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03.04.16

Links 4/3/2016: Linux 4.4.4, KDE Outreach Program

Posted in News Roundup at 7:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Accounting Software for Small Business

    You can choose from dozens of excellent open source accounting programs for everything from simple basic ledger bookkeeping to invoicing, inventory tracking, point of sale, payroll, taxes, and reporting and forecasting, and this roundup highlights five of the best.

    The main thing to remember about small business accounting software is that it’s not magic. It doesn’t turn you into an accountant any more than owning a hardware store turns you into a carpenter, electrician, or plumber. You still need to know the fundamental principles of accounting and bookkeeping.

  • Image processing at NASA with open source tools

    This past summer, I was an intern at the GVIS Lab at NASA Glenn, where I brought my passion for open source into the lab. My task was to improve our lab’s contributions to an open source fluid flow dynamics simulation developed by Dan Schroeder. The original simulation presents obstacles that users can draw in with their mouse to model computational fluid dynamics. My team contributed by adding image processing code that analyzes each frame of a live video feed to show how a physical object interacts with a fluid. But, there was more for us to do.

  • Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes

    Though widespread interest in software containers is a relatively recent phenomenon, at Google we have been managing Linux containers at scale for more than ten years and built three different container-management systems in that time. Each system was heavily influenced by its predecessors, even though they were developed for different reasons. This article describes the lessons we’ve learned from developing and operating them.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla unveils Firefox OS based IoT projects

        Mozilla announced four Firefox OS to Connected Devices projects, including a home automation system, an AI agent, a voice interface, and a “SensorWeb.”

        In December, when Mozilla announced a halt to development and sales of its open source, Linux-based Firefox OS mobile distribution, the company said it was already shifting the HTML5-focused open source Linux OS to Internet of Things projects. A month ago, Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla’s SVP of Connected Devices posted a blog entry noting progress on projects such as its Vaani voice interface. Jaaksi has now revealed more details on Vaani and three other projects, and invited open source developers to pitch in.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hortonworks Launches New Stack Components, and Updates its Release Cycle

      On the heels of its introduction as a hot publlic company back in 2015, Hortonworks, which focuses on the open source Big Data platform Hadoop, has steadily expanded and adjusted the focus of its technology stack. Now it is serving up new adjustments. Hortonworks DataFlow (HDF), Hortonworks’ streaming data package, based on Apache NiFi, now includes Apache Storm and Apache Kafka.

      If you’re unfamiliar with Apache NiFi, it is built around Niagarafiles, which is software that the NSA created to aggregate sensor data on the right systems and generate analytics from the data. Onyara will give Hortonworks an important play as the Internet of Things shapes up.

  • Databases

    • Tune Up Your Databases!

      My last full-time job was manager of a university’s database department. Ironically, I know very, very little about databases themselves.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Google, Oracle setting up jurors to fail in API copyright retrial, judge says

      One of the tech sector’s biggest upcoming trials—Oracle v. Google—careened Tuesday away from the hot-button topic of copyrighting application programming interfaces (APIs) and instead focused on the presiding judge’s concern that the tech giants are setting up jurors to fail. US District Judge William Alsup believes it’s all so the loser could challenge the verdict of the second upcoming trial set for May.

      Judge Alsup said Tuesday that the tech giants jointly submitted a proposed questionnaire (PDF) for prospective panelists containing “so many vague questions” that “the loser on our eventual verdict will seek, if history is any guide, to impeach the verdict by investigating the jury to find some ‘lie’ or omission during voir dire.”

    • Oracle’s JET JavaScript toolkit flies the open source skies

      When it comes to JavaScript, Oracle is not the first name that comes to mind. But the company this week is staking a bigger claim in Web development with the open source release of Oracle JET (JavaScript Extension Toolkit) 2.0.0.

      “The aim of Oracle JET is to provide a stable basis for intermediate to advanced JavaScript developers to efficiently visualize data in the cloud,” said Geertjan Wielenga, principal product manager in the Oracle tools group, in a blog post. Oracle has used JET to develop its own cloud applications during the past three years.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 10.3: Third Beta Available

      That personal tidbit aside, another important part of March — especially this month — is that on the road to FreeBSD 11 sometime later this year, FreeBSD 10.3 is well along the way, with the third beta already available, according to a very detailed post by Marius Strobl on the FreeBSD Stable mailing list.

      To summarize, installations for FreeBSD 10.3 Beta3 are now available for amd64, i386, ia64, PowerPC, Sparc and a variety of ARM processors. Checksums, too numerous to list here, can be found in Strobl’s original post, linked in the paragraph above.

    • LLVM Clang’s OpenMP 4.x Support Continues Maturing

      With LLVM Clang 3.7 came full support for OpenMP 3.1 at long last but with OpenMP 4.5 being the latest spec, Intel and others involved with the Clang OpenMP initiative haven’t let up and continue working towards supporting the latest OpenMP 4.x interfaces.

    • OpenBSD 5.9 network improvements

      There are no doubt many eyes on OpenBSD’s continuing network SMP renovation.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Foundation of Guix Europe

      I have a pleasant announcement to make! On February 11, 2016, we have started a non-profit around the GNU Guix project, „Guix Europe“, and celebrated comme il faut with a bottle of champagne. Precisely, it is an „Association loi 1901“, named after the venerable French law first passed in 1901 (but many times amended since then).

    • GnuTLS 3.4.10

      Released GnuTLS 3.4.10 a bug fix release of the current stable branch.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • IDE For Python Programming

      Programmers need some tools to writing application and scripts with them, one of the most important tool for programming is a good IDE (integrated development environment). there are different IDEs that you can use such as Pycharm, Spyder, vim, Emacs, Eclipse and ETC.

Leftovers

  • Reports Coming in of Big IBM Layoffs Underway in the U.S.

    Last week, IBM reported to investors that its workforce at the end of 2015 was almost as big as its workforce at the end of 2014 (within less than 1 percent), in spite of a year in which 70,000 employees left the company, to be replaced with new hires and acquisitions.

    By the end of this week, the picture may look quite different. Today reports are coming in that big layoffs across the United States are underway, likely one-third of the U.S. workforce, according to one soon-to-be-laid-off IBMer. (At the end of 2015, IBM had approximately 378,000 employees worldwide; it no longer breaks out numbers for individual countries.) Such reports used to be gathered by the Endicott Alliance, a union organizing effort that closed its doors last year. Now they are being collected by an informal Facebook group, “WatchingIBM,” that was started by former members of that organization.

  • Science

  • Security

    • Security advisories for Thursday
    • State Department Backs Off Criminalizing Security Research Tools

      Some good news for security researchers: the US government’s adoption of the Wassenaar Arrangement will no longer treat the tools of security research like crates of machine guns. While exploits and penetration tools can be used by bad people for bad things, they’re also invaluable to security researchers who use these to make the computing world a safer place.

      Vague wording in the US government’s proposed adoption of the 2013 version of the Wassenaar Arrangement threatened to criminalize the development of security research tools and make any researcher traveling out of the country with a laptop full of exploits an exporter of forbidden weapons.

    • IRS Tool Designed To Protect Identity Theft Victims — Exposes Users To Identity Theft

      Last year, the personal records of 100,000 taxpayers wound up in the hands of criminals, thanks to a flimsy authentication process in the agency’s “Get Transcript” application. In short, the IRS used all-too-common static identifiers to verify taxpayer identity (information that could be found anywhere), allowing criminals to use the system to then obtain notably more sensitive taxpayer information and ultimately steal finances. At the time, the IRS breathlessly insisted it would be shoring up its security standards, though it failed to really detail how it would accomplish this.

    • 1Password sends your password across the loopback interface in clear text

      1Password sends your password in clear text across the loopback interface if you use the browser extensions.

    • Bruce Schneier: We’re sleepwalking towards digital disaster and are too dumb to stop

      Security guru Bruce Schneier has issued a stark warning to the RSA 2016 conference – get smart or face a whole world of trouble.

      The level of interconnectedness of the world’s technology is increasing daily, he said, and is becoming a world-sized web – which he acknowledged was a horrible term – made up of sensors, distributed computers, cloud systems, mobile, and autonomous data processing units. And no one is quite sure where it is all heading.

    • Latest attack against TLS shows the pitfalls of intentionally weakening encryption

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Iran Joins The Using Video Game Footage To Pump Up Your Own Military’s Reputation Arms Race

      I suppose this was inevitable. As video games become more refined as an artform and as those games evince more realistic graphics, animations, and all the rest, I suppose it had to be that some folks out there would try to pass game footage off as real footage depicting their own power. I just never really thought it would be established nations that otherwise purport to be players on the world stage doing this. Yet, as we have seen done by Egypt, North Korea, and even Russia in the past, so too do we now find that Iran is trying to brag about its own military capability using game footage.

    • Debunked: The ace Hezbollah sniper…is from a video game

      Iran’s state television has been running impressive footage claiming to show ace Hezbollah fighters picking off fighters from the Islamic State group (IS) one-by-one with clear, cold precision. But here’s the thing: this video looks just like a scene from a video game. And it is…

    • Brave Afghan Forces Kill Inside Hospital, for Freedom

      Apparently a new feature of the modern war of terror is the shameless, blameless, overt targeting of hospitals, doctors and bed-ridden patients, all without the means of even modest self-defense.

    • ‘The Sense That Everybody Thought They Had WMDs Is a Total Fantasy’

      The Iraq invasion is a good example of Faulkner’s line about the past not even being past. Claims about the lead-up to the calamitous 2003 attack, who believed what and when, and even claims about the war’s impact on the course of Iraq and US history resurface repeatedly in US political discourse, including in the 2016 presidential election.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • UK weather: Leeds Bradford Airport closes as snow hits parts of Britain

      Parts of Britain could see almost four inches of snow on Friday, with flights delayed and motorists warned of treacherous driving conditions, as March continues to feel more like winter than spring.

      Ploughs were used to clear the runway at Leeds Bradford Airport, in West Yorkshire, which was forced to close after northern England was hit with snow showers overnight.

      Met Office weather warnings are in place for Northern Ireland, north Wales, northern and western England as well as Scotland as a cold frontal system continues to make its way in from the Atlantic.

  • Finance

    • Bitcoin’s nightmare scenario has come to pass

      Over the last year and a half a number of prominent voices in the Bitcoin community have been warning that the system needed to make fundamental changes to its core software code to avoid being overwhelmed by the continued growth of Bitcoin transactions. There was strong disagreement within the community, however, about how to solve this problem, or if the problem would ever materialize.

    • Comcast Nabs Huge Oregon Tax Break Thanks To Loophole Intended For Google Fiber

      For a few years now, the city of Portland and the state of Oregon have been jumping through hoops to try and make Portland as attractive as possible for Google Fiber. That has involved rewriting city ordinances so that Google can place its utility cabinets along public rights of way, something previously banned in the city.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The New Mind Control

      The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do.

    • Sandy Hook Puzzles

      Perhaps the most unusual feature of the Sandy Hook story is the large number of photographs that have been released in order to document the story. It is as if there is no event without the proof supplied by the photographs. This is unusual. When, for example, the FBI murdered approximately 100 men, women and children in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, the reality of the victims did not have to be established with a large number of photos establishing that the victims were real people with real families. When workers “go postal” and shoot their coworkers, photos are not used to prove that those killed were real people with real families. When an airplane crashes, the event does not have to be verified with news coverage of grieving relatives.

    • Talking About Racism May Be Destructive to Cable Relationships–Unlike Domestic Violence Charges

      fter four years, MSNBC cancelled the talkshow of African-American writer and political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry. The cable news network had repeatedly pre-empted her weekend morning show, and in response to questions about her absence from MSNBC’s roster had scheduled Harris-Perry to appear in a weekend news-reading role.

      [...]

      So bringing up the status of people of color at the network is something that you can’t do at MSNBC without destroying your relationship there—despite the fact that, as CNN’s Dylan Byers (3/2/16) pointed out, MSNBC has cancelled or sidelined numerous non-white hosts in recent years, including Martin Bashir, Toure, Karen Finney, Al Sharpton, Joy Reid, Alex Wagner and José Díaz-Balart.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Breaking: Honduran Indigenous Leader Berta Cáceres Assassinated, Won Goldman Environmental Prize

      Honduran indigenous and environmental organizer Berta Cáceres has been assassinated in her home. She was one of the leading organizers for indigenous land rights in Honduras.

      In 1993 she co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). For years the group faced a series of threats and repression.

      According to Global Witness, Honduras has become the deadliest country in the world for environmentalists. Between 2010 and 2014, 101 environmental campaigners were killed in the country.

      In 2015 Berta Cáceres won the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s leading environmental award. In awarding the prize, the Goldman Prize committee said, “In a country with growing socioeconomic inequality and human rights violations, Berta Cáceres rallied the indigenous Lenca people of Honduras and waged a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam.”

    • Race and the Crime of Felony Disenfranchisement

      Now that Super Tuesday is behind us and the field of presidential candidates is narrowing with the suspension of Dr. Ben Carson’s campaign, a potentially paradigm-shattering general election looms ever closer. “The stakes in this election have never been higher,” Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said in her speech after she had been declared the victor over Sen. Bernie Sanders in seven of 11 Super Tuesday states. As Donald Trump, piling victory upon victory on top of insult upon insult, edges closer to clinching the Republican nomination, the GOP is in chaos, with some predicting a historic split in the party. The presidential race to date has been well-characterized by a line of closed captioning text from a recent Republican debate: “unintelligible yelling.” The circuslike atmosphere masks deeply troubling statements made by several candidates that fan the flames of racism, white supremacy and xenophobia. It also deflects attention from a critical, and worsening, deficit in our democracy: the attack on the right to vote, and in particular, the wholesale disenfranchisement of close to 5 million Americans, mostly people of color.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Canadian Cablecos Dodge Government Demand For Cheaper TV Bundles — By Hiding Them From Consumers

      This week, the Canadian government will begin forcing Canadian cable operators to provide cheaper, more flexible cable TV packages. Under the new CRTC rules, companies must provide a so-called “skinny bundle” of discounted TV channels starting March 1, and the option to buy channels a la carte starting December 1. But while the CRTC’s attempt to force innovation on the cable industry may be well-intentioned, it’s already clear that Canadian cable operators plan to do everything in their power to tap dance around the requirements.

    • AT&T Buying Missouri State Law Ensuring Broadband There Continues To Suck

      For years incumbent ISPs like AT&T have spent millions lobbying for laws in roughly twenty states prohibiting towns and cities from building or expanding broadband networks — even in cases of obvious market failure. The laws are pure protectionism, taking the right to make local infrastructure choices out of the hands of local communities — all to protect companies like AT&T from the faintest specter of competition. And while some states have been waking up to the fact that letting AT&T write protectionist state law hurts consumers and state businesses longer term, Missouri apparently isn’t one of those states.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • No strict liability for infringement in online advertising, says the CJEU

        Having your own advertising spread all around the internet is every company’s dream. A dream that might become less pleasant, though, if that advertising starts infringing another company’s trade mark and you can’t manage to take it down, whilst the trade mark owner is breathing down your neck. In a nutshell, this is the factual scenario of the decision that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued today in Daimler AG Együd Garage Gépjárműjavító és Értékesítő Kft (C-179/2015). The ruling addresses the notion of “trade mark use” in online advertising and explores possible remedies against trade mark infringements on the internet that may be very useful in the era of viral marketing.

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright History: The Strange Case Of A Book Authored By Mark Twain Via A Ouija Board

        Mark Twain can be the subject of fascinating discussion for any number of reasons, but around these parts we talk intellectual property. Some years back, Mike wrote about Twain’s support for copyright extensions, including when he even went so far as to advocate for infinite copyright. Well, it turns out that Twain’s concept of infinite copyright might have been particularly germane to his legacy, as EFF’s Parker Higgins takes us on a delightful stroll, over at Fusion, through the historical copyright case concerning the novel Twain might or might not have written…from beyond the grave.

        The year 1917 was apparently a time in some ways even stranger than our own, in which the public was wrapped up in its interest in the occult. It was during that time that an author by the name of Emily Grant Hutchings attempted to publish the latest work of Twain’s, entitled Jap Herron. Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens, had died in 1910, seven years earlier. So, how did Hutchings get Twain to write this book even as his body decomposed below ground? Why, through a Ouija board, of course!

      • OLG Munich: YouTube not liable for damages for hosting copyright infringing content

        In a decision of 28 January 2016, the Oberlandesgericht Munich, like the first instance court before it, held that YouTube is not liable for financial damages for hosting copyright infringing videos.

        Plaintiff was the German collecting Society GEMA, acting on behalf of composers. It sent YouTube a list of 1,000 videos with music viewable on YouTube.com that were uploaded without the consent of the copyright holders and demanded information on the revenue generated by the display of these videos in preparation of claiming damages. When YouTube refused to comply, GEMA sued before the Landgericht Munich, which dismissed the complaint.

03.03.16

Links 3/3/2016: GNU/Linux in Estonian Schools, Shippable 4.0

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

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • To Appreciate a Life

    The most useful meanings outlive the words, people and media that carry them. On a Linux Journal Geek Cruise in 2005, I asked Andrew Morton, the Linux kernel maintainer, if he thought Linux would be around a hundred years in the future. He said yes, and that most work on the kernel in 2105 would still be “stamping out bugs”.

    A decade into that century, with Linux more meaningful than ever to our whole networked civilization, I find myself wondering how long the world it maintains will last, and if the world would be lucky to still have Linux, doing what it has always done, and much more—or if the world has come to depend on other ways of computing. No way to know, and few if any of us reading this will be around to find out.

  • Desktop

    • Is It Time For Desktop Linux To Focus On Niche Applications And Stop Obsessing About Flashy GUIs?

      More and more of our life is going to be spent on smaller devices such as phones and so developers would be far better spending their time creating decent web applications and mobile phone applications.

      If you are going to develop for the desktop operating system then you are better focusing on applications that people really need for the desktop.

      Kudos to the Ubuntu developers. The convergence looks really good.

    • Estonian schools piloting open source software

      Schools in Estonia’s capital Tallinn are piloting a new program, gradually moving to PC workstations running on free and open source software. Students, teachers, school administration and kindergartens’ staff members are using LibreOffice, Ubuntu-Linux and other open source tools, saving millions of dollars on software fees.

  • Server

    • Shippable 4.0 Sets Sail with Improved Docker Integration

      The first thing users will notice about Shippable v4.0 is its increased flexibility. Developers can use the tools and platforms they’re working with currently to automate their build and deployment pipelines.

      “When you want to change tools or languages, move to a new technology like microservices or containers, or expand your deployment environment, you don’t have to start over again rebuilding your app delivery pipeline,” said Shippable CEO Avi Cavale.

      Recreating one’s system from the ground up can be a headache, one which Shippable hopes to curb with its improvements made to version 4.0 of the platform.

  • Kernel Space

    • Thunderbolt 3′s lightning-fast speeds hit Linux PCs

      The PC maker is building driver support for Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C into the XPS 13 Developer Edition, wrote a Dell employee in a company forum.

      Thunderbolt 3 is a connector technology that can hook up PCs to external peripherals like storage and monitors. It’s like USB, but four times faster. A 4K movie could be transferred from an external storage device to a PC in 30 seconds.

      Linux PCs will be a lot more capable with Thunderbolt 3. Users will be able to connect two 4K monitors simultaneously, connect to external graphics cards and establish a peer-to-peer network with other Linux PCs.

    • Companies that Support Linux: Apprenda

      Last fall, Apprenda — an enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) provider — joined the Linux Foundation and the Open Container Initiative. And, just this week, the company announced it has joined Kubernetes, a container management system developed by Google.

      According to the blog post, Apprenda plans to incorporate Kubernetes into its current architecture, stating “over the course of the next few product releases, we’ll be merging Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration system from Google, into our architecture and joining the Kubernetes community.”

      As part of our series on companies that support Linux, we talked with Chris Gaun, Director of Strategy at Apprenda, to learn more about the company’s new direction and open source commitment.

    • If You Use An ASUS Motherboard & Hit A Linux Issue, Hopefully It’s On This List
    • Dell is bringing Thunderbolt 3 support to Linux systems

      The Dell XPS 13 is one of our favorite laptops, but that’s only if Windows is your operating system of choice. Mac users have a whole brand just for their computers, but Linux aficionados are typically left out in the cold. There’s good news today though, as the XPS Developer Edition, which runs a custom Ubuntu image, will bring support for Thunderbolt 3 to the platform with the Skylake update, according to chatter on the Dell forums, as pointed out by PCWorld.

    • Graphics Stack

      • OpenSWR High Performance Software Rasterizer Lands In Mesa

        Intel’s OpenSWR high-performance software rasterizer that’s an alternative to LLVMpipe has landed in mainline Mesa.

        OpenSWR is a performant software rasterizer developed by Intel that in their workloads is much faster than using LLVMpipe for rendering OpenGL on x86 CPUs. If this is your first time hearing about OpenSWR, read our earlier articles on the matter: Intel Is Making A High-Performance Software Rasterizer For Mesa and OpenSWR High-Performance Software Rasterizer Revised For Mesa.

      • AMD Sends Out Big Patch Series For HSA/OpenCL Interop Support

        AMD’s Marek Olšák sent out a set of 26 patches this morning for preparing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to have interoperability support between OpenGL and HSA/OpenCL.

      • AMD Publishes OpenVX AMDOVX Open-Source Beta

        The latest fruits of AMD’s GPUOpen initiative is the open-sourcing of a beta of AMDOVX.

    • Benchmarks

      • Linux 4.1 Through Linux 4.5 Kernel Benchmarks On An Intel Xeon E3 v5

        For your viewing pleasure to get our March 2016 Linux benchmarking started is a Linux 4.1 through Linux 4.5 kernel benchmark comparison when testing with a 4GHz Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake CPU and using a RadeonSI-supported graphics card and SSD for storage.

        Used for today’s kernel benchmark comparison was the new Xeon E3-1280 v5 with 3.7GHz base clock frequency and 4.0GHz turbo frequency, MSI C236A Workstation motherboard, 16GB of DDR4 system memory, 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and Radeon R7 370 graphics card. Thanks to MSI for making this motherboard and CPU testing possible.

      • Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 16.04 On The Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake Workstation

        With Clear Linux continuing to outperform other Linux distributions on Intel hardware, I was curious to see how the Intel OTC Linux distribution was performing when trying it with one of the new Xeon CPUs at our disposal for testing.

        For some quick Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS development benchmarks I compared some of the original benchmarks for the Xeon E3-1280 v5 to that of a fresh install of Clear Linux 6470 as the latest build of this rolling-release-like distribution at the time of testing.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Plasma 5.6 Beta

        Wednesday, 02 March 2016. Today KDE releases a beta update to its desktop software, Plasma 5.6.

        This release of Plasma brings many improvements to the task manager, KRunner, activities, and Wayland support as well as a much more refined look and feel.

      • February KWin/Wayland update: all about input

        I haven’t blogged for quite some time about the progress on KWin/Wayland and had a few people requesting an update. As we are now approaching a feature freeze and I have most of the things I wanted to do for Plasma 5.6 done, it’s time to blog again. I use this also as a public service announcement: thanks to Let’s Encrypt my blog is also available through an encrypted connection.

      • So what is Kube? (and who is Sink?)

        Michael first blogged about Kube, but we apparently missed to properly introduce the Project. Let me fix that for you Wink

        Kube is a modern groupware client, built to be effective and efficient on a variety of platforms and form-factors. It is built on top of a high-performance data access layer and Qt Quick to provide an exceptional user experience with minimal resource usage. Kube is based on the lessons learned from KDE Kontact and Akonadi, building on the strengths and replacing the weak points.

        Kube is further developed in coordination with Roundcube Next, to achieve a consistent user experience across the two interfaces and to ensure that we can collaborate while building the UX.

      • Will the Addons Weather widget be revived for Plasma 5.6?

        If you are deep in coding mode and cannot afford to turn your head or even your eyes to look through the window at outside to check the current weather… or if you are deep down below ground plumbing at your black hole farming machine and now preparing your way home and are unsure whether to put on a rain jacket or the sunglasses… what is there to help you? A widget on your computer telling you about the weather, right.

        Plasma5 so far was missing the port of the weather widgets which were part of the Plasma Addons package with the older Plasma. While there are nice Plasma5 weather widgets on kde-apps.org (1, 2) I wanted the weather widget back I was used to.

      • KDE Makes the Desktop Practical Again

        Before the KDE 4.1 release in 2008, Aaron Seigo announced the end of desktop icons. He was being provocative, because what he was really announcing was the end of being restricted to a single icon set. Instead, KDE Plasma began supporting multiple desktops, and with them several ways to swap sets of icons in and out. These changes have received little publicity, but they are ideal for quickly customizing a desktop for a specialized task.

        You do not have to use these features. However, if you choose to explore them, you can apply them not only to the main desktop, but also to any activities, or even any virtual workspaces, so long as you first select from the main menu System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Virtual Desktop > Different Widgets for each desktop. It’s all a matter of which combination of customizations you prefer: a default desktop, folder views, multiple desktop folders, or a single desktop folder with filters.

      • KDE Plasma 5.6 Is Getting Ready With More Wayland Improvements

        KDE’s Martin Gräßlin has provided a status update concerning KWin/Wayland support with the latest KDE stack.

        Martin Gräßlin has been spending most of his time recently focusing upon the KDE input support for Wayland and better supporting libinput. There’s been a lot of code clean-ups and bug fixes as well as bringing input features closer to parity between X11 and Wayland.

      • KDE Plasma 5.6 Beta Released

        The KDE community has banded together to release the Plasma 5.6 beta today.

        KDE Plasma 5.6 is bringing improvements to the default Breeze theme as well as to the light and dark versions, task manager improvements, smoother widgets, a weather widget has finally returned to Plasma 5, and plenty of Wayland improvements. Plasma 5.6 has also been prepping Plymouth boot screen and GRUB boot-loader screens designed around the Breeze theme in aiming to complete the KDE computing experience.

      • Tumbleweed gets KDE app store

        Since the last update on openSUSE Tumbleweed, there have been five snapshots and some of those snapshots have brought some interesting new packages.

        The 20160225 snapshot allows Tumbleweed users to add a package called ‘discover‘, which is the KDE software installer, implemented as an app store like application.

      • KDE Plasma 5.6 Beta Brings New Light Breeze Theme, Wayland Support, More

        KDE Plasma 5.6 Beta has been announced by the KDE community, marking the start of a new development cycle for the desktop.

        The new KDE Plasma 5.x branch wasn’t all that well received by users when it was initially launched, but the developers continued to improve upon it. This latest 5.6 Beta release shows just how far the project has come. The progress made by the developers is astounding, and it looks like they are still making significant changes.

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • A little teaser for future Maps

        We’ve just entered the UI and string freeze for 3.20, we have a lot of new stuff coming up for Maps in 3.20 that I’m really excited about to see ”out the door”.

        One thing that I’ve been wanting in Maps for a while is support for transit routing (for using public transportation options) in addition to our current ”turn-based” routing for car, bicycle, and walking powered by GraphHopper.

      • GNOME Maps 3.20 to Integrate Lots of New Features

        GNOME Maps 3.20 looks like it’s going to be a great release and developers have added quite a few new features.

        When GNOME Maps was upgraded from 3.16 to 3.18, the jump wasn’t all that obvious. Just a couple of new major features were added. On the other hand, the developers are now preparing for GNOME 3.20, and there’s a lot more interesting stuff going on.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

      • The March 2016 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the March 2016 issue. With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon 16.3 Monthly Release Available To Download

        Sabayon is a free, open source and Gentoo based Linux distribution. It aims to provide the easy to use, simple and yet powerful Linux operating system. Sabayon team has made the monthly release Sabayon 16.3 available to download with bug fixes and applications updates.
        Sabayon is a Gentoo based Linux distribution. It is available in all popular flavors, KDE, GNOME, Xfce and MATE. So if you are wanting to try this distribution then you can install Sabayon in your favorite flavor.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Last week ‘flu by

        My first chore was to set up VPN access to the development resources (source control, wiki, etc.). I sandboxed the proprietary VPN client in a VM with a systemd unit to run it at boot, so I can control it by starting and stopping that VM. I then set to work on unpacking and exploring the SoC vendor’s evaluation module (EVM), starting by looking at serial output – of which there was none. Nothing on the LCD panel or network port either. A frustrating day.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical and Intel Train Companies on the Use of Snappy Ubuntu Core and IoT

            Canonical and Intel continue to further their partnership in the IoT business, and the two companies have just recently completed a training session for developers at the Taipei Intel Technology Training Center.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint Devs Explain Timeline of Website Hack

              The Linux Mint team is recovering from the website attack in February that seriously affected their credibility. The lead developer of the project, Clement Lefebvre explained in great detail everything that happened.

            • Linux Mint: The right way to react to a security breach

              The Linux Mint developers have posted a summary of their reaction to the recent compromise of their distribution image. It provides an excellent example of what to do in such a situation.

            • Mint Recovery, Tumbleweed Updates, Charlie Brown Ubuntu

              Today in Linux news Clement Lefebvre today said that things are back up and running over in Mintland with more security measures in place. Douglas DeMaio posted of the latest Tumbleweeds news including new KDE app store and Jack Wallen asked, “Why’s everybody all pickin’ on Ubuntu?” The Free Software Foundation said to ‘read the fine manual’ in answer to the ZFS GPL question and another security vulnerability involving SSLv2 was announced.

            • FAQ: What the heck happened to Linux Mint?

              Apparently, a hacker going by the handle “Peace.” Peace gave an interview to ZDNet reporter Zach Whittaker, in which he or she explained that the idea was mainly just to get access to as many computers as possible, possibly for a botnet. Peace first gained access to the site in January, via a security vulnerability in a WordPress plugin.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • ReactOS – Fake Or Potential Windows Alternative? Review And Extended Test Drive Of Latest Release

    After 10 years of development was released the new major release of ReactOS, this event was highlighted in the most biggest tech resources. But I’m not interested in just talk about release notes from “crazy Russian developers”, more interested is technical opportunities and possibilities.
    Which architecture use React OS now, which hardware are supported, why users and developers might find it interesting, the degree of compatibility with Microsoft Windows? Is there a Windows-based copy with Unix-style? For these and other questions you can find the answers in this article (or ask new questions in comments).

  • FOSS History in Retrospect: 3 Generations of Open Source Coders and Users

    It’s 2016, and open source is everywhere you look. The norms, forms and faces of open source have changed so much, in fact, that they seem to signal the rise of a new generation of open source programmers. Here’s why.

    Lest I ruin anyone’s day by appearing to spread falsehoods on the Internet, I will note that the idea of generations is a construct. I realize there is no actual line separating one so-called generation of people from another. I also realize that most of the people who wrote the first free or open source programs several decades ago are still around and coding.

  • Navigating OPNFV’s Brahmaputra Release

    What we’ve seen with Brahmaputra is key stakeholders collaborating across the industry and a marked increase in community engagement overall. For example, 35 projects were involved in the Brahmaputra release, compared to just five in Arno. That’s a six-fold increase in just ten months! Even more telling is the more than 140 developers involved in the release—which means we’ve seen developer participation in OPNFV as a whole increase five-fold since August of 2015.

  • OPNFV Promises More Powerful Platform
  • OPNFV Project offers second platform release
  • OPNFV Matures with New Release of Open Source NFV Platform
  • Better Intel Skylake & Galileo Support Arrives For Coreboot

    Coreboot received some new Intel feature work yesterday for improving the state of initializing some newer hardware with this open-source alternative to proprietary UEFI/BIOS.

  • Open Source Initiative Welcomes Internet Systems Consortium as Newest Affiliate Member

    The Open Source Initiative® (OSI) is honored to announce ISC (Internet Systems Consortium), the organization behind the ongoing development and distribution of the most used name server software, BIND, has joined the OSI as an Affiliate Member. Founded in 1994, ISC plays a critical role supporting the fundamental architecture of the Internet, driving standards for the Domain Name System (DNS). ISC provides leadership both in standards development and software for the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and is an active contributor to the Internet Engineering Task Force.

  • Open source, open borders

    Over the past two decades open source has gone from a fringe interest to a mainstay of the technology industry. The importance of open source code and prominent issues like security flaws in major open source projects have led to open source foundations becoming more and more important, which means the decisions they make matter.

    The foundations are not just for fundraising and patent protection, although Ghost notes: “As a non-profit, no individual stands to gain if we pay more tax or less tax. The foundation either has more, or less money to spend on its mission to create free, open source software — that’s all.”

  • Log Analytics Tools: Open Source vs. Commercial

    In this article, I’m going to relay my own experience and that of other engineers at Search Technologies with log analytics tools–Splunk and Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) in the Elastic stack. As every article says, you’ll have to decide what works best for you.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Update on Connected Devices Innovation Process: Four Projects Move Forward

        The Internet of Things is changing the world around us, with new use cases, experiences and technologies emerging every day. As we continue to experiment in this space, we wanted to take a moment to share more details around our approach, process and current projects we’re testing.

      • Moving towards WebVR 1.0

        Consumer VR is at our doorsteps, and it’s sparking the imagination of developers and content creators everywhere. As such it’s no surprise that interest in WebVR is booming. Publications like the LA Times have used WebVR to explore the landscape of Mars, and a doctor was able to save the life of a little girl by taking advantage of Sketchfab’s VR features. The creativity and the passion of the WebVR community has been incredible!

      • Mozilla Releases Proposal For WebVR 1.0 API

        Mozilla’s Virtual Reality team working in conjunction with the Google Chrome team is ready to release a proposal for a new web API for handling VR devices: meet the WebVR 1.0 proposal.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hyperglance Bridges Cloud Worlds with AWS and OpenStack Focus

      Many people on the cloud computing scene will characterize Amazon Web Services as the proprietary platform that rules the roost, while OpenStack gets the nod among open platforms. There are new ways to leverage both platforms, though. Hyperglance Ltd. has announced Hyperglance 4.0 to bring together Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack cloud infrastructure, including Nagios alerts, into what it is billing as “an interactive, easy to use, 3D topology console within a single browser tab view.”

  • Healthcare

    • MITRE shares an open source FHIR testing tool

      Quina, speaking at the Federal Health IT Pavilion at HIMSS16, demonstrated Crucible, a tool that was created to help developers identify errors in FHIR applications. Funding from MITRE Corp. has made it possible for the software to be offered as an open-source project with an Apache license. Using the web interface at ProjectCrucible.org, a developer can run 228 test suites that include over 2,000 tests of the FHIR specification.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Windows 10 May Delete Important Programs Without Your Permission

    After installing a major update or newer builds, users are reporting issues of losing programs in Windows 10.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Uganda In Clinical Trials For Ebola Vaccine

      The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and GSK each own intellectual property that underlies this vaccine candidate. GSK is also the manufacturer of the vaccine.

    • Canada Welcomes USAians

      I love my local hospital. They provide quick, courteous service 24×7. We are also ~30million people in a country larger than yours so we won’t crowd you at all.

    • When did most Americans search for ‘move to Canada’?

      As sure as “Results Wednesday” follows Super Tuesday, Americans were reacting to the outcome of the voting by searching on Google for how to move to Canada.

  • Security

    • Why Linux Distros Look Insecure Even Though They’re Not

      The Linux distro is also likely to tell you about bugs as soon as they are discovered instead of waiting for an arbitrary day like “Patch Humpday” or a press conference where they also announce some sort of positive news — “Now includes NSA-supplied encryption back door for added security!” — or some other new feature they’re proud of.

      When it comes to bugs, hacks, and security breaches, FOSS is typically “no waiting” when it comes to telling users about program flaws.

    • Open-source code from Mars rover used in espionage campaign targeting Indian government

      Two open-source code libraries used in the development of the historic Mars rover have been exploited by cybercriminals and moulded into an effective espionage tool that is being used to target high-level officials in the Indian government.

      First exposed by security researchers at Palo Alto Networks, the malware, now dubbed Rover, was found in a malicious phishing email received by India’s ambassador to Afghanistan that was made to look like it was sent from India’s defence minister which, if opened, would have installed a slew of vicious exploits on the computer system.

      Upon analysis, the experts found the malware, which contained code that attacked a flaw in Office XP, boasted a range of spying features including the ability to hijack computer files, launch a keylogger, take screenshots and even record audio and video in real-time. All of the data compromised would be sent straight to the malware creator’s command and control (C&C) server.

    • Open Source Code Of Mars Rover Being Used To Create Malware To Target Indian Government

      Last year on December 24, 2015, a potential online target was identified which was delivered via an email to a high profile Indian diplomat, an Ambassador to Afghanistan. The email was spoofed and crafted as if it was sent by the current defence minister of India, Mr. Manohar Parikar. The mail commended the Ambassador to Afghanistan on his contributions and success.

    • Report: 3.5 Million HTTPS Servers Vulnerable to DROWN

      A report released Tuesday on the DROWN vulnerability raises concerns about possible attacks that could expose encrypted communications. DROWN is a serious vulnerability that affects HTTPS and other services using SSL version 2, according to the team of security researchers who compiled the report. The protocols affected are some of the essential cryptographic protocols for Internet security. An attack could decrypt secure HTTPS communications, such as passwords or credit card numbers, within minutes.

    • OpenSSL update fixes Drown vulnerability
    • HTTPS DROWN flaw: Security bods’ hearts sink as tatty protocols wash away web crypto

      DROWN (aka Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened eNcryption) is a serious design flaw that affects HTTPS websites and other network services that rely on SSL and TLS – which are core cryptographic protocols for internet security. As previously reported, about a third of all HTTPS servers are vulnerable to attack, the computer scientists behind the discovery of the issue warn.

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • DROWN Security Flaw Is Bad, But It’s Not Heartbleed or OpenSSL’s Fault

      For the second time in as many years, HTTPS encryption has turned out to have a huge flaw. This time, it’s called DROWN, and it affects more than 11 million servers that use the open source OpenSSL library. But that doesn’t make it another Heartbleed, and it doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on OpenSSL entirely.

    • DROWN Attack on TLS – Everything You Need To Know
    • Timely delivery of security updates
    • “Hack The Pentagon” — US Government’s Bug Bounty Program Invites Hackers And Coders

      This program is an initiative of the US Department of Defense’s new division Defense Digital Service (DDS) that’s led by former Microsoft executive Chris Lynch. Mr. Lynch says that he’s using his industry contacts to invite security experts and coders to participate.

    • John McAfee unlocks an iPhone and does not eat a shoe

      SHOE CONSERVATIONISTS should be glad that colourful security character John McAfee has lived up to his word and managed to unlock an iPhone.

    • Fedora Safe from DROWNing Attack

      If you are familiar with security , you likely saw the disclosure yesterday of the openssl v2 vulnerability given the sensational name “Drown”. Good news if you use Fedora (and it’s updated — Update with 20160229 ISOs) you don’t need to worry about a 0 day vuln fix. Openssl-1.0.2g IS the patched version and is on all Fedora Infrastructure and openssl that is shipped in fedora DEFAULTS to having the v2 AND v3 protocols not built-in “Compiled without openSSLv2/v3 support”.

    • Fedora Security Team FAD 2016

      In a couple of weeks (March 11th) the Fedora Security Team will be meeting in Washington, D.C. to hack on training, security fixes, and other issues. All Fedora contributors are welcome to stop by if you’re in the area.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • US Military Launches Cyber Attacks on ISIS In Iraq, And Announces It

      This is the first time when the US has announced an open cyber attack. The cyber attack on ISIS will focus on recapturing the city of Mosul in Northern Iraq from ISIS. The electronic infrastructure of Iraq was set by the US during the reconstruction of Iraq and the US is going to capitalize on those electronics with the cyber attacks.

    • U.S. Military Contractors Return In Droves to Iraq

      America’s mercenaries smell the blood (and the money) and are returning to Iraq.

      Mercs are a great thing for the U.S. government, in that they aren’t counted as “troops,” or as “boots on the ground,” even while they are both. The Defense Department can disavow any mischief the contractors get up like, such as murdering civilians, and keep the headcount low and the body count low when things are going well, or bad. It only costs money, and that America has a bottomless pool of, as long as it being spent on something violent abroad instead of helping Americans at home (which is socialism, sonny.)

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The worst drought in 900 years helped spark Syria’s civil war

      The drought that played a role in triggering the catastrophic Syrian Civil War was the worst such climate event in at least the past 900 years, according to a new study published this week.

      The study bolsters the conclusions from other research that found that because of human-made global warming, the drought was made three times more likely to occur, and that it was one of a number of factors that led to the outbreak of hostilities in 2011.

    • BHP Billiton-owned mining company agrees to pay $8.5bn to Brazil Government over 2015 dam collapse

      Millions of cubic metres of mining waste burst from a dam at the iron ore mine, causing what is considered to be Brazil’s worst environmental disaster.

    • Leonardo DiCaprio does a whole lot more than just talk about climate change

      Until his Academy Award acceptance speech on Sunday night, The Revenant star Leonardo DiCaprio had for years slipped under the radar as one of the most committed climate and oceans advocates in Hollywood.

      Instead, the public image that stuck was one of a talented, hard-partying star who seemed to be constantly surrounded by a coterie of models.

    • Climate Change Fuels Boko Haram

      Boko Haram, Nigeria’s homegrown Islamist terror group, continues to rampage across the country with growing impunity. Since its emergence in 2009, the group has killed 20,000 people and forced over 2.5 million Nigerians from their homes.

      Its expansion has been aided by growing ties with more established terrorist networks, especially al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), providing the group with “training and material support” according to the UN Security Council. Last year, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), active in parts of Iraq and Syria.

    • Climate deniers lose key talking point as satellites show temperatures hit all-time highs

      February was the warmest month in the satellite record of atmospheric temperatures, according to new data. This is just the first domino to fall during what will likely prove to be the warmest, or one of the warmest, months on record as more data trickles in on conditions during February.

      The satellite data deals a setback to climate deniers that frequently cite the satellite record of atmospheric temperatures as evidence that human-caused global warming either doesn’t exist or is far smaller than scientists claim.

    • Mosul dam engineers warn it could fail at any time, killing 1m people

      Iraqi engineers involved in building the Mosul dam 30 years ago have warned that the risk of its imminent collapse and the consequent death toll could be even worse than reported.

      They pointed out that pressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and more water flowed into the reservoir, bringing it up to its maximum capacity, while the sluice gates normally used to relieve that pressure were jammed shut.

  • Finance

    • TPP Is Obama’s Top Trade Priority For 2016

      Passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is the Obama administration’s top trade priority this year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative said in its annual trade agenda released today. The agenda highlights intellectual property protection but also says all the right things on copyright limitations and exceptions, safe harbor for internet service providers, promotion of generic medicines, and the ability of countries to use flexibilities under international trade law.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Clinton Politics Made Simple

      Hillary summed up the psychological trick of the faux egalitarianism in a simple sentence:
      “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … will that end racism? Will that end sexism? Will that end discrimination against the LGBT community?”. It is brilliant rhetoric, a masterpiece of sophistry. Of course breaking up the banks will not directly end these other evils. But neither would ending those things end the appalling level of wealth inequality. It comes directly back to my opening question of whether multi-billionaires are OK as long as they are appropriately representative of black, female and LGBT.

    • Hillary Lost My Vote in Honduras

      I am one of the many young women who to the consternation of so many pundits is just not Ready for Hillary in 2016. And it’s not because I am a bad feminist, it’s because I am judging Hillary Clinton, just as she has asked to be judged, on her record and her foreign policy credentials. I spent nearly five years in Central America working as a cross-border solidarity activist and I now work with immigrants in Massachusetts who have fled the violence in that region. So, I might have been moved by Clinton’s recent pledge to “campaign for human rights” and take on immigration reform. But I have seen first-hand how Clinton failed on that front when top military commanders in Honduras (all men, of course) overthrew its democratically elected president Manual Zelaya in 2009.

    • Why Bernie Sanders is No Jeremy Corbyn

      But attaching the label of “movement” to the Sanders’ campaign mistakes appearance for reality. Sanders’ rallies have certainly attracted large crowds – even larger than those of Obama in 2008. But a crowd is not a movement.

    • NYT Works Hard to Present Primary Race as More Boring Than It Is

      Something you often see in media analysis is that campaign reporters have a bias toward the horserace—that is, because they want an audience, they have an incentive to present electoral races as more interesting and competitive than they actually are.

      It’s completely untrue. The fact is, when real politics are at stake, corporate media often go out of their way to make races seem as boring as possible—to declare them over long before most citizens have had a chance to vote.

    • The Trump Campaign: Bad for America, but Good for CBS

      oonves noted that the election has been a boost for ratings—“We had a debate a couple of weeks ago, it was 14 million people on a Saturday night.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Different Brazilian Judge Orders Facebook Exec Released After Arrest

      A bit of a follow up to yesterday’s story about Brazilian law enforcement arresting Facebook vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, because Whatsapp (a Facebook subsidiary) refused to help in a drug trafficking case. This was a ridiculous move by almost any measure: (1) While Whatsapp is a Facebook subsidiary, it’s operated independently, so arresting a Facebook exec is like arresting an investor for what one of its companies does; (2) Whatsapp uses strong end-to-end encryption from Open Whisper Systems, the folks who make the gold standard encrypted communication system Signal Private Messenger, meaning that it’s impossible for Whatsapp or Facebook to decrypt messages; and (3) jailing unrelated executives over issues like that is just insane.

    • The UK’s Proposed Spy Law Would Force Apple to Secretly Hack its Phones Too

      The FBI’s demand that Apple craft new software to bypass iOS’s security protections has ignited a worldwide debate about a government’s ability to force tech companies to sabotage their own security. One repeated question has been: will other countries, like China, demand the same powers?

    • A Texas City Rescinds “No Cost” License Plate Reader Deal For Being “Big-Brotherish”

      At the beginning of the year, the City of Kyle, Texas, approved a controversial agreement to install automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology in its police vehicles. The devices would come at no cost to the city’s budget; instead, police would also be outfitted with credit card readers and use ALPR to catch drivers with outstanding court fees, also known as capias warrants.

      With each card swipe, an added 25% surcharge would go to Vigilant Solutions, the company providing the system. As an added bonus the company would also get to keep all the data on innocent drivers collected by the license plate readers—indefinitely.

      But before the license plate readers could even be installed, the Kyle city council voted 6-1 to rescind the order. The reason: public and media outcry over how the system would turn police into debt collectors and data miners.

      “It’s a little Big Brother-ish for me. It’s a little too invasive for me,” Councilmember Daphne Tenorio said at the February 16 hearing. “I’m uncomfortable with it…Because my husband’s in IT, I see what happens and, for me, personally I can’t justify it.”

      The February meeting was the city’s mulligan. Councilmembers grilled Vigilant Vice President of Sales Joe Harzewski with hard questions that should’ve been raised the first time around, such as what data is collected, where is the data stored, how long is it stored, how is it shared, and how is it protected.

    • State AG: We Have A Warrant Requirement For Stingrays; State Police: FILE(S) NOT FOUND

      This is a problem. It’s not that the state police chose to withhold the information, as it has with several other Stingray-related documents requested by the News Journal and the local ACLU. It’s that it says no records exist. This means the warrants the Attorney General says police must use are not being used.

      What do appear to be used by Delaware State Police are vague pen register orders that hide from judges and defendants the technology actually being used to obtain this phone data. Public defender John Daniello had one such document turned over to him by the police — one that apparently was used to deploy Harris Technology’s cellphone-tracking technology.

    • The revised Investigatory Powers Bill: what has changed

      A revised version of the Investigatory Powers Bill was published today, less than three weeks after critical reports by the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Joint Committee, which had scrutinised the Bill. Together with the Science & Technology Committee, they made 123 recommendations. On first reading, it appears that the revised Bill has made minor revisions not the full redraft that many, including ORG, have called for.

    • Stop rushing the Investigatory Powers Bill through Parliament

      Open Rights Group has responded to the publication of the Investigatory Powers Bill.

    • NSA can still spy under new ‘Privacy Shield’ agreement with Europe

      The United States and the European Union are about to reach a new privacy agreement intended to replace the old Safe Harbor agreement that came under intense scrutiny after the Snowden leaks revealed the scope of NSA’s data collection operations.

      The new Privacy Shield was published in full a few days ago, showing the principles that would govern the exchange of digital information between EU consumers and U.S. companies. However, the new agreement also has provisions that explain how and when the NSA can continue bulk data collection in the region.

    • FBI director says bureau asked NSA for help cracking San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone
    • FBI director implies that the NSA was unable to hack San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone
    • The FBI Says It Asked the NSA to Hack the San Bernardino Shootr’s iPhone. The NSA Couldn’t Do It.
    • NSA Chief Exhorts Tech Industry to Join Effort to Bolster Security

      NSA director makes plea to tech industry to partner on security; DROWN vulnerability hits SSL/TLS, but it’s no Heartbleed; EMC, leaving HDDs behind, unveils several new flash arrays; and there’s more.

    • Where is the Tort? Something seems to be missing in the Investigatory Powers Bill

      This provision means a person can sue another person for unlawful interception, rather than just rely on the government to prosecute. It was, in this way, a directly enforceable privacy right. (It was a tort used, I understand, in phone and computer hacking claims.)

      But the Bill does not (seem to) have this tortuous protection for individuals, even though Part 1 of the Bill is supposedly protecting privacy. (If it somewhere else in the vast Bill, I cannot find it. Please correct me if I am wrong.)

      If this is correct, and the tort is being repealed, then why is the government removing this civil law right, leaving the individual only with criminal law protection under what will be the new Act – which in turn needs the prior consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions?

    • Honest, Guv, I Didn’t See Nuffin’

      It is not only that I do not believe they could fail to notice. It is that anyone with that level of frequent access to the Prime Minister, other ministers and Royal family would be checked out by the security services. He would not have experienced full positive vetting (now called direct vetting), but a level of vetting would have been carried out on Savile himself. And many of his friends were subject to frequent direct vetting and it is impossible that a picture of Savile would not have built up tangentially. MI5, Special Branch (now also renamed) and GCHQ have tens of thousands of employees. What do you think these people do all day?

    • With Arrival Of New DA, The DEA’s ‘Likely Illegal’ Wiretap Warrants More Legal, Less Prolific

      The DEA’s South California wiretap kingdom is crumbling. Run almost solely through a single, very obliging judge and approved by an assortment of DA’s office underlings, the wiretap warrants were so toxic the DOJ wouldn’t touch them. Local prosecutors would, however, but now they’re finding their cases falling apart.

      The likely illegal wiretap program skirted guidelines meant to prevent exactly this sort of abuse. In response to the FBI’s abuse of wiretaps to surveil civil rights leaders (including Martin Luther King Jr.) during the 1960s, the DOJ stated warrants had to be signed off by the top prosecutor in the area they were deployed: in this case, Riverside District Attorney Paul Zellerbach. Zellerbach delegated when he shouldn’t have, compounding other problems, like the DEA’s use of a county judge for warrant requests, rather than a federal judge.

    • Former Google CEO Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board

      Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google, will head a new Pentagon advisory board aimed at bringing Silicon Valley innovation and best practices to the U.S. military, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Wednesday.

      Carter unveiled the new Defense Innovation Advisory Board with Schmidt during the annual RSA cyber security conference in San Francisco, saying it would give the Pentagon access to “the brightest technical minds focused on innovation.”

      Schmidt, now the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), the parent company of Google, said the board would help bridge what he called a clear gap between how the U.S. military and the technology industry operate.

    • “Privacy is Surveillance” – Part 1 of the Investigatory Powers Bill

      You will see that “Part 1” of the Bill is called “General Privacy Provisions”.

    • EFF Director Cindy Cohn On Why You Should Support Techdirt’s Encryption Crowdfunding Campaign

      This time around the issues surrounding encryption are much bigger than they were 20 years ago and reach far beyond the technical community. More than ever we need media and analysis that won’t be confused or misled, that will follow stories past the headlines and scare tactics and that will help the much wider range of people affected by this debate understand what’s at stake. Luckily, Techdirt is up for the task and all they need is a little help from their audience to get there. I hope you will help.

    • Congress Seems Pretty Angry About The FBI’s Belief That The Courts Can Force Apple To Help It Get Into iPhones

      Congressional hearings involving law enforcement and intelligence folks tend to be fawning affairs, with most of Congress willing to accept whatever these guys have to say. Sure, you’ll always have a few people critical of certain aspects, but generally speaking, Congress is especially friendly to the FBI, NSA, CIA, etc. So it must have come as a bit of a shock to FBI Director James Comey that during a long House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, they seemed pretty pissed off at Comey’s belief that the courts should force Apple to help him open up encrypted iPhones.

    • Rogers: Silicon Valley can benefit from CYBERCOM outreach

      Rogers tried to lighten the mood as he took the stage by calling it “an interesting panel to follow” as the NSA director.

    • NSA seeks to combine offense and defense in its spy efforts

      The NSA has two key missions: foreign intelligence-gathering and information assurance. One mission helps the other, as intelligence gathered by one side can be used by the other team to improve how government networks and private sector networks are protected. The NSA will pull together its offensive and defensive capabilities as part of the NSA21, or NSA in the 21st century, plan, said Michael Rogers, commander of the United States Cyber Command and director of the NSA, at the RSA Conference on Tuesday.

    • RSA 2016: cyber chief says US will fall short of recruiting goals
    • U.S. Spy Chief Expects More Power Grid Attacks Like One In Ukraine

      The head of the U.S. National Security Agency has warned that hackers will inevitably attack U.S. infrastructure in an attempt to cause a power failure like the one in Ukraine last year.

      Admiral Michael Rogers told a cybersecurity conference in San Francisco that it is a “matter of when, not if” a foreign state launches a cyberattack on U.S. targets.

      “An actor penetrated the Ukrainian power grid and brought large segments of it offline in a very well-crafted attack that both focused on knocking the system down but also focused on how was the provider likely to respond to that outage,” Rogers said.

    • NSA asks Silicon Valley to help fight cybercrime, terrorism

      The NSA is too big and slow to effectively fight ingenious cyber attacks without the help of Silicon Valley tech expertise, so it’s time to patch up relations between the two, the head of the NSA told a gathering of tens of thousands at RSA Conference 2016.

    • Apple formally appeals judge’s iPhone unlocking order

      Just in case its motion to vacate wasn’t enough, Apple late Tuesday filed an appeal of a California judge’s order requiring it to help the FBI defeat the password protection on the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino mass shooters.

      Apple’s lawyers filed the appeal “in an abundance of caution,” to cover the possibility that an appeal is the most appropriate way to oppose Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym’s Feb. 16 order, they said in a court filing.

      An appeal and a motion to vacate have similar goals, but attack a judge’s order in different ways. A motion to vacate asks a judge to withdraw her previous order; in this case, Apple asked Pym to reverse her Feb. 16 decision.

  • Civil Rights

    • Pennsylvania bishops hid sex abuse by ‘monster’ priest for 40 years, jury finds

      His alleged victims were humiliated, abused, raped and kept quiet. They were supposed to be able to trust him.

      Monsignor Francis McCaa spent nearly 40 years in the ministry, and for 25 of them, he was a serial abuser of young boys in his care, some as young as eight years old, according to a scathing report by a Pennsylvania state investigative grand jury.

      “Father Francis McCaa was a monster,” the grand jury found on Tuesday, after investigating the sexual misconduct of dozens of clergy in the Altoona–Johnstown diocese in Pennsylvania. The report was largely spurred by the discovery of a secret diocesan archive detailing administrative action around sex abuse, uncovered in August through a search warrant.

    • My School Requires All Girls to Wear Skirts. I’m Fighting for My Right to Wear Pants.

      I am like a lot of eighth grade students. I try to do my best in class. I like sports and playing outside, and I regularly go to Bible classes. I also believe in standing up for myself and others. So last year, along with some friends, I created a petition to ask my school to change its policy that says girls have to wear skirts to school or risk being punished.

    • President Obama, When It Comes to Human Rights, We Need More Action, Not Words

      The Obama administration record on torture and detention undermines its rhetoric.

      The Obama administration this week made new pledges and commitments to protect “human rights and fundamental freedoms” to the United Nations in advance of the U.S. re-election to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Yet while the U.S. has used its first six years of HRC membership to advance human rights overseas, its participation has had little direct bearing on human rights at home. Lack of accountability for torture and cooperation with U.N. human rights experts are just two examples of such double standards.

      When he took office, President Obama promised to disavow many of the disastrous Bush administration policies, including by closing Guantánamo and ending the use of torture. Obama also promised to reassert U.S. global leadership on human rights by joining the HRC later that year.

      While the president issued an executive order on his second day in office ending the CIA’s secret detention and torture program, he declined to support any meaningful measures of accountability for crimes that had taken place. His policy of “looking forward rather than backward,” as well as his administration’s continuing fight against transparency and any attempts to reveal the whole truth about Bush administration torture policies, will undoubtedly stain his human rights legacy.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • 5G Wireless Hype Overshadows Fact Nobody Actually Knows What 5G Is Yet

      At the Mobile World Congress convention in Spain last week, one of the most well-hyped products in convention history was something that doesn’t technically exist. Fifth generation wireless (5G) was all the rage at the show, with multiple carriers promising they were in various stages of bringing the new ultra-fast wireless standard to consumers. The problem is that while engineers have a general idea of some of the technologies that may be included in the final standard when approved, nobody actually knows what 5G is yet. And when it does finally get solidified, it’s likely to be 2020 or later before actual launches occur.

    • Afraid Of Upsetting The Cable Industry, Roku Won’t Support FCC Quest For Increased Set Top Box Competition

      But, because Roku believes it’s first in line for the cable industry’s affections, it appears to be backing away from an initiative that would likely be good for the entire sector (investment by Viacom, 21st Century Fox, and UK cable operator Sky might be shaping Roku’s thinking as well). After all, why support broader, healthy competition when you believe you’ve got the inside track? Well, because should the FCC’s gambit actually work, Roku (which people forget began as a brain child of Netflix) stands to gain a much larger chunk of this suddenly-open market than it will from remaining mute.

  • DRM

    • Join us this Thursday to fight an unjust DRM law

      We’ll be hand-delivering a comment against the the part of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) that makes circumvention of DRM a crime, even when done for important reasons like security research or accessibility. Our comment is co-signed by more than 1,000 people, but the Copyright Office won’t let us submit it online without proprietary software.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • USTR Strikes IP Deal With Honduras On Generic Cheese, Signal Piracy

      The government of Honduras has committed to a work plan for protecting intellectual property rights that includes recognition of food names considered generic by the United States such as “parmesano” (parmesan), provolone and bologna, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced today. Other commitments include signal piracy related to cable and satellite, and a customs trademark registry.

    • Trademarks

      • Canadian Smoke Shop Owner Demonstrates How To Turn Trademark Infringement Into Jail Time

        Lots of brands seem to feel trademark infringement should be greeted with the full brunt force of the law — even though it’s rarely anything more than a civil offense. Counterfeited goods are their own issue, with Good Guy ICE on hand to run interference for major studios, the NFL and anyone else with a significant amount of lobbying power. Counterfeiters can end up in jail, but entities that do nothing more than use a trademarked name/logo without permission or in a “confusing” fashion? Not so much.

        There are exceptions, of course. And caveats. But that’s exactly what happened in Canada. Jail time for trademark infringement. Richard Stobbe of IPblog.ca has more details.

    • Copyrights

      • President Barack Obama will speak at the South by Southwest interactive festival this year

        No, that’s not some hipster band. It’s the 44th president of the United States. President Barack Obama will be the first sitting president to speak at the annual music, film and interactive media gathering, which drew more than 80,000 attendees last year.

      • UK government launches initiative against online adblocking, compares it to piracy

        With the rise of users employing adblocking technology in the last 18 months, the conflict between online publishers and users has been mostly left as a problem for the market to resolve organically. However today the UK’s culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that the British government intends to ‘do something’ on the issue, describing the practice as a ‘modern day protection racket’, and comparing it to piracy.

      • The Murky Waters of International Copyright Law

        Copyright is too often used to stifle speech and restrict common sense uses of creative works, from books, to films, textbooks, images, and music. That’s why we need exceptions and limitations to copyright, to serve as a safety valve against these kinds of abuse. Fair use is the most robust framework to permit uses of copyrighted material without permission from the creator or rightsholders. The United States is particularly known for having a strong, court-tested fair use regime, enabling all kinds of uses and innovation to thrive on the Internet.

        Even though it has been so critical in the U.S. however, fair use is not strictly integrated into international law—nor, for that matter, any of the trade agreements the U.S. itself has negotiated with other countries. Most relevantly, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement carries a framework for governments to enact exceptions and limitations in their laws. That could be enough to justify the introduction of fair use in all the participating countries, but it’s far from a straightforward obligation unlike any of the pro-rightsholder restrictions that the agreement contains otherwise.

03.02.16

Links 2/3/2016: KDE Plasma 5.5.5, SSLv2 Bug

Posted in News Roundup at 5:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Evolving Market for Commercial Software Built On Open Source

    That is no longer the case. While an awful lot of companies are still stuck running immense software packages critical to their infrastructure, new projects are being deployed on cloud servers using open source technologies. This makes it much easier to upgrade one’s capabilities without having to rip out a huge software package and reinstall something else, and it also allows companies to pay as they go, rather than paying for a bunch of features they’ll never use.

    And there are a lot of customers who want to take advantage of open source projects without building and supporting a team of engineers to tweak one of those projects for their own unique needs. Those customers are willing to pay for software packages whose value is based on the delta between the open source projects and the proprietary features laid on top of that project.

  • Node.js 5.7 released ahead of impending OpenSSL updates

    The Node.js Foundation is gearing up this week for fixes to OpenSSL that could mean updates to Node.js itself.

    Releases to OpenSSL due on Tuesday will fix defects deemed to be of “high” severity, Rod Vagg, foundation technical steering committee director, said in a blog post on Monday. Within a day of the OpenSSL releases, the Node.js crypto team will assess their impacts, saying, “Please be prepared for the possibility of important updates to Node.js v0.10, v0.12, v4 and v5 soon after Tuesday, the 1st of March.”

  • Q&A: H2O.ai’s Vinod Iyengar on Machine Learning and Open Source

    On the tech scene today, it’s clear that cloud computing, Big Data analytics and machine learning are huge themes, and open source technologies are helping to drive these trends. There is also a shortage of skilled workers in these areas, and a shortage of understanding of the relevant technologies. At OStatic, we’ve been conducting an ongoing series of interviews with influencers focused on these key technology areas, and we’re particularly focused on how open source is involved.

    [...]

    We operate under the Apache 2.0 license, the most flexible open source license available.

  • Genode OS 16.02 Ported To RISC-V CPU Architecture

    Genode OS 16.02 has been released as the newest version of this popular, open-source operating system framework.

    The prominent features of Genode OS 16.02 include a port to the RISC-V CPU architecture, secure pass-through of USB devices to virtual machines, and updates to their Muen and seL4 kernels.

  • Events

    • Open Networking Summit

      ONS is the forum for service providers, enterprises, disruptive and incumbent vendors, open source projects, leading researchers and investors to discuss SDN and NFV developments and to shape the future of the networking industry.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Cloudera launches open-source effort to harness Hadoop for security analytics

      Hadoop will soon be brought up much more often in enterprise security discussions if Cloudera Inc.’s newest community effort achieves its goal. The Open Network Insight (ONI) project launched on GitHub this week to help organizations take advantage of data crunching platform’s processing power in their breach prevention efforts.

      The documentation for the tool explains that it’s a mix of free technologies from the Hadoop ecosystem and machine learning algorithms that Cloudera created in collaboration with a number of leading network protection vendors. Once all of its components are properly deployed, ONI starts pulling traffic logs from the environment that it’s protecting into the Hadoop File System, where they’re analyzed in stages.

    • Mirantis Delivers its Latest OpenStack Distribution

      Mirantis is out with version 8 of its OpenStack distribution, wrapping in the OpenStack Liberty release. The company says this release is the most stable OpenStack distribution available and it sought much feedback from large customers in building this release. The company has also announced that 26,000 unique users across 3,500 development teams globally are using its distribution now.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle’s JET flies into open source skies

      Oracle has published the code for its long-awaited open source JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) version 2.0.0.

      If you’re interested in looking over the code at GitHub, here’s what Big Red says is in the box: a full JS development toolkit, SPA template-based lifecycle management, two-way binding with a common model layer, single-page app navigation and mobile support.

      Open source libraries used with JET include jQuery, the jQuery UI, Knockout, RequireJS and Hammer.

    • LibreOffice Conference 2016 in Brno

      LibreOffice Conference will take place in Brno, Czech Republic this year. It will be our third international desktop-related conference in Brno. After GUADEC 2013 and Akademy 2014. And we’re very much looking forward to it.

      The conference is still more than 6 months away, but the organization already started some time ago. We made an agreement with the local technical university about the venue. It’s the venue where GUADEC 2013 and DevConf.cz 2015 and 2016 took place. The campus premises used to be a Cartesian monastery which was founded in the 14th century. Just recently, the campus was renovated and now features a beautiful combination of historical and modern architecture.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Google’s Self-Driving Car Causes First Accident, As Programmers Try To Balance Human Simulacrum And Perfection

    Google’s self-driving cars have driven millions of miles with only a dozen or so accidents, all of them being the fault of human drivers rear-ending Google vehicles. In most of these cases, the drivers either weren’t paying attention, or weren’t prepared for a vehicle that was actually following traffic rules. But this week, an incident report by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (pdf) highlighted that a Google automated vehicle was at fault in an accident for what’s believed to be the first time.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • NHS comes top in healthcare survey

      The NHS has been declared the best healthcare system by an international panel of experts who rated its care superior to countries which spend far more on health.

      The same study also castigated healthcare provision in the US as the worst of the 11 countries it looked at. Despite putting the most money into health, America denies care to many patients in need because they do not have health insurance and is also the poorest at saving the lives of people who fall ill, it found.

      The report has been produced by the Commonwealth Fund, a Washington-based foundation which is respected around the world for its analysis of the performance of different countries’ health systems. It examined an array of evidence about performance in 11 countries, including detailed data from patients, doctors and the World Health Organisation.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • NRA Lobbyist Will Co-Host Hillary Clinton Fundraiser

      Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called her support for gun control laws a key differentiator from her opponent Bernie Sanders, who she claims isn’t tough enough on the industry. But in mid-March, a Clinton campaign fundraiser will be co-hosted by a lobbyist whose clients include the National Rifle Association (NRA).

    • Former NSA and CIA director presents book at Nixon Library

      The Richard Nixon Foundation hosted Gen. Michael Hayden at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum on Tuesday night.

      Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and the CIA, presented his new book, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.”

    • Clinton-Bush Hardliner Attacks Congress for Blocking Invasion of Syria

      Michael Hayden [pictured left] said this in a video clip at Huffington Post Live, where the context of what he was saying was left ambiguous, but it concerned only the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, so his comment there was gratuitous: he asserted (at 23:00 in the complete interview) that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are prisoners of war and thus can legally be kept imprisoned for the rest of their lives without there being any need at all for them (and there were 775 of them) to be heard in any court — he said they’re prisoners of war and not prisoners of any legal system at all; and, so, even if they were actually captured in error (as many of them were found to have been), they’ve got no legal rights at all. Innocence or guilt is legally irrelevant to their continued imprisonment, says this former chief of America’s CIA and of the NSA.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Intel Agencies: Clinton Emails Match Top Secret Documents

      Clinton supporters, erroneously, make much out of the idea that of the many, many emails that passed through her private server, none were “marked” classified. They claim that, when in fact thousands of those same emails are indeed now marked classified, that is just after-the-fact Washington squabbling.

      So this new information — that America’s intelligence agencies now say the contents of some of those unmarked emails match the contents of their own classified documents — is a big deal. It also suggests just how Clinton’s unclassified server came to be loaded up with classified material.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Towns In Florida Can Keep Their Fracking Bans, State Senate Says

      It wouldn’t have been the first time something like this happened. People in small towns and counties get together, vote, and agree to ban fracking. And then the state legislature comes in and passes a ban on bans.

      But not this time.

      The Florida Senate’s Appropriations Committee has finally killed a bill that would have stopped towns from banning fracking, a week after the committee voted the measure down by a 10-9 vote. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Garrett Richter (R) made a motion Tuesday to not consider the bill.

    • “The Old Normal Is Gone”: February Shatters Global Temperature Records

      Our planet’s preliminary February temperature data are in, and it’s now abundantly clear: Global warming is going into overdrive.

      There are dozens of global temperature datasets, and usually I (and my climate journalist colleagues) wait until the official ones are released about the middle of the following month to announce a record-warm month at the global level. But this month’s data is so extraordinary that there’s no need to wait: February obliterated the all-time global temperature record set just last month.

  • Finance

    • Canada Agrees To Use EU’s ‘Lipstick On A Pig’ Version Of Corporate Sovereignty For CETA

      Last September, Techdirt reported on the EU’s plan to replace the highly-controversial corporate sovereignty provisions in TAFTA/TTIP — the “investor-state dispute settlement” (ISDS) chapter — with something it called the “Investor Court System” (ICS). As we reported then, even if ICS addressed all the problems of ISDS — spoiler alert: it certainly doesn’t — there was a huge backdoor in the form of CETA, the trade deal between the EU and Canada. If CETA includes old-style corporate sovereignty provisions, US companies with subsidiaries in Canada will be able to use CETA to by-pass TAFTA/TTIP’s new ICS system completely, and sue EU nations using ISDS with all its widely-recognized faults. In fact, Bernd Lange, the MEP with responsibility for making recommendations on how the European Parliament (EP) should vote on international trade matters, said at the time that he would not support CETA if it included ISDS.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • The Provocative President of the Supreme Court

      In essence, the President was trolling us – in the proper sense of that much-abused word.

    • End This British Atrocity

      One of the worst atrocities of the British Empire occurred well within my own lifetime – the removal of an entire people, the Chagossians, from their homeland. Uprooted and deposited across the seas hundreds of miles away, many died from the physical and psychological effects of this crime against humanity. The thing is, it is still happening. The survivors have clung together as a community, and the British government are still actively preventing their return to their homeland – all to make way for an American military base on Diego Garcia. There is no reason other than simple Imperialism for America to maintain a military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

      [...]

      It is of course another example of the unparalleled talent for hypocrisy of the British state that the same politicians who declare their willingness to fight and die for the right of self-determination of the Falkland Islanders, will defend the deportation of the Chagos Islanders and their continued exclusion from their own islands. Again I would stress that Labour have been at least as guilty as Tories. The entire British state is complicit in this atrocity.

    • Debating Glenn Greenwald was like “looking the devil in the eye”: Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden details distaste for media in new book

      Former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden is not a big fan of journalists. At least, that’s what his new book, “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror,” appears to suggest.

    • Ex-CIA Chief: ‘American Armed Forces Would Refuse to Act’ If Trump Ordered Torture
    • On whistleblowers and secrecy: What author Barry Eisler said to a room of ex-intelligence officers

      You might have come across a phrase involving Snowden—in fact, this phrase isn’t easy to avoid if you favor establishment pundits like David Brooks and Fred Kaplan and Josh Marshall—to the effect that Snowden violated his “oath of secrecy.” Even former CIA director David Petraeus has claimed—awkwardly, in retrospect—there is such an oath. I wrote about this supposed oath in a bit more detail after the first Snowden stories broke, in a blog post called “Memo to Authoritarians.”

      All of us in this room know there is no “oath of secrecy”—that the notion of such an “oath” is the product either of ignorance or propaganda. There is a secrecy agreement—what here in Silicon Valley we typically call a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA. But to inflate the status of such an agreement to the level of an “oath,” akin to, say, the president’s oath of office, is false and misleading.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • FCC ‘Probing’ Whether Cable Companies Have Sabotaged Internet Video

      Most people realize that the cable and broadcast industry has worked tirelessly to protect its legacy cash cow from disruption. Dish was forced to make its ad-skipping DVR less useful if it wanted streaming licensing rights. Fox, Disney and Comcast/NBC for years kept Hulu from being too disruptive. ESPN sued Verizon for trying to offer more flexible TV lineups. Apple keeps running face first into broadcasters terrified of real disruption with its own TV plans. That’s before you even get to cable companies busy capping and metering usage to hurt streaming services, while zero rating their own services for competitive advantage.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Operator of Sweden’s Largest Streaming Site Arrested on Secret European Warrant

        A man suspected of being the main operator of what was once Sweden’s largest streaming site has been arrested in Germany following the execution of a secret European warrant. The man, reportedly a Turkish national, is believed to have set up advertising deals at Swefilmer resulting in around $1.7m in revenue.

      • Jay-Z’s Tidal Music Streaming Service Hit With $5 Million Copyright Lawsuit

        In a twist of irony, Tidal, the music streaming service owned by Jay-Z and touting its pro-music artist model, is now being sued for not paying its artists.

      • Tidal Sued For Unpaid Royalties And Cooking The Streaming Counts

        It’s been no secret that Tidal, Jay-Z’s foray into the music streaming business, hasn’t exactly had the success it was supposed to have. In the wake of all the angry sentiment about just how much other streaming services were paying musical artists, Tidal positioned itself as artist-friendly, the option for fans that want to make sure musicians get paid. It sounded great, except now Tidal finds itself joining the club of streaming services facing legal action over artist royalties.

03.01.16

Links 1/3/2016: Firefox OS in Panasonic Ultra HD TVs, Raspberry Pi 3

Posted in News Roundup at 11:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How to choose the right brand architecture for your open source project

    Most people who start an open source software project aren’t sitting around waiting for someone to discuss brand architecture models with them, but many of them do have long term goals for their project that include eventually seeing it becoming a paid product or even the basis of a company built around servicing and supporting the project code.

  • Open Source Evolution: From Making Better Code to Making Better Business

    Today, open-source software is thriving in the Cloud, with a whole new generation of projects – such as Docker, Heroku, Open Stack and others. Cumulatively, GNU is still the leading license, but MIT, Apache and other licenses are among the top licenses used in open-source projects.

  • Top Open Source Creativity Apps

    There is a common belief among non-Linux users that there aren’t any good creative applications from the open source camp. In truth, this is absolutely false. The key is knowing which applications are needed to complete a specific task. In this article, I’ll share my recommendations for the top open source creativity apps.

  • 6 essential non-coding careers in open source

    When I started working in open source software in 1999, it was a small part of what I did. My company, SGI, wanted to start shipping Linux-based servers, and my task was to create a process for commercializing Linux. Today we’ve reached a point where open source software is in almost every area of technology. And while we often still think of it as code and developers, a whole ecosystem has evolved around open source—one that includes many full-time careers. These roles are much needed as open source matures, and they allow more of us who believe in the power of collaborative development to get involved.

    To help those looking to get involved in open source professionally, here’s a look at some of the most popular and emerging roles.

  • OPNFV Delivers Second Release of Open Source Network Functions Virtualization Platform
  • OPNFV puts out second release of open source NFV platform, Brahmaputra
  • Alluxio: Open Source Tech Making Baidu’s Data Centers Faster

    Running a successful internet business without using the data you accumulate to your advantage is clearly impossible in this day and age. Until about one year ago, Baidu, the web company behind the largest Chinese-language search engine and the country’s answer to Google, had a major technology problem on its hands.

    The queries Baidu product managers ran against its databases took hours to complete because of the huge amount of data stored in the company’s data centers. Baidu needed a solution, and its engineers were given the goal of creating an ad-hoc query engine that would manage petabytes of data and finish queries in 30 seconds or less.

  • 6 more must-have open source apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux

    In this follow up article, here are some more of the best open source and free apps I’ve found for my heterogeneous environment.

  • Hortonworks seeks salvation in proprietary software

    Three years ago Hortonworks led a chorus of open source Kumbaya as it sought to differentiate itself in the rapidly growing Hadoop market. Today, Hortonworks has significantly changed its tune, embracing proprietary software as a way to improve its financials.

  • Documentation should be concise, consistent, and simple

    “Words mean things” is one of my favorite expressions. I often use it in jest, but it’s an important consideration when writing documentation. I’m normally one to sling words around with great artistic flair, but when it comes to writing technical documentation, I’ve become more deliberate in my wording.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS/Big Data

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • native gtk3 menubar in libreoffice

      For comparison here’s the (not utterly awful) emulated look prior to this. You can compare the spacing of elements in the menubar, menu separator rendering, distance of checkmarks to the following text, the display of the short cuts in different font attributes with different positioning, and menu entry line spacing.

    • LibreOffice Now Has GTK3-Native Menus

      There’s even more progress now to report on with LibreOffice’s GTK3 tool-kit support.

      LibreOffice has been making lots of progress with their GTK3 tool-kit support to better integrate the open-source office suite on modern Linux desktops and is also needed for running LibreOffice on Wayland. A few days ago we reported on GTK3 native context menus for LibreOffice while the latest to mention now are native menu bars.

    • LibreOffice Is Getting GTK3 Native Menus

  • CMS

    • Acquia adapting to future needs as web trends change

      The Boston-based open source firm Acquia is dabbling in several technologies to ensure that, down the road, it stays as big a player in the market as it is now.

      Acquia uses the Drupal content management system to build websites for companies around the world and has produced and powered roughly 12 per cent of all Drupal implementations, according to Chris Stone, the head of engineering and chief product officer.

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • Video: 30 Years of Minix
    • Haiku in 2016

      About once a year I like to put aside Linux distributions, and the various flavours of BSD, to look at Haiku. As the Haiku website tells us, “Haiku is an open source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.”

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • UK open source drive ‘encourages citizens participation’

      The push by the UK government to use more free and open source software for its eGovernment services is helping to get citizens more involved, says Bernard Tyers, a user experience researcher working for the UK’s Home Office. “Everyone can see how the design and research process works, and users are helping to test our prototypes.”

    • Consultations launched for local authority common digital standard

      The views of council staff and other stakeholders are being sought for a draft Local Government Digital Service Standard devised to encourage use of common services and data registers between different authorities based on a similar approach used in Whitehall.

      With support from the Government Digital Service (GDS), a group of councils working as part of the LocalGov Digital network has been working to finalise guidelines for a common approach to service transformation and design.

    • Digital service standard set to mandate data reuse

      Last week, PublicTechnology reported that the new Local Government Digital Service Standard emerged from discussions held earlier this month at the offices of the Government Digital Service.

      Publication of the draft standard covering transactional services has been coordinated by digital practitioner network LocalGov Digital, and based on the existing central government standard could be adapted for councils.

    • Councils urged to use agile, open source and platforms

      LocalGovDigital publishes draft version of Digital Service Standard for local government

  • Licensing

    • Is SFLC Shooting Open Source in the Foot?

      The academic article by SFLC about ZFS is troubling and may unintentionally shoot free software licensing in the foot.

      When I was at Sun (as part of the team that released the Java Programming Language by starting the OpenJDK project) I often heard community concerns about the CDDL license. At the time the big complaint was about the “Choice of Venue” clause.

      I got involved because Sun had developed many essential Java libraries and distributed them under CDDL. The community requested a more permissive license and I was able to convince internal project leaders (and Sun’s lawyers) to make a licensing change for a handful of these projects. And there was much rejoicing.

      Based on my experience in helping Java to become open source I came to appreciate the legal hacks on copyright which make open source possible. It’s the free software license which uses copyright to enable sharing (vs. the default of disabling sharing).

    • The VMware Hearing and the Long Road Ahead

      On last Thursday, Christoph Hellwig and his legal counsel attended a hearing in Hellwig’s VMware case that Conservancy currently funds. Harald Welte, world famous for his GPL enforcement work in the early 2000s, also attended as an observer and wrote an excellent summary. I’d like to highlight a few parts of his summary, in the context of Conservancy’s past litigation experience regarding the GPL.

      First of all, in great contrast to the cases here in the USA, the Court acknowledged fully the level of public interest and importance of the case. Judges who have presided over Conservancy’s GPL enforcement cases USA federal court take all matters before them quite seriously. However, in our hearings, the federal judges preferred to ignore entirely the public policy implications regarding copyleft; they focused only on the copyright infringement and claims related to it. Usually, appeals courts in the USA are the first to broadly consider larger policy questions. There are definitely some advantages to the first Court showing interest in the public policy concerns.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • BrewDog’s open-source revolution is at the vanguard of postcapitalism

      Fast forward to now, and a very interesting thing just happened. BrewDog, the Scottish-based brewery whose beer outlets are spreading rapidly across the globe, just open-sourced its recipe collection. In a cheeky press release, its founders quipped: “Oh, and if you are from one of the global beer mega corporations and you are reading this, your computer will spontaneously combust, James Bond style, any second now.”

    • ‘Platform car’ is driving open-source design
    • The innovators: Skeleton car that is driving open-source design

      The OSVehicle units consist of parts that can be easily swapped without throwing away other working parts, which expands the vehicle’s lifespan, said Yuki. Its core unit contains the most complex parts of a vehicle, which means it is stable and ready to use, she added. Loddo compares it to the Android operating system for mobile phones, where developers can freely access the software as a base on which to build apps.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Source Hardware is an opportunity for Synthetic Biology research – the DocuBricks approach by Tobias Wenzel

        There is a lesson to be learned from the incompleteness of commercial assembly-set documentations: Open Source Hardware is more than an assembly instruction. It is also about documenting design files and decisions along its functionality and in a modular fashion, complete with testing and calibration instructions. A good documentation enables the project to grow and improve without the doing of the inventor. Only in this way most projects can enfold their benefit well to society and technology companies. To be sure, documenting a hardware project is not easy and requires time. For this reason a handful scientists at the University of Cambridge (including the author), all with a background in technology and biology, recently started the DocuBricks initiative. DocuBricks is an open source and free software that makes documenting hardware and usage procedures easier. The name is a reference to modularity in the same way as Lego or BioBricks. As the name suggests, the editor part of the software guides the user through a modular documentation structure with relevant fields in a standardised, yet general format. The user can create a hierarchy of documentation bricks, explaining their function, implementation and assembly while referring to a parts library. The result is a XML document and a folder with construction and media files that is displayed with the viewer part of the software (a style sheet and script to enable interactivity).

      • Kicad hacking – Intra-sheet links and ERC

        I spent time looking at gEDA and Eagle when I wanted to get back into hardware hacking for my own ends; but neither did I really click with. On the other hand, a mere 10 minutes with Kicad and I knew I had found the tool I wanted to work with long-term.

      • Open-Source System 3D Prints from Custom Powders

        An open-source laser sintering printer has been used to print intricate 3D objects from powdered plastics and biomaterials. The system costs a fraction of equivalent commercial systems and could give researchers a DIY technique for working with their own specialized materials.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • GitHubber wants to revive the first Unix in a PDP-7 emulator

    An IT lecturer from the Australian state of Queensland wants to revive the very first Unix – the version written by Ken Thompson on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7.

    While the PDP-11 is probably the most famous of the series – a genuine watershed in computer history, and a successful system that sold 600,000 units in its 20-year life on the market – the PDP-7 has its own place in history.

    Its most enduring contribution to the life of the sysadmin: it was the machine that then Bell Labs engineer Ken Thompson wrote the first Unix on, in assembly language, in 1969. As the Linux Information Project notes, it was also DEC’s first system to use a mass-storage-based operating system.

    That’s what Warren Toomey is working to re-create in this project.

  • Science

    • Footage of possible meteor in Scotland

      Footage has been recorded of what appears to be a meteor in the sky over Scotland.

      Police received a large number of calls after a big, bright flash was seen.

      People took to social media to report seeing a blue, white or green light, with some saying they also heard a rumbling sound.

      Driving instructor Bill Addison, from Buckie in Moray, recorded what appeared to be a meteor shooting across the sky on his dashboard camera.

      Mike Fleming captured similar footage on the road between Dunecht and Castle Fraser in Aberdeenshire.

      The “flash” was also caught on a security camera at Woodend, Lumphanan, Aberdeenshire, which was sent in by Craig Lindsay.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Thousands of NHS nursing and doctor posts lie vacant
    • The Rising Threat of Religious Hospitals Denying Women Medical Care

      Imagine you are 20 weeks pregnant, only halfway through your pregnancy, when you start to miscarry. It’s the middle of the night; you call an ambulance and are rushed to the hospital. The hospital admits you and consults with a specialist who concludes that the only option is to induce labor and complete the miscarriage — either way, the fetus will not survive. But without induction of labor you could die too.

      But instead of acting quickly to save your life, the hospital admits you and watches you get sicker and sicker. For 10 hours, the hospital will do nothing to complete the miscarriage, even though the hospital knows that every moment the miscarriage drags on increases your risk of contracting a life-threatening infection, which you ultimately do.

    • Calls Grow for Wendy’s to Join Fair Food Program as Coalition Plans Major Protest of Fast-Food Giant

      It ensures farmworkers access to shade and water, increased pay, as well as freedom from sexual harassment and forced labor. Although fast-food giants like McDonald’s and Subway have signed Fair Food Agreements, Wendy’s has refused—instead opting for their own “Supplier Code of Conduct,” which activists say is less stringent and has no enforcement mechanisms.

  • Security

    • Security updates for Monday
    • Peer-Seeking Webcam Reveals the Security Dangers of Internet Things

      Last week security blogger Brian Krebs revealed that a popular internet-enabled security camera “secretly and constantly connects into a vast peer-to-peer network run by the Chinese manufacturer of the hardware.”

    • Joomla Sites Join WordPress As TeslaCrypt Ransomware Target

      Exploit kits infecting thousands of WordPress websites are setting their sights on the open-source content management system Joomla in a new campaign spotted by a researcher at the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center.

      “The group behind the WordPress ‘admedia’ campaign is now apparently targeting Joomla sites,” said Brad Duncan, security researcher at Rackspace. “We are starting to see the same traffic characteristics in infections that are associated with Joomla sites – as we did with the WordPress campaign,” Duncan said.

    • Most software already has a “golden key” backdoor: the system update

      In 2014 when The Washington Post Editorial Board wrote “with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant,” the Internet ridiculed them. Many people painstakingly explained that even if there were somehow wide agreement about who would be the “right” people and governments to hold such an all-powerful capability, it would ultimately be impossible to ensure that such power wouldn’t fall in to the “wrong” hands.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Texas Academics Told to Avoid ‘Sensitive Topics’ to Prevent Angering Armed Students

      Here’s another swanky benefit of our out-of-control gun culture: university professors should be aware that their students might shoot them.

    • Kerry Phones Serbian PM Over Diplomats Killed in U.S. Libya Strike

      So, those American airstrikes recently in Libya, the ones for freedom and to defeat ISIS and banish Ant Man to hell? Yeah, darn it, they also killed two Serbian diplomats. But don’t worry, America’s own secretary of state John Kerry personally called the Serbian prime minister to say “Sorry, our bad, dude.”

    • Saudis lobby MEPs before arms embargo vote over Yemen

      Riyadh engaged in concerted effort to persuade European parliament not to pass amendment calling for EU sanctions because of bombing campaign

    • The Dulles Brothers and Their Legacy of Perpetual War

      I was intrigued by the 2015 release of David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. But it also reminded me of a 2014 book I had been wanting to read titled The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War by Stephen Kinzer. Since the earlier book covered both important brothers — the younger Allen who was Director of Central Intelligence and the elder John Foster who was Secretary of State — I decided to go with Kinzer.

      As it turned out, I was so fascinated by Kinzer’s discussion of the Dulleses that after finishing The Brothers, I dove right into Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard. I am so glad that I did. While there is some unavoidable overlap, reading the two books in quick succession is not at all redundant. In fact, they are such splendid complements of each other, that one almost wonders if the two authors coordinated.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Freedom Of Information Act To Remain: Here Are Eight Things We Wouldn’t Have Known Without It

      A decision not to charge for Freedom of Information (FoI) requests has been hailed as a “victory for journalism”.

      The government revealed on Tuesday that there will be no legal changes to the FoI Act after a review of the legislation found it was “working well”.

    • Freedom of Information charges ruled out after review

      Freedom of Information requests – used by campaigners and journalists to ask questions of public bodies – are to remain free of charge, a minister says.

      Following a review of the law, Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock said the FoI Act was “working well”.

      The FoI Commission was asked to examine it amid concerns within government that “sensitive information” was being inadequately protected.

      Its report said FoI had helped “change the culture of the public sector”.

      Mr Hancock said there would be no wholesale changes to the FoI Act.

    • Spain updates compendium of eGovernment rules

      The Spanish government has published an update of its Law on Electronic Administration. Two chapters have been added, on “Transparency and Access to POublic Information” and on “Electronic Judicial Administration”.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Coral bleaching in Qld is the ‘worst in 15 years’

      The worst coral bleaching in more than 15 years has hit Lizard Island off far north Queensland, scientists say, prompting fears about other northern parts of the Great Barrier Reef.

      Lyle Vail, who runs the Lizard Island Research Station north of Cairns, said the majority of the reef flat surrounding the island was showing signs of bleaching.

      “We do notice a bit of minor bleaching most summers but this year is exceptional – it’s the worst since 2002 – that year was quite bad,” he said.

  • Finance

    • CETA Legal Review Completed, Now Off To Parliaments And Governments For Approval

      The European Union and Canada have jointly announced the finalisation of the legal review for Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

      The agreement, which originally was signed by the negotiators in 2014, was re-negotiated to address strong concerns with regard to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) procedures.

    • Restaurants Demand State Freeze Servers’ Wage

      As an example, New York state’s hourly minimum wage for tipped workers rose from $5.00 to $7.50 on January 1 (standard, non-tipped, minimum wage is $9.00 an hour in the state), much to the dismay of the New York State Restaurant Association. The restaurant owners lobbying group sent a letter to NY Governor Andrew Cuomo demanding that he freeze the tipped wage for five years. This letter comes just weeks after the National Restaurant Association filed an appeal with the state Supreme Court, claiming that Cuomo’s plan to raise the minimum wage further by 2018 is part of a longstanding pattern of discrimination “against the hard working men and women that own New York’s restaurants.”

    • WaPo Factcheck Adds Confusion, Not Clarity, on Social Security

      In short, President Bush’s proposal for replacing a portion of the traditional Social Security system did offer a substantial bonanza for Wall Street in a way that was not true of President Clinton’s proposal for investing the trust fund. Secretary Clinton was not wrong to make this distinction, even if some of her comments were not entirely accurate, as Kessler points out.

    • EU referendum: Peter Mandelson breaks silence to warn over effects of Brexit

      British exporters would face trade tariffs of up to 20 per cent on goods such as cars, whisky, pharmaceuticals and fashion sold around the world if the UK pulled out of the European Union, the former Trade Commissioner Lord Mandelson will warn on Tuesday.

      In his first intervention in the referendum debate, the Labour peer will claim that the UK could not only lose access to the single European market but could also lose the EU’s preferential trading status in foreign markets.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • This terrifying Rupert Murdoch quote is possibly the best reason to stay in the EU yet

      Are you on the fence about Brexit? Do you feel akin to Boris (pre-blatant leadership bid) dithering and mulling your decision over, considering what suits your personal circumstance?

      We think we may have something that’ll sway it for you.

      As you are no doubt aware, although media mogul Rupert Murdoch hasn’t declared which side he stands on in the referendum, there have been a few subtle hints as to his position.

    • Scalia Dined at the Great Trough of Corruption

      Antonin Scalia was the longest-tenured justice on the current Supreme Court, and a great friend to conservatives in his opinions. It turns out he also ate his share at the great trough of American corruption.

    • Antonin Scalia: The Billion-Dollar Supreme Court Justice

      Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was worth billions of dollars to corporate America, if a Dow Chemical settlement made public Friday is any indication.

      Dow was in the midst of appealing a $1.06 billion class-action antitrust ruling, after a jury found that it had conspired with other chemical companies to fix prices for urethane, a material used in furniture and appliances.

      But because of Scalia’s death and the sudden unlikelihood of finding five votes on the Supreme Court to overturn the case, Dow decided to settle for $835 million, the bulk of the original award.

    • Donald Trump’s Appeal to White Nationalism

      AFTER TWO DECADES of studying the inner workings of extremist groups in the United States, Brian Levin, a professor at California State University in San Bernardino, has developed a routine for attending Ku Klux Klan rallies. He’ll tape an interview or two, collect whatever literature is available, see if he can spot any notable figures, and make a count of the demographics on hand. The aim, Levin says, is to maintain a degree of anonymity. That was the plan Saturday afternoon when he showed up to Pearson Park in Anaheim, California, for a demonstration by the local chapter of a Klan faction known as the Loyal White Knights.

    • Will it be Trump or Goldman Sachs?

      It’s largely a choice of style, not substance, dirty business as usual continuing no matter who succeeds Obama. Still, Snowden has a point.

      Hillary Clinton, like husband Bill, got super-rich through speechmaking, lucrative book deals and other Big Money handouts.

      Lots came from Wall Street and other corporate supporters – a rogue’s gallery of crony capitalist interests buying influence.

      Her public financial disclosures show she earned $2,935,000 from 12 speeches to Wall Street banks alone from 2013 – 2015, five for $225,000 (her usual fee).

    • Why Did It Take an Activist to Bring ‘Superpredators’ Into the Campaign?

      The fact that it took Black Lives Matter activist Ashley Williams to bring “superpredators” into 2016 presidential campaign coverage (AlterNet, 2/24/16) truly demonstrates the malfeasance of the corporate press.

    • Hillary Clinton Still Haunted by Discredited Rhetoric on “Superpredators”

      Hillary Clinton is relying on support from black voters to help her carry South Carolina in the Democratic primary on Saturday, but at a fundraiser in Charleston on Wednesday night, she found herself confronted by a young black activist demanding an apology.

      As video of the protest shows, the activist, Ashley Williams, interrupted Clinton’s remarks about criminal justice at the private event by unfurling a banner with the phrase “we have to bring them to heel.” Those words — language that has been taken as an offensive and racist characterization of young black teens as unruly animals — were used by the former first lady at a campaign rally for Bill Clinton in New Hampshire in January 1996.

  • Censorship

    • Fighting the phrase “Polish death camps” with education, not censorship

      However, where a line has to be drawn is when governments threaten to infringe upon the freedom of academic historians. And this appears to be the direction in which Poland’s government is heading, following two announcements made over the last week. Either one on its own would be worrying enough, but taken together they raise the spectre of concerted government interference in historical research.

    • Ridiculous Censorship

      Self-censorship during the final night of Putri Indonesia pageant show in a private TV station last week is really out of the proportion.

      During the show, the TV station decided to completely blur the torsos of contestants who donned the body-hugging Javanese kebaya dress.

    • China silences property mogul on social media after criticism of president

      The Chinese government has deleted the popular social media accounts of property mogul Ren Zhiqiang after he publicly criticized President Xi Jinping.

      On Sunday, the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered Chinese technology companies Sina and Tencent to shut down Ren’s microblog accounts on their platforms.

    • China’s Censorship Clampdown Stirs a Pushback

      A high-profile clash between China’s censors and an influential businessman with a huge social-media following marks a further tightening of a clampdown on public discourse under President Xi Jinping—one that is starting to generate unexpected pushback.

    • Chinese internet watchdog bans former tycoon Ren Ziqiang’s microblog
    • China’s ‘Donald Trump’ is latest victim of government crackdown
    • South Korea Embraces Ridiculous Right To Be Forgotten As Well

      I’m still in a position where I don’t understand this at all. If the information is somehow false or “illegal” I can understand the desire to remove it. But I have a lot more trouble understanding the ability to remove truthful and legal information just because someone doesn’t like it. This kind of system will always be abused to just censor perfectly reasonable and often useful information, just because it exposes something someone doesn’t like. It’s disappointing that South Korea appears to be embracing such a head in the sand approach to information.

    • White House Asked Google & Facebook To Change Their Algorithms To Fight ISIS; Both Said No

      Earlier this year, we wrote about how ridiculous the federal government’s view of Silicon Valley seemed to be, in that they had this weird belief that by nerding a little harder, we could somehow “disrupt” ISIS. The thinking seemed confused, and somewhat typical of people who don’t understand technology or how Silicon Valley works. It’s “magic wand” thinking. People who don’t understand technology tend to view technology as a sort of magic — and thus, they assume it can do anything. And, right now, a bunch of those people in the White House want that magic wand to make ISIS disappear from the Internet.

      Buzzfeed’s Sheera Frenkel has a great detailed report looking “inside” the administration’s attempt to have Silicon Valley help in the fight against ISIS. The main focus of a (not very secret) meeting held on Wednesday seemed to be entirely about fighting ISIS propaganda with American propaganda. As if that ever works. And, from the sound of it, the meeting was equally clueless about why ISIS propaganda is effective, while American propaganda flops.

    • Inside The Obama Administration’s Attempt To Bring Tech Companies Into The Fight Against ISIS

      They flew in from New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to hole up in a windowless D.C. conference room for nearly five hours on Wednesday — representatives of the country’s top tech and entertainment companies brainstorming with U.S. counterterrorism officials to tackle one tough question: how to stop the spread of ISIS online.

    • Obama Administration Asked Facebook And Google To Change Their Algorithms To Fight ISIS

      On 24th February, White House invited the biggest names in the tech world to discuss the plans to defeat ISIS online. However, the meeting only reflected the flawed approach of Obama administration that went on to ask Facebook and Google to change their algorithms to hide pro-ISIS stuff.

    • Chinese censors clamp down on popular online videos

      China’s dour censors have long maintained a lengthy naughty list, and used it to keep the country’s television sets unsullied by anything deemed to “lack positive thoughts and meaning.”

      Now, the Chinese Communist Party under President Xi Jinping has vowed to apply the same rules online, slamming shut an era of looser rules for Internet video, amid a sweeping campaign to reassert strict new controls over the country’s cultural life – a campaign motivated in part by fears that speech must be controlled lest a slowing economy sow dangerous unhappiness.

    • I Resign: The Writing Center’s Mission is to Teach Writing, Not Ideology

      I wish I could continue to work at the Writing Center because I feel that it’s important for all students, whether black or white, on financial aid or not, conservative or liberal, to have a place to review and strengthen their writing. Unfortunately, the Writing Center no longer seems to be that place. Until the Writing Center can return to its apolitical mission and forsake its acceptance and appeasement of political harassment, I regret that I must resign my position as a Writing Fellow.

    • Debate is good, but can it be imposed?

      The rise of campus censorship has helped reinvigorate a discussion about free speech across society.

    • The Latest Hillary Clinton Conspiracy Theory Doesn’t Make Sense
    • Is Twitter Censoring Hashtags Critical of Hillary Clinton?
    • Nintendo urged to FIRE feminist employee at centre of furious child pornography censorship row

      In her long essay, Rapp described people who possess child pornography as “simple possessors” or “mere possessors”, even though this is a serious crime.

      Her thesis jumps between discussing child pornography featuring “real children” and fictionalised depictions of sickening acts, meaning it often appears unclear what she is actually discussing.

      However, the content of the essay has provoked a furious response among many of the people who have read it.

      Rapp wrote: “Criminalising the the possession of a type of media – whether violent video games… controversial political or religious texts, or child pornography – is tantamount to criminalising thought, and should be above countries like the U.S. and Japan who have such strong freedom of speech protections.”

  • Privacy

    • Snooper’s charter to extend police access to hack phones and access internet data

      Latest version of investigatory powers bill will allow police to hack people’s computers and view browsing history

    • Sensing Public Support Waning, UK Fast Tracks Snooper’s Charter

      For some time now, we’ve been covering the UK’s plan — led by Home Secretary Theresa May — to pass a new Snooper’s Charter that would increase surveillance powers greatly in the UK. There’s been a growing amount of criticism of the plan in the UK, so rather than respond to it, May has simply moved to fast track the bill, officially called the Investigatory Powers Bill. The bill will officially be “published” today on March 1, and then will likely be voted on before the end of April.

    • The New EU-US Data Sharing Pact Still Allows Mass Surveillance

      A controversial, over decade-old arrangement used to transfer data of European citizens to US companies such as Facebook appears soon to be replaced: The draft text of the EU-US Privacy Shield, the data regulation pact rushed through to substitute the contentious Safe Harbour agreement, was published on Monday.

      Safe Harbour has faced renewed scrutiny since the 2013 Snowden revelations, and a new agreement has been anticipated for months. But surveillance law experts, as well as Max Schrems, who brought on challenges against Safe Harbour in the first place, say that the EU-US Privacy Shield doesn’t solve key privacy problems, and that it still facilitates mass surveillance.

    • GCHQ spy back at work after Plenty of Fish date rape claim

      Two women claim police did not believe that a spy working at the UK eavesdropping headquarters GCHQ raped them. The first woman claims the 28-year-old man – who they allege still works for the secretive agency – raped her in 2010 after they struck up a relationship on the matchmaking website Plenty of Fish.

      The second claimant, who also worked for GCHQ, which is in Gloucestershire, said the same man attacked her in 2012. In both cases, the man – who cannot be named for legal reasons – was given a harassment warning.

    • Encryption still a low priority for too many cloud users

      The vast majority of organisations plan to store confidential or sensitive data in the cloud by 2018, but despite that being just two years away, only a third have already set out an encryption plan which can be described as consistently applied across the entirety of the enterprise.

      According to the 2016 Global Encryption and Key Management Trends Study, more than half of global organisations are already transferring sensitive or confidential information to the cloud, with 56 percent of respondents stating that this already forms part of their data storage strategy, whether or not that data is encrypted or made unreadable via some other mechanism.

    • Next moves for the IPB: Split, Delay or Publish?

      Last week we heard three parliamentary committees’ criticisms of the Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB). All in all they had 123 recommendations about changes that need to be made to the Bill. So what’s next for this huge surveillance Bill?

    • The push-me-pull-yous of public policy: surveillance and freedom of information

      Surveillance and freedom of information are the push-me-pull-yous of public policy.

    • Declassified letter from 2002 defends warrantless taps

      A previously classified letter defending President George W. Bush’s controversial warrantless wiretap program deployed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks sought to justify the strategy as “the most effective method’’ to defend the country from additional assaults.

    • 2002 Letter Lays Out Bush’s Legal Authority For Conducting Surveillance After 9/11
    • Revealed: How The Bush Administration Argued Legal Loopholes for NSA Snooping
    • Classified 2002 Letter on NSA Eavesdropping Is Made Public
    • Apple Wins Big: Court Rejects FBI’s Argument For Hacking Drug Dealer’s iPhone
    • Former CIA Agent Barry Eisler Turned Writer on Imagining/Predicting Gov’t Surveillance
    • Apple to Court: FBI’s Failure Should Not Force Apple to Undermine Global Security
    • Voter Privacy: What You Need to Know About Your Digital Trail During the 2016 Election
    • Judge In Different Apple Case Says That All Writs Act Doesn’t Mean Apple Needs To Help Feds Break Into Phone
    • Spy continues to work at GCHQ despite rape allegations

      A GCHQ spy accused of rape by two women is still working at the secretive security agency because the police “did not properly investigate” the women’s claims, one of the alleged victims has said.

      The first alleged victim, who met the 28-year-old security officer through the dating website Plenty of Fish in 2010, said police ignored her claims twice, even after a second victim, a woman who worked with him at the GCHQ offices in Gloucestershire, came forward in 2013, the Mirror reports.

    • ACLU Sounds Alarm As Obama Administration Plans Quiet NSA Expansion

      Civil liberties advocates slammed reports on Friday that the Obama administration is poised to authorize the National Security Agency (NSA) to share more of its private intercepted communications with other U.S. intelligence agencies without expanding privacy protections.

      “Before we allow them to spread that information further in the government, we need to have a serious conversation about how to protect Americans’ information,” Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told the New YorkTimes.

      The change would loosen restrictions on access to the communications that are collected in mass data sweeps, including emails and phone calls, the Times reported, citing “officials familiar with the deliberations.”

    • Apple Wins Major Court Victory Against FBI in a Case Similar to San Bernardino

      Apple scored a major legal victory in its ongoing battle against the FBI on Monday when a federal magistrate judge in New York rejected the U.S. government’s request as part of a drug case to force the company to help it extract data from a locked iPhone. The ruling from U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein was issued as part of the criminal case against Jun Feng, who pleaded guilty in October to drug charges. It is a significant boost to Apple’s well-publicized campaign to resist the FBI’s similar efforts in the case of the San Bernardino killers.

    • Want To Report A Dangerous Drug Dealer? Just Enter Your Personal Info Into The DEA’s Unsecured Webform

      Chris Soghoian, the ACLU’s chief technologist, has decided to troll the DEA. His complaint is valid, though. The problem is, how do you troll the DEA when it’s almost impossible to find the contact info of the person you want to speak to? Just like the FBI has more options at its disposal than simply demanding Apple help it beat down an iPhone’s front door, Soghoian was able to route around the DEA’s unforthcoming attitude.

    • FBI Claims It Has No Record Of Why It Deleted Its Recommendation To Encrypt Phones

      Then, last year, I noticed that the page had been deleted. Seemed curious, so I sent in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the FBI to better understand why that page had magically been deleted, just at the time it seemed to contradict the FBI Director’s statements about encryption.

    • Courts, DOJ: Using Tor Doesn’t Give You A Greater Expectation Of Privacy

      In this month alone, we’ve had two federal judges and the DOJ state that there’s no expectation of privacy in IP addresses. This would normally be something covered by the Third Party Doctrine — where an IP address is part of the records retained by ISPs, and therefore, can be accessed with subpoenas rather than warrants.

      The twist, though, is that all of these statements were made in reference to people who made an active effort to obscure their IP addresses by using Tor.

    • Privacy Advocates Blast Plan to Expand NSA Data Sharing

      The Obama administration plans to increase the amount of private communications the National Security Agency can share with other government agencies without first adding privacy protections, according to a report published last week in The New York Times.

      The plan would ease restrictions on the amount of intercepted email and telephone intelligence the NSA gathers, including bulk collection of satellite communications, phone data between foreigners, and messages from overseas that U.S. allies provide, according to the report, which cited unnamed officials familiar with the deliberations.

      The move represents a major expansion of surveillance and data sharing authority and has been a longstanding concern of privacy groups, according to Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

      “There are significant privacy implications that EPIC will examine in detail,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

    • CIA And NSA Directors Blame The Media For Terrorists Using Encryption

      When it comes to the conversation that’s going on about the use of encryption, CIA director John Brennan and NSA Deputy Director Rick Ledgett have acquitted themselves rather poorly on a regular basis. It’s been an ongoing source of frustration to see the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks in particular devolve into a discussion on encryption, despite all evidence suggesting that those attacks weren’t planned using any kind of encryption at all. That didn’t keep Brennan from claiming that the CIA was unable to keep attacks from occurring due to encryption, nor has it stopped the calls from intelligence officials for even more data collection, despite the fact that those same officials have proven to be soft targets for hackers themselves. Ledgett, meanwhile, has proven to be an adversary of the free press, cheering on the destruction of computers from The Guardian.

    • European Pact Legalizes Facebook, Google, Amazon Data Transfers

      Privacy advocates railed Monday after the European Union unveiled a 128-page framework for trans-Atlantic data transfers that, the advocates said, amounts to little more than “10 layers of lipstick on a pig.” The document outlines the specifics of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, which replaces the 15-year-old Safe Harbor agreement struck down in October in a case that pitted Austrian grad student Max Schrems against Facebook[ticker symb=FB]. Schrems alleged Facebook misused Europeans’ data in cooperation with a National Security Agency program. Facebook has denied the allegation. U.S. spying tactics fell under scrutiny in 2013 after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released thousands of classified documents allegedly detailing mass surveillance by the government.

    • ‘Privacy shield’ – the new deal governing how Europe’s user data is sent to the US
    • Privacy Shield doomed from get-go? NSA bulk surveillance waved through

      The European Commission has published details of its transatlantic “Privacy Shield” agreement, which is designed to ensure that personal information of citizens is protected to EU standards when it is sent to the US—even though it would appear that the NSA will continue to carry out bulk collection of data under the new pact.

      The new deal replaces the earlier Safe Harbour framework, which was struck down by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) following a complaint by privacy activist Max Schrems.

      An accompanying Privacy Shield FAQ released by Brussels’ officials explained that there are four main elements. According to the commission, the new agreement will “contain effective supervision mechanisms to ensure that companies respect their obligations, including sanctions or exclusion if they do not comply.”

    • System Updates: Governments Can Hack Most Software Using This “Golden Key” Backdoor

      When you read the headlines like “FBI is forcing Apple to create a backdoor in their products”, what you are really reading is that the FBI is forcing iPhone-maker to use the “pre-existing software update backdoor” present in iPhones. Surprisingly, a backdoor already exists in most software in the form of system updates and the US government is looking to exploit the same.

    • Leaked! Details Of The New Congressional Commission To Take On The Encryption Issue

      Back in December, we wrote about plans by Rep. Mike McCaul and Senator Mark Warner to put together a “commission” to figure out what to do about the encryption “issue.” In his speech, McCaul did at least say that “providing a backdoor into everybody’s iPhone was not going to be a very good strategy” since it would open things up to hackers, but at the very same time, he kept saying that we had to somehow stop bad people (terrorists, criminals, child predators) from using encryption. He also keeps insisting that the Paris attackers used encryption, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. So it’s not entirely clear what the point of this Commission is, other than to chase down some mythical solution that doesn’t exist.

      The basic problem is this: to have real security you need strong encryption. And if you have strong encryption, people who are both good and bad can use it. So either you undermine strong encryption for everyone — harming the vast majority of good people out there — or you allow strong encryption, meaning that some bad people can use it. The only way to have strong encryption but not allow the bad guys to use it is to have a technology distinguish who is “bad” from who is “good.” I’m pretty sure that’s impossible because there’s no universal standard for what makes a “bad” or “good” person, and definitely not one that can be implemented in device hardware or software. So a commission seems like a waste of time.

    • NSA Spying, Privacy and the Fourth Amendment: The Views of U.S. Presidential Candidates

      Sanders, who voted against the Patriot Act and the U.S.A. Freedom Act, stated in a Time article last year: “Do we really want to live in a country where the NSA gathers data on virtually every single phone call in the United States – including as many as 5 billion cellphone records per day? I don’t.”

      Arguing against the U.S.A. Freedom Act in 2015, Sanders wrote: “Do we really want our government to collect our emails, see our text messages, know everyone’s Internet browsing history, monitor bank and credit card transactions, keep tabs on people’s social networks? I don’t.”

      “The Intercept” (theintercept.com) funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar teamed with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and former Nation writer Jeremy Scahill, has become the custodian of Snowden’s immense archive of classified documents, which it continues to mine for stories.

      Edward Snowden is living in asylum in Russia and currently in negotiations with the U.S. Justice Department. In February, he told a libertarian forum he will return home if he is guaranteed a “fair trial” and “can make a public interest defense of why this was done and allow a jury to decide.”

    • The Most Important Passages From Apple’s Challenge to the FBI

      GovtOS. That’s what Apple Inc. calls the newest product in its pipeline. It’s not the brainchild of the gadget masters in Cupertino but rather an iPhone operating system conceived by some buttoned-down folks in Washington, D.C. Unlike the latest iPhone or iPad, it wasn’t revealed on a stage before thousands of the faithful. Instead, it was unveiled in a stark response to the Obama administration’s attempt to force the computer maker to assist in a terrorism probe. And, Apple has warned, it may someday lead to every American being made an unwilling assistant to law enforcement.

    • ‘I’d move heaven and Earth’ to access Lavrov’s emails – former head of NSA and CIA

      Privacy seems less and less attainable these days, as foreign spy agencies target top political figures. The former director of both the NSA and CIA told US Today that he’d “move heaven and Earth” to access Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s email.

      Retired four-star general Michael Hayden, the only person who has ever served as both the director of the NSA and CIA, made the comments while criticizing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server for emails.

    • Spy who used Plenty of Fish dating site is accused of rape by two women but is still working for GCHQ because ‘police did not take their claims seriously’

      A spy accused of rape by two women, including one he met on dating website Plenty of Fish, is still working at GCHQ amid allegations police did ‘not take their claims seriously’.

      Both alleged victims say police ignored their claims about the national security expert, who is still working at the top secret intelligence headquarters in Gloucestershire.

      Details of the case emerged in a civil court hearing in which it was revealed that the worker had once been dismissed by GCHQ managers after child porn was discovered on his computer.

    • Spy accused of rape still working for GCHQ because ‘police did not properly investigate’ claims, alleged victim says

      A secret service official accused of rape by two different women he has had relationships with is described him as ‘untouchable’

  • Civil Rights

    • Panel: Poland’s constitutional crisis endangers democracy

      An international human rights commission says a crisis affecting the functioning of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal has endangered the rule of law, democracy and human rights.

    • Council of Europe criticises Poland’s court changes – report

      The Council of Europe’s advisory body has said reforms of Poland’s constitutional court pose a danger to the rule of law in the European Union member state, dealing another blow to the eurosceptic Warsaw government’s legal changes.

      Poland asked the Council’s Venice Commission to comment on the legal changes after parliament overruled appointments made to the tribunal by the previous government, causing uncertainty over its proceedings.

    • Police Shoot 17-Year-Old Teenager For Refusing To Drop Broomstick

      On Saturday night, two Salt Lake City officers shot a black teenager in his torso because he refused orders to drop his weapon — a broomstick. The shooting, which left the teen in critical condition, led to clashes between protesters and police.

      The Salt Lake City Police Department says the shooting occurred when two officers saw two men, including 17-year-old Abdi Mohamed, attacking another man with metal objects. In the officers’ version of events, Mohamed refused to drop his weapon and moved to attack the victim, prompting the officers to open fire.

    • Virginia Senate Committee Approves Bill to Withhold Public Employee Information

      The legislation was passed by the General Laws and Technology Committee whose rationale was to protect the private information of public employees from possible hackers.

    • Virginia Senate Votes To Exempt Police Officers’ Information From FOIA Responses

      Way to go, Virginia. In a time when police accountability is (finally!) a mainstream media topic, the Virginia state legislature is having none of it.

    • Federal Judge Says Third Party Doctrine A Perfectly ‘Good Law;’ No Warrants Needed To Obtain Cell Location Records

      Back in December, a Connecticut state court ruled that tracking people in near-real time with cell site location info required the use of a warrant. Three months later, a Connecticut federal court has ruled law enforcement can obtain CSLI without a warrant, in bulk and for extended periods of time. While the opinion doesn’t address the use of subpoenas and CSLI as a makeshift Stingray (for real-time tracking), it does come down firmly on the side of the government’s interpretation of the Third Party Doctrine.

    • Freed from Detention in Bahrain, U.S. Journalist Describes Interrogation & Ongoing Crackdown

      We continue our exclusive interview with one of four U.S. journalists who were detained in the Gulf state of Bahrain and released Sunday after an international outcry. Anna Therese Day and her camera crew were in Bahrain during protests marking the anniversary of the kingdom’s February 2011 uprising. She describes their interrogation and the ongoing crackdown on journalists and human rights advocates in Bahrain.

    • Only In America: An Indiscreet Selfie Can Put A Kid In Prison

      Did you know that if you are an American under 18 years old and you use your cell phone to send a nude “selfie” of yourself to a friend, you can be convicted of manufacturing and distributing “child pornography” and sent to prison? In case you are too old to be in the loop, a “selfie” is a photo that one makes of oneself.

      This is how expansively prosecutors, whose main purpose in life is to ruin as many people as possible, interpret laws passed to protect children from sexual exploitation.

    • When Immigration Detention Becomes a Death Sentence

      New report shows ICE is not holding immigration detention facilities accountable for medical neglect.

      On an April morning in 2012, at about 5:24 a.m., a guard inside the Denver Contract Detention Facility initiated a Code Blue emergency because he saw a detainee in medical distress. Minutes later, nursing staff arrived and found 46-year-old Evalin-Ali Mandza lying on the bed in his cell, holding his chest, and complaining of severe chest pain. He was having a heart attack.

      Denver Contract Detention Facility (DCDF) is one of approximately 250 detention facilities around the country that hold immigrants with pending deportation proceedings. It is operated by GEO Group, Inc. — a private prison company with annual revenues of nearly $1.7 billion — under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency responsible for detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants.

      After moving Mr. Mandza out of his cell, a nurse attempted to take an electrocardiogram. However, she was unable to get a reading because she had not been trained on the EKG machine and did not know how to use it. She then performed the wrong test. Once the nurse performed the correct test, she was unable to interpret the results because she had not been trained on this either.

    • Victory! State Department Will Try to Fix Wassenaar Arrangement

      Regular readers of this blog will likely be familiar with the Wassenaar Arrangement, a 41-nation agreement intended to regulate the export of certain “dual-use” technologies, such as guns and fissile material. In December 2013, the list of controlled technologies was amended to include surveillance systems for the first time and the participating countries have slowly been rolling out their implementations ever since. Today, news outlets in Washington DC are reporting that the State Department has finally agreed to try to renegotiate the language of the Wassenaar Arrangement to eliminate the 2013 changes.

  • DRM

    • Digital Rights Management Faces “Big Data,” Multiple-Rightsholder Challenges

      Managing copyright in digital musical works can be difficult because there are multiple rights holders and no standards for exchanging the massive amounts of data involved. Digital rights management services LyricFind and Rumblefish are among organisations working to streamline access to online content, company chiefs say.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • UNITAID Report On Delinking R&D Costs From Medicines Prices

      Delinkage of research and development costs from medicines prices could “vastly expand” access to medicines by drastically dropping costs of the knowledge component of health products, innovative medicines R&D facility UNITAID says in a new report.

      The report, entitled: “An economic perspective on delinking the cost of R&D from the price of medicines,” [pdf] was published on 26 February. The report summary from UNITAID is available here.

    • Re:Route – A Ready Reckoner Of Alternative R&D Models For Health

      The student-driven project, funded by Open Society Foundations, is a qualitative review of the alternative R&D initiatives around the world, in time for the United Nations High Level Panel on Access to Medicines dialogue next month.

    • Copyrights

      • Microsoft Sues Pirating Comcast Subscriber

        Microsoft has filed a complaint at a federal court in Washington accusing a Comcast subscriber of activating various pirated copies of its software. The account was identified by Microsoft’s in-house cyberforensics team which logs suspicious “activation patterns.”

      • Pirate radio playlist

        One of the UK’s most interesting historical legacies in music does not involve the actual bands that made up the British Invasion, but rather the people who played these band’s records illegally.

      • FBI Busts Movie Industry Insider for DVD Screener Leaks

        A 31-year old man from Lancaster has been arrested following an FBI investigation into several leaked DVD-screeners. The man, who worked in the entertainment industry, pleaded guilty to uploading screener copies of The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie to the private BitTorrent tracker Pass The Popcorn.

02.28.16

Links 28/2/2016: Raspberry Pi 3, Copyleft Fights

Posted in News Roundup at 5:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Manufacturers start to lock down Wi-Fi router firmware. Thanks, FCC.

    Curious. The FBI wants Apple to open up its own software while the FCC wants wireless router manufacturers to lock theirs down. And both demands are unacceptable, misguided, and will ultimately fail. Why? When it comes to the former, well, we don’t have time to wade through that quagmire, but as to the the latter, we have to go back to 2015 …

    [...]

    Why is this lockdown a bad idea? Because there are thousands of private users, academic researchers, and developers who rely on having wireless routers that are capable of modification. These modifications are to add functionality, fix bugs in the original product (all too common in consumer devices), and improve performance. However, the new FCC rules as written place a complex technical burden on manufacturers to comply and the only way to comply cheaply, is for the manufacturer to lock down their products completely rather than just the wireless components.

  • TP-LINK WiFi Router Firmware Locked Down Due to New FCC Rules

    Last year the FCC rules issues new rules that would prevent installing OpenWRT, DDWRT, or other firmware, but it went viral, and finally the commission launched a consultation with the community which ended by the FCC issued a statement “Clearing the Air on Wi-Fi Software Updates” last November, making the rules more accurate saying that the rules were now “narrowly-focused on modifications that would take a device out of compliance”.

  • Reading comprehension is a big problem in open-source

    Houston, we have a problem. Linux users can’t read good [sic]. Zoolander reference. Word. What am I on about, and where can you buy some of the stuff, you be asking? You can’t, it’s all au naturale, Dedoimedo freerange extract.

    To be serious, this topic is about the flow of information in the Linux world. After having a rather horrible autumn season of distro testing, I happened to come across commentary about my reviews on various forums and portal. It’s always when the negative is being discussed, because articles that praise products never ever get any reaction from the wider community. To put it bluntly, the message was not coming across.

  • Telecoms Band Together to Virtualize and Open Source their Network Stacks

    A group of telecommunication companies and their software providers have come together to bring Network Functions Virtualization to their data centers. NFV is an industry-developed framework to virtualize telecom networks.

    The group, formed under the umbrella of European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is called OSM, which stands for Open Source MANO. MANO, which stands for Management and Orchestration, is the part of the NFV framework consisting of orchestrator software, virtualized network functions manager (VNFM) and Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM).

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

  • BSD

    • BSDCan: OpenBSD presentations

      The event will be held on June 8-11th at the University of Ottawa in Canada.

    • The Release Of LLVM 3.8 Should Be Imminent

      While LLVM/Clang 3.8 was supposed to be released last week, its release got delayed but it looks like it should finally ship in the next few days.

      On Tuesday, LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg announced the release of LLVM 3.8 Release Candidate 3. He mentioned, “If there are no regressions from previous release candidates, this will be the last release candidate before the final release.”

    • FreeBSD 10.3 Is Almost Ready For Release

      The third beta of the upcoming FreeBSD 10.3 is now available for testing.

      FreeBSD 10.3 Beta 3 brings updated network drivers, improvements to the filemon device, Hyper-V fixes, a few new commands, and various other minor enhancements and corrections.

    • FreeBSD and ZFS

      For nearly seven years, FreeBSD has included a production quality ZFS implementation, making it one of the key features of the FreeBSD operating system. ZFS is a combined file system and volume manager. Decoupling physical media from logical volumes allows free space to be efficiently shared between all of the file systems. ZFS introduced unprecedented data integrity and reliability guarantees to storage on FreeBSD. ZFS supports varying levels of redundancy for tolerance of hardware failures and includes cryptographic checksums on all data to guard against corruption.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Cloud Explorer is back with v7.1

      Cloud Explorer is a open-source Amazon S3 client that works on any operating system. The program features a graphical or command line interface. Today I just released version 7.1 and hope that you give it a test drive. Feedback and uses cases are always encouraged.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Denmark to accelerate eHealth technology

      Danish public authorities are promoting the development and use of eHealth solutions. Increasing technology-use in healthcare, care for the elderly, social services and in education will “maintain or increase the quality of public welfare services while at the same time reducing public expenditure”, according to an English introduction to Denmark’s Strategy for Digital Welfare (2013-2020), published by the country’s Agency for Digitisation.

  • Licensing

    • Winning the copyleft fight

      Bradley Kuhn started off his linux.conf.au 2016 talk by stating a goal that, he hoped, he shared with the audience: a world where more (or most) software is free software. The community has one key strategy toward that goal: copyleft licensing. He was there to talk about whether that strategy is working, and what can be done to make it more effective; the picture he painted was not entirely rosy, but there is hope if software developers are willing to make some changes.

      Copyleft licensing is still an effective strategy, he said; that can be seen because we’ve had the chance to run a real-world parallel experiment — an opportunity that doesn’t come often. A lot of non-copyleft software has been written over the years; if proprietary forks of that software don’t exist, then it seems clear that there is no need for copyleft; we just have to look to see whether proprietary versions of non-copyleft software exist. But, he said, he has yet to find a non-trivial non-copyleft program that lacks proprietary forks; without copyleft, companies will indeed take free software and make it proprietary.

    • I’m Part of SFConservancy’s GPL Compliance Project for Linux

      I believe GPL enforcement in general, and specifically around the Linux kernel, is a good thing. Because of this, I am one of the Linux copyright holders who has signed an agreement for the Software Freedom Conservancy to enforce the GPL on my behalf. I’m also a financial supporter of Conservancy.

    • Welte: Report from the VMware GPL court hearing
    • Report from the VMware GPL court hearing

      Today, I took some time off to attend the court hearing in the GPL violation/infringement case that Christoph Hellwig has brought against VMware.

      I am not in any way legally involved in the lawsuit. However, as a fellow (former) Linux kernel developer myself, and a long-term Free Software community member who strongly believes in the copyleft model, I of course am very interested in this case – and of course in an outcome in favor of the plaintiff. Nevertheless, the below report tries to provide an un-biased account of what happened at the hearing today, and does not contain my own opinions on the matter. I can always write another blog post about that :)

      I blogged about this case before briefly, and there is a lot of information publicly discussed about the case, including the information published by the Software Freedom Conservancy (see the link above, the announcement and the associated FAQ.

    • I bought some awful light bulbs so you don’t have to

      Anyway. Next step was to start playing with the protocol, which meant finding the device on my network. I checked anything that had picked up a DHCP lease recently and nmapped them. The OS detection reported Linux, which wasn’t hugely surprising – there was no GPL notice or source code included with the box, but I’m way past the point of shock at that. It also reported that there was a telnet daemon running. I connected and got a login prompt. And then I typed admin as the username and admin as the password and got a root prompt. So, there’s that. The copy of Busybox included even came with tftp, so it was easy to get copies of tcpdump and strace on there to see what was up.

    • SFC: GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux
    • The Linux Kernel, CDDL and Related Issues

      The license terms on the Linux kernel are those of GPLv2. This is the unanimous consensus of the extensive community of copyright holders. No other terms, or modifications of those terms, are represented in any document as the consensus position of the relevant parties.

    • Conservancy’s Executive Director Testifies in Favor of NYC Free and Open Source Software Acts
    • Match Donation Extended until March 1st

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Java finally gets microservices tools

      Lightbend, formerly known as Typesafe, is bringing microservices-based architectures to Java with its Lagom platform.

      Due in early March, Lagom is a microservices framework that lightens the burden of developing these microservices in Java. Built on the Scala functional language, open source Lagom acts as a development environment for managing microservices. APIs initially are provided for Java services, with Scala to follow.

    • documentation first

      I write documentation first and code second. I’ve mentioned this from time to time (previously, previously) but a reader pointed out that I’ve never really explained why I work that way.

      It’s a way to make my thinking more concrete without diving all the way into the complexities of the code right away. So sometimes, what I write down is design documentation, and sometimes it’s notes on a bug report[1], but if what I’m working on is user-visible, I start by writing down the end user documentation.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • These Chicago teens can’t graduate until they learn some compsci

      The Chicago Public Schools district has become the first in the nation to make computer science training a requirement for high school graduation.

      The district, the third-largest in the US, says that starting with next year’s freshman class (graduating in 2020), all students will be required to complete one credit in a computer science class as a core subject alongside other fields such as science, English and mathematics.

      “Making sure that our students are exposed to STEM and computer science opportunities early on is critical in building a pipeline to both college and career,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

    • Kauppalehti: Finnish tire firm manipulated test results

      Finnish tire manufacturer Nokian Renkaat manipulated test results for years, according to a report on Friday in the business daily Kauppalehti. The company’s share price took a dive on the reports.

    • The left half – right half divide in human brains is a myth, scientist says

      The myth is thought to stem from social stigmatisation of left handed people and a misunderstood Noble Prize winning research project

  • Security

    • Thursday’s security updates
    • Friday’s security updates
    • Rewrite Everything In Rust

      I just read Dan Kaminsky’s post about the glibc DNS vulnerability and its terrifying implications. Unfortunately it’s just one of many, many, many critical software vulnerabilities that have made computer security a joke.

      It’s no secret that we have the technology to prevent most of these bugs. We have programming languages that practically guarantee important classes of bugs don’t happen. The problem is that so much of our software doesn’t use these languages. Until recently, there were good excuses for that; “safe” programming languages have generally been unsuitable for systems programming because they don’t give you complete control over resources, and they require complex runtime support that doesn’t fit in certain contexts (e.g. kernels).

      Rust is changing all that. We now have a language with desirable safety properties that offers the control you need for systems programming and does not impose a runtime. Its growing community shows that people enjoy programming in Rust. Servo shows that large, complex Rust applications can perform well.

    • Forthcoming OpenSSL releases
    • Improvements on Manjaro Security Updates
    • What is Glibc bug: Things To Know About It
    • IRS Cyberattack Total is More Than Twice Previously Disclosed

      Cyberattacks on taxpayer accounts affected more people than previously reported, the Internal Revenue Service said Friday.

      The IRS statement, originally reported by Dow Jones, revealed tax data for about 700,000 households might have been stolen: Specifically, a government review found potential access to about 390,000 more accounts than previously disclosed.

      In August, the IRS said that the number of potential victims stood at more than 334,000 — more than twice the initial estimate of more than 100,000.

    • Protect your file server from the Locky trojan
    • Google’s Project Shield defends small websites from DDoS bombardment

      If you want to apply, there’s an online form to fill in here which asks for the details of your site, and poses a few other questions about security and whether you’ve been hit by DDoS in the past. Note that you’ll need to set up a Google account if you don’t already have one.

    • 90 Percent of All SSL VPNs Use Insecure or Outdated Encryption

      Information security firm High-Tech Bridge has conducted a study of SSL VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and discovered that nine out of ten such servers don’t provide the security they should be offering, mainly because they are using insecure or outdated encryption.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Mini-World War Underway in Syria: The Players

      Various Kurdish forces working with Washington and/or Moscow are taking advantage of the chaos to extend Kurdish territories, in Syria, Iraq and odd bits of Turkey. The Islamic State has snatched land while all the focus was on the other groups, and still holds substantial territory in Syria and Iraq. The Saudis have threatened to invade Syria with ground troops, which the Iranians say they will respond to militarily.

    • Court Considers Releasing Key Documents Governing Secretive Targeted Killing Program

      Yesterday, in one of the three ACLU cases challenging the extreme secrecy shrouding the government’s targeted killing program, a federal judge in New York ordered the government to turn over, for the court’s review and possible release, three crucial documents containing the law and policy that govern the program. The full order is not yet public because, as the judge wrote, she is giving the government “time to vet opinions and orders for classification issues that might escape the notice of a reader of news media in which information that the Government considers to be classified routinely appears.”

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Chelsea Manning denied EFF articles because US Army cares about copyright

      Apparently the US Army is interested in a zealous interpretation of copyright protection, too.

      According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Chelsea Manning supporter recently attempted to mail Manning a series of printed EFF articles about prisoner rights. Those materials were withheld and not delivered to her because, according to the EFF, the correspondence contained “printed Internet materials, including email, of a volume exceeding five pages per day or the distribution of which may violate U.S. copyright laws.”

    • Did Twitter’s Exec Censor #WhichHillary in advance of Key Primaries? Twitter users speak out

      Considering the nature of Twitter’s algorithm, it may just be a coincidence that Twitter suspended activist account @GuerrillaDems, at the same time that its massively popular hashtags #WhichHillary & #WhichHillaryCensored were suddenly absent from many users’ trending lists. Twitter now says that the suspension of @GuerrillaDems was a mistake.

      It is entirely natural, and important, for users to be suspicious here. We don’t know whether it was intentional removal, or algorithmic coincidence. However, it is a fact that this past Sunday, Clinton held a political event headlined by Twitter CEO Omid Kordestani. It is also a fact that Clinton’s staff has exerted pressure on members of the media in the past, using its “muscular” influence to promote a certain narrative at the Atlantic, and suggesting experts to rebut Julian Assange during his interview with 60 Minutes. These relationships tend to be mutually beneficial — a journalist gets a scoop — a large media outlet gets favorable treatment by regulatory agencies — in exchange for promoting a certain narrative. It is also no secret that the Clintons have earned $153 million over the past 15 years in legal political graft, much of that coming from the same companies they helped deregulate in the 1990’s. If you would like to know why our media giants are grateful to the Clintons, read up on the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

    • Zuckerberg on refugee crisis: ‘Hate speech has no place on Facebook’

      Speaking in Berlin, Facebook boss calls Germany’s handling of European refugee crisis ‘inspiring’ and says site must do more to tackle anti-migrant hate speech

    • Zuckerberg Vows to Police Hate Speech in German Charm Offensive

      Facebook Inc.Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg vowed to rid his site of hate speech against migrants and lauded Germany’s leadership in the refugee crisis as part of an effort to win over those critical of the social media site’s handling of the matter.

      “We’ve recognized how sensitive this is, especially with the migrant crisis here,” Zuckerberg said to thunderous applause at a town hall event in Berlin on Friday carried live on German cable news channels. “We hear the message loud and clear and we’re committed to doing better, there’s not a place for this kind of content on Facebook.”

    • Someone At UMich Reported A Snow Penis As A ‘Bias Incident’

      Big Member On Campus — is causing a flurry of controversy.

      A University of Michigan dorm official reported a snow penis as a bias incident, according to the student publication The Michigan Review.

      The frosty phallus was erected in a field this week outside a residence hall after a snowfall, apparently leaving the hall director cold. Hall directors are paid non-students who carry some authority.

    • Site-blocking will make internet access more expensive – little else

      oday Laurie has a guest post at iTWire and looks forward to your comments or those of the content creators and distributors. This posting does not necessarily represent the views of iTWire.

      Last week both Village Roadshow and Foxtel finally launched court actions under the eight months old Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act designed to deal with Internet “piracy”.

      The first thing that needs pointing out is that downloading video and audio content over the Internet is a not a crime as such. It is, however, in breach of the intellectual property rights of the producers and distributors.

  • Privacy

    • EFF Urges Appeals Court to Allow Wikimedia and Others to Fight NSA Surveillance

      San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit Wednesday to permit Wikimedia and other groups to continue their lawsuit against the NSA over illegal Internet surveillance. A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in Wikimedia v. NSA would follow the lead of the Ninth Circuit, which allowed EFF’s Jewel v. NSA to go forward despite years of stalling attempts by the government.

    • The Government’s Decades-Long Battle for Backdoors in Encryption

      The FBI wants to crack open a mass shooter’s iPhone, and Apple has refused to cooperate. It’s a story for the 21st century, but the roots go back a whole generation earlier, to the 1990s when the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were trying to curb the then-new encryption technologies and create back door access for themselves.

    • Finland to boost its information security industry

      The Finnish government should help to create a competitive information security industry, recommends a report by a task-force at the Ministry of Transport and Communications. The country should attract investments in this area, assess rules and regulations, and make information security a common digital component.

    • More GOP presidential hopefuls now side with the FBI in iPhone crypto fight

      The now five candidates vying for the GOP presidential nomination discussed everything from immigration, health care, and the Middle East during their latest debate, sponsored by CNN/Telemundo and held in Houston on Thursday evening. But what caught our attention was the candidates’ discourse about the Apple-FBI encryption legal fight.

      CNN moderators Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash actually initiated the topic. Blitzer first mentioned how Apple responded to the FBI’s court order earlier in the day with a formal motion to vacate. Bash then addressed the topic to Florida Senator Marco Rubio, referencing his defense of Apple last week during a GOP candidate town hall in South Carolina.

    • Tens of Thousands Protest Netflix’s Expanding VPN-Blockade

      Netflix is continuing to expand its VPN and proxy crackdown, affecting VPN ‘pirates’ but also those who use such services for privacy reasons. The VPN crackdown is meeting fierce resistance from privacy activists and concerned users, with tens of thousands calling upon the streaming service to reverse its broad VPN ban.

    • Netflix overblocking non-exit Tor relays

      tl;dr: Even paying customers sharing IPs with non-exit Tor relays are now
      blocked from accessing Netflix

      Hello everyone !

      After two very fruitless attempts to get the issue silently resolved through
      proper Netflix support channels, the time has come to make this public. As
      some of you have probably already read in the news, Netflix recently
      announced a crackdown on what they call “VPN Pirates” and what I call
      “paying customers using the same benefits of globalization that global
      companies like Netflix (ab)use for their taxes”.

    • Tor Project Accuses CloudFlare of Mass Surveillance, Sabotaging Tor Traffic

      Tensions are rising between Tor Project administrators and CloudFlare, a CDN and DDoS mitigation service that’s apparently making the life of Tor users a living hell.

      The issue, raised by a Tor Project member, revolves around a series of measures that CloudFlare implemented to fight malicious traffic coming from the Tor network. These measures are also affecting legitimate Tor users.

      The way CloudFlare deals with Tor users is by flagging Tor exit nodes and showing a CAPTCHA challenge before allowing them to continue to their desired website.

    • German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

  • Civil Rights

    • The U.S. has Gone F&*%ing Mad

      Do you know how a properly functioning society would react to an event like San Bernardino? I do — because I’ve had the misfortune of living through such an event. On the 28th of April, 1996, a gunman equipped with an AR-15 assault rifle — the same kind that the San Bernardino shooters used — opened fire in Port Arthur, in Australia. 35 people were killed and 23 were wounded. It remains one of the world’s deadliest shootings by a single person.

      Within months, the country’s governing party led a bipartisan effort to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again.

      They didn’t do it by focusing on creating backdoors into phones.

    • Liverpool police pelted with stones as right-wing ‘infidels’ clash with anti-fascists (PHOTOS)

      Members of an extreme right-wing group and a rival anti-fascist movement have brought chaos to the center of Liverpool, with Merseyside police forced to intervene in violent street skirmishes

    • Former CIA Director: Trump’s foreign policy “would be in violation of all international laws of armed combat”

      “Real Time” host Bill Maher interviewed former NSA and CIA Director, General Michael Hayden.

      Regarding his thoughts on a President Trump, Hayden said, “I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign.”

      Asked to elaborate on what he meant by “language,” Hayden cited Trump’s comments on “waterboarding and a whole lot more — because they deserve it” and killing the terrorists’ families.

      “If he were to order that once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act,” Hayden added. “That would be in violation of all international laws of armed combat.”

    • Ex-CIA, NSA Head: If ‘President Trump’ Implements Certain Campaign Promises, U.S. Military ‘Would Refuse to Act’

      The former head of the CIA and NSA said that if Donald Trump is elected president and follows through on certain campaign promises, the U.S. military would “refuse to act.”

      “I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that candidate Trump expressed during the campaign,” Michael Hayden told “Real Time” host Bill Maher on Friday night.

    • Stand Up For Whistleblowers — Our Liberty Depends On Them

      The inhumane criminal organization that goes under the name of the United States Government has violated its laws and international laws by refusing to punish torturers and war criminals, instead punishing only those who expose the evil and illegal deeds of the United States government.

      After blowing the whistle on torture and domestic surveillance by the George W. Bush administration, former CIA officer John Kiriakou and former NSA executive Thomas Drake were prosecuted under the Espionage Act — by the same Obama Justice Department that has refused to prosecute a single torturer or any official who ordered illegal mass surveillance.

    • Virginia Wisely Rejects Secret Police

      It’s a frightening, Orwellian scenario that some legislators in Virginia thought was a good idea. Fortunately, a state House of Delegates subcommittee blocked the bill on Thursday, which would have allowed even more government information to be hidden away under the state’s F-rated open government laws.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Germany to fund broadband for underserved areas

      Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) is making available funds to bring fast Internet to underserved areas. Municipalities and rural districts (Landkreise) can initially apply for up to EUR 50,000 to plan expansion projects and to complete applications for federal funding of these projects. Approved projects will be funded up to a maximum of EUR 15 million.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Content ID and the Rise of the Machines

        In 2007, Google built Content ID, a technology that lets rightsholders submit large databases of video and audio fingerprints and have YouTube continually scan new uploads for potential matches to those fingerprints. Since then, a handful of other user-generated content platforms have implemented copyright bots of their own that scan uploads for potential matches.

      • Pirates Spend Much More Money on Music, Study Shows

        A new study has shown that music piracy is still rampant in the United States with 57 million people between the ages of 13 and 50 accessing music through unauthorized sources. Interestingly, however, these pirates also spend significantly more money on CDs and paid downloads, more than their counterparts who only consume legally.

02.27.16

Links 27/2/2016: New ROSA, Ireland National Library Goes FOSS

Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Tesla Fan ‘Incivility’ Forces Indiana To Back Off Direct Sales Ban… For Now

    We recently noted how Indiana was just the latest state to try and pass auto industry-backed bills banning Tesla’s direct-to-consumer sales model. Under the latest GM-backed bill, Tesla’s dealer license would have expired in 2018, forcing the company to embrace the traditional franchise dealership model — or stop selling cars in the state entirely. Telsa had been reaching out for the last few weeks to Tesla fans in the state, quite-correctly highlighting how GM was buying protectionist law instead of competing.

  • Hardware

    • Data Backup Devices for Small Businesses

      You already know you need to back up your small business data regularly, but you may get stuck figuring out the best way to manage the process. Fortunately, you don’t need to spend a scary amount of money to buy and set up a reliable data backup system.

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • New York investigates radioactive leak in groundwater near city

      Radioactive material has leaked into the groundwater below a nuclear power plant north of New York City, prompting a state investigation on Saturday and condemnation from governor Andrew Cuomo.

      Cuomo ordered an investigation into “alarming levels of radioactivity” found at three monitoring wells at the Indian Point energy center in Buchanan, New York, about 40 miles north of Manhattan.

    • Old Nuclear Reactor Leaks Radiation

      Nuclear fission reactors are expensive to build and decommission so it’s natural to keep them running as long as possible to optimize the economic benefit. The licence for the old Indian Point reactor in New York state has been extended and while there have been occasional problems, the reactor was considered reliable. News that a leak of tritium in the ground water has been discovered is a whole new ball-game however. Tritium is a short-lived radioisotope of hydrogen so it’s possible the contamination may not leave the site in dangerous concentrations.

  • Finance

    • TTIP Negotiations: 12th Round Ends With Plan To Hurry Between Official Rounds

      By July trade negotiators from the United States and the European Union want to present a draft text that only has brackets for the “most sensitive issues” in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This was announced by Ignacio Bercero, chief negotiator for the European Union, and his US counterpart Dan Mullaney during a press conference today after this week’s 12th round of TTIP negotiations in Brussels.

  • Censorship

    • Self-censorship runs amok on local television

      It should have been a regular live broadcast of a Putri Indonesia pageant show, but those who tuned in were surprised when private station Indosiar decided to completely blur the torsos of contestants who wore the body-hugging Javanese kebaya dress.

      But many considered that local television stations had gone too far when one of them blurred a scene from a popular cartoon show, simply because one of its characters wears a short skirt, and questions began to be raised about why the local channels were taking that conservative turn.

    • Video: Is Canadian self-censorship preventing open debate on racism, discrimination and other important issues?

      Conversations That Matter features former B.C. premier and free speech advocate Ujjal Dosanjh. He argues that people in power in Canada are self-censoring and in doing so are preventing open and honest discourse about issues that form the fabric of Canadian society. Dosanjh has been attacked and beaten for saying what he thinks and continues to do so because he maintains if we cower from vigorous debate then we deprive ourselves.

    • National TV Channel Denies Actor’s Censorship Allegation

      Tunisian actor, Majd Mastoura has accused Wataniya TV of censoring part of his acceptance speech following his win at the Berlinale Film Festival in Germany.

      During an emotional speech, Mastoura paid tribute to the martyrs of the Tunisian Revolution. However, during its showing upon the national channel, the actor’s closing remarks were cut from the broadcast of his award.

    • Twitter Accused Of Censoring Anti-Hillary Hashtag

      Political censorship or coincidence? Activists on Friday were in full pitchfork mode after Twitter users alleged the social media site removed #WhichHillary from its trending topics in an apparent kowtow to the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign. The collective uproar managed to inspire another Clinton-themed hashtag, #WhichHillaryCensored.

    • Hillary Vs. Hillary: Hashtag Pits Clinton Against Her Past Self

      Hillary Clinton is facing one of her biggest rivals online today: Hillary Clinton. A hashtag mocking the candidate for her flip-flops over the years rocketed to the the top of Twitter’s trending list Thursday—driven not by Republicans but supporters of her Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders.

    • China tightens censorship of online TV programmes

      Beijing has further tightened its muzzle on mainland China’s internet after a senior media content watchdog official demanded all online programmes be censored as strictly as those of traditional television programmes.

      The move comes days after widespread audience dissatisfaction when popular shows, made and aired by Chinese video streaming sites, were removed or suspended until they had been censored to the satisfaction of the media content regulator.

    • Puritanical Facebook Censors Parody Publication, Makes Appeal Process A Threat

      I have no idea why, but there seems to be a sudden influx of stories concerning Facebook patrolling its site and taking down content over rather puritanical standards of offense and vulgarity. The most recent examples of this have concerned a couple of pieces of artwork that the Facebook Decency Office deemed to be to risque, despite the fact that neither of the art pieces could reasonably be described as particularly pornographic. The most recent example of this kind of censorious brigade is less to do with scary, scary sex, and more to do with parody content that some might find vulgar.

    • Mark Zuckerberg Angry At His Employees For Disrespecting ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement

  • Privacy

    • Techdirt Needs Your Help To Fight Encryption Fearmongering
    • Poll: You Vote to Outlaw Tracking by Advertisers

      Back on February 15 when we ran an article calling for a ban on advertisers’ practice of tracking users who just happen to drive by an ad, much less click on it, we ran a poll to find out what you think. Actually, we were pretty sure we already knew what you thought. You tell us everyday, either in the comments section to our articles or by blocking ads here on FOSS Force. The poll was mainly to put some numbers to what we already knew.

    • FISA Court Accused of Failing to Restrain NSA

      A Washington spy court’s “secret, ex parte proceedings” do not provide the oversight required to restrain the National Security Agency’s Upstream program, a privacy group argued in a court filing Thursday.

    • ‘GCHQ spy who raped us is still working there because police didn’t take us seriously’

      A spy accused of rape by two women is still working at the heart of ­Britain’s security services after police ignored their claims.

      The spook’s first alleged victim, who met him through a dating website, today say detectives TWICE failed to act over her accusations – even after the second woman, who worked with him at the top secret GCHQ base, had come forward.

    • Katherine Jenkins Gives Spies Singing Treat [Ed: Katherine Jenkins has helped create femmewashing puff pieces for GCHQ - by associating with celebrities they created a dozen PR pieces]

      The classical music star hailed workers at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, England as “heroes”, before singing songs from her repertoire including Habanera from the opera Carmen.

    • Katherine Jenkins performs private show for GCHQ staff to thank them for keeping us safe
    • Obama Administration to Expand Sharing of NSA Data from Snooping
    • Obama To Allow FBI And CIA Access To NSA Data

      The Obama administration will soon allow the National Security Agency to share certain bulk collections of communications and satellite transmissions with other government intelligence agencies. This information includes phone calls and emails from foreigners within the U.S., as well as exchanges that involve or are about Americans collected by the NSA’s foreign intelligence programs.

    • Obama administration closing in on rules to let NSA share more freely with FBI, CIA

      The New York Times is reporting that Obama administration officials are close to agreeing on new rules that would allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to share surveillance information more freely with other federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, without scrubbing Americans’ identifying information first.

      In 2008, President George W. Bush put forth an executive order that said such a change to the rules governing sharing between agencies could occur when procedures had been put in place. When the Obama administration took over, it started “quietly developing a framework” to carry out the proposed change in 2009, according to the Times.

      For the past decade, the NSA has collected massive amounts of phone metadata, e-mail, and other information from a variety of sources—sometimes directly from the companies that make such communication possible, sometimes through overseas taps on lines that connect to data centers outside of the US. Currently when an agency wants information on a foreign citizen, it requests that data from the NSA, and the NSA theoretically scrubs it of any incidental references to American citizens who are not being targeted. This process is known as “minimization.”

    • Germany’s New Citizen Monitoring Spyware May Be Creepier Than NSA’s

      The new spyware Trojan virus recently approved by Germany’s Interior Ministry may actually steal personal photos and notes stored on Germans’ phones and laptops.

      The German government’s new computer virus intended for spying in criminal cases has drawn scrutiny because of its potentially unlimited abilities.

    • Barack Obama to allow NSA to share contents of intercepted phone calls and emails

      The Obama administration is planning to allow the National Security Agency to share more of the raw information it acquires through wiretapping with other intelligence agencies.

      The rule change, which would allow intelligence agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Central Intelligence Agency to access the unedited contents of phone calls and emails without having the information filtered by the NSA, was first reported by the New York Times Friday.

  • Civil Rights

    • Kos Bishop: Foreign Reporters Pay Refugees to Play Victims of Drowning

      Foreign reporters pay refugees 20 euros to act as if they have drowned, said Bishop of Kos and Nisyros Nathanael.

      The unusual testimony was made during a radio interview on Alpha 98.9 on Wednesday. Bishop Nathanael said that, “I witnessed with my own eyes foreign television reporters paying people (refugees) 20 euros to play victims of drowning.”

    • A blunt defense of interrogations, targeted killings and domestic spying
    • Former CIA Chief Warns Against Donald Trump

      In an interview with the BBC, ex-CIA boss Michael Hayden warned against the dangers of having, Republican front-runner, Donald Trump as President of the United States of America.

    • Ex-CIA, NSA chief: 2016 GOP rhetoric ‘scares me’

      Former CIA and National Security Agency Director Gen. Michael Hayden says the rhetoric from the GOP candidates in the presidential race is scary — and he suspects the rest of the world is concerned, too.

      Hayden was responding Thursday to a question from CNN’s Michael Holmes about the rhetoric on the campaign trail, with Holmes mentioning Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s promise of carpet bombing ISIS and GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s praise for waterboarding and harsher interrogation techniques as well as a proposed temporary ban on foreign Muslims.

    • Court Monitor Finds NYPD Still Performing Unconstitutional Stops

      The NYPD is more in its element when it’s creating terrorism/dissent-focused task forces or shipping its officers halfway around the word to get in the way of local investigators. What it’s less interested in doing is ensuring its officers live up to the Constitutional expectations of Judge Shira Scheindlin’s order from nearly three years ago.

    • Estragon’s boot: the Conservatives delay the repeal of the Human Rights Act

      According to a news report today, the Conservative government has “shelved” the proposals to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a “British Bill of Rights”.

      This is not a surprise. It was never going to be an easy task.

      In the last week or so, the proposals – as well as a daft and dappy “Sovereignty Bill” proposal – have been nothing other than tokens in a political game between the Prime Minister and other Conservative politicians about supporting and opposing Brexit. But the tokens turned out to have no value and no purchase in this game.

      Last May this blog set out the “seven hurdles” for repeal of the Human Rights Act. These hurdles included the facts that the Good Friday Agreement requires the European Convention on Human Rights to have local effect in Northern Ireland and that Scotland would have a veto on the replacement legislation.

    • Saudi Arabia sentences a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism on Twitter

      A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism in hundreds of social media posts.

      The report carried in Al-Watan says the 28-year-old man admitted to being an atheist and refused to repent, saying that what he wrote reflected his own beliefs and that he had the right to express them. The report did not name the man.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T Sues To Keep Google Fiber Competition Out Of Louisville

      We recently noted how the city of Louisville had voted 23-0 to let Google Fiber bring ultra-fast broadband competition to the city. As part of the vote, the city revamped its utility pole-attachment rules, which previously forced competitors through a six-month bureaucratic process to connect to the poles, an estimated 40% of which are owned by AT&T. The new policy streamlines that down to one month, letting competitors like Google Fiber move hardware already attached to the poles, while holding them financially accountable for any potential damages.

    • Cruz, Rubio Celebrate One Year Anniversary Of Net Neutrality Rules — By Trying To Kill Them

      It has already been a year since the FCC voted to reclassify ISPs as common carriers under the telecom act. And despite the countless calories spent by the telecom industry and its various mouthpieces claiming Title II and net neutrality would demolish all Internet investment and innovation as we know it, you may have noticed that things by and large did not implode. In fact, while the FCC has been snoozing on things like zero rating and usage caps, the mere threat of rules helped the Internet by putting an end to the interconnection shenanigans causing Netflix performance degradation.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ‘The Dress’ A Year Later: The Meme Has Faded, But The Copyright Will Last Forever

        Have you heard? Today is the anniversary of “the dress.” You know the one. It was all over the internet exactly a year ago. White and gold or blue and black. It was a phenomenon. And, yes, I know a bunch of you are snidely mocking it as you read this, but shut up. It was a fun way to kill an afternoon a year ago and it made a bunch of people happy, so don’t be “that person.” A year ago, we wrote a short piece about it, noting that you had fair use to thank for it, because the dress was being shared widely, and that was possible due to fair use. And the timing was great, because it was fair use week — as it is again.

02.26.16

Links 26/2/2016: Open-O Partnership, GPL Violations in ZFS/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Does Linux Still Need Windows Support?

      As an alternative operating system, Linux has always found ways to co-exist with Windows. However, I realized recently that I had gone four years without any installation of Windows in the house. I had to wonder: is Windows support even necessary in 2016?

    • Hands-On: Using Bluetooth on Linux

      I haven’t written about using my Bluetooth devices on Linux in quite some time. That is good, because it means that they are all just working so there is not a lot to write about. But there have been some interesting and useful developments in Bluetooth support for various Linux distributions recently, so I think it will be useful to run through a survey of Bluetooth devices and Linux distributions.

    • Review: System 76 Wild Dog Pro

      I got an order confirmation almost immediately with an estimate of 2 to 6 days to ship. Soon after that I got a note stating that the Wild Dog was running toward the latter end of that range. I figured I could just use my laptop until the new machine arrived if necessary, and I waited.

      While I was waiting, I still continued to use my old desktop. I noticed the rebooting issue happened toward the end of the day. It finally dawned on me (I’m a little thick) that it might be heat related. I crawled under the desk to find that the power supply fan wasn’t working. I ordered a new one of those to see if it would help.

  • Server

    • New platform offers endpoint protection for Linux servers

      Most of the internet is powered by Linux servers, so it’s not surprising that they’re increasingly a target for attack. In particular recent attacks have focussed on using compromised systems to distribute malware to other systems.

      Many Linux systems rely on traditional signature-based threat detection which leaves them vulnerable to zero-day attacks. Endpoint security company SentinelOne is announcing a new solution aimed at protecting enterprise data centers and cloud providers from emerging threats that target Linux servers.

    • Docker Datacenter: A New Enterprise Product for Open Source Containers

      If there was ever a question about how Docker, the open source container virtualization company, planned to generate revenue from the enterprise market, it was answered this week. The company has rolled out a new platform, Docker Datacenter, as a commercial product for on-premise or private cloud container deployment.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GTK+ 3.18.8 & 3.19.10 Out with RandR 1.5 Fixes, Wayland Startup Notifications

        The GTK+ development team has been quite busy this week, and they have recently published two new releases of the cross-platform and open-source GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit.

      • Nautilus 3.20 to Have a New Small Zoom Level

        Nautilus developers have pushed a final major update for the 3.20 branch of the application, and they are preparing for the launch of the stable version.

      • Nautilus 3.20 Beta 1 Removes the Bookmark Manager, Adds a More Robust Search

        The popular Nautilus file manager has just received its first Beta build towards the major 3.20 milestone that will be unveiled this Spring as part of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

      • GNOME 3.19.91 beta tarballs due (and more)

        Hello all,

        We would like to inform you about the following:
        * GNOME 3.19.91 beta tarballs due
        * String Freeze

        Tarballs are due on 2016-02-29 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.19.91
        beta release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were
        proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so
        everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be
        uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that
        will probably be too late to get in 3.19.91. If you are not able to
        make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late,
        please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll
        the tarball for you!

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Miniscule i.MX7 module is also offered in SBC format

      Phytec has spun a Linux-supported, 50 x 41mm PhyCore-i.MX7 COM with -40 to 85°C support, also available as part of a sandwich-style PhyBoard-i.MX7 Zeta SBC.

      NXP’s low-power, Cortex-A7 based i.MX7 system-on-chip, which includes a Cortex-M4 MCU for real-time processing and motor control, appears to be heading for the same popularity as the i.MX6. Size matters with an IoT-focused chip like the i.MX, and Phytec has announced the smallest i.MX7 computer-on-module yet.

    • ARM Linux IoT gateway offers cloud services support

      Eurotech’s rugged “ReliaGate 10-11” IoT gateway runs Linux on a TI AM3352, offers numerous options, and is supported with an updated ESF 3.3 framework.

      Eurotech, which is known here mostly for its Intel Atom-based Catalyst computer-on modules, has announced a new version of its ReliaGate Internet of Things gateway. The ReliaGate 10-11 runs on a Linux stack based on Yocto Project 1.6 and Linux Kernel 3.14, and is supported by a newly updated, Java-based Everyware Software Framework (ESF) 3.3 for remote IoT device management.

    • OpenWRT router SBC mixes Cortex-A5 and FPGA

      DAB-Embedded’s wireless enabled “DAB-OWRT-SAMA5” router SBC runs OpenWrt Linux on an Atmel SAMA5D36 SoC linked to an Altera MAX 10 FPGA.

    • Phones

      • Tizen

        • Samsung’s three most innovative Tizen products gets some artistic recognition

          With an established R&D, there is no stopping from innovations from happening at firms like Samsung. The fact that three of these recent innovations from Samsung had been built on the slowly growing Tizen platform however, gives it a special amount of attention in the Tech community. The three products from Samsung we are talking about here are the Gear S2 smartwatch, SUHD TVs and the unconventional new Family Hub Smart Refrigerator. Samsung have decided to rejoice this moment by working closely with an Artist, Kim Seung-Bae in showing the world what the company means by its innovations and Samsung’s design language in its most recent Tizen based innovations.

      • Android

        • Acecard: One Of The Most Advanced Android Trojans Of Our Time
        • Turing Robotics Drops Android And Sets Up Shop In Finland Amid Global Security Concerns

          Accompanying the announcement, TRI is switching its OS from Android to Jolla’s Sailfish.

          “We can now confirm that TRI has chosen to drop Android and use Jolla’s Sailfish OS. Sailfish is now running perfectly on the Turing Phone and we have started the final OS software testing phase,” the company announced on its Facebook page.

          Surveillance and privacy concerns have become central themes among mobile users around the world, highlighted by the ongoing spat between Apple and FBI.

          Indeed, TRI’s decision to both use Jolla OS and manufacture in Finland is about the primacy of privacy. Considering Android’s intimate relationship with Google growing security concerns around mobile security, the move speaks volumes.

        • Moto 360 Sport review: The best Android Wear fitness solution so far [Video]

          Still, I would say that — from what we’ve seen so far — the Moto 360 Sport is the best fitness option so far to run Google’s watch operating system. And that brings us to the price. Amazon is currently offering the device at around $280, which is $20 less than its retail $300. That’s too much, in my opinion, for any Android Wear watch. But it’s not terrible. It’s the same price as the 2nd generation Moto 360, and right around the same price as the Huawei Watch and other 2015 offerings. At this price I would probably just hold off for a while, but even if you don’t the Moto 360 Sport is a solid watch. At the very least, it’s not worse than the regular Moto 360.

Free Software/Open Source

  • NASA Takes Open Source to Mars

    NASA software engineer Parker Abercrombie is using open source to create a virtual workspace. The benefit of this open source project is that scientists and engineers can visit Mars in a virtual reality environment. While NASA hasn’t yet sent a manned mission to Mars, the virtual environment Abercrombie has made possible using open source is the next best thing.

    The project, called OnSight, enables scientists and engineers to work on Mars using what is known as “mixed reality.” Special headsets equipped with the OnSight software download the latest 3D maps of Mars’ terrain, giving the user a first-person view of the planet, much as if they had landed in a spaceship and were exploring on the ground.

    Read more

  • Top 5 sources for open source fonts

    When selecting a font, the decision process involves more than choosing between serif and sans serif: understanding how the font is licensed matters too. Though typographers need to be concerned with their rights to modify and extend a given font, even you as an end user should be asking yourself some questions. Do you have permission to use a font in commercial work, or in a public work at all? Can you even share that font with another person?

    If you’re creating a work you wish to share, then licensing matters to you, and you should understand how open source applies to the world of fonts.

  • How to add open source experience to your resume

    In this article, I’ll share my technique for leveraging open source contributions to stand out as a great candidate for a job in the technology field.

    No goal can be accomplished without first being set. Before jumping into a new commitment or spending the evening overhauling your resume, it pays to clearly define the traits of the job you’re seeking. Your resume is a piece of persuasive writing, so you have to know your audience for it to reach its full potential. Your resume’s audience is anyone with the need for your skills and the budget to hire you. When editing, read your resume while imagining what it’s like to be in their position. Do you look like a candidate that you would hire?

  • 50 Open Source Tools Tech Companies Love

    Over the last decade or so, many technology companies have begun embracing open source. Many use open source tools to run their own IT infrastructure and websites, some offers products and services related to or built on open source tools, and some are contributing to or supporting open source projects.

  • The U.S. Copyright Office requiring proprietary software in DMCA anti-circumvention study

    In Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) anti-circumvention study, the U.S. Copyright Office extends comment period and asserts that proprietary software is required for comment submission.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Introduces Surveillance Principles for a Secure, Trusted Internet

        Security is paramount to a trusted Internet. Encryption is a critical part of how that trust is made real. The recent events around Apple and the FBI set a dangerous precedent. Our position on these issues is simple: the FBI should not be able to require a technology company to create code that “undoes” years of security enhancements by creating additional vulnerabilities.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hadoop, Spark, Deep Learning Mesh on Single GPU Cluster

      When it comes to leveraging existing Hadoop infrastructure to extend what is possible with large volumes of data and various applications, Yahoo is in a unique position–it has the data and just as important, it has the long history with Hadoop, MapReduce and other key tools in the open source big data stack close at hand and manned with seasoned experts.

    • Yahoo brings deep learning framework to Spark

      Yahoo has released CaffeOnSpark, which brings the fruits of two University of California, Berkeley projects together: vision-focused deep learning framework Caffe, and Big Data processing engine Apache Spark.

  • Databases

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook Pushes Open Source Wireless with Telecom Infra Project

      A new initiative by Facebook aims to speed the development of wireless networks by promoting more open source network components. The social network announced the launch of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) at Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona this week. Several hardware companies such as Nokia and Intel, as well as wireless providers like Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom have signed on to the project.

  • BSD

    • Speaking on BSD: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

      After answering various calls for presentations to a few upcoming shows, it stands to reason that Tom Petty is right: The waiting is the hardest part.

      Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similiarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux

      This post discusses an atypical GPL violation. Unlike most GPL violations Conservancy faces, in this case, a third-party entity holds a magic wand that can instantly resolve the situation. Oracle is the primary copyright holder of ZFS, and, despite nearly eight years (going back to the days of Sun’s control of the code) of the anti-license-proliferation community’s urging, Oracle continues to license their code under their own, GPL-incompatible license. While this violation has many facets, and Oracle did not themselves violate GPL in this specific case, they hold the keys to this particular kingdom and they forbid the Linux community to enter. While there are complexities that we must address, in this context, Oracle could make everyone’s life easier by waving their magic relicensing wand. Nevertheless, until they do, since GPL-incompatible licenses are the root of all GPL violations, combinations of GPL’d code with Oracle’s GPL-incompatible code yield GPL violations, such as the ongoing violation by Canonical, Ltd.

    • Canonical accused of violating GPL with ZFS-in-Ubuntu 16.04 plan

      The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) thinks Canonical, the curator of Ubuntu, has breached the Gnu Public Licence (GPL).

      As the Conservancy explains, Canonical recently announced that Ubuntu 16.04 will “make OpenZFS available on every Ubuntu system. Canonical reckons that adding OpenZFS represents “one of the most exciting new features Linux has seen in a very long time.”

    • Software Freedom Conservancy Says ZFS Ubuntu Implementation Is Not Legal

      Software Freedom Conservancy group has issued a statement saying that the recent implementation of ZFS in Ubuntu is actually a GPS violation. The truth seems to be a matter of perspective.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • Why Sci-Hub is the true solution for Open Access: reply to criticism

        This article is to reply to some points made by publishers as well as some librarians who don’t like what Sci-Hub is doing to their job now.

        I will start with an article published last wekk by Ernesto Priego Signal, Not Solution: Notes on Why Sci-Hub Is Not Opening Access

        The title is misleading by itself, if not funny. Sci-Hub is not a signal: for many researchers out there in the world, Sci-Hub is the only solution available to access articles. I can support my words by providing letters I received as well as some statistics, but I will do this in future posts. The problem are paywalls, and Sci-Hub is a tool that solves this problem. A signal is when someone talks about the problem of paywalls, like many OA advocates do. What differentiates Sci-Hub from this talk, is that Sci-Hub not talking, but actually solving this problem, providing access to those researchers who need it, including myself.

    • Open Hardware

      • Matt Adereth’s open source 3D printed ergonomic Dactyl Keyboard is truly amazing

        Without being noticed, keyboards have actually become one of the most important tools in our society and economy. There’s at least one in very home, office, store and school: a keyboard is truly universal. That reliance on this clever tool has already led to the development of various forms of ergonomic keyboards: keyboards that decrease the likelihood of developing wrist or hand related injuries, such as RSI. You’ve probably seen them or even worked on one: they tend to have a curve in the middle to more naturally accommodate the wrists. However, Matt Adereth has been working on a far more original model with the help of 3D printing: the Dactyl keyboard, that actually consists of two completely separate, curved keyboard segments.

      • A Slew of Open-Source Synthesizers

        To install on an Arduino UNO, fetch the zip file from this GitHub repository, and move each subfolder to your Arduino sketch directory. You’re ready to play along.

Leftovers

  • Windows 10 lock screen ads begin with Rise of the Tomb Raider push

    With more than 200 million systems running Windows 10—many of them having upgraded from an earlier version for free—Microsoft has decided it’s time to monetize the lock screen.

    Over the past few days, Windows 10 users have reported having their lock screens taken over by advertisements for Rise of the Tomb Raider. Microsoft started selling the game through the Windows Store last month, in what might be the start of a much bigger push into PC gaming.

    Microsoft hasn’t hid its intentions to use the Windows 10 lock screen as a commercial billboard, having first discussed its plans during last year’s Build developers conference. Now, Microsoft appears to be making good on those promises, with How-To Geek’s Chris Stobing and at least one Reddit user having seen the Rise of the Tomb Raider ads themselves.

  • It’s Official: ‘Idiocracy’ Writer Says His Satire of a Brain-Dead America Has Become Reality

    Idiocracy has been a long-cherished sci-fi satire in cult circles, telling the tale of two people who wake up from a cryogenic sleep to find that the country has become a wasteland of anti-intellectualism.

    Now, ten years later, the co-writer of the cult comedy classic, Etan Cohen, thinks that the movie is satire no longer, marveling that his movie has gone from fiction to non-fiction. On Twitter today, Cohen used his movie to perfectly sum up our current political climate.

  • The demise of FIFA’s empire

    The FIFA empire has been slowly crumbling since last May following a string of allegations, investigations and scandals.

    The governing body’s former president Sepp Baltter was handed an eight year ban- reduced to six this week – from all football activities in December, just over a year after Michael Garcia’s initial investigation.

  • Science

    • Online Tool Serves Up Ocean Science Studies

      Updates to BOEM’s Environmental Studies Program Information System (ESPIS) tool, hosted by NOAA Digital Coast, now enable users to search, filter, map, discover, and download more than 40 years of studies and related data that can provide critical information for ocean plans and decisions.

  • Hardware

    • EU Projects Unite on Heterogeneous ARM-based Exascale Prototype

      A trio of partner projects based in Europe – Exanest, Exanode and Ecoscale – are working in close collaboration to develop the building blocks for an exascale architecture prototype that will, as they describe, put the power of ten million computers into a single supercomputer. The effort is unique in seeking to advance the ARM64 + FPGA architecture as a foundational “general-purpose” exascale platform.

    • ARM, Open Source Feed Buzz Around HPC File System

      There is but a small cadre of scalable parallel file systems and while the list might be small, weighing the relative benefits of each option against the available resources can be a challenge, as Sven Breuner and his HPC admin colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute realized in 2004.

      They were certainly not the first or last organization to labor over the inevitable question of which of these scalable parallel file systems to choose, but they did take an interesting route. Notably, the limited choices have not changed over those years, either—nor have the list complaints about each.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • GUEST POST: The #FlintWaterCrisis didn’t just happen

      The Flint water crisis didn’t just happen. It’s been a story decades in the making.

      Cities in America have been on the downswing for many years — deliberate policy on the federal and state level has favored suburbs, and also the preferences of the Boomer generation was to go in that direction too. So, people and money has slowly (or quickly in some cases) filtered out of the cities into suburbia. Also the shift of manufacturing out of America has hit the Midwest very hard (aka the “Rust Belt”). When your city is built for a certain amount of people and then you lose big chunks of your population, it’s hard to make the math work to maintain that infrastructure.

      Anyway, that’s the story on the national level. In Michigan, too, cities and schools have been starved by a “Tea Party” mentality — before the Tea Party even existed. The state has balanced its budget every year, for decades, based on mathematical trickery and from taking funds away from local governments and schools. Proposal A shifted funding from a local level to a pool managed by the state, and that was just too much temptation not to raid. Proposal A also capped the amount of property taxes charged, which puts established cities at an advantage, and helps locations that are not yet built out — because the cap cuts deeper the longer that a house or condo stays within the same ownership.

      So, federal policies and state policies have made it harder and harder for cities to function in Michigan. Flint, especially, after having lost much of its manufacturing base and then many of its people, was struggling.

      Enter the Emergency Manager idea. These problems are systemic and have been building up for many years, and raising taxes is anathema to Republicans, so what do they do? It’s so much easier to fault local government, and come up with an end-around solution to put somebody else in charge who can “make the hard decisions”. Also you want an easy answer and term limits limit who will even be around to see the effects.

    • Google’s DeepMind AI group working with NHS to develop patient care software

      DeepMind, a London-based “neuroscience-inspired AI company” bought by Google in January 2014, has launched DeepMind Health. Its first project is a collaboration with the NHS. The company says: “We want to see the NHS thrive, and to ensure that its talented clinicians get the tools and support they need to continue providing world-class care.”

      Working with leading kidney experts at the Royal Free Hospital in London, DeepMind Health has produced a mobile phone app called “Streams.” It is designed to present “timely information that helps nurses and doctors detect cases of acute kidney injury” (AKI). DeepMind says that “AKI is a contributing factor in up to 20% of emergency hospital admissions as well as 40,000 deaths in the UK every year. Yet NHS England estimate that around 25% of cases are preventable.”

  • Security

    • The Downside of Linux Popularity

      Popularity is becoming a two-edged sword for Linux.

      The open source operating system has become a key component of the Internet’s infrastructure, and it’s also the foundation for the world’s largest mobile OS, Google’s Android.

      Widespread use of the OS, though, has attracted the attention of hackers looking to transfer the dirty tricks previously aimed at Windows to Linux.

      Last year, for example, ransomware purveyors targeted Linux. Granted, it wasn’t a very virulent strain of ransomware, but more potent versions likely will be on the way.

    • Baidu is badforu – web browser and thousands of apps transmit personal data home

      Researchers have found that the Chinese Baidu browser and apps based on its SDK transmit user’s search terms, GPS coordinates, the addresses of websites visited and device’s MAC or IMEI address to Baidu’s servers without using SSL/TLS encryption or gaining the users permission.

    • Baidu Browser Acts like a Mildly Tempered Infostealer Virus

      The Baidu Web browser for Windows and Android exhibits behavior that could easily allow a security researcher to categorize it as an infostealer virus because it collects information on its users and then sends it to Baidu’s home servers.

    • Malware déjà vu – why we’re still falling for the same old threats

      In second place was Conficker – first discovered in 2008 – which again allows remote control and malware downloads. Together, these two families were responsible for nearly 40% of all malware attacks detected in 2015.

    • Conficker, AndroRAT Continue Malware Reigns of Terror

      Conficker meanwhile continued in its position as King of the Worms, remaining the most prevalent malware type and accounting for 25% of all known attacks during the period. Conficker is popular with criminals thanks to its focus on disabling security services to create more vulnerabilities in the network, enabling them to be compromised further and used for launching DDoS and spam attacks.

    • Child-Monitoring Company Responds To Notification Of Security Breach By Publicly Disparaging Researcher Who Reported It

      “Thanks for letting us know about this! We’ll get it fixed immediately!” said almost no company ever.

      There’s a long, but definitely not proud, tradition of companies shooting the messenger when informed of security flaws or possible breaches. The tradition continues.

      uKnowKids is monitoring software parents can install on their children’s cell phones that allows them to track their child’s location, as well as social media activity, text messages and created media. As such, it collects quite a bit of info.

    • Nissan Forgets Security Exists, Opens Leaf Owners To Remote Attack

      You can add Nissan to the laundry list of companies that aren’t making security a priority in the Internet of Things era. A hacker this week revealed that vulnerabilities in the Nissan Leaf companion app allows an attacker to not only track a driver’s driving behavior, but to physically control the Leaf’s heating and cooling systems. Not quite as severe some other car vulnerabilities that open vehicles to total control, the vulnerability still allows a hacker to cause some notable trouble by running down the Leaf’s batteries, potentially leaving an owner stranded.

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The U.S. Extends Its Drone War Deeper Into Africa With Secretive Base

      GAROUA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, proclaimed the sign on the concrete and glass terminal building. The designation was something of a misnomer, because only three or four planes land each week in this sleepy outpost in northern Cameroon, near the Nigerian border, all of them domestic flights. The schedule of the flights tends to be unpredictable. The aging jet that had just flown me to Garoua from Douala, for example, had made an unscheduled stop in N’Djamena, the capital of neighboring Chad, so that a government minister could attend a funeral nearby. As a result, the plane had touched down in Garoua five hours late.

    • Badass Attorney Shoots Down the Case for Drones

      Last Sunday, General Michael V. Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times called “To Keep America Safe, Embrace Drone Warfare.” After an opening scene of a drone operator double-checking for nearby civilians before taking out two enemy targets, General Hayden makes the case that America’s program of remote targeted killings, while not perfect, is achieving results. It has disrupted terrorist plots and weakened Al Qaida, he wrote. Furthermore, according to intelligence that Hayden himself claims to have seen, public concerns of massive civilian casualties are overblown.

    • Michael Hayden’s Pro-Drone Propaganda

      I have long been disturbed by the New York Times’ coverage of the drone campaigns. I was particularly appalled by the ghastly President-as-Godfather feature published on May 29, 2012. Many conservative pundits have complained that the so-called “liberal” newspaper serves as a mouthpiece for the current administration, which is shameful in and of itself. But how and why did the New York Times become an organ of state-funded propaganda? Whatever happened to fact-based, interest-free, objective journalism?

    • The Absurd Timing of Michael Hayden’s Drone Campaign

      MICHAEL HAYDEN, the former director of the CIA and the NSA, has been making the media rounds over the last few days, discussing and defending some of the most emblematic policies of the post-9/11 era in an effort to promote his new book.

      According to its Amazon description, Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror delivers “an unprecedented high-level master narrative of America’s intelligence wars.” The title is a reference to Hayden’s philosophy of pushing national security policies to their limits — what he envisions as the edge.

    • People Die (from Drone Strikes) While Hayden Lies

      In a New York Times op-ed published on February 21, former CIA director, Air Force general, and “Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror” author Michael Hayden advocated for the continuing use of drone warfare. He urges the public and implicitly, the next U.S. president, to “embrace” this policy for the desired result of “keeping America safe.” After over a decade of the CIA’s and USAF’s unilateral use of this sinister weapons system, a well-documented record of their unintended consequences confronts us, if we have the courage to face it.

    • Do US Drones Really Make Us Safer?
    • European Parliament calls for Saudi arms embargo

      The European Parliament called on the European Union to impose an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia on Thursday, saying Britain, France and other EU governments should no longer sell weapons to a country accused of targeting civilians in Yemen.

      EU lawmakers voted 359 in favour, 212 against and with 31 abstentions for the formal call for an EU arms embargo.

      Although the vote is not legally binding, lawmakers hope it will pressure the European Union to act.

    • The rape of East Timor: “Sounds like fun”

      Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

      The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

    • A New Low for the International Criminal Court

      The ICC really has plumbed new depths in the current trial of ex-Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo. I do urge you to read the analysis I wrote at the time of his overthrow. Gbagbo certainly was guilty of crimes, but much more killing and violence was done by current Ivory Coast President, and former Deputy MD of the IMF, Alassane Ouattara. My article was written at the time to counter an extremely misleading one written by Thalia Griffiths, editor of African Energy, and published in the Guardian. I have since discovered more about the role of Trafigura in funding Ouattara’s forces, and the picture becomes ever clearer.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Canada may “scrub” CETA rule allowing corporations to sue governments but we’ll keep it in the TPP?

      The Government of Canada appears to be tiptoeing away from a controversial provision in a new trade deal with the European Union at the same time as they’re plowing ahead with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes a similarly controversial provision.

    • Tesla Says GM Pushing Indiana Bill To Kill Direct-To-Consumer Tesla Sales

      As we’ve documented extensively, the auto industry has worked tirelessly to erect barriers to Tesla’s market entry. Legacy automakers have been engaged in sustained hysterics specifically regarding Tesla’s direct-to-consumer sales model, which lets customers buy vehicles directly from Tesla online, with limited showrooms to view, touch and test drive the Tesla vehicles. Annoyed by this pesky Californian upstart, the auto industry has frequently tied draft legislation to campaign contributions to ban Tesla’s successful model. Why compete when you can cheat?

    • The Kafkaesque Battle of Soulseek and PayPal, and Why Free Speech Defenders Should be Worried About Payment Networks

      Does your business follow copyright law to the best of its ability? Not good enough. At least that was the case for one long-standing peer-to-peer network, which had its payment processing shut down after more than 14 years of being a loyal PayPal customer.

      Soulseek, a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, faced a Kafkaesque battle with PayPal. When its donors were cut off from making payments to Soulseek, the network struggled to figure out what it had done wrong—or even get a response from PayPal to its questions. Thankfully, Soulseek reached out to EFF. We got in touch with Paypal and helped convince them to reinstate the network.

      PayPal did the right thing by restoring Soulseek’s account, and we commend them for that. But we’re also concerned: it’s not scalable for EFF to intervene whenever a law-abiding website is shut off from a payment provider (as we have done with an online bookseller and a short story archive). In addition, we think of Soulseek’s situation as indicative of a larger trend of Web censorship, as websites that haven’t violated any laws are choked of funds—a situation that was disastrous for WikiLeaks and is currently tightening a noose around the electronic neck of Backpage.com.

    • Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed

      There is an alternative. Achieving it requires understanding the dynamics at work and distinguishing between earned and unearned income, between productive and unproductive means of gaining wealth. That is the antidote to the neo-rentier power grab.

    • New Zealand Says Laws To Implement TPP Will Be Passed Now, Despite US Uncertainties, And Won’t Be Rolled Back Even If TPP Fails

      As Techdirt has noted, there is evidence from multiple sources that TPP will produce negligible economic benefits for most of the nations involved. Some governments are clearly well aware of this, because they are desperate to avoid an objective cost-benefit evaluation that would show that claims about TPP’s value don’t stack up. Even given that pig-headed determination to push the deal through, basic prudence would surely dictate that before making all the complex legislative changes required by TPP, countries should at least wait to see whether it’s going to happen.

    • Small businesses paying more tax than Uber

      When Uber revealed this week it paid just over $403,000 in tax in Australia over a three-year period many small businesses were left scratching their heads.

      The Silicon Valley technology giant with a market valuation of over US$60 billion responded to questions taken on notice at the Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance to disclose the amount of corporate tax it paid in Australia has only slightly increased from $19,387 in 2013, to $134,387 in 2014, and then $249,280 in 2015.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Anthony Hilton: Stay or go – the lack of solid facts means it’s all a leap of faith

      I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. “That’s easy,” he replied. “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”

    • With Donald Trump Looming, Should Dems Take a Huge Electability Gamble by Nominating Hillary Clinton?

      Many Democrats will tell you that there has rarely, if ever, been a more menacing or evil presidential candidate than Donald Trump. “Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory,” pronounced Vox’s Ezra Klein two weeks ago. With a consensus now emerging that the real estate mogul is the likely GOP nominee, it would stand to reason that the most important factor for many Democrats in choosing their own nominee is electability: meaning, who has the best chance of defeating the GOP Satan in the general election? In light of that, can Democrats really afford to take such a risky gamble by nominating Hillary Clinton?

    • Bernie Sanders Has Led Hillary Clinton in This Major National Poll Nearly All Month

      Bernie Sanders finds himself in a familiar place once again. Far away from home on the campaign trail in South Carolina and Missouri on Wednesday, Sanders is once again fighting off a rush of pundits and political talkers looking to write off his presidential campaign after an upset in Nevada last weekend — but according to one new national poll, Sanders has only been growing more popular all month.

    • The Party of ‘No Way!’

      Perhaps the most important thing Washington will do this year is decide whether to approve President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court. But Republicans have already announced their decision: “No way!”

      It’s rich for Republicans to declare pre-emptively that they will not even hold hearings on an Obama nominee, considering that they used to denounce (while their party held the White House) the notion that judges’ nominations shouldn’t proceed in an election year.

      “That’s just plain bunk,” Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said in 2008. “The reality is that the Senate has never stopped confirming judicial nominees during the last few months of a president’s term.” His sense of reality has since changed.

    • Annotating The Letter Disney’s CEO Sent To Disney Employees Asking Them To Fund Disney’s Sketchy Lobbying Activities

      Here’s quite a scoop from Joe Mullin over at Ars Technica. Apparently, Disney is getting a bit desperate on the whole TPP thing. The company, which has been having a rough go of things because of the next generation not giving a shit about ESPN, decided to take things up a notch. CEO Bob Iger apparently emailed Disney employees asking them to contribute to DisneyPAC, specifically to help Disney pay for lobbyists to push the TPP across the finish line.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • Tor users are actively discriminated against by website operators

      Computer scientists have documented how a large and growing number of websites discriminate against people who browse them using Tor.

      Tor is an anonymity service that is maintained with assistance from the US State Department and designed in part to allows victims of censorship in countries like China and Iran to surf the web. New research show how corporations are discriminating against Tor users, in some cases partly because it’s harder to classify anonymous users for the purpose of pushing ads at them.

    • Rather Than Ending NSA’s Key Surveillance Tool, White House To Now Let Other Agencies Use It

      Late last night, the NY Times broke a very troubling story. Rather than finally putting an end to Executive Order 12333, it appears that President Obama is going to expand the power of it in dangerous ways. We’ve written about EO 12333 a bunch of times, but for those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s an executive order signed by President Reagan that basically gave the NSA pretty free rein to collect signals intelligence outside of the US. Because it’s not (technically) about domestic surveillance, what the NSA does under EO 12333 is not subject to Congressional oversight. That is, Congress is mostly as much in the dark as everyone else is on what the NSA is doing overseas. And, as former State Department official John Napier Tye revealed a couple of years ago, for all the talk of domestic surveillance programs revealed by Ed Snowden, the NSA’s real power comes almost entirely from 12333.

      And it has no limitations. Napier noted that the other programs — things like Section 215 (now morphed into whatever the USA FREEDOM Act allows) and Section 702 — were merely used to “fill in the gaps” not covered by 12333.

    • White House moves to expand ‘sharing intelligence between NSA, FBI and CIA’

      The Obama administration is reportedly moving to broaden the current scope of information sharing between the National Security Agency (NSA) and other US intelligence agencies by stripping away existing restrictions on who exactly has access to communications data scooped up by surveillance programmes.

      The change would impact the sharing of both phone calls and email content collected alongside data from satellite transmissions and messages acquired from overseas intelligence agencies, according to The New York Times.

    • NSA poised to share more intel; Comey not interested in Apple precedent; encryption bill on its way

      MORE INTEL SHARING: The Obama administration is poised to expand NSA intelligence sharing “without first applying any privacy protections” for it, the New York Times reports. “The change would relax longstanding restrictions on access to the contents of the phone calls and email the security agency vacuums up around the world, including bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies,” the Times reports.

    • JOHN MCAFEE: The US may be violating the 13th amendment if it forces Apple to create a back door
    • JOHN MCAFEE: The NSA’s back door has given every US secret to our enemies [Ed: same as below]
    • JOHN MCAFEE: The NSA’s back door has given every US secret to our enemies

      Deng Xiaoping, in 1979 – his second year as supreme leader of China – perceived a fundamental truth that has yet to be fully grasped by most Western leaders: Software, if properly weaponized, could be far more destructive than any nuclear arsenal.

      Under Deng’s leadership, China began one of the most ambitious and sophisticated meta- software development programs ever undertaken.

      And what is meta-software? It’s the one science that the entire Western World has entirely overlooked. It is a high level set of principles for developing software that are imperative if a nation is to survive in a cyberwar.

    • Appeals Court Urged to Allow Wikimedia to Fight NSA Surveillance

      In the amicus brief filed Wednesday, EFF urges the Fourth Circuit to recognize standing for allegations of harm based on actual past and ongoing surveillance, like those alleged in both Wikimedia and Jewel.

    • EFF pushes forward with new amicus brief in case against NSA spying

      The foundation has had an ongoing case which has been termed Jewell v NSA, as well as Wikimedia v NSA. There are many irons in the fire in this battle and now the EFF has filed a new amicus brief in the Wikimedia case.

      On Wednesday the organization filed the brief, which urges the court to allow the various parties to continue their pursuit of the NSA for what the EFF terms “illegal surveillance”. This has been filed with the Fourth Circuit Court, which could prove favorable as it allowed Jewell v NSA to go forward after quite a bit of stalling by the government.

    • Apple Asks: Why Hasn’t The FBI Asked NSA To Break iPhone Encryption?

      The question Apple is asking the FBI: If you want to hack into our iPhone so bad, why don’t you just have the U.S. National Security Agency do it? That’s what a strongly worded legal brief filed Thursday amounts to. The brief asks a federal magistrate to throw out an order requiring Apple to build special software that would enable investigators to break into the iPhone 5c used by one the San Bernardino shooters.

    • Apple: The FBI Should Ask the NSA to Hack Shooter’s iPhone

      In a strongly-worded argument filed in court today, Apple pushed the US government on a question that many observers have been asking: If the FBI wants to hack an iPhone, why doesn’t it just ask the NSA?

      Last week, the company challenged a court order to build malicious software that would allow the FBI to crack the passcode of an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the deceased shooters responsible for the workplace rampage in San Bernardino last December. Apple is being compelled under the All Writs Act, a centuries-old law that allows courts to order anyone to do pretty much anything, as long as it’s meant to help execute a court order and isn’t “unreasonably burdensome.”

    • Judge Wants To Know More About FBI’s Secret Recordings Of Conversations Near Courthouse Steps

      Last November, lawyers defending five real estate investors against auction price-rigging allegations discovered the FBI had planted bugs to capture conversations during real estate auctions on the San Mateo (CA) Courthouse steps.

      The lawyers questioned whether these surreptitious recordings violated wiretap laws, despite them taking place in a public area. As they noted, investors often huddled away from the steps to discuss bidding strategies in “hushed tones” in order to prevent competitors from overhearing them. According to these lawyers, the “hushed tones” were not unlike the closing of a phone booth door — a key element in the Supreme Court’s 1967 Katz decision, which found an expectation of privacy could be found in public areas, provided the person being targeted by recording devices performed certain actions.

    • We Read Apple’s 65 Page Filing Calling Bullshit On The Justice Department, So You Don’t Have To
    • The Government Is Already Forcing Companies to Give It Access to Our Data
    • 7 Reasons a Government Backdoor to the iPhone Would Be Catastrophic

      You’ve likely caught wind of the fact that the government and Apple are in the midst of an intense legal showdown in what Edward Snowden has called “the most important tech case in a decade.” The battle is over the legality of a court order compelling Apple to write new software — which the company cleverly referred to as GovOS in a court filing today — that disables several security features that the FBI claims are preventing it from accessing the contents of the work phone of one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack. Apple is resisting the order, and the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has committed to going all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary.

      Lest there be any doubt, the ACLU is with Apple on this one, as it was in a similar case several months back. The government’s request is not just about this one iPhone — it has far-reaching consequences for every device, for global cybersecurity, and for basic freedoms at home and around the world. Communications security is critical for the functioning of democracy, and the precedent the government is seeking could do terrible and lasting damage.

    • FBI Waited 50 Days before Asking for Syed Rezwan Farook’s iCloud Data

      Apple’s motion to vacate the All Writs Act order requiring it to help FBI brute force Syed Rezwan Farook’s iPhone is a stupendous document worthy of the legal superstars who wrote it. To my mind, however, the most damning piece comes not from the lawyers who wrote the brief, but in a declaration from another lawyer: Lisa Olle, Apple’s Manager of Global Privacy and Law, the last 3 pages of the filing.

      Olle provides an interesting timeline of FBI’s requests from Apple, some of which I’ll return to. The most damning details, however, are these.

    • Labor, Coalition vote against strong encryption in Senate

      Both of Australia’s major political parties have explicitly rejected a Senate motion calling on the Government to support public use of strong encryption technologies, in a move that comes in the wake of the US Government’s demand that Apple provide it with a backdoor for open access to its iPhone handset.

      Yesterday in the Senate, Greens Senator and Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam (pictured) moved a motion dealing with encryption technology.

      The motion called upon the Senate to note that strong digital encryption protects the personal and financial information of millions of people; that encryption is an important tool to prevent identity theft and other crime; that encryption ensures that public interest whistleblowers, journalists and other civil society actors can conduct their activities more securely; and that the Government, through services such as Medicare and Centrelink, and digital platforms such as myGov, depends on encryption to keep client information safe.

    • MWC 2016: Mastercard rolls out selfie ID checks [iophk: biometrics]

      Credit card firm Mastercard has confirmed it will accept selfie photos and fingerprints as an alternative to passwords when verifying IDs for online payments.

    • The FBI’s Not-So-Compelling Pitch For Sacrificing Security For Safety

      The FBI’s attempt to use an All Writs order to force Apple to help it break into a locked iPhone is seemingly built on a compelling case: a large-scale shooting involving people with ties to terrorist groups. This is exactly the sort of case Comey hoped would help push his anti-encryption agenda forward. Or so it seems.

      But is the case really that “compelling,” especially in the legal sense of the word, which requires the court to weigh the imposition on Apple against the public’s interest in seeing wrongdoers punished/future terrorist attacks prevented?

    • The Way You Ask The Questions Matters: Reuters Poll Says People Support Apple Against FBI, But It’s All In The Questions

      And then, just days later, Reuters/Ipsos released a poll of its own, saying… basically the exact opposite, and it’s being spun to claim that there is “Solid support for Apple in iPhone encryption fight.”

      [...]

      And, once again, the poll is basically meaningless when it comes to the actual issues in this case. You can read the details of the questions in the linked document, which shows that, before asking the key question, the pollsters asked a bunch of questions about whether or not people were willing to “give up privacy” to help the US government on a variety of things. And lots of people said no. These questions more or less framed the issue as one about protecting your own privacy — as compared to the Pew poll that framed it more as being about investigating the San Bernardino attacks. Then after all those questions, the poll asks about the specifics of the Apple case, where they frame the question much more broadly than Pew’s.

    • Alternate Titles: Apple Now Looking To Close The Backdoor The FBI Discovered

      Yesterday the NY Times put out a story claiming that Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack, with the underlying thrust being that this is a response to the big DOJ case against it, in which the court has ordered Apple to undermine key security features, which would then enable the FBI to brute force the (almost certainly weak) passcode used by Syed Farook on his work iPhone. But, here’s the thing: prior to that order and its details coming to light, many people were under the impression that the existing iPhones were ones that it “couldn’t hack.” After all, it was offering full disk encryption tied to the device where it didn’t hold the key.

    • Charlie Rose Talks to Michael Hayden
    • CIA Director: It’s the Media’s Fault That Terrorists Are So Good at Encryption
    • CIA Director Blames The Media For Terrorists’ Encryption Skills
    • It’s Dangerous and Foolish for CIA and NSA to Blame Press for Terrorist Encryption
    • Obama Administration Set to Expand Sharing of Data That N.S.A. Intercepts

      That also means more officials will be looking at private messages — not only foreigners’ phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the N.S.A…

    • Apple: The FBI Should Ask the NSA to Hack Shooter’s iPhone

      In a strongly-worded argument filed in court today, Apple pushed the US government on a question that many observers have been asking: If the FBI wants to hack an iPhone, why doesn’t it just ask the NSA?

    • ‘Rethink U.S. presence in Italy’

      “I’m a friend of everyone, all it takes is that others respect our work”, he said. Daily La Repubblica and sister weekly l’Espresso carried the Wikileaks reports that the NSA listened in on three-time premier Berlusconi as Italy was on the brink of a Greece-style crisis, an economic emergency that eventually forced him from office. Berlusconi has often said he was the victim of an international plot.

    • Rome ‘Won’t Protest’ Against NSA Tapping as Italy is ‘Loyal US Servant’

      Even after finding out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was wiretapping former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government in Rome, being Washington’s loyal servant, won’t protest against it, Italian journalist Mario Sommossa said.

    • Italian Media: Rome won’t protest NSA Spying…loyal servants

      Even after finding out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was wiretapping former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the government in Rome, being Washington’s loyal servant, won’t protest against it, Italian journalist Mario Sommossa said.

      On Tuesday, WikiLeaks released a batch of classified documents revealing how the NSA was tapping different world leaders, including former Italian leader Berlusconi. Later that day, the Italian Foreign Ministry called US Ambassador John Philips to clarify the uncomfortable findings.

    • Spy Court Called Insufficient to Rein in NSA

      Brought to light by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the NSA program Upstream intercepts traffic from what has been called the “Internet’s backbone,” a phrase that refers to the major foreign and domestic Internet cables and switches.

    • Think the NSA is scary now? Wait till Donald Trump controls it.

      Donald Trump is pretty obviously an incipient tinpot dictator. He’s got the demagogue’s knack for both playing off and encouraging the worst instincts of his supporters, including violent reprisals against scapegoats. He’s got wide support among authoritarians. He’s even got the taste for garish prestige construction projects.

    • Will the NSA Finally Build Its Superconducting Spy Computer?

      Today, silicon microchips underlie every aspect of digital computing. But their dominance was never a foregone conclusion. Throughout the 1950s, electrical engineers and other researchers explored many alternatives to making digital computers.

    • The NSA spied on top-secret climate negotiations between world leaders

      Climate negotiations between the world’s powerhouses usually take place behind closed doors — unless, that is, the U.S. government is secretly listening in.

      A batch of documents released by WikiLeaks on Tuesday reveal that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spied on communications regarding international climate change agreements, including negotiations in 2008 between United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the NSA had reportedly been spying on for decades. The NSA listened in on a private meeting between the two leaders ahead of a 2009 conference in Copenhagen, and gleaned information about their hopes that the European Union play a major role in climate change mitigation, adding Merkel thought the “tough issue” would involve carbon trading.

    • Federal Judge Approves Gathering of Evidence on NSA Warrantless Surveillance Program

      For the first time, mass surveillance opponents can dig into evidence on the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet spying programs, a federal judge ruled Friday.

      Heeding the words of a December 2015 Ninth Circuit ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeffery White lifted a 12-month stay in two related class actions that accuse the government of illegally spying on citizens.

      An attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the plaintiffs, said this is the first time the court has allowed a party to gather evidence on the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program.

    • Opera star Katherine Jenkins performs at GCHQ [Ed: which violates human rights and laws]
    • WATCH: Singing star Katherine Jenkins comes to GCHQ and sings to staff as thanks for their work
    • WATCH: Singing star Katherine Jenkins comes to GCHQ and sings to staff as thanks for their work
    • Katherine Jenkins gives spies singing treat

      The classical music star hailed workers at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham as “heroes”, before singing songs from her repertoire including Habanera from the opera Carmen.

    • Singer Katherine Jenkins performs at GCHQ
    • Spy agencies say Clinton emails closely matched top secret documents: sources

      U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as “top secret” because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.

      The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server.

    • Arizona Legislators Trying (Again) To Ban Traffic Cameras

      Well, sort of. The bill is still undergoing massive invasive surgery from entities unwilling to see this revenue stream dry up. Another proposal to scale back the state’s reliance on traffic cam income moved forward after being limited solely to state highways — basically killing off cameras in only two towns along those roads. This more expansive proposal is experiencing whatever the opposite of growing pains are. The exceptions to the proposed rule are turning the bill into a hollow shell of an idea, despite the ban having widespread support from the public.

    • Some websites turning law-abiding Tor users into second-class citizens

      About 1.3 million IP addresses—including those used by Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, and Yelp—are turning users of the Tor anonymity network into second-class Web citizens by blocking them outright or degrading the services offered to them, according to a recently published research paper.

      Titled “Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users,” the paper said 3.67 percent of websites in the Alexa 1,000 discriminated against computers visiting with known Tor exit-node IP addresses. In some cases, the visitors are completely locked out, while in others users are required to complete burdensome CAPTCHAs or are limited in what they can do. The authors said the singling out was an attempt by the sites to limit fraud and other online crime, which is carried out by a disproportionately high percentage of Tor users. In the process, law-abiding Tor users are being treated as second-class Web citizens.

      “While many websites block Tor to reduce abuse, doing so inadvertently impacts users from censored countries who do not have other ways to access censored Internet content,” the authors wrote.

    • Thoughts on Tor router hardware

      I recently came across a small travel-router that claimed to provide transparent access to the Tor-network. Just make a wifi connection to its Tor access point and all the TCP and DNS traffic is routed through the Tor-network. For a price of only $25 I could not resist and bought one. Over the last month I have been playing with the device and… it worked flawlessly, it was fun!

      So, running the Tor software on cheap router hardware works, but is it a good idea? I believe it is. In this article I will argue that having Tor on the router benefits both security and usability. It opens up new possibilities for expanding the Tor-network and can provide a much needed source of income for the Tor-project.

    • Judge confirms what many suspected: Feds hired CMU to break Tor

      A federal judge in Washington has now confirmed what has been strongly suspected: that Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers at its Software Engineering Institute were hired by the federal government to do research into breaking Tor in 2014. The judge also made a notable statement in his court order that “Tor users clearly lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in their IP addresses while using the Tor network.”

    • US authorities used students to hack into Tor

      THE US COURTS have confirmed that the Department of Defence is not immune to employing students, and used a gaggle of them from Carnegie Mellon to find a way to crack into privacy alternative Tor.

      We would expect students to be against this kind of thing, but who knows these days? People like a challenge and there are plenty who would support efforts to crack Tor. The Russians are rather keen, for example.

    • Silk Road 2.0 Court Docs Show US Government Paid Carnegie Mellon Researchers To Unmask Tor Users

      Rumors that the US government used a university’s research institute to uncloak Tor users began floating around nearly two years ago. In July of 2014, the first hint that something weird was going on at Carnegie Mellon took the form of a hastily-cancelled Black Hat Conference talk on the subject of de-anonymizing Tor users. Carnegie Mellon’s lawyers stepped in and called the whole thing off at the last minute. The thought process at the time was that CMU’s legal team may have been concerned the researchers’ actions had broken wiretap laws.

    • Confirmed: Carnegie Mellon University Attacked Tor, Was Subpoenaed By Feds

      In November, Motherboard reported that a “university-based research institute” provided information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation that led to the identification of criminal suspects on the so-called dark web. Circumstantial evidence pointed to that body being the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). After a media-storm, CMU published a very carefully worded press release, implying that it had been subpoenaed for the IP addresses it obtained during its research.

    • How Existing Wiretapping Laws Could Save Apple From FBI’s Broad Demands

      There are all sorts of interesting (and frustrating and challenging) legal questions raised by the FBI’s use of the All Writs Act to try to force Apple to build a system to allow the FBI to hack Apple’s customers. But there’s one interesting one raised by Albert Gidari that may cut through a lot of the “bigger” questions (especially the Constitutional ones that everyone leaps to) and just makes a pretty simple point: the DOJ is simply wrong that the All Writs Act applies here, rather than the existing wiretapping statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or 47 USC 1002, better known by basically everyone as CALEA. CALEA is the law that some (including the DOJ) have wanted “updated” in ways that might force internet companies and mobile phone companies to make their devices more wiretap-ready. But that hasn’t happened.

    • Facebook Is Making a Map of Everyone in the World

      Americans inhabit an intricately mapped world. Type “Burger King” into an online box, and Google will cough up a dozen nearby options, each keyed to a precise latitude and longitude.

      But throughout much of the world, local knowledge stays local. While countries might conduct censuses, the data doesn’t go much deeper than the county or province level.

      Take population data, for instance: More than 7.4 billion humans sprawl across this planet of ours. They live in dense urban centers, in small towns linked by farms, and alone on the outskirts of jungles. But no one’s sure where, exactly, many of them live.

  • Civil Rights

    • Refugee crisis: Concern over ‘unprecedented’ arrivals in Greece and Italy after 2016 total passes 100,000

      More than 100,000 refugees and migrants have arrived in Europe so far this year – more than eight times the rate seen during the same period in 2015.

      Humanitarian organisations have already raised concern about the “huge” numbers and their implications as border controls continue to tighten on the long route to western Europe and the political will to welcome asylum seekers wanes.

    • Plaintiffs had no First Amendment right to take cellphone video of police, federal judge rules

      A federal judge in Philadelphia has ruled that citizens don’t have a First Amendment right to take cellphone videos of police unless they are challenging or criticizing the police conduct.

      U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney ruled (PDF) on Feb. 19 in consolidated cases involving Richard Fields and Amanda Geraci, the Legal Intelligencer (sub. req.) reports. Fields, a Temple University student, took a cellphone photo of about 20 police officers standing outside a house party because he thought it would be an interesting picture. Geraci, a trained legal observer, tried to move closer to see and possibly record an arrest during a protest of hydraulic fracturing.

      An officer handcuffed Fields, searched his cellphone before returning it, and cited him for obstructing the highway and public passages, Fields says. Geraci says an officer physically restrained her to prevent her from recording the arrest. Both sued for alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations.

    • Victorian Government to begin talks with First Nations on Australia’s first Indigenous treaty

      The Victorian Government will begin talks to work out Australia’s first treaty with Indigenous people within weeks.

    • The Obama Guantánamo Plan — What You May Have Missed

      There were both good and bad developments buried in Obama’s speech and plan to close Guantanamo.

      I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines or read the news on President Obama’s speech this week about the plan he sent to Congress to close the Guantánamo prison. But what’s really going on? And what new developments — good or bad — were buried in the speech and the plan? Here’s our take.

    • America’s Killer Prisons

      If the people running prisons know there’s a problem and do nothing about it, is that not manslaughter? Is that not depraved indifference? A person who should be alive is not — all because of the incompetence or apathy of prison administrators. This isn’t an issue of who did what or who broke what law. Every American deserves decent health care. That includes our prisoners.

    • Albert Woodfox, the Last of the Angola Three, Is Finally Free

      Albert Woodfox turned 69 years old Friday. He also was released from prison that day after serving 43 years in solitary confinement, more time than anyone in U.S. history. “Quite a birthday gift,” Woodfox told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour, in his first televised interview after gaining his freedom. Woodfox is a living testament to the resilience of the human spirit when subjected to the cruel and unusual punishment of solitary. His case also serves as a stark reminder of the injustice that pervades the American criminal-justice system.

    • Court Says Cops Can’t Testify In Case After Destroying Footage Of DUI Arrest

      They like automatic cameras that record license plate and location data. They like surveillance cameras aimed at citizens around the clock. They even like dashcams and body cams, provided the released footage is limited to exonerating officers of wrongdoing.

      What they don’t like are cameras that don’t show their side of the story. A camera is inherently trustworthy — much like a confidential informant — until it isn’t, at which point any footage captured is claimed to be devoid of “context” or unable to show “the whole picture.” In some cases, the cameras don’t show anything at all.

      Sure, the footage may have been available at some point. But it’s suddenly missing when the defense needs it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Whistleblowers Detail Accountability Problems At The Top Of WIPO; US Congressional Members Prepare Actions

      A set of senior former employees of the World Intellectual Property Organization and their representatives yesterday gave detailed sworn testimony to US lawmakers on what they termed extremely serious misconduct and retaliation at the United Nations agency. A congressional subcommittee chairman told Intellectual Property Watch afterward that based on all they have heard, they believe WIPO Director General Francis Gurry has “gone rogue” and that action against him will begin immediately. The US State Department will be pressed to demand a copy of a newly completed UN investigation of Gurry that apparently has been shared with the Colombian Ambassador in Geneva, Gabriel Duque, who is chair of the WIPO General Assembly this year.

    • Trademarks

      • Google Threatens 9to5Google Over Trademark, Rescinds Threat, Leaves Everyone Frightened

        If you correct for company size, Google is generally pretty decent on intellectual property matters. But, hey, I guess no corporation is perfect. The company whose motto is “don’t be evil” is, of course, very big. And they certainly have a very big legal team. I think it might be time for that legal team to get a quick primer on the wider culture at Google and do a quick review on the company motto, because those lawyers apparently suddenly decided that a news site, called 9to5Google, was suddenly violating Google’s trademark after a scant five full years in operation.

        The threat device Google decided to employ in this case was the news site’s use of Google’s Doubleclick/Ad Exchange network, which the site claims is a decent profit center for 9to5Google. There had apparently been occasional blips of the network not working in the past, all of which had been quickly resolved. Not the case this time, however.

    • Copyrights

      • HTTPS Renders UK Pirate Site Blocklist Useless

        By now most UK Internet users have gotten used to pirate sites being blocked by their ISPs. However, thanks to HTTPS many subscribers have been enjoying a glimpse of an open and unrestricted web, as several popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents are no longer being blocked by all providers.

      • UK’s Pirate Site Blocklist Even More Pointless Than Previously Thought: HTTPS Defeats It

        Apparently this has been known in certain circles for quite a while. Some pirate sites have even gone so far as to force users to connect using HTTPS to enable them to enjoy this further advantage of encryption. There’s an interesting discussion in the comments on the TorrentFreak post as to when and why HTTPS connections can get around the court-mandated blocks, and what ISPs might try to do to close this gaping loophole. Even if they do, the other circumvention methods will remain.

      • RIAA Wins $22 Million Piracy Lawsuit Against MP3Skull

        A group of prominent RIAA labels have won a default judgment against piracy site MP3Skull. A Florida court awarded the music companies more than $22 million in damages and issued a permanent injunction which allows the RIAA to take over the site’s domain names.

      • Japan Police Arrest 44 in Nationwide Internet Piracy Crackdown

        Police in Japan have arrested 44 people suspected of being involved in illegal Internet file-sharing. Raids in over 90 locations across the country targeted individuals suspected of downloading and distributing a wide range of content including movies, music, anime, manga and software. If convicted they face fines and up to ten years in jail.

02.24.16

Links 24/2/2016: Wine-Staging 1.9.4, CaffeOnSpark

Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 tips for growing your developer community on GitHub

    You’ve done it: you’ve taken your own personal utility, library, or web application and placed it on GitHub as free and open source software for all the world to see.

    Maybe you wrote this software to fill a personal need, or maybe you’ve always hoped that it would reach more people. One thing’s certain: it’s always been yours, and yours alone—but the moment you pushed that code for the first time, your baby left the nest. What comes next is up to you.

  • BeeGFS Parallel File System Now Open Source
  • Let’s meet the 2016 OSI Board of Directors candidates!

    The nominations for the Open Source Initiative board of directors closed on February 15th and we are delighted to share our list of candidates with you!

    We are excited that so many people want to take part, and as such would like to introduce you to the candidates before voting opens on February 29th.

  • Web Browsers

    • on ditching css frameworks and preprocessors
    • Run Windows 98 And Linux In Your Web Browser, Thanks To JavaScript And NodeJS

      Short Bytes: A coder, known as Fabian on GitHub, has created x86 architecture based emulations that allow you to run Windows 98, Linux, KolibriOS etc. inside your browser.

    • Mozilla

      • A Mozilla journey: Contributor to Firefox Student Ambassadors executive board

        One thing that I have learned from working in the open source community is that you must never hesitate to ask for help. People are really very friendly, and finding the right mentor can prove to be immensely helpful in your life. Contributing to open source projects will only help you, so don’t waste too much time thinking about it. Take a leap of faith and dive into the community behind your favorite open source product. If you’re specifically interested in acquiring technical skills, there’s nothing a commit a day can’t solve! It also enhances your e-karma.

      • The case for an embeddable Gecko

        Strap yourself in, this is a long post. It should be easy to skim, but the history may be interesting to some. I would like to make the point that, for a web rendering engine, being embeddable is a huge opportunity, how Gecko not being easily embeddable has meant we’ve missed several opportunities over the last few years, and how it would still be advantageous to make Gecko embeddable.

      • Continuing the Conversation About Encryption and Apple: A New Video From Mozilla

        In the past week, the conversation about encryption has reached fever pitch. Encryption, Apple, and the FBI are in headlines around the world. And lively discussions about security and privacy are taking place around kitchen tables, on television, and in comment sections across the Internet.

        Mozilla believes the U.S. government’s demand for Apple to circumvent their own security protections is a massive overreach. To require Apple to do this would set a dangerous precedent that threatens consumer security going forward. But this discussion is an opportunity to broaden public understanding of encryption. When people understand the role encryption plays in their everyday lives, we can all stand up for encryption when threats surface — this key issue related to the overall health of the Internet becomes mainstream.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Don’t Laugh: Yahoo’s Open Source AI Has a Secret Weapon

      Yet another tech giant is sharing its artificial intelligence know-how with the world. Today Yahoo published the source code to its CaffeOnSpark AI engine so that anyone from academic researchers to big corporations can use or modify it.

    • Yahoo open-sources CaffeOnSpark deep learning framework for Hadoop

      Yahoo today is releasing some key artificial intelligence software (AI) under an open-source license. The company last year built a library called CaffeOnSpark to perform a popular type of AI called “deep learning” on the vast swaths of data kept in its Hadoop open-source file system for storing big data. Now it’s becoming available for anyone to use under an open-source Apache license on GitHub.

    • Google’s Managed Hadoop and Spark Cloud Service Goes Live

      Google has announced that its Cloud Dataproc service — a managed tool based on the Hadoop and Spark open source big data software — is now generally available. Google Cloud Dataproc, because it leverages both Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, promises to be in strong demand, especially at enterprises.

      “When analyzing data, your attention should be focused on insights, not your tools,” Google notes. “Often, popular tools to process data, such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, require a careful balancing act between cost, complexity, scale, and utilization. Unfortunately, this means you focus less on what is important — your data — and more on what should require little or no attention — the cluster processing it. We created our managed Spark and Hadoop cloud service, Google Cloud Dataproc, to rectify the balance, so that using these powerful data tools is as easy as 1-2-3.”

  • Databases

    • Vendor: ‘Governments moving to open source databases’

      Governments across the world are increasingly turning to Postgresql, an open source relational database management system, according to a press release by Enterprisedb. The company provides commercial services for the database system, and reports a hefty growth of its government contracts.

    • Introducing motranslator

      What changes you can expect? First of all it supports all current PHP versions. It also performs way better – in my tests loading of mo file is 4-5 times faster and memory consumption went down about 10 percent. You can additionally use object API instead of traditional function based.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • current LibreOffice native gtk3 elements

      LibreOffice typically basically has just one gtk widget per top level window and draws everything you see itself, using the gtk themeing apis to make what it draws look like they do in gtk.

      But there are some truly native gtk elements. Some of them new.

    • LibreOffice 5.1 Videos: Analytics

      For LibreOffice 5.1 we created a playlist of short videos highlighting some of the new features in action. At the time of writing, these videos have been viewed over 50,000 times in total. Here’s the breakdown:

      Calc: 15,346
      Impress: 12,275
      Writer: 25,229

  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)

    • Facebook TIPs the Scales Toward Better Networking

      TIP will bring together telecommunications companies, infrastructure providers, system integrators and other technology companies, according to Jay Parikh, Facebook’s global head of engineering and infrastructure.

  • BSD

    • DragonFlyBSD Intel Graphics Driver Gets BXT Support, Aims For A Blob-Free Skylake

      Thanks to the fabulous open-source graphics driver porting work done by François Tigeot, the DragonFlyBSD kernel’s i915 Intel DRM graphics driver is up to a comparable state to the code ported from the Linux 4.2 kernel.

      Just months ago the i915 DragonFlyBSD graphics driver was years behind the upstream Linux kernel while in recent times a lot of headway has been made where the Intel graphics driver on this BSD operating system is just a few releases behind the upstream state.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Software Freedom Conservancy, Others, Makes Case for FOSS at NY City Hall

      On Tuesday, representatives of four FOSS friendly agencies testified before a New York City committee considering bills that would mandate the use of FOSS by city government.

      “Free and open source software has many advantages over proprietary software,” Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, testified Tuesday before the New York City Council Committee on Contracts. “Studies show that, over time, free software is safer from vulnerabilities. Free software is auditable — security and functionality can be verified upon inspection. Anyone can independently assess the software and its risks. Developers can more easily and quickly repair discovered vulnerabilities or bugs (and bugs are very common in all software – the Software Engineering Institute estimates that an experienced software engineer produces approximately one defect for every 100 lines of code). Free software removes dependence on a single party, as anyone can make changes to their version of the software. And municipalities can hire any contractor on the open market to work on the software.”

    • ARM Adds Cortex-A32 Support To GCC Compiler

      ARM only announced the Cortex-A32 ARMv8 32-bit processor yesterday but already they’ve gone ahead and landed the support inside the GNU Compiler Collection.

      It’s not an entirely big surprise that there is already compiler support baked for the Cortex-A32 considering this is just an ultra power efficient cut-down version of the ARMv8 that runs in 32-bit mode. The ARMv8 64-bit support has been maturing in both GCC and LLVM/Clang for quite some time already. However, it’s nice to see the quick turnaround time by ARM on getting the support upstream.

    • denemo @ Savannah: Release 2.0.4 is imminent!

      new features:

      Conditional Directives on Chords/Notes
      Create editions with/without ornaments, fingerings …
      Conditional items are highlighted in the display
      Object Inspector reports on them
      Enhanced Object Editor
      Set Conditional Behavior
      Initiate Search/Edit from Object
      New Commands
      Gaps in Staffs
      Enharmonic transpositions of passages
      Generating Parts
      Part naming extended to multi-staff instruments

    • GDB 7.11 Released For Better GNU Debugging

  • Public Services/Government

    • Munich Greens: Linux is made a scapegoat for IT issues

      The Green party in Munich says the city’s use of the Linux operating system is wrongly being blamed for all IT issues. “The problem is usually not the operating system, but something else”, says Florian Roth, leader of the city’s Green Party. The party wants to increase support for the city’s central IT department, to bolster the open source strategy.

    • Portugal adds 20 eGovernment service access points

      The government of Portugal has opened another 20 Espaços do Cidadão (Citizen Spots), in town halls across 8 of its 18 districts. There are now almost 200 such eGovernment service access points across the country. Here citizens can go online to renew driving licences, apply for permits and request official documents.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Can we tackle the Zika virus with rapid, open research?

      One of the major issues with the Zika virus is that so little is known about it. That means that a lot of research has to be done very quickly.

      The Zika virus is at the heart of a global health emergency. It became a global health emergency after outbreaks began in 2015, and has possible links to birth defects. When the virus was first discovered in the late forties, human infections had been observed as early as 1952 according to Wikipedia.

    • Flanders services exchange eGovernment practices

      Municipalities and public service organisations in Belgium’s Flanders region are exchanging their eGovernment practices and ICT policies. Many municipalities are considering an overhaul of their websites in order to improve eGovernment services, reports the region’s ICT Organisation (V-ICT-OR). Additionally, local administrations are looking for solutions to manage meeting minutes, and want to boost IT security, V-ICT-OR says.

    • Open Data

      • Portugal to monitor public health through a national open data portal

        The National Health Service in Portugal (SNS – Serviço Nacional de Saüde) has set up an open data portal whose goal is to provide a dashboard to monitor the health of Portuguese people. Called Transparencia (Transparency), the portal gathers operational data generated or collected by the agencies of the national health system.

    • Open Access/Content

      • President Obama Nominates New Librarian Of Congress Who Supports Open Access, Fights Against Surveillance

        So here’s a pleasant surprise. President Obama has nominated Carla Hayden as the new Librarian of Congress, and at a first glance, she looks perfect for the job. The job is super important for a whole variety of reasons, including that the Librarian of Congress controls the Copyright Office (more on that in a bit…). The former Librarian of Congress, James Billington, was really bad. He apparently was mostly focused on hobnobbing with rich people in fancy places around the globe than doing anything useful. A report by the Government Accountability Office found a massive leadership vacuum with Billington when it came to technology issues, noting that he basically ignored technology entirely. When Billington announced he was retiring, the Washington Post reported that employees were absolutely elated…

Leftovers

  • NY Yankees Do Fans A ‘Favor’ By Preventing Them From Printing Their Tickets At Home

    As an avid sports fan, and more specifically an avid baseball fan, I can still remember the advent of home-printed tickets. My reaction was perhaps more elation than what was warranted, but having spent years going up to the Wrigley Field box office with my father and later my friends, the idea of being able to purchase tickets online and then print them at home in order to bypass the lines and go directly to the gate was exactly the kind of technological progress that, albeit small, meant something to me.

  • Canada Forcing Cheaper, More Flexible Pricing On TV Industry March 1. Will It Work?

    Starting next week, Canadian cable providers will be forced by the government to do something inherently and violently foreign to them: offer cheaper, more flexible cable bundles. In March of last year, Canadian regulator CRTC announced it would be combating high TV prices by forcing cable operators to offer cable channels a la carte, or so-called “skinny bundles” of cheaper cable channels, by December 2016. The CRTC’s full ruling declared that by March 2016, all Canadian TV providers must at least provide a $25, discounted skinny bundle, letting users pick and choose individual channels beyond that.

  • Science

  • Security

    • Hackers use Microsoft security tool to pwn Microsoft security tool

      FireEye security wonks Abdulellah Alsaheel and Raghav Pande have twisted the barrels of Microsoft’s lauded EMET Windows defence gun 180 degrees and fired.

      The result of their research is p0wnage of the enhanced mitigation toolkit so that instead of defending Windows it attacks it.

      The attacks the pair found affect older versions of Windows which rely on EMET for modern defences like address space layout randomisation and data execution prevention.

    • Is Linux Really as Secure as You Think It Is?

      Security is an important topic on everyone’s minds in today’s highly-technological world. With all of the security news that pops up on almost a daily basis, trying to be aware of the choices you make can make a big difference. Linux is often touted as the most secure operating system you can get your hands onto, but is this reputation deserved?

    • A Fedora Distribution download primer

      With the fresh news of a compromise in the Linux Mint distribution images, I thought I would take a few minutes to explain how Fedora handles image downloads and what you can do as an end user to make sure you have the correct and official Fedora images.

    • Mousejack: Hacking Computers Via Your Mouse With 15 Lines Of Code And Radio Dongle
    • How Criminals Could Hijack Wireless Mice to Hack Computers from Afar

      Wireless computer mice give users the convenience of not having to deal with cumbersome wires and cables. But they might also open up the door for malicious hackers to get a way into their computers, researchers warn.

      A flaw in the way several popular models of wireless mice and their corresponding receivers, the sticks or “dongles” that plug into a USB port and transmit data between the mouse and the computer, handle encryption could leave “billions” of computers vulnerable to hackers, security firm Bastille warned on Tuesday.

    • Child tracking firm calls out security researcher on ‘hack’

      A CHILD MONITORING COMPANY is mad as heck at a security researcher for highlighting a security problem without asking its consent first. Or something.

      The company in question is uKnowkids and its target is a chap called Chris Vickery, a security researcher. His crime? Security research.

      uKnowKids.com is a kind of virtual Mary Poppins. It does not put children in danger, like Mary Poppins, but it does look out for them and keep an eye on what they do by monitoring their communications and stuff.

      We imagine that in some circumstance it has got some children in trouble. This week it is getting an older person in trouble, and accusing a security researcher of hacking as opposed to security researching.

    • URL shortening – are these services now too big a security risk to use?

      Spammers and malware pushers are still heavily abusing URL shortening services, messaging security firm Cloudmark has reported in its 2015 annual security report (reg required). The popular Bit.ly service has recently become a particular favourite with criminals with 25,000 individual malicious links run though that service every single day in recent times. This sounds alarming but it gets worse. According to the firm, this meant that an extraordinary 97 percent of Bit.ly links now led to malicious websites.

    • Security advisories for Wednesday
    • Google, Red Hat discover critical DNS security flaw that enables malware to infect entire internet

      Google and security firm Red Hat have discovered a critical security flaw in the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) that affects a library in a universally used protocol. This means an attacker could use it to infect almost everything on the entire internet. With the flawed code spread far and wide, it will likely take years of effort to patch the bug.

    • Hackers compromise Linux Mint Cinnamon ISO and forums
    • Why the Linux Mint hack is an indicator of a larger problem

      Security vulnerabilities at the Linux Mint project highlight substantial issues with the popular Linux distribution, and the difficulty of maintaining a Linux distribution as a hobbyist project.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Malaysian Borneo’s air quality hits hazardous levels as forest fires rage

      Forest fires spread over 500 acres in the north of the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Borneo island have raised air pollution to hazardous levels on Monday in areas close to the inferno, government data showed.

    • Trade Officials Promised Exxon That TTIP Will Erase Environmental ‘Obstacles’ Worldwide

      Newly released documents show that, in back-room talks, European officials assured ExxonMobil that the pending US-EU trade agreement would force the removal of regulatory “obstacles” worldwide, thus opening up even more countries to exploitation by the fossil fuel empire.

      Heavily redacted documents pertaining to an October 2013 meeting, obtained by the Guardian and reported on Tuesday, reveal that then-trade commissioner Karel de Gucht met with two officials from ExxonMobil’s EU and U.S. divisions to address the benefits of the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

      As the Guardian notes, the meeting was held at a time when countries in South America and Africa were “tightening regulations on fossil fuel companies for the first time in a decade, despite ExxonMobil’s ambitions to open up shale gas fracking wells in North Africa, Asia and South America.”

  • Finance

    • Google tax deal: MPs criticise secretive settlement

      Google’s controversial tax deal cannot be properly assessed by MPs because of secrecy surrounding the negotiations, according to a report by parliament’s public spending watchdog.

      But the deal to pay £130m in back taxes for a 10-year period seems “disproportionately small when compared with the size of Google’s business in the UK”, the public accounts committee has found.

    • House Speaker Paul Ryan Demands TPP Be Renegotiated; Neglects To Mention It Was His Bill That Makes That Impossible

      Go back and work on this agreement? Oh really? Now, this is the same Paul Ryan who (as he mentions in the interview) was the driving force behind the so-called fast track or “Trade Promotion Authority.” Though Ryan totally misrepresents what that means. He claims that the TPA gave the USTR “the ability to go negotiate trade agreements.” That’s hilariously not true. After all, the USTR has been negotiating the TPP for more than half a decade at this point, and only got Trade Promotion Authority in June. All Trade Promotion Authority REALLY does is ties Congress’s hands so that it can no longer ask the USTR to go back and renegotiate sections, because the whole point of the TPA is that it limits Congressional authority to a simple yes or no vote — rather than allowing it to actually debate and challenge specific aspects of the agreement.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Tesla: GM wrote a bill in Indiana to stop us from selling cars in the state

      Tesla recently sent a letter to “Tesla Owners and Enthusiasts” living in the Indiana area asking for their help to defeat a piece of legislation introduced by state lawmakers that would prevent auto manufacturers from selling cars directly to their customers. Tesla has almost exclusively sold vehicles to customers through direct vehicle sales, and it says if the bill is signed into law it would revoke Tesla’s permission to sell vehicles from its existing storefront in Indianapolis.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • New Group Seeking Privacy/Security Balance Loads Up On Former Government Officials And RSA Employees

      This is the same Art Coviello who said anonymity is the “enemy of privacy.” Why? Because it allows bad people to do bad things and get away with it — a sentiment echoed by any number of law enforcement officials and intelligence agency heads.

      Coviello’s timing couldn’t be better. Against the backdrop of the FBI’s efforts to force Apple to help it break into iPhones, Coviello hopes a balanced discussion of the issues may result in workable common ground between parties he feels often “talk past each other.”

    • What’s At Stake In Apple/FBI Fight: Who Gets To Set The Rules That Govern Your Privacy & Security

      Lots of people, mainly those supporting the DOJ/FBI’s view of the Apple fight, have been arguing that this isn’t a big deal. They’re just asking for one small thing. Other people have tried to examine “what’s at stake” in the case, with a number of the arguments falling into the typical “privacy v. security” framing, or even something around precedents related to privacy and security. However, Jennifer Granick recently wrote a great piece that does a much better job framing what’s truly at stake. It’s not privacy vs. security at all, but rather who gets to set the rules over how software works in an era where software controls everything.

    • Bay Area Rallies Against FBI Threats to Privacy and Security

      Dozens of people gathered at the Apple Store in San Francisco this evening to shout their support for the company’s position defending privacy and security in the face of irresponsible government demands.

    • Where’s Obama’s Encryption Policy?

      The news has been flooded with reactions to Apple’s principled stance in defense of user privacy. But even as Apple opposes the FBI’s demands to undermine the security of its operating system, where is President Obama on the issue of strong encryption?

      On Wednesday, the President’s press secretary said that “the F.B.I. can count on the full support of the White House.” Does that mean President Obama is going to turn his back on strong security for modern tech?

      EFF, Access Now, and a coalition of nonprofit and industry groups launched a public petition calling on President Obama to defend strong encryption and oppose backdoors in September. We used the We The People API, Obama’s preferred petition tool, and quickly surpassed 100,000 signatures.

      President Obama has promised to respond to any We the People petition that receives at least 100,000 signatures. But so far, we’ve gotten only nonresponses.

    • California Says Companies Should Embrace NSA-developed Data Protections

      The state of California has put companies on notice that they should be following a basic set of 20 information security controls developed by the U.S. government’s top code breakers.

      Many of the 657 data breaches California businesses and agencies reported during the past four years could have been prevented or at least more rapidly triaged had the protections been in place, according to a new state audit.

      “The set of 20 controls constitutes a minimum level of security – a floor – that any organization that collects or maintains personal information should meet,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat, said in the February breach analysis.

    • NSA leak probe ‘heavy handed,’ says Hayden

      The leak investigation included armed raids on the homes of veteran congressional investigators and agency staff, and ended six years later with the collapsed prosecution of NSA official Thomas Drake.

    • Could the former NSA director be encryption’s friend?

      It isn’t every day that civil libertarians and national security hawks agree on policy, but the encryption debate has created an unlikely alliance.

    • NSA spied on U.N. Secretary General/Merkel whilst having climate change talk
    • Italy Summons US Ambassador Over WikiLeaks Spying Reports

      Italy s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday it had summoned the US ambassador to Rome over reports of widespread US surveillance of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi, among several other European leaders.

    • Italy summons US ambassador after reports on NSA
    • US Ambassador To Rome Summoned
    • Italy summons US envoy over reports Berlusconi was spied on
    • Italy asks US to explain NSA spying report
    • Italy Summons U.S. Ambassador over Reports NSA Spied on Prime Minister
    • NSA: World Leaders Under Surveillance, Claims Wikileaks
    • Foreign affairs programmer watched by NSA
    • Rocky Anderson: Why I’m Suing Bush, Cheney and the NSA

      On today’s special episode of Loud & Clear, host Brian Becker is joined for the full hour by former mayor of Salt Lake City Rocky Anderson to discuss why he filed a class action lawsuit against former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the National Security Agency.

    • Confessions From Bush’s NSA Spy Program

      A memoir from former NSA director Michael Hayden reveals new details about the controversial U.S. intelligence program that targeted Americans’ private communications.

    • Why we must defend our last shred of privacy

      It’s not only Apple. Hundreds of technology companies large and small are engaged in a historic battle to determine how much access governments can have to your personal information. This includes Google, Microsoft, and nearly every technology company that has significantly impacted your life over the last two decades.

    • Facebook Tries (Again) to Take On Google and Twitter With Search

      There are 1.5 billion searches a day on Facebook, but the vast majority are for people’s names—the kind of search one might surreptitiously conduct after meeting an alluring stranger in a bar. Last October, the company quietly made it possible to search for all public posts on Facebook, not just material posted by friends or pages. Stocky’s team developed the new function, which uses an algorithm to rank and refine trillions of posts from Facebook users. “What we really tried to do was make Facebook a place where you could tap into the global conversation of what was happening in the world,” Stocky said at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters, unwittingly (or perhaps not) trotting out a favorite phrase of executives at rival Twitter. “We really want to basically make Facebook the best place to find what people are saying about something right now.”

    • Danish police back online monitoring plans

      The Danish government’s controversial plan to reintroduce so-called ‘session logging’ received the backing of Danish National Police (Rigspolitiet) Commissioner Jens Henrik Højbjerg, who said the Justice Ministry’s proposal would give police a means of tracking and catching criminals who are now conducting their illegal activities on the internet.

      “Crime and communication is increasingly taking place in cyberspace. But our investigation opportunities are undermined if we do not have the opportunity to get information on internet traffic,” Højbjerg said speaking to Danish broadcaster DR.

      Denmark scrapped the so-called ‘session logging’ in 2014 and the European Court of Justice has previously ruled that the blanket retention of internet usage is illegal.

    • German police allowed to use its own “federal Trojan”

      The German Interior Ministry has approved for investigative use a spying Trojan developed by the German Federal Criminal Police (a so-called “federal Trojan”). In fact, it could end up being used as early as this week.

    • FTC Dings ASUS For Selling ‘Secure’ Routers That Shipped With Default Admin/Admin Login (And Other Flaws)

      ASUS’s insecure products are no different than countless others offered by competitors. Far too many companies view end user security as something that can always be patched into existence after the first big breach. Why the FTC has chosen to hang ASUS rather than any number of other misbehaving tech manufacturers isn’t clear, but it could be this is just the first in a wave of settlements.

      The FTC isn’t just unhappy about ASUS’s bogus security claims. It’s also unhappy with the company’s response time. The complaint notes ASUS failed to act quickly in response to reported security holes.

    • Justice Department Wants Apple to Extract Data From 12 Other iPhones

      The U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing additional court orders that would force Apple to help federal investigators extract data from twelve other encrypted iPhones that may contain crime-related evidence, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    • DOJ Reached Out To San Bernardino Victims For Legal Support Before Going To Court Against Apple

      The FBI keeps insisting that it’s legal fight with Apple is not about the precedent and not about using the tragic incident in San Bernardino as an emotional plug to break down strong encryption. And yet… now it’s come out that even before going to court, federal prosecutors from the DOJ went to the families of those killed in the San Bernardino attacks and asked them to file an amicus brief of support with the court…

    • Is the FBI v Apple PR war even about encryption?

      The war between Apple and the FBI is a PR war. And it’s one that the FBI has fought well, from its initial selection of the battleground (a fight over access to a dead murderer’s government-owned iPhone) to the choreographed intervention of the relatives of the victims of the San Bernadino shootings – who were contacted by the FBI for support before the dispute even became public, according to Reuters.

    • San Bernardino Shooter’s Apple Password Changed While in Government Possession

      They lie like a rug.

    • Pew Asks Stupid Misleading Question About FBI Apple Fight, Gets Stupid Misleading Answers

      The folks over at Pew Research usually do pretty good work, but they decided to weigh in on the Apple / FBI backdoor debate by asking a really dumb poll question — the results of which are now being used to argue that the public supports the FBI over Apple by a pretty wide margin.

    • FBI’s Scorched Earth Approach To Apple Means That Tech Companies Now Have Even Less Incentive To Help Feds

      On Friday, we debunked a key FBI talking point, which the press has been parroting, that Apple had helped the FBI in 70 previous cases, and only changed its mind now for “marketing” or “business model” reasons. As we explained, that’s not even remotely true. In the past, Apple helped out because it had access to the content, and so it got it and turned it over following a lawful search warrant/court order. In this case, the situation is entirely different. Apple does not have access to the content that the FBI wants, and is now being forced to create a backdoor — build an entirely revamped operating system — that undermines some key security features found on iPhones today. That’s quite different.

    • Netherlands begins eID pilots

      The Dutch government has started pilots with electronic identification cards and smart phone apps, to allow online identification for eGovernment services. The first eID card was handed out in mid-February, marking the official start of both pilots. The eID pilots are intended to increase security, and prevent identity fraud.

  • Civil Rights

    • Latest Wikileaks documents: Irish citizen working for the UN Refugee Agency was targeted by the NSA

      It’s still early days but it appears from the latest Wikileaks document release that an innocent Irish citizen, Bernard Doyle, was targeted by the NSA. Doyle is currently the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “Regional Representative for Central Asia.”

    • Federal Judge Says Recording Police Not Protected By The First Amendment

      Over the years, the nation’s courts have moved towards recognizing First Amendment protections for citizens who film public servants carrying out public duties. Nearly every case has involved a citizen arrested for filming police officers, suggesting far too many law enforcement entities still feel their public actions deserve some sort of secrecy — even as these agencies deploy broader and more powerful surveillance tools aimed at the same public areas where no expectation of privacy (under the Fourth Amendment) exists.

    • FBI Borrows From Anti-Muslim Playbook in New Video Game

      Earlier this month, the FBI quietly launched “Don’t be a Puppet,” a website aimed at teachers and students, ostensibly to teach them how to spot and counter the “radicalization” of young people. It wasn’t a hit. One tech writer called it an “awful, out-of-touch 90s educational game.” Another headline read, “The FBI made a video game and it sucks.”

      From the landing page, players set off through five stages: What is Violent Extremism? What are Known Violent Extremist Groups? Who Do Violent Extremists Affect? Why Do People Become Violent Extremists? How Do Violent Extremists Make Contact? As players successfully answer questions, they get to cut the puppet strings and ultimately earn an “FBI certificate” upon completion.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Facebook is not a charity: Mark Zuckerberg’s “Internet for all” push is big business, barely disguised

      Tech titans have drawn good press in recent months. In December, Mark Zuckerberg pledged his and his wife’s fortune to charity – sort of. Apple chief Timothy Cook is now standing up to the U.S. government’s request to unlock a killer’s cellphone, which is has been a public relations hit as well as the right thing to do. If you were reading the news superficially, it might look like the tech community had turned into a big, friendly non-profit devoted to changing the world for the better.

      But developments overseas reminds us that these companies – whatever their mix of good and bad qualities– are self-interested, for-profit corporations that aim to make money by expanding markets. And not everyone is eager to buy what they’re selling.

    • The Web’s First Blackout Protest: The CDA, 20 Years Later

      Twenty years ago, large chunks of the Web went dark. These sites were changing their layout, or in some cases even going offline, to protest the Communications Decency Act, signed on February 8 by President Bill Clinton as Title V of the landmark Telecommunication Act. By some estimates, more than 5% of sites online on the early Web took part.

      The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was embroiled in controversy: as a direct response to the new law, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow wrote his influential Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace; EFF kicked off the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech campaign that became one of the most iconic images of online activism of the era.

      It’s only against that background that the largest show of online activism to that point—a web blackout campaign, known variously as “Turn the Web Black,” “Great Web Blackout,” or the “Black World Wide Web protest”—could be anything but center stage. Even if it’s not as widely remembered, though, the CDA blackout has made itself part of the DNA of online protest, and its influence can be seen on major recent protests, such as those against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

      At 25 years old, EFF is one of the few digital rights groups to have participated in the CDA protests first-hand. To mark the 20th anniversary of the passage of that law—and the protests against it—we pulled some of the most interesting material from the archives of that era.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • The ‘Coke Zero’ Trademark Madness May Finally Be Coming To An End

        Did you know that Coca-Cola has been attempting to get a trademark on the word “zero” for beverages in the United States for well over a decade? Yes, the most well-known soft-drink maker, which sells a product called ‘Coke Zero’, first filed for a trademark on the single word in 2003. The fight has been ongoing ever since, with Dr. Pepper Snapple Group opposing the trademark, because, well, lots of other beverage companies use that common word and because of course it did. Oddly, we covered a trademark case a few years back in which Coca-Cola was on the receiving end of a trademark suit over its use of the word, that time from a water company that offered a product it had named ‘Naturally Zero.’

    • Copyrights

      • Copyright Office Decides To Rewrite Copyright Law Itself, Blesses A ‘Making Available’ Right That Isn’t There

        The Copyright Office has decided to take a stance on copyright law that requires two slightly odd things. First, it requires ignoring what the Copyright Act actually says and then, separately, it requires pretending that the law says something that it clearly does not say. That’s pretty incredible when you think about it.

        For quite some time now there have been ongoing legal fights in the copyright world over whether or not there’s a “making available right” in copyright law. The issue is actually super important. 17 USC 106 lays out the only six exclusive rights granted to rights holders under copyright.

      • Fancy an Anti-Piracy Threat….To Your Dropbox Email Address?

        Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN is stepping up its game when it comes to scaring would-be pirates. While people sharing files in public using BitTorrent are the group’s usual targets, BREIN has just sent scary emails to people who thought they were sharing eBooks privately using Dropbox.

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