’s commitment to the fight against global warming.

      Trump, who is the first self-declared climate change denier to lead one of the world’s top emitters, has dismissed global warming as “very expensive … bullshit” and claimed the concept “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.

      But speaking at UN climate talks in Marrakech on Wednesday, China’s vice foreign minister, Liu Zhenmin, pointed out that it was in fact the billionaire’s Republican predecessors who launched climate negotiations almost three decades ago.

      “If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Liu was quoted as saying by Bloomberg.

      The IPCC was set up by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in 1988 in a bid to better understand and respond to the risks of climate change. It received the 2007 Nobel peace prize for helping build “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming”.

  • Finance

    • Snapchat Parent Files for $25 Billion IPO

      Snap Inc. has confidentially filed paperwork for an initial public offering that may value the popular messaging platform at as much as $25 billion, a major step toward what would be one of the highest-profile stock debuts in recent years.

    • The great CETA swindle

      On both sides of the Atlantic, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada is hugely controversial. A record 3.3 million people across Europe signed a petition against CETA and its twin agreement TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). European and Canadian trade unions, as well as consumer, environmental and public health groups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) reject the agreement. Constitutional challenges against CETA have been filed in Germany and Canada and the compatibility of CETA’s controversial privileges for foreign investors with EU law is likely to be judged by the European Court of Justice.

      The controversy has also reached governments and parliaments. Across Europe, more than 2,100 local and regional governments have declared themselves TTIP/CETA free zones, often in cross-party resolutions. National and regional parliaments, too, worry about CETA, for example in Belgium, France, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands. In October 2016, concerns in four sub-federal Belgian governments (led by Wallonia) over the agreement’s negative impacts, and in particular its dangerous privileges for foreign investors, nearly stopped the federal government from approving the signing of CETA.

    • Lessons from the Barroso affair: How to reform Commission ethics

      Following the revelation that former Commission President Barroso would join Goldman Sachs International, Juncker had to be prodded long and hard before passing the case on for assessment at the Commission’s ad-hoc ethics committee. At the start of November, the committee published its opinion, criticising Barroso’s lack of judgment regarding his new roles as chairman and adviser at the bank.

      And yet, the committee failed to find sufficient evidence that a breach of the ethics requirements in the European Treaty had occurred.

      Juncker is now proposing an extension of the cooling-off period for outgoing presidents from 18 months to three years. Anticipating that this may not sit well with other Commissioners, he has insisted he would still subject himself to this longer period of abstinence, even if his colleagues were to object to the change of rules for ex-presidents.

      It is, of course, positive to see the Commission finally accepting that there is a problem with its ethics rules. But Juncker’s proposal is yet another example of the Commission’s highest level insisting on regulating itself, and, after months of ignoring the public outcry over Commissioners’ scandals, it does too little to prevent future cases.

    • ‘Monster’ at the Berlaymont

      Martin Selmayr is admired, despised and feared. What’s clear: He’s the most powerful EU chief of staff ever.

    • Obama calls for ‘course correction’ to share spoils of globalisation

      Barack Obama has given a rousing defence of the virtues of democracy and warned that a backlash against globalisation is boosting populist movements around the world, in what was billed as his last public address abroad.

      Speaking near the Acropolis of Athens, the outgoing US president said that democracy – like the version invented by the ancient Greeks “in this small, great world” – might still be imperfect, yet for all its flaws it fostered hope over fear.

      “Even if progress follows a winding path – sometimes forward, sometimes back – democracy is still the most effective form of government ever devised by man,” Obama said.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • The Clinton Campaign Was Undone By Its Own Neglect And A Touch Of Arrogance, Staffers Say

      In the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s staff in key Midwest states sent out alarms to their headquarters in Brooklyn. They were facing a problematic shortage of paid canvassers to help turn out the vote.

      For months, the Clinton campaign had banked on a wide army of volunteer organizers to help corral independents and Democratic leaners and re-energize a base not particularly enthused about the election. But they were volunteers. And as anecdotal data came back to offices in key battlegrounds, concern mounted that leadership had skimped on a critical campaign function.

      “It was arrogance, arrogance that they were going to win. That this was all wrapped up,” a senior battleground state operative told The Huffington Post.

      Several theories have been proffered to explain just what went wrong for the Clinton campaign in an election that virtually everyone expected the Democratic nominee to win. But lost in the discussion is a simple explanation, one that was re-emphasized to HuffPost in interviews with several high-ranking officials and state-based organizers: The Clinton campaign was harmed by its own neglect.

    • Americans Throw Their Support Behind The Free Press

      Donald Trump railed against the “failing” New York Times throughout the 2016 election, and days after winning the presidency claimed the paper was “losing thousands of subscribers” for its “very poor and inaccurate” election coverage.

      Not so, says the Times. The paper has picked up new subscribers to both its print and digital editions at four times the normal rate, according to spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades-Ha.

      The Times is one of several publications to tout increased paid readership or donations in the aftermath of Trump’s victory. The uptick in subscriptions is a bright spot amid a flurry of unflattering post-mortems on the media’s role in propelling Trump to become the Republican nominee and general uncertainty about the industry’s influence going forward.

    • Republicans Stole the Supreme Court

      We are already hearing from Republicans and Democrats in leadership positions that it is incumbent on Americans to normalize and legitimize the new Trump presidency. We are told to give him a chance, to reach across the aisle, and that we must all work hard, in President Obama’s formulation, to make sure that Trump succeeds. But before you decide to take Obama’s advice, I would implore you to stand firm and even angry on this one point at least: The current Supreme Court vacancy is not Trump’s to fill. This was President Obama’s vacancy and President Obama’s nomination. Please don’t tacitly give up on it because it was stolen by unprecedented obstruction and contempt. Instead, do to them what they have done to us. Sometimes, when they go low, we need to go lower, to protect a thing of great value.

    • FBI Director Comey’s credibility issues go beyond presidential politics to 9/11 panel

      FBI Director James Comey’s credibility is under heavy fire due to his headline-making public statements about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton that have entangled the bureau in presidential politics.

      Republicans howled in July when Comey publicly declared he wouldn’t recommend criminal charges against Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Over the weekend, Democrat Clinton reportedly told supporters she blames her surprising loss to President-elect Donald Trump on Comey’s announcement 11 days before the election that he had restarted the email probe, as well as his announcement two days before the election that an examination of newly discovered emails had not changed his July findings.

    • Federal prosecutors launch probe of law firm over donations

      Federal prosecutors in Boston have opened a grand jury investigation into potentially illegal campaign contributions from lawyers at the Thornton Law Firm, a leading donor to Democrats around the country, according to two people familiar with the probe.

      The US attorney’s office is one of three agencies now looking into the Boston-based personal injury firm’s practice of reimbursing its partners for millions of dollars in political donations, according to the two people. The law firm has insisted that the donations were legal, but, soon after the Globe revealed the firm’s practice, politicians began returning hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

    • Apocalypse Then, and Now, Cracker Revolution Edition

      These things have been ongoing for the past 15 years. Obama prosecuted more dissidents, er, “whistleblowers,” than all previous presidents combined, and he did by calling them spies under the 1917 Espionage Act. The NSA as state security has been monitoring you under two administrations.

      Militarized police forces received their tanks and other weapons from two presidents. All of the terrible events that lead to Black Lives Matter took place before the election, and the killers were for the most part left unpunished by both the judiciary for criminal murders, and by the Federal-level Department of Justice for violation of civil rights. Unlike during the 1960s when the Feds stepped in and filed civil rights charges to bust up racism among local and state governments, the last two administration have not.

      When people do bad things and know they’ll get away with them, that is “normalization,” not just some hate words we have sadly all heard before.

      As for war and fracking, um, the U.S. has been engaged in global wars for 15 years, and set the Middle East on fire. Fracking has been destroying our nation for years, and oil dumped into the Gulf back in 2010.

      Fascism did not start on November 8. We have been living in a police state of sorts for some time before you all discovered it will start next year.

    • Carl Icahn Confirms 2 Trump Cabinet Contenders on Twitter

      Longtime Donald Trump supporter and activist investor Carl Icahn confirmed on Tuesday that the president-elect is looking at Wall Street veteran Steven Mnuchin as his choice for treasury secretary and billionaire Wilbur Ross for commerce secretary.

    • Trump’s vast web of conflicts: A user’s guide

      Donald Trump’s new hires should brace themselves for a full immersion in government ethics school.

      They’re going to need it given the president-elect’s sprawling business empire and his lack of interest in selling off his companies and properties outright.

      The Republican’s appointees will be running departments and agencies with direct ties to their boss’ businesses and wider political interests, from an IRS audit into his tax records to National Labor Relations Board enforcement of cases involving his hotel workers to the FBI’s investigation into the suspected Russian cyberespionage aimed at influencing an election that Trump just won.

      Unlike past presidents who took office with considerable wealth, from George H.W. Bush to John F. Kennedy, the setup Trump is creating for his financial assets — leaving his three oldest adult children and a “team of highly skilled executives” in charge while he’s in the Oval Office — appears likely to expose large numbers of people the president hires to an unprecedented set of conflicts spanning his entire federal government.

    • Jesse Jackson: Obama should pardon Hillary Clinton

      Speaking at President Gerald Ford’s alma mater, The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for President Obama to issue a blanket pardon to Hillary Clinton before he leaves office, just like Ford did for Richard Nixon.

      Stopping short of saying Clinton did anything wrong, Jackson told a large crowd of University of Michigan students, faculty and administrators gathered at daylong celebration of his career that Obama should short-circuit President-elect Donald Trump’s promised attempt to prosecute Hillary Clinton for use of a private e-mail server.

      “It would be a monumental moral mistake to pursue the indictment of Hillary Clinton,” Jackson said. He said issuing the pardon could help heal the nation, like Ford’s pardon of Nixon did.

    • It’s Worse Than You Think

      Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump’s base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.

      Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Megyn Kelly’s Cautionary Tale of Crossing Donald Trump

      The Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly has spent the better part of the last year living in the main gladiator pit of 2016, becoming as much a target for Donald J. Trump as any of his opponents and emerging as a pivotal figure in the forced resignation of the Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes, whom she accused of sexual harassment.

      On Tuesday, she was in her office at the Fox News headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, taking stock, preparing for the next phase — a Trump presidency — and warning fellow journalists to look at her experience during the campaign as a potential cautionary tale.

      “The relentless campaign that Trump unleashed on me and Fox News to try to get coverage the way he liked it was unprecedented and potentially very dangerous,” she said, casual but animated behind her translucent desk. If he were to repeat the same behavior from the White House, she said, “it would be quite chilling for many reporters.”

    • Twitter suspends American far-right activists’ accounts

      Twitter has suspended the accounts of a number of American “alt-right” activists hours after announcing a renewed push to crack down on hate speech.

      Among the accounts removed were those of the self-described white-nationalist National Policy Institute, its magazine, Radix, and its head Richard Spencer, as well as other prominent alt-right figures including Pax Dickinson and Paul Town.

      Spencer, who according to anti-hate group SPLC “calls for ‘peaceful ethnic cleansing’ to halt the ‘deconstruction’ of European culture”, decried the bans as “corporate Stalinism” to right-wing news outlet Daily Caller.

      “Twitter is trying to airbrush the alt right out of existence,” Spencer said. “They’re clearly afraid. They will fail!” Members of the Reddit forum r/altright called the move a “purge”.

    • Booming e-business and tight censorship: China wants to have the internet both ways

      Liu Yunshan, the No. 5 in the Politburo Standing Committee and in charge of ideological control, doesn’t look like an internet guru or a man who can influence the future of one of humanity’s great inventions.

      Yet the 69-year-old senior cadre will be the keynote speaker at the third World Internet Conference, an event organised by the Chinese government.

    • China holds ‘World Internet Conference’ as censorship intensifies

      As China hosts execs from global tech companies at its World Internet Conference, human rights advocates are warning that online censorship in the country is only getting worse.

    • Satan, sex and censorship: 17 banned album sleeves

      As so often, The Beatles led the way. Barely a month before Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comments got their records burned in America, The Beatles almost pole-axed their “lovable Moptops” image with the sleeve for a US-only album, Yesterday… And Today. Satirising their US label’s latest mincing of their UK records into an extra LP, the Fabs kitted themselves up as butchers for the cover, chopping up dolls with gleeful grins. The Beatles as a premonition of Alice Cooper was all too much, and quickly recalled copies had an innocuous publicity pic glued over the grisly bloodbath.

    • AZERBAIJAN: Raids, fines enforce state religious censorship

      Police and officials of the State Committee for Work with Religious Organisations have raided at least 26 shops and six homes in October and early November across Azerbaijan to seize religious literature being distributed without the compulsory state permission. Some book sellers have already been punished. All the literature seized from shops appears to have been Muslim.

      Not one State Committee official in Baku or in branches around the country, police officer or court would discuss these raids, literature seizures or punishments with Forum 18.

      The “Expertise” Department at the State Committee in Baku – which implements the state censorship – told Forum 18 on 16 November its head Nahid Mammadov was out of the office and no-one else could speak for the department. Asked about the many raids, the man simply said that everything done was “in the law”. The man who answered the phone of State Committee official Aliheydar Zulfuqarov – who participated in raids on shops in the southern town of Masalli (see below) – put the phone down when Forum 18 introduced itself. The State Committee press office told Forum 18 its head, Yaqut Aliyeva, was away until 18 November and no-one else could speak to the press.

    • TUSC vindicated in censorship protest

      As the democratic credentials of ‘official politics’ are being increasingly questioned, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) recently chalked up a modest victory against establishment efforts to prevent alternative voices from being heard.

    • Southampton Labour must bin Tory cuts!
    • Professor compiles list of fake, misleading ‘news’ websites

      An assistant professor’s list of fake and misleading websites, many of which have driven the dialogue of politics this election season, is going viral after being published this week.

    • Trump Supporters Warn of Censorship, Suggest Alternatives, In Battle Over Fake News Sites

      On Tuesday Twitter announced it was rolling out new tools for reporting abuse on its network and later that day it suspended numerous “alt-right” accounts. Then Facebook came under fire after a report exposed it knew how to combat fake news articles, but did not tackle the problem for fear of conservative backlash. Facebook has since removed ads from fake news sites and a “rogue” team allegedly been put in place to take on fake news. Google, who was criticized for fake news filtering onto its front page, is also taking action to ensure more real reporting from credible outlets is highlighted. On the surface this news seems positive, but to some Donald Trump supporters this news means one thing: censorship.

    • Breitbart and Private Eye among websites accused of false, misleading, clickbait or satirical ‘news’

      The spread of fake online news has itself been hitting headlines in recent weeks, with accusations flying that such content may have helped sweep Donald Trump into the White House.

      Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communications and media at Massachusetts’s Merrimack College, has created a list of websites as a teaching resource for her students, which categorises websites and organisations that publish “false, misleading, clickbait-y, and/or satirical ‘news’ sources.”

    • Here are all the fake ‘news’ sites to watch out for on Facebook
    • Fed up with phony news? College professor creates list of ‘false, misleading, clickbait-y’ sites
    • How to break it to your friends and family that they’re sharing fake news
    • Fed up with fake news, Facebook users are solving the problem with a simple list
    • This List of Fake News Websites Proliferating on Facebook Is Staggering
    • Twitter’s Misbegotten Censorship
    • Could alt-right account bans spell the end of Twitter?
    • Twitter suspends prominent alt-right accounts
    • Twitter Suspends Accounts Affiliated With Alt-Right
    • Twitter Suspends Alt-Right Accounts, Promises Tools To Fight Abuse
    • Q&A: The science of online censorship

      Information doesn’t flow through the internet as freely as it seems. Depending on which country you live in, you may see different content on a webpage—or no content at all. As the internet has become the most important public space for everything from protest movements to pornography, governments around the world have started locking it down. And that has given rise to a new field of research: the science of censorship. ScienceInsider caught up with Phillipa Gill, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, to find out what’s cooking in this online cat and mouse game. She spoke to us yesterday from the Internet Measurement Conference in Santa Monica, California, which she co-chaired. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

    • Chief Censor says his office’s work is now more important than ever

      A century ago, viewing a picture of a woman’s exposed decolletage was considered a “grave danger” to the average person’s moral health.

      “Suggestive” or violent images – laughably tame by today’s standards – were quickly sliced from incoming films by New Zealand Government censors. They were the moral guardians of what the country viewed.

      Today, as censorship in this country celebrates its centenary, critics are asking – is there even any point?

    • Pressure grows on Facebook over censorship

      Palestine Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, 18MillionRising and Dream Defenders also signed the letter, which specifically points to the disabling of Palestinian journalists’ accounts and the removal of Black activists’ content as examples of Facebook’s censorship.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Liberals need to stop carping about Saudi Arabia. In a dangerous world, our allies cannot be saints

      Among the many conflicts marked during this year’s Remembrance Day commemorations, the ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the First Gulf War provided a timely reminder of what can be achieved when nations work together.

      In an age when the very notion of military intervention has become anathema for political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, the highly successful 1991 campaign to liberate the Gulf state of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s illegal annexation marked a high point in relations between the West and its Arab allies.

      Western forces, it is true, were responsible for conducting most of the operation. But the supporting role provided by Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, which actively facilitated the formation of a 500,000-strong foreign army on its soil, was invaluable.

    • Indonesia Says Jakarta’s Christian Governor Is Suspected of Blasphemy

      Indonesia was thrown into turmoil on Wednesday after the National Police named the Christian governor of the country’s capital a suspect in a blasphemy investigation over comments he made about the Quran. Outrage over those remarks set off bloody street protests this month.

      The governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Jakarta’s popular leader, has been barred from leaving the country as the authorities continue their investigation of him, Tito Karnavian, the national police chief, said at a televised news conference.

      Mr. Basuki, who is known as Ahok and is running for re-election in February, has been a political target of radical Islamic organizations since taking office in 2014. Some of those groups seized on comments he made in September to a group of fishermen, in which he lightheartedly cited a Quran verse that warns against taking Christians and Jews as friends.

    • UK woman ‘gang-raped’ in Dubai now faces jail for ‘extra-marital affair’ in Sharia arrest

      The 25-year-old is not allowed to leave the country after claiming she was attacked by two UK men last month.

      The situation is not uncommon in the middle-eastern country that prohibits women from being alone with men who they are not married or directly related to.

      Under Sharia law, adultery can be substantiated through a confession or if four people witnessed the offence and testified before the court.

      The men are understood to have flown back to the UK.

    • British woman who says she was gang raped arrested on ‘extra-marital sex’ charges in Dubai as attackers go free

      A British tourist has been arrested and charged with illegal “extra-marital sex” in Dubai after telling police she had been gang raped.

      The 25-year-old woman, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was on holiday in the United Arab Emirates when she was allegedly attacked by two British men last month.

      When she reported the rape at a police station, she was allegedly arrested for breaking Emirati laws against extra-marital sex, while her attackers have since flown home to the UK.

    • Here are the devastating capabilities of the weapons Obama will leave behind for Trump

      Even the extreme legal theories of the George W Bush administration were mild compared to some of the “compromise” positions Obama’s DoJ argued for, and now Donald J Trump gets to use those positions to further its own terrifying agenda of mass deportations, reprisals against the press, torture and assassination, and surveillance based on religious affiliation or ethnic origin.

      When it came to things like closing Guantanamo, Obama argued for limits on establishing offshore black-sites and military tribunals, but refused to shut the door on them. So maybe Trump won’t be able to use Gitmo to house the people he has kidnapped by his CIA, but he can use the legal authority that Obama argued for to set up lots of other Guantanamos wherever he likes.

      Likewise torture: Obama decided that it was better to move and and bury the CIA torture report, and had his DoJ block any attempt to have torture declared illegal, which would have given people opposing Trump’s torture agenda with a potent legal weapon that is now unavailable to them.

      Obama argued that the president should be able to create kill lists of Americans and foreigners who could be assassinated with impunity, and argued against even judicial review of these lists.

    • A Message to President-Elect Trump About Upholding Freedom in the Muslim World

      President-elect Donald Trump, the American people voted you as the future 45th President of the United States and entrusted you with many missions and responsibilities. As head of a great democracy you will be the defender of what the forefathers of the American nation cherished the most: liberty and freedom of speech for all the citizens irrespective of their origin, religion, wealth or social status.

    • Rutgers Lecturer Forcibly Sent For Psych Evaluation By NYPD For Some Tweets About The Election

      As you may have noticed, a lot of people have opinions on the election that just happened. And, many people are using social media to express those opinions, for good or for bad. Some people are excited, some people are angry. And no matter which side you fall on, you should recognize that expressing opinions on social media is protected (and should be encouraged as part of a healthy political process involving public discussion and debate). Kevin Allred, a lecturer at Rutgers University, is definitely on the side of folks who aren’t happy with the results of the election. And, like many, he’s been tweeting about his opinions on the matter. Having read through his Twitter feed, it doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary from stuff that I’ve seen from others. In fact, I’d argue that it actually seems fairly tame.

      Either way, last night he Tweeted that the NYPD had come to his house because the police at Rutgers believed he was “a threat” based on some of his tweets. There were two tweets in particular. One was about burning a flag in protest and the other was a rhetorical question about the 2nd Amendment.

      [...]

      Allred blames Trump for this — and while we’ve made it clear that we’ve got lots of concerns about Trump’s views on free speech, Trump isn’t exactly directing police to pick up people for various tweets. But the whole situation is extremely disturbing nonetheless. It’s frightening how little law enforcement seems to recognize or care about the First Amendment.

    • Chelsea Manning Petitions Obama for Clemency Before Leaving Office

      Imprisoned Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning is petitioning President Obama to grant her clemency before he leaves office. Manning is serving a 35-year sentence in the disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after being convicted of passing hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks. She has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement and for years was denied gender-affirming surgery.

  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC abides by GOP request, deletes everything from meeting agenda

      The Federal Communications Commission has deleted every major item from the agenda of its monthly meeting, apparently submitting to a request from Republicans to halt major rulemakings until Donald Trump is inaugurated as president.

      Republicans from the House and Senate sent letters to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler yesterday urging him to stand down in his final months as chairman. The GOP pointed out that the FCC halted major rulemakings eight years ago after the election of Barack Obama when prompted by a similar request by Democrats.

    • GOP tells FCC to just stop what it’s doing until Trump is inaugurated

      Republicans in Congress have urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid passing any controversial regulations between now and Donald Trump’s inauguration as president. If FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler complies with the request, it could prevent passage of rules designed to help cable customers avoid set-top box rental fees—and any other controversial changes.

      “Leadership of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon change,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote to Wheeler yesterday. “Congressional oversight of the execution of our nation’s communications policies will continue. Any action taken by the FCC following November 8, 2016, will receive particular scrutiny. I strongly urge the FCC to avoid directing its attention and resources in the coming months to complex, partisan, or otherwise controversial items that the new Congress and new Administration will have an interest in reviewing.”

  • DRM

    • Bug Related To HDCP DRM Is Giving New Playstation PS4 Pro Owners Headaches

      Sony recently released the slightly-more powerful Playstation 4 Pro console, a beefier version of its existing PS4 console that brings 4K and HDR functionality to customers with 4K sets. 4K was already proving to be a bit of a headache for early adopters, many of whom didn’t realize that in order to get a 4K device to work, every device in the chain (particularly their audio receiver) not only needs to support 4K and the updated HDMI 2.0a standard for HDR (high dynamic range), but HDCP 2.2 — an updated version of the copy protection standard used to try and lock down video content.

      HDCP has always been a bit of a headache, like so much DRM usually causing consumers more trouble than it’s worth, and then being ultimately useless in trying to prevent piracy that occurs anyway. The latest incarnation of this issue appears to be plaguing PS4 Pro owners, who are plugging their $400 console into their expensive new receiver and 4KTV only to find that the unit doesn’t work as advertised.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • The CJEU decision in Soulier: what does it mean for laws other than the French one on out-of-print books?

        As reported by this blog through a breaking news post, yesterday the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued its decision in Soulier and Doke, C-301/15.

        This was a reference for a preliminary ruling from the French Conseil d’État (Council of State) and concerned the compatibility with EU law [read: the InfoSoc Directive] of the 2012 French law to allow and regulate the digital exploitation of out-of-print 20th century books.

      • Police Raid Pirate Site & Seize 60 Servers Following MPAA Complaint

        A complaint from the MPAA has led the cyber-crime division of Ukraine’s National Police to raid FS.to, one of the country’s most popular pirate sites. Thus far 60 servers have been seized and 19 people have been arrested, but police fear the site could reappear since some individuals are on the run and a mirror site may be standing by in Russia.

      • “Anti-Piracy Outfit Impersonates Competitor, Steals its Clients”

        Two employees of anti-piracy outfit MarkScan have been arrested by Indian police. The men are accused of masquerading as competing anti-piracy firm Aiplex, informing its clients via a fake website that the company was shutting down, and suggesting MarkScan as an alternative. The CEO of the company was allegedly in on the scam, which is still under investivation.

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